Ukraine claims record daily Russian casualties as Moscow stays defiant at Abu Dhabi talks

Ukraine's military said it had caused more than 26,000 Russian casualties — meaning those killed and seriously wounded — in the first 10 days of November, suggesting this month's figure could mark a new record topping October's 54,400.

On November 9, Ukraine also claimed a new daily record of 2,980 Russian soldiers killed or wounded. That marked the fourth reported daily record this year.

Al Jazeera cannot independently verify casualty claims by either side.

This cluster of new casualty records in the autumn, accompanied by a lack of any significant territorial gains by Russia, suggested that Moscow was not coming any closer to its goal of seizing the last remaining quarter of Ukraine's eastern Donbas region this year.

A group of pro-Ukrainian hackers from Belarus said they had accessed records of the Russian state statistical service, Rosstat, and discovered an official tally of 450,000 Russian fatalities for the entire full-scale invasion, since 2022.

Independent assessments indicate that Russia has seized a net 117sq km (45sq miles) this year, a poor showing for its pains.

Yet Russia was as defiant as ever at peace talks in Abu Dhabi on November 10-11, as Ukraine, Russia and the United States engaged in their first peace talks since February this week.

Presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, who headed the Russian delegation, told Vesti television after the talks concluded that he would be satisfied “only when we win and sign a peace agreement on our terms.”

Russia has demanded territory Ukraine is not willing to surrender, and said NATO needs to pull out of all the former Soviet bloc countries which joined it since 1997.

Medinsky called for “a new, comprehensive, and just security system in Europe,” because the one put in place after World War II “is functioning very poorly, and, in fact, the entire system is sick. In Ukraine, a festering wound has simply burst.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saw it differently. “When the Russians now talk about a security architecture for themselves … What they really want is to freely interfere in the affairs of other countries, and to use force whenever they want, and to make sure that no one can support liberty inside Russia,” he told the Danish parliament, the Folketing, on the day the talks concluded.

Although US negotiators agreed to table the subject of a European security architecture at Abu Dhabi, the three European powers present – Germany, France and the United Kingdom – did not, and they were excluded from the proceedings. “We did not communicate with them. We don't really understand what their status is here,” Medinsky said.

Europe agrees with Ukraine that such a discussion puts the cart before the horse. “The idea of discussing European-Russian security infrastructure is a complex and potentially dangerous one,” Zelenskyy said on the eve of the talks. “First, we must discuss how to end Russia's war against Ukraine. Second, what the security infrastructure will be for Ukraine.”

Ukraine has asked for an ironclad guarantee of military intervention if it is attacked again, as offered in NATO's Article 5. Instead, Zelenskyy said, the Trump administration offered “something similar to NATO.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin received the US negotiating team in Saint Petersburg after talks in Abu Dhabi, and repeated the Russian position that the presence of European peacekeepers in a post-war Ukraine would also be “absolutely unacceptable.”

Zelenskyy attributed Russia's absolutism to its inaccurate understanding of realities on the ground. “Putin lives in a different reality,” he told journalists in Copenhagen on November 11. “When I received the second report from our negotiating group after the meetings in Abu Dhabi, they told me that the Russians believe and claim that they have already occupied half of the [part of the] Donbas region which is actually under our control. These were military officers, Russian intelligence.”