Russian military has lost more than 60,000 troops in Ukraine

It has been 222 days since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. On Monday, the Ukrainian forces are making gains in the south while they are consolidating their positions in the east around the recently-captured Lyman.

Gains in Kherson

The Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south is making gains again, with reports from the ground suggesting that the Ukrainian forces have liberated several settlements in the northern part of the Kherson province.

The counteroffensive in the south hasn’t achieved the same degree of success as the rapid advance in the east. However, there are several reasons for that.

First, the geography in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia favors the defender. Farmland and irrigation ditches make offensive operations harder than the open fields of eastern Ukraine.

Moreover, the Russian military had been repositioning forces from across the battlefield to the south for weeks. As a result, the better Russian units are now in the south fighting off the Ukrainian counteroffensive — something that also played a role in the Ukrainian successes in the east.

The Ukrainian forces advance in the south too. (ISW)

In the east, the Ukrainian forces are consolidating their positions around the recently-liberated Lyman.

Meanwhile, in the south of the Donbas, the Russian military persists with its ground assaults against Bakhmut.

Russian casualties

Every day, the Ukrainian military is providing an update on their claimed Russian casualties. These numbers are official figures and haven’t been separately verified.

However, Western intelligence assessments and independent reporting corroborate, to a certain extent, the Ukrainian casualty claims. For example, the Oryx open-source intelligence research page has visually verified the destruction or capture of more than 1,100 Russian tanks (which amounts to more tanks than the combined armor capabilities of France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom) and more than 5,300 military vehicles of all types; this assessment has been confirmed by the British Ministry of Defense.

The same independent verification exists for most of the other Ukrainian claims. Recently, the Pentagon acknowledged that the Russian military has lost thousands of combat vehicles of all types, including over 1,000 tanks, and dozens of fighter jets and helicopters.

Furthermore, more recent reports that are citing Western intelligence officials indicate that the Russian military has suffered up to 50,000 casualties (killed and wounded) in the war so far.

The overall situation on the battlefield. (UK MoD)

In the summer, Sir Tony Radakin, the British Chief of the Defence Staff, recently told the BBC that the West understands that more than 50,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded in the conflict thus far. If we were to take the Ukrainian figures as accurate, the number mentioned by Sir Radakin is on the low side of the spectrum.

Yet, it is very hard to verify the actual numbers unless one is on the ground. However, after adjusting for the fog of war and other factors, the Western official numbers are fairly close to the Ukrainian claims.

As of Monday, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense is claiming the following Russian casualties:

60,430 Russian troops killed (approximately three times that number wounded and captured)
4,991 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles destroyed
3,811 vehicles and fuel tanks
2,380 tanks
1,405 artillery pieces
1,026 tactical unmanned aerial systems
265 fighter, attack, and transport jets
338 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS)
228 attack and transport helicopters
246 cruise missiles shot down by the Ukrainian air defenses
176 anti-aircraft batteries
131 special equipment platforms, such as bridging equipment
15 boats and cutters
four mobile Iskander ballistic missile systems

For most of May, the Russian military suffered the greatest casualties around the Slovyansk, Kryvyi Rih, and Zaporizhzhia areas, reflecting the heavy fighting that was going on there. As the days and weeks went on, most of the heavy fighting shifted toward the direction of Bakhmut, southeast of Slovyansk, around Severodonetsk, Lyman, and Lysychansk.

Destroyed Russian equipment. (File photo)

Then the location of the heaviest casualties shifted again westwards toward the area of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — where one of Europe’s largest nuclear plants is located — as a result of a Ukrainian counteroffensive in and around the area.

Then, the concentration of casualties once more shifted back to the Donbas, especially in and around Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, the two urban centers the Russians managed to capture in July. For most of August, the heaviest fighting took place in the Donbas, where the Russian forces unsuccessfully tried to breach the Ukrainian defenses and capture the Donetsk province. But lately, most of the fighting has shifted to the south where the Ukrainian military is mounting a major counteroffensive to recapture Kherson. It is now there, on the southern front, that the Russian military is suffering the heaviest casualties.

On Monday, Ukrainian forces continued to inflict the heaviest in the direction of Kramatorsk, which is located in the central Donbas, and in the vicinity of Bakhmut, in the south of the Donbas, which the Russian forces have been trying to capture for the past several months.

The stated goal of the Russian military for the renewed offensive in the east is to establish full control over the pro-Russian breakaway territories of Donetsk and Luhansk and create and maintain a land corridor between these territories and the occupied Crimea.

Feature Image: The Ukrainian flag in a recaptured location. (Photo by Sergiy Bobok/Defense Ministry of Ukraine)