These are tricky times for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The “special military operation” he launched against Ukraine in 2022, intended to last a few days until a puppet regime in Kyiv could be installed, has now gone on longer than both the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany and all of World War I. His forces have long ceased making significant gains on the battlefield; some data even suggest that Russian forces lost territory in April and May. What gains the Russians have made have come at enormous cost: Last month, Anna Keast-Butler, the director of British intelligence agency GCHQ, cited new intelligence indicating that Russian war deaths had likely reached almost half a million; various Western sources put total Russian casualties at significantly more than 1 million.
In relative terms, the attrition losses are even more staggering. By some accounts, Russia is now incurring eight men killed or seriously wounded for every one lost by Ukraine. With average monthly casualties running at more than 30,000 this year, the Russian army is struggling to replace them with fresh recruits. It is offering sign-up bonuses as high as $80,000, and up to $140,000 in debt relief to encourage more men to enlist.
Those who do have little to look forward to. According to Russian military bloggers, the average life expectancy of a new recruit—from arrival at a training ground to death in a combat zone—lies somewhere between 10 days and three weeks. Once they are sent onto the battlefield, Russian fighters survive an average of 20 to 35 minutes. Much of the reason for this is the extraordinary shift in battlefield technology and tactics—in particular, the ways that drones have become the primary killing machines in this war, with stark implications for the future of combat in other parts of the world.
More ominously for Putin, the mood in Russia is changing. For years, most Russians supported the invasion of Ukraine because of the relentless patriotic news they’ve been subjected to by Kremlin-controlled media and the limited impact that the war had on most Russians’ daily lives. Now, however, Ukraine has brought the war home to Russia. Kyiv’s new, domestically produced long-range drones, such as the FP-1, FP-2, and Hornet, are proving extremely effective in hurting Russia economically, strategically, and psychologically. Ukraine now regularly strikes targets deep inside Russia, including a massive attack on Moscow in mid-June that has apparently disabled the Russian capital’s largest oil refinery until 2027.
Rattling sabers is often a sign of limited leverage. But while few Russia watchers take the Kremlin’s threats of nuclear escalation seriously, the fact that Putin formally revised the country’s official nuclear doctrine at the end of 2024—significantly lowering the threshold for the use of such weapons while also declaring that aggression by a non-nuclear state against Russia could set off nuclear retaliation if that state is supported by a nuclear power—was clearly intended to send a warning. Russia has also long dropped hints that it has stationed nuclear weapons in Belarus, although some commentators have treated these hints with skepticism.
Playing up fears of a NATO plot to attack Russia has been a hallmark of the Kremlin playbook since Putin came to power more than 25 years ago. But it is being articulated ever more forcefully as Russia’s war in Ukraine goes from bad to worse. At the end of May, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergei Naryshkin claimed that “hypocritical and treacherous Albion” was behind a plan for NATO to attack Russia—a claim that is out of kilter with the current capabilities of the British armed forces.
Although Putin regularly says he is willing to negotiate, he shows no sign of readiness to compromise. He has repeatedly rejected peace proposals from U.S. President Donald Trump, even though those proposals were more favorable to Russia than Ukraine. Putin’s goal remains to subjugate all of Ukraine in one way or another, denying it the ability to act as a sovereign state.
This dude and a couple handfuls of other leaders around the world make you really REALLY wish death notes were a real thing...