1,400 Russian troops injured in Ukraine discharged from hospital – newspaper
Around 1,400 Russian troops injured in Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine have already been discharged from the hospital, Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), the official newspaper of the Russian Defense Ministry, reported.
They were treated in a military hospital in Moscow, where some of them underwent surgery, the outlet reported on Sunday, adding that the recovering troops will now be sent to treatment facilities for rehabilitation.
“All of them have expressed willingness to rejoin their units after a full recovery to further fulfill their duties as part of the ‘special military operation,’” Red Star reported.
Moscow first revealed the number of troops killed and injured in Ukraine on March 2. At the time, the Russian Defense Ministry put the death toll at 498, and said that 1,597 servicemen were injured, rejecting Kiev’s claims that there were “countless” Russian casualties as disinformation.
Since then, the Russian military has not updated the death toll. The Ukrainian side regularly releases estimates of slain Russians, claiming “over 12,000” may have lost their lives in the offensive.
On Sunday, Kiev said that at least 35 people were killed and over 130 were injured at the Yavoriv military range, also known as the International Center for Peacekeeping and Security, outside Lviv, near Ukraine’s border with Poland.
The Russian military confirmed the long-range strike at Yavoriv and a nearby military training center, saying it was carried out with high-precision weapons. Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said during a briefing on Sunday that “up to 180 foreign fighters” were killed and a large cache of foreign weapons were destroyed in the attack. Kiev later called the claims “propaganda.”
Moscow attacked its neighbor in late February, following a seven-year standoff over Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk Agreements, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics in Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered protocols had been designed to regularize the status of those regions within the Ukrainian state.
Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.
