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Business Standard
4 days ago
- Business
- Business Standard
Russia has lost over 1 million troops in Ukraine war, CSIS report estimates
Over one million Russian troops have been killed or injured in the war against Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, according to a report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Ukraine has also paid a steep price, with around 400,000 killed or injured, taking the total number of casualties in the war to nearly 1.4 million over three years. The CSIS report, cited by The New York Times, is described as one of the most comprehensive independent studies to assess the human cost of the war. The figures draw from estimates by US and UK intelligence agencies, alongside other open-source data, given that Russia is known to underreport its losses and Ukraine does not publicly disclose them. Minimal gains despite staggering losses Despite its massive toll, Russia has managed to seize less than 1 per cent of additional Ukrainian territory since January 2024. It now controls about 20 per cent of Ukraine. The report notes that Russian forces are advancing at an average rate of only 165 feet per day—slower than the pace of some of the most notorious battles of World War I. 'Russia's war in Ukraine is on track to be one of the slowest offensive wars of modern times,' said Seth G. Jones, CSIS senior vice president and co-author of the report. 'They've lost over one million casualties; they've captured a tiny little slice of terrain; and they've lost enormous quantities of equipment.' A war of disproportionate tolls The report estimates that around 250,000 Russian soldiers have died, making it Russia's deadliest conflict since World War II. Ukraine has lost between 60,000 and 100,000 troops. While Russia has deployed more than 400,000 troops—nearly three times Ukraine's 250,000—Kyiv is losing a far greater share of its population and military capacity relative to its size. Russia has sustained its troop levels by holding its first military draft since World War II and offering financial incentives to convicted criminals, debtors, and others to enlist. The report also highlights support from allies such as North Korea, which is believed to have sent more than 10,000 personnel to aid Russia in the Kursk region. Despite this, the Russian military has made little meaningful progress in capturing key Ukrainian territory. Ukrainian resistance shifts perception of Russian might Recent Ukrainian strikes on Russian airfields have surprised many in the West and challenged assumptions of Moscow's military superiority. These attacks suggest that Ukraine retains significant offensive capability, even after years of attritional warfare. Jones also hinted that a potential second term for Donald Trump could shift the trajectory of the conflict. 'If America doesn't take a walk, Putin is in big trouble,' he said. 'The Russians would have the long-term upper hand if President Trump takes a walk.' Trump has called for a peace agreement but has refused to commit to further military aid for Ukraine. European and Ukrainian officials have warned that this stance could prolong the war and give Russia a significant strategic advantage. Kyiv survives at enormous human cost The CSIS report underscores that Ukraine's survival has come at immense human cost and is largely thanks to backing from international allies. Without external military and financial support, the report concludes, Kyiv would likely have lost the war.
New York Times
18-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Russia Escalated Sabotage to Pressure U.S. and Allies on Ukraine, Study Says
Russia significantly stepped up its sabotage campaign over the past two years as it sought to pressure Europe and the United States to curb their support for Ukraine, according to a new study released on Tuesday. The report, by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is one of the first that try to quantify the scale of Moscow's covert campaign that targeted undersea cables, warehouses and railways. It found that Russian attacks in Europe quadrupled from 2022 to 2023 and then tripled again from 2023 to 2024. 'This is an important tool that the Russians are using in coordination with their conventional war in Ukraine,' said Seth G. Jones, the author of the study and a former adviser to the U.S. military. 'It makes very little sense now for Russia to push troops across the border to the Baltic States or Finland. But their payback for these countries that are providing weapons is going after their companies, assassination plots against officials and threatening critical infrastructure.' Amid the push by Washington to halt the war in Ukraine, Russia has tamped down its sabotage efforts in recent weeks, according to a Western official. But experts believe the campaign against European targets could continue once governments put in place new plans to support Ukraine with weapons or peacekeepers. Anger at Russia's sabotage efforts has the potential to influence European reactions to the U.S.-led push for an end to the war in Ukraine. Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland noted in a social media post on Monday that Lithuanian officials had confirmed his assessment that Russia was responsible for a series of fires in shopping centers in Warsaw and Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. 'Good to know before negotiations,' Mr. Tusk wrote. 'Such is the nature of this state.' The message to countries supporting Ukraine has been that Russia can impose costs — and increase them. There is little evidence that the Russian campaign was effective last year. But as the United States apparently retreats from its backing of Ukraine and European allies, the question will be whether a covert Russian campaign can become more successful at pushing countries to reconsider their support. The report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that about 28 percent of Russia's attacks were against transportation targets, 20 percent against industrial targets and 20 percent against undersea cables, pipelines and other infrastructure. Overall, the study tracked 50 separate acts of sabotage from 2022 to the present. Russia has tried to control its campaign and not escalate too much. It tried to cap the level of violence to avoid inadvertently driving up support for Ukraine, Mr. Jones said. 