Russia Loses 1,300 Troops, 12 Artillery Systems in a Day: Kyiv

Russian forces in Ukraine have lost more than 1,300 soldiers and a dozen artillery systems in the past 24 hours, Kyiv has said, as the human cost of the gruelling war rises.

Moscow has lost a total of 342,800 troops since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, according to the General Staff of Ukraine's military. Kyiv's destruction of 12 of Russia's artillery systems in the past day brings Moscow's total reported losses to 8,088 systems.

Newsweek could not independently verify the Ukrainian General Staff's count, and has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.

Ukraine's figures are the latest indication of the staggering human cost of the attritional war. It is difficult to get a sense of exactly how many of Moscow's elite soldiers, paratroopers, tank crews, conscripted convicts and mercenary fighters have been killed or injured, but Western analysts believe Russia has sustained hundreds of thousands of casualties in the almost two years of war.

On Tuesday, Reuters reported that nearly 90 percent of Russia's pre-war personnel were now dead or injured, citing a source familiar with a declassified U.S. intelligence document. This amounts to around 315,000 Russian troops either killed or injured in the many months of casualty-heavy warfare.

In mid-November, the U.K.'s armed forces minister, James Heappey, told British lawmakers that London believed around 302,000 Russian personnel had been killed or wounded since the start of all-out war.

Russia is now frequently losing more than 1,000 soldiers in a day, according to Kyiv's statistics. This has coincided with the start of Russia's concerted push on the heavily fortified frontline industrial town of Avdiivka, which Moscow launched on October 10.

The weeks between October 10 and late November had "likely seen some of the highest Russian casualty rates of the war so far," the British Defense Ministry said last month.

Since Moscow embarked on its offensive to encircle Avdiivka, it has sustained more than 13,000 casualties around the town, National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson told CNN this week.

Like Russia, Ukraine does not publish tallies of its own losses, but Kyiv has also sustained eye-watering casualties. Ukrainian losses are likely lower than Russian losses, Newsweek was previously told, but any given number of casualties would wound Ukraine's military more than it would Russia's much larger force.

Russia's military does not provide a running total of its estimation of Ukrainian losses, but said on Thursday that Kyiv had lost 665 fighters in the past day across the south and east of the country.

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