By Spy Uganda Correspondent
Latest reports have revealed that over 45,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
This is according to reports by the BBC Russian Service and news outlet Mediazona.
Based on open sources, the BBC, together with Mediazona and a team of volunteers, managed to establish the names of 45,123 Russian military personnel who have died.
In the Wednesday report, they noted that of the casualty figure, at least 6,614 were killed from October 2023 to February 2024, during the period when Russian units were advancing near Avdievka and in the neighboring areas of the Donetsk region.
From the analysis of obituaries, it follows that the main burden during the assault on Avdeevka fell on people who entered the army “as civilians” – “prisoners of Russian colonies, volunteers and (those) mobilised.”
The report says 30-year-old Denis Kuznetsov was mobilised for the war from Irkutsk and on December 29, 2023, he received a shrapnel wound. But less than a month later, he was again sent to the front near Avdeevka. On January 29, Denis was wounded by a shell dropped from a drone. On January 31, his colleagues found him dead.
“Our total estimated Russian casualties for 2023 amounted to 27,906 people, which is 57% more than the confirmed losses for the first year of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (16,044 people).
“These are only the losses that we were able to confirm using open data. The real number of deaths on the Russian side, according to our estimates, maybe twice as high,” the report said.
The media houses noted they came to this conclusion by systematically studying the situation in cemeteries in 70 settlements throughout Russia, adding that beginning in October 2023, confirmed weekly losses on the Russian side began to increase significantly.
In August and September, an average of 360 military deaths were confirmed each week. And since October 9, confirmed weekly losses have increased to 550-600 people.
This jump coincides with reports of the start of a new operation to storm Avdeevka (in general, the battles for this city have not stopped since February 2022) and other settlements of the Donetsk region.
From October 2023 to February 20, 2024, the deaths of 6,614 Russian military personnel were confirmed, the report stated.
“On the one hand, a number of obituaries did not indicate the place of death of the military, so it cannot be stated unequivocally that all these people died during the attack on Avdievka. On the other hand, the real number of deaths on the Russian side near Avdeevka is definitely higher than the figures we established for the total losses at the front during this time. After all, we rely only on data that we manage to find and verify from open sources,” it added.
The report says some of these sources include messages from officials and the media, publications of close relatives of the victims on social networks and information from cemeteries.
AFP reports that after over a year of grinding trench warfare that failed to yield territorial gains for either Moscow or Kyiv, the Kremlin is ramping up deployments to the front.
President Vladimir Putin rarely acknowledges setbacks on the battlefield, framing the almost two-year war as a battle for Russia’s survival in a bid to rally patriotism.
Ukraine also keeps its military losses and casualties secret, although analysts believe they number in the tens of thousands after two years of fighting.
