“A top adviser to Ukraine’s president has cited military chiefs as saying 10,000 to 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the country’s nine-month struggle against Russia’s invasion, a rare comment on such figures and far below estimates of Ukrainian casualties from Western leaders.
Russian forces kept up rocket attacks on infrastructure and airstrikes against Ukrainian troop positions along the contact line, the Ukrainian general staff said Friday, adding that Moscow’s military push has focused on a dozen towns including Bakhmut and Avdiivka — key targets for Russia in the embattled east.
Late Thursday, Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, relayed new figures about Ukrainian soldiers killed in battle, while noting that the number of injured troops was higher and civilian casualty counts were “significant.”
“We have official figures from the general staff, we have official figures from the top command, and they amount to between 10,000 and 12,500-13,000 killed,” Podolyak told Channel 24.
The Ukrainian military has not confirmed such figures and it was a rare instance of a Ukrainian official providing such a count. The last dates back to late August, when the head of the armed forces said that nearly 9,000 military personnel had been killed. In June, Podolyak said that up to 200 soldiers were dying each day, in some of the most intense fighting and bloodshed this year.”
Comment: This would make more sense to me than the 100k figure that has been spread around. Is the Ukrainian general staff encouraging the circulation of the larger number as some sort of ruse de guerre? Could be. pl
Official says over 10,000 Ukrainian troops killed in war | AP News
An order of magnitude discrepancy: 10,000 versus 100,000.
That’s humongous. If an estimate is off by an order of magnitude? Then it’s not worth discussing as an estimate. How do you interpolate? The arithmetic average would be 55,000. But going by order of magnitude which is geometric, you need what’s between 1 and 10 or 10 and 100 geometrically – so not 10 but the square root of 10 or 3.16.
So geometrically speaking the numbers under consideration are:
10,000 … 31,600 … and 100,000
Well, I’m even more confused now than when I started. One interesting fact though – if you take the well known 3 to 1 ratio of wounded to killed which pertained statistically over the course of many battles then if 31,600 IS close to correct that results in:
3×31,600 + 31,600 casualties or 126,400.
That’s ballpark (order of magnitude) for Wench der Lyin’s 100,000.
And in accord with many other estimates. For Order of Magnitude’s sake. being off by a factor of 2 is allowable but not being off by the square root of 10.
Proving again: Nothing much.
It may be that the general staff wants the Russians to think they (Ukrainians) are weaker than they really are and this civilian just ran his mouth out of school.
Pat….
Which Civilian are you referring to on this Story…??
Mykhailo Podolyak..The 50 year old
Close Advisor to Zelinsky…Who says He was Deported from Belarus by the KGB in 2004. to Kyiv..??
Stick w/t 100M number. 100M/270 days of fighting = 370 dead p/day; or there abouts. Is that possible? I dunno. Extend that to the end of February ’23 and you get a total of 130M dead. Is that sustainable for Ukraine. I don’t know. But I knew this war would happen. I knew it in the summer of ’91. That was b/f the “Maiden” and b/f 2014, and b/f the neocons. That’s when the Ukrainians declared they were free men. People are confused about this fight. This is NOT an existential fight for Russia. It IS an existential fight for Imperial Russia. Sometimes things are exactly what they seem. Who was that guy with the razor?
Statistical analysis without evidence means nothing.
In 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Armenia had some 4k killed and Azeris about 3k.
These are official numbers.
That conflict was orders of magnitude less violent, involving much fewer forces, mountainous terrain and lasted only about 6 weeks.
I suspect that the KIA:WIA ratio for the Russians is not 1:3 or 1:4. First, their ability to treat battlefield casualties appears to be absolute crap, and second, every time you see a T-72 family tank with the turret blowing off, that’s likely 3 KIA/0 WIA.
The Ukrainians are not “encouraging” the circulation of 100,000 dead.
That was Ursula’s doing – just two days ago – and the Ukrainians were so outraged that she had let the cat out of the bag that the video of her speech was edited to remove that comment.
The current claim of 10,000 – 13,000 is an attempt at narrative control, it is not in any way an accurate figure. And if Ursula hadn’t blurted out the real number the Ukrainians would have simply continued with their practice of saying “Dead? What dead?”
Yeah, Right
It looks like she was reading from a teleprompter. If that is true than she did not blurt anything out. Someone prepared that text, someone approved it.
She has been in politics long enough to know that numbers like that are sensitive information. It is possible she just read incorrectly, after all she mentioned 100k dead officers, not soldiers. More likely yet is that whoever prepared that text did not do a very good job.
With the extensive use of artillery perhaps the WIA/KIA rate would be fairly high. Or maybe not because of the increased lethality of modern day artillery shells? The Brits had a 5 to 1 ratio in WW1. But in this war we have not seen WW1 tactics of going “over the top” and rushing enemy lines through barbed wire, against enemy machine guns. So probably a lot lower.
On civilian casualties, the UN count is 6655 killed and 10,368 injured from 24 February through 27 November. That would make a 1.6 to 1 ratio.
Ukrainian medical care at the front seems damn good. Not so for Russian care of their own wounded. At least not until eventually medevacked back to a hospital in Russia.
Leith,
This is from the 30 Nov interview with Aleksey Arestovich. It’s the best explanation I’ve seen so far, although it’s obviously an official Ukrainian view.
“Exact losses are national secret, as it allows enemy to evaluate efficiency and make strategic decisions. Approximate numbers were called by Zaluzhniy, Zelensky. Unofficially Arestovych can tell that Ukrainian losses are between 10k and 20k killed.”
“Ukraine has high sanitary losses – it’s when soldier is removed from battle for more than 1 day. 96% of wounded and ill are returned to service. There exists following types of losses:
– non-returning: killed, POW, lost, died before reaching hospital
– sanitary: lost battle capabilities for more than 1 day
NATO has different types of causalities.”
“Russia has ratio of 1 killed to 1-2 wounded (occasionally 1:3), their medical care, equipment and evacuation times are terrible. Russia has much more killed. Ratio of approximately 1 Ukrainian killed to 7-7.5 Russian killed. Russian total losses are over 100k killed and over 100k wounded. Ukraine could have about 100k total wounded and killed, from which 80k are wounded and 72k returned to service.”
Re the UN count of civilian casualties: they do not have access to the number of civilian casualties in Russian controlled areas. So the count could be much, much higher. Especially in places like Mariupol, there are undoubtedly tens of thousands more dead civilians there. Same for other siege cities hit by massive and constant artillery barrage.
” But in this war we have not seen WW1 tactics of going “over the top” and rushing enemy lines through barbed wire, against enemy machine guns.”
Not exactly right.
It depends on the period.
For the French, they did exactly that during the first 4 weeks of the war, known as the border battles. Result: four lost battles (North-West, 2 in the center, North-East), 400,000 dead, about 150 generals relieved from their command (dismissed), a general retreat until Marne river.
One would have thought that the lesson had been learned. But no, in 1917 a general suspected of not being combative enough defended himself by pointing out that he had lost 2/3 of his division in 15 days, that is to say 10,000 losses.
On the side of our friends Britt, I was told that the first battle of Somme river was a horrible butchery: the Tommies were advancing in line and at a walking pace in the direction of the very well protected German machine guns. 30000 losses per day on average.
The Germans who witnessed it were stunned.