Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on Tuesday that Ukraine’s military used drones to kill or gravely injure more than 30,000 Russian forces near the front lines of the battlefield in July.
“In July, all our units on the front eliminated 30,272 Russians — specifically using drones. This figure includes both killed and badly wounded,” he said, noting that this tally only includes cases in which “there is clear video evidence.”
Zelensky’s assessment demonstrates the tremendous casualties Russia’s military is sustaining on the front lines due to Ukraine’s drone proliferation and development over the course of the war.
The Russian military, over the course of the full-scale invasion that began in February 2022, has suffered an estimated 1.4 million troop casualties, which includes killed or injured, while there were likely as many as 450,000 troops killed in that time, according to a July report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Despite the tremendous loss of life, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not been deterred from continuing to push his troops to conquer his war objectives. Putin launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022, expecting to defeat the smaller Ukrainian military easily, but Russian forces advancing on Kyiv were stopped, and he had to shift his objectives to capturing the Donbas region shortly thereafter. The Donbas is Ukrainian territory, but pro-Russian factions have stirred unrest in the region since 2014. Russia controls a significant portion of the area but has been unable to fully conquer it despite years of trying.
“Putin has articulated explicitly what his theory of victory is,” George Barros, an expert with the Institute for the Study of War, said during an Atlantic Council event on Tuesday. “Putin believes that his forces, as long as they advance, even at a slow rate, even if the attrition gradient is terrible, that Putin can all the same dominate a protracted war of attrition because all else equal, Western support for Ukraine will diminish with time.
“That theory of victory only works, however, as long as the Russian rate of advance” remains in the positive, he said, adding that “as soon as that becomes zero or goes in the negative, it actually invalidates the theory of victory and incentivizes Putin to actually try to change his calculus, change his positions, make some concessions, and at that point, when you made it zero, it actually creates an opportunity for the Ukrainians to use some of these tactics and operational concepts we’ve been discussing to, in part and parcel, slowly retake terrain in some tactical areas.”
Ukraine has changed the war dynamics in recent months with frequent strikes on Russian logistics and supply lines. It has also targeted Russia’s oil and energy infrastructure with medium and long-range drones. These new Ukrainian capabilities and strategies have created problems for Russia that it has struggled to resolve.
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“To say that Ukraine is already completely comfortable with the situation would be wrong, to say this is a race and this is a very difficult, but at the same time, obviously, there are capabilities and there are types of operations which Russian cannot intercept at all,” former Ukrainian Minister of Defense Andriy Zagorodnyuk said during the event. “Russia cannot compel us to basically any kind of surrender, obviously, but it seems like we’re also not compelling Russia right now to any political movements, for instance, de-escalation or meaningful negotiations.”
Ukraine is still struggling to intercept Russian ballistic missiles, of which there are few relevant air defense systems. Ukraine is largely reliant on its allies for air defense systems capable of defeating incoming ballistic missiles, though it has offered to share its drone advancements and strategies with partners in exchange for that assistance.