Russian President Vladimir Putin may have accidentally admitted to losing over 360,000 troops in his country’s war with Ukraine.
Putin made the admission during an annual four-hour press conference in Moscow on Friday. The purported losses would be orders of magnitude beyond those previously claimed by Russia, with the Kremlin having only officially admitted to around 6,000 troop deaths.
The newly claimed losses—which could include deaths, major injuries or deployments away from the battlefield—were calculated in a post on the “Maps and Arrows” Telegram account of Russian military analyst Ian Matveev.
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“Russia lost 360,000 people in the war, according to Putin,” Matveev wrote. “244 thousand mobilized. 486 thousand volunteers. And there are only 617 thousand at the front. Entertaining military mathematics from Putin.
“The losses were 113 thousand people,” he continued. “But there was also the invasion group and those who were recruited before mobilization. And this is around 250 thousand. That is, Putin literally admitted irretrievable losses in the amount of 363 thousand people.”
Newsweek reached out for comment to Putin’s office via email on Thursday.
Despite the figures from Matveev, it is not clear that Putin was admitting to 363,000 lost soldiers. However, the figure does come close to the 315,000 claimed Russian troop casualties that were revealed in a leaked declassified U.S. intelligence document this week.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine claimed in a Facebook post on Wednesday that Russia had lost 342,800 troops since first launching its invasion on February 24, 2022. The U.K. military also estimated in mid-November that 302,000 Russian personnel had been lost.
Newsweek is unable to independently verify any of the casualty figures, which are notoriously difficult to accurately determine during any war.
“It is very difficult to determine casualties in an ongoing conflict since both sides will try to keep the data secret and inflate the number of adversary casualties,” Marina Miron, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, told Newsweek earlier this year.
Russia has also claimed that Ukraine is suffering a high number of troop deaths during the war, with Putin saying in October that Kyiv had lost 90,000 troops since starting its latest counteroffensive in June alone.
Putin said the Ukrainian death toll was “simply huge” and at “approximately one to eight as a ratio” to Russian deaths, likely inadvertently suggesting that Moscow’s losses were more than 11,000 since the counteroffensive started.
The Russian president previously offered what appeared to be an exaggerated estimate of Ukrainian equipment losses in September, boasting about the destruction of 18,000 armored vehicles and 543 tanks in a three-month period beginning in June.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense offered a somewhat more modest tally two days earlier, claiming that Ukraine has lost a total of 11,773 armored combat vehicles during the entire war, including tanks.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.