Zelenskyy: Russia lost 650 thousand killed and wounded in war

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in the interview with The Times of India that Russian casualties in the war amount to approximately 650,000 killed and wounded.

“Russia has killed many Russians themselves. Many mobilized Russian soldiers were killed by their own Russian army because they were afraid to go forward, to advance, to die under bullets or be wounded,” Zelenskyy told The Times of India.

According to the Ukrainian president, Russian forces are executing their own retreating soldiers.

“They were running back and there they were killed by their own army… They don’t count the numbers,” Zelenskyy said.

Zelenskyy said that Russia fails to retrieve its dead soldiers from the battlefield.

“Russia is pushing through the meat grinder,” using its soldiers as “meat” and “throwing their corpses at us,” Zelenskyy added.

The Ukrainian General Staff reported on 28 October that the Defense Forces eliminated 1,680 Russian soldiers in the past day and destroyed seven tanks, 51 artillery systems, and 40 armored fighting vehicles. According to the General Staff, total Russian losses exceed 690,000 personnel.

The WSJ report, published on 17 September 2024, claimed that Ukraine had suffered 80,000 military fatalities since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

A Ukrainian Member of Parliament and Security Service, Colonel Roman Kostenko, said that this number is inflated, suggesting that “even an estimate of 50,000 deaths could be too high.”

Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 25 February 2024 that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the first two years of the war. It was the first time when Ukraine revealed the number of its killed soldiers in the war against Russia. However, Zelenskyy did not disclose figures for wounded and missing personnel.

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