Ukraine General Staff: Russian losses in Ukraine topped 100K

In its December 22 morning digest, the General Staff of Ukraine reported that Russia lost 100,000 military personnel since the start of the invasion. Its other losses include 3,000 tanks and 6,000 armored equipment units.

The Facebook post that announced this data does not distinguish between casualties and heavily wounded troops, and may refer to both.

Meduza has no means of verifying this figure at the moment.

Mediazona, BBC News Russian, and a group of volunteer analysts documented 10,002 Russian army casualties, based on open-source data as of December 9.

Both Russia and Ukraine make regular statements about the other side’s losses, but avoid declaring their own. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu last stated the number of Russian war casualties in September, when he said that 5,937 Russian troops had been killed in Ukraine since the start of the “special military operation.”

In early November, U.S. Joint Chiefs chair Mark Milley claimed that Russia had 100,000 dead and wounded in the Ukraine war, and that Ukraine’s losses were similar in scale.

In a late November video statement, European Commission chair Ursula von der Leyen claimed that 100,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed since the start of the invasion. That statement was sharply criticized by Kyiv, prompting a correction, to the effect that this number included both dead and wounded personnel. Later, the Ukrainian President’s Office stated that 10,000–13,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed in the 10 months of the war.