WASHINGTON — September was the bloodiest month of the war for Russian forces in Ukraine, U.S. officials said, with the costly offensive in the east bringing the number of Russia’s dead and wounded to more than 600,000 troops since the war began in early 2022.
U.S. officials attribute the high number of Russian casualties to what they describe as a grinding war of attrition, with each side trying to exhaust the other by inflicting maximum losses, hoping to break the enemy’s capacity and will to continue. Russian troops have made steady but incremental gains in recent months in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, U.S. officials said.
It is a style of warfare that Russians have likened to being put into a meat grinder, with commanding officers seemingly willing to send many thousands of infantry soldiers to die.
“It’s kind of the Russian way of war, in that they continue to throw mass into the problem,” a senior U.S. military official said this week, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments, in announcing the Pentagon’s latest Russian casualty estimate. “And I think we’ll continue to see high losses on the Ukrainian side.”
Russian casualties in the war so far number as many as 615,000 — 115,000 Russians killed and 500,000 wounded, according to U.S. assessments. Ukrainian officials have zealously guarded their casualty figures, even from the Americans, but a U.S. official estimated that Ukraine had suffered a bit more than half of Russia’s casualties, or more than 57,500 killed and 250,000 wounded.
The official did not specify the number of Russian casualties last month beyond calling it the costliest month for Moscow’s forces. U.S. and British military analysts put Russian casualties at an average of more than 1,200 a day, slightly surpassing the previous highest daily rate of the war that was set in May.
Despite its losses, Russia is recruiting 25,000 to 30,000 new soldiers a month — roughly as many as are exiting the battlefield, U.S. officials said. That has allowed its army to keep sending wave after wave of troops at Ukrainian defenses, hoping to overwhelm them and break through the trench lines.
U.S. officials said President Vladimir Putin of Russia was trying to avoid a mass mobilization, which would be deeply unpopular domestically. Russia has offered sizable bonuses and other increased pay for voluntary soldiers to avoid a major mobilization, U.S. officials said.
“We’re just watching very closely how long that stance can actually be one that he can maintain,” a senior Pentagon official said.
Russian casualties have surged at other times, especially during the assaults on Avdiivka this year and Bakhmut in 2023. But the assaults on those cities were spread over many months.
The push in September involved trying to advance along the front in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, as well as defending against the Ukrainian incursion in the Kursk region of southern Russia. It has involved intense periods of Russian attacks, with small infantry units pouring into relatively small areas that created what one senior Pentagon official called “a target-rich environment” for Ukrainian forces.
Russia’s use of infantry in waves of small-unit attacks reflects one of its advantages in the war: Its population, roughly 146 million, is three times as large as Ukraine’s, giving it a larger pool of potential recruits.
But the casualties have forced Russia to ship new recruits to Ukraine relatively quickly, U.S. officials said, meaning that those sent to the front are often poorly trained.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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