For Putin, Russian soldiers continue to be nothing more than cannon fodder — a term defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “not considered important by their officers and sent into war without their leaders worrying if they die.” 🇺🇦💙💛🇺🇦
#Repost @kyivindependent_official with @use.repost . . . September was the second-deadliest month for Russian forces fighting in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion, according to figures released by Kyiv.
Adding up, the daily reports from the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces show 38,130 Russian soldiers were reported as casualties last month.
The figures do not specify killed or wounded, though the overall consensus is that it includes dead, wounded, missing, and captured.
This figure is only surpassed by that of May 2024, when Ukraine reported 38,940 Russian casualties.
According to an analysis of the Ukrainian figures by analyst Ragnar Gudmundsson, four of the top ten bloodiest days for Moscow’s forces since the launch of the full-scale invasion all occurred last month – Sept. 22, with 1,500 casualties, Sept. 28, with 1,470, Sept. 21, with 1,440, and Sept. 24, with 1,400.
The data doesn’t indicate where the losses occurred, but Russia has continued to make grinding advances in eastern Ukraine, most recently capturing the town of Vuhledar, Donetsk Oblast.
Ukraine has published daily estimates of the number of killed and wounded Russian soldiers since the early days of the launch of the full-scale invasion.
Initially, there was some skepticism about how accurate the numbers were, which was reflected in the fact that Western nations were at first reluctant to publish their own numbers.
"At the start of the war when I was in Moscow, we didn't speculate on numbers because there was a lot of propaganda flying around," John Foreman CBE, the U.K.'s former defense attache in Moscow from 2019 to 2022, told the Kyiv Independent earlier this year.
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