Russia Loses 1060 Troops, 66 Artillery Systems, 78 Vehicles in One Day—Kyiv

MSTA-S self-propelled howitzers parade through Red Square during the Victory Day military parade in central Moscow on May 9, 2022. A former Russian general has contradicted Vladimir Putin’s assertion that Russia’s artillery was superior to NATO;s.

Russia has suffered the greatest artillery losses in a single day since the start of the Ukraine war, with 66 systems destroyed, along with over 1,000 personnel and nearly 80 vehicles, Ukraine’s military said in an update on Wednesday.

Russian artillery losses, as reported by Kyiv, have in recent weeks remained at the highest levels since the war began, with Ukraine, independent analysts and Russia itself admitting to serious problems.

It is impossible to gain an accurate picture of the true scale of Russian losses. However, Western experts and governments broadly agree that more than 300,000 of Moscow’s troops had been killed or injured by the final months of 2023. This number will have risen in the grueling weeks of war since the start of 2024.

Russia does not publish a tally of its own losses, and does not typically respond to Ukraine’s figures.

Kyiv’s estimates, however, do offer insight into the impact wrought by nearly two years of grinding warfare that has had a constant emphasis on artillery. The Ukrainian military said on Wednesday that Russia has lost a total of 9,566 artillery systems since the invasion.

Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.

“Russian artillery stockpiles are totally depleted,” Ivan Stupak, a former officer in Ukraine’s Security Service who now advises Ukrainian lawmakers, told Newsweek in November 2023.

As Ukrainian fighters battled to get their ultimately slow counteroffensive off the ground in summer and fall 2023, both militaries were locked in an attritional conflict where “artillery is king,” Frederik Mertens, an analyst with the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, told Newsweek in late September.

Ukraine has also suffered large-scale artillery losses. Moscow said on Tuesday that Kyiv has lost 8,021 field artillery and mortar guns since February 2022. It is not possible to verify this figure.

In late January, British armed forces minister James Heappey told U.K. lawmakers that London believed Russia had lost around 1,400 artillery pieces in the two years of war.

“We estimate that approximately 350,000 Russian military personnel have been killed or wounded since the start of the conflict,” he added.

“It is very difficult to determine casualties in an ongoing conflict since both sides will try to keep the data secret and inflate the number of adversary casualties,” Marina Miron, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, U.K., told Newsweek in May 2023.

Ukraine’s Defense Minister Rustem Umerov told countries gathered in support of Ukrainian military efforts in January that Russia loses “an average of 400 soldiers in exchange for one square kilometer [0.4 square mile] of land” along the front lines.

Casualties have soared since Russia launched its assault on the Donetsk town of Avdiivka, northwest of the regional capital, Donetsk City, in early October. Avdiivka has been dubbed a “meat grinder,” a label referring to long periods of bitter fighting with heavy casualty counts.

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