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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/of-soldiers-killed-in-ukraine-estimated

https://theduran.com/of-soldiers-killed-in-ukraine-estimated-by-interpreting-u-s-propaganda/

# of Soldiers Killed in Ukraine, Estimated by Interpreting U.S. Propaganda

26 December 2024, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

On 26 September 2024, the U.S. Government’s Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) buried in a news-report their estimate that around 70,000 Russians have definitely been killed in action in Ukraine; they emphasized that the death-toll was disproportionately high in a few regions of the country, and so headlined negatively “RFE/RL Reveals Spike In War Deaths From Russia's Ethnic Regions”. Like U.S.-and-allied-billionaires-controlled ‘news’-media usually do, it focused its report on the allegedly divergent interests of different ethnic groups, instead of on the inevitably divergent interests of the mega-rich investors versus the general public; they do so in order to distract and divide-and-rule the public so they won’t know that America’s investors in firms such as Lockheed Martin are profiting enormously from this war and are in control over the U.S. Government, to continue it.

Anyway, RFE/RL stated that, “On September 20, the BBC Russian/Mediazona project -- which tracks war deaths by monitoring funeral notices and other open-source data -- reported it had confirmed more than 70,000 killed soldiers nationwide.” Translated into English, that BBC article was headlined “70,000 dead: what is known about Russia's losses in Ukraine by the end of September”. It reported:

Using open data, the BBC, together with the publication Mediazona* and a team of volunteers, identified the names of more than 70,000 Russian soldiers killed during the invasion of Ukraine. Every fifth person killed was a person who decided to sign a contract with the Russian army or the Russian National Guard after the war had already begun.

Thousands of obituaries show how the image of the average Russian fighter changed during the invasion.

While in 2022 the typical soldier whose death was confirmed by the BBC was around 21 years old and a contract soldier serving in elite units such as the special forces, airborne forces or marines, today it is increasingly men in their 40s, 50s and even 60s who are sent to the front, often without combat experience or special training.

From civilian life to the front

More than half of all the dead we identified were not connected with the army at the start of the war.

The largest category of Russian military casualties at the moment are volunteers. These newly minted contract soldiers are very different from professional soldiers: for many years before the war they worked in the civilian sector, and before being sent to the front they underwent training that lasted from three to ten days.

We have established that at least 13,781 volunteers died in the war - this is 20% of the total number of confirmed losses on the Russian side. Since September 2024, the losses of volunteers have exceeded the losses of other categories of war participants, including prisoners (19% of all confirmed deaths) and mobilized (13%).

Currently, volunteers aged 42 to 50 are the ones who most often die in war - there are 4,100 of them on our list, which is 30% of all those killed in this category. The oldest volunteer who died was 71 years old, and in total, 250 volunteers over 60 years old died in the war.

Units made up of volunteers began to play a significant role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine as early as April 2022. The military command began to protect the paratroopers and special forces who survived the first months of the invasion, using them to hold positions and conduct sniper operations.

In late 2022 and early 2023, the most difficult sections of the front began to be covered by prisoner units. However, by early 2024, the importance of these units had diminished: the human resources of this category were gradually exhausted.

Since October 2023, we have been recording a sharp and stable increase in losses among volunteers. This coincided with the start of a new wave of Russian offensive on Avdiivka. At the same time, losses among mobilized and prisoners, for example, remained at approximately the same level.

Judging by the published obituaries, it is the recruitment of volunteers that is now the main way to replenish the ranks of Russian military personnel stationed in Ukraine.

By analyzing obituaries and talking to relatives of the deceased, we can conclude that most of those who signed contracts after 2022 did so voluntarily. However, there are known cases where people were pressured. This is especially common among soldiers doing their military service. There are also known incidents where residents of Chechnya agreed to become military personnel to avoid bullying their relatives. Some prisoners in pretrial detention centers and colonies also testified to threats and pressure.

