The Russian military suffered record casualties in Ukraine last month while also ceding some territory to Kyiv’s forces, according to Western intelligence data and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

More than 54,000 Russian troops were killed and heavily wounded in October, the most since the full-scale invasion began almost five years ago, the Ukrainian leader said Sunday. Ukraine uses drone footage to document casualty numbers, which have now exceeded Russia’s monthly recruitment rate.

European government assessments shared with Bloomberg show similar figures, with the proportion of troops killed also at a record.

For the second month running, Kyiv’s forces have also managed to regain more territory than Russia was able to seize, according to the Institute for the Study of War. Moscow’s troops are even losing territory in the key eastern Donbas region, which Vladimir Putin wants to control in full.

Battlefield successes underscore Ukraine’s ability to fight back despite Russia’s increasingly deadly airstrikes menacing its civilian population as the war heads into the fifth winter. They are also likely to strengthen Kyiv’s position in US-led peace talks that have continued on-and-off since President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year. The next round of the three-way negotiations could take place as early as this week in Abu Dhabi.

“Russia’s battlefield momentum in Ukraine is likely to remain weak through the rest of 2026,” said Alex Kokcharov, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence in London. “That’s even as Moscow increases pressure on Ukraine through its expanding air campaign.”Russia has gained less than 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) of Ukrainian territory since the beginning of this year, a sharp decline from 3,400 square kilometers during the same period last year, according to DeepState, a Ukrainian open-source collective with links to the country’s military. The area captured this year amounts to 0.2% of Ukrainian government-controlled territory.

In October, Russia lost nearly 1,000 troops for every square kilometer of Ukrainian territory it captured in terms of net gains, according to Kokcharov’s calculations based on DeepState data and estimates Ukraine’s General Staff of the number of casualties.

The estimates are inherently approximate during the ongoing conflict, but they are likely a reliable indicator of the broader battlefield trends.

With progress stalling on the frontline, Russia has stepped up air attacks on Ukrainian energy, railway and logistics infrastructure, and businesses, killing the most civilians since the start of the full-scale invasion, the United Nations said in its report last month.

Ukraine is also suffering rolling blackouts with as little as 1.5 hours of power a day in Kyiv over the weekend after Moscow’s latest massive strikes.

Russian attacks will probably push the Ukrainian economy into contraction this year for the first time since the start of the full-scale invasion, the central bank said last week. Kyiv has responded by increasing strikes on Russian refineries in a bid to sever the main source of the Kremlin’s war financing, despite US pressure to stop the attacks.