'We don't see a lot of people dying right now,' he said. 'If a train was derailed carrying weapons, that would be one thing. If it were full of people, that would be a whole different thing.' People who have been killed as part of the covert campaign, such as a former Russian helicopter pilot in Spain, were mainly defectors. While Russia has tried to avoid killing foreigners, Western intelligence officials said last year that it had sought to kill the chief executive of a prominent German arms maker. American and European officials have been concerned about miscalculation by Russia and its inability to precisely control some of its own operatives. After Russian intelligence plotted to place incendiary devices on DHL cargo planes last year, the Biden administration warned President Vladimir V. Putin that sabotage that brought down aircraft would elicit a serious response. European leaders and NATO have repeatedly called out the attacks, issued warnings and expelled Russian diplomats and spies over them. But the report found that those efforts 'failed to coerce Russia' from stopping its campaign. The effort is part of a Russian tradition of covert sabotage, known as active measures, that the K.G.B. honed during the Cold War. Russian military intelligence, known as the G.R.U., has led the current campaign, The New York Times reported in May. The operation intensified last year, when the Kremlin approved a push after Britain and Germany announced new support for Ukraine, according to the Western intelligence official. The German publication WirtschaftsWoche reported the decision to expand the sabotage campaign, including the use of other Russian intelligence services. The new study found no recorded attacks in European countries friendly to Russia, such as Serbia and Hungary. On the other hand, Poland, which has been the hub of Western aid flowing to Ukraine, has been repeatedly targeted. 'They are clearly making concrete decisions of whom they go after and whom they don't go after,' Mr. Jones said of Russia. While the cutting of cables by Russia's shadow fleet of ships trying to evade sanctions has received much of the attention in recent months, Mr. Jones said a majority of attacks were explosive or incendiary devices causing fires at factories, warehouses and other facilities. He added that there had not been any instances of sabotage around U.S. bases in recent weeks. Last year, as the sabotage campaign stepped up, military officials ordered U.S. bases in Europe to raise their alert level. 'I have not seen a U.S. target in the last couple weeks,' Mr. Jones said, 'so they appear to be holding off from U.S. targets right now.'
New York Times
05-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Trump's Decision to Halt Aid to Ukraine Could Reorder the Battlefield
On the battlefields of Ukraine and western Russia, a stalemated war has ground on, with Ukrainian troops defending against Russian progress that can be measured sometimes in mere yards. The cost has been heavy casualties on both sides. President Trump's decision this week to pause military assistance and intelligence sharing could reorder the battlefield, either halting the fight or potentially giving Russia a decisive advantage. With help from Europe, both with arms and intelligence support, Ukraine could continue the fight through the summer without additional American aid. But the loss of one of its most important benefactors will make it easier for Russia to assault Ukrainian lines of defense, analysts say. 'Despite the disadvantage in munitions and forces, Ukrainians have done admirably well in preventing any kind of Russian breakthrough,' Seth G. Jones, a senior vice president with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview. Trump administration officials have suggested that the pause in support could be relatively short-lived if Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, bends to the demands of the White House. Mr. Trump, in his address to Congress on Tuesday night, said he appreciated that Mr. Zelensky had said earlier in the day that he was ready to 'come to the negotiating table.' For now, the Trump administration is putting maximum pressure on Ukraine, and relatively little on Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, or the Russian military, which has continued to attack Ukrainian cities. If the United States is seen as a completely unfair broker of peace, Ukraine could look for ways to continue the fight with the support of Europe. The Russians still have not established air superiority since invading Ukraine three years ago. They have not effectively managed to combine military units in the joint operations, and have suffered so many casualties that Mr. Putin brought in 11,000 North Korean troops to help relieve the strain, military experts said. But that was before Mr. Trump threw his weight behind Russia. 