Russia says 1,351 of its soldiers have died in Ukraine, well below Western estimates

RFE/RL
Fri, 25 Mar 2022 18:35 UTC

Russian casualty in Ukraine

Moscow's official death toll for its troops in Ukraine is far lower than other estimates. A NATO official said this week that it was likely 7,000 to 14,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the conflict.

Russia says 1,351 of its soldiers have died in the fighting in Ukraine, the first casualty update that Moscow has given in more than three weeks and a figure well below Western intelligence and Ukrainian estimates.

Senior military officials said in Moscow on March 25 that 3,850 Russian soldiers had been injured in the fighting, which began on February 24 when Russia launched its unprovoked attack on Ukraine.

Comment: Not unprovoked, but hey, RFE/RL gotta earn that propaganda paycheck.

Russian officials last gave an estimate on troop deaths from the fighting on March 2, when they said 498 soldiers had died.

The latest figure from Russia is markedly different than estimates by others.

A NATO official told AP on March 24 that the Russian death toll was likely between 7,000 and 14,000, although numbers from both sides are impossible to independently confirm.

That figure compares with a March 16 report in The New York Times which quoted officials as saying that conservative U.S. intelligence estimates put the death toll for Russian soldiers at around 7,000.

Ukraine's General Staff of the Armed Forces said in a tweet on March 23 that more than 15,000 Russian soldiers have died in the fighting.

Comment: Moon of Alabama's take:

Andrei Martyanov looks back at the casualties Soviet forces suffered in 1943 when they liberated Donbas from then still first class German Wehrmacht forces. Back then there were more than 1,000,000 Soviet soldiers involved against some 600,000 Germans. Some 1,600 Soviet soldiers were killed each day in fierce fighting. We are now supposed to believe that the much smaller operation against a less fierce and less capable enemy in the Ukraine is killing 550 Russian soldiers per day? That's obviously nonsense.

As one anonymous Pentagon officer said about the NATO number:

"We continue to have low confidence in those estimates"

For the record Russia's Defense Ministry just announced that as of today 1,351 Russian servicemen have been killed and 3,825 wounded. (The losses of the Lugansk and Donetsk militia are not included in those numbers.)

RT reports:

The[Russian] official did not provide any figures on soldiers who have potentially gone missing in action or been taken prisoner amid the conflict. The Ukrainian side has sustained heavy casualties (around 30,000) over the past month, Rudskoy clarified. According to Russian military estimates, around 14,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed, and a further 16,000 have been injured.

[...]

The official casualty figures provided by the Russian military differ drastically from the estimates from the Ukrainian side. According to the latest claims by Kiev, around 16,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the conflict, with hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces destroyed.

Kiev, however, remains tight-lipped on its own casualties. The most recent figure was announced by President Volodymyr Zelensky in mid-March, when he said that around 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers had died in combat.

The French don't think Russia is losing:

A sitrep map of Ukraine, March 24, 2022, produced by French military analysts