Massive Russian Offensive Coming….Why Has Russia More Combat Deaths Than Ukraine?

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

(Washington D.C.) Heavy armor is on the way to Ukraine, and Feb. 3, the Pentagon announced yet another round of weapons and military support to Ukraine, including rockets, ammunition, transport vehicles, hand-held drones and cold weather gear in preparation for what many expect is an upcoming large-scale Russian offensive.

The Institute for the Study of War is citing Ukrainian intelligence officials saying that Putin is not only redeploying large amounts of weapons to areas of Eastern Ukraine, but has also specifically ordered the Russian military to capture Donetsk and Luhansk by March of this year. The ISW brief cites Ukrainian intelligence officials anticipating that Russia will need to “mass” its forces to a much larger extent to compensate for its inferior combat tactics, performance in war and faltering morale.

“Ukrainian Colonel Serhiy Hrabskyi stated that Russia does not have sufficient forces to conduct an attack along the entire 1,500km frontline in Ukraine and will concentrate its efforts on seizing Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts,” an ISW brief writes Feb 1.

Video Above: Ukraine schools, cultural emblems, museums, and health care facilities have been decimated by Russia

This Russian need to “mass” and heavily “outnumber” Ukrainian forces in order to advance or prevail aligns and make sense with respect to available casualty figures. Certainly it needs to be said that wartime casualty figures are very tough to get fully accurate exact information on given the nature of propaganda in war. Nonetheless, it does appear that the Russian-Ukrainian casualty discrepancy is massive, as available figures from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence report that as many as 129, 030 Russian soldiers have been killed during the war thus far, nearly five times the amount of publicly reported Ukrainian casualties. Ukrainian numbers seem potentially accurate, as a Pentagon news report from as far back as August of 2022 cites US officials estimating Russian troop loss/war dead soldiers in the neighborhood of 80,000. At that rate, which may have even increased, current numbers would likely be near or at what the Ukrainian ministry reports. 

Public reports on Ukraine’s casualties vary considerably from roughly 15,000 war dead to 30,000, according to public reports from the BBC and a UK newspaper called UnHeard.