Russia’s offensive to seize Kyiv has largely stalled, NATO officials said, and on Thursday Ukraine said it had launched a counteroffensive aimed at establishing final control over the city’s suburbs.
U.S. and allied intelligence estimates differ widely on exactly how many Russian troops have been killed to date, sources familiar with the intelligence told CNN. But even the lowest scores run into the thousands.
According to one source, according to one such estimate, about 7,000 Russian troops have been killed so far. But this figure, first published by The New York Times, is on a higher level with the US estimates, which vary because the US and its allies don’t have an accurate way of calculating casualties. Some estimates put the number of Russian troops killed in Ukraine at around 3,000, while other estimates put more than 10,000 killed.
So far, this number has been calculated mainly based on open source reports from non-governmental organizations, the government of Ukraine, commercial satellite imagery, and intercepted messages from Russia. U.S. officials also extrapolated the death toll based on the number of Russian tanks destroyed, the sources said.
Regardless of the exact number, US and Western intelligence officials say Russia is having difficulty replacing its forces, which has a significant impact on the morale of Russian troops, senior NATO officials said Wednesday.
“Every day it becomes more and more clear that Putin has seriously miscalculated,” a senior NATO intelligence official told reporters at NATO headquarters on Wednesday evening, speaking on condition of anonymity to reveal confidential estimates. “Russia continues to face difficulties in recovering its combat losses and is increasingly seeking to use irregular forces, including Russian private military corporations and Syrian fighters.”
A senior NATO military official backed the assessment, saying that “we estimate that more private military companies will soon be involved in the conflict.” But in general, according to him, the losses “had a bad effect on the morale of the troops.”
“We can see [Putin] miscalculated in the stamina and resistance of the Ukrainians, – said the military representative of NATO. – It is a fact. He didn’t see it. And this is a big surprise for him. And so he had to slow down.”
Decreased Russian Morale
A NATO intelligence official added, citing the Ukrainian General Staff, that “Russian military personnel are increasingly refusing to travel to Ukraine despite promises of veteran status and even higher salaries.” He noted that NATO expects that “reports of heavy losses in Russia will also generate some reaction in Russia, as the Russians will eventually become aware of the extent of their losses.”
A senior US defense official told reporters on Thursday that the Pentagon has anecdotal evidence that Russian morale is waning.
“We don’t have information about every division and every feature. But we have certainly received anecdotal evidence that morale is low in some units,” the official said. “Part of this, we believe, is due to poor leadership, the lack of information that the troops receive about their missions and goals, and, I think, the frustration of such fierce resistance that they had.”
In some cases, Russian troops simply abandoned broken vehicles in the field, walked away, and abandoned tanks and armored personnel carriers, two U.S. officials said.
A congressional source briefed on the intelligence also said the US assessed there was a gap between what Russian troops were ready for and what they actually faced. Many Russians taken prisoner said they did not expect, for example, that they would have to fight a war in Ukraine and believed that they were just part of a military exercise.
However, the commitment of the Russian military leadership appears to be still high, the congressional source said.
Last week, Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told a congressional committee in a public hearing that the US intelligence community estimates Russian service deaths between 2,000 and 4,000. He said the estimate was made with low confidence and based on both intelligence sources and open source material.
American and Western intelligence officials generally acknowledge that the will to war is often difficult to measure, and it is not clear how much declining morale has contributed to Russia’s sluggish advance on the battlefield. But open source reports for weeks have documented signs of discontent and low morale among the ground forces, with one official suggesting that one reason Russian generals are operating in high-risk forward operating positions is to try to reinforce weakened troops.
Western officials say Ukrainian troops have killed at least three Russian generals since the start of the war.
According to the official, the problem may extend to the elite aviation units of Russia.
“They lost a bunch of planes,” the man said. “It really affects the morale of the pilots.”
Russia is also behind schedule, a senior NATO military official said Wednesday. The official said Putin hoped to extend Russian control of Ukraine all the way west to the Moldovan border in order to link up with additional Russian troops and try to encircle Kyiv.
Transnistria, a breakaway state from Moldova, is hosting pro-Russian troops that are “kind of ready” to join the war, the official said. But they haven’t done so yet because regular Russian forces haven’t yet made significant headway to the west, he said.
Despite all the losses, a senior NATO intelligence official said the alliance believes Putin is still “unlikely to be contained and could escalate instead. Most likely, he remains confident that Russia can defeat Ukraine militarily.”
Barbara Starr of CNN contributed to this report.