NATO Secretary General Estimates the Number of Russian Armed Forces Casualties in Ukraine at 700,000 People

The Russian army has lost 700,000 people killed and wounded in Ukraine, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said at a press conference during a meeting of North Atlantic alliance foreign ministers in Brussels, IStories’ correspondent reports. 

“We are very much in agreement that at this moment — in the next two days, and in all my consultations with allies — we need to focus on stepping up aid to Ukraine. The front is not moving from west to east, but from east to west - slowly and with heavy losses on the Russian side. We now think that it is more like 700,000 rather than 600,000 we were talking about earlier, killed or seriously wounded,” he said.

A senior NATO official told reporters that the average daily casualties of the Russian Armed Forces have reached a “new, horrifying monthly high” of about 1,500 people per day since September. 

“The overall increase in casualties since May is almost certainly due to the expansion of the combat zone in Ukraine’s Kharkiv Oblast and Russia's Kursk Oblast. Along the front line, there has also been an increase of the intensity [of fighting],” he said. 

According to an estimate by the Ukrainian AFU General Staff published this morning, the number of casualties on the Russian side has reached 745,700. In late October, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, speaking to journalists in Brussels, estimated the number of casualties of the Russian Armed Forces at 600,000 people.