The American secret service estimates 15,000, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claims 40,000 and Moscow has not commented on the subject for months: There are very different figures on the number of Russian soldiers who died in the war in Ukraine, and this casual treatment of them deaths is almost as frightening as the numbers themselves. Why does the information about those killed in this war vary so widely?
At least one explanation is political. “Numbers of casualties are always propaganda figures,” explains military historian Sönke Neitzel from the University of Potsdam. “That’s a very important currency for victory or defeat. If they’re too high, they’ll bleed out, if they’re too low, they’ll hold up quite well.”
It is an old adage: in war little is usually gained by telling the truth. It is better to present enemy losses as very high and remain silent about your own. In this regard, even Moscow and Kyiv agree.
Presumably, who is a soldier and who is a member of the militia is not precisely recorded
In the West, however, other numbers are circulating than the 15,000 of the US secret service. When casualties are mentioned – including wounded, prisoners, deserters and missing soldiers – the range of allegedly lost Russian soldiers becomes ever larger and more speculative. An American MP recently spoke of 75,000 casualties on the Russian side. Can this be? Especially with something as organized as an army, it should be possible to say relatively precisely how many soldiers there used to be and how many there are still.
“The Russians probably already know approximately, but not exactly exactly, how high their losses are,” says Neitzel. “Because the Russian army also uses recruits from the Donbass and mercenaries. It’s probably not registered exactly who is a soldier and who is a militiaman. It’s similar in Ukraine, by the way. And if a militiaman is killed in a rocket attack, who capture that then?”
There are organizations like the United Nations that document victims of war. However, they often concentrate on the civilian population and always state that only a small proportion of those killed can be held with certainty. However, the real number is always much higher. How do secret services do that when they publish numbers like 15,000?
Highly specialized personnel cannot simply be replaced
“You can count the vehicles that have been shot down, for example,” explains Neitzel. “If 600 tanks, each with a crew of three, were destroyed, you can assume 1,800 casualties. In the Donbass, where the fighting is taking place in a relatively small area, you can currently also estimate how many soldiers went into a battle and how many came back There are also intercepted reports of losses. The picture that emerges is certainly not complete. But you can extrapolate from that.” Neitzel considers 15,000 to be a realistic figure.
In view of these numbers, however, the question remains what 15,000 casualties mean for an army like the Russian one, which consists of millions of soldiers and reservists. Is that a lot or a little? “For the year 2022 in Europe, that’s a remarkable number,” says Neitzel. “But the question is also: who died? The Russians lost paratroopers, officers and generals, these are highly specialized personnel that cannot simply be replaced. Militarily, that is probably still sustainable. But every army has a point at which it tilts.”