Key Points – A new Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report challenges the narrative that Russia is winning in Ukraine, presenting data showing its military is performing poorly.
-Since January 2024, Russian forces have achieved only minimal territorial gains at an extremely slow rate of advance (slower than WWI’s Battle of the Somme), while suffering staggering casualties approaching one million and disproportionately high equipment losses.
-The report argues that despite Putin’s belief he can win a war of attrition, Russia’s economic vulnerabilities mean the US “holds many of the cards” and could leverage them, particularly through tougher energy sanctions.
Russia Isn’t Winning the War in Ukraine
A recent report from the Washington, DC Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) offers this assessment of the more than three year-long war in Ukraine:
“Russian military forces have failed to effectively advance along multiple axes in Ukraine, seized limited territory, lost substantial quantities of equipment relative to Ukraine, and suffered remarkably high rates of fatalities and casualties since January 2024, according to new CSIS data. While some policymakers and experts argue that Russia holds “all the cards” in the Ukraine war, the data suggests that the Russian military has performed relatively poorly on the battlefield.”
The authors of the report point out first that multiple voices continue to claim that Russia is winning the war and that Ukraine is losing.
They state that in order to assess which side retains any advantage or the direction of any trends that could be used to forecast the eventual outcome, a set of key indicators must be examined.
These indicators focus on Russia’s battlefield performance, and they are: the relative rate of advance of Russian forces, the size of Russian territorial gains, the scope of equipment losses, and fatality and overall casualty rates.
Overall, they state the evidence suggests that Russia has largely failed to achieve its primary objectives and has suffered high costs. In fact, Russia might very well be losing based on such metrics.
Russian Progress (Or Lack Thereof)
Analysing those indicators, the authors come up with a surprising set of conclusions:
-Russian forces have advanced only 50 meters daily in areas like Kharkiv. This is a slower rate than during the Somme offensive in World War I, where French and British forces advanced an average of 80 meters per day.
-Russian rates of advance have also been significantly slower than offensives like Galicia in 1914 (1,580 meters per day), Gorzia in 1916 (500 meters), Belleau Wood in 1918 (410 meters), Leningrad in 1943 (1,000 meters).
-Russia’s seizure of approximately 5,000 square kilometers of territory in Ukraine since January 2024 has been miniscule.
-Overall, it amounts to less than 1 percent of Ukrainian territory.
-What gains there are have been in the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv Oblasts.
-Russia’s almost symbolic advances “are particularly noteworthy compared to its conquest of 120,000 square kilometers during the first five weeks of the war and Ukraine’s recapture of 50,000 square kilometers in the spring of 2022,” reada the study.
-Russia has seen massive quantities of equipment lost across land, air, and sea domains, which reflects the mounting and crippling levels of matériel toll from Moscow’s attrition campaign.
–Russian equipment losses have been significantly higher than Ukrainian losses, varying between a ratio of 5:1 and 2:1 in Ukraine’s favor.
-Moscow’s casualties will hit the 1 million mark in the summer of 2025. “Russia has suffered roughly five times as many fatalities in Ukraine as in all Russian and Soviet wars combined from the end of World War II and the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. In addition, Russian fatalities in Ukraine (in just over three years) are 15 times larger than the Soviet Union’s decade-long war in Afghanistan and 10 times larger than Russia’s 13 years of war in Chechnya,” the report reads.
Russia Does Not Hold the Cards
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intransigence in negotiations and maintaining his maximalist demands for Ukraine’s almost total capitulation tells us that he believes he can win this war of attrition.
He believes Ukraine will run out of bullets before Russia will run out of soldiers.
But this position assumes that Moscow can maintain its current war footing at this level indefinitely.
However, as more than one analyst has observed, Russia does not hold the cards to carry on in this manner indefinitely, perhaps not for much longer at all.
Referring to the CSIS report again, the economy is the most significant factor not in Russia’s favor.
Stubborn and persistent inflation, labor shortages, and almost no mechanisms to generate economic growth are beginning to be felt throughout the country.
Moscow’s economy is seriously exposed and over-dependent on oil and gas, which make up between 30 percent and 50 percent of Russia’s total federal budget revenue.
One analysis estimated that the US and its allies can afford to go after Russia’s energy economy. The secondary sanctions against Russia proposed by the US Congress would cause Kremlin oil revenues to drop by 20 per cent while raising gasoline prices in the United States by only 15 cents per gallon.
However, these and other weaknesses will only bring the war to an end if Washington takes real steps to take advantage of them.
Without the US creating serious levels of pain, “Putin will continue to drag the peace talks out, keep fighting, and wait for the United States to walk away,” concludes the report.
“The United States holds many of the cards in Ukraine. It just needs to start playing them.”
About the Author
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
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