Russians and Ukrainians most likely minimize their losses so as not to weigh on the morale of their troops.
A maximum of 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Russia invaded their country in February, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday (December 1st). “We have official estimates from the general staff (…) They range from 10,000 (…) to 13,000 dead“Said Mykhailo Podolyak, one of Zelensky’s advisers, on the Ukrainian channel Channel 24. According to him, the head of state will make public the official data “when the time is right“.
When Russian forces battled in June to completely take over the Lugansk region of eastern Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky said his country was losing “60 to 100 soldiers per day, killed in action, and around 500 people injured in action“. On the opposing side, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in September that 5,937 Russian soldiers had been killed since the start of the conflict on February 24. The two adversaries are suspected of minimizing the scale of their human losses to avoid weighing on the morale of their troops.
The US Chief of Staff, General Mark Milley, estimated in November that more than 100,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or injured since the invasion and that the losses were probably of the same order on the Ukrainian side. These figures – which cannot be confirmed from independent sources – are the most accurate provided to date by the US government. Several thousand civilians have also been killed in the most violent armed conflict in Europe for decades.
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