Lisa Haseldine
Nearly 188,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or injured since the start of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine eleven months ago, according to the latest estimate by US intelligence. This devastating toll amounts to an average of over 500 Russian dead or wounded soldiers for each of the 341 days Russia has been at war with Ukraine. Russia is also believed to have lost as many as two thirds of its tanks on the battlefield in the past eleven months.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Kremlin has yet to acknowledge these figures that were confirmed in a UK cabinet meeting this morning, even to deny them. The last time the Russian Ministry of Defence acknowledged any army casualties at all was on 21 September. Back then, shortly after Putin announced a partial wave of mobilisation, defence minister Sergei Shoigu admitted that 5,937 Russian soldiers had died since the start of the conflict.
Ordinary Russians don’t trust the official Kremlin death count
With several months of humiliating military setbacks since, as well as a clear drop in enthusiasm for the war domestically, the Kremlin has kept shtum. Even the military blogging community, which in recent months has become increasingly critical of what it perceives as Russia’s ‘military failures’, has barely uttered a peep on the American estimates.
Ordinary Russians, of course, didn’t trust September’s official Kremlin death count. In the months since, the downplaying of casualties has continued: following the Ukrainian strike on a military base in Makiivka on New Year’s Eve that, according to the Ukrainian army, killed 400 Russian soldiers, the Kremlin admitted to the loss of 63 lives. Outrage on the part of the families of soldiers stationed at the base, as well as the milblogging community, eventually forced the Kremlin to revise this figure to a measly 89 – still well below the likely true number.
The latest US estimate comes as rumours continue to circulate that Putin is gearing up for a second wave of mobilisation in preparation for a large-scale offensive in the spring. The reports began in December, when Shoigu announced that the Russian military would be expanded to 1.5 million troops in the near future. He didn’t elaborate on how or over what timescale this would happen, prompting fears that the Kremlin would once more resort to forcing men into the army.
Russia is thought to have an army of approximately 1.1 million troops, including those soldiers not currently stationed at the front. If the number of casualties the Americans think Russia has suffered is even close to being correct, this means that nearly one in five of Russian soldiers has been killed or injured in the war so far.
Russia might want the West to believe it is undefeatable, but these casualty numbers suggest otherwise. Even if Putin is able to grow his army by another 400,000 troops over the next months and years, the rate at which the US’s figures imply he is losing troops is unsustainable. As much as Putin hopes Russians might not notice, sooner or later they will. What happens then is anyone’s guess.
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Lisa Haseldine
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