President Volodymyr Zelensky has said. Zelensky announced the figure in an interview with France 2 TV on Wednesday. Additionally, a large number of people are considered officially missing, he said. While both Kyiv and Moscow have regularly published estimates of the other side's losses, they have been reluctant to detail 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 been leading efforts to end the war that began with Russia's full-scale invasion of its neighbour on 22 February 2022.

Special US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, held talks with Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi, for a second day on Thursday in an effort to try and thrash out the details of the US-proposed peace deal. It was the second such trilateral meeting and the talks had been "detailed and productive", Steve Witkoff wrote on X, but "significant work remains". The most difficult issue is territory, with Russia demanding that Ukraine cedes the rest of the eastern industrial region of Donbas that Moscow does not currently control.

Zelensky said the talks had not been easy, and Ukraine would remain "as constructive as possible", but wanted "faster results". Trump often says thousands of Ukrainians and Russians die unnecessarily every week. Western intelligence agencies also publish estimates, which are impossible to verify. The last time Zelensky gave an update on Ukraine's casualties was in December 2024, when he put deaths at 43,000. In his interview with French television, he said: "In Ukraine, officially the number of soldiers killed on the battlefield - either professionals or those conscripted - is 55,000." The official number of dead cited by Zelensky is considerably lower than Ukraine's total losses. As he said himself, "a large number of people" are registered as missing. As of six months ago, Ukraine's interior ministry had recorded more than 70,000 people as officially missing - both soldiers and civilians - but the breakdown is never given. (BBC)