FALSE: Every month, about 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers are killed or seriously wounded — Ukrainian doctors

There is news circulating online from ABC News, supposedly citing doctors, stating that about 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers are killed or seriously wounded every month.

However, this is not true. Doctors did not mention the figure of 30,000 deaths and injuries per month. This information was voiced by Yurii Lutsenko. According to estimates by researchers from the “Book of Memory of the Fallen for Ukraine,” Ukraine’s losses amount to over 30,000 deaths and about 100,000 wounded in 2022-2023.

On January 9, 2024, ABC News published an article titled “Hospital sees 30% rise in seriously wounded Ukrainian soldiers, says doctor“. In it, the chief physician of the Mechnykov Regional Hospital in Dnipropetrovsk Region, Serhii Ryzhenko, reports that over the past few weeks, they have seen a 30% increase in severely wounded patients. He states that they receive between 40 to 100 seriously wounded individuals daily, and his team performs between 50 to 100 surgical operations per day.

At the same time, doctors do not mention 30,000 wounded and deceased Ukrainian soldiers per month. ABC News cited this figure from the words of former Prosecutor General Yurii Lutsenko, spoken on January 3, 2024. Previously, he derived the figure of 30,000 by dividing the military command’s announced need for 500,000 mobilized individuals per month during the war. We do not know exactly which period he refers to for this calculation: from February 24, 2022, or the requirement for 2024. In the first scenario, the losses amount to about 22,700 per month (if divided by 22 months), and in the second scenario — 41,600 (divided by 12 months). In any case, such a method of calculation is incorrect because it does not consider the need for rotation and demobilization — part of the replenishment is required to replace other units for recovery and to enable the demobilization of soldiers serving since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

From publicly available data, the authors of the “Book of Memory of the Fallen for Ukraine” have determined that there were 24,500 deceased soldiers, whose names are known, 15,000 missing persons, and 3,400 prisoners of war during the period from February 24, 2022, to November 14, 2023. According to the researchers’ estimates, the number of deceased individuals constitutes at least 70% of the total number of combat and non-combat deaths from the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Security Service of Ukraine, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Therefore, the actual number of deceased individuals may exceed 30,000. The number of wounded is approximately 90,000 to 100,000 individuals, but the vast majority of soldiers with injuries or concussions continue their service or will later return to their comrades after treatment.