The controversial death toll in Ukraine, the deadliest European war in eight decades

General or partial assessments of the number of victims in the war in Ukraine reveal the high human cost of an armed conflict unprecedented in Europe in the last eight decades. With estimates of nearly two million military casualties, it is reminiscent of the worst conflicts experienced in the 20th century on the Old Continent. The most conservative figures — around half a million deaths on the Ukrainian side — are five times higher than those of the Balkan War. The Ukrainian Commissioner for Missing Persons has raised the number of missing persons to 90,000. Overall military casualties (killed, missing, wounded, and prisoners of war) are approaching two million: 1.2 million for Moscow and between 500,000 and 600,000 for Kyiv, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Civilian deaths exceed 15,100 according to UN tallies.