British military intelligence has released its estimate of Russian casualties on the battlefield since the start of the war in Ukraine, putting the dead and wounded at 610,000. In its post, it is not specified where this number comes from and how many are the dead and how many are injured, writes the Russian service of the BBC. He even points out that usually the international press cites as sources the American secret services and much less often the British ones.

The Wall Street Journal, earlier today, in an article (One Million Are Now Dead or Injured in the Russia-Ukraine War) citing “Western intelligence”, writing that “the number of Ukrainians and Russians killed or injured in the war of 2.5 years reached about one million”. It gives its own estimate of Russian losses, which according to the paper amount to 200,000 dead and 400,000 wounded.

The American newspaper writes that the losses of the Ukrainian military reach 80,000. He even points out that heavy losses are painful for the Russian military, but for the less densely populated Ukraine they could be even more painful. The losses on the battlefields as well as the population departures, the newspaper reports, cause enormous damage to the future of the two countries. Ukraine’s population of 48 million according to the 2001 census could have been reduced to 25-27 million without taking into account the inhabitants of the Russian-occupied territories. According to the newspaper’s estimates, after the start of the war, about 600,000 people, mainly young people with professional training, left Russia.

British intelligence writes that the widespread use of the tactic of mass infantry attacks makes the Russian army dependent on a constant flow of recruits. Among other things, in 2024, recruitment rates for recruits probably decreased. Last year, as British espionage writes in its post, Russian officials publicly stated that 1,600 people are being recruited daily, while this year 1,000. In fact, these numbers themselves are probably somewhat exaggerated (the word “probably” is defined as a probability of 55% to 75%).

In August, the Russian Ministry of Defense increased lump sums for those signing a contract. According to the estimates (the source of the estimates is not mentioned), from January to June, the salaries of the military made up 8% of the total expenditure of the Russian budget.

The British spy agency estimates that the increase in pay (based on the aforementioned meaning of the terminology) makes it possible to maintain the recruitment of contractors until the end of the year.

Russia and Ukraine do not disclose war losses. Name lists of the dead are created based on open sources by some groups of investigative journalists in collaboration with volunteers. In one of these lists, compiled by the journalists of the BBC Russian service, in collaboration with the independent website Mediazona and volunteers, 69,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian servicemen killed in the war are listed by the anonymous website UAlosses, which reports that 55,812 Ukrainian servicemen have been killed.