Today the Telegram channel “Poisk_in_UA” (the largest Russian channel for collecting the names of their KIAs/MIAs/POWs) published the report on the number of Russian servicemen identified as KIAs or POWs during the week from February 26 to March 3. The number is an all-time record since reports began on a weekly basis at the end of January 2023. For the first time the number of 1000 Russian servicemen identified (almost all of whom were fallen members of the regular armed forces) was exceeded. I gathered the data into an Excel chart.

https://t.me/poisk_in_ua/49219

A few notes. The fallen include those killed in action while fighting for PMC Wagner (in orange; both “professionals” and convicts) and for the Armed Forces and other minor PMCs (in red; contract soldiers, mobilized, convicts…). The identified POWs (thanks to Ukrainian interviews with them) are shown in light green. The data should not be taken as indicative of the number of actual fatalities in a given week. Obituaries (i.e., the main source, along with graves, for the KIAs) are usually published several weeks after the death, sometimes even months - very rare in the following days. Sometimes a death is made known as much as a year later (usually due to examinations in cemeteries). Such is the case with those who fell in the ranks of PMC Wagner who get published in the last months: even now, every week, one, two, sometimes three dozen fallen Wagnerites are still identified, despite the long temporal distance from the Bakhmut campaign. Often there are backlogs - a large number of inputs that are made known at once. E.g. it may happen that in one day they publish 20 fallen soldiers from the same battalion who may have died over the past months, because perhaps there was an event where the battalion honored the losses and released photos and names of their fallen soldiers, and they were not in the database of this channel. Consequently, the week represents the date when a death is made known and not when the death occurred. Let’s also recall that just a share of the soldiers (however, not a very small one) receive a public obituary and are thus identified. Despite all of this, the number of fatalities remains a decent proxy for finding out, a few weeks later, the trend of KIAs along the front. For example, the increase in fatalities due to the Avdiivka offensive can only be noticed from the first week of November. The number of POWs is relatively negliglibile for the volume of troops involved. Several thousand POWs per year are captured by each side, but then a significant portion are later exchanged and the number of POWs is very small compared to comparable wars in the past, for several reasons.

The KIAs from D/LPR that are identified are included (although this, for the vast part, influenced the 2022 count, not the one of the last period). The datas don’t include those reported as MIA by their families (usually over 100 per week). When Avdiivka fell, Poisk in UA wrote that it was having serious problems processing the inputs because of a large number of obituaries in their backlog and an equally large number of relatives of missing servicemen contacting the channel to get the notice of their beloved one posted. Only very recently the first substantial amount of obituaries of those killed in the final part of the battle of Avdiivka (the urban clash of the first half of February) are arriving. Mediazona (which adjusts KIAs for their actual date of death, when known) has yet to catch up on the number of deaths for the last month: their latest update was on Feb. 15, and they report that they process between 500 and 600 KIAs per week (up considerably from the summer/autumn). It’s widely possible that during February the Russians may have even exceeded the peak of losses they had between January and February 2023, at the height of the battle of Bakhmut. With one difference, however: at that time up to half of the dead were Wagnerites, mostly convicts (per statistics published by official Wagner sources, 15k of the 22k KIAs of PMC Wagner in Ukraine were convicts). This is no longer the case today: the number of convicts (fighting in Storm-Z/V detachments of the MoD, in this case) out of the total number of Russian troops in Ukraine and also out of the total number of casualties has plummeted since then, and makes up a small minority now. Much of the recruiting potential from jails has been exhausted and in February the contracts (which lasted 6 months) of the last inmates who joined Storm-Z detachments last August expired and they went back home, while today just Storm-V detachments (which contracts aren’t fixed-term) remain active, but the convicts are considerably fewer in number than in the past. Today, it’s largely regular contract soldiers who die (it can be noticed from the analysis of obituaries too).

Some “napkin math” now. Net of the caveats I listed above, we might try to estimate the current Russian death toll. A plausible estimate of the number of the KIA/MIAs fighting for the Russian side in these 2 years might be around 135k, so an average of about 190 per day. Looking at the trend and using it as a proxy, my personal estimate is that the number of Russian KIA/MIAs over the last few weeks may have been even 350 per day on average, all along the front. Adding to these the remaining irretrievable losses (wounded who have permanently lost combat capability and POWs) and also the hospitalized wounded who will return to the war but are unavailable in the short-medium term, and decreasing them by those wounded in the past months who are returning to duty today (and assuming, given the growing trend of casualties, that the former of the these two categories is greater than the latter) we could be very close to the number of men that (per Ukrainian intelligence) the Russian Armed Forces manage to recruit each month to fight in Ukraine - namely 30k. Not by chance, the Ukrainian military observer Kovalenko disclosed, that per Ukrainian military intelligence, in February there was a drop in the number of Russian personnel deployed along the front. The drop is small: the number went from 470 to 466k (I publish these datas when Mashovets is the one who releases them, as he also includes all the other numbers, including the vehicles etc). This drop is obviously very small, but it should be noted because it’s the first drop since a very long time: the number of Russian troops had been increasing basically unabated since the “partial mobilization”. The biggest negative consequence for the Russians is that they may lack the personnel to staff the many new units and formations being created. Mashovets had reported that due to bottlenecks (particularly in equipment), the deadline for the creation of some units has been postponed from Feb. 29 to May 31; some divisions (the 46th and 47th Motorized Divisions of the Southern Military District) have been in the creation stage in Crimea since last summer but they would have created only one regiment each (according to Ukrainian sources).

