more than half of Russian soldiers injured on the front will have to be amputated

The human toll of the war in Ukraine is one of Russia’s best-kept secrets, to the point that the army has not communicated on this subject since September 2022, more than a year ago. The last official intervention was that of Sergei Shoigu, the Minister of Defense, who spoke after seven months of war of 6,000 dead and more than 90% of the wounded who had returned to combat. Few people, including in Russia, believed this figure which has just been denied… by another member of the government.

This colleague is Alexei Vovchenko, Deputy Minister of Labor. He has just released a statistic in front of the Russian Senate: 54% of Russian soldiers injured in Ukraine will have to have a limb amputated. And it is not by chance that he raises the subject since he is also in charge of the social protection portfolio. It’s a lot, he admitted to senators. A figure that says a lot about the violence of the fighting.

No official figures

One of the problems with this figure, 54% amputees among the Russian wounded, is that we do not know precisely how many people this represents. Especially since the last assessment of the number of wounded given by the Russian army dates back to March 2022, after a month of war. The other statistics provided by Ukraine or the United States on the adversary should be taken with a grain of salt. Especially since the country led by Vladimir Putin almost no longer publishes demographic statistics.

However, an independent media investigation Meduza And Mediazona, published last July, was based on statistics of inheritances claimed in Russia since the start of the war. This investigation concluded that there was an abnormal increase of almost 50,000 inheritances since the start of the conflict. For many experts, the toll of 50,000 Russian deaths seems plausible, which would bring the number of wounded between 150,000 and 200,000 soldiers, half of whom must be amputated.

For comparison, the war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 was a real trauma for Russian society: nearly 25,000 deaths on the Soviet side at the time. If we stick to the figures of Meduza And Media zone, we would be double after a little more than a year of war. Furthermore, the Russian state budget which was published by certain media provides for sharply increasing compensation in the years to come for soldiers’ families. This seems to mean that the authorities are counting on a long and deadly conflict.