The personnel participating in the defense of Ukraine against Russian invaders wiped out two Russian military columns in a single day, according to information shared by the Ukrainian news source called The Kyiv Independent. These strikes on Russian troops occurred on Thursday, the same day that Ukrainian personnel say they also destroyed ten Russian aircraft — throughout this conflict, dozens upon dozens of Russian planes and helicopters have been taken out one way or another by Ukrainian defenders, according to sources in Ukraine. As The Kyiv Independent explained that recent spate of strikes on advancing Russians, “Ukraine’s military: Two columns of advancing Russian forces and ten enemy aircraft were destroyed on March 10. According to Ukraine’s armed forces, the columns were Russian airborne troops and tanks, IFVs, and Grads. The aircraft consisted mainly of Su-25s and Su-34s.”
Ukrainian forces have also claimed to have killed over 12,000 advancing Russian troops, although exact numbers remain difficult to pin down, and the situation is obviously rapidly changing. Western officials have provided tentative support for the notion that thousands of Russian troops have been killed, although specific estimates have varied. In recent days, a U.S. official pinned the potential number of Russian troop deaths at from 5,000 to 6,000, although they reiterated that it could be outside that range — and obviously, even that lower casualty level for the Russian army, or even something between it and the Ukrainian estimates, would be well-poised to be relatively destabilizing for Putin. A related and also destabilizing factor in the war would be the number of wounded Russian troops — an exact figure isn’t immediately available, but anything reasonably above the death numbers could leave advancing Russians struggling to accommodate to the strain.
⚡️CNN: Stalled 64-km-long Russian convoy near Kyiv largely dispersed.
Satellite images taken on March 10 show the Russian military convoy northwest of Kyiv has “largely dispersed and redeployed,” Maxar Technologies says.
— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) March 11, 2022
Notably, the lengthy Russian military convoy that had stalled out near the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv has apparently mostly fallen apart at this point, with the forces that were a part of it reorganizing elsewhere. CNN notes that Russia is, however, “regrouping for a possible attack on Kyiv, say UK defense officials” — and besides that continuing threat to the country’s capital, serious threats against civilian populations elsewhere have also been continuing. Not that many people outside of Russia appear to believe the Putin regime’s propaganda about this sort of thing anyway, but the notion that Russian military personnel have been sticking to engagements with military factions in Ukraine is utterly false. In Mariupol alone, over 1,500 people have died in the span of the roughly couple of weeks that the war has been unfolding, according to local officials. Mariupol is where Russian forces bombed a maternity hospital this week — which the Russian Embassy in the U.K. lied on Twitter had been set up to look like civilians who supposedly weren’t there at the time had been affected. Twitter removed a post from that embassy lying that a victim was merely wearing make-up to suggest wounds.
These are the indicative estimates of Russia's losses as of March 11, according to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/9X4srzneRJ
— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) March 11, 2022
