WASHINGTON – Ukrainian forces have killed approximately 20,000 Russian fighters and wounded roughly 80,000 more over the past five months, US officials revealed Monday.
The latest estimate — formerly classified — brings the total number of approximate Russian casualties in the 14-month-old war to about 200,000 after Gen. Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, revealed in November that both Ukraine and Russia had suffered 100,000 casualties each.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby declined to say how many Ukrainian troops had been killed or injured since December, and Russian propaganda estimates of “up to 300,000” Kyiv casualties are considered unreliable.
“I’m not ever going to put anything out in the public domain that’s going to make [Ukraine’s] job harder. They are the victims here. Russia is the aggressor,” Kirby said. “If they decide they want to declassify and make public their casualty figures, that’s up to them to do.
“But I don’t need to abide by that same sense of courtesy for the Russians and I’m not going to,” he added. “I haven’t done it and I ain’t going to start now.”
If the US estimate is correct, Russia has suffered the same number of battle casualties over the past five months as it did in the first nine months of its war on Ukraine.
“Some historical perspective … [the 20,000 killed since December] is three times the number of killed in action that the United States [suffered in the] Guadalcanal campaign in World War II, and that was over the course of five months as well,” Kirby said. “So it’s really stunning, these numbers.”
While the early casualties primarily affected Russian regulars, Kirby said about half of the most recent victims were paid mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a notorious private paramilitary outfit the Kremlin has tapped to carry out atrocities in conflicts since 2017.
Of the 10,000 Wagnerites believed to have been killed, Kirby said “the majority of them are ex-convicts – folks who went knocking around on the doors in prison cells throughout Russia to throw human flesh at this fight.”
Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin this week claimed just 94 of his mercenaries had been killed in action – a notion Kirby called “ludicrous.”
Most of the latest casualties have happened in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the NSC spokesman went on.
“Last December, Russia initiated broad operations across multiple lines of effort, including towards Vuhledar, Avdiivka, Bahkmut and Crimina,” he said. “Most of these efforts have stalled and failed. Russia has been unable to seize a real strategically significant territory.“
“The only area where Russia has made some incremental gains – and I want to focus on the word ‘incremental’ – is in Bakhmut. And that really holds very little strategic value for Russia,” Kirby went on. “The capture of Bakhmut would absolutely not alter the course of the war in Russia’s favor, and Ukraine’s defenses in the areas surrounding background still remain strong.”
Meanwhile, the battle for Bakhmut has come “at a terribly, terribly high cost” for Russia, which “has exhausted its military stockpiles and its armed forces,” he said.
The high casualty count is partially attributed to Moscow’s increased reliance on Wagner mercenaries, “the majority of whom were Russian convicts that were thrown into combat in Bakhmut without sufficient combat training, combat leadership or any sense of organizational command and control,” according to the US official.
In addition to literally pressing Russians into service, the hired-gun group has adapted other questionable recruiting strategies, as well. In March, it placed a highly suggestive ad on Pornhub, urging male viewers to stop satisfying themselves and go apply for a job at Wagner.
But after tens of thousands of trained Kremlin forces were decimated in the war’s first year, Moscow has had little choice but to send green troops and mercenaries into Ukraine, senior US officials have said.
“The bottom line is Russia’s attempted offensive has backfired,” Kirby said. “After months of fighting and extraordinary losses, Russia continues to be focused on a single Ukrainian city with limited strategic value. Ukraine’s armed forces are defending their territory bravely and effectively and making Russia expend enormous resources for marginal gains.
“The world and battlefield momentum remain on the Ukraine side,” he added, “and we will continue to support Ukraine, as the president has said, for as long as it takes.”
