Russia on Wednesday acknowledged the death of 5,937 soldiers since the start of its offensive in Ukraine in late February, a figure well below Ukrainian and Western estimates.
“Our losses so far are 5,937 dead,” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in an interview with Russia-24 television, after stating that Russia “was not fighting Ukraine as much as it was fighting the West in the house of its neighbor a few minutes after the president Vladimir Putin’s decision to decree a partial mobilization.
A balance that no one believes
Outside the circles of Russian power, few observers will be found who give any credence to this account. On our set this Wednesday, Ulrich Bounat, geopolitical analyst, specialist in Central and Eastern Europe, explained where Sergei Choïgou’s statistics came from:
“It more or less corresponds to estimates made by Russian journalists from simple funeral press releases in newspapers. This is the minimum figure that the Russian Defense Minister could give, knowing that there were at least four times as many deaths.
Our adviser on defense issues, General Jérôme Pellistrandi, also finds the Russians’ assessment ridiculous: “It’s above ground. You have to give a figure to say that we are fighting and remember that it is a special military operation.” “A month ago, it was estimated that 80,000 Russian soldiers were hors de combat, thus dead, wounded, prisoners, deserters. Since then, we haven’t been far from 100,000. And we can estimate that a third have died,” he noted. additional.
Referring to the “partial mobilization”, that is, the convocation of reservists, announced by Vladimir Putin in a speech broadcast this Wednesday morning, Laurent Neumann, one of our political editorialists, stressed: “And if there were only 6,000 dead, Vladimir Putin would not need to mobilize 300,000 reservists.”
Source: BFM TV
