Russia's four-month offensive on the destroyed Donetsk town of Avdiivka, in eastern Ukraine, cost more lives than the 10 years of war Moscow waged under the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, new figures suggest.
About 17,000 Russian soldiers were killed between October 10, 2023, when Russia launched its assault on the Donetsk city, and February 17, 2024, said Dmytro Lykhovii, spokesperson for Ukraine's Tavria group of forces covering Avdiivka.
A further 30,000 Russian fighters were wounded, he said. On Sunday, the commander of the Tavria group, Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, had said Russia had lost more than 47,000 troops in the fighting for the city.
Newsweek was unable to independently verify Ukraine's statistics, and has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email. Western analysts have said Russian casualties in the nearly 2-year-old war picked up after Moscow embarked on its encirclement of Avdiivka.
If Kyiv's figures are accurate, this means more Russian soldiers were killed in and around Avdiivka than during the decade the Soviet Union spent fighting in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union sent thousands of its soldiers into Afghanistan at the end of December 1979. The resulting conflict lasted nearly a decade, and estimates widely put the Soviet death toll at around 15,000 troops.
Within three months of the start of the current conflict from February 24, 2022, Russia had lost the same number of troops as the Soviet Union did during the more than nine years in Afghanistan, the British Defense Ministry said in late May 2022.
Although the two wars are not exactly the same, this is a "valid comparison" that speaks to the high death toll of the largest land war in Europe since World War II, said Nick Reynolds, research fellow for land warfare at the London-based Royal United Services Institute think tank. In both cases, Moscow was dedicating a huge amount of resources to its military, he told Newsweek.
Casualties are notoriously difficult to pin down in active wars, and Moscow and Kyiv are tight-lipped about losses, rarely nodding to their own casualty counts or how much equipment has been destroyed. Russia has not published any data on its own reported losses since September 2022. At that point, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russia had lost 5,937 troops since Moscow's invasion on February 24, 2022.
"It is very difficult to determine casualties in an ongoing conflict since both sides will try to keep the data secret and inflate the number of adversary casualties," Marina Miron, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, U.K., told Newsweek in May 2023.
As of Monday, Ukraine's military put the number of Russian soldiers taken out in Ukraine since February 2022 at 403,720. Western estimates broadly agree Russian casualties are well over 300,000.
In late January, Britain's armed forces minister, James Heappey, told U.K. lawmakers that about 350,000 Russian personnel had been killed or wounded in Ukraine. Tens of thousands of mercenaries serving with the Wagner Group, which were influential in operations to take the Donetsk city of Bakhmut in May 2023, were also killed and injured, Heappey said.
But Ukraine's count gives some indication of the price Russia paid to capture the Ukrainian stronghold of Avdiivka, a strategically important city close to the regional capital, Donetsk City, which had weathered a decade on the front lines of fighting between Kyiv and Russian-backed forces.
Ukraine had meticulously built up its defenses around Avdiivka, and Russia began attacking the stronghold in a concerted offensive on October 10. The ensuing battle quickly earned the label "meat grinder," a term used to describe prolonged battles that rack up high casualty counts and absorb significant resources.
Russia said on Sunday that it had "completely liberated" Avdiivka the previous day, after Ukraine said on Saturday that it was withdrawing its forces from the city.
"We are preserving our people, our warriors, because this is what defense is all about," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an address at the Munich Security Conference in Germany over the weekend. Zelensky recently said that Russian losses in Avdiivka totaled seven times the number of casualties Ukraine sustained defending the city.
Russia had been slowly advancing around the small city since October, but Ukraine had managed to keep a vital supply route from the west of Avdiivka in play.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday that its forces had taken complete control of the Avdiivka Coke and Chemical Plant in the northwest of the city. Its troops raised Russian flags in the facility's administrative buildings, Moscow said in a statement.
In a separate update, the Kremlin said Russian troops were now clearing mines throughout Avdiivka.
Update 2/19/24, 11:50 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from Nick Reynolds.
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Ellie Cook is a Newsweek security and defense reporter based in London, U.K. Her work focuses largely on the Russia-Ukraine ... Read more
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