‘Nearly two million more casualties': The numbers that show Russia is years from victory

Yahoo

12 hours ago

Donald Trump's message – or rather, the message he transmitted from Vladimir Putin – to Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington on Monday was stark: accept the deal Russia is offering, because otherwise you'll lose the war.
But if Moscow appears strong now, Ukraine and its European allies believe, it's partly because Trump's choices have made it stronger – namely, his decisions to curtail US military aid, interrupt intelligence sharing and, above all, accept Putin's insistence on a peace deal before a ceasefire.
And in fact, Russia is far from battlefield supremacy. Just hours before the Oval Office discussions, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) declared it would take 4.4 years of fighting at current rates of advance for Russia to capture the remainder of territory it has 'annexed'.
It would also, according to the MoD calculations based on Ukrainian estimates of Russian casualties, cost Russia an additional 1.93m killed and wounded to achieve Putin's goals. That would be on top of the more than one million casualties it has already sustained.
In other words, Russia could be headed for breaking points of its own.
How long can Russia last?
All of which raises the question, if Trump chose to throw his weight behind Ukraine, could he change the tide? Should the US president be asking not how much Ukraine must surrender, but how long Russia can last?
Sam Greene, professor of Russian politics at King's College London, points to two potential Russian breaking points: the military and the economic. Predictions about when either will come has become something of a mug's game, he cautions. Nor should we underestimate Russia's capacity to keep going. 'But eventually they do reach a pinch point: there are strains on the economy. There are strains on the military. A breaking point will come,' he says.
'Because Trump is in a hurry, Putin has the ability to sort of shift that sense of emergency, so that, all of a sudden, it feels like this sort of political breaking point for the West – whereas, if there was a little bit more strategic patience and consistency from the White House, the opposite would actually be true.'
The British Defence Intelligence assessment about the Russian rate of advance is meant for public consumption rather than real strategic analysis.
Applying the same crude logic to British military performance in the First World War, one might have said in early 1918 that the Allies were decades from victory. By the end of that year, Germany had suffered a devastating defeat, and arguing about rates of advance and attrition in the previous four years were not much use to German negotiators at armistice talks.
'The problem is, wars are not linear,' points out Rob Lee, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an expert in the Russian and Ukrainian militaries.
Nor are they boxing matches to be decided on points. Nonetheless, Russia's advance is indeed painfully slow. Even a recent 10-mile infiltration near Dobropillia, while initially alarming for Ukraine, failed to achieve an operational breakthrough. It ended instead with hundreds of Russians being captured or killed.
'Limitless manpower is a myth'
In the Oval Office, the US president led Zelensky over to an easel holding a large map of Ukraine showing the current line of control. The implication: to stop the conflict, the map will have to be redrawn.
There was little progress on Monday, however, partly because Zelensky and his allies see that map in a very different way. Speaking after the talks Emmanuel Macron said that in the past 1,000 days of war Russian forces 'took less than one per cent' of Ukrainian territory. 'Those who are saying… 'The Ukrainians are lost. They will lose'. It's total fake news,' the French president said.
As the Institute for the Study of War has pointed out, Russian forces are currently struggling to complete the encirclement or envelopment of Kupyansk despite 22 months of offensive operations. It took them 14 months to cover the 6.4 miles from the eastern to western outskirts of Toretsk, and 26 months to advance 6.8 miles from western Bakhmut to the western edge of Chasiv Yar.
And yes, says Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and veteran watcher of the Russian military, it is true to say that Russia faces increasing risk as the war goes on.
'The question is not how much territory is Russia gaining per day. The only question that's actually being tested in the fighting in 2024 and 2025 is which proposition is more likely to be true: is Russia able to sustain its offensive effort and eventually put Ukraine in an untenable position? Or is Ukrainian defence more viable and more likely to exhaust Russian offensive potential, if not this year then next?' he says.
'This is what both parties are looking at to try to inform their decision on the questions of how much time they have and whether they can hope to attain a better and different outcome.'
