Putin’s Folly: A Million Casualties, a Struggling Economy, and No Signs of Quitting a Ruinous War

As Russia passes the tragic milestone of 1 million dead and critically injured young men in its unprovoked war on Ukraine, one wonders if there is any level of self-inflicted injury to Russia’s future that would convince President Vladimir Putin to abandon his quixotic mission to conquer a sovereign neighbor.

In 3 ½ years of full-scale invasion, Russian recruits and mercenaries thrown into “meat-grinder assaults” have taken control of another 5% of Ukrainian territory to expand the Kremlin’s 2014 occupation of 15% of Ukrainian land.

Much of the occupied territory lies in ruins, a no-man’s land left behind by the painfully slow and destructive advance into four of Ukraine’s 27 provinces.

British military intelligence tracking Russia’s war casualties projected earlier this year that Russia’s human toll in Ukraine would top 1 million this summer. That analysis was validated last month by a report from Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies that called the grim statistics “a sign of Putin’s blatant disregard for his soldiers.”

“No Soviet or Russian war since World War II has even come close to Ukraine in terms of fatality rate,” the CSIS analysis stated. British Defense Ministry now estimates Russian casualties in Ukraine exceeding 1,000 soldiers per day.

On Feb. 24, 2022, after months amassing an invasion force of 190,000, Putin sent his ill-equipped and poorly trained recruits into Ukraine through multiple invasion routes with the expectation that the government in Kyiv would surrender within two weeks.

From the beginning phase of the invasion with armored columns to the current assaults relying on drones and missiles targeting civilian communities, Putin and his siloviki – the power ministers of defense, interior and intelligence – have grossly overestimated their military and strategic capabilities. Yet Putin has shown no willingness to end his war of aggression, not even when President Donald Trump attempted to stop the bloodletting by forcing Ukraine to surrender what territory Russia already occupies.

Putin’s best hope for cutting his losses was on offer shortly after Trump took office in January and attempted to play the role of peacemaker, eager to broker a ceasefire at any price to Ukraine. The Kremlin leader’s determination to take all of Ukraine scuttled what amounted to Trump’s effort to deliver the 20% of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory to Putin plus an assertion that Ukraine never be allowed to join NATO.

Trump’s U-turn this week on providing military aid to Ukraine delivered a humiliating blow to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who — certainly not without the president’s direction — announced last week that shipments of critical air defenses to Ukraine had been “paused” out of concern about their impact on U.S. military readiness.

After the latest hours-long phone call with Putin on July 3, Trump expressed sudden concern for Ukraine’s vulnerability. He described his takeaway from the sixth call with the Kremlin leader since beginning his second term as “disappointing.”

“I’m not happy with President Putin at all,” Trump said, announcing he would order a resumption of defensive weapons shipments to Ukraine.

As occurred three months ago when Putin refused to commit to a 30-day ceasefire agreed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump pretended to distance himself from the Kremlin leader for whom he has shown slavish admiration for years. Other than stating he is “not happy” with Putin, Trump has exerted no real pressure on his friend in the Kremlin.

Putin demonstrated his disregard for Trump’s displeasure in the wee hours of Wednesday with a record overnight barrage of 728 missiles and drones fired on Ukrainian civilian cities.

The primary miscalculation of both Putin and Trump is expecting that Zelensky and his war cabinet would capitulate to Russian dictatorship over any part of their country that has been independent since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian troops are fighting for their sovereignty, against a return to Russian domination and for the hope of aligning with Western democracies through membership in NATO and the European Union.

Aside from the staggering loss of young men in a World War I-style battle of attrition, another 1 million young Russian men are estimated to have fled abroad to avoid conscription ahead of the invasion and a further mobilization in September 2022.

Putin ally Kim Jong-un has also provided more than 10,000 North Korean troops to fight on Russia’s side, mostly deployed to defend the Kursk region after Ukrainian forces occupied parts of the southern Russian province last summer. Except for the occasional Ukrainian capture of North Koreans, the fate of the surviving foreign indentured fighters is unclear.

