Russia On Course To Set Grim Record: Kyiv

Russia is on course to sustain its highest number of casualties in one week since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to figures from Kyiv's military.

Since Moscow unleashed a new offensive on Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region nearly a week ago, Ukraine's military has reported a spike in Russian casualties.

Kyiv's armed forces also reported fierce clashes in the east and south, as well as increased Russian attacks in hotspots in the eastern Donetsk region.

By Monday morning, Russia had lost 1,740 troops over the past 24 hours—according to Ukrainian statistics—marking the highest number of daily Russian casualties since the start of the full-scale war.

On Tuesday the losses over a similar period were 1,400 soldiers, followed by 1,510, on Wednesday and 1,520 on Thursday. Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.

Russia said on Wednesday it had seized control of Robotyne, a Ukrainian outpost in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and two villages north of Ukraine's second-largest city, Kharkiv. But Ukraine's military said on Thursday Kyiv's fighters had not lost any ground around Robotyne, which its forces retook from Russia during Kyiv's 2023 summer counteroffensive.

Casualty counts are incredibly difficult to accurately pin down, but Ukraine's figures do offer some indication of Russian losses along the hundreds of miles of front line. Both sides are thought to have suffered heavy losses of life and equipment, but neither Moscow nor Kyiv regularly acknowledge their own casualties.

Russian authorities do not provide a running tally of Ukraine's total purported losses, but said on Thursday that Ukraine had lost 1,320 fighters over the past day. In late February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said 31,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed in two years of war. Russia has said Ukraine's death toll is much higher, saying Kyiv lost 215,000 soldiers in 2023 alone.

Earlier this month, the U.K. government said Russia's average daily casualties stood at just under 900 throughout April 2024. The British defense ministry has previously said Russia sustained an average of 913 casualties each day in March 2024, after a rise throughout the early months of the year when Moscow was attacking the Donetsk city of Avdiivka. Kremlin forces captured Avdiivka in mid-February.

Each year of the war has seen a rise in Russia's daily reported casualties, the U.K. government calculated in early April. The figure stood at 400 in 2022, jumping to 693 in 2023, the British defense ministry said.

London estimated earlier this month that Russia has likely suffered more than 465,000 casualties. French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné told Latvia-based Novaya Gazeta Europe in an interview published on May 3 that Paris put total Russian casualties at around 500,000, with around 150,000 fighters killed.

Ukraine's General Staff said on Thursday that Russian forces have sustained 488,460 casualties.

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