Russian soldiers appear to be dying in Ukraine at a remarkably high rate

All of our coverage, including the latest reports and analysis, of the war in Ukraine is collected here.

In august 2014 Major General Harold Greene was assassinated at a training facility outside Kabul. He was the first American general killed in combat since the Vietnam war, four decades earlier. Deaths of high-ranking military officers are rare, since they tend to avoid getting dangerously close to the front line (they typically do so only when their troops are in trouble). Yet in the three weeks of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, four Russian major-generals have been slain; there are thought to be only 20 or so in the theatre. In fact, Russia seems to have been losing soldiers of all ranks at an astonishing rate.

Estimates of the number of fallen soldiers in Ukraine are hazy. Mr Putin, still claiming that his “special military operation” is going to plan, has good reason to understate its human cost. By March 2nd after a week of war, 498 of his soldiers had died in combat, according to official Russian tallies. But the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) has put the count at between 2,000 and 4,000 in the war’s first 11 days. (The New York Times reports that the American estimate has since risen to more than 7,000.)

The DIA had only low confidence in this estimate; working out casualties from images and fragmentary intelligence is hard. Even so, this number of deaths so early on in the war is striking. The lower bound of the DIA’s estimate is already greater than the number of Soviet soldiers who died in the first year of the Afghanistan war that began in 1979. It exceeds the number of military casualties America suffered in the first 11 years of its own Afghan campaign, which started in 2001, and the first two years in Iraq, from 2003. It is roughly equivalent to the number of Russian soldiers lost in the first year of the brutal second Chechen war of 1999-2009. According to human-rights organisations, that war claimed a total of 5,500 Russian soldiers’ lives in a decade. The toll in Ukraine seems to be approaching that sum in mere weeks, if it has not already exceeded it.

Shocking as they are, these losses make little dent in Russia’s armed forces. Before the war, Russia had 900,000 active soldiers and 2m reserves. At most the DIA’s death toll in Ukraine so far accounts for just 0.4% of its active fighters. But it is a far larger proportion of the Russian fighting force in the country, and an even larger number of troops are likely to have been wounded—perhaps ten times as many, if recent trends hold. All that will be doing little to boost their low morale. ■

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