Casualty Estimates on the War in Ukraine - 14,000 Ukrainian Soldiers & 5,500 Rebel Fighters KIA

This report from Tatzhit Mihailovic is the first believable estimate I've seen of the casualties in the Ukrainian civil war. The Ukrainian government and the separatist rebels give casualty reports so wildly different from one another they might as well come from different planets. As Mihailovic puts it, "Both sides in the Ukrainian civil war hugely overestimate enemy losses and conceal most of their own. Therefore, there is pressing need for a fact-based estimate of the loss of life."

Mihailovic uses the reports of armored vehicles destroyed as documented by the lostarmour.info database website as the basis of its estimates. Lost Armour is well-regarded as an accurate source by both Western and Russian observers, documenting vehicle losses that are captured on camera. Lost Armour has logged 627 Ukrainian Army vehicles destroyed and 376 captured, versus 76 rebel-held vehicles destroyed and 27 recaptured by the Ukrainian Army.

Mihailovic's analysis then extrapolates casualty figures by computing this data with the ratios of men lost and killed to armored vehicles destroyed in wars involving comparable armies in the past - the First Chechen War, Desert Storm, and the civil war in Syria. Also figuring into his estimates are the reported numbers of medevac operations for wounded soldiers carried out by the Ukrainian Army (around 12,000 as of January). His estimates take into account the fact that the Ukrainian Army is much more heavily mechanized than the rebel forces, so while it has lost nearly ten times as many vehicles, the casualty ratio in terms of men is more even - about two to three Ukrainian soldiers killed or wounded for every rebel.

The final figures he arrives at are about 14,000 Ukrainian soldiers KIA and more than 20,000 wounded, alongside around 5,600 separatists KIA and 12,000 wounded. Civilian deaths he estimates at 6,000-7,000, a range that is generally agreed upon by both the Ukrainian government and the Novorussian rebels.

These figures may not prove to be very accurate in the end, but they are definitely more believable than any of the ones the Ukrainian government or the rebels have put out so far.


- Tim Mulhair

http://thesaker.is/seeing-through-the-doublethink-primary-evidence-on-losses-of-the-combatants-at-donbass/