Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman admitted Thursday that the country’s military has suffered “significant losses” during the six weeks since it invaded Ukraine.
Dmitry Peskov called Russia’s military death toll, which the Ukrainian Armed Forces said the same day is nearly 19,000, “a huge tragedy for us” during an interview on Sky News. He did not provide a specific range, and the reporting of death totals in war is very difficult to tally accurately as each side has its own incentives to either over- or undercount.
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Putin’s spokesman participated in an extensive interview in which host Mark Austin repeatedly pressed him on crimes against civilians in Bucha and Mariupol. Peskov repeated Russia’s denials of these actions and pushed claims that the killings had been “staged.”
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A senior U.S. defense official told reporters Wednesday that the Pentagon believes that the Russian forces around Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and Chernihiv have “completed their withdrawal from the area.”
Peskov called the decision to have troops retreat from the capital to Belarus as “an act of goodwill” for peace talks, though the Pentagon believes the troops will get redeployed.
There have been new accusations of war crimes levied against Russian forces for their alleged actions in Bucha, a suburb northwest of Kyiv, after hundreds of bodies were found buried in a mass grave and other civilians were found shot and killed with their wrists bound behind them and other signs of torture.
The alleged war crimes in Bucha are “a well-staged insinuation, nothing else,” Peskov said, while the New York Times reported that an analysis of satellite images of the area rebuts his denial. “It’s a bold fake, and we’ve been speaking about that for a couple of days, but no one would listen to us.”
He also maintained those denials even after Austin showed Pesvok the satellite imagery and videos from Ukraine.
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In response to Bucha, the Biden administration announced new sanctions on Wednesday, going after Putin’s adult children. A day earlier, it announced the authorization of an additional shipment of up to $100 million in military supplies, bringing the total amount of military aid the United States has provided to Ukraine since Russia invaded on Feb. 24 to $1.7 billion.
The Russian spokesman also repeated Russia’s denial when asked about the maternity hospital in Mariupol that was bombed last month.
