British spy reveals huge number of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, plus a first from 2022: 'They are withdrawing from the battlefield'
Almost half a million Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion launched by Vladimir Putin, more than four years ago, according to a new estimate by the British secret services, writes The Guardian.
Anne Keast-Butler, the head of GCHQ (Britain's main communications watchdog), said in her first speech in the post on Wednesday that Russian forces are “back on the battlefield” in Ukraine for the first time since late 2022.
She then presented a new estimate of the Russian death toll, which is far higher than a recent estimate of 352,000 deaths calculated by the independent exiled Russian publications Meduza and Mediazona, which extrapolated their totals based on official succession and death registries.
Keast-Butler said there was “new information showing that almost half a million Russian soldiers have been killed since the beginning of the conflict”. An exact figure was not provided, but the estimate is understood to be close to this total, The Guardian newspaper notes.
Ukraine is trying to increase the number of Russian soldiers killed or seriously wounded in fighting beyond Moscow's ability to recruit new fighters, in order to stem more than three years of slow territory losses in the country's east.
The number of Russian casualties – dead and wounded – was estimated by Western countries at around 30,000 per month in April. This month, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that between 15,000 and 20,000 of them are killed each month.
The very high casualty rate on the front reflects Russia's continued attempts to seize the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, as President Vladimir Putin has called for. Exact recruitment figures are hard to come by, but economist Janis Kluge estimates that Russia recruits between 800 and 1,000 people a day, or between 25,000 and 31,000 a month, The Guardian notes.
