Ukraine is trying to find Russia’s tipping point with a steep new goal for battlefield kills

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Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s new defense minister, has set an audacious new goal for his forces: killing 50,000 Russian troops a month. Andrii Nesterenko/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

2026-01-22T08:16:00.980Z

• Mykhailo Fedorov outlined a brutal new goal for his troops: Kill 50,000 Russian soldiers every month.
• The defense minister said Ukrainians are already reporting 35,000 kills a month, confirmed by video.
• It comes amid heightened talk that Russia may soon no longer be able to sustain its supply of troops.

Ukraine’s new defense minister has set a new goal for its forces to kill 50,000 Russian troops a month, a sharp increase from the losses that Kyiv says it’s inflicting on the Kremlin now.

In a meeting with reporters on Tuesday, Mykhailo Fedorov said the new figure would be a core "strategic objective" for Ukraine.

"The objective is to impose costs on Russia that it cannot bear. In this way to force peace through strength," Fedorov said.

Notably, he specified only battlefield fatalities.

The new standard comes as Russia intensified its offensive in some areas of the front lines last year, aiming to take key cities such as Pokrovsk. The nature of its operations — often reliant on continuous high-casualty infantry attacks — has led to political discussion in recent months that the Kremlin may soon reach a point where it will lose more soldiers than it can recruit.

Ukraine’s commander in chief, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, said in December that his forces had, for the first time, killed and wounded more Russian soldiers in one month than the Kremlin had called up for the same time period.

Fedorov, who was confirmed in his role last week, said on Tuesday that Ukrainian troops are already documenting 35,000 kills every month via video.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte cited another figure while speaking in Brussels on January 16, saying that 20,000 to 25,000 Russian troops were dying every month.

While differing significantly, both figures indicate that Russia is fighting the war at a high cost.

Rutte said the death rate has become "unsustainable" for Russia, and drew comparisons to the Soviet Union’s losses during the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, when an estimated 15,000 Soviet troops died every month over nine years.

Likewise, Fedorov expressed hopes that ramping up a focus on lethality will exhaust Russia’s war machine.

"If we reach the figure of 50,000, we will see what happens to the enemy. They treat people as a resource, and problems with that resource are already obvious," he said.


Russian soldiers train in Rostov-on-Don in mid-January. Arkadii Budnitskii/Anadolu via Getty Images

Ukraine hopes that Russia will run out of troops

Russia does not disclose how many of its troops are wounded or killed during the war. However, international and Ukrainian analyses say the number is likely tracking past 1 million people over nearly four years of war.

The UK’s defense ministry said in early January that the Kremlin may have suffered at least 1.2 million total casualties, which includes both wounded and deceased, since February 2022.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin has relied largely on hefty sign-up bonuses to attract local contract soldiers, though it’s also been found to sustain troop levels through other means, such as by recruiting from prisons or hiring foreigners via informal channels.

Some of those strategies may be waning. On Tuesday, the Russian independent media outlet Vertska reported that contract soldier sign-ups were slowing in some areas of the country.

Data from an unnamed source in the Moscow mayor’s office, it wrote, showed that the capital had seen a roughly 25% annual drop in recruitment in 2025.

It’s unclear how Fedorov intends to specifically target increasing combat kills. He said in his opening remarks to Ukrainian lawmakers last week that he intended to divert more staffing to drone units. Drones are thought to be responsible for roughly 70 to 90% of casualties inflicted during the war.

His new objective also comes against the backdrop of the US attempting to negotiate a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. Many of the Kremlin’s latest war actions, such as attempts to take Pokrovsk, have been seen in Ukraine as efforts to posture into a position of strength.

At 32, Fedorov is Ukraine’s youngest-ever defense minister. He’s begun his new appointment with promises of aggressive reform of the military’s structure and how it distributes resources to its fighters.

Fedorov was previously Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation.

• Ukraine War

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