Over 1,000 Russian soldiers killed or wounded on average each day in May in Ukraine, NYT reports

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More than 1,000 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded on average each day in May in Ukraine, the New York Times (NYT) reported on June 27, citing NATO and Western military officials. "May was a particularly deadly month for the Russian army in Ukraine," the article read. Russia continues to recruit 25,000 to 30,000 new soldiers a month, according to U.S. officials.

This amount is enough to replenish troops as many as are exiting the battlefield and allows the Russian army to continue to carry out human wave-style attacks. "It is a style of warfare that Russian soldiers have likened to being put into a meat grinder, with commanding officers seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are sending infantry soldiers to die," the NYT said. This approach helped Russia capture the key cities of Avdiivka and Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast earlier.

But this spring, such tactics have not succeeded in taking much land near the city of Kharkiv, the outlet said. Russian forces achieved a crucial objective set by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russian army created a buffer zone along the border to make it more difficult for the Ukrainians to strike deep into Russia, the NYT reported, citing American officials.

Ukraine eventually halted the Russian offensive in Kharkiv Oblast.

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War Notes

"They (Russian forces) tried, and they failed. They made very small gains, and they are paying a very high price," Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, told the NYT. While the Russian troops were carrying out the offensive in Kharkiv Oblast in May, they were losing an average of 1,200 personnel a day, according to the British military intelligence.

"Russia's use of infantry in wave attacks reflects one of its advantages in the war: its population is much larger than Ukraine's, giving it a bigger pool of potential recruits," the article read. "But the casualties have forced Russia to ship new recruits to Ukraine relatively quickly, meaning that the soldiers sent to the front are poorly trained." Russia has lost almost 540,000 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to Ukraine's General Staff.

This number includes both killed and injured. Through open-source research, Mediazona, a Russian independent media outlet, together with BBC Russia, confirmed the names of 56,858 Russian soldiers who had been killed since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Since Mediazona's last update at the end of May, the names of 2,677 Russian soldiers have been added to the list of casualties.

The Kyiv Independent could not independently verify this data.

'We took out so many of them:' Ukraine stabilizes Kharkiv front after brutal Russian offensive

Editor's note: In accordance with the security protocols of the Ukrainian military, soldiers featured in this story are identified by first names and callsigns only.

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