Ukrainian Army 105,000 Dead, Zelensky '43,000 Dead' NYT 'Facing Defeat'
As statistics continued to come out that the Ukrainian military death toll had exceeded 100,000, President Zelensky officially announced that '35,000 dead', but the New York Times stated that 'Ukraine is losing' and faced defeat.
The Ukrainian government blocked access to information on population statistics, but in a rare move, prominent Ukrainian independent war correspondent Yury Butusov challenged President Zelensky's '43,000 dead as of December 8' and told his 1.2 million YouTube subscribers, citing sources inside the Ukrainian military command, that 105,000 soldiers had "lost their lives irretrievably," including 70,000 dead and 35,000 missing.
The website Lostarmour.info reported the death toll as 62,473 (+337) as of the 24th, and said that only some of the dead soldiers could be found because the death reports were delayed and some deaths were not disclosed at all.
The website UALosses (UALosses.org), which tracks Ukrainian military deaths, has individually counted approximately 62,000 Ukrainian soldiers who have died since the Russian invasion.
The New York Times, which interviewed the website operator, reported on the 23rd that “LostArmor estimates that more than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died as of December,” and that “the UALosses operator said that he is an IT expert based in a Western country and that he started the project to address the gap in public knowledge.”
The actual death toll is likely to increase as the fighting intensifies after December. The Ukrainian independent journalist Butusov said the published death toll “excludes units outside military command, such as the National Guard,” raising the total number of casualties significantly.
A military analyst familiar with Western government assessments of Ukrainian casualties told the Times on condition of anonymity that Butusov’s figures were “reliable.”
The Ukrainian government, which relies on support from its allies, and Western intelligence agencies have blocked the release of internal Ukrainian casualty figures, citing “weakening” of the alliance.
The Times reported that U.S. officials told the Times that “Ukraine is hiding this information even from its closest allies,” and that “as of August 2023, 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died.”
The actual war has been the bloodiest since. The New York Times reported that “According to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, about 59,000 Ukrainians were registered missing in December, most of them soldiers.” The Times said that “the most complete counts of Ukrainian casualties are compiled by foreign groups with biased or opaque motives,” and that “information calculating casualties and the trajectory of the war is a state secret in both countries, and the Ukrainian government is particularly secretive, restricting access to demographic data that could be used to estimate troop losses.” The New York Times, which covered the website LostArmor, said, “While the Ukrainian military had lost more than 100,000 soldiers through December, Russian researchers and journalists, using similar methods, estimated that Russia had lost more than 150,000 soldiers through the end of November.” “The LostArmor casualty project is run by about a dozen anonymous volunteers, mostly Russians, who scour the Internet, cross-check information and verify its authenticity,” a website spokesperson said in an email. The group appears to be sympathetic to Russia and seeks to discredit Ukrainian propaganda.
“Russia is still winning,” the New York Times said. “With a much larger population and more effective recruitment, Russia has been able to more effectively replace its losses and gradually advance,” said Franz-Stefan Gaddy, a military analyst in Vienna, as a possible Russian victory.
The combat casualty statistics, based on a combination of irreparable injuries and fatalities, estimated a ratio of “one dead to two seriously wounded.”
The Times reported that “analysts combined these estimates with caveats and shortcomings to show that the ratio of Ukrainian casualties to fatalities among all Ukrainian soldiers who suffered the same fate as Russia did, suggests that Ukraine cannot overcome Russia’s population and recruiting advantage,” and that “on current trends, Ukraine is losing a larger share of its small army.”
“More than 400,000 Russian troops are currently facing about 250,000 Ukrainians on the front lines,” a military analyst familiar with Western assessments told the Times, adding that “the gap between the two forces is widening.”