Roughly 30,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since they invaded Ukraine in late February, the latter announced Saturday.
The estimate is largely in keeping with Ukraine’s previous death toll announcements, as the invaded country claimed just over a month ago that approximately 20,600 soldiers had been killed, suggesting a rate of roughly 10,000 deaths per month.
“30,000,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said on Twitter. “Does this huge number make us happy? No. This should not have happened. But as long as even one enemy soldier remains on our land, we will continue to be unhappy, regardless of how many zeros are added to this horrible statistic.”
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Ukrainian officials have an incentive to inflate this number, while Russian officials have reason to undercount the total, and U.S. Department of Defense officials have repeatedly declined to speculate on death tolls on either side of the war due to insufficient knowledge.
Russians lost roughly a third of the ground combat forces that had been committed to the fight, the British Defense Ministry said on May 15 in an estimate apparently in line with the Pentagon‘s May 2 assessment that the Russians lost 25% of their capabilities. A senior U.S. defense official told reporters more recently that they’re no longer calculating this figure.
Russia has roughly 110 battalion tactical groups in Ukraine, according to a Defense Department official who previously said the groups were made up of 800-1,000 service members. The Russian military committed “more than 80% of their total” BTGs, a senior defense official told reporters earlier this week.
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The actions of Russian soldiers in Ukraine have been denounced as war crimes by much of the West, which has moved to show support for Ukraine. Upon surveying the damages, Ukrainians discovered mass graves filled with women and children, civilians who had been executed with their hands tied behind their backs, and torture chambers — acts so severe that a handful of Russian soldiers have pleaded guilty to war crimes.
The United States has provided Ukraine with nearly $4 billion worth of military aid since Russia invaded roughly three months ago, and there are reports that it could step up the weapons it’s providing in the next tranche to comply with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky‘s request for a multiple launch rocket system, a U.S.-made weapons system that fires a barrage of rockets farther than the weapons the U.S. has provided so far.
Russian President Vladimir Putin commenced the invasion on Feb. 24 after months of readying troops at Ukraine’s borders. They expected to topple the capital of Kyiv in days but were met with much stronger Ukrainian resistance than expected and were forced to retreat from the areas surrounding the city.
