Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine entered its fifth year on 24 February, with no end in sight despite Russia’s vast material superiority.
Most experts expected Ukraine’s defeat within days. Russia’s population is more than three times Ukraine’s, its GDP around 10 times bigger, its army far larger, its arsenal of tanks, artillery, missiles and warplanes greater. Russia’s leadership, Putin included, expected Ukrainians to capitulate, perhaps even to welcome Russian troops. US and British intelligence predicted the war early, but also projected a rapid Russian victory.
Ukraine’s strong morale is one reason it has belied early doomsday predictions. Its army has suffered between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, including between 100,000 and 140,000 fatalities, but retains the will to fight. Russia has reportedly suffered twice as many casualties: 1.2 million, including 219,000 deaths verified through obituaries and probate records. According to some estimates, fatalities total 325,000. Geolocated tallies show that roughly 24,000 pieces of Russian equipment have been destroyed, damaged, abandoned or seized. No one expected such losses, least of all Putin.
Ukrainian civilians have also braved terrible hardships. During the winter of 2022–23 Russia repeatedly struck Ukraine’s electricity grid, depriving millions of light, heat and even water. This brutal winter has been much worse. Russia launched thousands of drones and missiles to hit cities and power stations. Ukraine doesn’t have anywhere near the number of missile defences needed to protect these targets.
Yet any visitor to Ukraine will hear some version of this refrain: “We have no choice but to fight if we want to survive.” No Russian soldier believes his country faces a comparable threat. Higher stakes can bolster morale, as the French and Americans learned in Vietnam.
On the battlefield, Ukraine’s drones have prevented Russia’s generals from fighting the kind of war they prefer – concentrating armoured and mechanised brigades to punch through an adversary’s lines and deploying infantry to seize and hold territory. In this drone-dominated war, manoeuvre warfare is suicidal. Russia has been trapped in a war of attrition, but that cuts both ways: Ukraine also cannot concentrate forces for breakthroughs.
Russian commanders have adapted and improvised. They dispatch small numbers of dismounted infantry to infiltrate Ukrainian lines and create bridgeheads and send supplies using passenger vehicles, motorbikes – even donkeys and horses – to limit armoured vehicle losses. Ukraine, thanks to ingenious tech-savvy civilians, often using makeshift facilities, has the qualitative edge in drones. That knowhow matters: these weapons account for 60-70% of casualties in this war.
Ukraine has relentlessly used drones, and increasingly, domestically produced missiles (the Long Neptune, a modified anti-ship missile, and the Flamingo models) to strike distant Russian command posts, airfields and ammunition depots. It has hit more than half of Russia’s major refineries at least once, cutting their capacity, though not nearly as much as some reports claim. Parts of the country have experienced gasoline shortages, long lines and price hikes. Ukraine’s deep strikes have also disrupted Russian logistics. Ukraine’s sea drones and anti-ship missiles have kept Russia’s Black Sea fleet at bay. Since sinking its flagship, Moskva, on 14 April 2022, Ukraine has sunk some two dozen ships, forcing the Russian navy to shift its headquarters from Sevastopol – in annexed Crimea – to Novorossiysk on the Black Sea’s east coast.
In short, Russian forces haven’t been able to use their numerical advantage to seize territory at the pace they did in 2022. (Ukraine retook much of that land by year’s end.) Since 2024, especially in key offensives – such as those against Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad – Russia’s maximum average daily territorial gains have been 70 metres, and last year its monthly casualties averaged nearly 35,000.
Since taking Avdiivka – prewar population: 30,000 – in February 2024, Russia hasn’t taken another large town until this February and gained only 1.5% of Ukrainian territory. To annex the rest of Donbas, it must breach defensive fortifications and storm the large Slavyansk, Kramatorsk and Kostyantynivka conurbation. Urban warfare is a bloody business.
Ukraine has numerous problems, notably troop shortages, worsened by draft-dodging. The western press has covered this extensively, but implies that Russia’s much larger population guarantees abundant manpower. In fact, Russia has increasingly recruited foreign fighters – including Africans, Cubans, Central Asians, Indians and Nepalis – and enlisted thousands of North Korean troops. And despite intensifying economic pressures, Moscow pays soldiers lavish signing bonuses and salaries to enlist.
Russia hasn’t lost the war. Its economy isn’t collapsing. It still has ample firepower. Yet its army’s performance has been shambolic, despite Donald Trump’s pausing of direct military aid to Kyiv. This may explain Putin’s new proposal. He has consistently defined victory as the conquest of four provinces: Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Russia fully controls only Luhansk. Now he is proposing a deal – provided that Ukraine hands over the rest of Donetsk.
Although Putin boasted recently that “our troops are advancing all across the line of contact,” he may be realising that his generals’ reports about having “liberated” Kupiansk (in Kharkiv province) and conquered swathes of Zaporizhzhia are eyewash. Likewise, western accounts that Ukraine recently ejected Russian forces from parts of Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk provinces presume the accuracy of Russian commanders’ claims that they controlled these places.
Despite Trump’s fulminations, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy rejects a political settlement that includes giving Putin territory his army has failed to take. Polls show that, though war-weary, 75% of Ukrainians do as well.
Rajan Menon is a professor emeritus of international relations at the City College of New York and a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a time of war. On Wednesday 30 September, join Charlotte Higgins and acclaimed Ukrainian writers Olia Hercules, Sasha Dovzhyk and Olesya Khromeychuk as they reflect on the profound connections between war, art and life. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
The Guardian
About the Author
