(Kyiv) A maximum of 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Russia invaded their country in February, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday.
“We have official estimates from the general staff […] They range from 10,000 […] to 13,000 dead,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, one of Mr. Zelensky’s advisers, on the Ukrainian channel Channel 24.
According to him, the Head of State will make the official data public “when the time is right”.
When Russian forces battled in June to completely take over the Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky said his country was losing “60 to 100 soldiers a day, killed in action , and around 500 people injured in action”.
On the opposing side, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in September that 5,937 Russian soldiers had been killed since the start of the conflict on February 24.
The two adversaries are suspected of minimizing the scale of their human losses to avoid weighing on the morale of their troops.
US Chief of Staff General Mark Milley estimated in November that more than 100,000 Russian servicemen had been killed or injured since the invasion and that casualties were likely to be of the same order on the Ukrainian side.
These figures — which cannot be confirmed from independent sources — are the most accurate provided by the US government to date.
Several thousand civilians have also been killed in the most violent armed conflict in Europe for decades.