Putin is saved by the fact that the numerous losses of the Russian army in Ukraine have not yet shaken the situation inside Russia itself.
For According to statistics, since 1816, war has taken an average of about 50 lives on the battlefield per day. Russia's war in Ukraine is much bloodier. Bill Burns, the director of the CIA, Richard Moore, the head of MI6, and Mikk Marran, the head of the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service, said that about 15,000 Russians had died since February 24 – an average of more than 100 a day. The Ukrainian side says that their losses were at the same level, and sometimes even higher, than in the previous two months of the war. “I expect that the death toll in this war will be higher than in other major European wars, such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, but this is not true of world wars,” says Paul Poast of the University of Chicago, writes The Economist.
How is the number of victims estimated?
Military casualties fall into two main categories: killed in action (kia) and wounded in action (wia), some of whom die later. Captured and missing persons are taken into account separately. Some estimates of Russian losses in Ukraine refer only to the personnel of the army. Others include forces of the Roshvardiya (national guard), the FSB (the main successor to the KGB) and other regular formations, such as the Airborne Forces, which were destroyed in the first phase of the conflict. The Russian Federation also separately recruits fighters from the so-called “Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics” — a pair of Russian-backed puppet governments in eastern Ukraine that have conscripted a large number of local residents. These mercenaries from the “LDNR” together with the Russians took part in heavy battles in recent months.
According to the calculations of the Americans, since the beginning of the war on February 24, a total of 15,000 to 20,000 Russians have died in all the listed categories. On June 29, British Defense Minister Ben Wallace announced that 25,000 Russians had been killed.
As of July 19, according to the calculations of the Ukrainian side, 38,500 Russian soldiers were destroyed (as of July 27, 40,070 were destroyed – the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine), although Ukraine has an obvious incentive to present a high possible number of enemy losses. On July 19, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov somewhat implausibly stated that 11,000 Russians died in the battles for Severodonetsk and Lysychansk alone.
Such a scattering of numbers reflects the fact that estimating losses by another country inevitably involves assumptions. “It's not an exact science,” says one Western official. The details of the loss estimate are usually secret, but analysts have several ways of calculating it.
One is to use Russian assessments using classified intelligence, such as agents in the Russian government or intercepted messages in which Russian units describe their losses. However, this data can be distorted: Western officials believe that Putin himself is not getting the full picture of how badly his war is going.
Another is to be guided by Ukrainian “contact reports” of the same battles, although this becomes more difficult when most of the fighting is done by artillery and is out of sight, unlike infantry close combat.
Third, to infer losses based on destroyed equipment, which can be monitored anywhere from social media to satellite imagery, based on prior knowledge of how many Russians tend to service a certain machine or make up a certain type of combat unit. Although such calculations are made, it is clear that their “range of error” is wide, reflecting considerable uncertainty.
It is even more difficult to obtain figures for the wounded. It is also vital because the effectiveness of an army depends not on how many of its soldiers die, but on how many fail. Something can be calculated by observing field hospitals, blood supplies and other indicators of medical activity. However, analysts usually have to draw conclusions based on the assumption that soldiers tend to be wounded in the expected ratio of being killed.
(Blue dot – quantitative ratio of “wounded: killed” in the US war in Afghanistan; Gray dots – “wounded: killed” military personnel in the world wars years; Red dots – Russians killed in wars by “wounded: killed” years; Red dot with a black line around it – Russians “wounded: killed” in the Russian Federation's war against Ukraine, as estimated by the CIA for July 2022)
But which ratio to choose? According to the Dupuis Institute, which collects historical data on wars, during World Wars I and II, the average ratio of the American military was just over three to one, or three wounded for every one killed. However, later in the 20th century, this changed. Research by Tanisha Fazal of the University of Minnesota shows that the ratio of wounded to killed has increased dramatically in the post-war period (see graph) because soldiers go to war much healthier, have better protective gear, evacuation is faster, and if soldiers are wounded, they receive better medical care in general.
