This information was disseminated by the Russian media. Allegedly, this was said by the First Deputy Commander of the Special Operations Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (2016-2019) Serhii Kryvonos. Russian propagandists manipulated the words of Kryvonos - the phrase was taken out of context.

As fact-checkers from StopFake noted, Serhii Kryvonos in an interview for the Ukrainian Media Network YouTube channel spoke about a hundred thousand Ukrainians killed by Russia since the beginning of Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine. “Only in Mariupol alone, 87,000 people died, and this, I think, is not the final figure. Who will answer their relatives and friends if they are still alive?”, he said.

Serhii Kryvonos did not make statements that these were supposedly losses of the Ukrainian army.

Due to the fact that the war continues and part of the territory of Ukraine is temporarily occupied by the Russians, it is impossible to calculate the exact number of civilians who died. Experts from the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) believe that the Russians in all the occupied Ukrainian territories are deliberately massacring Ukrainians and mocking them. This is confirmed by the mass graves and mass graves in the cities of Izium, Bucha, and Irpin, liberated by the Ukrainian military.

The Russians are deliberately spreading theses about the heavy losses of the Ukrainian military in order to show the supposedly low combat capability of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to raise doubts among Ukraine's Western partners in military assistance and to divert attention from their own defeats.