It is one of Ukraine’s best-kept secrets: how many soldiers have died and how many have been wounded since the Russian invasion began on February 24, 2022. Now President Volodymyr Zelensky gave a number for the first time in a long time: “31,000 Ukrainian military personnel died in this war. Not 300,000, not even 150,000, as Putin lies… But every loss is a big loss for us,” Zelenskiy said at a press conference in Kiev on Sunday. Of course, other estimates and evidence suggest that this number may be far removed from the true extent of the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers.
US intelligence estimated Russian losses in December 2023 at 315,000 dead and wounded. Exile media like Meduza or Mediazona evaluate inheritance registers and other sources – and now found outat least 75,000 Russian soldiers will have died by the end of 2023, and by the end of February this number will have risen to 83,000.
Previous estimates were often much higher
There are no regular evaluations for Ukraine. Published so far only mid-November 2023 the military historians Yaroslav Tynchenko and Herman Shapovalenko estimate. Shapovalenko has been running one since 2014 Database of fallen Ukrainian soldiers, the data since the beginning of the invasion is of course confidential. Both also evaluated Zelensky’s decrees regarding posthumous honors for fallen soldiers. Their conclusion: 24,500 dead soldiers were confirmed to have died, which probably corresponds to 70 percent of the actual number of soldiers killed. That would have been around 30,000 at the beginning of November 2023.
It is not entirely impossible that these numbers are correct. In one of the Washington Post A leaked US military document dated February 21, 2023 states that between 15,500 and 17,000 Ukrainian soldiers died and up to 110,500 others were injured. Of course, the author caveated that, given the sparse data, the estimates might be wrong.
In mid-August 2023, after the first months of an offensive that resulted in enormous losses for the Ukrainians, the New York Times US officials and a high-ranking Ukrainian ex-official. Their estimates, which were based on the analysis of social media, satellite images and intercepted communications: Almost 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died by this point.
Evidence points to hundreds of thousands of injuries
President Zelenskiy did not want to reveal the number of injured soldiers on Sunday. But evidence such as amputation figures point to hundreds of thousands of injuries. At the beginning of September 2023, Olha Rudneva, director of the citizens’ group specializing in prostheses for amputee soldiers, estimated Superhumans, told AP the number of 20,000 amputations since the invasion began. At the end of September 2023, Rudnewa’s colleague Andriy Staniwzer wrote of “over 60,000 amputations”. And the Ukrainian Health Minister Viktor Lyashko is said to have reported in Berlin on February 2nd over 100,000 amputations since 2022, according to the NZZ citing the German prosthesis manufacturer Ottobock.
Numbers of tens of thousands of amputations raise alarm bells when compared to typical casualty figures in war. In 2007, US military doctor Lynn Stansbury and four colleagues researched the amputations of US soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Their conclusion: Up to 70 percent of all serious injuries at the front occur in hands, arms or legs. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, the proportion of amputations amounted to a good five percent of all serious injuries on the front and has remained practically unchanged in half a century, according to US military doctors.
The chief traumatologist of the Ukrainian army, Yuri Yarmolyuk, gave similar figures for injuries at the front in July 2023: “65 to 70 percent of wounds in war occur in the limbs.” If the ratio of amputations to serious injuries in Ukraine corresponded to the experience of the US military, just 20,000 amputations would mean around 400,000 injured soldiers.
Certainly, the level of emergency medical care in the US wars was likely to have been higher than in Ukrainian frontline medicine, which was often impaired by the long front and lack of transport – significantly more amputations could be necessary in Ukraine if injured people could only be treated with a delay.
Even an assumption of “only” 200,000 injured soldiers would be a frightening number if what researchers Tynchenko and Shapovalenko found in November is true: “The ratio of dead to wounded in modern wars is 1:3 – and the authors have one There is a lot of documentary evidence that this relationship remained that way at this stage of the Russo-Ukrainian War.” This alone would mean almost 70,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers – more than double the number admitted by the president.