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By David Brennan
Diplomatic Correspondent
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Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday gave a rare update on casualty and prisoner-of-war figures from Moscow's ongoing war in Ukraine, saying to international journalists that Kyiv's losses were several times that of Moscow's, but providing no evidence to support the assertion.
RIA Novosti reported that the president told the heads of international news agencies at a meeting in St. Petersburg that there are 1,348 Russian soldiers and officers in captivity in Ukraine, versus 6,465 Ukrainians in Russian detention.
Putin also said that the ratio of "irretrievable losses" between Russia and Ukraine was one to five in favor of Moscow. "I can tell you that our losses, particularly irretrievable losses, are certainly significantly smaller than those of the opposite party," the president said, as quoted by the state-run Tass news agency.
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Putin's claim runs contrary to both Ukrainian and U.S. battlefield estimates, which have reported throughout the war that Moscow has suffered significantly more casualties than Kyiv.
Ukraine's military claims as of Thursday to have "eliminated" 515,000 Russian troops since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022. Kyiv also says it has destroyed more than 7,800 tanks, 13,400 artillery pieces, 831 air defense systems, 357 aircraft, and 326 helicopters.
Neither Kyiv nor Moscow releases its own detailed casualty figures, though President Volodymyr Zelensky in February acknowledged 31,000 Ukrainian troops killed in action during the invasion. He did not say how many soldiers had been wounded.
A New York Times report from August 2023 citing U.S. officials put the Ukrainian death toll at close to 70,000.
Ukraine's casualty data have been close to U.S. and other Western estimates throughout the conflict. An American estimate from December put Russian killed and wounded at around 315,000, a number equal to nearly 90 percent of the soldiers that took part in the initial February invasion.
A BBC-Mediazona investigation published in April confirmed the deaths of at least 50,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine using official reports, open-source information, newspaper articles, and social-media posts.
The BBC-Mediazona figure—though to be much lower than the actual total of those killed—is eight times more than almost 6,000 troops acknowledged by Russia's Defense Ministry in September 2022. That remains the only detailed figure given by Russian authorities since the beginning of the invasion.
BBC and Mediazona said that more than 27,300 Russian soldiers died in the second year of the operation, hinting at what the media outlets called a "meat grinder" strategy that has become synonymous with Moscow's major offensive operations all along the front.
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