Estimated 75,000 Russians killed or injured in Ukraine, says US

WASHINGTON • The Biden administration is quietly circulating an estimate of Russian casualties in Ukraine that far exceeds earlier ones, telling lawmakers that more than 75,000 members of Russia's forces have been killed or injured.

A legislator who recently visited Ukraine confirmed on Wednesday that the estimate emerged in a briefing from the State Department, Department of Defence, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Earlier in the day, a reporter for CNN tweeted the estimate and said it had been shared in a classified congressional briefing.

If accurate, the loss of 75,000 troops to death or injury would amount to a staggering loss.

Estimates of the number of Russian forces in Ukraine were as high as 150,000 from March to June, meaning roughly half could be out of action.

Pentagon officials have said losing just 10 per cent of a military force, including those killed and injured, renders a single unit unable to carry out combat-related tasks.

Such losses also affect the morale and cohesion of a military unit.

Throughout the war, Ukraine and Russia have shielded their casualty numbers, keeping one another - and the rest of the world - guessing about the depth of their losses.

Both sides have an interest in under-reporting battlefield losses: Russia, to preserve its domestic narrative of success, and Ukraine, to maintain morale.

Troop deaths and injuries have been mounting, given that fierce fighting has endured for months.

But the Biden administration's estimate suggests just how high casualties may have gone on Russia's side.

More recently, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said Ukrainian military casualties were now 100 to 200 per day.

Just weeks into the war, American officials offered what they said was a conservative estimate of more than 7,000 Russian war deaths at that point - more than the number of US troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

Russia followed with a far smaller count, saying on March 25 that 1,351 of its troops had been killed. And Mr Zelensky said the same month that an estimated 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed.

In May, Ukraine said 30,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the invasion began in February, a number impossible to independently verify.

In April, a British intelligence assessment had put the estimated Russian losses at half that number.

Mr Zelensky made a new claim in his nightly address on Tuesday, saying that almost 40,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the start of the war, with tens of thousands more injured.

That claim comports, in broad terms, with the US estimate of about 75,000 Russian casualties in total.

NYTIMES