Ukraine military, on Tuesday described ‘the last 24 hours’ as the deadliest of the war so far for Russian forces ever since the invasion.
In a fresh attack that sees Moscow pressed on with an intensifying winter assault in the east, bringing tens of thousands of freshly mobilised troops to the battlefield.
The Ukrainian claim of more than 1000 Russian troops killed over a day could not be independently verified, and Russia has also claimed to have killed large numbers of Ukrainian troops in recent weeks.
The Ukrainian military increased its running tally of Russian military dead by 1030 overnight to 133,190, describing the increase as the highest of the war so far and among 1900 over two days.
Brutal fighting around Bakhmut near the Donbas region is thought to have contributed to the rise in causalities, with both Kyiv and Moscow escalating their campaigns.
In the claim, Ukrainian military also said 25 Russian tanks have been destroyed in the past two days to add to a total of 3,245 since February last year.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces announced the latest figures on social media alongside a video that appeared to show a Russian tank being destroyed by Ukrainian’s 92nd Mechanized Brigade.
Russia has also claimed it inflicted 6,500 Ukrainian casualties in the month of January.
Since the turn of New Year, Western countries have freshly pledged hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles to Ukraine to give it the firepower and mobility to push through Russian lines and recapture territory later this year.
Even a new US package of weapons is expected to include longer-range rockets, which would give Ukraine the ability to hit Russian supply lines in all of the territory it occupies in Ukraine’s mainland and parts of the Crimea Peninsula.
Meanwhile, western military supports to Ukraine does not sit well with people in Moscow.
‘The US and its allies are trying to prolong the conflict as much as possible,’ Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Tuesday in a conference call with military officials.
‘To do this, they have started supplying heavy offensive weapons, openly urging Ukraine to seize our territories. In fact, such steps are dragging NATO countries into the conflict and could lead to an unpredictable level of escalation.’
