This photograph taken on September 11, 2022, shows a Ukrainian soldier standing atop an abandoned Russian tank near a village on the outskirts of Izyum, Kharkiv Region, eastern Ukraine, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images
Russia has “lost nearly half” its combat power since invading Ukraine, a top UK defense official said.
Admiral Sir Tony Radakin claimed Russia is now “so weak” it cannot wage a counter-offensive.
A classified US assessment previously said Russian forces may have suffered over 200,000 casualties.
A top British defense official said Tuesday that Russia’s combat abilities have been slashed in half since last year’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In comments before a parliamentary hearing, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin — the formal head of the United Kingdom’s armed forces and chief military adviser to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — claimed that Russia is now “so weak” it could no longer wage a military counter-offensive of its own.
“Russia has lost nearly half the combat effectiveness of its army,” Radakin said, according to the Financial Times. “Last year it fired 10 million artillery shells but at best can produce 1 million shells a year. It has lost 2,500 tanks and at best can produce 200 [new] tanks a year.”
Meanwhile, he defended Ukraine’s counter-offensive, which has been criticized for not making enough progress.
Radakin said Kyiv’s strategy to “starve, stretch and strike” is gradually eroding Russia’s defenses, though he acknowledged that Russian mines as well as Ukraine’s insufficient air defenses and lack of certain equipment it requested have weighed on operations.
“The question is, how do you take a front line that is more than a thousand kilometers long and turn it into more of a problem for Russia than for Ukraine?” he said. “That is why you are seeing multiple axes being probed and feints by Ukraine.”
Radakin’s claims about Russia’s combat losses in Ukraine are roughly in line with previous reporting.
In February, Oryx, an open-source intelligence group, said that at least 1,000 Russian tanks had been destroyed in Ukraine — and another 500 captured. A classified US military assessment, leaked earlier this year, suggested that as many as 43,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and another 180,000 wounded since February 2022.
When Russia invaded last year, it was assessed to have over 400,000 contract soldiers, PBS reported.
Experts have said the losses have taken a huge toll, in particular, on Russia’s elite infantry and armored fighting brigades.
“They’ve been decimated,” Jeffrey Edmonds, a Russia expert at the Center for Naval Analyses and former CIA military analyst, told Insider’s Jake Epstein earlier this year, describing it as a “blow to Russian’s ground force’s combat power.”