Volodymyr Zelensky made the remark in his regular nightly address to the nation on Monday, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
‘Occupiers die by the hundreds every day’
The Ukrainian president said: “The Donetsk region remains the epicentre of the greatest madness of the occupiers - they die by the hundreds every day.”
He added: “The ground in front of the Ukrainian positions is literally littered with the bodies of the occupiers…”
Russia’s top military brass slammed for huge losses, poor command in Donetsk region
Meanwhile, the Institute for the Study of War reported on Monday evening that Russian bloggers had issued scathing criticism of “reported extensive losses and poor command within Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade of the Pacific Fleet.”
According to the US think tank, Russian bloggers published and circulated a letter claiming that “Russian military leadership ‘threw’ the brigade into an ‘incomprehensible offensive’ near Pavlivka, Donetsk Oblast, where it suffered losses amounting to over 300 killed, wounded, and missing and lost half of its equipment, all within four days.”
Moreover, the US experts said the letter “explicitly blamed Eastern Military District Commander Lieutenant General Rustam Muradov, 155th Naval Infantry Brigade Commander Colonel Zurab Akhmedov, and Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov for the brigade’s losses and called on Primorsky Krai Governor Oleg Kozhemyako to conduct an independent review of the actions of the officers involved in planning and conducting the recent Russian offensive push in western Donetsk Oblast.”
The Russian Ministry of Defence “issued a rare response on November 7 to the outcry and claimed that less than one percent of the brigade was killed and less than seven percent was wounded within the past 10 days, and that Ukrainian forces suffered high losses instead,” the Washington-based think tank said in its latest report on the war in Ukraine.
It added that “Kozhemyako also sought to address the outcry and claimed that the brigade’s losses are greatly exaggerated and (without providing evidence) speculated that the letter was a product of Ukrainian special services.”
The controversy came as Russian troops continued offensive operations around Bakhmut, in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area, and in the Donetsk region, the ISW reported on Monday night.
Tuesday is day 258 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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Source: PAP, president.gov.ua, understandingwar.org