'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.
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.
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.
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SubscribeThis is pure guff.
In 2022 Russia arrested 200 people for what they had written on the internet. The UK arrested over 3000! Authoritarian?? Who?? NCHI anyone??
This horrible war was caused by NATO (Org. that allowed the US to seemingly act multilaterally) meddling in Ukraine and freaking the Russians out. We’ve been at it since 2008.
There is a huge mainly untold story behind this conflict that most people are not aware of in the west due to the appalling state of the MSM here. Like Covid, it will come out slowly when this ends.
Ultimately, we want to break Russia up and emasculate it with a weak liberal democracy and a blizzard of international laws and financial ‘treaties’. Why? Because we care about Russians? We believe in freedom and democracy? …. No, they are soundbites for the sheeple … we want/need access to Russias vast range of resources and commodities (that’s why BlackRocks all over Ukraine like a rash) but on our terms, not Putins.
We also want to control the Artic and pressure China. Win win.
So, we tried to use the Ukrainians as a battering ram to see what would happen. You never know it might have weakened Russia/Putin. It failed badly. Still, there are always the 18 year olds to murder … but Zelenskys not playing ball on this one …yet.
This will be the end of western military adventures for a while I think.
“This is pure guff”
I’m glad you warned me about what you were going to write.
Well said, Sir.
Just remind us – which country shoots journalists who upset the President ?
The only “military adventure” going on here is Russia’s. If we stick to the job (defending free and independent countries from tyrants), it will indeed be the last hurrah for the Russian empire. And hopefully a better future for the Russians.
“Journalists who upset the President”? I assume you are talking about public truth-tellers. But still, who are you talking about? Julian Assange? Tommy Robinson? Edward Snowden? Matt Taibbi? Andy Ngo? Tucker Carlson? Alex Jones? Gonzalo Lira? Glenn Greenwald? ALL have been fired, attacked, cancelled and censored in the U.S. and/or Britain at one time or another (Lira was murdered by the Ukrainians). Several have been imprisoned for years. Which ones are you referencing?
A vanishingly small percentage of people still believe the Kremlin’s narrative on Ukraine.
I think you need to get out more.
Merkel admitted the delay in implementing the Minsk Agreements was so Ukraine could rearm.
And she was believed. Funny, because she is a Russian speaker as well.
Who’s paying your wages, Vlad?
Whoever it is, they’re not getting their money’s worth.
Stop with the childish ad hominems and counter my points Rob. Can you? Do you know enough? Or have you been so emotionally captured (Langley have large departments working only on that 24/7) that you are no longer able to process information that might challenge the moral certainty of your warm fuzzy worldview? I fear you’ll have to deal with a bucket load of cognitive dissonance shortly.
It will continue to meddle in internal affairs and the political process of Western democracies.
That would be the US right
All absolutely right…except your last paragraph.
Honestly, the State Dept will find it difficult to spin this when it finally ends (Putin clearly won’t take the fall to save DC face) as it has cost so much and gone so badly. Looking at the front line today we are not far from a rout…. You’d think they might be a little hesitant after this catastrophe … But yes, maybe you’re right .. a new campaign against Iran is certainly not hard to imagine. However we need to remember alas that each enormously expensive failed exercise brings the West (as we know it) closer to its end.
There are some serious logic problems with this analysis. It presents conclusions without premises. And then a dose of self-pitying rhetoric on top.
Lift up the rock and take a peek.
Absolutely.
A good article – the historical analysis is sound. This disdain for human life and the individual is a persistent thread running through the history of the Russian state, broken only by brief periods where a more liberal path might have been taken (1860 – 1881, 1905 – 1917, 1991 – 2000). There is one major difference now which the author has not mentioned though, which is that Russia’s supplies of manpower are no longer inexhaustible. Stalin and Hitler between them used up an entire generation of young men between 1928 and 1953, and population growth never really recovered. The 1990s saw a further demographic dip because of economic chaos and collapse, combined with older social problems such as persistent (largely male) alcoholism. Now Russia suffers from the same low birthrate as most developed economies. The tragedy is that all these factors also apply to Ukraine, which had a much smaller population to begin with, and which unlike Russia has been sending many of its best and bravest to the front. They are not wasted or treated as disposable as Russian soldiers are, and they have tried to protect their youth, but the casualty rates, combined with the outflow of refugees, represent an existential demographic crisis for the country. And let’s be clear, all of this is the fault of Putin and the other creeps – Patrushev, Naryshkin, Shoigu – who surround him. He will go down in history as the greatest slaughterer of Slavs since Stalin.
