Russia-Ukraine war: Zelenskyy claims over 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed during conflict

Kiev (Ukraine), April 16: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that more than 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and about 10,000 were injured in the course of Russia's special military operation in Ukraine. "As to our military, out of the numbers we have, we think that we have lost 2,500 to 3,000... We have about 10,000 injured. It is hard to say how many will survive," Zelenskyy said. The Ukrainian President, however, found it difficult to name the number of civilian casualties due to a lack of information from the "blocked" territories in the south and east of Ukraine. On March 12, Zelesnkyy stated that over 1,300 Ukrainian troops had been killed. Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to Ukraine's president's office, stated at the end of March that Kiev is no longer giving information about army losses because it is a military secret. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, around 14,000 Ukrainian troops were killed and 16,000 were injured during the operation. Also Read | IAF shelves plan to buy 48 Russian Mi-17 V5s to boost ‘Make in India’ According to Ukrainian officials, Russian forces withdrawing from the Kiev have region left behind the bodies of more than 900 slaughtered Ukraine civilians. On Friday, the police stated that the vast majority of the victims in the area surrounding the capital were “simply executed” by gunfire. Meanwhile, the grim body count continued to mount as corpses were uncovered under rubble and in mass graves. As per Andriy Nebytov, the head of the capital’s regional police force, around 95 percent of bodies left stranded in the region had been shot, and civilians who had expressed strong pro-Ukrainian views had been hunted down and killed. Zelenskyy, on the other hand, has accused Russian troops in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of doing the same. Also Read | Covid-19: India logs 975 new cases, 4 deaths in 24 hours -PTC News