The Chief of the General Staff in Moscow, General Valery Gerasimov, published a new balance sheet on Thursday regarding the losses of the Ukrainian armed forces, stating that they amount to approximately 160,000 soldiers over the past 6 months, TASS reports.

“During the last [șase luni]The losses of the enemy in all directions amounted to about 160 thousand people, more than 3 thousand units of combat armored vehicles, including 766 tanks, as well as 121 airplanes, 23 helicopters,” he said at a briefing for military attachés of foreign countries about “the results of operations Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation in 2023”.

TASS, the most famous news agency of the Russian state, also recalls that at an extended meeting of the Ministry of Defense of Russia, which took place this week and was also attended by President Vladimir Putin, Minister Sergei Shoigu said that since the beginning of the “Military Special Operation”, the total number of casualties The Armed Forces of Ukraine will comprise approximately 383,000 servicemen.

Although the approximate number of losses of the Ukrainian army is difficult to estimate from open sources, and Kyiv has made it clear that it will not release the balance until the end of the war, the figures given by General Gerasimov on Thursday for the losses of the equipment suffered by the Ukrainians again seem phantasmagoric, since the small Ukraine is likely to has at its disposal such a number of armored vehicles and tanks.

The Ukrainian command asked Zelensky to increase the number of troops

A separate report released in early August by Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that Ukrainian forces had lost more than 11,000 tanks and more than 1,000 rocket launchers, far more than Ukraine had ever had in its arsenal.

However, given that President Volodymyr Zelenskyi announced on Tuesday that army chiefs had asked him to mobilize up to 500,000 additional troops, it is indeed plausible that Ukrainian forces suffered heavy losses during the summer offensive, although not at the level that the Moscow command supports . .

In addition, all these military personnel will not be needed for combat operations at the front, but to supplement auxiliary activities behind it, as the Ukrainian army wants to replenish its forces to respond to Russia’s offensive in the east of the country.

The former Minister of Defense of Ukraine Oleksiy Reznikov said last summer that about 1 million people are employed in the security and defense sector of Ukraine.

But two problems that Ukrainian commanders on the front lines have increasingly pointed out concern the fatigue of the troops and the need for their rotation, as well as the sharp increase in the average age of soldiers in the armed forces, which now exceeds 40 years. age, according to some data, up to 45 years.

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