“Aside from the hazard of China or Iran adding to the number of ongoing wars, the currently slow attrition strategy is only working against President Putin because he is trapped.”
The early failure by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to help Ukraine inflict severe costs on Russia has allowed Moscow to adjust and prepare for a protracted conflict where it can meet these accumulating personnel losses, now estimated at between 85,000 Russian combatant deaths (the French low estimate) to 180,000 (the American count). NATO’s default inclination is to stabilize rather than intensify the level of pressure applied to Russia through arms transfers to Ukraine, as demonstrated by its political reluctance to concentrate on dramatically increasing artillery ammunition output. According to Air Force Command and Staff College professor Charles T. Kamps, this strategy of slow graduated punishment was the principal reason why the Linebacker II Bombing campaign failed to produce political effects during the Vietnam War. This risks continuing the war until either China or Iran may find it worthwhile to exploit a distracted NATO by launching attacks in their respective spheres of influence. Chinese President Xi Jinping has committed to resolving the Taiwan issue by 2027, though this may be hyperbole. Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey has shown that world wars typically emerge out of simultaneous deterrence failures. This is applicable to the current circumstance of simultaneous wars, crises, and confrontations. As such, NATO must stand firm at the first domino because it has insufficient armaments production to prosecute wars to defend all of Eastern Europe, Taiwan, and the Straits of Hormuz, from where Europe gets most of its energy for transportation. Crises are more easily confronted when they occur sequentially rather than concurrently, and this means resolving or winning them as quickly as possible.
Western policymakers are searching for the strategic Goldilocks zone in the war in Ukraine: At one extreme is the incentive to drag out the conflict so that Russia both incurs costs that will lead to the conceivable overthrow of Russian President Vladimir Putin but also without allowing Moscow to justify politically an escalation that could lead to an Article V provocation of the NATO charter, or the use of chemical or tactical nuclear weapons. Aside from the hazard of China or Iran adding to the number of ongoing wars, the currently slow attrition strategy is only working against President Putin because he is trapped. The relative performance imbalance in favor of the Ukrainians shows that Russia will pay an extremely high price for an ultimate capitulation by Kyiv. Consequently, rationally, President Putin should pull out of the war and rebuild for a future confrontation with NATO, but he is instead politically ensnared in the conflict and his personal survival is bound to victory.
Although the cost to Russia of the Ukraine War has far exceeded Moscow’s initial expectations of a quick fait accompli by convoy parade into Kyiv, the additional impacts of Western sanctions, weapons shipments, Ukrainian gains, and deaths on the battlefield have not on their own altered the cost-benefit analysis in a fashion dramatic enough as to result in policy concessions from the Kremlin. President Putin may indeed believe that he has a medium-term advantage given the additional year or so it will take NATO countries to match Moscow’s artillery production, but he must also be aware that the war’s delayed impact on the economy will alienate the under-35 cohort from which the bulk of the Russian army is conscripted. President Putin may also be hoping, as Adolf Hitler did, that a war in the Middle East (1941 Golden Square revolt in Iraq) or Asia (Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor) would reduce Russia’s war burden. More likely, his policy advisors are wary of a United States provoked to mobilization, as Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto warned the Tokyo War Cabinet.
Ukraine is faced with the prospect of what Carl von Clausewitz termed an absolute war, in which either Russian forces are victorious or defeated, an unlikely prospect in both cases, or are withdrawn due to political exhaustion. The early failure by the West to impose high military costs on Russia has allowed Moscow to explore and continuously shift its war aims. Because Ukraine will never be more than just a legitimacy threat to the illiberal authoritarian regime of Moscow, President Putin is unconstrained in his freedom to control the intensity of his war effort. Since 2023, Russia has put its economy on a war footing, enabling it to better cope with the costs of the war. Russian gains in Avdiivka and its surroundings are a testament to the determined persistence to make gains even at elevated costs to military equipment and manpower. The bulk of mobilized Russians have not come from the major European cities, but from the poorer regions of the country; “of the 26 areas with the highest known rates of conscription, 23 had income levels below the national average.”A further study by the Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies, has revealed the same trend by using public banking records to identify from where soldiers are being recruited: “as soldiers are paid significantly more than the average national average salary, causing spikes that are easy to identify in the regional banking sector.” Russia has expanded its recruitment of foreign fighters to include Africans, Asians, and Europeans. In mid-2024, the war expenses for the Kremlin are not high enough to compel negotiations for a withdrawal. President Putin may still believe victory is possible, especially if he thinks that he has freedom of action because he has insulated his regime from any domestic shock of a battlefield defeat in Ukraine.
