'Europe must find a way to confront a revanchist regime that is likely to persist even once Putin exits the stage.' Photo by Mikhail Metzel/AFP/Getty Images.


January 28, 2025   6 mins

Vladimir Putin promised a lightning war — but almost three years after his invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s military is bleeding. The number of casualties, alone, is shocking. Even Trump has remarked on the consequences of Putin “grinding it out”. Since February 2022, Moscow has suffered some 700,000 casualties, including around 100,000 dead. There are amputees, invalids and paralytics, to say nothing of the psychologically damaged, wandering the streets of Samara or Kazan.

And yet, amid all this butchery, Putin’s war machine has a steady stream of volunteer fighters — though recently these numbers had to be augmented with the help of North Korea. These “meat-grinding tactics” are rooted in a deadly combination of historical precedent, cultivated society attitudes, and ruthless economic calculus — and they present a significant challenge to Ukraine and potentially Europe.

For much of its pre-revolutionary history, what we now know as Russia was ruled by foreigners who would treat their population as slaves. Vikings, Mongols, and even the Europeanised Romanovs — all behaved as conquerors or absolutist despots. Whatever the dynasty, governance was predatory. Alien rulers had no obligations to their subjects and often acted as their worst abusers. In the polity of Kievan Rus’ established by Vikings, one of the primary commodities were Slavic slaves, often sold to the Arab Caliphate. During the Mongol era, meanwhile, the warrant to rule was typically granted to the Rus’ princes who extracted the highest tribute from their people. In Imperial Russia, roughly 40% of the country’s male population were serfs well into the 19th century. Peasants were bought and sold by owners, with families left behind. And a particular branch of serfdom was military service: those conscripted were considered as good as dead.

That disregard for the individual has echoed through time, and is reflected in the attitude of Russian commanders towards their subordinates that could be summed up in the well-worn phrase: “Don’t spare the soldiers, Russian women will give birth to more.” Attributed to Marshal Zhukov, Stalin’s most celebrated commander during the Nazi invasion, the attitude was rooted in modern Russia’s geopolitical realities. Active expansionism, particularly after the 16th-century conquests of Ivan the Terrible, led to consistently larger populations compared with Russia’s immediate Western neighbours. Given the low technical and industrial development of the Russian state, rulers leaned on manpower to win wars.

The pattern was established in Ivan the Terrible’s Livonian War, whose enormous military and civilian casualties depopulated Russia and plunged it into large-scale political turmoil. Later, in Peter the Great’s army, conscripts were recruited for life, and discharge typically came in the form of death. Know much about Peter’s wars and that’s unsurprising. Fought against Sweden for 21 years, the Tsar’s Great Northern War “axed the window into Europe” as Russia’s newly acquired dominance in the Baltics was rendered in the Soviet textbooks. Yet that came at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives lost in battles and famines.

That model, in which rulers treated their subjects as disposable tools, was reproduced by the Bolsheviks. While proclaiming unity between the Communist Party and the people, the Soviet state was its people’s worst enemy, grinding down millions in civil wars, purges, repressions, artificial famines. The Nazi invasion did not stop those murderous practices. The only thing the poorly armed Red Army feared more than the Germans was their own NKVD secret police units, ordered to shoot anyone retreating, reflecting Stalin’s infamous “Not a step backward” order. The USSR endured the highest human losses of any nation during the Second World War.

This long history of bloodshed is essential to understand the Russian war calculus. Dying for the motherland is not a natural state of being; few are born martyrs, and Russians are no exceptions. Recognising this, the state invests heavily in cultivating values of self-sacrifice. “We need one victory, one for all of us — for any price,” went a line from a widely popular Soviet-era song about the Great Patriotic War, which I heard countless times growing up in the USSR. Our field trips were not to nearby play parks, but to memorials like Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, a battle which claimed the lives of 1.1 million Soviet soldiers. “The Soviet nation is the nation of victors,” was another maxim that appeared most frequently in the shape of faded billboards adorning our grim apartment buildings. “Russians don’t surrender,” the boys playing war in our communal yards shouted, a staple of countless movies.

These Soviet “memes” remain ever-present in Putin’s war on Ukraine, adjusted to a post-modern, post-truth world. The amount of state muscle that goes into the 9 May celebration of Soviet victory over Germany — complete with parades, reenactments, and “immortal regiment” processions — would make you think the war finished last month. Even kindergarteners are indoctrinated to be defenders of the motherland, encouraged by their teachers to play games like “mine the field” and “gather the munitions”. All the while, at the real front, soldiers often commit suicide rather than surrender; the cultural tropes used to shape the consciousness of Soviet citizens are revived and reapplied. Russian society tolerates the heavy toll of the Ukrainian war because, in their traumatised collective memory, “this is how it’s always been”.

