Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he plans to increase his armed forces’ lethality as part of a strategy to disarm Moscow and turn a deadlocked negotiating table.“The task of Ukrainian units is to ensure a level of destruction of the occupier at which Russian losses exceed the number of reinforcements they can send to their forces each month,” he told military personnel on Monday.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list“We are talking about 50,000 Russian losses per month, this is the optimal level,” he said.Video analysis, Zelenskyy recently said, showed 35,000 confirmed kills in December 2025, up from 30,000 in November and 26,000 in October. But on Monday, he clarified that the 35,000 were “killed and badly wounded occupiers”, who would not be returning to the battlefield.His commander in chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, conservatively estimated “more than 33,000” confirmed kills in December.Ukraine believes it has killed or maimed 1.2 million Russians since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.The Center for Strategic and International Studies recently estimated that Russia had suffered 1.2mn casualties, including at least 325,000 deaths, and Ukraine up to 600,000 casualties, with as many as 140,000 deaths.Al Jazeera cannot confirm casualty estimates from either side. The war is currently stalemated, with Russia struggling to make meaningful territorial gains.Russia held just more than a quarter of Ukraine a month into its full-scale war, in March 2022, according to g …
