​How many Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine? What we know, how we know it and what it really means.

“Last week, after Ukraine’s dramatic and deadly strike on a Russian air base in Crimea, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a particularly blunt message for the Kremlin. ‘If almost 43,000 dead Russian soldiers do not convince the Russian leadership that they need to find a way out of the war,’ Zelenskyy said, ‘then more fighting is needed, more results are needed to convince.’ We don’t really know how many Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine. But there is no shortage of estimates.The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which provides a daily running tally on social media, put the number of enemy ‘liquidated’ at around 43,000 as of Aug. 11 — hence Zelenskyy’s figure. The Russian government has not published its own losses since March 25, when it gave a total of 1,351 killed and 3,825 wounded. (Wartime casualties are a state secret in Russia, and revealing them is punishable by up to seven years in prison.) ...”

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A Ukrainian serviceman inspects a destroyed Russian tank at an abandoned Russian position near Bilogorivka, Ukraine, on June 17.