Russia rejects report saying combined war casualties to hit 2m

Kyiv: The Kremlin on Wednesday dismissed a report by a Washington based think-tank that Russia had suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties since it began its war in Ukraine in Feb 2022, saying that such reports should not be seen as reliable.The report warned that the number of soldiers killed, injured or missing on both sides of Russia’s war on Ukraine could hit 2 million by the spring, with Russia suffering the largest number of troop deaths recorded for any major power in any war since World War II. The report from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies came less than a month before the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s onslaught on Ukraine.Officials said Wednesday that two people were killed on the outskirts of Kyiv after Russian strikes hit an apartment block, and at least nine people were injured in separate attacks in the Ukrainian cities of Odesa and Kryvyi Rih and the front-line Zaporizhzhia region.