Russia Loses 10,000 Troops in Two Weeks: Ukraine

Ukraine has claimed there has been a big spike in Russian casualties over the Christmas and New Year period.

In an update on Thursday, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said that 109,720 Russian personnel had been killed since the start of the invasion on February 24, 2022. This figure included 810 Russian personnel reportedly killed in the 24 hours preceding the update.

The unverified number that Newsweek has contacted the Russian defense ministry about is a sobering statistic when compared with Kyiv's claims two weeks ago.

On December 21, the six-figure milestone was reached, according to Kyiv, after 660 Russian troops had been killed—taking the death toll from 99,740 to 100,400. Ukraine's estimates put the death toll of Russian personnel at 9,980 over the last fortnight.

At the end of December, Ukraine said that 10,000 Russian troops had been killed each month since February 2022 when Vladimir Putin started the war.

The estimates come as a bloody battle for Bakhmut in the Donetsk Oblast continues to rage and follow a devastating New Year's Eve strike on the Russian-held town of Makiivka in the same region about 50 miles south.

Moscow announced that 89 personnel had been killed in the strike it blamed on Ukraine, although Russian military bloggers have said that the death toll could run into the hundreds and blamed the commanders for putting troops close to ammunition stores.

Exact figures of Russian military deaths in the war are tricky to ascertain with Moscow's official figures considerably lower than Kyiv's estimates.

Russia has only updated the figure twice, at the end of March and in September, when defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, said that 5,937 Russian troops had been killed since the war started.

That official number is notably smaller than estimates from Western military and intelligence officials. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, said in November that Moscow's casualties were "well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded."

Michael Clarke, visiting professor in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, told Newsweek in October that the estimates by both Moscow and Kyiv are likely to be inaccurate.

Meanwhile, a project by BBC Russian and the Russian media outlet Mediazona said in December that it had counted the war dead as at least 10,000. It drew on open source information including news reports, announcements from local officials, social media posts, plaques in schools as well as cemeteries.

These included over 400 newly mobilized recruits, 95 serving prisoners as well as fighter pilots and special forces officers. The outlet's research found Krasnodar to be the region with the highest losses, followed by Dagestan and Buryatia.