Human cost of war in Ukraine reaches historic threshold for Russia

Half a million dead. This is the dizzying toll that British intelligence services now attribute to the Russian army since the start of the invasion of Ukraine. If this estimate is confirmed, the war launched by Vladimir Putin in February 2022 would have become the deadliest for Russia since the Second World War.

This assessment was made public earlier this week by Anne Keast-Butler, the director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which is none other than the British agency responsible for electronic intelligence. During a speech devoted to the threats that the United Kingdom believes it faces, she indicated that nearly 500,000 Russian soldiers had lost their lives since the start of the conflict.

Such a report is difficult to verify independently because Moscow communicates very little about its losses while kyiv regularly puts forward figures contested by the Kremlin. Last January, the American organization CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) estimated the total number of losses suffered by Russian forces since February 2022 at more than a million, including the dead, wounded and missing soldiers. The number of soldiers killed was then estimated at up to 325,000, while a joint study of the BBC et Mediazona (un média indépendant russe) l’évalue à 221 000.

The British estimate, however, is part of a trend observed for several months by several organizations which describe a particularly costly war for the Russian forces, as noted by our colleagues atWest France.