Russian forces suffered more than 2,000 casualties in a single day for the first time, according to the Ukrainian army.

On Friday, the kyiv General Staff announced that 2,030 Russian soldiers had been lost over the past 24 hours. It was not clear whether they were killed, captured or missing.

This figure exceeds the previous record of 1,950 victims, announced by Ukraine. Russia suffered on November 12.

In the same report, the General Staff indicates that Russia lost 33 combat vehicles transporting troops, 34 artillery pieces, 89 tactical drones and an anti-aircraft system the day before.

Despite heavy losses, Russia was move at your fastest pace since the early days of the 2022 invasion, when Moscow’s forces swept across large swathes of Ukraine before being pushed back into eastern and southern Russian territory.

Earlier this week, Agentstvo, a Russian news agency, estimated that Kremlin forces had captured 91 square miles in the week before its report, and 232 square miles total in November.

Ukrainian commanders put the total number of Russian casualties since the invasion began at 738,660, of which the Defense Ministry estimates 500,000 were wounded. These figures could not be independently verified, as battlefield losses are notoriously difficult to estimate and neither Ukraine nor Russia publishes casualty data.

In July, The Economist estimated that between 106,000 and 140,000 Russians had been killed in the war so far, while Ukraine’s death toll was between 60,000 and 100,000.

He said he calculated Ukraine’s losses using data from leaked or published intelligence reports, agencies and researchers.

High casualties on both sides have been attributed to both armies’ reliance on Soviet-style doctrine that emphasizes massive firepower and overwhelming numbers.

A joint project by the BBC and Mediazona, an independent Russian media outlet, said on Friday it had confirmed 80,973 Russian soldiers killed since the start of the large-scale invasion.

The project uses open source data such as funeral announcements, local government publications and social media posts to track the names of the Russian dead. Many were killed within weeks of arriving at the front, the BBC said.

A 32-year-old man from the central Russian city of Zarinsk was killed five days after arriving in Ukraine, according to a social media post detailing his funeral.

The BBC said that the share convicts the percentage of total Russian deaths was decreasing. In November last year, they accounted for 26 percent of all Russian losses, but now they account for 18 percent.

The channel stressed that convict units were still operating on the front lines and detailed the case of a 45-year-old twice-convicted murderer who could neither read nor write.

He signed a contract with the army in June and died from shrapnel two months later in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. His obituary said: “His destiny was not easy, but he fulfilled his duty to the homeland. »

Russia offered prisoners freedom if they fought for a year in Ukraine. However, it was reported in February that the agreement had changed and the convicts were to fight until the end of the war.

On Friday, Ukraine said Russia had returned more than 500 bodies of Ukrainian soldiers killed in combat. “Thanks to repatriation activities, the bodies of 502 fallen defenders were returned to the territory controlled by the Ukrainian government,” the kyiv coordination headquarters for the treatment of prisoners of war said on social media.

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