The Uppsala Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University has published its annual conflict data report for 2025, recording 244,600 conflict deaths — the highest since the Rwandan genocide of 1994 — across 65 active conflicts, including eight interstate wars, the most since the data programme began in 1946.
Global conflicts surged to the highest number tallied by Uppsala Conflict Data Program. Fatalities were the highest on record since 1994, with approximately 244,600 people killed in conflict in 2025.
The Uppsala Conflict Data Program, based at Uppsala University in Sweden, is regarded as the world’s leading systematic source of quantified information on armed conflict. Its annual report — released on June 9, 2026, covering 2025 — provides the most authoritative single accounting of what the world’s wars cost in human lives.
There were 65 active conflicts in 2025, according to researchers at the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. Out of that total, the number of direct conflicts between individual states doubled from the previous year to eight in 2025 — the highest number of such conflicts since UCDP began collecting data in 1946. They included the wars between Russia and Ukraine and between Iran and Israel, as well as conflicts between India and Pakistan, Thailand and Cambodia, and Israel’s conflicts in Syria and Yemen.
Fatalities were the highest on record since 1994, with approximately 244,600 people killed in conflict in 2025, the data shows. That’s up from 187,000 deaths in 2024.
The jump from 187,000 to 244,600 — a 31% increase in a single year — is the most significant annual increase in conflict deaths in the dataset’s recent history. It is not driven by a single catastrophic event but by the combination of an already-deadly Ukraine war producing more Russian battlefield deaths than in any previous year, a continuing Israel-Hamas conflict, and a Sudan conflict that reached new levels of civilian targeting.
The Deadliest Conflicts
The Russia-Ukraine war was the deadliest interstate conflict, accounting for 62% of all battle-related deaths, with 77,700 from the Russian side killed in 2025 and 14,000 from the Ukrainian side. While the warring sides do not regularly release casualty figures, the Uppsala researchers use a variety of open sources, including social media, to come up with the tallies. “Russian battlefield losses have increased and Ukraine losses have remained relatively stable,” the researchers noted.
The Russia-Ukraine casualty asymmetry — 77,700 Russian dead to 14,000 Ukrainian — reflects the war’s fundamental tactical character. Russia has been advancing through attritional tactics that trade soldiers for territory at an exceptionally costly rate. Ukraine, fighting defensively with Western weapons and intelligence support, has inflicted casualties at a ratio that, in any conventional military assessment, represents extraordinary Ukrainian tactical success even as Russia makes slow territorial gains.
The Israel-Hamas war was the second-deadliest conflict, with 14,400 fatalities, though that was still a decrease compared to the previous year due to ceasefire agreements.
The third deadliest state-based conflict was Sudan with 12,200 deaths.
Sudan’s position as the third-deadliest conflict in the world should generate more attention than it typically receives. “It is not only a story of more conflicts, but also of extremely high levels of lethal violence. Most notably, we see a dramatic increase in violence directed against civilians, particularly in Sudan,” said Therése Pettersson, senior analyst and project manager at UCDP.
The Interstate War Surge: What It Means
The doubling of interstate conflicts — direct wars between two or more states — from four to eight in a single year is among the most historically significant findings in the report.
“We are seeing a clear increase in conflicts between states. For a long time, interstate wars were relatively rare, but developments in recent years point to growing international tensions and a changing global security order,” said a UCDP researcher.
The eight interstate conflicts documented in 2025 include: Russia vs Ukraine; the US and Israel vs Iran; India vs Pakistan; Thailand vs Cambodia; Israel vs Syria; Israel vs Yemen; and the US and UK vs Houthi-controlled Yemen.
The breadth of that list is remarkable. It spans three continents, involves the world’s largest military power, two nuclear-armed states, and multiple regional powers. The pattern it describes is one in which the post-Cold War assumption that interstate wars were becoming obsolete — that state-on-state military conflict had been replaced by civil wars, insurgencies, and proxy conflicts — has been decisively overturned.
2025’s Conflicts Were Just the Beginning
The UCDP data covers 2025. The report was released in June 2026 — by which time the world’s conflict picture had already grown significantly more complex.
The 2025 dataset includes the early phase of the US-Iran war, which began on February 28, 2026 — but the war’s full impact, including 100+ days of ceasefire-period military exchanges, Iranian ballistic missile salvos against Gulf states, the Lebanon front escalation, and the UNIFIL peacekeeper deaths, will appear in next year’s data.
It does not include the Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities that in June 2026 killed 23 people including children in a single overnight assault. It does not include the RSF attacks on North Kordofan villages that killed more than 30 civilians on Eid al-Adha. It does not include the Lebanon front’s intensification, the UNIFIL deaths, or the India-Pakistan post-Sindoor standoff that has left 13 million people in the world’s largest displacement crisis alongside everything else.
The 244,600 people killed in conflict in 2025 are the documented baseline. The 2026 additions are still being counted.
The Civilian Death Surge
“Most notably, we see a dramatic increase in violence directed against civilians, particularly in Sudan,” said Therése Pettersson at UCDP.
The characterisation of Sudan as the context for the most dramatic increase in violence against civilians in 2025 is consistent with LoudFact’s own documentation of the conflict. The RSF’s pattern of targeting civilian villages — documented across North Kordofan, Darfur, and South Kordofan — represents exactly the kind of deliberate civilian targeting that produces the numbers Pettersson describes.
Civilian deaths in conflict — as distinct from combatant deaths — are particularly significant because they represent violence against people who have taken no active part in hostilities. International humanitarian law is built on the principle of distinction: civilians must be protected, combatants may be targeted. When civilian deaths surge, it is a signal that the principle of distinction is being systematically violated.
The surge in civilian deaths globally in 2025 is not primarily the product of collateral damage — civilians killed incidentally during legitimate military operations. It reflects intentional targeting of civilians as a military and political strategy: in Sudan, by RSF forces killing farmers and villagers in areas of contested territorial control; in Gaza, by the densely civilian character of an environment where military and civilian infrastructure are intermingled; in Ukraine, by Russia’s deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure.
What the Data Means for 2026
The UCDP 2025 report was released three and a half months into 2026’s addition to the conflict ledger. The Iran war, the Lebanon escalation, the continued Russia-Ukraine fighting, the Sudan RSF attacks, and the India-Pakistan post-conflict standoff are all active in 2026. The 2026 UCDP data — to be released in 2027 — will almost certainly show further increases.
“We are seeing a clear increase in conflicts between states. For a long time, interstate wars were relatively rare, but developments in recent years point to growing international tensions and a changing global security order.”
The “changing global security order” that UCDP researchers identify is not abstract. It is the world that LoudFact has been documenting since Day 1: a world in which the restraints on state-on-state violence that were built through the post-Cold War period — the norm against interstate war, the expectation of diplomatic resolution, the credibility of multilateral institutions as enforcement mechanisms — have been eroding faster than they can be repaired.
244,600 people in 2025. The count for 2026 is still running.
LoudFact.com is an independent global news and explainer platform. This report is based on the Uppsala Conflict Data Program 2025 annual report and reporting from NPR, WRVO, KUNC, WRKF, and Wyoming Public Media as of June 9, 2026.
