Russia is about to suffer its millionth casualty. For Putin, that's a price worth paying

Telegraph

2 days ago

Almost two centuries ago, the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz cautioned against the temptation to 'shut one's eyes to what war really is from sheer distress at its brutality.'
One milestone betrays the sheer scale of the butchery in Ukraine: by the end of June, Russian forces will, in all probability, have suffered their millionth casualty in this war.
When Vladimir Putin sent some 200,000 Russian soldiers into Ukraine in February 2022, he expected to seize Kyiv by the third day of a lightning offensive. Today, his troops remain hundreds of miles from the capital, while the number of Russian dead and wounded has grown to nearly five times the size of that initial invasion force.
'Overall, a high of 250,000 Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine, with over 950,000 total Russian casualties,' notes a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an American think tank based in Washington, DC.
Those numbers conjure an image of Putin casting the entirety of his first invading army into a furnace, then gathering another and doing the same – over and over again.
On an average day in April, about 1,200 Russians were killed or wounded on Ukraine's battlefields, where killer drones and heavy artillery have together created the most lethal expanse of territory on Earth.
If this casualty rate is sustained, the CSIS study concludes, 'Russia will likely hit the 1 million casualty mark in the summer of 2025.'
By way of comparison, the combined death toll in every Soviet or Russian conflict since 1945 – from the invasion of Hungary in 1956 to the Second Chechen war in 1999, including the Afghanistan campaign of 1979-89 – came to less than 50,000. Putin has sacrificed about five times that number in the space of three years and four months in Ukraine.
Having been thrown back from Kyiv, Putin is now waging what the CSIS calls a 'grinding contest of attrition', in which Russia loses 'vast quantities' of men and materiel for 'mere metres of ground'.
Since January 2024, Putin has captured about 1 per cent of Ukraine at the cost of between 800 and 1,600 Russian casualties per day. By comparison, 179 British military personnel were killed during six years of combat operations in Iraq.
Yet Putin's frame of reference is almost certainly not the conflicts since 1945. He is steeped in the history of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War – the Soviet Union's epic struggle against Hitler's invasion between 1941 and 1945.
That titanic confrontation claimed the lives of at least 24 million Soviet or Russian citizens, amounting to 12 per cent of the entire population of the Soviet Empire. The Battle of Stalingrad alone, lasting less than six months, killed almost 675,000 Russians.
The siege of Leningrad – the city of Putin's birth – was even more deadly. His parents lived through those harrowing years from 1941 to 1944; his father fought in the city's defence, while his elder brother was among the children who died of hunger and privation. In total, over 1 million Russians gave their lives to save Leningrad from the Nazis.
If that is your perspective, then 250,000 dead and a million casualties in Ukraine become far more acceptable. Putin will doubtless see these figures as just a fraction of the cost of preserving his home city from Hitler.
And that is not even to consider earlier episodes of suffering. The Russian civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 claimed some 10 million lives, mainly from starvation, while Stalin's Great Purge, between 1936 and 1938, is estimated to have claimed between 700,000 and 1.2 million.
If, like Putin, your historical memory is dominated by events before 1945, then you take a different view of a million Russian casualties in Ukraine.
And the Kremlin's propaganda campaign is designed to ensure that the Russian people think like their leader. Not even the prospect of Putin soon having sacrificed a million of their sons in the country's bloodiest war in 80 years appears to be stirring popular discontent. In March, polling by the Levada Center, a Russian independent, nongovernmental research organisation, found that a 'majority of respondents support the actions of the Russian military and believe that the special military operation is progressing successfully.'
For Western policy-makers, by contrast, Putin's cold indifference to suffering presents a strategic dilemma. Effective deterrence depends on an adversary believing that any act of aggression will incur an overwhelming and unacceptable cost.
But what constitutes an unacceptable cost in Putin's eyes? Given that a million Russian casualties in the crucible of Ukraine seem to leave him unmoved, sustaining effective deterrence becomes far more difficult. Hence the continued importance of nuclear weapons – perhaps the only price even Putin would be unwilling to pay.
Meanwhile, his dogged assault on Ukraine has forced his neighbour to defend itself with ever greater force, vindicating the bleak words of Clausewitz: 'If one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand. That side will force the other to follow suit; each will drive its opponent towards extremes.'
Russia's extreme violence has killed between 60,000 and 100,000 Ukrainians, according to the CSIS, inflicting around 400,000 casualties in total – an astonishing toll reminiscent of the pre-war era. Given that Ukraine's population is less than a third of Russia's, the target of the invasion has endured a heavier toll per capita – a butcher's bill greater even than that of its aggressor.
Ukrainian soldiers on the front line know better than anyone that the prospect of a million Russian casualties will not deter Putin. The only counterweight is still greater force.