Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksiy Danilov, denied the information that appeared in the American media about the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed during the war of 100,000, Ukrainian Pravda reports.

“I declare to you with all responsibility that we do not have 100,000 casualties among the military. It is impossible. During the war, this is secret information, and 100,000 is a complete lie,” he said in an interview with “Interfax-Ukraine”.

Danilov emphasized that only the president of Ukraine and the leadership of the Ukrainian army know exactly the number of dead Ukrainian soldiers during the invasion launched by Vladimir Putin last year.

The Ukrainian official also noted that now the casualty ratio is 1 to 7, that is, for every Ukrainian soldier there are 7 dead Russian soldiers, and in some cases 1 to 8, or even 1 to 10 in favor of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

He noted that “in many areas [rușii] they had just crazy losses.”

How information about 100,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers appeared

Danilov’s comments came after the website Politico reported last Wednesday, citing several US officials on condition of anonymity, that up to 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers could have died in the war launched by Vladimir Putin.

According to the relevant source, Washington officials are concerned that, in addition to the huge number of dead, another problem for the Ukrainian armed forces will be the fact that many of the dead servicemen were veterans of the battles against pro-Russian separatists in Donbas, being practically the most experienced soldiers of Kiev.

A significant part of these losses was recorded during the fighting around the city of Bakhmut, Donetsk region, where both sides suffered huge losses.

The report of the figure was immediately criticized by some Ukrainian journalists and observers of the war in Ukraine, some of whom suggested that Politico had confused the total number of “casualties,” including wounded, with the death toll.

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, made a similar mistake in her speech at the end of November last year, which was immediately speculated by Russian propaganda.

But the Politico article was written by Lara Seligman, a Pentagon news correspondent and veteran military journalist.

“Lara Seligman is a well-known journalist who writes about the Pentagon for POLITICO. Her reporting on the military and defense industry has taken her around the world, from the Middle East to Mongolia to the seat of the Air Force Thunderbird.

Before working at POLITICO, she wrote about the Pentagon and national security for Foreign Policy. While there, she traveled to West Africa to write about the rapid expansion of terrorism in the Sahel, and accompanied the then defense minister on his first international visit to Asia,” the journalist’s website description reads.

Seligman has also written on military issues for The Washington Post, Defense News, Aviation Week, and Inside Defense.

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