Did the Ukrainian Army Kill 1,100 Russians In A Single Day? It’s Certainly Possible.

Ukrainian forces recently killed 1,090 Russian troops in a single day, the general staff in Kyiv claimed on Saturday.

That’s a staggering rate of loss for a deployed army that might include just 200,000 soldiers and marines, in total.

While it’s always wise to be skeptical of any claim that an army makes about its enemy’s losses, there are good reasons to believe the Russians really could bury a thousand troops in a day.

There also are good reasons to believe they can’t sustain such a high casualty rate for much longer.

The fighting in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region is brutal right now. Russian forces are attacking along several axes and making almost no progress anywhere but along the flanks of the Ukrainian garrison in the ruins of the eastern town of Bakhmut.

In and around settlements such as Vuhledar, repeated Russian assaults have disintegrated. Mired in minefields. Pummeled by artillery. Run over by aggressive Ukrainian tank counterattacks. When a Russian brigade loses dozens of armored vehicles in one failed attack, it might also lose hundreds of soldiers.

1,090 “liquidated” Russian troops, to borrow the Ukrainian general staff’s phrasing, is on the upper boundaries of Russia’s typical daily loss since Russian president Vladimir Putin widened his war on Ukraine in late February 2022.

U.S. officials a few weeks ago estimated Russia’s total casualties—killed and wounded—as “approaching 200,000.” But the analysts at the independent Conflict Intelligence Team believed Russian losses at the time were closer to 270,000. And after a month of hard fighting in Bakhmut, 270,000 might be an undercount.

Assuming a three-to-one ratio of wounded to killed, Russian fatalities in the first year of the wider war could number 68,000, if you believe CIT’s estimate. That’s 200 killed per day, on average.

But the average loss isn’t the median loss. Some days have been far bloodier than the average day is. Some may even have been worse than the day the Ukrainian general staff described on Saturday.

U.S. Army general Mark Milley, the chairmain of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, claimed the Russians lost “closer to 1,200” killed around Bakhmut in a single day in mid-February. “That’s Iwo Jima, that’s Shiloh,” Hertling said, referring to some of the bloodiest battles in American history.

Battlefield intel underscores the feasibility of a thousand-a-day loss rate. On or around March 14, a Ukrainian soldier found, on the killing fields around Vuhledar, a notebook apparently belonging to a Russian officer.

The notebook seems to provide a daily tally of manpower in a battalion-size assault group. A hundred soldiers attacked Ukrainian positions on March 1, according to the notes. Just 16 came back.

Two days later, 116 Russians attacked. Twenty-three survived. On March 4, 103 soldiers left their bivouac. Just 15 came back. The next day, out of 115 attackers, three returned. If the notes are reliable, that single Russian formation lost 377 troops in the span of five days.

All that is to say, it’s conceivable the Russians occasionally lose a thousand men a day across Ukraine.

Western armies almost certainly would not keep fighting under similar conditions. “I cannot wrap my head around these kinds of casualties and how Russian commanders don’t even blink about sending in more,” commented Mark Hertling, a retired U.S. Army general.

The Russian army isn’t a Western army, of course. But if history is a guide, even the Russians have a breaking point.

Last month, Volodymyr Dacenko—a Forbes columnist and former member of a military-industrial reform team in Ukraine—assessed the overall casualty rates in several wars and arrived at a sobering conclusion. The Russian army appears to be losing .144 percent of its deployed force every day in Ukraine, on average.

That’s not the highest loss rate in recent history, Dacenko found. But wars with higher casualty rates for the losing army—the 2020 territorial clash between Armenia and Azerbaijan and the Soviet-Finnish war in 1939, to name two—ended quickly. The former lasted just 44 days. The latter ended after 104 days.

In long wars such as the Vietnam War, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq or the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the losing force tended to suffer daily fatalities representing .002 or .003 percent of deployed troops.

When an army’s average daily losses exceed .1 percent, that army tends to quit or collapse after a few months of fighting. The big exception might be the Russian war in Chechnya from 1994 to 1996, which saw the Russian army lose .113 percent of its troops every day for 630 days.

History tells us that Russia can’t keep losing as many as a thousand men a day in Ukraine for much longer. Maybe a few months. A year, perhaps, if the Kremlin takes extraordinary measures to replace losses, enforce discipline in front-line units and—perhaps most importantly—control the domestic media narrative.

Russia’s staggering recent casualties, and the corrosive effect these losses are likely to have on the Kremlin’s overall war effort, help to explain why the Ukrainian army has chosen to stand and fight, rather than withdraw, in the sector where Ukrainian positions are most tenuous—but where Russians are dying in the largest numbers.

That is, Bakhmut. The battlefield where the Russian army might be marching toward its eventual demise.