At the moment, Kofman says, time seems to favour Russia. Ukraine is not facing either imminent defeat or a collapse of the front line that would force it to sign a humiliating surrender, but the Russians are accelerating. Year-on-year, their pace of advance has picked up in 2025 compared to 2024.
And while Ukraine has serious problems with manpower, Russia still has a steady supply of men to replace battlefield losses, which, according to Britain's Defence Intelligence, currently stand at 1,060,000, including 250,000 killed or missing presumed dead.
The recent Russian infiltration at Dobropillia shows that Ukraine's drone units, despite their remarkable effectiveness, cannot stabilise the front alone in the absence of sufficient infantry.
For now, however, the Russians are struggling to translate their dominance in infantry into decisive advantage.
'Russia's vulnerability is simply that they are far too slow and they don't have the force quality, nor do they employ the tactics, to achieve a major breakthrough. So their overall approach is deeply inefficient and costly in terms of manpower,' says Kofman.
'The political leadership doesn't care about this, but Russia does not have limitless manpower either – that's a myth. It also does not have limitless time. That's another myth.'
Russia 'on the verge of recession'
There are other constraints on Russia too, Kofman argues.
'The reality is that the war is a significant strain on the Russian economy. Despite outwardly projecting the ability and willingness to keep fighting for many more years, if the war enters 2026 and Russia doesn't appear to be winning decisively on the battlefield, it is eminently unclear that they, too, will not run into significant sustainability problems that could force them to a much weaker negotiating position,' he says.
That explains why Putin may be keen to seal a deal now: he feels comparatively strong, but knows the moment of apparent dominance may not last.
For two years, Russia's economy appeared to defy gravity, turning massive military spending into rapid GDP growth despite Western sanctions. But the sugar high appears to be over. And the signs of the comedown are everywhere.
In June, Maxim Reznikov, the minister of economic development of the Russian Federation, warned the St Petersburg economic forum that the country was 'on the verge of recession'. The following month, the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, the country's second largest steel producer, reported a 21.1 per cent collapse in profits and a sharp drop in output that it attributed to high interest rates and a general slowdown in the Russian economy.
Indeed, at the end of July, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cut its 2025 growth estimate for Russia to 0.9 per cent, down from an initial 1.5 per cent forecast it made in April. Even that was a dramatic drop from the 4.3 per cent growth the IMF estimated in 2024.
And inflation has prompted the ministries of agriculture and of trade and industry to draft a law for price caps on vegetables, poultry and dairy products, according to a report in Kommersant, a Russian business daily, earlier this month.
'The economy is an interesting thing because there's an objective standpoint to it, which is, frankly, that they do have considerable fiscal and monetary headroom, and they remain very good at managing the economy, albeit at increasing cost,' says Greene. 'But eventually they do reach a pinch point.'
'If you remember back to January, the very last thing the Biden administration did was to impose some new sanctions, somewhat unexpectedly, on the Russians. And that sent Russian markets into a tailspin for two or three weeks. If the West were interested in manufacturing those sorts of moments of unpredictability, then it would bring some very real risks, including near-term risks, for the Russian economy.'
'They're playing with fire'
None of these factors mean Russia is facing imminent collapse, says Ian Bond, deputy director for the London-based Centre for European Reform.
There is no sign that the casualty rate or the economic strains of the war have created any kind of serious domestic political challenge to Putin so far. 'But Russia is strong until it's not. It looks mighty, and then mental fatigue sets in, and things fall apart quite quickly,' he says.
'Is that going to happen this time? We simply don't know,' Bond adds. But, he argues, it is a reason for Europe and Ukraine to resist acquiescing to a bad deal – like surrendering Donbas – that would leave them much more vulnerable.
These are the considerations that Russian, Ukrainian and European leaders will be weighing up as Trump shepherds them into more negotiations in the coming weeks.
In the final analysis, 'war is very much an uncertain business, and even though some things may be in Russia's favour, there's a great deal of uncertainty', says Kofman.
'And keep in mind the external factors: at the end of the day, much for Russia depends on things, like the price of oil, that they can neither predict nor control. The longer things go on, the more they're playing with fire.'
Solve the daily Crossword