Loss confusion
Oleksiy Arestovych, Ukrainian presidential adviser, puts the Ukrainian army casualties between 10,000 and 20,000, while another presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak notes that 10,000-13,000 Ukrainian military personnel have been killed since February.
At the same time, warring sides often clearly play down their own losses and exaggerate those of the enemy.
On 6 December, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said that the Ukrainian army lost 8,300 fighters in November. In September, the Russian Defence Ministry reported 61,207 dead and 49,368 injured Ukrainian military personnel. Meanwhile, Moscow put its death toll in the war at 5,937. In turn, the Ukrainian Defence Ministry claimed that more than 92,000 soldiers and officers of the Russian army had been killed.
US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said in November that according to the Pentagon data, more than 100,000 Russian service members died or were injured in Ukraine. Milley added that the Ukrainian army was likely to have suffered similar losses.
It is worth noting that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky reported that five times more Russian service members had been killed in the war in Ukraine than the Ukrainian ones. In the meantime, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin claimed that Ukrainian losses in battles sometimes were 7-9 times higher than that of Russia.