At least 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in the war with Russia, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday, in a rare admission of his country’s losses.
Zelensky disputed Russian claims of much higher numbers when it comes to Ukrainian casualties. The Ukrainian president also said tens of thousands of civilians in occupied parts of the country have been killed.
CNN cannot independently verify these numbers. Ukraine’s battlefield losses are a closely guarded secret, but US officials estimate some 70,000 soldiers have been killed — and nearly twice that number wounded.
Some context: Throughout the conflict, Kyiv has been hesitant to admit how many soldiers have been killed. Former Ukraine Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in June 2022 that he believed tens of thousands of Ukrainians had been killed since February of that year. But two months later, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, then the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, said 9,000 troops had been killed.
Russia, meanwhile, has lost a staggering 87% of the active-duty ground troops it had prior to the invasion, a source familiar with a declassified US intelligence assessment provided to Congress told CNN in December.
SOURCE: CNN, Sunday, February 25, 2024
