Ukraine War Turns Two—What Russia has Lost
Recent Russian successes on the Ukrainian battlefield should not obscure a much larger truth: Russia has lost far more than Putin or anyone else thought possible when the war started 2 years ago.
Two years ago this weekend, as Russian forces streamed across the border with Ukraine from the north, east, and south, many feared (and the Kremlin believed) that the Russian army would occupy much of Ukraine within weeks—deposing a democratically elected government, installing a new puppet regime, and ensuring Ukraine’s future would once again be dictated by Moscow. For Ukraine and its western backers, the best that could be hoped for was a long counter-insurgency that over many years and at great costs might oust the occupier from Ukrainian lands—much as the mujahideen had done to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Reality turned out much better for Ukraine—and much worse for Russia.
To be sure, the costs to the Ukrainian people has been incomprehensible—with millions fleeing abroad, hundreds of thousands fighting and many dying at the front, and tens of thousands injured and killed by indiscriminate shelling. But the country and nation have survived, in some important ways stronger now than before. Its people are united in a singular determination to expel Russian forces from their territory and secure their complete independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. A once divided nation, still uncertain about its true identity, is now united in the proudly patriotic unity of the Ukrainian nation. And where many long doubted the wisdom of choosing to become part of the West by joining NATO and the European Union, Ukraine’s western destination is now undisputed and clear.
Meanwhile, Russia has lost a great deal. Its army has been virtually destroyed. Its political isolation has grown, especially in Europe. Its economy has suffered from the most severe sanctions regime ever imposed on a single nation. And its society is kept in check only through an ever more brutal repression by security forces.
A war that was started to demonstrate Russia’s global greatness has in fact demonstrated the exact opposite: Russia’s walloping weakness. Let us count the ways.
Strategic Failure
All wars, the great German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz taught us, are conducted for political ends. Putin’s war on Ukraine is no different. Starting with the annexation of Crimea ten years ago, Russia’s assault on the country has had the overriding purpose of preventing Ukraine from joining the West and ensuring its leadership would fall under Moscow’s effective control. This war is therefore less about territory than about who controls the future destiny of Ukraine—Moscow or Kyiv.
By that measure, Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has been an utter strategic failure. Far from falling under Moscow’s sway, Ukrainians have united around the central proposition that it is they, and they alone, who get to decide their country’s future. If before the full-scale invasion two years ago some Ukrainians might have sympathized with the idea of being aligned with Russia (if still independent), after the brutality that was first exposed in Bucha a month after the war started, no Ukrainian would ever again support such an idea. Ukrainians want to be independent. They want to be sovereign. They want complete control over every inch of their territory, including Crimea. They want the right to decide who to align with and who to align against. They want to be in NATO.
Not only did Putin lose Ukraine by going to war, he also ensured that Russia is now in the weakest strategic position in Europe it has ever been. Far from weakening and undermining NATO, Russia’s actions have made the 75-year old Alliance stronger than at any time since the end of the Cold War. NATO is bigger, with Finland and Sweden abandoning decades and centuries-long commitments to neutrality by joining the Alliance. NATO is stronger, with its European members boosting annual spending on defense by 62 percent in real terms since Russia first invaded Ukraine a decade ago, including by 21 percent just in the last two years. And NATO is closer. With the accession of Finland and Sweden, all Arctic nations aside from Russia are now members of the Alliance. The Baltic Sea has turned into a NATO lake. The border separating Russia and NATO has more than doubled in size. And large new deployments of NATO forces, including by all of NATO’s strongest militaries, are now stationed from the Baltic to the Black and Mediterranean Seas.
Some might argue that the strategic losses in Russia’s west have been compensated by gains in Russia’s east. No doubt, Moscow’s relations with Beijing, already strong before the war, have been strengthened since. Russia has also bolstered relations with Iran and North Korea. But in each instance, these moves reflect its essential weakness rather than strength.
When, before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin and Xi Jinping decided that their countries’ partnership was one “without limits,” once the war started Putin learned that it wouldn’t be a partnership of equals. Far from it, Russia has grown increasingly dependent on China—as an export destination for oil and gas at sharply reduced prices, as a supplier of electronics and other civilian and dual-use technologies to support its defense industry, and as an actor that doesn’t criticize Russia publicly for violating a core principle of international law. But China has refused to supply Russia with any lethal weapons, many of its companies have been reluctant to get too engaged with Russia for fear of being sanctioned by the United States and European Union, and it has provided no access to foreign currencies, relying on barter and the use of local currencies instead.
As for its burgeoning relations with North Korea and Iran, those too are a sign of Russia’s weakness. Moscow was forced to turn to Tehran and Pyongyang as the only source for weaponry once its own stocks had been depleted. For a country long among the largest suppliers of weapons to countries around the world now having to rely on international pariah states for artillery shells, drones, and ballistic missiles is truly embarrassing.
In short, it is hard to think of another time in modern history when a major power so miscalculated its strategic interests. But that’s hardly the only failure Russia has suffered. The war has also cost it much in terms of military and economic power.
Military Loses
The army that defeated Napoleon and Hitler has not fared well against a nation one-quarter its size and totally unprepared to defend itself against the onslaught that arrived two years ago. In fact, that army has been destroyed—none of the combat forces and units that started the full-scale invasion remain intact. Russia has suffered some 350,000 killed and wounded—more than its entire army deployed before the war. About two-thirds of its armored vehicles (including 2,700 tanks) have been destroyed. And one-third of the Black Sea fleet has been eliminated.
