There are no reliable figures on how many soldiers have been killed during the war between Russia and Ukraine. In previous wars, it has been in the interest of both sides to keep their own numbers down and exaggerate the losses of the opposing side.
The British Ministry of Defense states according to Forbes that about 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed so far, which in that case is as many as died during the nine-year war in Afghanistan. Ukrainian authorities has set the number at 28,700.
According to Ukrainian data, a large number of Russian generals have been killed.
Through open sources, the British BBC can now confirm that at least 31 Russian fighter pilots have been shot down over Ukraine. The deaths of the 31 pilots have been reported by local media in Russia in connection with funerals, discussions on social media and by visiting cemeteries.
A few days ago could BBC and Ukrainian Apostrophe Tell us that the 63-year-old Russian Major General Kanamat Botashev was shot down by a Ukrainian stinger robot when Botashev made a flight over the Luhan area on 22 May.
Botashev died when he did not have time to jump from his Su-25. He is thus the highest-ranked military man who has so far died during an air strike against targets in Ukraine.
Botasjev’s career as a pilot actually took since he on June 28, 2012 persuaded a friend to borrow a Su-27 and then crashed the plane after performing some aerial acrobatics, wrote Novaja Gazeta in December 2021. Botashev and his co-pilot he jumped when the plane was 500 meters above the ground.
“I just wanted to fly a fighter jet of that type but did not take into account that such a plane has its own peculiarities,” Botashev told the court, wrote the Russian state-controlled news agency Paw.
Despite this, it was allowed the 63-year-old former pilot to be deployed in the war in Ukraine.
As recently as May 13, the BBC had been able to confirm the names of 2,336 Russian soldiers who had died during the war. The BBC notes that the figures reported by the Russian Ministry of Defense were almost half as many as BBC’s own survey visat. 19 percent of those who died have been officers of various degrees.