The statement made by American politician Robert Kennedy Jr. on Tucker Carlson's program on the Fox News channel seemed so important to the editors of Vesti Nedeli that it was included in two stories at once – about Western aid to Ukraine and about Kennedy's own presidential ambitions. The statement sounds like this:
“No one talks about it, but 14,000 Ukrainian civilians, 300,000 military personnel died. Russians kill Ukrainians at a ratio of 7 to 1 or 8 to 1. Ukrainians cannot stand. Everything we are told about this war is a lie!”
Where did Kennedy get such numbers, Vesti Nedeli did not even try to explain, so let's try to do it for them. The Pentagon's recently leaked classified materials state the total losses of Ukraine and Russia at approximately 354,000 people, and it is stipulated that this is the total number of losses in killed and wounded. Russia's losses are estimated at 35,500–43,000 killed and 154,000–180,000 wounded, and Ukraine's losses at 15,500–17,500 killed and 109,000–113,500 wounded, that is, Russian military died about twice as many as Ukrainian.
But Kennedy apparently has other sources of information. Who named similar figures? In early February, Colonel Douglas McGregor, who was a Pentagon adviser during the last months of the Trump administration, said that the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valery Zaluzhny, told the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, that the Armed Forces of Ukraine lost 257,000 people during the war. McGregor is not the most authoritative source; he repeatedly predicted the imminent devastating defeat of Ukraine and even declared in March 2022 that the war was practically over and Ukraine was defeated. Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, called McGregor a representative of the "Putin wing of the Republican Party" and resented that Fox News channel put him on the air, where he constantly engages in disinformation. Where the retired colonel, who became a Kremlin propagandist, could get information about the content of the confidential conversation between Zaluzhny and Milli remains unknown.
In early April, former American intelligence officer Scott Ritter stated on his YouTube channel US Tour of Duty :
“Zaluzhny, in a conversation with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Pentagon, Mark Milley, said that 250,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed. About 83,000 are missing, of which about 60,000 are most likely dead. This gives an approximate number of 315 thousand dead.
Ritter did serve in intelligence, but that was a very long time ago – in the early 1990s. Later, he was the UN weapons inspector in Iraq, and in 1998 he resigned and began to sharply criticize the American government – first for being too soft on Iraq, then for being too tough. In the 2000s, he went to prison for attempting to seduce a minor, after which the demand for his expert services in America, for obvious reasons, disappeared; since 2019, he has been regularly collaborating with RT. Ritter denied the crimes of the Russian military in Bucha and shifted the blame to the Ukrainians and Biden, whom he called a war criminal. As he found out what Zaluzhny and Milli were talking about, the ex-spy, of course, did not say a word either.
In December 2022, Andrey Marochko, an officer of the so-called people’s militia of the LPR, named a similar figure, but he spoke about the total number of irretrievable and sanitary losses, that is, those killed and wounded. At the same time, on the website of the NSN radio station, a message about a conversation with him was titled ““300 thousand killed”: Marochko named the number of losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine since the beginning of the special operation.” The source of Marochko's data was also not reported.
In early March 2023, Kremlin Telegram channels and online publications claimed that CNN, citing informed sources, reported an almost exact number of UAF losses: 259,085 dead and about 247,000 wounded. Even the quite pro-Kremlin Voennoye Obozreniye noted some strangeness of this information:
“It is difficult to say how close these figures are to reality. There is one nuance that draws attention to itself: these figures are dozens of times higher than the official data of the Kyiv regime. In addition, attention is drawn to the ratio of the number of wounded to the number of irretrievable losses. Usually in armed conflicts, the first number is at least 2.5–3 times higher than the second. In the CNN material, these numbers are almost identical.
However, there is no such information on the CNN website, just as there is no trace of this message left on the Internet that would indicate that it was once deleted. These figures are found only in Russian and pro-Russian media and blogs. No one has links to the original CNN material or publications in other Western media.
But the source of Kennedy's data on the ratio of losses of the Ukrainian and Russian sides, apparently, is known. In October 2022, at a meeting of the Valdai Club, Vladimir Putin stated :
“There are losses one in ten, one in eight. Recently, almost always one to seven, one to eight. People are not sorry at all. Can true patriots of their country allow this? They go straight along this path calmly and even without looking back, they do not think about it. Of course, they are not defending their national interests.”
The implausibility of these figures is obvious: as a rule, in any war, the losses of the attacking side are higher than those of the defending side. At the same time, it should be noted that during the Ukrainian counter-offensive near Kharkov and Kherson (the latter had not yet ended by the time of Putin's speech in Valdai), Russian troops did not offer serious resistance. Two weeks after Putin's statement, Kherson was surrendered without a fight; most likely, the losses of the APU in this operation were not great. So we have to admit that Kennedy believed the unfounded Russian propaganda claims.
