The Kremlin has acknowledged “significant losses” in the force. However, it is still unclear how many Russian soldiers were actually killed in the Ukraine war. Enlightenment by Putin is not to be expected.
What does Vladimir Putin want? Even on the 44th day of the Ukraine war, an answer is proving difficult. The decision to end the Russian invasion appears to be in the mind of the Kremlin ruler alone. A place that is being described and that so far seems to have defied all attempts at mapping and crisis diplomacy.
What Vladimir Putin doesn’t want, on the other hand, is obvious: to lose, or even to make it seem like something might not go according to his plan. The rapid withdrawal of troops from the areas in the north and north-east of Ukraine, that is, the obvious failure of the Russian offensive, .
In this respect, the appearance of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quite remarkable. Not because he gave an interview to a Western television station, but because of what he said there: “We have significant losses,” Putin’s mouthpiece admitted with unusual openness, “this is a huge tragedy for us.” Not long ago he still had .
Six weeks after the invasion of Ukraine, the leadership in Moscow has acknowledged major losses among the troops for the first time. However, Peskow did not say how many soldiers actually died or were wounded. Most recently, Russia had spoken of 1,351 of its own soldiers killed. In fact, the number is likely to be significantly higher.
What are the Russian troop losses?
, up to 40,000 Russian soldiers were killed, injured, captured or missing within the first month of the war. At the end of March, the defense alliance assumed that between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian soldiers had died. The British Ministry of Defense was also speaking in the Russian army at this time.
A realistic order of magnitude, says military expert Gustav Gressel from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). “About 12,000 to 14,000 died, and about 25,000 to 30,000 injured and disabled – that’s a lot”, . “We see a particularly large number of casualties in the combat troops, for example in the paratroopers, motorized riflemen in the armored troops, combat support troops such as artillery and anti-aircraft defense.” The Ukrainian armed forces even count almost 19,000 Russian soldiers killed.
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The information cannot be verified. It is war information in the context of an information war. Which the Kremlin has been running in its own country since the beginning of the invasion.
New laws criminalize “fake news” about the country’s own military, “war” has been erased from the vocabulary and protests smashed. Officially, the number of military fatalities as a result of the “special operation,” the Russian euphemism for aggressive war, is put at 1,351 – a number that hardly plays a role on state television. And therefore not in the minds of a large part of the Russian population, the bereaved, who could rebel against Putin’s campaign.
Putin creates (his) facts
Putin creates (his) facts and tries to stop unpleasant reports by threatening to punish them. As early as 2015, he signed , which forbids reporting on the deaths of members of the Ministry of Defense during “special operations”, even in peacetime. Previously, the loss of soldiers in wartime was declared a “state secret”.
At that time, reports of dead or captured Russian soldiers in the embattled Donbass were piling up. At the time, Russia denied international accusations that it was sending soldiers into battle itself – the fighters on the side of the pro-Russian rebels were “volunteers” who would take up arms, it was said.
The accident of a Russian submarine in 2019 was also declared a “state secret”, which is why details of the incident “cannot be made completely public”. A fire on board killed 14 naval personnel, some of whom were high-ranking officials, who, according to official information, were on a seabed exploration mission in northern Russian waters. According to local media reports, however, it is said to have been a nuclear-powered mini-submarine on a secret mission, which also called the Norwegian radiation protection authority NRPA onto the scene.
Only Putin himself knows how high Russia’s “significant losses” in the Ukraine war actually are, and he is unlikely to be willing to share his knowledge with the world and the Russian people. The propaganda of the Kremlin ruler, the withholding of information, follows a skewed logic: if you don’t know anything, you can’t believe anything – and won’t do anything. According to Putin’s will.
Source: Stern
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