Russia’s war in Ukraine, seen in terms of the cost-over-time of equipment losses, deaths, and the narrowing of support for President Putin’s government, is comparable to other conflicts that began with seemingly limited aims but evolved—over time—into high cost protracted campaigns. According to a RAND Corporation report published in 2023, the estimated direct costs of the war to Russia “through 2024, were expected to amount to almost $132 billion.” This estimate excludes the long-term economic and domestic effects of its shift toward a wartime economy.
The death toll of this war for Russia has certainly been hard to ascertain with precision. A report from BBC Russia, the independent media group Mediazona, and volunteers, has concluded, through “open-source information from official reports, newspapers and social media,” that, as of April 17, 2024, at least 50,000 Russians soldiers have died. They believe that the true figure is even higher. Crucially, however, these conservative estimates mean that most of the Russian populace likely does not have an accurate idea of the scale of deaths. As the Kremlin has taken steps to suppress the release of this information and has relied on propaganda to undermine the threat of collective action from activists such as The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia, the Russians have remained quiescent.
The Ukraine war shares similarities with the Afghan War (1979-89) in the protracted accumulation of losses and dubious political goals. This author, in his youth, interacted with the Soviet troops in Tashkent, as they were boarding a train with their armor loaded on flatbeds, heading to Afghanistan, in 1987. According to a declassified Central Intelligence Agency assessment from February, 1987, the total cost of the Russo-Afghan War between 1980 and 1986, was estimated at $48 billion, which is equivalent today to $145 billion. Lester Grau, the leading Western analyst on the Soviet-Afghan War, and who had access to Russian after-action reports and archival information, stated that total equipment losses were significant and almost comparable to the current situation in Ukraine. Based on reliable open-source intelligence from Oryx, which has tracked the Ukraine war since its start, Russian equipment losses amount to 16,129 pieces that have been either destroyed, abandoned, or captured. These include 3,079 tanks (T-62 to T-80s); 748 Self-Propelled Artillery Vehicles; 378 Multiple Rocket Launchers Systems; 114 Aircraft; 137 Helicopters; and 26 Naval Ships and Submarines. In Afghanistan, “Soviet combat equipment losses included 147 tanks, 118 aircraft, and 333 helicopters,” with a sum total of 13,714 major pieces of equipment lost to the Soviet-Afghan War.
Again, according to Grau’s estimates, “About 620,000 Soviets served in Afghanistan, with officers doing a two-year tour and enlisted men putting in 18 months. Official Soviet casualties total 14,453 dead: 9,511 killed in action; 2,386 died of wounds; and 2,556 lost from disease and accidents.” Afghanistan also inflicted 53,753 wounded, plus an additional and incredible 415,932 hospitalizations from disease. The lower casualty figures compared with the Ukraine War are expected, given the counter-insurgency nature of combat in Afghanistan, Nevertheless, a Central Intelligence Agency report from 1988 on the “Domestic Fallout from the Afghan War,” confirmed Moscow’s durable ability to prevail against personnel losses to achieve its political goal. The report observed that “the Soviets displayed an ability to stay the course as long as they viewed the gains outweighing the costs.” It did nevertheless observe that Soviet Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev valued the importance of harnessing public support, and that it was possible that Moscow’s failure to articulate the purpose of the war to the Soviet citizenry was a factor in the withdrawal of that backing.
The tendency of protracted conflicts to begin as limited efforts but then escalate into tests of resolve and alliance commitments is commonplace because of the incentive politicians have to exaggerate the justifications of the wars they start. These policy entrapment wars are well known: The United States and South Vietnam lost over 10,000 rotary and fixed-wing aircraft before Washington decided to concede defeat in the Vietnam War, and this phenomenon was visible by the cascade failure of the International Security Assistance Force Coalition-led Afghan War.
