Ukraine Successfully Eliminates 780 Russian Soldiers, 27 Combat Vehicles In One Day

Russia lost 780 military personnel, 14 tanks and 27 armored fighting vehicles (AFV) in Ukraine within a day, according to the Ukrainian military.

A total of 123,860 Russian combat losses have been recorded since the invasion of Ukraine began in February last year, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine stated in its most recent casualty report released Thursday.

Russia has also lost 3,175 tanks and 6,334 AFVs, among other pieces of military equipment.

A Wednesday casualty report from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine claimed that Russian losses at the time included 123,080 military personnel, 3,161 tanks and 6,307 AFVs.

The Russian government's last official death toll from the war, which was provided in September 2022, claimed that 5,937 Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine up to that point.

Independent Russian news site Mediazona, with the help of the BBC's Russian service and volunteers, was able to confirm via publicly available reports 11,662 Russian military deaths in Ukraine as of Jan. 17.

The real death toll is likely much higher, according to the outlet.

While Ukrainian officials previously stated that up to 13,000 of Ukraine's soldiers have been killed in the war, Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the California-based Rand Corporation think tank, estimated that the number of Ukrainian casualties was approaching 100,000.

Both Ukraine and Russia may be underreporting the true scale of their losses, the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense has suggested.

The two sides are incentivized to undercount their losses for domestic and international propaganda purposes, according to UnHerd.

Amid its reported losses in Ukraine, Russia is regrouping its troops in preparation for what Ukrainian intelligence officials believe is a new offensive in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, EuroNews reported.

The Institute for the Study of War, a British think tank, previously assessed that Russia would either carry out a major offensive likely in Luhansk or go on a defensive operation to defeat and exploit a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

"The full capture of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts remain the Kremlin's official war goals and are among Russia's most achievable (though still highly challenging) objectives given Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts are logistically the easiest territories for Russia to capture," the organization said in a statement on Jan. 15.