How comes this are totally different numbers of KIA?
Wait a moment: “long-established culture – of dishonest reporting within the military” ….
From our point-of-view (Finland) the Russian culture of lying and being dishonest goes well beyond military.
We have an ages old saying of our neighbours: “A Russian is a Russian even if you steak him/her in butter” (ryssä on ryssä vaikka voissa paistais).
Who thinks UK defence intelligence has a better accuracy than Ukraine who counts russian losses every day with drones and field reports?
Ukraine figures get confirmed over and over again in different ways.
There are at least 330k KIA.
Nobody knows how many WIA but probably many fewer than on the Ukrainian side where wounded are rescued.
Basic numbers may be off. The number of KIA may be higher and the number of WIA lower. The Russians have little to no medical treatment near the fronts. This and with leaving their wounded in the field should skew the KIA numbers higher. Using the casualty and loss rates from the US and NATO books calculating loss rates based on types of operations is likely a mistake based on Russian tactics, losses, and failure to properly treat wounded. These rates are based on western concepts of operations and Russia is not following US and NATO concepts.
Lets be honest, i do think the numbers are very roughly accurate… however i do think the death toll is higher as the injured one would be.
Why? cause we all have seen how those orcs deal with casualties… they dont!!!
Does this include Wagner?
Do the Russian MOD figures also include casualties within the Luhansk and Donetsk militias and other PMCs other than Wagner?
It does seem to be like counting kangaroos in a paddock.
Figures on killed seems way too low. Report says 20k Wagner KIA.
There were about 20k killed Wagner just in Bakhmut.
Wagner also took part in assaults on Sieverodonetsk and Lysychansk among other towns, the real number of killed must be much higher than what this report suggests.
These low numbers does not explain half million newly mobilised orcs though…
The term “official” is a shifty one. As stated in a culture of untruth, and also in a society where the majority is not considered full citizen then what is “official”? In the west a life counts, but counting lives one by one is not they way to see Putin’s foggy doings.
Putin summons 300k, then another 170k, and the year in between doing monthly stealth summons of 20k. No amount of name returns home. On the back of an envelope I count 700k dead Russians.
And brace yourselves: we got millions to go. So keep the weapons coming.
[removed]
I read from a reputable source that those figures do not include casualties from private mercenary groups, prisoners, and soldiers from the DPR and LPR.
So in a way the DI assessment is accurate plus or minus, but do not include a good portion of total KIA and wounded.
It should scare you that Russia can suffer so much and still have the capacity to conduct more offensive
It is interesting that UK Defense intelligence arrives at the figure “320,000 total Russian combatant casualties.”
As I’m sure you are all well aware, Ukraine releases regular updates on their kill sheet and the number that is generally placed at the top is “eliminated,” which is not in any way a standardized social scientific term for referring to casualties. It may however, refer to an estimate of total combatant casualties (killed, and wounded); in fact this is what I had surmised they mean by “eliminated:” observations of Orc combatants who were either wounded or killed. The Ukrainians are of course happy for people to conclude that the “eliminated” number means “killed,” and who can blame them?
Based on wars that have been waged in the 20th century, these numbers (70,000 Orcs killed and 250,000 wounded) are believable, while also being shockingly high. Over the course of TEN YEARS involvement in the Soviet-Afghanistan war (1979 to 1989) the USSR suffered a total of around 68,470 combatant casualties (14,453 killed, 53,753 wounded and 264 lost).
This comparison is salient for a number of reasons.
1. It shows us that, while many aspects of warfare remain similar to patterns observed more than 100 years ago (the importance of artillery, entrenching and defensive measures like mines, the potency of airborne attacks in a phase where defensive technology is far behind offensive technology, the fundamental importance of infantry even in a war where $ multi-million systems are common) war has become even more lethal.
2. In the late 1980s there were growing manifestations of dissent and protest, mostly among female-relatives of Soviet personnel serving in the Soviet-Afghanistan war. Many scholars conclude that this “Wives and Mothers” protest movement in the USSR was an important catalyst which contributed to the decreasing legitimacy and authority of the Soviet authorities and ultimately contributed to the collapse of the empire.
3. Russia has large numbers of resources, but there are already signs that compliance with recruitment is problematic, and deficiencies in their capacity to properly train, supply and support the troops that they already have, much less more of them. The fact that Ukrainian leadership are keenly familiar with post-Soviet and Russian civil and military society and have adopted a method of warfare which is largely focused on depleting Russian combat power (both personnel, equipment and supply) speaks volumes.
