Follow up by Alexander Mercouris to previous article posted on Russia Insider with comments by The Saker.

War in the Ukraine Feb. 04.2015

1. My key point is that it is not minor tactical movements that are determining the course of this war. It is the level of casualties the Ukrainian military is suffering. They were hammered in the summer and they are being hammered again now.

In my pieces for Russia Insider I quoted the number of Ukrainian military deaths on the basis of official Ukrainian documents obtained by a hacking group as 1,100 for a two week period that covered the battle for Donetsk airport. The NAF today puts the total number of Ukrainian military deaths presumably since the resumption of the fighting at 1,500. Colonel Cassad yesterday was saying that the number could be over 1,800.

The figures of 1,500 and 1,800 cover a longer period than the 1,100 in the hacked Ukrainian documents. The fact that they are all of the same order of magnitude however suggests that all these figures are reliable. If so then that that shows that my guess that the Ukrainian army is suffering deaths at a rate of several hundred a week is probably correct.


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