THE casualty rate for Russian soldiers in Ukraine increased to a new monthly high in March, according to Ukraine’s armed forces. They say drone production enabled a record number of strikes.
Ukraine tallied Russian casualties at 35,351 last month, with drones causing 96 per cent of them while artillery and small arms fire accounted for the rest. That casualty rate was a 29 per cent increase on February, said Ukraine’s commander in chief.
“These are clearly confirmed losses: we have video footage of each such strike in our system,” said Ukrainian Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.
The losses are slightly above a previous record set in December, and appear to confirm Ukraine’s claim that Russian casualty rates are rising inexorably this year. Ukrainian Presidential Office Deputy Head Colonel Pavlo Palisa told RBC-Ukraine that Russia had suffered 316 casualties for every square kilometre it captured in the first three months of 2026, compared with 120 casualties per square kilometre last year.
Ukraine’s defence ministry said Russia has been unable to replace all of the losses since December. Russia aimed to recruit 409,000 contract soldiers this year, Ukraine’s armed forces said in January.
That means a daily average recruitment rate of 1,120. But Ukraine’s “I Want to Live” initiative, which provides communication channels for Russian soldiers wishing to surrender, said Russia recruited 940 troops a day in the first quarter.
If sustained, that meant Russian recruitment was on track for a 65,000-man shortfall this year. Ukraine now sees manpower shortages as a Russian strategic weakness it can exploit. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, set a goal of 50,000 Russian casualties a month in January, which he called the “optimal level” to ensure Russian forces weaken irrecoverably.
“We are confidently moving towards our strategic goal – 50,000+ eliminated occupiers per month,” said the Ukrainian defence ministry.
The territory Russia is capturing for its mounting losses is also in long-term decline, according to estimates by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank. Russian forces captured an average of 5.5sq km a day this year, compared to 10.66sq km a day in the middle of last year and 14.9sq km a day at the end of 2024, said the ISW.
Zelenskyy said the stark reality of manpower weakness lay behind Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ceasefire demand that Ukraine hand over the heavily fortified quarter of the eastern Donetsk region it held last August.
“They believe that if we retreat, they won’t lose hundreds of thousands of people,” Zelenskyy told the Associated Press in an interview this week.
Drones are the key
Ukrainian officials credit drone production and training for their armed forces’ growing lethality. Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskii said the armed forces struck 151,207 targets in March using drones, a 50 per cent increase on February. That’s the result of 11,000 drone sorties a day.
“This is all a historical maximum,” Syrskii said.
Palisa said that’s because Ukraine’s drone manufacturing had managed to outpace Russia’s to achieve a 1.3:1 overall ratio in First Person View drones on the frontlines.
Other reports suggested Ukraine was raising drone production. Fedorov said Ukrainian interceptor drones shot down a record 33,000 Russian UAVs of various types in March – twice as many as in the previous month.
His deputy, Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov said he was working with interceptor drone manufacturers to develop the next generation of interceptors capable of flying at 400-550km/h to counter the jet-powered Shahed drones to which Russia was gradually converting.
Fire Point, Ukraine’s biggest manufacturer of long-range drones used in the majority of strikes deep inside Russia, told Reuters that it had designed two ballistic missiles of 300km and 850km range, which were approaching the deployment stage.