about 15,000 russians died during the five months that the invasion of Ukraineaccording to intelligence services of the United States and Great Britain, which consider that the president Vladimir Putin is suffering much higher losses than anticipated.
Richard Moore, head of Britain’s MI6, explained that the 15,000 dead were “probably a conservative estimate” and marked a “defeat” for Putin, who had hoped for a quick victory.
“That’s about the same number that they lost in ten years in Afghanistan in the 1980s,” he told the Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado, USA.
“And these are not middle-class kids from St. Petersburg or Moscow,” Moore said. “They are poor children from rural areas of Russia. They are from working-class towns in Siberia. They are disproportionately from ethnic minorities. They are your cannon fodder.”
CIA Director Bill Burns told the same conference a day earlier that US intelligence estimated Russian losses “at around 15,000 dead and perhaps three times as many wounded.”
“It’s a pretty significant set of losses. The Ukrainians have also suffered significant casualties, probably a little less than that,” Burns said.
For its part, Ukraine claims that Russia’s losses are greater, some 36,200 Russian troops killed earlier this month.
Russia has been very reluctant and has only given an official number of victims twice, the last on March 25 with a figure of 1,351 dead, although experts consider it to be too low.
Source: Gestion
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