After three months of conflict, Kyiv, which decreed general mobilization, has more human reserves than the Russian army.
How long can the troops hold out? Since the beginning of the Russian offensive in the Donbas, on April 18, after the failure of the conquest of Kyiv, the question haunts the staff. After three months of fighting as Europe has not known since the Second World War, many are wondering about the state of the brigades engaged by Ukraine and Russia. “The next weeks of war will be difficult”, himself warned, Monday, May 23, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky.
The human losses are already counted in the thousands in each camp. According to Kyiv, more than 29,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since February 24. An exaggerated figure, say specialists. In a long development published on May 16 on Twitter, the American Michael Kofman, director of studies on Russia at the Center for Naval Analyses, in Arlington, and one of the best analysts of the conflict, evoked a range going from 7,000 to 15,000 Russian servicemen killed, with a plausible average of “10,000 to 12,000 dead”.
On the Ukrainian side, the authorities refuse to give the slightest indication. Sunday, May 22, on the sidelines of the visit of Polish President Andrzej Duda to Kyiv, Mr. Zelensky acknowledged that 50 to 100 Ukrainian soldiers were killed every day in the Donbas, but without giving further details. “We can reasonably think that Ukraine has as many losses as Russia,” indicates a Western military source, for whom the reality would be between 15,000 and 20,000 soldiers killed on each side.
But beyond the dead, the number of which is already colossal compared to other conflicts (Russia had lost 15,000 men in Afghanistan, but the war there had lasted almost ten years), it is above all the quantity of soldiers put out of action which questions the analysts. “To determine the state of a unit, it is necessary to take into account the number of killed, but also the wounded soldiers, those who are captured by the enemy, those who have disappeared or deserted…”, recalls Joseph Henrotin, in charge of research at the Center for Analysis and Forecasting of International Risks.