🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
Russia has lost 490 soldiers, 10 tanks and 22 artillery systems in the past 24 hours, Kyiv said on Sunday, as Ukraine prepares to take its counteroffensive into tougher weather conditions.
Moscow's forces have lost a total of 268,630 fighters since the outbreak of full-scale war, Kyiv's military said in a post to social media on Sunday. The Kremlin has also lost 4,554 tanks and 5,811 artillery systems in the more than 18 months of fierce warfare, the military's General Staff said.
Ukraine has lost 11,773 tanks and armored combat vehicles, and 6,319 field artillery weapons and mortars in the year and a half of war, Russia's Defense Ministry said on Sunday.
Newsweek could not independently verify Ukraine and Moscow's figures and has reached out to both countries' defense ministries for comment via email.
Losses are continuing to mount on both sides as Ukraine presses on with its counteroffensive, which has been ongoing for more than three months. Kyiv has been probing Russia's heavily fortified front lines in southern and eastern Ukraine since early June, but in recent weeks has increasingly focused on Moscow's southern fortifications.
Although gains have been slow for Ukraine, Kyiv officials and commanders said earlier this month they had broken through the first line of Russian defenses around the Zaporizhzhia town of Robotyne, which had become a hotspot of fighting.
There is a "realistic possibility" Kyiv troops could break through the rest of Russia's defensive lines in southern Ukraine by the end of the year, Trent Maul, the director of analysis at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Economist in an article published on Wednesday.
On Sunday, Ukraine's General Staff said its forces were carrying out "defensive operations in the east and offensive operations in southern Ukraine."
Russian forces "repelled" six attacks by Ukrainian assault groups around Robotyne in the past day, Moscow's Defense Ministry said on Sunday. Up to 80 Ukrainian soldiers were killed around the settlement in one day, the ministry added in a statement.
General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the BBC on Sunday that Ukraine's forces have up to six weeks remaining before poor weather conditions set in.
"There's still a reasonable amount of time, probably about 30 to 45 days' worth of fighting weather left, so the Ukrainians aren't done," Milley said.
"They haven't finished the fighting part of what they're trying to accomplish," he added.
But Kyiv hit back at the suggestion that the country's muddy season, also known as rasputitsa, will prevent further Ukrainian gains as the weather worsens.
"Combat actions will continue in one way or another," Major General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine's military intelligence agency, said on Saturday.
"In the cold, wet and mud, it is more difficult to fight. Fighting will continue," he said in remarks reported by Reuters. "The counteroffensive will continue."
About the writer
Ellie Cook is a Newsweek security and defense reporter based in London, U.K. Her work focuses largely on the Russia-Ukraine ... Read more