The Ukrainian military chief has said that 150,000 of Vladimir Putin’s troops were killed in 2024, as the countries prepare for a new era of their conflict after Donald Trump re-enters the White House.
A record 434,000 casualties, including the wounded, were suffered last year taking total Russian casualties to 819,000, claimed Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces. “This year of combat has cost them more than the previous two years of the war combined,” Mr Syrskyi told Ukrainian TV channel TSN.
Russia has gained ground in eastern Ukraine over the past year, but at the cost of heavy casualties as it throws waves of soldiers at Ukraine’s defensive lines.
Moscow’s Defence Ministry claimed on Monday that Russian troops had taken control of the eastern Ukrainian villages of Shevchenko and Novoiehorivka. Shevchenko is just south of the city of Pokrovsk, a strategic supply route for Ukraine which Russian troops have been advancing towards for months. The battlefield reports have not been independently verified at the time of writing.
A leading war monitor said on Monday that Russia is recruiting unskilled men and women to boost its manpower on the frontline – a crucial element of Russia’s war of attrition.
“Russian volunteer military detachments continue efforts to boost manpower by recruiting women into the Russian Armed Forces,” the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said. Army units are “recruiting specialists and unskilled men and women from across Russia to participate in combat operations in Ukraine”, it added.
Meanwhile, Kyiv has issued a warning to the incoming Trump administration that forcing negotiations between Ukraine and Russia before the defending army has gained a territorial advantage would be a catastrophic mistake.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, said: “The bottom line is that there are no simple, quick decisions to be made here. The initiative has to be controlled. It must not be given away to Russia.”
Donald Trump’s inauguration marks a new era in American-Ukrainian relations, with Kyiv fearing that the president may try to force a rushed resolution to the war. Mr Trump, who once said the war would be over in 24 hours if he was president, now aims to bring an end to the war within 100 days of his presidency.
As Ukraine’s ground troops fiercely defend the frontline, its air force shot down 93 of 141 Russian drones launched overnight, it said on Monday. Of the remaining drones, 47 were “lost”, referring to Ukraine’s use of electronic warfare to redirect drones.
Putin’s forces were also accused by Ukraine’s general staff of using chemical weapons 434 times in December. The use of chemical agents banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) added to a total of 5,389 documented cases since February 2023, the general staff said. The Kremlin says it has not broken international law with the weapons the Russian army uses.
