Nearly half a million Russians killed in Ukraine war, UK spy chief says

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. Ukraine has been trying to lift the number of Russian soldiers it kills or seriously wounds above Moscow’s ability to raise new recruits in an attempt to halt more than three years of slow losses of territory in the east of the country. Russian casualties, killed and wounded, have been estimated by the west to be running at around 30,000 a month during April. This month, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said that, of those, 15,000 to 20,000 a month were killed. …