The annual celebrations of Russia’s Airborne Forces (VDV) Day on 2 August 2023 have been overshadowed by an apparently unsanctioned disclosure of the scope of the casualties the elite force has suffered in Ukraine.
In a recorded address for VDV Day, the VDV’s Commander-in-Chief General Colonel Mikhail Teplinsky said that 8500 paratroopers had been wounded and later returned to duty or had refused to leave the front line at all. The video was quickly deleted from the Russian MoD’s official channels. He did not comment on how many troops had been killed or were too seriously wounded to return to duty.
However, extrapolating Teplinksy’s figures endorses the assessment that at least 50 per cent of the 30,000 paratroopers who deployed to Ukraine in 2022 have been killed or wounded.
