Russian troops fired on a group of civilians being evacuated from a village near Kyiv on Friday, killing seven people, including a child, Ukraine’s military intelligence service said Saturday.

“During an evacuation attempt from the town of Peremoga (…), in an agreed ‘green’ corridor, the occupants opened fire on a group of civilians, made up exclusively of women and children. The result of this brutal act was seven dead. One of them is a child,” Ukrainian Intelligence said on Facebook.

There are more than a thousand dead soldiers

On the other hand, about 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers have died since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday during a press conference in Kyiv.

“We have about 1,300 deceased soldiers,” declared the Ukrainian president, without giving more details about this balance, the first given by the Ukrainian authorities since the beginning of the conflict on February 24.

Zelensky also said that the Russian army had lost “around 12,000 men”, in a “ratio of one to ten, which, however, does not make me happy”, he declared.

On March 2, the Russian army (which mobilized some 150,000 soldiers) claimed to have lost 500 soldiers, a figure that has not been updated since then.

With heavy fighting in many cities across the country, most notably the siege of the Sea of Azov port city of Mariupol and near Kyiv, the Pentagon estimated on March 8 that Russian losses ranged from 2,000 to 4,000 troops.