November was the most costly month of the war for Russia in terms of average daily dead and injured: UK intel

Russian servicemen jump off a T-90M Proryv tank during combat training in an undisclosed location in Ukraine

November saw Russia suffer a record daily average for the number of soldiers injured or killed since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, according to UK intelligence.

The UK Ministry of Defence said in an intelligence update on Thursday morning that “the average daily Russian casualties (killed and wounded) in the Russia-Ukraine conflict reached a new monthly war high during November 2024.”

Citing the Ukrainian General Staff, it said that Russia suffered 45,680 casualties in November, up from 41,980 in October, with a daily average of 1,523.

It was the third month in a row that Russian forces suffered record-breaking daily average losses, it said, and the fifth straight month that it had seen its total losses rise.

The increased casualty figures, the UK MOD said, are “likely reflective of the higher tempo of Russian operations and offensives.”

According to the MOD, Russia is trying to increase pressure on Ukraine’s lines as it tries to push it back on several fronts, notably in Kupiansk, Toretsk, Pokrovsk, and Velyka Novosilka, as well as in the Russian region of Kursk, which Ukraine partially occupied in August.

The losses likely made it the most costly month of the war for Russia in terms of personnel, it said.

The MOD added that Russia’s casualties “will likely continue to average above 1,000 a day in December 2024 despite the onset of winter,” with continued attacks on multiple fronts.

Russia has been relentlessly trying to push forward on multiple fronts in Ukraine over the past few months, slowly gaining territory, but in a way that warfare experts say is not proportionate to its losses.

Washington DC-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War said in an update on Tuesday that Russia suffered significant losses of people and armored vehicles last month as it “attempted to maintain intensified offensive operations in eastern Ukraine.”

It also pointed to Russia’s losses in September and October and said the country “cannot sustain such significant loss rates indefinitely in return for gradual, creeping battlefield gains.”

George Barros, a Russia analyst at the ISW, told B-17 in September that Russia’s death toll was rising because it had been running a high tempo of operations without really taking a substantial pause since October 2023.

“What we have seen here is a really active Russian military, which has been just sort of sprinting for a very long time and continuing to sprint,” he said.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said in late October that over 600,000 Russian troops had been killed or wounded in the conflict.

Russia doesn’t release its own figures.

Rajan Menon, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, told B-17 that “the kind of fight the Russians have been doing is to say: ‘To hell with losses, we are just going to push forward wave after wave after wave.'”

Russia’s plan for victory in Ukraine, according to many warfare experts, has been to keep pushing forward with the expectation that Western support for Ukraine will fade and that Ukraine’s military will become increasingly fatigued.

Such a scenario could result in Ukraine not having the weaponry it needs to fight, or for it to be pushed into a peace deal that would involve it giving territory and other concessions to Russia.