'The immediate hit will be on troop morale — bolstering the Russians and depressing the Ukrainians,' said Alexander Vindman, a Ukrainian-born former U.S. Army officer who served on the National Security Council in 2019. Mr. Trump's decision affects billions of dollars in arms and ammunition in the pipeline and on order. It halts deliveries of equipment from Pentagon stockpiles as well as aid through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which provides funds that Kyiv can use to buy new military hardware directly from U.S. defense companies. Ukraine also stands to lose advanced weapons, including surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, long-range rocket artillery, parts, and maintenance and technical support. Critically, the pause in U.S. military aid will halt the delivery of interceptor missiles for Patriot and NASAMS air defense systems, which have saved an untold number of lives as they shielded Ukrainian cities from missile and drone attacks. The intelligence pause will withhold information that Ukraine uses to target Russian forces. Withholding the aid, according to Trump administration officials, is meant to pressure Mr. Zelensky into signing a deal to give American companies access to Ukrainian minerals. If he makes an agreement, said one Trump administration official, the intelligence sharing will continue and the military supplies already allocated by the Biden administration will flow once more. But how much new military aid Mr. Trump would be willing to provide is not clear. Russian forces have been trying to claw back more of the territory in the Kursk region of Russia that Ukraine seized last year, and preparing for more fighting along the main front lines in Ukraine's eastern Donbas area. 'They've been regenerating in place and trying to repair some damage from last fall's offensive,' said Dara Massicot, a Russian military specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 'I would expect another push to begin probably by May.' Ukraine, which has boosted its own weapons production, and Europe are not without their own resources. Europe, in particular France and Britain, supplies Ukraine with satellite imagery that can be used to find Russian targets on the battlefield. Still, European satellites have not been as focused on Russian miliary movements as American spy satellites, and Ukrainian officials concede that if the intelligence pause continues there will be consequences. And if the halt in deliveries extends beyond early summer, Ukraine would lose its supply of some advanced weapons, including advanced air-defense systems, surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, navigation systems and long-range rocket artillery. A prolonged shortage of those arms would hurt Ukraine's ability to strike longer-range targets and could make Ukrainian cities and troops more vulnerable to missile, rocket and drone attacks. The Trump administration has sent some of the weapons the Biden administration promised Ukraine, including 'hundreds of Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (GMLRS) and antitank weapons and thousands of artillery rounds,' the Pentagon said on Monday. Under Mr. Trump's directive, those deliveries would stop, at least until the president determined that Ukraine had demonstrated a good-faith commitment to peace negotiations with Russia, a senior administration official said. Still, 'the nature of the kinds of weapon systems that the Ukrainians are presently using are different than the ones that they were reliant upon very heavily in the early months of the war,' said George Barros, a Russia expert at the Institute for the Study of War. 'The Ukraine defense industrial base has grown significantly, and they could produce a lot of stuff that they need.' In fact, in recent weeks the pace of Russian assaults has slowed along some of the hottest parts of the front, and Russian troops 'have suffered heavy losses during their offensive actions,' Col. Oleksii Khilchenko, a Ukrainian brigade commander in eastern Ukraine, said in a phone interview. 'Assaults that previously involved 10 to 15 soldiers have now been reduced to small group attacks of up to five soldiers,' he said. Mr. Barros said that most of the casualties Ukrainian troops were inflicting on Russia were caused by homemade drones and other weapons produced in Ukraine. 'So it's not as if Ukrainians on the front lines are going to be running out of their most basic tools right away,' he said. But what Ukraine will run out of, he and other experts say, are interceptors for the Patriots, which have aided the country's air defenses. European countries have Patriot interceptors, but they would have to sacrifice parts of their own air defense umbrella. That might be a big ask at a time when NATO allies can no longer assume that the United States will help defend them if they are attacked. European leaders have said that they will convene in Brussels on Thursday with two things on the agenda: how to support Ukraine and how to shore up their own military capabilities. It was unclear where the Starlink satellite internet service stands in Mr. Trump's pause. Operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX, Starlink has been critical to the Ukrainian military since the early days of the war, allowing soldiers to communicate and share information without having to resort to text messages on cellular networks that can more easily be intercepted. During a tense meeting in the Oval Office last week, Mr. Trump told Mr. Zelensky that he was not in a good position. 'You don't have the cards right now,' Mr. Trump said. But no one can predict what the pause in aid and intelligence sharing will mean for the war, military officials said. 'To say that the Ukrainians 'don't have the cards' indicates to me that those around POTUS don't actually understand the nature of war or why men and women are actually willing to fight, even if outnumbered,' said Frederick B. Hodges, a retired lieutenant general and a former top U.S. Army commander in Europe. Ukraine could win, or at least be in a much better position, if the Europeans deliver the support 'they're capable of delivering,' he said. 'And they'll have done it without the U.S. The result will be lost credibility and lost influence.' The other scenario — where Russia succeeds in Ukraine — could be even dimmer for the Trump administration, military experts said. A Russian victory could embolden Mr. Putin's expansionist aims, eventually leading to a major war in Europe. Mr. Jones, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that the United States tried in the past to stay out of major-powers wars in Europe, and was unsuccessful.
