Live updates: follow the latest news on Russia-Ukraine
Seventeen days into one of the largest state against state conflicts for decades, civilian and military casualties are mounting rapidly.
Massive attacks raining down rocket artillery, missiles and aerial bombs are pounding the country’s largest cities, including Kharkiv, which had a population of around 1.5 million at the start of the war; Mariupol, which had a population of about 430,000; and the capital Kyiv, home to 3.5 million people when the war started.
As with most modern conflicts, civilians are bearing the brunt of death and destruction.
On the military side, US officials say Russia may have lost anywhere between 2,000 and 6,000 soldiers.
The officials caution that the fog of war means these figures could vary widely, but it is clear from following open source conflict monitors that Russia's losses are very high.
On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported that 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers had died in fighting since the war started on February 24.
In material terms, Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have uploaded hundreds of videos and photographs of Russian losses, enabling conflict monitors to make a rough estimate of attrition.
Russia says that 498 of its troops have been killed in action and 1,597 wounded — almost twice the number of fatalities suffered by Britain in the 74-day Falklands War with Argentina, which also claimed the lives of 649 Argentine servicemen.
Ukrainian military losses are harder to gauge, although Russian forces and allied separatists in the Donbass region have been uploading videos of destroyed and captured Ukrainian armour.
While Russian forces have been less prolific than Ukrainians in sharing videos of destroyed enemy hardware, it appears Ukraine’s losses have been staggeringly high.
If the upper limit of these estimates is correct, then the war is claiming the lives of around 430 soldiers per day, in total.
From fatalities, a rough estimate of the wounded can be determined: taking Russia’s figures of three times the number of wounded to dead, about 20,000 Russian soldiers may have been injured if the upper US estimate of fatalities is correct.
Russia’s acknowledgement of nearly 500 killed was made on March 2. If accurate, the figure is now considerably higher. After seven days of war, 498 killed equates to an average of more than 70 killed per day.
Ukraine's admitted losses 16 days into the war, are at a slightly higher average of 76 per day.
For comparison, during 1968, the bloodiest year for American forces in Vietnam, the US suffered on average 1,400 dead per month, or around 46 per day.
Fighting was intense throughout 1968, with US forces fighting the major Communist Tet offensive that saw battles rage from urban centres such as Hue and the outskirts of Saigon — now Ho Chi Minh City — to the jungles along the borders of Laos and Cambodia.
Whichever figures are correct in Ukraine, it is obvious that both sides are taking heavy losses, placing an increasing strain on the political will to continue the conflict.
