Russia continues to pay a high cost in troops and equipment during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to Kyiv’s latest figures.
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said Saturday that, over the previous day, Russia had lost 1,470 troops, which was the highest number since September 21 when Kyiv’s daily tally had hit 1,500.
The latest figure is the second highest since May 15, 2024 when Kyiv said Russia had lost 1,520 troops and is not far off the record daily tally of 1,740 three days earlier, on May 12. It takes Ukraine’s total estimate of Russian troop losses since the start of the war on February 24, 2022 to 649,170. Newsweek has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry for comment by email.
People walk past a billboard honoring a Russian serviceman reading “Pride of Russia” in St. Petersburg, Russia, on September 24, 2024. Russian troop and equipment losses continue to be high in Moscow’s full-scale invasion, according to Kyiv’s figures released September 28, 2024.
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It is difficult to get an exact number of Russian casualties in Ukraine that includes both dead and injured, with neither side releasing official figures, and Newsweek has not been able as yet to verify the Ukrainian claims. Moscow has not updated its death toll since September 2022 when it said just under 6,000 of its soldiers had been killed.
A tally by the independent Russian media outlet Mediazona and BBC News Russian released Friday said more than 71,057 Russian soldiers have been confirmed to have been killed, an increase of 1,998 since its last update in mid-September.
The joint project said the real death toll is probably much higher as it gets its figures from public sources such as obituaries, posts by relatives, regional media reports, and statements from local authorities.
Most of those dead came from Rostov, Sverdlovsk, Bashkiria, and Chelyabinsk oblasts, as well as the Buryatia republic. A surge of recruitment in the predominantly Muslim regions of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan have also showed an increase in those killed in action throughout recent months.
The tally included over 4,100 officers, and the analysts said at least 13,175 Russian inmates have been killed on Ukraine’s eastern front.
Meanwhile, Ukraine said on Saturday that, over the previous 24 hours, Russia had lost five times more special equipment than it usually does in a day.
Special equipment includes electronic warfare systems and radars, engineering equipment like mine-clearing vehicles, as well as support and maintenance vehicles used to maintain other assets, such as tanks and armored vehicles.
The total of 99 special equipment losses far exceeded the usual range of between 18 and 22 per day in recent months and takes the tally since the start of the war to 3,291.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is in the U.S. to promote his victory plan to end the war during which he met Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, in New York City.
“The problem is that Putin killed so many people,” Zelensky told Fox News, “we need to do everything to pressure him to stop this war.”
