Russia’s military personnel losses in its invasion of Ukraine have crossed 300,000, showed estimates by the UK that also said thousands more have deserted the battlefield.
James Heappey, minister of state for the armed forces, revealed the UK’s estimates of losses faced by Vladimir Putin since the start of the invasion in February last year.
“We estimate that approximately 302,000 Russian military personnel have been killed or wounded, and tens of thousands more have already deserted since the start of the conflict,” he said on Tuesday in response to queries from John Healey, the shadow secretary of state for defence.
Detailing other extensive Russian losses, Mr Heappey said Russia has lost thousands of military vehicles, naval vessels, and equipment, in a massive resource drain.
“We also estimate that over 7,117 Russian armoured vehicles, including nearly 2,475 main battle tanks, 93 fixed wing aircraft, 132 helicopters, 320 unmanned aerial vehicles, 16 naval vessels of all classes, and over 1,300 artillery systems of all types have been destroyed since the start of the conflict,” he said.
The UK’s estimate of casualties is similar to the assessment made by Kyiv, that said Russia had lost a total 313,470 military personnel in combat as of Tuesday.
On being asked about the casualties seen in Russian private military companies (PMCs) in the war, Mr Heappey said the actual toll of these casualties cannot be obtained amid difficulties.
“The number of personnel killed serving in Russian PMCs is not clear,” he said.
“Russia have utilised several PMCs and volunteer units in Ukraine to augment Russian military forces, but the deaths of personnel from these organisations are not reflected in Russian official military death tolls.”
The Wagner group, one of Russia’s most prominent PMCs, had been deployed in some of the bloodiest battles in Ukraine.
The group has suffered significant casualties in Ukraine. But after an aborted mutiny by its now-dead chief Yevgeny Prigozhin earlier this year, many Wagner fighters had left the country and relocated to Belarus under a deal.
Kyiv, however, later said several hundred of them had returned to eastern Ukraine.
Russia has not released any official casualties suffered by it since the start of the war in Ukraine. Moscow and Kyiv have guarded their own battlefield losses and treated them as state secrets.
In the early stages of war, Russia publicly acknowledged the deaths of just over 6,000 soldiers. Reports about military losses have been repressed in Russian media, activists and independent journalists said.
Documenting the dead in the country has become an act of defiance; those who do so face harassment and potential criminal charges.
In February, the UK’s defence ministry said approximately 40,000-60,000 Russians had likely been killed in the war.
A leaked assessment from the US Defence Intelligence Agency put the number of Russians killed in action in the first year of the war at 35,000-43,000.
