Wagner Group has lost up to 30,000 fighters in Bakhmut

It has been 401 days since the Russian invasion began. On Friday, the fighting on the ground continues with little progress for the Russian offensive against Bakhmut.

Little progress, Many Casualties  

Over the past 24 hours, the Russian forces have continued to push in and around Bakhmut in an attempt to capture the town. However, their efforts have produced very little progress on the ground but heavy casualties. In the latest Western intelligence estimates, the number of Russian casualties in the fight for Bakhmut is more than 30,000 killed and wounded, most of who are Wagner Group mercenaries.

The Russian military has also been attacking elsewhere in the Donbas. Russian units have been conducting offensive operations in the direction of Avdiivka, which is close to the Russian-occupied Donetsk City, the regional capital of the Donetsk province. But the Russian offensive has produced little results there too.

In the east, the Russian military has continued with its limited ground attacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line of contact. The Russians are trying to reach Kupyansk and create a defense bubble around Svatove, a key logistical node.

In the south, the situation remains fairly similar. Ukraine continues to launch special operations raids against Russian positions along the Dnipro River, and the Russian military continues to expand its defensive positions in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces.

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 March, U.K. Defense Minister Ben Wallace shared a Western intelligence estimate that assesses that the Russian forces have lost more than 220,000 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 Friday, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense is claiming the following Russian casualties:

• 173,360 Russian troops killed (approximately three times that number wounded and captured)
• 6,977 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles destroyed
• 5,521 vehicles and fuel tanks
• 3,615 tanks
• 2,675 artillery pieces
• 2,248 tactical unmanned aerial systems
• 911 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
• 278 air defense systems
• 294 special equipment platforms, such as bridging equipment
• 18 boats and cutters
• four mobile Iskander ballistic missile systems

On Friday, 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.