Standing on the cold roof of a Kiev hotel in the early hours of February 24, 2022, it still seemed almost unimaginable that Russia would launch a full-scale attack on Ukraine despite its massed troops on the border.
Yes, Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin has developed a taste for wielding Russian hard power. Putin’s wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, as well as military operations in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, have allowed him to succeed at relatively low cost.
But an invasion of Europe’s second-largest country, after Russia, would be a potentially catastrophic prospect that would surely give a ruthless strategist like Putin pause for thought.
Apparently not, I remember thinking, clutching my body armor as missiles rained down on the Ukrainian capital.
The past four years of conflict have exposed more than one faulty assumption, especially as even Kiev’s allies generally believed that Ukraine was too weak and too disorganized to withstand a full-scale invasion.
Likewise, the reputation of Russia’s massive military as invincible has been tarnished.
When the Kremlin launched what it called a “special military operation,” it expected its troops to take control of Ukraine in just 10 days, according to research by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank.
More than 1,450 days later, that timeline, which seemed hopelessly naive, proved to be a fundamental miscalculation that caused devastating pain, destruction and bloodshed.
casualties
Of course, in Russia, where information is increasingly tightly controlled, the real costs are carefully suppressed. Official casualty figures are strictly withheld from the public, although estimates from multiple sources indicate eye-popping losses.
For example, the latest research from the US Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) shows that Russia has caused nearly 1.2 million casualties since the launch of the full-scale invasion.
The CSIS report said the shocking death toll — which, of course, does not include the staggering death toll in Ukraine, which is believed to be between 500,000 and 600,000 — is higher than the number of casualties suffered by “any major nation in any war since World War II.”
A woman takes shelter in a subway station during an air raid siren during a Russian attack on Ukraine, as nighttime Russian drone and missile attacks continue across the country. – Alina Smutko/Reuters
The report adds that it is estimated that as many as 325,000 Russians have been killed in the past four years – for some perspective, that’s three times the combined losses of U.S. troops in every war Washington has fought since 1945, including in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
As the conflict in Ukraine enters its fifth year, as President Donald Trump has often noted, the military carnage has only gotten worse, and the situation has steadily escalated as the years have passed.
The Kremlin again did not confirm the figures, but Ukrainian officials recently boasted of killing 35,000 Russian soldiers in December alone. The stated goal of Kiev’s military planners is to kill Russian soldiers faster than new recruits, currently mostly volunteers, can be trained and put on the battlefield.
“If our numbers reach 50,000, we will see what happens to the enemy. They see personnel as a resource, and the shortage is already evident,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Mikhailo Fedorov told reporters at a recent press conference.
In many ways, this war has turned into an ugly numbers game.
economy
Whenever I visit Moscow, I am surprised to see how far away the brutal war in Ukraine seems, and how many friends and colleagues in the city now have left or are excluded.
On the surface at least, the glitzy Russian capital, with its shops, cafes and traffic jams, is well insulated from the horrors of the front lines, save for the occasional interception of a Ukrainian drone, about which, frankly, few Muscovites have given a passing thought.
After a brief sanctions shock following the 2022 invasion, Russia’s military spending surged and its economy boomed.
Driven by oil and gas exports, Russia has defied Western predictions of economic collapse to become the world’s ninth-largest economy in 2025, ahead of Canada and Brazil, according to the International Monetary Fund. That’s up from 11th place before the war in Ukraine began.
But there are growing signs that the financial pain associated with the distorted war economy is spreading.
One problem is the increasingly expensive practice of offering huge signing bonuses to Russians who agree to join the military, coupled with larger compensation if they are killed in action.
In addition, conscription and the prioritization of military production have led to what Russia’s pro-Kremlin newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta called “serious labor shortages” in other important industries.
“There are not enough machine operators or assembly workers in the economy. We need to find 800,000 blue-collar workers from somewhere,” the newspaper reported.
Spiraling food prices have become a growing focus for consumers, with cucumbers becoming the latest lightning rod for popular discontent.
Official statistics show cucumber prices have doubled since December, while some stores are reportedly selling them for even more – wartime prices for the salad staple – as Russia’s economy slows.
“The prices of cucumbers and tomatoes are ridiculously high. Once, they said eggs were ‘gold’. Now it’s cucumbers,” a woman who gave her name only Svetlana said in a rare public rebuke of the authorities online.
Elsewhere, the story of the economic downturn — from soaring inflation to restaurant closures to the knock-on effects of massive tax hikes — describes the myriad ways in which Ukraine’s protracted war is hitting the pockets of Russians at home hard.
international status
Nor has the war done much good for the Kremlin abroad.
Russian officials say preventing further NATO expansion is one of the main reasons for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The fact that Sweden and Finland joined the alliance as a direct result of a full-scale invasion was a clear failure of this goal, with Finland’s admission alone more than doubling the land borders between Russia and NATO countries.
What’s more, Western sanctions and political isolation are forcing Russia to turn east, especially toward China. Russia is now increasingly reliant on China for basic trade, from energy exports to imports of cars and electronics, all of which give Beijing leverage over Moscow.
A recent report by the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) commented: “The relationship is unbalanced, as Moscow is more dependent on Beijing than Beijing is dependent on Moscow.”
“Russia has clearly become a secondary partner, largely because of its limited economic options,” the CEPA report added.
Moscow also appears unable to prevent the erosion of its traditional influence elsewhere.
In 2024, when Syrian ally Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by rebels, the Kremlin was forced to withdraw and provide him with asylum. Russia still maintains two military bases in Syria, and the new president has repeatedly called for Assad’s extradition from Moscow.
Last summer, Russia stood idly by as U.S. and Israeli warplanes targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities and struck Iran, the Kremlin’s other key partner in the Middle East.
It also failed to protect Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, who has close ties to the Kremlin, from being captured by U.S. troops in a raid on his bedroom in Caracas last month.
Russia may never have been able to prevent these events from happening, even if it had not been in trouble in Ukraine.
But after four years of brutal war and horrific losses in Ukraine, Russia is exhausted at home and weakening on the international stage.
Back on that hotel rooftop in Kiev in February 2022, I, like many others, had been wrong about the likelihood that Putin would order a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
But unfortunately, while we were right about the catastrophic consequences of doing so — certainly for the Ukrainians, but also for the Russians — that prediction turned out to be far too accurate.
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