Ukrainians firing into Russian-controlled territory in the Donetsk region last week. Credit…Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Forty thousand Russian soldiers dead in less than six months of war. This astonishing claim made by the Ukrainian military on Wednesday is impossible to verify and far exceeds the estimates of the United States and Western allies.
But it aligns with Western assessments of the war’s high cost to the Russian military and underscores a central issue at this point in a conflict where both sides have suffered heavy losses.
Could Russia be nearing a point of exhaustion?
Although Ukraine’s Western allies have offered lower estimates of Russian deaths, with the most recent Pentagon estimate of 15,000 and the British saying it was probably closer to 25,000, there is agreement that their losses have reduced deeply.
“Russia has put on what I call a steamroller,” said Ben Barry, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, referring to its military strength, particularly in artillery. “We don’t know when Russia will run out of strength.”
Battlefield success is usually measured in terms of territorial gains and relative casualty figures. By the measure of seized territory, Moscow has gained ground since April, when Russian President Vladimir V. Putin made the eastern Donbas region the centerpiece of his campaign. The city of Lysychansk, the last Ukrainian stronghold in the Donbas province of Luhansk, fell this month.
Barry said the critical question was whether Moscow reaches a “tipping point,” a point where an “offensive runs out of supplies or has so many casualties that it cannot be sustained.”
There is some evidence that such a time may be approaching.
Russia’s offensive operations in eastern Ukraine have failed to make significant strategic gains in weeks. And after losing control of most of the southern Kherson region in the first weeks of the war, Ukrainian troops have now liberated 44 towns and villages along the border areas, about 15 percent of the territory , according to the military governor of the region.
Moscow may be deliberately ramping up slowly, but Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said the pace of its artillery strikes in Donetsk province had also slowed. Data from NASA satellites that detect fires and thermal anomalies around the world “show that Russian remote fire is greatly decreasing,” he said in a recent Twitter thread.
One possible explanation for the decline is the impact of recently deployed long-range weapons, and in particular HIMARS, truck-mounted multiple rocket launchers supplied by the United States. Ukraine has repeatedly claimed since the deployment that it has hit Russian munitions dumps behind the front lines.
Ukrainian forces have destroyed 50 Russian ammunition depots using the new weapons, Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said on Monday.
It was not possible to verify the accuracy of the claim, but the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, said at a news conference last week that the attacks are “degrading constantly the Russian ability to supply its troops. , command and control of its forces.”
A recent report by the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based research group, argued that frontline developments were less critical in the long term than the underlying strength of rival war machines. Issues such as training, logistics and supplies will ultimately determine the outcome of the conflict. Ukraine’s military has taken a brutal beating and its forces are also at risk of exhaustion.
“There is a need to ensure that Ukraine’s war effort can be sustained,” the report said. The alternative is “a symmetrical stalemate that can only lead to a conflict of attrition, with the risk of the exhaustion of Ukraine.”
What could be a major test of the two armies appears to be fast approaching. Ukrainian forces are massing troops around the Kherson region for a counteroffensive that could be the country’s most ambitious attempt yet to retake the territory. For Moscow, the battle will be a test of its resilience.