According to the estimates of Western intelligence, 200,000 Russian soldiers are dead or out of combat; The Ukrainian side record would be twice as high.
by Cédric Pietrapurunga
How long can they hold? While the troops of Moscow and Kiev have competed for a year in Ukraine, with thousands of shells fired every day and of fighting sometimes carried out to the body in the trenches of the Donbass, the sustainability of Their losses remains one of the main unknowns of the war. “The exact number of victims of the conflict in Ukraine, on both sides, is extremely difficult to assess but I think that, when we know them, we will be faced,” said General Vincent Breton, director of the joint center of concepts, Doctrines and experiments (CICDE) of the French army, during a Hearing in the National Assembly on November 30 .
If no official figure has not been given for months by belligerents, as much to support the morale of their populations as not to inform the enemy, different sources today consider several hundred thousands the number of soldiers killed, injured or taken prisoner in both camps. In a statement published on February 17, the British Ministry of Defense said that “the forces of the Russian Defense Ministry and private military subcontractors [the Wagner militia] have probably recorded between 175,000 and 200,000 losses since The beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, [including] around 40,000 to 60,000 killed “.
According to London, the number of Russian victims would have notably “considerably increased since September 2022”, the date on which Vladimir Putin ordered a “partial mobilization” of its population. The little training of these new conscripts, several tens of thousands of which were deployed in Ukraine in the fall, unlike the Kremlin commitments, would result in a mortality rate significantly higher than that of regular troops. In the same way, the thousands of detainees out of the Russian penitentiary colonies and sent without training on the battlefield by Evgueni Prigojine, the boss of the Wagner militia, would have experienced a rate of loss “going up to 50 %”, said the British.
More consideration
During A hearing in the National Assembly, November 16 , vice-admiral Hervé Bléjean, managing director of the European Union staff, had estimated that “At least 60,000 Russian fighters have been killed, for three times more injured, which means that around 250,000 Russian fighters would be” out of service “. Unverifiable figures but which give an idea of the extent of the losses: at the start of the war, Vladimir Putin had massaged between 120,000 and 150,000 men on the borders of Ukraine. Since then, Moscow has mobilized 300,000 to 320,000 additional conscripts and could, according to the Ukrainian intelligence, still amplify its recruitment. By way of comparison, the Russian army had lost some 15,000 men in ten years of conflict (1979-1989) with the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
You have 46.51% of this article to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.