Russia Loses 1,230 Soldiers, 5 Tanks, 36 APVs in a Day: Kyiv

Russian forces in Ukraine lost more than 1,200 fighters in a single day, Kyiv's military said on Tuesday, suggesting Russian casualties remain high, days after Moscow captured the strategic eastern city of Avdiivka.

Russia lost 1,230 soldiers in the past 24 hours, the General Staff of Ukraine's armed forces said in an update on Tuesday. This brings Russia's total personnel casualties to just under 405,000 in almost two years of full-scale war, by Kyiv's count.

Ukraine also said Russia lost five tanks in the past day, pushing Ukraine's count of total Russian tank losses over 6,500. Moscow has lost 12,268 armored vehicles since February 2022, including 36 in the previous 24 hours, Kyiv's military added.

It is not possible to verify Ukraine's count independently, and Newsweek has approached the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.

Experts broadly say that Ukraine's counts are likely to be roughly accurate ballpark figures, although intelligence estimates from Western governments tend to come in lower than Kyiv's tallies. Even with a margin for error, the numbers offer an indication of the huge human and material toll wrought by the conflict since it started in February 2022.

On Monday, Russia's Defense Ministry said Ukraine's military had lost more than 15,100 tanks and armored vehicles since the outbreak of full-scale war. Moscow does not publish a continuous tally of Ukrainian troop losses, but said on Monday that Kyiv had lost more than 1,000 troops in the previous 24 hours.

Newsweek contacted the Ukrainian military for comment on Tuesday via email.

In late January, James Heappey, Britain's armed forces minister, told U.K. lawmakers that around 350,000 Russian personnel had been killed or wounded in Ukraine. It is hard to work out how many casualties Ukraine has sustained, but U.S. officials told The New York Times that around 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, with up to 120,000 wounded, in August 2023. This figure will be now have increased.

Casualty counts and equipment losses often pick up during extended battles for key settlements, such as the grueling fight for the Donetsk city of Bakhmut in spring 2023 and the more than four months that Russia spent pushing on Avdiivka from October 2023. Russia said over the weekend it had captured the city, which sits to the north of the regional capital, Donetsk City. Ukraine confirmed on Saturday that it had pulled back from Avdiivka to save the lives of its soldiers.

Russia has claimed the city at a steep cost to its personnel and its equipment supplies, the loss of life and of military vehicles a defining part of Moscow's victory in Avdiivka.

Between October 10, 2023 and February 17, 2024, Russia's forces lost more than 47,000 troops, Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavsky, the commander of Ukraine's Tavria grouping of forces covering Avdiivka, said on Sunday.

Of these, around 17,000 soldiers were killed, Tavria spokesperson, Dmytro Lykhovii, later said. This is higher than the Soviet death toll in the more than nine years Moscow spent fighting in Afghanistan from late 1979.

Moscow lost a total of 364 tanks and 748 armored fighting vehicles during its offensive on Avdiivka, Tarnavsky said at the weekend.

"Avdiivka has fulfilled its mission of draining the Russian reserves," Elina Beketova, of the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington D.C., told Newsweek. It was crucial that Ukraine saved the lives of its fighters and prevented the full encirclement of Avdiivka with Kyiv's troops still in the embattled city, she said.

Earlier this month, the U.S.-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War said Russia had now lost over 3,000 tanks, which is more than it had operational when Moscow's forces rolled into Ukraine in 2022.

However, Russia is likely to be able to sustain its tank fleet with lower-quality vehicles for several years, according to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). Moscow has also ramped up its defense spending and military production since the beginning of the full-scale war.

The ISW says that Russia is also bearing down on Ukrainian defenses at other points along the front line, including further north, close to the Russian-controlled cities of Kreminna and Lysychansk, and in Ukraine's southern Zaporizhzhia region.

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