4. In sum: there is likely to be “breaking point” for the Russian military as a whole, just as there are breaking points for component units (Divisions, Brigades, Battalions, etc.) as well as small units and individuals. What that breaking point is is impossible to say.
In 1917, when Russian involvement in WWI was brought to an end (and the Empire itself soon after), total Russian casualties were probably in the ballpark of several million total dead and wounded (wikipedia lists the totals for the entire war as 2.2m killed, 3.75m wounded, and 3.3m captured). In this case also, a women’s protest movement played a leading role as a catalyst for spreading civil unrest and the end of the Tsardom.
On International Women’s Day, Thursday, 23 February 1917/8 March 1917, as many as 90,000 female workers in the city of Petrograd left their factory jobs and marched through the streets, shouting “Bread”, “Down with the autocracy!” and “Stop the War!” These women were tired, hungry, and angry,[75] after working long hours in miserable conditions to feed their families because their menfolk were fighting at the front. They were not alone in demanding change; more than 150,000 men and women took to the streets to protest the next day.
Whether the breaking point for the Russian society of 2023 is as high as it was in 1917 seems unlikely; the composition of Russian society in 2023 is fundamentally different, with much higher literacy, much higher standards of living, and very different expectations of the authority of the state and the obligations of individuals to the state. The other important difference is that, World War I placed far worse economic strain on the already impoverished and underdeveloped Russian society of 1917. There are a number of other complications that make drawing a direct analogy between the social uprisings of 1917 with an hypothesized 21st century mutiny and revolution in Putin’s Russia.
With that said however, if we use the casualty figures from the Soviet-Afghan war (68,000) as a low end and some relatively large fraction of those from WWI (2 million?) as a high end, it may offer us a vague sense of how much more the Russian people can endure before they turn on their real oppressors: the Putin regime.
If only 350k then why 1.7M call ups, conscripts, and what ever “special” name Russ uses to send troops to Ukraine? And why have they billed 260,000 body bags? Why-has their population fallen another 700,000?
15 comments
How comes this are totally different numbers of KIA?
Wait a moment: “long-established culture – of dishonest reporting within the military” ….
From our point-of-view (Finland) the Russian culture of lying and being dishonest goes well beyond military.
We have an ages old saying of our neighbours: “A Russian is a Russian even if you steak him/her in butter” (ryssä on ryssä vaikka voissa paistais).
Who thinks UK defence intelligence has a better accuracy than Ukraine who counts russian losses every day with drones and field reports?
Ukraine figures get confirmed over and over again in different ways.
There are at least 330k KIA.
Nobody knows how many WIA but probably many fewer than on the Ukrainian side where wounded are rescued.
Basic numbers may be off. The number of KIA may be higher and the number of WIA lower. The Russians have little to no medical treatment near the fronts. This and with leaving their wounded in the field should skew the KIA numbers higher. Using the casualty and loss rates from the US and NATO books calculating loss rates based on types of operations is likely a mistake based on Russian tactics, losses, and failure to properly treat wounded. These rates are based on western concepts of operations and Russia is not following US and NATO concepts.
Lets be honest, i do think the numbers are very roughly accurate… however i do think the death toll is higher as the injured one would be.
Why? cause we all have seen how those orcs deal with casualties… they dont!!!
Does this include Wagner?
Do the Russian MOD figures also include casualties within the Luhansk and Donetsk militias and other PMCs other than Wagner?
It does seem to be like counting kangaroos in a paddock.
Figures on killed seems way too low. Report says 20k Wagner KIA.
There were about 20k killed Wagner just in Bakhmut.
Wagner also took part in assaults on Sieverodonetsk and Lysychansk among other towns, the real number of killed must be much higher than what this report suggests.
These low numbers does not explain half million newly mobilised orcs though…
The term “official” is a shifty one. As stated in a culture of untruth, and also in a society where the majority is not considered full citizen then what is “official”? In the west a life counts, but counting lives one by one is not they way to see Putin’s foggy doings.
Putin summons 300k, then another 170k, and the year in between doing monthly stealth summons of 20k. No amount of name returns home. On the back of an envelope I count 700k dead Russians.
And brace yourselves: we got millions to go. So keep the weapons coming.
