Russian assaults across the Russo-Ukraine War’s 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) front were at a record 2025 high on Saturday, with the Ukrainian Army General Staff (AGS) recording 253 enemy assaults somewhere on the fighting line on May 3. Despite increasingly heavy casualties and shrinking ground gains, continued Kremlin assaults are probable, independent observers said. Saturday’s attacks were heavily concentrated (80%) in the eastern sectors of the fighting line – the main focus of Russian offensives since early 2023. On that day, about half of those battles (113) were fought in the flashpoint Pokrovsk sector, that data showed. Battle video published by the 31st Mechanized Brigade, a Ukrainian formation geo-located to the Pokrovsk region, backed up Ukrainian claims that near the Pokrovsk region villages Zelene Pole and Uspenivka, Russian infantry, aboard more than 60 vehicles – among them BTR armored personnel carriers, stripped-down civilian automobiles, quadracycles and motorcycles – attacked in waves – with the objective of capturing a nearby wood line held by Ukrainian forces. Russian command threw 250-300 men into the attacks, close to 80 of them mounted on motorcycles, the report said. A Ukrainian army statement credited the 31st Brigade and supporting drone units with the destruction of half of that force using drones, mortars, and artillery. Sometimes horrific video showed soldiers cut down by splinters, blown off vehicles, and even set on fire. The Ukrainian semi-official military information platform, AFUStratCom, called the action a defensive success and praised the 31st and associated units for a job well done. But, in those battles, Russian troops captured about 4 square kilometers (1.5 square miles) of Ukraine-controlled territory and advanced Russian lines about 400-800 meters (1,312-2,625 feet), the independent open-source battle tracking group DeepState reported on Monday. Findings published by the Icelandic researcher Ragnar Bjartur Gudmundsson on Monday, looking at estimated Russian combat losses over the course of the war, show that daily Russian soldier casualties have shot up over time, from lows of 250 men a day in March 2022 to 1,300+/day three years later. The bloodiest period of the entire war for Russian forces, per Gudmundsson’s research, was October 2024-March 2025. During those months, major Russian offensives were in progress in the eastern Donbas sector and the Kursk sector inside Russia. Kremlin forces during that time made limited progress in Donbas. In the Kursk region, over some 15 weeks, employing frontal attacks against prepared Ukrainian defenses, Moscow’s troops recovered a chunk of Russian territory about half the size of Greater London. Western military researchers say that Russian forces, though continuing to advance in Ukraine, are doing so at greater cost, and capturing less ground, and paying more in casualties, than ever before in the war. “Russian gains along the front line have slowed over the last four months…Russian forces are currently sustaining a higher casualty rate per square kilometer gained than in fall 2024...Russia has thus far sustained these casualties and the current tempo of offensive operations by rapidly deploying low-quality troops to frontline units, although the reliance on such troops is also hindering Russia’s ability to conduct complex operations and make rapid advances in Ukraine,” the US-based Institute of the Study of War (ISW) said in an analysis published on May 3. A British Ministry of Defence (MoD) report published the same day said its analysts believe Russian forces have probably lost at least 950,000 soldiers since the start of the war, and that 160,000 men and officers became casualties just in the first four months of 2025, “without any major gains.” Australian military writer Mick Ryan, in a May 4 review of Russian attack potential, said that Kremlin losses are increasing and that they probably are around 40,000 men a month. Ryan called that casualty rate “a significant figure. “(I)f such losses continue until the end of 2025, this will be the bloodiest year of war for Russia,” Ryan wrote. According to Ukrainian government statements, Russian forces currently occupy about 18.3% of Ukraine’s territory, but almost all of that was captured in the early months of the war, and since then, aside from a pair of late 2022 Ukrainian counteroffensives, the front line has remained largely static. Russian advances have taken place almost every month of the war since then, but Kremlin gains, independent monitoring groups say, have been marginal. In March 2025, a month in which observers like Ryan and the British MoD are estimating Russia lost around 40,000 men, Moscow’s troops advanced into and occupied 272 square kilometers (105 square miles) of Ukraine at about a dozen spots along the front, the research group WarMapper reported in April. The cost paid by Russia for that relatively small territorial gain – amounting to about a quarter of a single percentage point of Ukraine’s total land mass – works out to 145-150 men killed or wounded for every square kilometer captured, Kyiv Post researchers calculated. In a landmark study of Russian army casualties during World War I, the post-Soviet Russian researcher Boris Urlanis (Урланис, Б.Ч.: История военных потерь. СПб., 1994) wrote that during most months of that conflict, Imperial Russian forces fighting on a front from the Baltic to Black Seas lost 22-24,000 men to all causes per month, even during periods of static attrition fighting. That figure is about half the casualty rates currently suffered by Russian army forces deployed to Ukraine, based on the British MoD’s and others’ estimates of Russian losses. President Volodymyr Zelensky, in Jan. 15 comments, said Ukrainian army intelligence estimates the number of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine at around 600,000 men. The Imperial Russian army entered World War I in August 1914 with a strength of about five million men. After suffering heavy losses for years, its morale collapsed in Summer-Fall 2017. ISW said of heavy ongoing Russian losses in Ukraine: “ISW has not observed a notable decrease in the tempo of Russian offensive operations along the frontline in recent months, despite the slowing rates of advance, suggesting that Russia is generating enough forces to sustain these casualties.”