Russian forces continue to suffer high losses of troops and equipment in their invasion of Ukraine, according to Kyiv.
In an update on Thursday, the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said that 1,040 Russian troops had been killed over the previous 24 hours. This took its estimate of the total number of Russian troop losses since the start of the war to 200,560.
The update also said that Russia had lost 22 tanks and 33 armored vehicles the previous day. This put the total number of tank losses to 3,504 over the course of the war and the number of armored vehicle losses at 6,810, according to Kyiv.
Kyiv first started reporting more than 1,000 Russian daily deaths in February, a figure which has been surpassed several times. However, Ukraine’s tally of Russian personnel losses is higher than Western estimates. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said in February that in the first year of the war, there were approximately 200,000 Russian combat fatalities.
The think tank’s tally included the deaths of troops from various strands of Russia’s armed forces, such as regular soldiers, those from the national guard Rosgvardiya, the Federal Security Service and Federal Guard Service.
Troops fighting for pro-Russian militias, such as the Donetsk People’s Militia and Luhansk People’s Militia as well as private military companies such as the Wagner Group were also included in the figure. Moscow has not updated its official estimate since September, when it was said just under 12,000 of its troops had been killed in Donetsk.
Ukraine’s latest figures, about which Newsweek has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry via email, have not been independently verified. But they come amid reports of substantial Russian losses in both personnel and equipment as the fierce months-long fight for the Donetsk city of Bakhmut continues to rage.
Ian Stubbs, a senior military adviser within the British delegation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OCSE), told Ukrainian news outlet Ukrinform on Wednesday that since May 2022, as many as 30,000 Wagner and regular forces have been killed and wounded around Bakhmut alone.
He described this as “a huge loss of human life for a total territorial advance of approximately just 25 kilometers [15.5 miles].”
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