The kill ratio that can sink Putin’s war

Kyiv’s army is eliminating 25 Russians for each Ukrainian lost on the front line - AFP

At moments last year – in spring, and then again in autumn – “Navigator” worried that the Ukrainian front line might collapse. Today, he holds a rosier view. In the bloodiest sections around the eastern city of Pokrovsk, Kyiv’s army is eliminating 25 Russians for each comrade they lose.

“Objectively, it’s pure mathematics,” explains the chief of staff of the Dovbush Hornets, a drone battalion in the 68th Infantry Brigade. Russia cannot sustain an invasion at this rate.

In all wars, defenders can expect the casualty ratio to lean in their favour – perhaps three or four to one. But drones have turned swaths of eastern Ukraine into a “kill zone”, where one step into the open invites a lethal strike.

 

Combine that revolution with Vladimir Putin’s disregard for the lives of his soldiers, and the result is a charnel house of historically freakish proportions.

Still, the Russian president has been allowed to shape impressions of the war. In his telling, Moscow’s superior reserves of manpower and weaponry lead to an inevitable victory, with only the date of Ukraine’s surrender – and the number of its soldiers killed – yet to be decided.

On Dec 9 last year, Donald Trump echoed that position: “They’re much bigger, they’re much stronger,” he told a reporter. “At some point, size will win.”

But on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, that prospect appears a long way off.

 

Since 2024, Moscow’s forces have captured around 3,130 square miles of Ukrainian territory, or 1.4 per cent of the country, according to analysis by the Black Bird Group, a Helsinki-based think tank. In that time, they have sustained more than 800,000 casualties, bringing the total from the invasion to 1.2 million.

Over the last two months, the army has started to lose more men than it can recruit, according to Western officials said. The gap now stands around 10,000.

The economy is bleeding, too. Moscow pours around half the state budget into the armed forces and servicing the debt taken on to fund the war, which by itself will absorb more cash this year than education and healthcare combined. Inflation is in double digits. Tank factories stay open 24/7 while carmakers shut their doors, and the only job market not facing rising rates of unemployment offers a peculiarly bloody form of “termination”.

Thanks to Western sanctions and falling prices, Russia’s budget receipts for oil and gas halved in the year to January. “We always said, ‘No, nothing is collapsing’,” says Pyotr Mironenko, co-founder of The Bell, a Russian website run by exiled financial journalists. “But I think we’re closer to that moment.”

 

To be sure, Ukraine’s military suffers from fatigue, shortages of manpower and a high awol rate. Cities endure prolonged blackouts after a year-long bombardment of 55,000 Russian drones and missiles knocked out nearly half of the country’s electricity-generating capacity.