Ukraine war troop deaths, injuries nearing 500,000: US officials
Nearly 500,000 Ukrainian and Russian troops have been killed or wounded since the start of the war 18 months ago, according to US officials.
Russia’s military casualties are approaching 300,000, including up to 120,000 deaths and 170,000 to 180,000 injuries, said the New York Times, citing the anonymous officials.
Ukrainian deaths were around 70,000, with 100,000 to 120,000 wounded, it added.
Ukraine’s battlefield deaths have already surpassed the number of Americans killed in Vietnam over the course of nearly 20 years, which amounted to about 58,000 people.
The sources cautioned that casualty figures remained difficult to pin down because Moscow is believed to habitually undercount its war dead and injured, and Kyiv does not release official figures.
The officials who spoke to the newspaper said that the casualty rate shot up after Kyiv launched its long-awaited counteroffensive in June, which so far has failed to net any major territorial gains, having run head-on into fortified Russian defensive lines and sprawling mine fields with little air support.
Losses in killed and wounded during the first two weeks of Kyiv’s counterpunch have been estimated in the thousands, according to the officials.
On top of that, about 20% of the modern arsenal of weapons that Ukraine has obtained from its Western allies, including tanks and armored personnel carriers, were either destroyed or damaged by the enemy, officials said.
The last time a senior US official has gone on-record about casualty estimates was in January, when Chief of the Joint Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley said Russia had suffered “significantly well over 100,000” casualties. At the time, the war had yet to reach its one-year mark.
US officials have been notoriously tight-lipped on estimates of Ukrainian losses – which could be partially attributed to Kyiv’s own reluctance to share the number, and partially to analysts’ preoccupation with Russian casualty rates.
However, Milley in November suggested that Ukraine had lost roughly 100,000 troops to injuries or death.
That number was said to have skyrocketed over the winter and spring months, when the two warring sides battled for control of the key city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, which has been compared to a “meat grinder” due to the intensity of the fighting there.
The ravaged city ultimately fell to Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries in May, but Ukrainian troops have been making incremental gains in Bakhmut’s vicinity.
Russian troops outnumber Ukrainians 3 to 1 on the battlefield, owing to the fact that Russia’s army is nearly three times that of Ukraine’s, and the country has a proportionately larger population from which fresh conscripts could be drawn to replace fallen troops.
Ukraine, with its pre-war population of 43 million, has around 500,000 troops, including active-duty regulars, reservists and paramilitaries, according to analysts. By contrast, Russia, which boasts a population of more than 143 million, has 1,330,000 fighters at its disposal.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, commenting on the Times article, said only the General Staff could disclose casualty figures.
“We have adopted a model that only the General Staff has the right to voice the figures on the wounded, the disabled, people who lost limbs, and the missing, and, of course, the number of people who died in this war,” he said in a live broadcast on the YouTube channel of journalist Yulia Latynina on Friday.
The Ukrainian military on Thursday claimed gains in its counteroffensive, with Kyiv saying that its forces had retaken a village on the southeastern front — the first such success since July 27.
More good news followed Friday, when Washington gave the green light to Denmark and the Netherlands to deliver US-made F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine after a months-long lobbying campaign by Zelensky.
It was not immediately clear when the first F-16s might enter the conflict, but Ukrainian pilots will first have to undertake at least six months of training on the aircrafts.
Air Force Gen. James Hecker, commander of US air forces in Europe and Africa, downplayed the significance of the F-16s’ role in the war, saying that getting F-16 squadrons ready for battle could take “four or five years.”
Danish Defense Minister Jakob Ellemann-Jensen said Friday that the training of Ukrainian pilots is getting underway this month.
Also on Friday, a Ukrainian drone smashed into a building in central Moscow after Russian air defense shot it out of the sky, causing flight disruptions at all the civilian airports in the area.
Photos taken at the scene showed emergency workers inspecting a damaged roof of a building of Moscow’s Expo Center complex, located just over 3 miles away from the Kremlin.
“At about 4 am Moscow time, the Kyiv regime launched another terrorist attack using an unmanned aerial vehicle on objects located in Moscow and the Moscow region,” the Russian Defense Ministry said.
The frequency of drone strikes deep inside Russia has increased since a drone was destroyed over the Kremlin in early May.
With Post wires
