Putin: Ukrainian army has “suffered heavy losses “

MOSCOW, Jun.13, (ST)- The Russian army has lost ten times less troops than the Ukrainian military that is carrying out a counteroffensive, President of Russia Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with military reporters on Tuesday.

The Ukrainian army has “an unfavorable structure of casualties,” the Russian leader said.

“Of all the casualties, and they are close to the estimate that can be called catastrophic in terms of the personnel, the structure of their losses is unfavorable because casualties can be sanitary and irretrievable. Normally, irretrievable losses amount to 25% or maximally 30%. However, they [the Ukrainian military] has the almost 50/50 ratio,” Putin pointed out.

It is understandable that the defending party sustains less casualties, the Russian president said.

“But still, this 1 to 10 ratio is in our favor, so to speak: we have ten times less losses than the Ukrainian armed forces,” Putin said.

Speaking about Ukrainian armor losses, the Russian president said that they were “even more serious.”

“They have lost over 160 tanks and more than 360 armored vehicles of various types over this time [the period of the counteroffensive],” Putin said.

“This is only what we see. There are also losses that we do not see that are inflicted by strikes of long-range precision weapons against amassed manpower and equipment. That is, in real fact, they have greater losses,” the head of state specified.

In my estimates, this is about 25% or, perhaps, 30% of the amount of equipment delivered [to Ukraine] from abroad,” Putin said.

“As it seems to me, they will agree with that, if they make an impartial count and, proceeding from what I have seen from open Western sources, they say about actually the same thing,”

The Russian president declined to speak about Russia’s personnel casualties, referring the issue to the Russian Defense Ministry.

As for equipment losses, the Russian leader said that “they [the Ukrainian military] have lost over 160 tanks while we have lost 54 tanks and some of them can be repaired,” the head of state said.

In another development, Putin signed a law denouncing the 2003 treaty between Russia and Ukraine on cooperating in using the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait.

The treaty originally stipulated that the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait were internal waters of Russia and Ukraine. Vessels from both sides were allowed to navigate the Kerch Strait freely.

The agreement, signed on Dec. 24, 2003, in Kerch, entered into force in April 2004.
Russia’s State Duma, or the lower house of parliament, denounced the agreement on June 1 after the Russian president had submitted a bill on May 24. Russia’s upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, approved the same bill on June 7.

compiled by: Basma Qaddour

Source: Agencies