(Adnkronos) – Confirmation of the priority, for Russian commands, of the advance in the directions of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, comes from the record number of casualties recorded in the area from last January to August.
According to leaked Russian data released by the Ukrainian initiative “I Want to Live”, they indicate that in the period considered there were 281,550 casualties among Russian military personnel, of which 86,744 were killed in action (1,583 officers and 8,633 former prisoners), 33,996 missing, 158,529 wounded, and 2,311 soldiers captured.
Russia appears to have the capacity to sustain this very high rate of losses: from January 1 to September 15, 292,000 military personnel were recruited, an average of 31,600 per month, whereas the average number of casualties is 35,193. However, the number of Russian casualties has been decreasing in the last four months. The General Staff believes this trend will continue in the future and has therefore begun forming strategic reserve forces for future deployments.
Analysis by the Institute for the Study of War indicates that the Center Group of Forces, responsible for the Pokrovsk direction, reported 43,709 soldiers killed, missing, or captured and 52,865 wounded, accounting for 34 percent of total front-line casualties during the period considered.
The Northern Group of Forces, which operated to repel Ukrainian forces from Kursk, and now operates to create buffer zones in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions, suffered 53,572 casualties in the same period. The Western group, which is responsible for the Kupyansk, Lyman, and Borova areas, reported 47,410 casualties.
