While Russian gains are putting pressure on the Ukrainian front, Radakin said, Moscow is suffering losses “for tiny increments of land.”
The Kremlin does not provide figures on the impact the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has had on the Russian military. A Wall Street Journal report in September said more than a million people on both sides had been injured or killed since the start of the conflict. United States officials told reporters last month that Russia had suffered more than 600,000 dead or wounded.
The estimated number of Russian casualties is more than 40 times what it suffered during its decade-long invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Ukraine has over the past few weeks struggled to contain Russia’s advance into the Donetsk region. Last month, Russian troops managed to take full control of the critical Ukrainian town of Vuhledar after a more than two-year effort to do so.
During the last week of October, Russia seized more Ukrainian land than at any point since the start of the war, Bloomberg reported.