What a Blessing this war has been ... for the USA.
“Russia’s latest big Ukraine offensive gains next to nothing, again”
“Hundreds of thousands of Vladimir Putin’s troops are losing their lives for barely any land”
“In May, Russia launched an enormous offensive aimed at breaking Ukrainian lines. Its furious attacks in the following months set the entire front line ablaze.
However, our calculations suggest it has seized just 0.4% of Ukrainian land
Russian forces have achieved no major objectives, with key cities such as Pokrovsk holding the invaders at bay…
…despite relentless attacks
The offensive has come at an enormous cost: our meta-estimate suggests over 100,000 Russian soldiers have died in the war this year.”
“WAS IT THE Tomahawks? The deadly cruise missiles are probably one reason Vladimir Putin spoke to Donald Trump on October 16th and agreed to meet him in Budapest in the coming weeks to talk about a ceasefire in Ukraine. Mr Trump claims to have told the Russian leader during their call: “Would you mind if I gave a couple of thousand Tomahawks to your opposition?” But the next day, meeting the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, he seemed to backpedal.
Regardless of whether and when America decides to supply Ukraine with the powerful missiles, Mr Putin has deeper reasons to worry. According to an analysis by The Economist, it is paying a huge cost in return for minimal gains on the battlefield.
Russia’s summer offensive is winding down. Many in the West focus on the grinding progress its troops have made, and the shortage of Ukrainian manpower it has exposed. But that is to look down the telescope from the wrong end. More striking is how little territory Russia has taken in its third and largest offensive; and the terrible cost it has paid in men and materiel. Unless something dramatic changes, Vladimir Putin will be unable to win the war on the battlefield. The fact that he nevertheless continues to try regardless suggests that he is out of ideas.
Exactly how poorly Russian forces have fared is impossible to tell. But data from satellites and shifts in areas of control suggest when the fighting is intensifying, and that permits a rough guess. This lines up well with more than 200 credible estimates of casualties from Western governments and independent researchers. Combining these data allows The Economist to estimate Russian losses and track them over time.
Our meta-estimate suggests that, from the beginning of the full-scale invasion to January of this year, Russian casualties amounted to 640,000–877,000 soldiers, of whom 137,000–228,000 have died. By October 13th, those totals had risen by almost 60%, to 984,000–1,438,000 casualties, including 190,000–480,000 dead.
Russia’s losses have not won a commensurate gain in territory. Since the battle lines stabilised after Ukraine’s first counteroffensive ended in October 2022, they have barely moved. No large city has changed hands. At the pace of the past 30 days, seizing what remains of the four regions Mr Putin already claims—Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia—would take until June 2030. (For Russia to occupy all of Ukraine would require a further 103 years.)
Moreover, a sudden collapse in Ukraine’s defensive lines is unlikely given how the two armies are fighting the war. Constant drone surveillance, coupled with long-range precision weaponry, has made massing forces near the front suicidal. Incremental gains remain possible—though only at enormous cost—by sending small groups of men into the “kill zone” to stake out forward positions. It is hard to breach Ukrainian lines. Should a breach happen, the advance of massed forces and equipment needed to exploit it is extremely difficult.
Perhaps that is why this summer’s fighting appears to have been much less deadly for Ukraine than for Russia. There is too little data for us to generate a meta-estimate of the cost to Ukraine. However, UALosses, a website, has catalogued 77,403 deaths among Ukrainian soldiers since the full-scale invasion began (it reckons a further 77,842 are missing in action). By date of death, there has been a marked downward trend since last autumn, with 8,668 fatalities recorded this year. Crucially, that is a lower bound, and although independent investigations have confirmed the fate of soldiers in the list, no one knows how many are missing from that count. Moreover, recent deaths are less likely to be in the database, as recording them takes time (some will never be included). But even if the true number is twice the tally, the figures would imply a ratio this year of roughly five Russian soldiers killed for every Ukrainian.
At such rates, manpower may soon become a more serious constraint for Russia than for Ukraine. When the offensive began, Russians were lured with generous sign-on bonuses, and Mr Putin’s recruitment drive outpaced Ukraine’s by 10,000-15,000 per month. But Russia’s heavy casualties this summer probably nullified that advantage.
Only some of Mr Putin’s wounded will ever return to the front lines—perhaps 40%, according to one 2024 estimate by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank. And in the long term, the supply of Russian men to be sacrificed on the fields of eastern Ukraine is limited by the number reaching fighting age inside Russia. About 800,000 boys turned 18 there last year. Insatiable demand meeting limited supply may mean that even larger bonuses will be needed to get people to join up. Failing that, Mr Putin could resort to conscription—though that would be unpopular.
Our rough calculations suggest that the soldiers killed in the war amount to 0.5%-1.2% of Russia’s pre-war cohort of men under the age of 60, compared to 0.6%-1.3% for Ukraine, taking UAlosses’ record of dead, and dead plus missing, as a starting guess.
Equipment is another issue. Oryx, a Dutch open-source intelligence site, has confirmed the loss of 12,541 Russian tanks and armoured fighting vehicles; 2,674 artillery and missile systems; 166 aircraft; and 164 helicopters. All these numbers are lower bounds. Ukraine’s daring strike on Russian airfields and other targets in June, using drones hidden in lorries, wrecked perhaps one sixth of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. Much of this can be replaced—but not cheaply, and rarely quickly.
And after the pause in American assistance in late 2023 and early 2024—when a lack of, among other things, artillery shells saw many soldiers killed—Ukraine now appears much better supported by its allies. Aid cannot bring back the dead. But, at current trends, it could keep the arithmetic of attrition in Ukraine’s favour.
The war is changing in other ways, too. For years, Ukraine’s economy has been battered by Russian missiles. It is still suffering much more than Russia is. But it is now at least hitting back at some scale, in part via relatively cheap, domestically produced missiles and drones. If the front lines remain much as they are, and the war morphs into one of installations rather than territory, it is no longer so obvious that Russia has the upper hand. Although its economy is much larger than Ukraine’s, it is tiny compared with that of Ukraine’s allies; and although they face the odd act of sabotage, they are not being battered by Russian bombs. Indeed, several of them have promised to bump their defence spending by sums exceeding Ukraine’s annual budget.
Before the recent strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, surveys—always to be taken with a grain of salt in Russia—suggested its people were bullish about the economy. Few signs point to an imminent collapse. If Western backing for Ukraine holds, the war may well grind on at enormous cost, with Russia gaining ground only slowly.”