Putin estimates the number of Russian troops fighting in Ukraine at 700,000

Vladimir Putin On Friday it acknowledged that there are 700,000 Russian troops there Fighting in Ukraine right now. “We have about 700,000 in the area of ​​our special military operation,” the Russian president confessed during a televised meeting with honored soldiers.

In December the head of the Kremlin put the number of troops participating in the war at 617,000. An additional deployment that allowed the Russian military to launch an offensive in early May Large-scale offensive on Kharkiv region Due to a slowdown in the arrival of Western aid and a shortage of material, exhausted Ukrainian troops were able to retreat, causing heavy casualties in the Russian ranks.

Moscow, which usually does not talk about losses, has not commented on the number of victims. The last time it provided an official figure was in September 2022, when it announced that 5,937 soldiers had died in the war. However, a number of independent analyses and assessments by intelligence services of Western countries suggest that the death toll on the Russian side was in the thousands. For his part, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr ZelenskyIn February it was revealed that around 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had lost their lives.