Yesterday at the official SPIEF (St. Petersburg International Economic Forum) Putin gave an extremely revealing 3-hour long open round table with foreign journalists. I will do a break down of some of the most interesting clips and soundbites, though you can see the entire important meeting here.

But first let’s cover the most interesting of the revelations:

The Russian MOD stopped listing official losses sometime around May of 2022, likely after it became obvious that the conflict would drag on and the losses would grow to an unsuitably painful degree.

Now at the SPIEF, Putin gave the first indication since that time of Russian losses when he stated that Russia loses 1 soldier for every 5 Ukrainian ones, as well as giving an exact figure for POWs, which he states as follows:

There are 1,348 #Russian soldiers and officers in captivity in #Ukraine, and 6,465 such #Ukrainian in #Russia, #Putin said.

There is a lot to digest and unpack here, so let’s do it one thing at a time.

Let’s first spell out exactly what he says:

• Ukraine loses 50,000 men per month, both irrecoverable and sanitary losses, i.e. total casualties included wounded, KIA, etc.
• The ratio of their wounded to irrecoverable/KIA is 50/50, which means out of 50k, 25k of them are actually irrecoverable losses. (note: this is a high proportion to wounded because of Ukraine’s comparative lack of battlefield medicine which causes far more wounded to die, not to mention Russia’s usage of powerful airstrikes/bombs which proportionally simply kills far more soldiers outright)
• Ukraine mobilizes 30,000 new men per month from the street.
• The ratio between Russian and Ukrainian losses is 1:5 in favor of Russia.
• The ratio of POWs is 1,348 to 6,465 in favor of Russia.