Russian forces continue to suffer high casualty figures in their invasion of Ukraine according to the latest figures provided by Kyiv, which show daily losses of more than 1,000 on most days over the last week and total losses of nearly 6,000 over the last five days.
In its latest update on Wednesday, Ukraine's defense ministry said that over the previous 24 hours, Russia had lost 1,120 personnel, making it the fifth successive day that casualty numbers had surpassed 1,000.
On Tuesday, Russia suffered 1,250 losses, 1,320 on Monday, and 1096 and 1,124 the previous two days, taking the tally over the last five days to 5,910. The total for the last week hit 7,980, for a daily average of 1,140.
Russian losses increased in the second half of April amid a push in the Donetsk region, following Moscow's capture of the town of Avdiivka in February, as Kyiv awaits the delivery of military assistance recently approved by U.S. Congress.
In March, there were more than 1,000 losses in a day on nine occasions, 13 times in February, and only four times in January. The latest tally by Kyiv puts total Russian losses over the 797 days of the war at 469,840, for a daily mean of 560. Newsweek has contacted the Russian defense ministry for comment.
The Ukrainian defense ministry describes the figures as "approximate" and they include both killed and injured. Ukraine itself is tight-lipped on its own losses, with President Volodymyr Zelensky revealing in February that 31,000 of his troops had been killed, although other estimates are higher.
While Russia has not updated its casualty figures since September 2022 when defense minister Sergei Shoigu said just under 6,000 had been killed, an accurate estimate of the number of personnel lost in Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion is difficult to ascertain.
On April 27, the British Secretary of State for the Armed Forces Leo Docherty said Moscow's personnel losses had reached 450,000, which like the Ukrainian figure, includes those who have been killed or wounded.
The previous day, the independent Russian media outlet Mediazona, along with BBC Russian, said they could confirm that 51,679 Russian soldiers had been killed in the war, an increase of 1,208 since its last update in mid-April.
However, the outlets say the tally, which includes over 3,400 officers, was likely to be an underestimate because the figures were drawn only from publicly available sources, such as obituaries and online notices.
It comes as the Ukrainian General Staff said that Russian forces had not made any confirmed advances in the Avdiivka area on Tuesday as Moscow bears down on the town of Chasiv Yar, which Kyiv has warned Vladimir Putin wants to capture in time for the Victory Day celebrations on May 9.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Brendan Cole is a Newsweek Senior News Reporter based in London, UK. His focus is Russia and Ukraine, in particular ... Read more
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