Since its initial surprise attack against Ukraine, Russia lost about 50 percent of the territory it seized in its full-scale invasion, including critical control of major cities like Kharkiv, Kherson, and Kyiv. For the past 16 months, it has fought a smaller Ukrainian army to a standstill along a 1,000 kilometer front. Brutal fighting throughout all of 2023 and into 2024 resulted in very little territory changing hands. Massive waves of
men and firepower needed many months to take control of the towns of Bakhmut last May and Avdiivka this month—the latter having been a target of Russian forces ever since its troops first invaded Ukraine in 2014. And the costs of those victories were exceedingly high: nearly 50,000 Russian troops killed. All in all, the dynamic and bloody war along the frontline has produced remarkably little change in territorial control since Ukraine reconquered the city Kherson in November 2022.
Economic Crisis
Much has been made recently of the fact that Russia’s economy grew in 2023 and, according to the latest estimates by the International Monetary Fund, will continue to grow at a rate eclipsing all G7 countries. This, despite the fact that the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia imposed the toughest sanctions regime on Russia ever imposed on any country. But hopes that sanctions would strangle Russia’s economy, let alone lead to an end of the war, were always overblown. Sanctions take time to bite, and trying to cut a major economy like Russia’s, which is one of the largest energy exporters in the world, off from the international market was always going to be difficult.
Yet, even though the Russian economy has grown faster and recovered quicker than expected when the severe sanctions were imposed, the medium to long-term prospects for Russia’s economy are far from bright. One reason is the structural changes that have occurred since Russia’s invasion. Its finances have effectively been cut off from the international financial system—at least as far as the dollar, euro, and other major western currencies are concerned. Russian exports of gas to Europe have come to a virtual halt, with only a limited amount of gas reaching Europe in liquified form. Europe’s dependence on Russian gas has effectively ended, and until Moscow builds new pipelines or constructs new LNG terminals, that gas will stay in the ground—worthless, until sold. Though Moscow has exploited various loopholes to overcome some of the technology sanctions, those will be tightened over time and the overall cost of the sanctions regime to the Russian economy remains great and will continue to grow. Finally, western investment in Russia has come to a complete halt, while most western companies have exited the Russian market. They won’t return.
Aside from these structural changes, Russia’s economy as a whole is increasingly distorted. The main reason Russia’s economy has continued to grow is that it has been able to sell oil (mainly in China and India), though at below market prices, and diverted much of its productivity to a war economy, boosting spending on defense to about one-third its annual budget.
In the short term, this form of military Keynesianism has boosted economic growth. But is has done so in a way that greatly distorts the overall economy. So far, more than 750,000 men have been sent to the front (more than forty percent of whom have been killed and wounded). Another 500,000 or more men of prime working age have fled Russia to avoid being sent to the front. And, yet another half a million new jobs have been created in the defense sector. That’s close to two million people; none of whom are contributing to the civilian economy in a meaningful way. Labor shortages, accordingly, have boosted wages and demand. Meanwhile, sanctions have increased the price of imports and put pressure on the ruble, which fell 30 percent against the dollar in 2023. All of this has put pressure on prices and threaten to overheat the economy, forcing the Russian central bank to raise interest to 16 percent, even higher than in Ukraine.
In short, while Russia’s GDP has grown in the last two years, the main reason is its new addiction to military spending (complementing its long-time addiction to oil and gas exports to generate government revenue). That’s hardly the sign of a healthy economy—or a sustainable one. While sanctions may not prevent Russia from churning out more war material, much of it is of questionably quality and in any case does little to sustain the overall welfare of its civil society—which is increasingly suffering as a result. Thus, with much of Russia experiencing a very bad winter, the dilapidated state of Soviet-era infrastructure proved unable to provide heating and hot water to people even in Moscow and St. Petersburg—long the privileged cities in the country.
Political Instability
The worsening economic conditions for the average Russian citizen hasn’t translated into political unrest inside the country. At least not yet. Putin governs with an iron fist, designed to smother any opposition as soon as it appears. Just last week, hundreds of people were arrested when they laid flowers or took other peaceful actions to mourn the death of Alexei Navalny. Censorship, repression, imprisonment, even murder is increasingly the core modus operandi of the Putin regime. Any sign of opposition is thwarted. A candidate securing the requisite 100,000 signatures to appear on the ballot for next month’s presidential election is immediately disqualified. And even a prisoner in a Siberian penal colony is deemed too large a threat to be allowed to live.
These are signs not of strength, but of a deep insecurity at the very core of the regime. For many years, Putin has been spooked by the possibility that the people might get a voice and express views and sentiments different from his own. Ever since the colored revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine in the early years of this century, and especially after the widespread protests in Russia prior to his return to the presidency in 2012, Putin has feared the will of the people—the Russian people who he claims to represent as a historic figure of greatness.
The war represents a new battlefront Putin fears. He knows that it was the mothers of soldiers and their silent protests that forced the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan in 1989. That’s why he still calls what is happening a “special military operation” and not the biggest war in Europe since 1945. And it is why he has refused to call for a full-scale mobilization, and relied on sending prisoners, and recruiting ethnic minorities and poorer, less educated people in the hinterlands to the fight at the front.
But the war in all its manifestations—starting with the many men who will never come home and the even greater number returning without an arm or a leg—is coming home to Russia. And sooner or later people will ask: Why? Why are we suffering and losing our brothers, fathers, and sons? Why are we spending on a war rather than building at home? Why should one man have all this power?
And Putin will not have any answers.
Two years into this war—or ten, really—Ukraine may not yet be winning. But one thing is clear: Russia has already lost.