Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale aggression in Ukraine, at least 251 Russian officers with the rank of lieutenant colonel have died. Their identity was confirmed by journalists of the BBC Russian Service and Mediazona.
Since the beginning of June 2023, as the investigators specified, nine high-ranking officers have died, including Major General Sergei Goryachev, chief of staff of the 35th Combined Arms Army of the RF Armed Forces. He became the fifth Russian general whose death has been confirmed since the beginning of the war.
Also among the Russian officers who died over the past two weeks is Colonel of the Internal Service Sergey Postovalov, who worked as deputy head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the occupied part of the Kherson region. He, as journalists noted, died as a result of a rocket attack on the building of a sanatorium on the Arabat Spit in the Kherson region.
Three of the total number of officers, as journalists write, died in Russia at the hands of “saboteurs”.
So, in the Belgorod region, in battles with fighters of the “Russian Volunteer Corps”, Colonels Andrey Stesev, who led the Belgorod task force, and Vladimir Kuznetsov, who commanded a regiment of mobilized, were killed. Another officer, Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Bykov from the special detachment of SOBR “Kmet” in the Kursk region, died in September 2022, but his rank and place of service became known only now. Obituaries claim that he was also killed by “saboteurs”.
In total, as of June 16, 2023, investigators have verified the identities of 25,528 Russian military personnel who have died since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Among them – 2498 mobilized. The greatest losses, as the journalists specified, were recorded among the prisoners – the identities of 4,721 convicts who died in Ukraine were confirmed.
According to the number of losses confirmed by journalists among the regions of Russia, the Krasnodar Territory (959 dead), Sverdlovsk (955 dead) and Chelyabinsk (808 dead) regions continue to lead. It is also known about 193 dead from Moscow and 230 from St. Petersburg.
Earlier, John Kirby, strategic communications coordinator at the US National Security Council, said that between January and May 2023, Russia lost 20,000 dead in Ukraine, half of them Wagnerians. According to him, a significant part of the losses fell on Bakhmut. About 80 thousand more Russian soldiers were wounded in battles in this and other directions.
In turn, the owner of Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin, in an interview with media technologist Konstantin Dolgov, said that 20,000 Wagnerites died in Ukraine during the entire war, half of them were recruited prisoners.
The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation does not disclose data on the number of military, volunteers and prisoners killed in the war with Ukraine. The last time the agency announced the total number of personnel losses in September 2022 was 5937 dead.
