This is a first since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Moscow acknowledged, Thursday, April 7, having lost many soldiers in this war which began on February 24. Asked about it by British television channel Sky News, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted “significant military losses”, without providing a specific figure. He added that it was a “huge tragedy for us”, breaking with the rather triumphalist tone adopted by the Russian media and authorities since the beginning of the war.
Between 20,000 and 25,000 Russian soldiers out of action
Before Dmitri Peskov’s intervention, Moscow had expressed itself only twice on this assessment. First on March 2, the Russians establishing the number of their soldiers killed at 498. And a second time on March 24, where they counted 1,351 killed and 3,825 wounded. And then that’s all. In the thick fog of war, the true toll of casualties is one of the best-kept secrets, especially when the numbers are big. “It is very difficult to establish it”explains a source within the staff of the French army, Friday April 8. It is estimated between 7,000 and 10,000. And between 13,000 and 15,000 wounded. This would bring the number of Russian soldiers out of action to between 20,000 and 25,000, which is huge. »
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If we include these losses in the full volume of troops engaged by Moscow in this war, ie between 140,000 and 160,000 soldiers, it is very difficult to pursue the same objectives as at the start of the war, continues this source. Hence, probably, the withdrawal, for a week, of the units engaged in the north of kyiv to reinstall them in Belarus or in the Donbass. Taking the Ukrainian capital would no longer be an objective for Moscow at this stage.
Prior to the withdrawal of Russian forces from the region, NATO estimated that between 7,000 and 15,000 people had been killed in Russia on Wednesday, March 23rd. And adding up the dead, wounded, prisoners and missing, these losses amounted to 30,000 to 40,000 Russian soldiers. So Russia has already lost as many, and perhaps more, military personnel in a month and a half as the Red Army in Afghanistan in a decade: 14,400 dead from 1979 to 1989.
Losses that cannot be hidden
If these figures are, for the time being, unverifiable, observers note on the other hand a multiplication of funeral ceremonies in Russia, and in the regional press a flowering of announcements concerning the death of soldiers from local garrisons. Russian investigative media iStories, said “undesirable organization” and banned in Russia by the Ministry of Justice in early March, published on April 7 a video showing on a table decorated with candles the portraits of 55 Russian soldiers probably killed in Ukraine and belonging to the 247e parachute assault regiment. Leading the way in the early days of the Russian invasion, the paratroop units would have suffered heavy casualties.
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Dmitry Peskov’s statement on the “tragedy” of these losses, which no doubt reflects Moscow’s inability to conceal the reality, aroused the fury of part of the Russian elite. “What are significant losses? What about insignificant losses? And the victims of the genocide in Donbass which has been going on for eight years, weren’t they a tragedy for us? »wrote Andrei Turchak, leader of the ruling United Russia party, on April 8, referring to the fallacious motive used by Moscow to justify the invasion of Ukraine.
The latter had gone the day before to a village in the Ukrainian region of Zaporijjia (south-east of the country) to replace the Ukrainian flag of the local town hall with a Russian flag.