Russia will likely surpass 1 million casualties in its war on Ukraine this summer, according to one of the world’s leading think tanks, reflecting the staggering human toll of President Vladimir Putin’s assault on his neighbor.
Around 250,000 of these Russian soldiers have died, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a report Tuesday.
Ukraine has also suffered heavy losses, with 400,000 casualties including between 60,000 and 100,000 killed, it said.
Surpassing 1 million people killed and wounded would be “a stunning and grizzly milestone” for Russia and showed “Putin’s blatant disregard for his soldiers,” according to CSIS. To put this figure in historical perspective, it is five times as many deaths as all Russian and Soviet wars since World War II.
The figure is stark but roughly tallies with previous estimates given by Western intelligence agencies, which have said that around 1,000 Russian troops are killed or injured every day.
Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and began supporting pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country in 2014. But the CSIS figures relate to the period starting with the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2022.
The Russian leader’s justification for this blitzkrieg on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv saw him mix ahistorical fallacy — asserting Ukraine has never been a real independent country — with complaints that NATO enlargement had risked his country’s border security.
However his tank columns were pushed quickly back in a stunning defense by Ukraine. Since then, his forces have reverted to attritional trench warfare, attempting to wear down Ukraine by throwing forward waves of troops in what analysts call “meat grinder” tactics.