The Russian military has relied heavily on hard-core prisoners to fight in Ukraine in exchange for commutation of their sentences if they survive six months of frontline duty. The released criminals were alleged to have committed many of the atrocities that led to International Criminal Court indictment of Russian leaders.

Putin’s military adventure has cost him personally. His war is condemned by a large majority of the 193 countries of the United Nations and Putin is restricted to Russia and a handful of other rogue-nation allies by an ICC arrest warrant for U.N.-documented war crimes. The Kremlin leader missed the BRICS summit this past week, for the second year in a row, for fear of traveling to host country Brazil that is a signatory to the treaty requiring ICC member states to arrest fugitives from justice when on their territory.

Even in his isolated and sanctioned home country, Putin’s success so far in containing anti-war sentiment is showing signs of erosion. Recent reports from the far-flung regions of Russia, the world’s largest national landmass, show a deteriorating social network and enthusiasm for Putin’s war.

Turbulence in the Kremlin leadership erupts periodically into mysterious deaths of once-favored lieutenants. It remains unclear whether Transportation Minister Roman Starovoit died by suicide Monday after being fired by Putin, as state media reported, or whether it was another of the deaths of the disfavored who fall out of windows or succumb to allegedly random acts of violence.

The Russian economy has defied gravity for the past 42 months. State investment in the war machine has provided jobs and salaries paid by Moscow’s lucrative trade in oil, gas and other commodities to states like China, India and Turkey willing to skirt sanctions imposed on Russia by Western democracies.

Putin recently conceded that due to inflation and his constrained global trade market there is a shortage of potatoes in Russia, the most important food in the Russian diet.

Inflation is running at 9.9% this month and interest rates of 20% have all but shut down housing construction and sales.

“We’re basically already on the brink of falling into a recession,” Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov was quoted as telling a recent conference.

Lucrative jobs in the munitions industries that have dominated employment since the war began have dried up as the Kremlin encounters budgetary constraints, unsteady oil prices and unpredictable markets as a global trade war threatens. Decent wages paid to a civilian workforce churning out armored vehicles and fighter planes are dwindling as Russia turns to cheap drone production and procurement from Iran and North Korea.

The social costs of the war are becoming increasingly visible. The absence of sons, brothers, fathers and other male family members has had a detrimental effect on children’s safety and emotional well-being, according to social services in the neglected Siberian and Far East communities. Children with family deployed to Ukraine are increasingly being classified as “at-risk” and removed from their homes to state-run orphanages and boarding schools, according to  Sibirskiy Ekspress, a Telegram channel that covers social problems in the far-flung regions.

The illusion of stability on the home front is rising in cost and constricting in scope. In an opulent projection of normalcy, a three-month “Summer in Moscow” festival has bathed the capital in floral gardens, street fairs and amusement parks. It kicked off with a solemn ceremony in the Kremlin’s ornate Hall of the Order of St. Catherine where Putin reviewed formations of uniformed men and women on June 12, Russia Day, the national holiday celebrating the latest constitution.

“The meaning of today lies in the immortality of the Russian people. Our state, our motherland, Russia,” the president told the assembled troops. “And the road to this immortality lies through the victories you and your comrades-in-arms are blazing.”

Like the distractions of the summer festival, the ceremony projected a confidence in Russia’s current economic and political strategy that is not supported by reality. The ceremony included a disproportionate share of uniformed women soldiers, who are not subject to conscription and make up only about 4% of the Russian military. They are seldom sent into combat in a society that prioritizes women’s importance as mothers and tenders of traditional family values.

Russia has long suffered declining population, a Soviet-era development after World War II losses of at least 20 million, mostly men. Birth rates have worsened since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union and better access to contraceptives.

In a commentary in the latest edition of The Economist, the writer notes that Russia’s ability to shrug off casualties depleting the population and its demographic stability for the next generations “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,” Sir Lawrence Freedman, a leading British strategist, told The Economist. “But there are no signs of exhaustion, they are just carrying on.”