Ukraine has said that Russia lost 25 tanks and 37 armored vehicles in a single day as it gave its latest estimates of Russian losses.
On Saturday, the Ukrainian armed forces said on its Facebook page that Russia had lost an additional 25 tanks, taking the total number of such vehicles reportedly destroyed since the start of the full-scale invasion on February 24 to 2,034.
In its daily update, Ukraine also said that Russia now had lost a total of 4,403 combat armored machines, with 37 destroyed on a single day. “The opponent suffered the biggest losses in the Donetsk and Kryvyi Rih directions,” its Facebook statement said, referring to the center and east of the country.
The U.K. Ministry of Defence in May said that Russia was losing a large number of tanks and that Moscow had taken 50-year-old T-62 tanks out of storage to be used by its Southern Grouping of Forces (SGF).
Meanwhile, the death toll of Russian troops is also nearing 50,000, according to the latest Ukrainian figures, which said that a further 350 had been killed, taking the total to 49,050.
An accurate figure of losses of Russian troops and equipment is difficult to verify. Moscow rarely discloses its military losses and it last officially released figures of 1,351 troops killed at the end of March. Newsweek has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry for comment on Ukraine’s latest estimates.
Meanwhile, the governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said on Saturday that Russian troops had launched overnight rocket attacks on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine. He wrote on Telegram that there had been damage to houses and businesses but no fatalities.
It comes amid a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the country’s south, as Kyiv’s forces focus on the Kherson region and its capital with the same name, which was seized by Russia early in the war and is of significant strategic and political value.
In an interview with the independent news outlet Meduza, military analyst Rob Lee said it was not clear if Ukraine had the equipment or the soldiers with enough training to pull off the military offensive.
Lee expected a “kind of grinding offensive” where Ukraine’s forces take back towns “but it takes time” and “might require a lot of artillery.”
“I think Ukraine wants to make the position of Russian forces west of the Dnieper unsustainable,” he told the outlet, “Basically what they’re trying to do is make it more costly for Russia to try and hold Kherson.”
This involved targeting bridges or “anything within HIMARS range,” he said, referring to the U.S-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) which have allowed Kyiv’s forces to hit the Antonovsky railway and road bridges which have stranded Russia’s forces.
