Ukraine war: Russia’s troop death toll ‘passes 150,000’

Russian losses in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have passed 150,000, according to the latest figures released by Kiev, as the armed forces continue to hold on to their positions in the devastated city of Bakhmut.

Ukraine’s Armed Forces General Staff said on Thursday that 715 Russian soldiers had been killed since Wednesday’s count, bringing the total to 150,605.

The final tally came as Moscow continued its efforts to encircle Bakhmut, which Russia said would open the way to full control of the rest of the strategic Donbas industrial region bordering Russia, one of the main objectives of Putin’s invasion .

However, this has come at a cost. The months-long battle for the city has been likened to a World War I “meat grinder,” in which Russia claimed tens of thousands of casualties while making only marginal gains in the region.

A military analyst said Russia today sent “human waves” only to carry its soldiers “like an assembly line” from the battlefield.

While Ukraine does not release official figures on its own losses, it is believed to have also lost thousands in its struggle to control the city. Yet it managed to keep the Russian invaders at bay for months.

Military analyst Oleh Zhdanov lamented the continued pressure Ukrainian positions in Bakhmut have received in a post on YouTube, assessing the situation as “critical.”

“They are exerting what could be described as colossal pressure, with wave after wave of attacks,” Zhdanov said. “They bring reinforcements into trucks and transport their wounded aboard the same trucks.

“This process is constant – like an assembly line – around the clock,” he added.

The battle for Bakhmut began about seven months ago, but in recent weeks Russian advances from three sides have left the defenders the only way out to the west.

“There is a danger that our garrison in Bakhmut will be surrounded,” Zhdanov said.

‘There is a danger that our garrison in Bakhmut will be surrounded. The enemy is trying to cut off the routes used to supply our troops in Bakhmut and stop all movement there,” he said.

“Russian forces cannot win street battles in Bakhmut or take the city by attacking head-on. The only way they can take the city is to surround it.’

Ukraine says Bakhmut has limited strategic value, yet offers fierce resistance. Not everyone in Ukraine is convinced that the defense of Bakhmut can go on indefinitely.

“I believe that sooner or later we will probably have to leave Bakhmut. There is no point in holding on to it at any cost,” Ukrainian MP Serhiy Rakhmanin said on NV radio late Wednesday.

“But for now, Bakhmut will be defended for several purposes — first, to inflict as many Russian casualties as possible and allow Russia to use its munitions and assets.”

No defense lines should collapse, Rakhmanin said.

“There are two ways to approach this: an organized retreat or a simple flight. And we cannot allow flights to take place under any circumstances,” he said.

A Ukrainian soldier tests his sights on the outskirts of Kharkiv as fighting continues in the Russo-Ukrainian war in Kharkiv, Ukraine on Feb. 28.

A Ukrainian soldier pilots an APC into frontline positions near Bakhmut, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 1, as Ukraine continues to hold on to its positions around the city

Ukraine’s military capabilities have surprised many observers since the Russian president ordered his troops to cross the border on February 24, 2022.

Western intelligence has suggested that the Kremlin expected its armies to take Kiev within days, overthrow Volodymyr Zelensky and replace his government with a pro-Russian one.

This plan failed drastically. Instead, more than a year later, Russian troops are waging a brutal war of attrition in eastern Ukraine after pushing further and further back to their own borders last year.

Analysts say the war – and Moscow’s massive losses – have exposed the Russian military as obsolete. Figures from Ukraine suggest that Russian casualties have been many times higher than in the wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan. The British Ministry of Defense recently estimated the number of Russian casualties (dead and wounded) at more than 200,000.

It has also exposed Russia’s reliance on outdated Soviet-era tactics, pitting slow-moving, outdated armored vehicles against a modernized Ukrainian force that has used small, more mobile units with modern technology, such as drones, to stay nimble.

Images released on Thursday demonstrate this. Drone footage shows Ukrainian forces targeting Russian tanks around Bakhmut and dropping explosives on top of the armored vehicles – where their protection is weakest.

The footage shows two apparently abandoned Russian tanks sitting next to each other along a road, somewhere on the battlefield in the region.

You can see the Ukrainian drone closing in on one of them before positioning itself directly over an open hatch and dropping its bomb into the tank, causing an explosion.

The footage then shows drone bombs being dropped on the two tanks from above, with one of them landing directly in a hatch and causing the tank to catch fire after the explosive detonates.

The Ukrainian army said late on Wednesday that the Russians were trying to advance on Bakhmut “without interruption” and President Volodymyr Zelensky said his troops are “controlling every sector of the front.”

Russian forces were also preparing for new attacks in the central Zaporizhzhia region and on the southern front in the Kherson region, it said.

According to the Ukrainian army, more than 40 towns and villages were shelled, including the regional center of Kherson and other towns on the west bank of the Dnipro River, which had been abandoned by Russia in November.

But while Ukraine’s military has done better than expected, civilians have still suffered. Thousands of civilians remain in the devastated city of Bakhmut, which had a population of about 70,000 before the war.

More civilian casualties occurred on Thursday when rockets hit Zaporizhzhia.

The war took center stage on the eve of a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in New Delhi, with the EU’s foreign policy chief saying their success would be measured by what they could do to help end the conflict .

Ukrainians and Russians traditionally mark March 1 as the onset of spring and the frozen ground at the front has melted, ushering in the season of sucking black mud – “bezdorizhzhia” in Ukrainian, “rasputitsa” in Russian – which in history has been notorious for destroying attacking armies.

‘Winter is over. It was a very difficult one and without exaggeration every Ukrainian felt the difficulties,” Zelenskiy said in a video message after a meeting devoted to energy issues.

‘But we succeeded in supplying Ukraine with energy and heat. The threat to the energy system remains. And work is underway to ensure that the energy system continues to function,” said Zelenskiy.

Russia regularly launched waves of missile strikes against power plants in what Ukraine says was a calculated strategy to destroy civilian morale.

Ukraine and its Western allies describe Russia’s war as unprovoked with the aim of crushing its European-leaning neighbour, which was part of the Soviet Union until its breakup in 1991.

Russia accuses the West of provoking what it calls its “special military operation” to remove security threats and of prolonging the conflict by backing the Kiev government with arms.

Ukrainian soldier of the 80th Brigade on duty in a mobile howitzer outside Bakhmut, Ukraine during the war between Russia and Ukraine on February 28

Russia’s top lawmaker said he was introducing amendments to a wartime censorship law that would increase the sentence for discrediting the military from five to 15 years in prison and extend the law to Wagner’s mercenaries.

Moscow introduced sweeping censorship laws shortly after tens of thousands of troops commandeered Ukraine a year ago.

A magazine from Russia’s Defense Ministry said Moscow was developing a new kind of military strategy using nuclear weapons to protect against potential US aggression, the RIA news agency reported Thursday.

The article is the latest in a string of belligerent remarks from Russian politicians and commentators after the invasion of Ukraine, who suggested that Russia would be ready to deploy its nuclear arsenal if necessary.