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the current heavy death toll will necessarily remain the same over time, and it’s entirely possible that Russian grouping in Ukraine will return to grow. But the war has taken on a very bloody phase compared to the average of the past two years. Only two periods were comparable to today: as mentioned above, the battles of Bakhmut and Soledar between January and February 2023 and the Russian Donbas offensive in June 2022 (when the overwhelming majority of those who died in the Russian side were D/LPR servicemen). In any case, if the number of Russians signing a contract doesn’t increase (or worse, for them, if it decreases) and/or the number of daily casualties doesn’t decrease, and if the Russians want to go ahead with their plans to raise new formations, we cannot rule out that, not as soon as after the elections, but during the second half of 2024, there may be a new mobilization wave.

It should be pointed out that the Ukrainians are not only in the same boat, but also in a worse one in this respect. Without trying to figure out the ratio, it’s at least logical that the trend of Ukrainian losses resembles the Russian one, and while the Russians may have difficulty in staffing new units, over the recent months for the Ukrainians hasn’t been easy at all even fully replenishing their losses. As we speak, the intensity of hostilities along the whole front has never been higher. A year ago for example, there was the huge Bakhmut campaign, which absorbed a considerable plurality of the losses on both sides. Then there was also Avdiivka, there had recently been Vuhledar and relevant clashes on the Svatove-Kreminna line. But the rest of the front, compared to today, was quiet. Sectors such as Velyka Novosilka (but also Orikhiv) were covered just by an handful of TDF brigades or protection units of the National Guard, and on the other side there were Russian units often still being restored after Kherson, or mobilized regiments. Several formations of the Western and Central MDs were refitting in Belarus. Clashes in those areas involved a few artillery exchanges and occasional reconnaissance in force; today only in very few areas the situation could be stated to be equally “quiet” and most sectors have become hot. The number of men and units deployed compared to a year ago has increased considerably for both sides - battalions on average cover a smaller area compared to the past. This is true for many sectors but particularly in the southern front, along the Dnipro, in Marinka, in Kupyansk. In itself this situation doesn’t benefit the Ukrainians. Ukraine’s challenge during 2024 will be to fix their mobilization system, hope to get a good number of artillery shells from the partners, expanding domestic production of FPV drones, and inflict as many losses as possible on the Russians while minimizing their own.

Let’s recall that part of the Russian fortifications were built by civilian contractors from Central Asia, though.

Agree, the only things I would add is that the time needed for the Russians to receive new recruits should be pretty fast - many instances of people signing a contract and dying or disappearing the next month.

Also, the TRC of Poltava Oblast stated it mobilizes 300 men per month. Trying to make a proportion at the national level (while remembering that for some reason this region is the one in Ukraine with the largest share of men deemed unable to serve) and adding a small amount of contract personnel (which are few but still exist), I find it likely that the figure of 10 thousand per month is reached. Although there continues to be serious issues regarding training, which is still too short, with the consequences bearing from that.

A few notes. The word “lent” used by Fico might be misleading, since the system, as later specified in the article, is operated, maintained and garrisoned by Italian soldiers.

Ironically, all this comes just days after that funny character, who today wonders who will protect the country’s infrastructure, had criticized the SAMP/T, calling it inferior (!) to the S-300.

Either way, as for potentially sending this system to Ukraine, I really don’t know. The Italian Army currently has five batteries. One in Slovakia, one in Kuwait, one protects Rome during major events and, in rotation, two are under maintenance. In theory, the decision to withdraw the one in Slovakia could free up space for a shipment to Ukraine.

The financial value of such donation would be very significant, as one system is worth over half a billion euros. And Italy would have to train a few dozen Ukrainians to operate it, as was done in early 2023. Although back then it was classified and only became known once the training was over, so I think we won’t have “spoiler” in that respect. The only thing is that last month the Italian Army quite unexpectedly announced that it will buy four new batteries, which will be added to the five batteries ordered by the Italian Air Force last year. Only thing we can say: we shall see.

SAMP/T is a long range system, comparable to Patriot. Italy already sent one a year ago, together with France. Italy provided launchers, a batch of missiles and training while France the radar and the engagement module. To my knowledge Ukraine got Aster 30 missiles. It can engage both ballistic missiles and aircrafts. No worry for the questions!