RUSSIA: A new report has declared that over 75,000 people have either perished or been injured in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The US intelligence revealed that the casualties amounted to nearly half of the troops deployed to the war when President Putin announced a “special military operation” against Ukraine on February 24.
The Kremlin, however dismisses the report, calling it a “hoax”. Russia has not officially declared its number of casualties since the initial days of fighting. In March, Russia reported that 1,351 soldiers died in action.
The report also said that if this “hoax” is true, then the war is the “worst ever war in terms of casualties” and the “second worst worldwide since World War II” with the Vietnam War claiming the biggest number of 350,000 US troops. The report also claimed that the erstwhile Soviet Union suffered nearly 70,000 casualties in the Afghanistan war in the mid-80s.
However, the report also added that the casualty rates are perhaps distorted since the actual rates are likely higher. The report comes just days after CIA Director William Burns evaluated a substantial loss of 15,000 Russian soldiers and “maybe three times that wounded,” saying it was “quite a significant set of losses”. Burns added that Ukrainians have suffered equally, if not more, saying it was “probably a little less than that”.
Last month Ukraine announced that 100 to 200 troops perished per day. Burns also said that Russia had resorted to “long-range firepower to stand off and effectively destroy Ukrainian targets” in order to “compensate for the weaknesses in manpower “.
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