Nicolas Tonev (special envoy to Ukraine)
Has Moscow already launched its offensive? In southern Ukraine, particularly in the Donbass, Russian forces are advancing slowly, a few hundred meters a day, at the cost of appalling losses. In Bakhmout, an area concentrates most of the fighting. Europe 1 is on site.
Almost a year after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the actual death toll at the front lines on both sides remains a state secret. But the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense claims more than 1,000 Russian dead for the day of February 6 alone. A figure difficult to verify but the intensification of fighting in the Donbass and calculations of losses by Russian NGOs make these calculations plausible.
At least 867 Russian fighters dead in past two weeks
Bakhmout and surrounding communities are becoming death zones. Day and night, tanks and rocket launchers fire as much as possible. In this city, a hundred combat points are present on a front of less than 250 kilometers.
The Russian forces would have regained hundreds of square kilometers, at the cost of soldiers sacrificed to identify the source of the shots and bombard it. Losses are therefore difficult to hide. Media Area, a specialized Russian site, authenticates them using public data in a documented manner, with photos and family testimonials. At least 867 Russian fighters have been identified, one of the highest loss rates since the beginning of the war with this new characteristic: many are not of military career, but have civilian biographies which, for some, do not wouldn’t even have served.
In this count, there are therefore neither the dead abandoned on the ground, nor the missing, nor those whose families the Russian army has not yet spoken to.