Ukraine and Russia only agree when it comes to exchanging bodies. The Kiev Coordination Center for the Treatment of Prisoners, established a few weeks after Kremlin troops invaded its territory more than two years ago, announced this Friday through its Instagram account that both parties had proceeded to deliver to the enemy more than a hundred bodies of soldiers killed in combat.
He detailed that these were the remains of 99 soldiers from the invading troops, of which 77 had died fighting in the Donetsk region, 20 in Zaporizhzhia and two in Kharkiv. For its part, 23 fallen Ukrainian soldiers were handed over from Moscow, as confirmed by deputy Shamsail Saraliev in statements to the RBK news portal.
However, this facet of the conflict is not free from the action of propaganda either. Ukraine took advantage of the disparity between the number of bodies to highlight that Moscow loses more men than kyiv on the front. Last month, President Volodymyr Zelensky put the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed this year at 31,000, although other sources suggest that this figure could be much higher. On the contrary, he maintained that the enemy had seen twice as many of his uniformed men fall.
The conflict also reaches statistics and we must resort to sources other than those of the combatants to draw a scenario closer to the real one. The United States estimates that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since mid-2023, while pointing out that the Russian side could have suffered 120,000 casualties.
More academic sources took stock when the war entered its third year in February. Although all independent studies highlight the difficulty in calculating the number of civilians and soldiers injured or killed during the two years of confrontation, when considering these state secret numbers, one could speak of 315,000 soldiers injured or killed on the Kremlin side since the start of the fight, while among the Ukrainians the figures would remain between 100,000 and 120,000.
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