Russia has spent $3.5 billion to seize just one kilometer of Ukrainian land, according to journalists' estimates.

Since 2022, Russia has occupied Ukrainian territory measuring 70,050 square kilometers, as calculated by experts from the Russia Matters analytical platform at Harvard's Kennedy School.

At the same time, Russia has suffered and inflicted colossal material losses on Ukraine.

The Kyiv School of Economics estimated the damage to infrastructure at $170 billion by mid-February 2025. The most affected areas include residential buildings, transportation infrastructure, and Ukraine's energy sector. By November of last year, the following had been damaged or destroyed:

• 236,000 residential buildings;
• 26,000 km of roads;
• nearly 500 large, medium-sized private and state enterprises damaged or destroyed;
• 4,000 educational institutions;
• 1,554 medical facilities;
• almost 4,000 cultural sites.

The Russian budget has already spent around 22.2 trillion rubles, or $248.5 billion at the current exchange rate, on the war, according to The Moscow Times.

In 2022, the country's budget allocated 4.7 trillion rubles for the "National Defense" line item, 6.8 trillion rubles in 2023, and 10.7 trillion rubles in 2024.

The cost of seizing 1 square kilometer of Ukrainian land has amounted to 316 billion rubles for Russian taxpayers. This is more than the annual budgets of 83% of Russian regions. Only in 14 out of 83 regions (excluding occupied territories) do the annual budgets not exceed 316 billion rubles. Among them are the republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and others.

Restoring the destroyed cities and other populated areas will require a vast amount of resources. Experts suggest that if the occupied territories remain under Russian influence after peace negotiations, Russia will have to spend billions on rebuilding the devastated cities.

"The territories that were seized during the full-scale invasion lie in ruins. Cities like Bakhmut, Vuhledar, and Vovchansk are piles of concrete, destroyed roads, bodies of the dead, and thousands of unexploded shells. Their restoration will take years and require tens of billions of dollars that Ukraine simply does not have," noted Ivan Stupak, a consultant for the Ukrainian Parliament's Committee on National Security.

Background. It has become known that the U.S. may abandon criminal prosecution of Russia for war crimes in Ukraine. Representatives of the United States declined to label Russia as an aggressor at the Core Group meeting – a group of countries preparing a special tribunal for Putin.