On Wednesday afternoon, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine published Kyiv’s first reaction to the figure of 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed in the war, published by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, reports Ukrainian Pravda.

“We cannot confirm this figure, we emphasize that the losses of the Ukrainian army are official information and fall under the ban on disclosing information,” said Bohdan Senyk, head of the public relations department of the General Staff in Kyiv.

“We can only support actions that will contribute to the legal punishment of the organizers of the genocide of the Ukrainian people. Everything must be done so that all those responsible for the deaths of civilian and military citizens of Ukraine are brought to justice,” he added, referring to another statement made by the head of the European Commission on Wednesday.

Ursula von der Leyen said in a video message broadcast earlier on Wednesday that the EU is proposing the creation of a UN-backed international court to investigate the “crime of Russian aggression”.

“Russia must pay for its terrible crimes, including the crime of aggression against a sovereign state. That is why, although we continue to support the International Criminal Court, we propose to establish a specialized court with the support of the United Nations to investigate and try the crime of Russian aggression,” she announced.

The head of the European Commission spoke about 100,000 killed Russian soldiers

However, von der Leyen’s controversial statement was linked to the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed, saying that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought untold death, devastation and suffering. We all remember the horrors of Buchi. According to estimates, more than 20,000 civilians and more than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed to date.”

His comments were widely picked up by the Russian media due to the publicized huge number of casualties among the Kyiv armed forces.

Von der Leyen later removed the video from her Twitter page, and the European Commission removed the comments from its website.

Dana Spinant, the Commission’s deputy spokesperson, later confirmed that von der Leyen was wrong.

“Many thanks to those who pointed out the inaccuracy of the numbers in the previous version of this video. The estimate used from external sources was supposed to be for casualties, i.e. both dead and wounded, and was intended to show Russia’s brutality,” she wrote on Twitter.

In the new recording, published by the spokeswoman of the European Commission, there is no part where von der Leyen talks about the human losses allegedly suffered by Ukraine during the war, which was launched by Vladimir Putin on February 24.

Ursula von der Leyen’s mistake looked even more strange, because in a video message she spoke about the dead “Ukrainian military”, as if confusing soldiers with officers, although she was the German Minister of Defense for 6 years from 2013 to 2019.

And the removal of that part of the video was widely reported in Russian media, with numerous publications openly stating or suggesting that her comments were removed because she inadvertently revealed the true number of soldiers who died in the war.

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