Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, at a meeting with Vladimir Putin, reported to him about the capture of the Ukrainian Avdiivka “with minimal losses.” The meeting between Putin and Shoigu is broadcast by the Kremlin press service.
Avdeevka is a satellite city of Donetsk. The Ukrainian army has held it since 2014. On February 17, the new commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Alexander Syrsky, announced the decision to leave Avdeevka, and the Russian Ministry of Defense reported on its complete capture.
Fierce battles for the city began on October 10, 2023 and lasted more than four months. A serviceman of the Russian army and one of the popular z-bloggers Andrei Morozov, referring to a discussion in a telegram channel, wrote that 16 thousand Russian soldiers were killed or seriously injured.
“Since October. From Nevelskoye to Novoselovka. 16 thousand irretrievable losses on our part. And about 300 units of knocked out armored vehicles,” Morozov reported in his post.
This post was published on February 18, and caused a lot of discussion in other z-channels; it was also fiercely criticized by propagandists Yulia Vityazeva and Armen Gasparyan.
According to the TGstat service, the text with loss figures was deleted on February 20 just before the start of the meeting between Putin and Shoigu in the Kremlin, where the latter spoke about “minimal losses” in the battles for Avdievka.
The Russian army captured Avdeevka. How will this affect the course of the war
Mediazona cannot yet independently confirm the data on the losses of the Russian army near Avdeevka. Since mid-October, a significant increase in the death toll is evident — however, it is not as large as during the assault on Bakhmut, when the Russian army was losing up to 800 people a week only according to publicly available obituaries, which indicate the exact date of death.
But the record losses in the battles for Bakhmut, which we can talk about now, became known only a few months after the end of the assault; these data are not final and will be supplemented.
Russia’s losses in the war with Ukraine. Summary «Media Zones»