Not only is it impossible to verify Ukraine’s claims of Russian losses in the Special Military Operation, it is impossible to take them seriously on a statistical basis.
The scale of Russian troop losses in Ukraine has tipped 21,000 as Putin’s war rumbles into its third month today.
The latest statistics, published by the Ukrainian Land Forces this morning, suggest 21,800 Russian fighters have been killed amid bitter resistance from Ukraine’s armed forces and territorial defence units – though this figure could not be verified.
Meanwhile, the land forces claim to have dealt massive damage to Russia’s military equipment and machinery.
A total of 873 tanks are said to have been destroyed, along with 2238 armoured vehicles, 179 planes, 154 helicopters and 408 artillery systems.
According to the same article, “On February 24, Russia’s land army consisted of 280,000 full-time active soldiers compared with Ukraine’s 125,600.”
Now, the number of casualties in war is always a multiple of the number of fatalities. For example, the USA lost 407,316 KIA during WWII and 671,846 WIA out of 16.4 million troops, for a Cas/Fat ratio of 1.65. As medical science improved, this ratio increased over time, to 2.6 for Vietnam, 7.2 for Iraq, and 8.6 for Afghanistan.
So, if the most recent US war is a reasonable comparative, the Ukrainian claims would indicate an additional 180,600 wounded Russians for a total of 201,600 Russian casualties, which would mean that the Russian casualty rate of 72 percent exceeds that of the German, Japanese, and Soviet militaries during the entirety of World War II. And at 7.5 percent, the fatality rate is three times the US WWII fatality rate of 2.5 percent in just two months.
In other words, we can state with certainty that these reports are highly improbable, and logically conclude that they are false.