Nearly half a million Russians killed in Ukraine war, UK spy chief says | Russia | The Guardian

 

Nearly half a million Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine since the start of Vladimir Putin’s invasion more than four years ago, according to a new estimate from the head of the British spy agency GCHQ.

 

Anne Keast-Butler, the chief of the electronic intelligence agency, said in her first speech in the job that Russian forces were “going backwards on the battlefield” inside Ukraine for the first time since late 2022.

 

She then offered a new Russian death toll estimate, which was higher than a recent estimate of 352,000, calculated by the exiled media outlets Meduza and Mediazona, who extrapolated their total from official probate records.

 

Keast-Butler said there was “new intelligence showing that almost half a million Russian soldiers have now been killed since the conflict began”. An exact figure was not given, though the estimate is understood to be close to that total.