Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said up to 3,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed since in seven weeks of war with Russia and about 10,000 have been injured.
He also told CNN on Friday that 19,000 to 20,000 Russian soldiers had been killed in the war, now in its eighth week.
Civilian casualties are more difficult to quantify, he said.
“It is very difficult to talk about civilians, since south of our country, where the towns and cities are blocked — Kherson, Berdyansk, Mariupol further east, and the area to the east where Volnovakha is — we just don’t know how many people have died in that area that is blocked,” Zelensky said.
At a Moscow briefing on Friday, Russian senior military officials updated its losses in Ukraine to 1,351 soldiers, adding that 3,825 soldiers had been wounded.
One also must be careful about numbers, as both Russian and Ukrainian sources will either under-report or over-report losses for propaganda purposes.
NATO estimated that 7,000 to 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine, where fierce resistance from the country’s defenders has denied Moscow the lightning victory it sought.
A senior NATO military official said the alliance’s estimate was based on information from Ukrainian authorities, what Russia has released — intentionally or not — and intelligence gathered from open sources. The official spoke on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by NATO.