There are 617,000 Russian troops in the zone of the "special military operation" in Ukraine, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin said during a live broadcast on Thursday.
Until now, the Russian authorities have not disclosed the exact number of Russian troops fighting on Ukrainian territory.
However, Russian telegram channels have analyzed Putin's speech, and their calculations suggest that at least 363,000 Russians have already died in the war against Ukraine.
"Vladimir Vladimirovich said that there are 617 thousand soldiers at the front. There were 244 thousand mobilized and 486 thousand volunteers. Plus our army of 250 thousand people, which entered Ukraine in February (2022 – ed.). There are no rotations, which means that these hundreds of thousands of people simply did not return from the front. The numbers are complete..." – Russian Z-bloggers write.
Putin said that there is no need for a second wave of mobilization in Russia.
"We had a partial mobilization, we drafted 300,000 people... After that, we launched a campaign to recruit people on a voluntary basis to sign contracts with the armed forces," Putin said. – "We planned to recruit, I think, 412,000, 400,000 something by the end of the year. As of last night, I was informed that 486,000 had been recruited."
"The flow of our men who are ready to defend the interests of our homeland with arms in their hands is not decreasing – 1,500 every day across the country. So, together with volunteers... all together we will have half a million people by the end of this year. Why do we need mobilization? There is no need for it today," Putin added.
"There will be peace when we achieve our goals. Now, let's get back to these goals: they are not changing, I'll just remind you what we talked about then – denazification in Ukraine, demilitarization, its neutral status," the Kremlin dwarf said.
"As for demilitarization, if they don't want to negotiate, well, then we are forced to take other measures, including military ones. Or we will agree... we will agree on certain parameters, and by the way, during the negotiations in Istanbul we agreed on them, but then we threw them into the furnace, these agreements. But we did agree on them. There are other possibilities – either to negotiate or to solve it by force. This is what we are striving for," he said.
As a reminder, Putin never signed a decree to end the "partial mobilization," despite the fact that in the fall of 2022, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said it had been suspended.
Background. According to U.S. intelligence, as of early December 2023, the Russian army's losses in Ukraine, including killed and wounded, reached 315,000 people. This is 90% of the army personnel that the Kremlin assembled to launch the invasion in February 2022. US intelligence estimated its strength at 360 thousand soldiers.