‘Warlord’ Vladimir Putin has ruthlessly pummelled Ukraine in a new set of lethal strikes, but his illegal invasion could have killed more than half a million Russians.
In Slavyansk – a city in the Donetsk region that Putin wants to grab – Russia wounded six people, aged between 38 and 69, in an aerial bomb strike on residential buildings.
These attacks on Ukrainians were spread across the country as a 50-year-old man was killed in his home following a Russian drone strike in Novhorod-Siverskyi, Chernihiv region.
A day earlier, NATO was forced to scramble fighters in Poland amid the intensity of Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine.
Russia’s relentless bombing and strikes have continued despite The Economist indicating the number of Putin’s own men who have been killed in the horror invasion, which the dictator won’t stop, could be more than half a million.
‘Perhaps 1% of Russia’s pre-war male population of fighting age has died in Ukraine,’ according to Independent Russian outlet Astra.
‘A number of losses of less than 600,000 means that this year Russia could have lost more people in Ukraine than in 2022-2024.’
The site continued, ‘From the beginning of the full-scale invasion to January of this year, the Russian army’s losses amounted to between 640,000 and 877,000 people, of which 137,000 – 228,000 were killed.’
The half a million estimate is at the upper limit of Russian men killed in the war.
Ukraine overnight hit back at the aggressor with a strike on the Engels airbase in southern Russia, triggering repeated ‘wall-shaking explosions’ and a fire, with a suspected hit on Kristall oil depot used to fuel Putin’s strategic bombers.