Largely agree.
However, the good news from the Ukraine war is that we know that quantity alone is not sufficient to win. The Russians are proving to destruction the idea that they will win on numbers alone. Not if you have a brain dead, corrupt, incompetent military (and political leadership) with substandard kit and troops who don’t know why they are there and what they are really fighting for.
Absolutely we need to contain Russian imperialism and keep it in its box (just as we had to throughout the 1800s – e.g. the Crimean War). It is not a new policy. And is – as the author notes – necessary until Russia mends its ways (if it ever does).
And we need to point out to poorer countries around the world that it is indeed the Russians who are the imperialists now.
I disagree about Ukraine dying out. I suspect that in any partition of Ukraine, any Ukrainians in territory being ceded to Russia will leave for the remaining Ukrainian state to the west. The Russians will then – rightly – have to rebuild from scratch the mess they created.
Much of the fault lies with using the delay in implementing the Minsk Agreements to rearm Ukraine.
I’ve almost forgotten her name, but not quite!
Both Russia and Ukraine (and the US from the mid 1960s onwards and, by extension, to probably all countries now) have middle classes who won’t fight. The Ukrainians say they are trying to protect their young but what they really mean (and everyone knows it) is that their young middle class males won’t defend their country. Why in heaven’s name Europe came to the aid of a country whose young men won’t fight for it is something that will be discussed when the war ends.
“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“. I don’t know why it should be baffling. It is how Russia has always conducted itself (as the author eloquently points out).
“Ukraine’s western allies” are, unfortunately, not as well educated as Anastasia Edel.
Two years ago I remember reading in many places that for Russia, Ukraine would be “as bad as Stalingrad”. Yet Russians, even those sceptical of the current war, still think of Stalingrad as the finest hour in their nation’s history
Well, they did win at Stalingrad. I’ll give them that.
Ukraine teaches the west how to kill russians cheaply at scale. The west is ungrateful for that opportunity. Ukraine should be supported in expanding its capacity to do so and protect it’s own people and soldiers. That capacity is unfortunately needed to live in “peace” with russia and always has been.
I keep hearing about Russia’s vast reserves of manpower. India or China, fair enough. But Russia? 150 million people isn’t huge; it’s barely twice the population of the U.K.
People are going to be so shocked to find out what they are being kept from finding out, and the pressure to open up and tell the truth will come from the biggest Nato member! 🙂
It is in fact, it is just getting started… All of the globalist war mongering NGOs are starting to get defunded, and USAID officials are being put on “paid leave”.. The money trails are getting sniffed out!
There is a realization I’ve had recently is that Russia isn’t really a western country, the Russian culture is not a western culture. The fundamentals ideals of the West from the Enlightenment, with an emphasis on individual rights and the value of each person; however the Western tradition is one that was imported into Russian and was never something that was really part of the Russian psyche.
It thus behooves westerners to realize that Russia is more like an eastern country, with an emphasis on the good of the individual being subordinate to the good of the society, the importance of knowing your place and doing your job, and the inherit acceptance of autocracy. This can even be seen in the propaganda around sacrifice. In the west we view sacrifice as a path to glory, look at the Charge of the Light Brigade, but the Russian doesn’t emphasize how you can secure immortality and glory for yourself but your place as a member of the Russian people.
Until you understand that you can understand the Russian motivation or the way it operates with human lives being a resource to be used, it will be difficult to understand the reality of Russian motivation or behavior. They will pursue it long, however it turns out that this type of willingness to turn the ground red with blood does have its costs and can be overcome, it’s just often a terrifying cost especially when facing a country of 100 million.
I agree with what you say, but I can’t work out why you have only just realized it.
“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.”
Containment is the only answer, which requires a ramp-up of inventory, reactive capacity and western European sense of nationhood.
“Moscow” has not suffered 700,000 casualties. Most of the cannon fodder have come from the poor and distant regions and not from Moscow. The reality of war has to be kept from the people who keep Putin in power.
Nice history lesson, though a bleak outlook.
A very strong article, which shows the kernel of the Ukranian tragedy is Russian expansionism not western hubris. Russia was always going to do this.
But surely some Russians are more intelligent than this.
Probably. Its just that those Russians currently reside in Siberia, and don’t get out much.