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The commander of Russia's elite airborne troops, General Colonel Mikhail Teplinsky, leaked the number of casualties sustained by his unit since President Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, prompting the Kremlin to scramble to delete his announcement.
In a video now deleted by Russia's Defense Ministry, Teplinsky, commander of the Russian Airborne Forces (the VDV), revealed on Wednesday that 8,500 Russian paratroopers have been wounded since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022.
The figure marks the highest number of casualties among a single type of military force mentioned by a Russian military official since the war began, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Teplinsky was appointed commander of the Airborne Forces in June 2022. He revealed the casualty figure during a video in which he congratulated paratroopers on the Day of Airborne Forces—marked on August 2—which was published by "Zvezda," the Russian defense ministry's TV channel.
In his congratulatory message, Teplinsky said that in the 17 months since the war began, "more than 5,000 wounded paratroopers returned to the front after treatment, and over 3,500 of our wounded refused to leave the front line at all."
The Zvezda TV channel quickly removed Teplinsky's congratulatory video message from its website and from its Telegram channel, according to Agentsvo, an independent Russian investigative site launched in 2021.
Russian news outlets including MK.ru have published articles which include Teplinsky's quoted figures.
Newsweek has reached out to the Russian defense ministry for comment via email.
Russia itself rarely releases figures on troop losses, but when it does, its estimates are far lower than those of Ukraine. The BBC's Russian service reported in September 2022, citing publicly available data, that Russia had lost more than 900 special forces soldiers, paratroopers, marines and pilots in over six months of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
That figure included 151 soldiers from Russia's military intelligence, 337 marines, 245 troops from the National Guard's special forces and riot police, 144 members of elite paratrooper units, 20 members of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and Federal Guards Service (FSO), as well as at least 67 combat pilots.
Last month, an alleged leak of a secret memo obtained by Russian dissident in exile, Vladimir Osechkin, appeared to show that Russia was prepping the VDV to be deployed to hot spots in Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, as "assault forces" under Teplinsky's leadership.
The document, hand-dated and signed on July 18, which couldn't immediately be verified by Newsweek, was published by the anti-corruption website Gulagu.net after troops from the VDV published an audio message warning against the dismissal of Teplinsky, who has criticized how the war in Ukraine has been handled.
There had previously been rumors of his arrest in mid-July, "possibly as a result of his affiliations with the Wagner Group," which staged a mutiny in Russia at the time, analysis by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) on Wednesday suggests.
Teplinsky this week announced the formation of up to two new VDV regiments and the reestablishment of the 104th VDV Division by the end of 2023, an announcement which "indicates that he maintains his position and the public support" of the Russian defense ministry, analysis by the ISW said.
It's unclear whether Teplinsky has been punished for revealing VDV casualty figures.
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About the writer
Isabel van Brugen is a Newsweek Reporter based in Kuala Lumpur. Her focus is reporting on the Russia-Ukraine war. Isabel ... Read more