A senior Pentagon official estimates Monday that as many as 80,000 Russians have been killed or injured in Ukraine since the war began at the end of February
“Russia may have taken 70 or 80,000 victims in less than six months,” said Defense Minister Colin Kahl.
Kahl also said that Russian troops have also lost “three or four thousand” armored vehicles, and can run low in the missiles guided by available precision, including air and sea cruising missiles, after firing a large number of Ukraine targets since launching the invasion on February 24 .
The loss was “extraordinary considering that Russia did not achieve the goal of Vladimir Putin at the beginning of the war,” he told reporters, referring to the Russian President.
He said the slowdown in the use of a longer range and Russian troops guided by Russian troops were an indicator that their supply had fallen close to what Moscow needed to hold as a reserve for “other contingencies.”
Kahl admitted that the Ukraine team also had significant losses from labor on the battlefield, but did not provide numbers.
“Both sides took sacrifices. War was the most intense conventional conflict in Europe since the second world war,” he said.
“But Ukraine has many advantages, not a few of that is their desire to fight.”
