Russia’s casualties including dead and wounded in what they euphemistically call their “special military operation” in Ukraine is on the road to hitting a quarter-million people, the United Kingdom says.
Huge numbers of Russians are being killed in Ukraine according to “the latest U.S. assessments” shared by British defence secretary Ben Wallace during a press conference on Wednesday, with those lives being sacrificed for “almost no progress whatsoever”.
Mr Wallace, who is a former British Army officer and one of the longest-serving ministers in the British government as his close involvement in executing the UK’s support for Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion has seen him immune to the recent churn of Prime Ministers, said the Russians were “suffering huge casualties for whatever piece of ground they do take”.
Speaking alongside the Swedish defence minister after talks in London, Wallace remarked; “The latest U.S. assessments I have seen put casualty figures at 220,000 dead or injured… what that shows is the direction of travel of huge losses of Russians for no gain whatsoever.”
While the actual rate of attrition in Russia’s war in Ukraine is extremely opaque, Western military estimates are made public from time to time. “Senior U.S. officials” cited by The New York Times three weeks ago put the number of Russian casualties at 200,000.
The Ukraine government regularly published extremely precise figures of the number of enemy personnel and equipment they believe they have taken out, although the degree to which this information is good or manipulated for morale is of course unclear. At the time of publication, Ukraine claims it has “eliminated” 172,340 “Russian occupiers”, as well as 3,609 of their tanks.