DISINFO: Ukraine lost 90,000 men since the start of counteroffensive
SUMMARY
Since the start of its counteroffensive in the south and east of Ukraine in early June 2023, the country's Armed Forces have lost at least 90,000 personnel, 557 tanks, and 1,900 armoured vehicles.
RESPONSE
The claim is part of an ongoing pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign concerning Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It attempts to push forward a recurring disinformation narrative portraying Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive as a costly failure not providing any meaningful results.
Given that neither Ukraine, nor Russia, reveals its own war casualties, it is difficult to accurately gauge the number of personnel losses sustained by either side. However, US government sources were cited by The New York Times as saying that some 70,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed in 16 months of fighting between February 2022 and August 2023, an estimate based on "satellite imagery, communication intercepts, social media and news media dispatches from reporters in the country, as well as official reporting from both governments." This makes the claim of 90,000 Ukrainian Army losses over a four-month period extremely unlikely.
Evidence of military hardware losses is more readily available. According to a Dutch-based war tracking project, Oryx Spioenkop, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have lost a confirmed total of 660 tanks since 24 February 2022, as well as a combined total of 2,000 vehicles during the same 18-month period, including armoured personnel carriers, armoured fighting vehicles, infantry mobility vehicles, infantry fighting vehicles, and mine-resistant ambush-protected trucks. Again, this all but invalidates the figures cited by Russia's Foreign Ministry.
See here and here for debunked claims casting the Ukrainian counteroffensive as a fiasco, and here for another instance of the Russian Foreign Ministry citing logically impossible numbers of Ukrainian equipment losses.