feeding their human meatgrinder in Ukraine. The article was copied and pasted, meaning all the charts, photos and graphics are not included.
To Putin and his cronies, ordinary Russians are nothing more than lambs to be slaughtered.
"JUNE IS turning into an ill-fated month for Russia’s armed forces. It started with a daring Ukrainian drone attack on airfields stretching from Siberia in the east to Murmansk in the north that Ukraine claims destroyed 41 large planes, or about one-third of Russia’s strategic-bomber fleet. (Analysts viewing satellite pictures of some of the airfields reckon the real number is about half that.) But another momentous statistic looms. Before the month ends, Russia will probably suffer its millionth casualty since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, based on current trends of about 1,000-1,200 soldiers killed or injured every day.
Russia’s staggering losses—which far exceed those it suffered in all its wars since the second world war—are a testament to Ukraine’s stubborn defence against a far stronger power. Yet Russia’s ability to shrug them off and to keep recruiting men to throw into meat-grinder attacks ought also to pose sobering questions for NATO’s European members. How can democracies that value the individual deter an adversary so unconcerned about the lives of its soldiers that it will sacrifice them, year after year, in a punishing war of attrition? Russia’s human-wave attacks are “largely useless, grinding stuff” says Sir Lawrence Freedman, a leading British strategist. “But there are no signs of exhaustion, they are just carrying on.”
The grim tally of losses comes from figures compiled by the Ukrainian general staff, leaving it open to question. But the number is not far out of line with estimates by Western intelligence services. It also roughly chimes with attempts by Russian independent media, such as Meduza and Mediazona, to count the bodies. By this time last year, Meduza reckoned that 106,000-140,000 Russian soldiers had died. Much of its analysis was based on inheritance records and obituaries on social media and in other outlets.
An estimate of excess mortality among Russian men based on probate records gave a figure of 165,000 by the end of 2024, with 90,000 having been added in the previous six months. Given the intensity of Russian operations for much of the past year, it would not be hard to reach a figure of about 250,000 killed by now. The ratio of severely wounded to killed is thought to be about four to one, reflecting both the severity of injuries inflicted in Ukraine and the low priority Russia gives to medical evacuation or the prompt field-hospital treatment that saves lives.
Another reason to have confidence in the casualty figures is that, to an unusual degree, they are attributable to those sustained by soldiers in action. In most wars a high proportion of deaths, even among combatants, result from disease, famine, accidents and the deliberate persecution of people in occupied territories, which inherently defy the best attempts at statistical accuracy.
A good example is the second civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, from 1998 to 2003. The most lethal conflict of this century, it is believed to have been responsible for 5.4m deaths, mostly from disease and hunger. In the second world war, out of the nearly 27m Soviet citizens who lost their lives, some 6.3m were killed in action or died of their wounds.
Ukraine does not publish its own combat losses in any detail. In February its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said that more than 46,000 had been killed and 380,000 wounded since Russia’s invasion. That is probably an underestimate. Last September a leaked Ukrainian intelligence report suggested that 70,000-80,000 of its soldiers had been killed in action. But the relatively smaller number of Ukrainian deaths compared with their enemy reflects various factors.
Apart from its ill-fated counter-offensive two years ago, Ukraine has been fighting a largely defensive war. Advances in drone technology have thus far favoured defence over offence. Racing drones packed with explosives, known as first-person view (FPV) drones, which are flown into tanks or soldiers, are playing a similar role to the machinegun in the first world war. That innovation made infantry attacks so costly that neither side could break the stalemate of trench warfare until the development of new tactics and the invention of tanks. FPV drones have now made tanks vulnerable, too. Russia has lost nearly 11,000 tanks and almost 23,000 armoured infantry vehicles since the war began. Now it depends largely on infantry attacks by small groups of men, sometimes on foot, sometimes on motorcycles.
Another reason why Russia’s casualties are much higher is that Ukraine has only about a quarter as many people to draw upon, so it cannot afford to waste its soldiers’ lives. Moreover, as a democracy, it must show concern for its troops’ welfare, in how it fights the war and in the way it cares for injured soldiers. Its ratio of wounded to killed is thought to be eight to one. Whenever Ukraine’s army has seemed indifferent to its troops, its struggle to mobilise more of them has intensified.
Even so, it is remarkable how Russia continues to absorb such staggering losses: it needs to recruit 30,000-40,000 soldiers a month to fill the lines. To put Russia’s losses into context, they are to date on a par with the entirety of Britain’s losses in the second world war of 264,000 killed. They are approaching America’s battlefield losses (292,000 killed) in the same conflict, when its population was similar in size to Russia’s today. The number of Russians killed in Ukraine is probably more than four times the 47,000 combat losses that America suffered in the eight years of its direct involvement in the Vietnam war, a toll that led to mass protests. Russia’s losses also dwarf the roughly 68,000 casualties (both killed and wounded) suffered by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Whereas Ukraine is fighting a war of national survival, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has choices. Yet he appears to be under little domestic pressure to call it a day. Having lost much of the mainly professional army that set out to defeat Ukraine over three years ago, he has come up with an almost entirely novel way of replenishing manpower at the front without risking social destabilisation.
It combines the ideological militarisation of society, by persuading most Russians that they are in a war against an imperialistic NATO and that there is glory in death, with lavish contracts for those willing to sign up. “Putin believes that the Afghan war is one of the main reasons the Soviet Union collapsed,” says Aleksandr Golts of the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies. “He has come up with a revolution in Russian military thinking. I call it ‘market mobilisation’, others have called it ‘deathonomics’.”
The sums being paid to soldiers, the majority of whom come from poorer provincial towns and are in their 30s and 40s, are genuinely life-changing for many families. By the end of last year, according to Elena Racheva, a Russian former journalist now researching at Oxford University, the signing-on bonus had reached 1.19m roubles ($15,000), whereas the average annual pay for a contract soldier was between 3.5m and 5.2m roubles, or up to five times the average salary. If a contract soldier is killed, his family will receive between 11m and 19m roubles.
According to a survey last October by the Levada Centre, an independent Russian polling organisation, 40% of Russians would approve of a family member or close friend signing up. Another journalist, Olesya Gerasimenko, reporting last summer from a recruiting centre in Moscow, found that many middle-aged fathers were accompanied by their wives and children when they came to sign up, determined to improve their family’s fortunes. Mr Golts says the impact can be seen in small towns across Russia, where recruitment has been most brisk. New houses are being built, smarter cars are turning up on the streets, and nail bars and gyms are opening.
For now, Ms Racheva reckons, Russian society accepts that the system is an alternative to fully enforced mobilisation. Some 88% approve of contract soldiers receiving money and benefits for going to war “instead of us”. For the families of the dead and injured, huge payouts “alleviate…their grief, such as feelings of injustice…and they allow society to avoid moral responsibility for the casualties and injuries they endure,” wrote Ms Racheva. In other words, the contract is not just between the soldier and the state, but also wider society. The question nobody can answer is how long that contract will hold".