US intelligence assesses Russian casualties in Ukraine war
(Baonghean.vn) - According to Reuters, a source close to the intelligence community said that a declassified US intelligence report assessed that the war in Ukraine had left 315,000 Russian soldiers dead and wounded, equivalent to nearly 90% of Moscow's personnel when the conflict began.
The report also assessed that Moscow's losses in manpower and armored vehicles to the Ukrainian army had delayed Russia's military modernization by 18 years, the source said.
The Russian Embassy and the Russian Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this information.
Russian officials say Western estimates of Russian deaths in the war have been greatly exaggerated and almost always underestimate Ukrainian losses, which Russian officials say are huge.
The news came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a final appeal to US lawmakers on Capitol Hill to maintain US military aid to Ukraine, his first closed-door meeting with US senators.
The source confirmed that a newly declassified US intelligence report assessed that Russia started a full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022 with 360,000 soldiers.
Since then, the report found, 315,000 Russian soldiers, or about 87 percent of the country’s total force at the start of the war, have been killed or wounded, forcing Russia to relax its recruitment standards to deploy more troops in Ukraine.
This source also said that the Russian army still has 1,300 armored vehicles on the battlefield and is having to reinforce this force with T62 tanks produced since the 1970s.
Kiev, meanwhile, regards its losses as a state secret, and officials say revealing the figure could harm its war effort. A New York Times report in August quoted US officials as putting the Ukrainian death toll at nearly 70,000.
Writing in the Ukrainian magazine Tyzhden, historian Yaroslav Tynchenko and volunteer Herman Shapovalenko said last month that the Shapovalenko Book of Memories project had verified 24,500 Ukrainian combat and non-combat deaths using open sources. They said the actual number could be higher.
