Western intelligence services estimate that the number of Russian soldiers killed or wounded in the war in Ukraine is higher than 350,000, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday.
He did not mention how many of these Russian soldiers had been killed, giving only a global tally of the dead and wounded in the Russian camp. This tally cannot be independently verified, while neither side publishes data on its losses, instead exaggerating those of the enemy.
In his statement, given to the press after a meeting at NATO headquarters with Polish President Andrzej Duda, Stoltenberg also sought to emphasize that the Ukrainian military had recently shot down high-value Russian surveillance planes, referring to the downing of two early warning radar planes A-50, and sank or damaged a significant part of the Russian Black Sea Fleet
“Russia is paying a very high price for marginal gains,” Stoltenberg said, as the troop- and ammunition-strapped Ukrainian army tries to halt the advance of Russian troops returning to the offensive on the eastern Ukrainian front after a failed Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer. past.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on February 24, two years after the start of the Russian invasion, that the losses of the Ukrainian army reached about 31,000 soldiers killed, without mentioning the number of wounded, the first official casualty count provided by Kiev, statement after which Moscow said that “Zelensky is lying” and that he would have lowered the real figure “several times”.
Unspecified American officials told the New York Times last August that by that time, about 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died and between 100,000 and 120,000 had been wounded.
According to a French journalist, Emmanuel Grynszpan, who has been to the front in Ukraine several times, the last time recently, the balance communicated by Zelenski would be correct only in terms of the number of “officially documented” deaths and does not include the missing soldiers, whose number there would be approximately another 30,000, most of whom are also dead.
“A source close to the (Ukrainian) military intelligence services told me that the estimates are around 60,000 dead. The 30,000 more are missing (according to the source, 90% are dead, 10% are prisoners in Russia), as well as thousands of unidentified dead deposited in morgues, in the absence of DNA tests”, said the French journalist in an interview published this month by Le Monde.
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