Ukrainian troops admit to having lost between 10,000 and 13,000 soldiers in the nine months of war. One of the advisers to the Ukrainian presidency, Mykhailo Podolyak, advanced the figure in a television interview last night, but President Volodimir Zelensky will officially release the data “when the time is right.”
In the latest figures offered by Ukraine on the casualties among its troops in June, Zelensky acknowledged that his country was losing “between 60 and 100 soldiers a day, killed in combat, and around 500 wounded in combat.” Back then, Russian forces were fighting to take complete control of the Luhansk region, which together with the Donetsk region make up the Donbass, in the east of the country.
This unusual revelation since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24 comes as one of the bloodiest battles is taking place in the city of Bakhmut, in Donetsk and a few kilometers from Luhansk, which the Russians have been trying to encircle for months. Fighting in the trenches, under very difficult conditions caused by mud and cold, causes between tens and hundreds of injuries a day.
On the other side, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu admitted in September that 5,937 Russian soldiers had been killed since the start of the conflict. Both adversaries are suspected of minimizing the scale of their human losses so as not to affect the morale of their troops.
The US chief of staff, General Mark Milley, estimated in November that more than 100,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or wounded since the invasion and that losses were likely to be of the same order on the Ukrainian side. These figures, which cannot be confirmed by independent sources, are the most accurate provided to date by the US government.
Beyond the lives lost in combat, several thousand civilians have also died in Europe’s most violent armed conflict for decades. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates a figure of 6,655 victims and 10,368 confirmed injuries, although he believes that the real number is considerably higher, because the information takes time to arrive and in the places where the most intense hostilities are concentrated. the verification process is complicated.
