Putin Lost Nearly 90 Percent of the Standing Ground Forces He Had Prior to Ukraine Invasion, U.S. Reveals in Stunning Report

CNN national security correspondent Katie Bo Lillis reported Tuesday on a newly declassified U.S. intelligence report with stunning new details about Russia’s losses in Ukraine.

“Some pretty staggering numbers here for us. This intelligence assessment provided to Congress yesterday reports, and I’m going to give you some of these figures, reports that of the 360,000 troops that Russia sent into Ukraine initially and then made up their entire standing ground force prior to the invasion. Of those 315,000 have been lost on the battlefield,” Bo Lillis began, adding:

That’s an 87% loss of Russia’s standing ground forces before the invasion. Now, look, important to understand that Russia has been able to defray these losses. They have been able to lean on, for example, the Wagner Group with some of their convict fighters. They have also launched a number of constrictions and mobilizations to try to sort of throw more bodies at this fight. So they have been able to defray some of these losses. Still, this assessment warning and again, I’m going to quote from this directly, ‘This assessment warning that the war has sharply set back 15 years of Russian effort to modernize its ground force.”

So huge and important figures. But again, I think very important to be reading this in the context of what Manu [Raju] has just been telling us, of course, which is that the real peril for Ukraine here is that U.S. funding may run out. And so I think you’re going to hear these sort of staggering numbers, these Russian losses really talked about as evidence that, look, the Ukrainians are capable of exacting costs against the Russian military if they are provided with the military support to get it done.

Bo Lillis was then asked what Putin’s strategy might be going forward and if he’s hoping to “wait this out and sort of get through the winter?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly that’s exactly right,” Bo Lillis replied, adding:

I think one of the other things that you are seeing, the intelligence community here in the United States watch very carefully is sort of the way Vladimir Putin is thinking about, you know, the next 12 months or the next two years. And right now, the belief is that Putin believes that he can essentially outwait the West, that he’s going to be able to sort of take advantage of this kind of moment in which there are some real divisions in the domestic politics in the United States.

And sort of public opinion seems to be kind of in flux about supporting Ukraine. Right. And so I think for for Putin, there’s a real kind of benefit to let’s just sit back, let’s wait, let’s see if the United States will get tired of this.

Watch the full clip above via CNN.