The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, stated today that some 31,000 soldiers from his country died in the war unleashed by the invasion of Russia, in the first official report of its own casualties reported by kyiv since the beginning of the conflict, two years ago.
“I don’t know if I have the right, it is a very serious moment; there have been voices among the most radical American audience who say that we have 300,000 dead and how many more do we want,” the president said at a press conference.
“The Russians say that Ukraine lost more than 100,000 people and that the Russians lost about 35,000; they say something like that, but it’s all a lie,” he added.
Zelensky maintained that “31,000 Ukrainian soldiers died in this war“Not 300,000, not 150,000 as (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and his circle of liars say.”
“Each of those lives is a big loss for us and I am not going to say how many wounded there are, because Russia would know how many left the battlefield,” he continued, according to the Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform and the Spanish agency Europa Press.
“I’m not going to play with the figures, I don’t want to, because the last exchange showed that it would be inaccurate, because several people who were on the missing list returned,” he argued.
In addition, Zelensky said there are “tens of thousands of civilians dead in the territories temporarily occupied” by Russian troops.
“We know of tens of thousands, I don’t know how many died, how many were murdered, tortured, how many were deported,” he remarked.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian armed forces reported in their latest balance that since February 24, 2022, the day of the invasion, 409,820 Russian “invaders” have died, including 810 deaths in the last 24 hours.
Russia affirmed that Ukraine is lying about the number of fallen soldiers
Quickly, Russia said Zelensky was “lying” by reporting 31,000 military casualties, without providing its own balance sheet on the number of dead Ukrainian soldiers.
“The fact that Zelensky is lying, every citizen of Ukraine understands it and, first of all, every fighter of the Ukrainian armed forces,” said the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova.
The official maintained that Zelensky “previously did not consider the Russian-speaking population of Donbass (the pro-Russian separatist Ukrainian region) as people and now he stopped perceiving the inhabitants of the rest of the parts of Ukraine as human beings.”
“I think that explains the fact that he vastly underestimated the losses, leaving so many dead souls in the ranks of the Ukrainian armed forces, so that they could continue to finance themselves as if they were alive,” Zakharova added, without providing her own balance of Ukrainian casualties. , according to the Russian agency Sputnik.
In early January, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu declared that Ukraine’s armed forces would lose more than 215,000 troops in 2023.
Source: Ambito
