Russia claims to have killed 300 Ukrainian soldiers in the past 24 hours
In a press release published on Sunday on the site of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Moscow claims the destruction of a “vast depot of arms and ammunition” at Kryvy Rih, the birthplace of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Dnipropetrovsk region. The Russian army also claims to have hit, in the past twenty-four hours, several military targets in the Donbass and in the Kharkiv region, further north. According to this report, 53 military targets were destroyed by air strikes, while artillery targeted several hundred targets.
“Following the Russian airstrikes, more than 300 [soldats ukrainiens] killed and up to 50 units of military and special equipment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were destroyed,” claimed the press release, which also lists the Ukrainian weapons destroyed since the start of the offensive, including 183 planes, 128 helicopters and 1,049 drones.
Ukraine has also provided an assessment of the material and human losses it claims to have inflicted on the Russians. According to kyiv, Russia has thus lost 30,150 soldiers since February 24, and, on the material level, 1,338 tanks, 3,270 armored vehicles, 631 artillery pieces, 203 multiple rocket launchers, 2,240 vehicles and tanks of fuel, 504 drones…
All these figures should be taken with caution because of the inherent propaganda stakes and the difficulty – even impossibility –, in the current state of things, of verifying them. In a long development published on May 16 on Twitter, the American Michael Kofman, director of studies on Russia at the Center for Naval Analyzes in Arlington, and one of the best analysts of the conflict, evoked a range going from 7,000 to 15,000 Russian soldiers killed, with a plausible average of “10,000 to 12,000 dead”. The Ukrainian army does not reveal any figures on the number of dead in its ranks, but a Western military source mentioned a few days ago to World losses at least as high as in the Russian camp.
On the material side, the Oryx site, which lists all the losses confirmed or documented by images, reports 525 military equipment destroyed on the Ukrainian side (1,105 if you count those damaged, abandoned or taken), and 2,428 on the Russian side (4,172 if you count all those that are no longer usable). For combat aircraftOryx counted 51 destructions in the Ukrainian camp, and 27 among the Russian arsenal.