​Volodymyr Solovyov, one of the most famous Russian TV presenters, who is considered the favorite propagandist of President Vladimir Putin, forgot about official propaganda in his last show, but assured Russians that everything will be fine with the war in Ukraine.

He begins by calling the “special military operation” launched by Putin on the 24th, “a war for our survival.” As noted by OVD-info, a website owned by a Russian human rights NGO, some Russians have been arrested in recent months simply for calling the invasion of Ukraine a “war” rather than the Kremlin’s term “special operation.” “.

“We didn’t wait for June 22, we decided to finally end the 8-year war,” Solovyov said, referring to the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the war in Donbas by Kremlin-backed pro-Russian separatists.

This appears to be another departure by Solovyov from the official Kremlin propaganda line, which has denied for years that it supports separatists in eastern Ukraine. As an exception, a Russian court involuntarily confirmed the presence of Russian troops in Donbas last December, months before the invasion of Ukraine.

Solovyov says that the Russians are not fighting in Ukraine with their entire army

“During the first 6 months of the special operation,” Solovyov returns to the terminology approved by the Kremlin, “with minimal losses, we fought less than 15% of our peacetime army… According to the Americans, we disabled more than 200,000 Ukrainian Nazi soldiers. These are both the dead and the wounded,” he says.

It is not clear what data Solovyov is citing here. In the balance of losses that it would have caused to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, published on Wednesday by the Ministry of Defense of Russia, no such figure was made public, but only the destruction of weapons and equipment was indicated.

The Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valery Zaluzhnyi, said on Monday that Ukraine lost 9,000 soldiers in the war. He did not specify to what figure the number of victims will increase, but it is unlikely that it will be as high as Solovyov made public.

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“We liberated 20% of the territory of Ukraine. A number of European countries could easily fit into this territory. We liberated 10 million citizens of Ukraine from the Nazi authorities, which in percentage terms is even more than the liberated territory,” says Volodymyr Solovyov.

Despite Soloviev’s upbeat statements, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the UK’s Chief of Defense Staff, said as late as mid-July that Russia had lost a third of its ground forces, with an estimated 50,000 Russian troops killed or wounded.

An analysis published in early August by the Center for European Political Analysis with reference to numerous statements in the Russian media showed that even military experts close to the Kremlin began to fear the continuation of the war in Ukraine.

Oleksandr Zhilin, a former colonel of the dreaded GRU (General Intelligence Directorate) who is now the director of the Center for the Study of Public Problems in the Field of National Security, recently argued in somewhat apocalyptic terms that a protracted war would lead to “destruction of the economy, bleeding armies that inflict great losses on countries , which are at war,” and that there is a risk that Russia will find itself on the sidelines of international politics.

Another analysis published around the same time also found that Russia had not lost as many soldiers as it had in Ukraine in any conflict since the end of World War II, and that it had lost a significant portion of its professional military and experienced officers. .

In its latest assessment of the fighting situation in Ukraine, the US Institute for the Study of War showed on Thursday morning that since July 16, Russian forces have gained an area the size of Andorra, having lost an area 100 times larger.

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