Ukraine world’s deadliest conflict in 2025 despite US-brokered peace talks, analysis finds
Russia’s war in Ukraine was the world’s deadliest conflict in 2025, according to a new report that tracks conflicts globally, despite U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to bring an end to the nearly four-year invasion.
The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) new Conflict Index reports around 78,000 people killed — including soldiers on both sides and civilians — in Ukraine this year, the highest of any conflict.
Because troop casualty figures are state secrets in both Ukraine and Russia, ACLED relies on in-country researchers and open-source monitoring to collect and estimate figures that it says are conservative and could be higher.
By comparison, fatalities stand at roughly 18,350 in Palestine and 15,100 in Myanmar over the past 12 months — the two conflicts ACLED ranks as the most severe overall. Ukraine, while first for deadliness, ranks 11th on the index when all factors are considered.
The report comes at the close of a year dominated by diplomatic efforts, driven by the U.S. President Donald Trump administration, to broker a peace settlement in Ukraine. Several drafts of ceasefire and peace proposals circulated over the year, but failed to halt the fighting. Despite the efforts, ACLED writes in its report that the U.S.-led push "bore no fruit."
The monitoring group attributes Ukraine’s high death toll to Russia’s continued push to capture the eastern Donbas region, its widening of front-line offensives, and intensified strikes on energy infrastructure.
ACLED recorded a record 26,500 clashes in the first 11 months of the year — a 53% increase from 2024. The number of battles per week along the now 1,200-kilometer front line has also been growing year-on-year.
Russia’s drone attacks on Ukraine in 2025 surged 150% year-on-year, ACLED reports, becoming "more numerous and harder to intercept," as Ukraine's air defenses struggle to keep up with the volume and precision of Russian drones.
Moscow now regularly launches swarms of hundreds of drones in a single night, striking targets across the country with a particular focus on energy infrastructure.
The report also found that "Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of densely populated areas of Ukraine led to a 30% increase in strikes that led to civilians being killed or injured." The group said these attacks had killed around 2,000 civilians in Ukraine in 2025.
In its annual index, ACLED monitors conflicts according to four factors: deadliness, the danger posed to civilians, how much of the country is affected, and the number of fighting groups. This allows it to gauge the overall intensity of "a mix of different conflicts," explains lead data scientist Katayoun Kishi.
Not only does Ukraine rank as the world’s deadliest conflict this year, it is also the third most dangerous place specifically for civilians, behind only Palestine and Mexico, according to ACLED.
Unlike many conflicts elsewhere that erupt at isolated border points or remain confined to a single region, Russia's aggression in Ukraine spans nearly the entire country. Missiles strike far behind the front line, making Ukraine the fifth most "diffuse" conflict, according to the analysis.
Analysts consider Ukraine relatively "unfragmented," since the fighting is essentially between the armies of Russia and Ukraine instead of various armed groups.
Ukraine ranks 51st in "fragmentation," with ACLED counting only a few partisan groups and Russian-backed militants in the east, while Myanmar — the most fragmented conflict — reportedly has 1,244 distinct fighting groups.
Ukraine’s overall intensity ranking in the 2025 Conflict Index climbed from 14th last year to 11th in 2025.
Although the war in Ukraine has seen a "drastic increase" in fatalities in 2025, the fact that the fighting is between only two armies means other countries are found to have higher intensities.
"High levels of conflict are the new normal," ACLED writes in its report.
Reflecting this new normal, the five overall most intense conflicts were unchanged from last year. "The wars in Ukraine and Palestine continued to drive the level of violence, contributing over 40% of conflict events in the past 12 months," said the monitor.
Though global news has been dominated by stop-start discussion of peace, in Ukraine, the conflict has only been ratcheting up.
And keeping a reliable tally of these incidents is a daunting task. In Ukraine, ACLED mentions the challenge of finding verifiable reports from the occupied territories and on military developments.
While the authors of the index note that Ukraine has "consistently defied expectations in its fight against a behemoth invader," highlighting the depth of its drone strikes into Russia and the growing cost it has imposed, they predict Ukraine will face both military and diplomatic pressure in 2026.
Ukraine "now faces formidable challenges as the war enters what may be the endgame," they write.
