Russia facing ‘WW1-level casualties’ as Putin’s staggering death toll in Ukraine exposed
A military analyst said Moscow is having "real difficulty" sustaining its mounting losses in Ukraine.
Russia’s shocking casualties rates in Ukraine are akin to those suffered in the First World War, a top military analyst has said. Former British Army officer Hamish de Bretton-Gordon said Moscow is having “real difficulty” sustaining its losses as it continues to pay a heavy price for minimal gains in Ukraine. His comments come after leaked data from Moscow’s state statistics agency, Rosstat, suggested more than 450,000 Russians have been killed in the war . Then on Monday, Ukraine claimed Russia had suffered a single-day record of 2,980 killed or wounded.
Speaking to the Frontline podcast, Mr de Bretton-Gordon said: “If you extrapolate that over a month’s period, that’s nearly 40,000 soldiers killed and injured. These are figures that we would normally associate with the First World War. We know that Russia is having real difficulty sustaining those numbers.”
He said the fatality figures revealed in the data leak from Rosstat were about 90% higher than what the Kremlin has publicly admitted. “When you put all that together you can see where the divergence is”, the retired colonel added.
Vladimir Putin has repeatedly attempted to avoid acknowledging the true scale of Russian fatalities in Ukraine. A senior British Army commander recently said Russian forces are paying a “heavy price for incremental territorial gains” in what has become a “grinding war of attrition and sustained bombardment”.
Russia’s devastating losses have often been attributed to its so-called meat grinder tactics. Experts believe Mr Putin is planning a new mass mobilisation to bolster his frontline forces.
Renewed peace talks between Ukrainian, Russian and American officials took place in Abu Dhabi this week, but failed to achieve a breakthrough. US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have pledged to include European Union delegates in the next round of peace talks.
On Friday, the bloc’s foreign policy chief warned Moscow is setting “traps” by trying to start a discussion about wider European security arrangements. Overnight, Ukraine fired almost 1,200 drones at Russian targets overnight in one of its biggest aerial attacks since Moscow’s full-scale invasion nearly five years ago.
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