September bloodiest month for Russian troops: US officials

September was the bloodiest month of the war for Russian forces in Ukraine, US officials said, with the costly offensive in the east bringing the number of Russia's dead and wounded to more than 600,000 troops since the war began in early 2022.

US officials attribute the high number of Russian casualties to what they describe as a grinding war of attrition, with each side trying to exhaust the other by inflicting maximum losses, hoping to break the enemy's capacity and will to continue.

Russian troops have made steady but incremental gains in recent months in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, US officials said.

It is a style of warfare that Russians have likened to being put into a meat grinder, with commanding officers seemingly willing to send thousands of soldiers to die.

"It's kind of the Russian way of war, in that they continue to throw mass into the problem," a senior US military official said this week, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments, in announcing the Pentagon's latest Russian casualty estimate. "And I think we'll continue to see high losses on the Ukrainian side."