FLASH
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The number of Ukrainian soldiers killed on the battlefield in the 4 years of the war with Russia is 55,000, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
Zelensky announced the figure in an interview with France 2 television. In addition, a large number of people are officially considered missing, he said.
While both Kiev and Moscow have regularly published estimates of the other side's casualties, they have been reluctant to provide details of their own. However, the BBC has confirmed the names of almost 160,000 people killed fighting on Russia's side in Ukraine.
US President Donald Trump has led efforts to end the war that began with Russia's full-scale invasion of its neighbor on February 22, 2022.
US special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, held talks with Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in the United Arab Emirates capital, Abu Dhabi, for a second day on Thursday in an effort to discuss the details of a US-proposed peace deal.
This was the second trilateral meeting and the talks had been "detailed and productive", wrote Steve Witkoff in X, but "important work remains to be done".
The most difficult issue is territory, with Russia demanding that Ukraine cede the rest of the eastern industrial region of Donbas, which Moscow does not currently control.
Trump often says that thousands of Ukrainians and Russians are dying needlessly every week. Western intelligence agencies also publish estimates that are impossible to verify.
The last time Zelensky gave an update on Ukraine's casualties was in December 2024, when he put the death toll at 43,000.
In his interview with French television, he said that “in Ukraine, officially the number of soldiers killed on the battlefield, whether professional or conscripted, is 55,000.”
The official death toll cited by Zelensky is significantly lower than Ukraine's total losses.
As he himself said, "a large number of people" are registered as missing.
As of 6 months ago, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry had registered more than 70,000 people as officially missing, both soldiers and civilians, but the breakdown of the data has never been provided.
The true figure may be higher, information about the number of dead is very sensitive and affects morale.
Throughout Ukraine, military graves are prominent in all cemeteries, marked with blue and yellow national flags. They often have an image of a soldier in uniform carved into the tombstone.
We also met mothers who are still searching for their sons, who never returned from battle.
Often, they hope that the men are prisoners of war, captured and held somewhere in Russia, but not on any official list.
Access to Russian prisons for organizations like the Red Cross is very limited.
The alternative is that the missing men were killed and their bodies were not recovered from the territory now controlled by Russia, or that their remains have not yet been identified using DNA tests.
From time to time, the two countries organize a troop exchange, in addition to the exchange of prisoners of war, but there has been nothing since last August.
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