An analysis of battlefield conditions in the Ukraine war says Russia will hit one million casualties this summer and that there have been approximately 1.4 million casualties between both sides so far.
Russia is trading ever more human lives and military materiel for a glacial pace of progress in capturing Ukrainian territory, a digest of the state of the Ukraine War produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies states.
According to estimates published by the think tank, Russia has now sustained 950,000 casualties, and given it is known to take 1,000 fresh casualties a day in the fighting is on course to hit one million this summer. Of those 950,000, the CSIS estimates 250,000 are fatalities.
Ukraine has succeeded in conserving the lives of its own soldiers through a better approach to integrating defences and not resorting to high casualty tactics, like using human-wave tactics to draw fire for reconnaissance, the CSIS claimed. Nevertheless the Ukraine has taken 400,000 casualties, between 60,000 and 100,000 of which are deaths, it stated.
Ukraine, for its part, has previously claimed its killed-in-action roll is so much shorter than Russia’s because of a better approach to battlefield medicine.
Between 950,000 Russian and 400,000 Ukrainian casualties, the butchers’ bill for Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine is steadily tracking to 1.4 million. They said: “Russia has suffered roughly five times as many fatalities in Ukraine as in all Russian and Soviet wars combined between the end of World War II and the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022… 15 times larger than the Soviet Union’s decade-long war in Afghanistan.”
The CSIS asserted in their digest that, in contrast to the blitzkrieg phase of the early war, which was highly mobile and saw large exchanges of territory between Ukraine and Russia in the matter of weeks, in the past year even though Russia has been advancing, it is doing so slower than the British and French Armies at the Somme in the Great War. Russia conquered 120,000 square kilometres (46,000 square miles) of Ukraine in the first five weeks of 2022, they noted, while at a much higher cost to lives and equipment they took only 5,000 square kilometres (1,900 square miles) in the past 12 months.
The grim bulletin on battlefield casualties comes as progress on peace talks gives all appearances of having all but stalled. As things stand, both sides remain relatively well wedded to their initial negotiation positions, both sides wanting something close to total victory out of the talks. This impasse has led to a series of accusations, the Ukrainians saying Moscow has no real intention of negotiating in good faith, and Russia calling Kyiv “delusional”.
On Thursday, President Trump said he had spoken to Russia’s President Putin by telephone, calling the conversation “good” not not one “that will lead to immediate Peace”. In a warning that a massive surprise airstrike by Ukraine on Russian airfields over the weekend may lead to fresh escalation, Trump related that: “President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields”.
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