By Galina Korol | 2024-06-13

KYIV -- The number of Russian soldiers wounded fighting in Ukraine is stressing hospitals in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine and in Russian border regions, according to eyewitnesses.

The overflow of Russian military casualties is affecting civilian medical care as well, according to the Ukrainian underground.

"The Belgorod civilian hospital is overflowing with soldiers who were wounded in Ukraine. That is causing 'concern' among the local population, which has now been demoted to second place," the National Resistance Center of Ukrainian said in a statement May 27.

Such information is impossible to confirm with official Russian sources. The Kremlin has not given a casualty figure for its forces since September 2022.

Meanwhile, doctors who are treating wounded Russians are operating under a gag order.

The National Resistance Center previously documented a similar situation, when local residents were denied care because of an influx of wounded Russian soldiers in occupied Luhansk province and then soon after that in the occupied part of Zaporizhzhia province.

For example, in January 2023, the occupation authorities shut down the children's outpatient unit in the Berdyansk municipal hospital and began treating Russian soldiers there instead of children, according to the National Resistance Center.

Opposition Russian media outlets are documenting similar situations in Russia too. The only hospital in the country that treats patients with cystic fibrosis is being converted into a hospital for soldiers wounded in Ukraine, according to Novaya Gazeta.

Soon enough authorities will reserve that hospital "completely" for injured troops, a source told the newspaper.

Russian soldiers feel unsafe

The picture for wounded Russian soldiers in the occupied territories of Ukraine is varied (and far from ideal), said Petro Andriushchenko, a politician and adviser to the lawful mayor of Mariupol.

Russian commanders are "reluctantly" allowing their men to be treated in Enerhodar, Zaporizhzhia province, he said.

The reluctance stems from their distrust of the Ukrainian doctors, whom the Russians prohibited from leaving the occupied zone, he added.

They are equally suspicious of medical care in Mariupol, he said.

The Russian troops themselves "don't trust our doctors and don't trust our patients," said Andriushchenko.

But Ukrainians are paying the price for the "collapse" of the healthcare system in occupied territory.

While Russian soldiers dread going under a Ukrainian surgeon's knife, Ukrainian patients find themselves pushed to the back of the line if "some Russian officer" has a "common cold," Andriushchenko said.

'Tremendous losses'

The patient load is soaring from what analysts describe as tremendous Russian losses.

"Russia's total losses during the war are already over 500,000," Mykhailo Prytula, a reservist colonel in the Security Service of Ukraine and a specialist on military counterintelligence, told Kontur.

"The Russian army ... hasn't seen losses like that since World War II," he said.

"In other words, these are tremendous losses. And now Russian propaganda is directed at suppressing any ... information about this," Prytula said.

Russian troop fatalities have been increasing, Alexander Kovalenko of Odesa, a military and political correspondent for the website InfoResist, pointed out.

"In May the Russian occupying troops lost a record number of [men]: 38,940," he told Kontur. "This is unquestionably a record number of losses for them since the full-scale invasion started in February 2022."

'Pulverized' in Kharkiv

The May record was driven by confrontations on two fronts -- Chasiv Yar and Pokrovsk, northwest of Avdiivka -- and in Kharkiv, said Kovalenko.

"[Kharkiv] pulverized the Russian grouping to such an extent that without achieving any substantive results from the incursion, the occupiers quickly paused operations to replenish their resources," he said.

Mykhailo Samus, a military analyst and deputy director of the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, agreed.

"This is definitely related primarily to Russian commanders' attempt to conduct a so-called operation in Kharkiv, and of course it was immediately visible as an operation to distract the Ukrainian reserves from Donbas," he told Kontur.

"But many assessments say that because the Russians didn't prepare adequately for this operation and therefore are suffering losses off the charts, they're putting in unprepared personnel ... while Ukraine's armed forces are destroying them."

Now that Ukraine has received permission to use Western-made weapons to hit Russian targets outside Ukraine, it should be able to annihilate the Russian invaders even more efficiently, Samus said.

"We are actually shifting to a normal approach where it's possible to destroy the enemy no matter where it is," he said.