Russia is on course to lose 500,000 troops by end of 2024, says UK intel

Russians conscripted as part of the mobilization in Rostov on October 31, 2022. Arkady Budnitsky/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images© Arkady Budnitsky/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

• Russia is on course to have lost half a million soldiers by the end of the year, the UK Ministry of Defense said.
• Russia’s forces have become “a low quality, high quantity mass army,” the department said.
• It will likely take Russia five to 10 years to rebuild its forces to a high standard.

Russia is on course to have lost a total of 500,000 soldiers by the end of this year if casualties continue at their current rate, the UK Ministry of Defense said.

The average daily number of Russian casualties in Ukraine has risen by almost 300 during the last year, the department noted, citing data from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

Neither Business Insider nor the UK’s MOD could independently verify the methodology used by the Ukrainian General Staff.

But the MOD previously said the figures are “plausible,” putting it down to mounting casualty figures from Russia’s attacks on Avdiivka, a small town on the edge of occupied Donetsk.

The increased casualty rate reflects how the quality of the Russian military decreased following the partial mobilization of military reservists in September 2022, the department said.

The mobilization turned Russian forces into “a low quality, high quantity mass army,” according to the department.

Russia shows ‘no regard for the lives of its own soldiers’

Analysts have said that Russia is employing “human wave” tactics in Ukraine, in which large numbers of poorly trained soldiers are sent to the battlefield and die in high numbers.

One example of this tactic was a recent report of near-suicidal attacks on a section of the eastern front in which Russian forces repeatedly tried to commit identical tank assaults in the same part of a Ukrainian forest that was thwarted by Ukrainian forces seven times.

John Kirby, the spokesperson for the National Security Council, said that the tactic demonstrated that Russia “continues to show no regard for the lives of its own soldiers, willingly sacrificing them in pursuit of Putin’s goals.”

The UK defense department said it will likely take Russia five to 10 years to rebuild a cohort of “highly trained, experienced readiness force.”

Russia has been secretive about the numbers of its casualties, but US intelligence estimates that around 315,000 of Russia’s troops have been killed or injured since the beginning of the war.

This is believed to be around 90% of the personnel it had when the war began.