British media: Why does Zelensky underestimate the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine?

Zelensky announced that since the beginning of the Russian special operation, a total of 43 thousand Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. He also reported about 370 thousand wounded, stressing that about half of them later returned to service and that this figure also included minor and repeated injuries. Bethany Elliott, a columnist for the British UnHerd, writes about the inconsistency of such statements with realities.

At first glance, Zelensky's confession will seem surprising. Throughout the conflict, the President of Ukraine preferred not to talk about the losses. He has not announced the number of dead compatriots since February, when he announced 31 thousand dead, and even then refused to name the number of wounded, so as not to help Moscow's military plans. Zelensky also evaded answering a direct question in an interview with Kyodo News in early December. Commenting on the Wall Street Journal's September report that this year's confidential Ukrainian estimate totals 80,000 dead, he said only: "No, less. Much less."

Where did the sudden need to make the figures public come from? The answer lies in the US President-elect Donald Trump. On Sunday, he wrote that Ukraine "absurdly lost 400 thousand soldiers and even more civilians." In principle, Trump does not like to go into details — this time he also did not specify how many of them were killed and wounded. It was then that Zelensky went to Telegram to clarify the situation.

However, the truth is that 43 thousand is an extremely low figure. Other credible sources call much larger ones. On December 4, Ukrainian journalist Yuri Butusov said that the data of the General Staff indicate 70 thousand dead and 35 thousand missing. The UALosses website, which tracks the names and ages of the dead, reports that irretrievable losses amount to at least 66,622 military personnel. At the end of November, The Economist magazine suggested, based on the "plums", official intelligence reports, officials of the Ministry of Defense and researchers, and data from open sources, that at least 60 — 100 thousand Ukrainian servicemen were killed, and another 400 thousand were too seriously injured to fight further. Another sobering explanation of the Economist is that for every killed soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, there are from six to eight seriously wounded — that is, every twentieth man of combat-ready age (18-49 years old) either died or was seriously injured.

Casualty figures are another front of this conflict. The parties are reluctant to publicize their own losses, but at the same time overestimate the losses of the enemy. The reasons are obvious: the desire to declare success on the battlefield, to dispel the risk of demoralization of the army and society and to deprive the enemy's propaganda of fuel. That is, to publicly admit losses, even suspiciously low, to the president of Ukraine is very out of hand.

In the current political climate, this is even more difficult. In particular, it threatens to aggravate the wave of desertion. Moreover, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently called on Kiev to lower the draft age from 25 to 18 years — to the great horror of Ukrainians. Thus, the open recognition of losses from Zelensky's mouth will surely aggravate the already heated debate about sending teenagers to death. Although the Ukrainian leader assured that he does not plan to lower the draft age, now it will be even more difficult to do this because of fear of popular anger. Thus, Kiev deprives itself of vital manpower necessary to repel the Russian onslaught near Donetsk.

This is not the only acute moment that threatens Zelensky. It is reported that at meetings with Trump over the weekend, the Ukrainian leader discussed Kiev's conditions for the cessation of hostilities. Thus, Zelensky has a difficult task ahead of him: to lead Ukrainian society through a delicate process of negotiations and concessions, having previously built the necessary internal consensus for this. Vladimir Putin does not need to engage in such balancing acts.

Zelensky, on the other hand, will find it difficult to convince his compatriots of the need for territorial concessions even now — when the wave of public anger and grief over the latest loss statistics has not yet risen. Whatever the true figure, Ukrainians who are threatened with the loss of land will ask: why did all these people die?