A Ukrainian lawmaker has blasted the country’s defense minister over his call to kill 50,000 Russians each month, saying Kiev should instead prioritize ending the conflict and bringing exhausted troops home.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday, Anna Skorokhod, an opposition lawmaker who has frequently criticized the government in Kiev, lashed out at Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov, who earlier suggested that inflicting heavy losses on Russia was a prerequisite for concluding peace.
Skorokhod wondered whether Ukraine’s leadership had adopted a “sick” strategy and said the aim should be “the end of the war,” the exchange of all Ukrainian prisoners of war, the search for those missing, and the return of soldiers she said were “morally and physically exhausted.”
“Why are we all sitting without light, without water, without heat, and we have a strategy to kill 50,000 Russians?!” she asked.
The MP also questioned Kiev’s claims about Moscow’s losses, saying that if Ukraine had indeed been killing tens of thousands of enemy soldiers, the Russian Army “would have already ceased to exist.” She also criticized the Ukrainian leadership for not providing what she called a transparent accounting of Ukraine’s own losses.
Skorokhod has long been a vocal critic of Ukraine’s leadership and senior military commanders. In August, she said official figures understated the scale of AWOL and desertion cases, claiming the number was approaching 400,000.
In December, several media outlets reported that Skorokhod had been named in an investigation by Ukrainian anti-corruption bodies into an alleged bribery and extortion scheme. Skorokhod denied any wrongdoing, labeling the investigation an attempt to exert “direct pressure on the opposition and… block my political activities because of my principled position.”
Commenting on Fedorov’s remarks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there was “nothing new” in them, adding that “the time is coming for the regime to make the appropriate decisions and take responsibility.”