Economist Tacitly Admits Kiev Regime's Staggering LossesSouth Front

Click to see the full-size image

Written by Drago Bosnic, independent geopolitical and military analyst

Anyone even remotely familiar with the ongoing Ukrainian conflict is perfectly aware of the unprecedented losses suffered by the Kiev regime forces. Numerous independent sources have confirmed that the Neo-Nazi junta’s KIAs (killed in action) have been in six digits for well over a year now, with more recent losses during its abortive counteroffensive being well into five digits.

Although the exact numbers are up for debate, as claims by both sides vary significantly, battlefield information (particularly footage) indicates that Kiev is the side with the overwhelming majority of manpower and equipment losses. And yet, the mainstream propaganda machine and the Neo-Nazi junta itself have been trying (albeit ineptly) to either hide these numbers or at least present Russian ones as the same or far worse.

Earlier this year, flagships of the mainstream propaganda machine, such as the New York Times, have presented claims that Russia lost 200,000 soldiers by February 2023. Citing American and other Western officials, the infamous (neo)liberal mouthpiece insisted this is supposedly “a stark symbol of how badly Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion has gone”. The report further claimed that Moscow was allegedly “desperate for a major battlefield victory” and that the Russian military was sending “poorly trained recruits and former convicts to the front lines, straight into the path of Ukrainian shelling and machine guns”. The ludicrous claim was significantly higher than the previous public assessments by several high-ranking officials of the troubled Biden administration.

Namely, back in November 2022, US General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated that “more than 100,000 troops on each side had been killed and wounded”. Even that estimate was considered highly inflated, let alone the February figure published by the NYT. The report further cited the Norwegian defense chief, General Eirik Kristoffersen, who claimed that Russia and the Kiev regime have suffered 180,000 and 100,000 dead and wounded, respectively. And yet, Kristoffersen’s comments also included his own clarification that “there is much uncertainty regarding these numbers, as no one at the moment is able to give a good overview” and that “they could be both lower or even higher.” In other words, this was always a rather amusing guessing game for Western officials.

It could be argued that this was also an admission that such assertions were questionable at best. And yet, the numbers game and propaganda guesstimates are perhaps best illustrated by the December data released by the Neo-Nazi junta, when its General Staff claimed that 90,000 Russian soldiers died compared to just 13,000 of their own. At the time, Zelensky insisted that their losses were even lower, standing at 8,000-10,000 soldiers. And while the NYT admitted that “Ukraine’s casualty figures are also difficult to ascertain, given Kyiv’s reluctance to disclose its own wartime losses”, it still went with a figure for Russian casualties that was over 100% higher than the one released by the Kiev regime. It’s certainly difficult to outperform even the Neo-Nazi junta in propaganda, but it seems the NYT somehow managed to do just that.

And while the mainstream propaganda machine was busy fantasizing about millions of unarmed Russian automatons charging mindlessly at NATO machine gun nests, the rest of the world was working on compiling much more realistic data. For instance, back in late January Turkish Hürseda Haber reported, citing unnamed Israeli intelligence sources, that Russia (including the forces of the Donbass republics) and the Kiev regime lost 18,000 and 157,000 soldiers, respectively, by January 14, 2023. And while it’s impossible to verify these claims with complete certainty, they were much closer to contemporary estimates by various non-Western sources and military experts. What’s more, the figures given for the Kiev regime did not contradict the number cited by the head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen.

Namely, back in November, she stated that the Neo-Nazi junta’s losses exceeded 100,000 soldiers. Leyen’s statement was later promptly cut from the official address video. However, no matter how hard the political West tries to hide these staggering losses, it’s impossible to just pretend that hundreds of thousands of people simply vanished into thin air, particularly as the Kiev regime itself is going through so much trouble to bury so many of the soldiers killed in combat. The Economist, also one of the most (in)famous mainstream propaganda outlets, recently admitted that the losses were exponentially higher than any claim by either the Neo-Nazi junta or other Western media. Its report, titled “To bury its dead, Ukraine is having to dig up victims of past wars“, published on August 10, is pretty self-explanatory.

“So many people have been killed in the war that in Lviv, in western Ukraine, the latest victims are displacing the dead from wars past. On August 4th, Vitaly Chekovsky’s family looked on sadly as he was buried with two comrades, in a military section of the city’s historic Lychakiv cemetery. The sandy earth where they buried him was soft and loose. Until only weeks ago his grave had been the resting place of someone else,” the Economist reports.

“The numbers of war dead are a secret in Ukraine, but it is possible to get an impression of the scale by visiting the rapidly expanding military cemeteries that feature in every town and city. At the Lychakiv cemetery, says Oleksandr Dmytriv, its director, Mr Chekovksy was the 507th to be buried since the invasion began on February 24th, 2022. At first the dead were buried in another part of the cemetery, but space quickly ran out, so the cemetery turned instead to a grassy slope where a war memorial had been built in the 1970s, while Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union. As the rows of graves marched up the hill, the gravediggers unexpectedly found skeletons,” the report continues.

This tacit admission is further reinforced by ample footage of endless military cemeteries that have sprung up all across Ukraine in the last over year and a half. As previously mentioned, the numbers are difficult to ascertain, but it’s safe to assume that the losses of the Kiev regime are well past 250,000 KIA. Tens of thousands died in Artyomovsk/Bakhmut only, not to mention the rest of the frontline, while the losses ever since, particularly after the abortive counteroffensive started, have been anywhere between 25 and 45 thousand.