There’s something different about this war, though, even with the adjustment to Russian history baggage and the way it’s exploited in propaganda. Unlike the country’s other modern quagmire, the decade-long Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which hovered menacingly over my male high school classmates — “If you don’t get into a university, you’ll be drafted!” their parents warned them — this war is a matter of patriotic pride for many Russians. Having lost about 10 times more people in the three years of the Ukraine war than in the 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan, Russians gamely knit anti-tank nets, sing ecstatically “I’m Russian” and line up to sneer at captured Nato weapons. Even those tired of war want to end it on Russia’s terms. According to a recent poll by Levada, for instance, two-thirds of Russians who want the war to end are against returning occupied territories to Ukraine.

“Dying for the motherland is not a natural state of being; few are born martyrs, and Russians are no exceptions.”

To be sure, dissent is deadly in a totalitarian country. Initial anti-war protests were ruthlessly suppressed, and draconian laws were enacted shortly after the start of the “special military operation” — imposing harsh prison sentences for the mere act of calling the war a war. About a million people left the country. Yet the majority stayed, and now either actively support the war or try to live as though it has nothing to do with them. Their acquiescence gives their leader carte blanche to continue until Ukraine surrenders, and to throw more of their own into the war’s meat grinder. In his customary New Year address to the nation, on the eve of 2025, Putin pledged “to only go forward” and promised that “everything will be well” before declaring 2025 the Year of the Defender of the Motherland.

This collective indifference to human losses may be baffling to Ukraine’s Western allies, who operate on the assumption that their soldiers’ lives are valuable, and casualties should be minimised. Russia’s strategic interest is one consideration.

For the Russian state, near 700,000 dead and wounded to capture one-fifth of Ukraine — a region home to millions of people and rich in critical resources like coal and lithium — might just seem like a decent bargain.

As for the Russians themselves, their jingoistic bullishness is surely fuelled by the fact that many casualties are simply out of sight. The lion’s share comes from the lower rungs of Russian society, including impoverished ethnic minorities and convicts. Most have enlisted voluntarily: the state offers generous payments to “contract fighters” (kontraktniki) exceeding the average salaries in their regions by the magnitude of tenfold or more.

That the life expectancy of a recruit in Ukraine is measured in weeks doesn’t seem to deter these lower-class volunteers. And their death at the front will allow their families to get “coffin money” in their place. It surely helps Putin, too, that these troops, which are running low, are reinforced with fighters from North Korea, avoiding another mobilisation.

And woe betide any lower-class trooper who tries to back out of service after signing up. “You can get discharged only if you don’t have two legs, two arms or a head,” is how one unfortunate sums up the situation. According to the same kontraktnik, he and his comrades were forced into suicidal missions, taking wild chances because otherwise they’d get killed by their own officers. Almost a century on, little has changed from Stalin’s “Not a step backward” order.

This kind of adversary presents a formidable challenge to Ukraine and any European country that Russia might target. From a military standpoint, it means that the “peace dividend”, earned from winning the Cold War, is long spent. Europe will need to rebuild its conventional forces to prepare for a conflict with an adversary that doesn’t value the lives of its soldiers. This means mass producing munitions, mines, artillery shells and drones. European nations may also have to consider the unthinkable — reinstating the draft. Any hope for a peace deal with Russia and a return to pre-2022 “business as usual” is a delusion.

Politically, meanwhile, Europe must find a way to confront a revanchist regime that is likely to persist even once Putin exits the stage. As long as Russia remains an expansionist empire, it will pose a constant threat to smaller democratic states on its borders. It will continue to meddle in internal affairs and the political process of Western democracies. It will continue building alliances like the Brics, attracting more states from the Global South, dissatisfied with American hegemony. The only happy ending for this story is if Russia stops being a “nation of serfs, a nation of masters” as the Romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov once put it. Only then can it learn to recognise the value of individual human life, both inside and outside its borders. But if history is our guide, don’t expect that moment to arrive anytime soon.


Anastasia Edel is a Russian-born American writer and social historian. She’s the author of Russia: Putin’s Playground: Empire, Revolution and the New Tsar

AEdelWriter