Russia-Ukraine War
The largest interstate war in Europe since 1945, with mass casualties, displacement and global food and energy shocks.
Severity score
81.8
Catastrophic · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Russia invaded Ukraine at scale in February 2022, following the 2014 annexation of Crimea and war in the Donbas. Casualty figures are treated as state secrets on both sides and independent estimates diverge sharply; the ranges below reflect Western intelligence and open-source assessments of combined military and civilian dead. Beyond the battlefield, the war disrupted Black Sea grain exports and European energy markets, drove food price spikes across import-dependent countries in Africa and the Middle East, and caused extensive destruction of Ukrainian housing, energy and industrial infrastructure.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
88Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
84People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
88Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
55Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
85Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.