Half of Russian Battlefield Deaths Are Preventable

Russian soldiers in Ukraine are experiencing a crisis of bad combat medics.

U.S. Soldiers conduct medical evacuation training in an MH-60 Blackhawk during Exercise Combined Resolve 17 (CbR 17) at Hohenfels Training Area, Joint Multinational Readiness Center (JMRC) in Hohenfels, Germany, May 26, 2022. Public domain

In a UK Ministry of Defense intelligence update this week, the agency estimates that up to 50% of Russian combat fatalities in Ukraine are preventable. The Russian head of the Kalashnikov company’s combat medicine division confirmed this number.

What’s more, the UK claims that Russia has averaged 400 casualties a day in the 17 months since it invaded Ukraine. That comes out to roughly 204,000 casualties (killed and wounded combined).

Two independent Russian media outlets, Mediazona and Meduza, working with a data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University, recently conducted the first independent analysis of Russia’s war dead.

What’s the number they arrived at?

50,000 Russian men dead.

That is a far cry from the 6,000 that Moscow has publicly acknowledged.

In NATO and the West, commanders put a high priority on the survivability of their troops.

When I was serving in the 101st Airborne Division, we had one combat medic assigned per platoon (of about 30 infantrymen.)

To this day, I can’t tell you our medic’s name because we just called him “Doc.”