Russia has taken 60,000 casualties in Ukraine: CIA chief

Russian forces have sustained about 60,000 casualties of their marketing campaign to overthrow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a high U.S. spy official estimates.

"It is all the time a variety and, you understand, there isn't any good quantity,” CIA Director William Burns instructed the Aspen Safety Discussion board. “I feel the newest estimates from the U.S. intelligence neighborhood can be, you understand, one thing within the neighborhood of 15,000 killed and possibly 3 times that wounded, so a fairly vital set of losses.”

The defending Ukrainian troops “have suffered as properly — in all probability rather less than” the Russians, he added.

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That’s a clearer glimpse of the toll paid by either side than Western officers have a tendency to supply. The estimates contributed to an image of a slugfest that Russian President Vladimir Putin had not anticipated, in keeping with Burns, who described Moscow’s miscalculations as a perform of Putin’s character and beliefs throughout a dialog with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.

“Putin actually does consider in his rhetoric — and I've heard him say this privately through the years — that Ukraine will not be an actual nation,” mentioned Burns, a longtime diplomat who visited Putin in November in an effort to discourage him from launching the struggle. “He believes that it is his entitlement, Russia's entitlement, to dominate Ukraine. ... Putin and the individuals closest to him clearly believed that they had a positive panorama over this previous winter — a Ukraine that they judged to be weak and divided, that will fold shortly, a Russian army modernized to the purpose the place they might win, in his view, a fast and decisive victory at minimal price.”

These expectations had been dashed over the primary a number of weeks of the struggle because the common Ukrainian army and territorial protection forces repelled the Russian troops who tried to grab Kyiv. Russian forces had extra success in japanese Ukraine, nonetheless, and Moscow has dropped the pretense that they intend solely to combat in protection of the so-called separatists in Donbas.

“Now, [our] geography is totally different,” Russian International Minister Sergey Lavrov instructed state media. “It isn't solely the [Donbas] — it is usually the Kherson area, the Zaporizhzhia area, and quite a few different territories.”

Burns downplayed the suggestion that Putin’s actions have been formed by psychological or bodily instability.

“So far as we are able to inform, he is completely too wholesome. It’s not a proper intelligence judgment,” he mentioned to laughter. “His views have hardened, in my expertise, through the years, however he is obtained his personal method of actuality. And as we, you understand, may see within the first phases of this struggle, it was based mostly on some profoundly flawed assumptions and a few actual illusions, particularly about Ukraine and the desire to withstand in Ukraine.”

That doesn’t imply the struggle is getting any simpler for Ukraine, as officers in Kyiv have acknowledged to Burns.

“In one in all my latest conversations with one in all my Ukrainian counterparts, he identified that the dumb Russians are all lifeless,” Burns mentioned. “What he meant by that's ... the Russians have tailored. Putin has shrunk his aims, at the very least in the meanwhile — I stress, at the very least in the meanwhile — he’s concentrated his forces within the Donbas, they usually’re grinding away.”

Burns additionally famous that Putin “helped to create” that Ukrainian dedication to combat by conducting a low-intensity struggle in japanese Ukraine since 2014.

“My very own robust view is that Putin was improper in his assumptions about breaking the alliance and breaking Ukrainian will earlier than the struggle started,” he mentioned. “And I feel he's simply as improper now. ... He insists that Ukraine will not be an actual nation. Properly, actual nations combat again, and that is what the Ukrainians have completed, as long as we proceed to help them with the weaponry and the munitions that they've used so successfully.”