Ukraine Eliminated 'Nine Battalions' Worth of Russian Troops in 2024: Kyiv

Ukrainian forces have taken out more than nine battalions worth of Russian soldiers since the New Year, Kyiv said on Monday, in the latest indication of the human cost of the nearly two-year-old war.

Russia lost around 4,350 soldiers between January 1 and January 7, according to Ukraine's Military Media Center, a platform run by the country's Defense Ministry and military.

The count takes 500 soldiers to constitute a battalion. It is not clear whether this count refers to total Russian casualties, including those injured, but Kyiv described the troops as "destroyed."

The tally is less than the figure offered up by the General Staff of Ukraine's armed forces. Between January 2 and January 8, the General Staff said Russia had lost 5,160 soldiers.

The figures put forward by Kyiv's General Staff on January 2 and January 8 covered the previous 24-hour periods. As of Monday, Ukraine said Russia had lost 365,170 troops.

The Kremlin does not provide a running total of reported Ukrainian losses but said on Monday that 820 Ukrainian soldiers had been taken out of action in the past day.

Newsweek could not independently verify either count and has reached out to authorities on both sides for comment via email. The figures, however, are an indication of the casualty count Russia has racked up through its invasion of Ukraine.

"It is very difficult to determine casualties in an ongoing conflict since both sides will try to keep the data secret and inflate the number of adversary casualties," Marina Miron, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, U.K., told Newsweek in May 2023.

Western intelligence estimates put the total number of Russian casualties since February 2022 in excess of 300,000.

"Approximately 302,000 Russian military personnel have been killed or wounded, and tens of thousands more have already deserted since the start of the conflict," British armed forces minister, James Heappey, told U.K. lawmakers in early November. "The number of personnel killed serving in Russian private military companies (PMCs) is not clear," he said.

Ukraine is trying to make "life unlivable for Russian soldiers," ensuring there are "no safe places" for Moscow's troops, Daniel Rice, former special adviser to Ukraine's lead commander, General Valery Zaluzhny, told Newsweek in late December.

Ukraine's wielding of cluster munitions and the targeting of Russian vessels with long-range Western weapons is contributing to the higher Russian casualty count, he said. "Whole Russian units are being wiped out."

On December 30, the British Defense Ministry said the average number of Russian casualties sustained each day had risen by almost 300 per day throughout 2023 compared to the previous year.

"The increase in daily averages, as reported by the Ukrainian authorities, almost certainly reflects the degradation of Russia's forces," the U.K. government said.

If Russia's casualty count stays the same throughout 2024, Moscow will have sustained more than 500,000 casualties in the war by 2025, the British Defense Ministry said.

The previous month, the U.K. government said a spike in Russian losses in the last months of 2023 was largely down to Moscow's offensive on the Donetsk town of Avdiivka.

The town, which has spent nearly a decade on the front lines between Kyiv and Russian-backed forces and Moscow's troops, has become the site of one of the bloodiest battles since Moscow launched its onslaught on the town in October 2023.

"Thousands, thousands of killed Russian soldiers, nobody even took them away," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told The Economist in an article published on January 1, referring to the bitter fighting around Avdiivka.

Dmytro Lazutkin, a spokesperson for Ukraine's 47th Brigade, previously told Newsweek that the brigade was deployed on the northern flank of Avdiivka, adding: "Defending the city is worthwhile as long as we exhaust the Russians."

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