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More than half a million Russian military personnel have been killed since President Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to a new British intelligence estimate.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the head of Britain’s armed forces, said Friday that Russia had suffered an estimated 1.5 million military casualties, including those wounded. He said the vast majority of those losses had occurred since January 2023, while Russian forces gained territory amounting to about 2 percent of Ukraine. Sky News reported Knighton’s remarks, and The Associated Press separately reported the same casualty figures.
“I think these numbers illustrate clearly the senseless and futile waste of human life for such little progress,” Knighton said.
The British estimate cannot be independently verified as an exact death toll. But Russian public records, independent investigations and an earlier British intelligence assessment all point to military deaths numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
In May, Anne Keast-Butler, the director of GCHQ, Britain’s signals-intelligence agency, said new intelligence showed that “almost half a million” Russian soldiers had been killed since the war began.
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