A war that would have killed 1,200 soldiers in 1860 is expected to kill 800 soldiers in 1980, as many of those previously killed will be wounded. So in the Iraq war, between 2003 and 2011, the ratio of the well-supplied US military was almost nine to one; in Afghanistan around ten to one. These ratios, the highest in modern warfare, were in part the result of emergency care being provided to wounded soldiers within 60 minutes of being wounded, a period known as the “golden hour,” thanks to the deployment of more surgical teams and faster medical evacuations.
The question is how it applies to Russia. In Iraq and Afghanistan, America intensively used helicopters for medical evacuation. This is more difficult to do when helicopters are often shot down, as is the case in Ukraine. Perhaps America would face the same problem under similar circumstances. Dr. Fazal, in the online journal “War on the Rocks” in 2018, noted that simulations showed that treatment during the “golden hour” would be much more difficult for America against an equal or near-equal adversary. A war against North Korea, for example, would require the evacuation of casualties equivalent to those suffered by America in all of its conflicts over the previous 17 years (including Iraq and Afghanistan) “within months, if not weeks.” Such intensity would undermine even American medical evacuation capabilities.
Russian medical evacuation capabilities are outdated. Its military medicine is “less advanced” than that of its Western opponent, says Ronald Tee, an expert in military medical logistics at King's College London. For the Russian Federation, a particular disadvantage is the provision of medical assistance on the battlefield, which is provided by paramedics. The emphasis, as in many former Soviet republics, including Ukraine, is on sending the wounded back to the doctors in the rear areas. “That's all well and good,” says Dr. Tee, “but the result is that the wounded become dead because of the longer evacuation lines.”
Based on the numbers, Burns and Marran claim that Russia suffered three times more wounded than killed. This is roughly consistent with documents obtained from Ukraine and analyzed by Rob Lee of King's College London and Michael Cofman of the CNA (National Security Analysis) think tank. Documents received from the Ukrainian side showed losses up to mid-March in the 1st Tank Army, a key Russian offensive formation.
Analysts suggested a ratio of 3.4 to 1, rising to 4:1 if the missing soldiers were presumed dead. The latter is very close to the ratio, with the summary of the “DPR”, which, unlike the Russian army, accurately documented its losses. Another problem, Cofman says, is that the ratio may decrease as wounded soldiers die, but it will increase as artillery — a weapon that wounds with shrapnel — dominates the battlefield, as it has in recent months.
These calculations may seem imprecise. But the specific ratio you choose matters in assessing how badly the Russian army has been outgunned, a key indicator of a prolonged war of attrition. The 3:1 ratio chosen by American and Estonian intelligence suggests that about 60,000 Russian soldiers have been disabled, although some soldiers wounded in February or March have already recovered.
If the number of dead according to Wallace's calculations true, this means that about 100 thousand Russian soldiers were disabled at one point or another. That number will rise to a whopping 125,000 – equivalent to the entire ground force with which Russia entered the war – if the new Western artillery increases the ratio to 4:1.
Also read: Occupiers, enemy air defenses reduced on Ukrainian soil , helicopters and not only: the General Staff named the losses of the enemy
This multiplier means that very high estimates of Russian deaths are less likely, Kofman argues. If the total losses were significantly higher than the American and British figures, the Russian army would clearly have been in even more trouble a long time ago.
Nevertheless, Russian losses of this magnitude do explain why so many Russian battalions are in dire straits, why their advance in the Donbass has been extremely slow, and why the army is now raising reserve battalions from volunteers across the country. If Ukraine conducts a large-scale counteroffensive in the south of the Kherson region in the coming months, it will stretch Russian forces even more.
The officers who led the army were especially badly affected: thousands of lieutenants and captains and hundreds of colonels were killed, the American official noted 22 July Another source says that it is no wonder that the number of soldiers refusing to fight is now in the thousands.
Perhaps the saving grace for Vladimir Putin is that there has so far been no serious domestic backlash against such a waste of human life. resource “These are not middle-class kids from St Petersburg or Moscow,” said Mr Moore of MI6. These are poor children from the countryside of Russia. They are from Siberian towns. These are ethnic minorities. This is Putin's cannon fodder”.
Earlier it was reported that in the south of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Andriivka was liberated and 89 occupiers were destroyed in a day — OK “South”. Ukrainian defenders eliminated four enemy strongholds.
