The fighting in Ukraine has gone badly for the Russians. They hadn’t anticipated the resistance they would face from the Ukrainians, nor were they properly prepared for a long slog. But up until Thursday, the Kremlin had put on a brave face.
At a March 25 news briefing, Sergei Rudskoi, the first deputy chief of the Russian armed forces’ General Staff, said that 1,351 Russian troops had been killed and 3,835 wounded, according to Bloomberg. Rudskoi told reporters that the invasion was “successful.”
At the time, outsider estimates of Russian casualties ranged between 7,000 and 15,000.
Two weeks have passed since the Kremlin’s briefing. In an extraordinarily revealing interview with Sky News’ Mark Austin on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov tried valiantly to advance Russia’s version of the facts. But the unapologetic Austin wasn’t having it.
“You’ve lost thousands of troops. How many troops have you lost?” Austin demanded an answer.
In a rare moment of candor, Peskov admitted, “We have, we have significant losses of troops. And it’s, it’s, it’s a huge tragedy for us.”
Pressed for a number, Peskov demurred, saying that the figures had not been “double confirmed.”
“We have significant losses of troops”.
Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov says it’s a “huge tragedy to us” to have lost Russian troops during the war in Ukraine.https://t.co/X3flQUBL0r
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/PGHoFvdewb
— Sky News (@SkyNews) April 7, 2022
“Let’s be honest about this,” Austin told Peskov. “Ukraine posed no threat to Russia and NATO is a defensive organization that also poses no threat to Russia.”
Austin dug in. “You’ve retreated from the capitol, Zelenskyy is still in power, you’ve lost thousands of troops, you’ve lost six generals, hundreds of tanks and other equipment. It’s a humiliation really, isn’t it?”
…
Clearly on the defensive, unwilling to even look the camera, Peskov said, “That is a wrong understanding of what is going on.”
Peskov continued: “Now about two regions, Kyiv and Chernikov regions, so actually, the troops were really withdrawn from that region as an act of goodwill during the negotiations between delegations.”
As the press secretary tried to support this remarkable statement, Austin interrupts to say, “But it’s just not true, is it?
“If it was a measure of goodwill, why then did you continue to bombard Mariupol in the way that you have to devastate the city, if you really wanted to facilitate peace talks, you would have had a ceasefire. … So it’s not really true, is it?” Austin asks.
The men argue back and forth about the pounding of Mariupol and Austin asks if Russia is determined to take the city regardless of the cost of civilian lives. Peskov insists Russians are trying to liberate the city from eight years of Ukrainian attacks.
Asked during the interview to explain the images of civilian corpses lying in the streets of Bucha after the Russian retreat, many of which showed signs of torture, Peskov tells Austin that it was a “well-staged insinuation, nothing else.”
The photographs were a “bold fake.” he said. “We’re living in days of fakes and lies. … We deny the Russian military can have something in common with these atrocities and that dead bodies were shown on the streets of Bucha.”
Peskov told Sky News that, “Our military are doing their best to bring an end to that operation. … And we do hope that in coming days, in the foreseeable future, this operation will reach its goals or will finish it by the negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian delegation.”
The full interview can be viewed below.
A previous version of this article was published on The Western Journal.
Follow AFNN:
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA
Please follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter
Russians up to their old tricks. Lest we forget the Katyn Massacre:
“In 1940, Poland was caught between the military aggression of both Germany and the Soviet Union. The conflict climaxed that spring in Russia’s Katyn Forest when the Soviets murdered 22,000 of the best and brightest Poles of their generation en masse — then tried to blame the whole thing on the Nazis.” https://allthatsinteresting.com/katyn-massacre
Rooting for Zelensky and Ukraine over Putin and Russia is just as ignorant as rooting for Democrats over the GOP. They two are both the same; despotic lies spreading disinformation propaganda which suits their respective goals. Zelinsky was a known tyrant who squelched dissent before Russia attacked. He was engaged in bullying and murder of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the East for a long time before Russia attacked. He was criminally engaged with the Biden and Obama crime families during the latter’s administration. In short, taking sides is stupid. It is as likely as not that Zelinsky’s troops murdered Ukrainians for use in his propaganda against Russian, in order to keep the billions from our American tax dollars being funneled to him by the Biden crime family and the criminal DNCGOP.
Why don’t you write me an article with links to substantiate what you just wrote. We can always use more good, well-researched and documented content. managingeditor@afnn.us
Regards,
Mike