Colonel Sergiy Cherevathy, spokesman for Ukraine’s Eastern Sector Armed Forces, said today that the number of Russian dead in the Battle of Bakhmut is “at least 100,000”. Although the dispute over the city has been going on for months without any restraint, the monstrous number announced by the Kiev spokesman far exceeds any other estimate of the casualties Moscow has suffered 15 months after the first attack on Ukraine.
We know that in wartime propaganda always hides the truth, but what is a realistic estimate of Russian casualties? To get an idea, other dates must be stringed together and compared to what Colonel Cherevathy said.
* Official Kremlin figures – Russia has so far admitted 5,937 military casualties in Ukraine. But that’s a widely underestimated number. Firstly, it dates back to September (Moscow did not update it later), but most importantly, the balance sheet does not take into account the fallen of private militias (mainly Wagner, but also the so-called people’s militias of Donbass).
* Pentagon estimates – The Portal agency, citing military intelligence sources in Washington, wrote that between 35,000 and 43,000 Russian soldiers have died on the Ukrainian front since the war began; the casualties exceed 100,000 if one also takes into account the wounded. The same sources put the death toll on the other side at 15,000.
* The American study – Without giving numbers, Seth Jones, military expert at the Csis (Center for Strategic and International Studies), declared last February that the losses suffered by Russia in the first year of the war in Ukraine were the worst of all wars were waged by Moscow after the end of World War II. In fact, they’re worse than all the previous ones combined.
* Afghanistan, Chechnya, Vietnam: comparisons – To understand how the figure given by Kiev exceeds all other precedents, even comparison with other “battlefields”. The invasion of Afghanistan, in which the then Soviet Union was involved for a decade (1979-1989), cost Moscow the deaths of about 26,000 soldiers. As for Russia, the attack on Chechnya (December ’94 – August ’96) was paid for with 3,826 dead. Compared to another bloody and relatively recent war, 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam between 1962 and 1975.