In the early hours of February 24 2022, standing on the freezing roof of a hotel in Kyiv, the idea that Russia would launch a full-scale assault on Ukraine, despite a troop buildup on the border, still seemed almost impossible to imagine.
Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin strongman, had developed a taste for wielding Russia’s hard power. Putin’s wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, as well as military action in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, had delivered him success at a relatively low cost.
But invading the second biggest country in Europe, after Russia itself, would be a potentially catastrophic prospect which would, surely, give a cold strategist like Putin pause for thought.
The past four years of conflict have exposed more than one faulty assumption, not least the previously widespread belief even among Kyiv’s allies that Ukraine would be too weak, too disorganized, to resist a full-scale invasion.
Likewise, the reputation of invincibility surrounding Russia’s vast military has also been dented.
According to research by one think tank, The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), when the Kremlin launched what it dubbed its “Special Military Operation,” it expected its forces to take control of Ukraine within just 10 days.
More than 1450 days later, that timeframe looks hopelessly naïve and has proved to have been a fundamental miscalculation that has taken a devastating toll in pain, destruction and bloodshed.
The true cost is, of course, carefully suppressed in a Russia where information is under increasingly tight control. Official casualty figures are kept strictly out of the public gaze, although estimates from multiple sources indicate losses that are eye-wateringly high.
Latest research from the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), for example, puts the number at nearly 1.2 million Russian dead and injured since the full-scale invasion was launched.
That appalling body count – which does not, of course, include the staggering Ukrainian toll, thought to be between 500,000 and 600,000 people – is higher than all casualties suffered by “any major power in any war since World War II”, the CSIS report says.
Of that estimate, as many as 325,000 Russians, the report adds, have been killed in the past four years – for some context, that’s triple the combined losses inflicted on US forces in every war Washington has fought since 1945, including on the battlefields of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
And as the Ukraine conflict enters a fifth year, the military bloodbath – as President Donald Trump frequently points out – is only getting worse, climbing steadily upwards as every month passes.
Again, the Kremlin has not confirmed the figures, but Ukrainian officials recently boasted of killing 35,000 Russian troops in December alone. The stated aim of military planners in Kyiv is now to kill Russian soldiers faster than new recruits – who are for the moment mainly volunteers – can be trained and sent into battle.
“If we reach 50,000, we will see what happens to the enemy. They view people as a resource and shortages are already evident,” Ukraine’s defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, told journalists at a recent news conference.
In more ways than one, this war has mutated into an ugly numbers game.
