One only has to look at daily output of videos showing Russian army vehicles and frontline positions getting blown sky high, to realise Russia’s loosing masses of men in Ukraine. This Russian reality is backed up by the fact the Kremlin hasn’t published any casualty stats since March, when they put out the unrealistic figure of 1,351 soldiers killed. Why stop publishing casualties numbers if your “special operation” is going according to plan?

In May, a BBC investigation put the number of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine at 3,052, that’s over double the official figure. And these were just those they could confirm from burials, reports from regional officials and social media. Link to BBC report.

An Extract from the BBC report.
In some (Russian) cities, entire alleys have been allocated for the burial of those killed in Ukraine. The BBC got acquainted with the situation at 11 cemeteries in Stavropol, Kazan, Krasnodar, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Balashikha, near Ulyanovsk and in the Kaliningrad region.

Graves of soldiers who died after February 24, 2022 were found in each cemetery. In the public space, the names of not all the buried were called. It is not difficult to understand that the graves of military personnel are in front of us: the age of the dead is from 18 to 45 years, there are photographs in military uniform on the cross, and wreaths from the Ministry of Defense lie on the grave.

Meanwhile in Russia’s sham Donetsk people’s republic (DPR).
Losses of their soldiers is reaching epic proportions. I say soldiers, but they are untrained, ill-equipped cannon fodder, shoveled into Ukraine’s meatgrinder – and are Russian mercenaries. On June 17th, the DPR reported a staggering 2,128 soldiers had been killed and 8,897 wounded. That’s around 55% of their original military force. Russia’s equally sham Luhansk republic will almost certainly have suffered the same high casualty rate. Link to BBC report on this.

A disaffected former DPR official, Yevgeniy Mikhailov said last month that untrained reservists from Donetsk had been sent to the front line because Russia had stopped sending conscripts. One resident told the BBC last month that there had been “tragedies everywhere”.

And it is this scared, poorly led cannon fodder, which Russia hopes to hold the territory its captured in Ukraine. Hopes that when they dig in to hold a frontline stretching for over 1,000km, that they’ll stand the daily deluge of shells, sniper bullets, bombs and UAV attacks Ukraine will happily dump on them. That they wont cut and run.