The Human Cost of Putin’s New Offensive, According to Ukraine
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More than 10,000 Russian troops have been killed in the past two weeks in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, data from Kyiv’s military show, as a new offensive by Moscow adds to Russia’s recent losses.
According to daily updates by the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, a total of 11,520 Russian troops have been killed in the 14 days since the first time Russia went over 1,000 daily deaths—that was then a record for the war, and coincided with reports of Russia’s new offensive beginning.
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The daily record, according to Kyiv, was 1,140 Russian personnel killed on February 10. That was more than the previous highest tally which Kyiv recorded just days earlier, of 1,030. Monday’s estimate brings Ukraine’s tally of Russian personnel deaths to 143,680.
The number of Moscow’s war dead couldn’t be independently confirmed. Russia last updated its death toll at the end of September 2022, when it said that 5,937 of its soldiers had died since the conflict began on February 24, 2022.
Newsweek has contacted the Russian defense ministry for comment.
“We see how they are sending more troops, more weapons, more capabilities,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels on February 14, saying it was the start of a fresh offensive.
Serhiy Haidai, the governor of the eastern Donbas’ Luhansk region, posted on Telegram on February 15 that Russian forces were attacking in waves with air support in eastern Ukraine.
“The Russians attack in ‘waves’ with the support of aviation,” he said, noting that the Luhansk settlement of Belogorivka was one area where the Russians were focusing their attacks.
A day earlier, the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, maintained its assessment that Russia’s most likely cause of action was to launch “an imminent offensive effort” in the contested Luhansk region.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov has said Russia will likely use the symbolism of the one-year anniversary of the war to launch a fresh offensive.
Countering that assessment , Andriy Chernyak, a representative of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, has said he believes Russia lacks the military resources to launch a major offensive tied to the one-year anniversary of the start of the war.
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