Zelensky disputes estimate of Ukrainian troop losses
Ukrainian military personnel losses in the conflict with Russia are far below the 80,000 recently reported by the Wall Street Journal, Vladimir Zelensky has claimed. According to Russian estimates, however, the figure is approaching one million soldiers.
Asked in an interview with Kyodo News released by Zelensky’s office on Monday how many people Kiev had lost in the hostilities, the Ukrainian leader declined to give exact figures.
“I apologize, but I cannot share these numbers. Someone recently, I believe that was the US media, reported that 80,000 Ukrainians have died. I want to say that the actual number is much lower,” Zelensky claimed, without providing details on the number of wounded.
He went on to say, however, that “to be completely truthful, we don’t really know how many have died in the temporarily occupied territories,” referring to Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zapororzhye Regions, which overwhelmingly voted to join Russia in referendums. “I’m talking only about documented military losses on the territories we control,” he said.
The figure of 80,000 Ukrainian troops killed in action was reported by the Wall Street Journal in mid-September, citing a confidential Ukrainian estimate, adding that the number of injured service members had reached 400,000.
The last time Zelensky released an official estimate of Ukrainian losses was in February, when he claimed that 31,000 soldiers had died in the conflict. The US media cast doubt on this figure, suggesting that Zelensky was downplaying the numbers to avoid sabotaging the already-struggling mobilization campaign.
At the time, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused Zelensky of “lying” and downplaying the numbers by orders of magnitude, a fact she said was not lost on Ukrainian society.
In mid-November, TASS, citing its own analysis, put Ukraine’s losses at around 906,500 service members killed and wounded since the escalation of the conflict in February 2022. In June, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Kiev was losing around 50,000 troops a month.
Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov suggested last month that the Russian army had “ground down” the best units of the Ukrainian army, crippling its military efforts for 2025. His comments come as numerous Ukrainian commanders complain of manpower shortages, raw and reluctant recruits, and a general decline in morale and extreme exhaustion due to inadequate rotation schedules.
