Russia lost 200,000 soldiers killed and wounded during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. These losses in just 11 months are eight times the American losses in the two decades of the war in Afghanistan. These are the assessments of Western officials, the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) points out, citing The New York Times.
On February 2, the publication reported that U.S. and other Western officials said the fighting around Bakhmut in the Donetsk region had increased the already high number of casualties in the Russian army. Hundreds of servicemen are killed or injured every day in the Bakhmut area.
Norwegian Defense Minister General Eirik Christofferson said on January 22 that Russian forces had lost 180,000 men in Ukraine. However, Christofferson pointed to the existence of uncertainty in these estimates (“There is a lot of uncertainty in these numbers, as no one can give a good overview at the moment. They could be lower or higher”).
The head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said on November 10 last year that US officials estimated that more than 100,000 Russian troops had been killed or injured in Ukraine.
The increase in these Western estimates between November 2022 and January 2023 may indicate a general adjustment in Western estimates for Russian losses. The New York Times wrote that thousands of Russian Wagner volunteer prisoners died in the Bakhmut area, confirming the report by the Russian newspaper Meduza that more than 80% of the 40,000 Wagnerites are either dead or missing. The high number of Russian casualties in the war in Ukraine prompts Russian officials to conduct a new wave of mobilization.
Source: Racurs
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