Dead commanders

Since the beginning of the invasion, Russia has lost 4,104 officers in Ukraine, including 7 generals and another 458 people at the rank of lieutenant colonel and above. …

In the event of the loss of rank-and-file specialists of widely used specialties (for example, riflemen or mortarmen), a soldier or officer of another specialty who comes to replace him can be retrained in a few weeks, or in rarer cases, in one or two months.

But if, for example, a special forces company commander dies, then only an officer of the same military specialty can replace him. And his training requires at least four years of military school, and then another two or three years of service to gain the appropriate experience.

Moreover, in the Russian armed forces, as a rule, only officers are trained to coordinate with other branches of the armed forces, especially artillery. If these tasks are assigned to untrained or inexperienced commanders under conditions of increased stress, this can lead to a lack of coordination and increased casualties.

What are the real casualty figures?

The actual toll is likely much higher than can be determined from open sources. Military experts we interviewed suggest that our analysis of Russian cemeteries, war memorials, and obituaries may account for between 45% and 65% of the actual death toll.

This is partly because the bodies of many soldiers killed in recent months may still be on the battlefield. Removing them would risk the lives of surviving soldiers who could be hit by drone strikes. As a result, evacuation is temporarily abandoned in many cases.

Taking into account the above estimate, the real number of fatalities on the Russian side could be in the range of 107,864 to 155,804 people killed in action.

As-of 27 December 2024, the BBC/Mediazona project increased that at-least 70,000 estimate up to at least 84,761, and to a likely figure of around 120,000. 

On 26 November 2024, the Economist headlined “How many Ukrainian soldiers have died? Three charts show the country’s losses”, and provided slightly higher estimates of Ukrainian military deaths than RFE/RL/BBC had on 26 September 2024, of dead Russian soldiers.

Also regarding Ukrainian soldiers killed-in-action, Politico headlined on 5 December 2024, “Kyiv reveals total Ukraine casualties in Putin’s war for first time: Zelenskyy said 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and 370,000 wounded. That compares with 600,000 dead and wounded reported for Russia.”, and reported Zelensky’s entirely unverified and unverifiable much lower estimates of Ukraine’s killed-in-action.

Putin doesn’t publicly state how many Russian soldiers have been killed in action in Ukraine nor in Russia (Kursk).

If this is a “war of attrition,” then corpse-counts do not yet provide any indication of which side is attritting the other side.

Putin certainly won’t accept Trump’s terms to settle the conflict, because Trump’s terms fall way short of meeting what Putin has repeatedly and consistently stated to be his minimal demands, such as that there must be no possibility that Ukraine will ever be in NATO, and that all of Ukraine must be denazified.

Nor is Trump likely to reduce his demands.

This war could continue for decades. If this is a war of attrition, then it will last until it wears out either the U.S. empire, or Russia. OR ELSE, it will continue until U.S.-and-allied (i.e., U.S. empire) weapons will have degraded Russia’s national security (such as by positioning a U.S. nuclear missile in Ukraine a mere 300 miles away from blitz-annihilating Russia’s central command in the Kremlin) so much as to compel Russia to preemptively invade the U.S. empire so as to avoid becoming trapped into a forced surrender to the U.S. Government. The longer that this war lasts, the higher the likelihood of that outcome (Russia’s defeat) will become. If Russia is determined to win this war, then Russia’s current strategy of winning it by attritting the opposite side might need to become replaced soon by abandoning that strategy and going instead for a considerably more aggressive strategy — to take control over all of Ukraine, no matter what, and do it soon.

America started this war, in 2014. Russia might be compelled by the U.S. empire to end it with a Russian victory before 2026, or else to accept becoming itself yet another colony (‘ally’) of the U.S. Government (which would mean regime-change in Moscow). The aggressor was not Russia in February 2022 (which U.S. empire media falsely claim) but was instead America in its coup that grabbed Ukraine in February 2014 — the nation that has by far the nearest border to The Kremlin. The question at hand now is whether or not that coup will succeed at its ultimate objective, which was and is for the U.S. Government to take Russia itself.

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding — what the ‘news’-media ignore if they can, and deny if they must. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.