Russia had 100,000 troop casualties in four months, US claims
More than 20,000 Russian troops have been killed since December, most of them in the battle for Bakhmut, the US National Security Council says.
The US National Security Council (NSC) claimed yesterday that Russia has suffered more than 100,000 casualties since December alone, including more than 20,000 troops killed in action, most of them in the battle for Bakhmut.
John Kirby, the NSC spokesman, said that the estimate was based on recently declassified intelligence. He said that nearly half the Russian troops killed were fighters with Wagner Group, most of them convicts freed from Russian prisons.
“Russia’s attempt at an offensive in the Donbas, largely through Bakhmut, has failed. Russia has been unable to seize any real strategically significant territory,” Kirby told reporters, although he acknowledged Russia’s “incremental gains” in Bakhmut itself.
“For Russia this attempted effort has come at a terribly, terribly high cost,” he added. “Russia has exhausted its military stockpiles and its armed forces.
“After months of fighting and extraordinary losses, Russia’s fighting continues to be focused on a single city with limited strategic value.”
The announcement came after Russian missile strikes targeted ammunition warehouses at a railway depot in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad in an apparent attempt to slow an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive.
The pre-dawn attacks ignited a blaze that injured 34 people, including three children.
Pavlohrad is a key railway point behind the southern and eastern fronts, where thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers face off along a 650-mile front line.
Ukraine claimed that an industrial building was hit but a Russian official in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region said military targets had been struck. One person was killed and several others injured in a separate attack in the Kherson region. Big cities, however, survived unscathed in another night of missile strikes. Ukraine said its air defence personnel destroyed 15 of 18 missiles fired from the Black Sea.
Despite its air defence systems being bolstered by the delivery of western equipment, including US Patriot missiles, recently leaked American documents indicate Ukraine’s air-defence missiles stock is running low. On Friday, 23 people were killed in missile strikes in the central city of Uman.
Oleksandr Prokudin, a military official for the Kherson region, also said that formerly occupied areas had faced heavy shelling from across the Dnieper river. He said: “Over the past day, the enemy carried out 39 shellings, firing 163 shells from heavy artillery, Grads, UAVs and aviation. The enemy shelled the city of Kherson eight times. One person died and three others, including a child, were injured.”
It was the second continuous day of pre-dawn shelling by Russia before the expected Ukraine counteroffensive. Last week, Oleksii Reznikov, the defence minister, claimed a big push was imminent and NATO announced the delivery of 98 per cent of the weaponry that Ukraine had been promised, including 1550 armoured vehicles, 230 tanks and millions of rounds of ammunition.
Ukraine’s military command said that “a fire” destroyed ten oil tanks at the weekend with a capacity of about 40,000 tonnes at the Crimean port of Sevastopol, home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet, while not directly admitting its forces were responsible.
In western Russia, a freight train was derailed after an “explosive device” detonated on the tracks, an act of sabotage, the governor of Bryansk said.
A day earlier a Ukrainian strike killed four people in a Russian village in the Bryansk region, close to the border.
The Times
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