The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said that Vladimir Putin’s claims about the September advance of Russian troops in Ukraine do not match the situation on the front line. According to the institute’s assessment, instead of the claimed 1,301 sq. km, Russian forces suffered net territorial losses of 80.81 sq. km over the month.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said that Vladimir Putin’s statements about the September advance of Russian troops in Ukraine are so far removed from reality that they “resemble hallucinations”, The Moscow Times writes. On October 1, Putin said at a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club that in September the Russian army had taken control of 1,301 sq. km of Ukrainian territory and that this was “2.5 times more than in previous months”.
According to ISW calculations, Russian troops suffered net territorial losses of 80.81 sq. km over the same month. If cases of Russian military penetration into territories they failed to bring under control are taken into account, Russia’s net losses in September would amount to 175.18 sq. km.
ISW believes that such statements create a fictional picture of what is happening on the battlefield and align with the Kremlin’s efforts to present the situation in a favorable light; the institute calls this part of cognitive warfare. At the same time, ISW does not claim to know whether Putin is aware that his figures do not match reality, and allows that he may be receiving distorted data from the Russian military command because of a culture of concealing failures.
In addition to assessing the troops’ advance, Putin said that Russia could capture the entire territory of Donetsk region sooner than Europe and Ukraine expect, and hinted that Kyiv should voluntarily give up Donbas. He also asked: “If the loss of these territories is inevitably going to happen, is there any point in clinging to them?”
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