It has been 399 days since the Russian invasion began. On Wednesday, the Russian forces are still trying to find a breakthrough.
No Breakthrough in Sight
The Russian campaign in Ukraine is stuck in the Donbas.
Despite tens of thousands of killed and wounded Russian troops, the town of Bakhmut is still contested. Wagner Group mercenaries are inside the town and have made significant progress, especially around the AZOM industrial complex. But the Ukrainian garrison is still fighting and has open lines of communication and supply with the rest of the Russian military.
The Russian military has been attacking elsewhere in the Donbas in an attempt to achieve an operational breakthrough. But assaults against Avdiivka, Pavlivka, and Vuhledar have failed to achieve anything significant.
In the east, the Russian military is also attacking along the Svatove-Kreminna line of contact, trying to push the Ukrainian forces back from the key logistical nodes in the area.
In the south, the situation remains the same with not major updates.
Russian casualties
Every day, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense is providing an update on its 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 1,800 Russian tanks (which amounts to more tanks than the combined armor capabilities of France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom) and more than 8,300 weapon systems 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.
In November, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley shared the U.S. military’s assessment that the Russian military has lost way more than 100,000 troops so far in the war. But U.S. officials revised this assessment in February. According to U.S. intelligence, Russia has lost almost 200,000 troops killed or wounded in the conflict so far.
Yet, proper casualty figures are still hard to compute and verify given the fog and friction of war.
As of Wednesday, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense is claiming the following Russian casualties:
- 172,340 Russian troops killed (approximately three times that number wounded and captured)
- 6,966 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles destroyed
- 5,507 vehicles and fuel tanks
- 3,609 tanks
- 2,659 artillery pieces
- 2,239 tactical unmanned aerial systems
- 909 cruise missiles shot down by the Ukrainian air defenses
- 526 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS)
- 306 fighter, attack, and transport jets
- 291 attack and transport helicopters
- 277 air defense systems
- 288 special equipment platforms, such as bridging equipment
- 18 boats and cutters
- four mobile Iskander ballistic missile systems
On Wednesday, Ukrainian forces continued to inflict the heaviest in the direction of Bakhmut, which is located in the south of the Donbas, and along the Kreminna-Svatove line in the east.
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.
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