Over half of the Russian soldiers who have been severely injured in Ukraine have lost limbs, a government official in Moscow has said, as President Putin’s forces suffered fresh losses in an offensive in the east of the country.
“This is such a vivid problem, it’s a lot,” Alexei Vovchenko, a deputy labour minister, said at a meeting with Russian senators, according to state media. Vovchenko said that 54 per cent of all severely injured Russian soldiers had at least one limb amputated.
Russia has not provided figures since March last year, one month after the start of its invasion, when it said the number of wounded soldiers was 3,825. However, the British defence ministry said that up to 190,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or so badly injured that they would be unable to take any further part in combat.
Some analysts have suggested the ratio of severely injured-to-killed Russian soldiers in Ukraine could be as high as 1.7 to 1. Such a figure could mean that about 60,000 Russian soldiers have had an arm or leg amputated since Putin ordered tanks into Ukraine.
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The figures do not include casualties among the Wagner group. A Telegram channel close to the mercenaries said in July that about 20,000 Wagner fighters had been killed and 40,000 injured. The majority happened during the battle for Bakhmut, the town in eastern Ukraine that has witnessed the bloodiest fighting in Europe since the Second World War.
This month a Russian soldier in Siberia who had his left arm amputated after being wounded in Ukraine complained that he had waited six months for a prosthetic limb that turned out to be a metal stick and a plastic tip in the shape of a hand. “He could not control it in any way — it was useless,” a family member said. Officials are said to have paid five million roubles [£43,400] for the “artificial limb” to a company owned by the relatives of a local politician.
Up to 50,000 Ukrainians, including civilians who have been injured by Russian missiles, are estimated to have lost limbs since the start of the war. Kyiv does not provide casualty figures.
Russia has taken heavy losses during a frenzied attempt to capture Avdiivka, a strategically and symbolical important town in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Putin’s forces are believed to have lost about 70 armoured vehicles in an attempt to encircle the town on the front line last week. In his daily address President Zelensky said the situation in Avdiivka and the nearby town of Maryinka was “particularly tough”. However, he said Ukraine was holding its positions.
In southern Ukraine Kyiv’s forces are said to have broken through on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River opposite the city of Kherson, in a potentially significant development that could provide an impetus to Ukraine’s stalled counteroffensive. The city has been shelled relentlessly by the Russian army since it was forced to retreat across the river in November. A Ukrainian military spokesperson warned however that it was too early to speak about a large-scale advance. The comments came as six postal workers were killed yesterday in a Russian missile attack on a post office warehouse near Kharkiv in northern Ukraine.