[removed]
I read from a reputable source that those figures do not include casualties from private mercenary groups, prisoners, and soldiers from the DPR and LPR.
So in a way the DI assessment is accurate plus or minus, but do not include a good portion of total KIA and wounded.
It should scare you that Russia can suffer so much and still have the capacity to conduct more offensive
It is interesting that UK Defense intelligence arrives at the figure “320,000 total Russian combatant casualties.”
As I’m sure you are all well aware, Ukraine releases regular updates on their kill sheet and the number that is generally placed at the top is “eliminated,” which is not in any way a standardized social scientific term for referring to casualties. It may however, refer to an estimate of total combatant casualties (killed, and wounded); in fact this is what I had surmised they mean by “eliminated:” observations of Orc combatants who were either wounded or killed. The Ukrainians are of course happy for people to conclude that the “eliminated” number means “killed,” and who can blame them?
Based on wars that have been waged in the 20th century, these numbers (70,000 Orcs killed and 250,000 wounded) are believable, while also being shockingly high. Over the course of TEN YEARS involvement in the Soviet-Afghanistan war (1979 to 1989) the USSR suffered a total of around 68,470 combatant casualties (14,453 killed, 53,753 wounded and 264 lost).
This comparison is salient for a number of reasons.
1. It shows us that, while many aspects of warfare remain similar to patterns observed more than 100 years ago (the importance of artillery, entrenching and defensive measures like mines, the potency of airborne attacks in a phase where defensive technology is far behind offensive technology, the fundamental importance of infantry even in a war where $ multi-million systems are common) war has become even more lethal.
2. In the late 1980s there were growing manifestations of dissent and protest, mostly among female-relatives of Soviet personnel serving in the Soviet-Afghanistan war. Many scholars conclude that this “Wives and Mothers” protest movement in the USSR was an important catalyst which contributed to the decreasing legitimacy and authority of the Soviet authorities and ultimately contributed to the collapse of the empire.
3. Russia has large numbers of resources, but there are already signs that compliance with recruitment is problematic, and deficiencies in their capacity to properly train, supply and support the troops that they already have, much less more of them. The fact that Ukrainian leadership are keenly familiar with post-Soviet and Russian civil and military society and have adopted a method of warfare which is largely focused on depleting Russian combat power (both personnel, equipment and supply) speaks volumes.
4. In sum: there is likely to be “breaking point” for the Russian military as a whole, just as there are breaking points for component units (Divisions, Brigades, Battalions, etc.) as well as small units and individuals. What that breaking point is is impossible to say.
In 1917, when Russian involvement in WWI was brought to an end (and the Empire itself soon after), total Russian casualties were probably in the ballpark of several million total dead and wounded (wikipedia lists the totals for the entire war as 2.2m killed, 3.75m wounded, and 3.3m captured). In this case also, a women’s protest movement played a leading role as a catalyst for spreading civil unrest and the end of the Tsardom.
On International Women’s Day, Thursday, 23 February 1917/8 March 1917, as many as 90,000 female workers in the city of Petrograd left their factory jobs and marched through the streets, shouting “Bread”, “Down with the autocracy!” and “Stop the War!” These women were tired, hungry, and angry,[75] after working long hours in miserable conditions to feed their families because their menfolk were fighting at the front. They were not alone in demanding change; more than 150,000 men and women took to the streets to protest the next day.
Whether the breaking point for the Russian society of 2023 is as high as it was in 1917 seems unlikely; the composition of Russian society in 2023 is fundamentally different, with much higher literacy, much higher standards of living, and very different expectations of the authority of the state and the obligations of individuals to the state. The other important difference is that, World War I placed far worse economic strain on the already impoverished and underdeveloped Russian society of 1917. There are a number of other complications that make drawing a direct analogy between the social uprisings of 1917 with an hypothesized 21st century mutiny and revolution in Putin’s Russia.
With that said however, if we use the casualty figures from the Soviet-Afghan war (68,000) as a low end and some relatively large fraction of those from WWI (2 million?) as a high end, it may offer us a vague sense of how much more the Russian people can endure before they turn on their real oppressors: the Putin regime.
If only 350k then why 1.7M call ups, conscripts, and what ever “special” name Russ uses to send troops to Ukraine? And why have they billed 260,000 body bags? Why-has their population fallen another 700,000?