Key facts
- The 1st Azov Corps said Russian forces lost 2,980 troops in a single day on November 8.
- Ukraine's General Staff said Russia lost 54,400 personnel in October, the largest monthly figure since February 2022.
- The 1st Azov Corps said Russian forces lost around 200 troops killed per day around Dobropillia in October.
- The 1st Azov Corps said inflexible take-by-date orders and unrealistic deadlines drive Russian casualties.
- Dr. Jade McGlynn of King's College London said Russia has a history of timing offensives around summits.
- British intelligence assessed in September that around 500,000 Russian troops had been killed in action.
Russian forces lost 2,980 troops in a single day on November 8, 2026, the 1st Azov Corps told the Kyiv Independent, after October produced the highest monthly personnel losses since the start of the full-scale invasion. The losses came as US, Ukrainian and Russian officials held trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi on November 10 and 11, the first such meeting in nine months.
The 1st Azov Corps said Russian forces were taking particularly heavy losses around Dobropillia in Donetsk Oblast, losing around 200 troops killed per day in that sector in October, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky's October 12 evening address. The corps attributed the losses partly to inflexible orders given to lower-level commanders as Moscow seeks to show battlefield success while negotiations continue.
"When a lower-level commander is given a deadline, he loses the ability to stop an unsuccessful attack," the 1st Azov Corps said in a statement shared with the Kyiv Independent. The corps called this a classic example of a take-by-date order, in which assaults are repeatedly launched along the same, previously targeted routes.
Dr. Jade McGlynn, head of the Ukraine and Russia Program at King's College London's Center for Statecraft and National Security, said Russia has a history of timing offensives around summits. She pointed to the Minsk-1 talks in August and September 2014, the Astana-Berlin diplomatic track in January 2015, and the period around the Minsk-2 talks in January and February 2015.
Zelensky said at a November 10 press conference that the Russian military has systematically misstated the territory it controls, saying Russia reported occupying half of Donbas that Ukraine holds. Putin said at the Valdai Discussion Club's plenary session in October: "If the loss of territories is inevitable, does it make sense to cling to them?"