John E. Mueller’s 1971 study of the public support level differences between the Korean and Vietnam wars revealed that the relationship between battlefield casualties and public support for the war effort was far more complex than the prevailing conventional wisdom of an arithmetic correlation. In both cases, “While they did weary of the wars, they generally seem to have become hardened to the wars’ costs: they are sensitive to relatively small losses in the early stages, but only to large losses in later stages.” This is in part because of the assertion of a sunk cost fallacy, where political and military leaders call for the need to win to justify the accumulation of deaths.
With comparatively fewer sources of information, the Russian population of today is in even less of a position to organize opposition to the war in Ukraine. This is in great part due to strong propaganda efforts and the prompt punishment for dissenters, with an estimated 20,000 Russians having been detained. A poll conducted between November 13 and November 21, 2023 (with 1,046 respondents in Russia) by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, indicated that “64% of Russians see the conflict in Ukraine as a civilizational struggle between Russia and the West.” This provides President Putin and the Kremlin political elite with the necessary domestic conditions to continue their limited war, and the resulting shift toward a war economy allows for the almost indefinite material reconstitution of combat units.
The concern with a protracted war is particularly salient in the warnings from the NATO military leaders of Norway, Estonia, and Denmark, in which they estimate that Russia will in just a few years be able to re-build-up their military for a conventional attack on countries in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Thus far, and likely for a few years, Russia’s energy-export economy has proven resilient to sanctions, even posting a positive GDP output through 2023, though this trend is not expected to last.
After over two years of fighting, NATO allies and suppliers of Ukraine have adopted measures that are not hazardously escalatory, such as deploying training teams to Ukraine, allowing frontline states like Poland to shoot down Russian missile incursions over Ukraine), ramping-up the delivery of arms and ammunition, and permitting Ukraine to strike Crimea and military targets deep within Russia). The West must permit Ukraine to stick to its maximalist territorial claims, however unrealistically attainable, rather than threatening to compel Kyiv to submit to a politically compromising ceasefire, in a bid for “peace at any price.”
Several further stressing measures are worth considering. First, NATO navies should harass core or weak Russian allies, such as Cuba, Mali, and Eritrea (but not Iran, North Korea, or Myanmar, which should be peeled off of Moscow). Second, aggressive covert means should be applied to Russian mercenaries and investments in Africa (Niger, Libya, Burkina Faso, (North) Sudan, Madagascar, Cameron, and Equatorial Guinea), excluding those states with a Russian United Nations presence (Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan). If these attacks are targeted with little collateral damage, they will not create the diplomatic space for China to exploit politically. Third, it is time that NATO begins a gradual deployment into Western Ukraine, which will dampen Moscow’s incentive to use tactical nuclear or chemical weapons. This is a less escalatory step than engaging in a tit-for-tat with Russian aircraft and drones over the Baltic and Black Seas. Fourth, NATO and allied states should be encouraged to risk direct confrontation with Russian air defense, aircraft, and ships, in Syria and Transnistria.
Moscow’s allies that host Russian strategic equipment must also be made aware that they could become targeted. Since NATO has technical escalation dominance in Europe and Belarus is reluctant to become involved in the Ukraine War, Russia is unlikely to provoke a confrontation by retaliating with frontline NATO states like Norway, Finland, the Baltics, or Poland. The adoption of an aggressive defensive posture by the world’s leading democracies is also likely to deter Beijing and Tehran from any geostrategic adventurism. Now that members of the United States Marine Corps Force Recon are deployed on Penghu Island, any invasion of Taiwan will now begin with Chinese and Americans in direct combat for the first time since the air war over Vietnam.
Julian Spencer-Churchill is an associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, author of the 2007 book Militarization and War and of the 2014 book Strategic Nuclear Sharing. He was also a former Operations Officer, 3 Field Engineer Regiment. He has published extensively on Pakistan, where he conducted fieldwork for over ten years, as well as in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt.
Alexandru Filip is an International Relations student at Concordia University, as well as an analyst and editor at the Canadian Center for Strategic Studies research institute. His research focus is strategic and security studies, with a particular interest in naval, air and nuclear capabilities.
