Reports of Ukraine’s Demise Are Still Exaggerated
Four years after Russia began its invasion, some pundits are still forecasting doom and gloom. Never trust a weatherman.
AS A NEW WAR STARTS IN IRAN, the Russian war in Ukraine crossed the four-year mark last week. It’s an anniversary the official Russian media buried in almost complete silence, likely because it was so obviously inglorious: Even when Russian television reported on a post by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán castigating Volodymyr Zelensky as a warmonger, they cut off the opening line, noting that “the war between Ukraine and Russia began four years ago.” But the occasion also elicited some stock-taking in the international media, running the gamut from “Ukraine is losing” to “Russia is winning.”
Most prominent among these is a Foreign Affairs piece bluntly titled “Ukraine Is Losing the War” by Michael Desch, professor of international relations at the University of Notre Dame. Desch makes the familiar argument that Ukraine is significantly, even drastically, outmanned and outgunned (even with Western assistance) and that even the Ukrainians’ technological know-how and ingenuity cannot close the gap. His conclusion is predictable: Ukraine should yield to Russian demands and cede all of the Donetsk province, including the heavily fortified cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk—which Russia could not take without massive additional sacrifices of men and materiel.
Desch makes some valid points that have long worried Ukraine supporters (and which amount to another reason for stepping up aid). But some of his analysis is simply bizarre to anyone who follows the war news out of Russia. For instance:
Russia is fighting mostly with contract soldiers—people who have volunteered—and keeping conscripts away from the front. The result is more motivated Russian soldiers. So far, Moscow is not having much trouble meeting recruitment needs. Ukraine, in contrast, relies heavily on conscription.
Ukraine’s manpower problems, including desertion and low morale owing to sometimes heavy-handed conscription tactics, are hardly a secret. But Desch’s portrayal of “motivated” Russian volunteers is absurd. Independent Russian media such as Novaya Gazeta, now in exile, have published verified reports on the heavy pressure on Russian conscripts to “volunteer” for service in Ukraine and sign a contract once their year of compulsory service is up; recruitment tactics include everything from threats of prosecution on ginned-up charges to physical intimidation and outright psychological torture. One conscript says that “a sergeant fired a gun next to him and showed him a video of dead and wounded people, threatening that the same thing would happen to him if he didn’t sign.” The Russian military has also started coercive recruitment at colleges and universities, many of which have quotas for signing up “volunteers”—particularly drone operators. Some students are offered to enlist as an alternative to expulsion after failing exams, others in exchange for debt forgiveness, grants, and other perks. Just a few days ago, a viral video filmed in a transportation technology college in Novosibirsk showed the college director berating students for their reluctance to go to war: “Are you all cowards, sitting around and being afraid for your lives?”
Other targets of heavy-handed tactics intended to boost recruitment include Central Asian migrants working in Russia, convicts, detainees offered a chance to avoid trial by going to the frontlines—and foreigners, mostly from less developed countries, who are often tricked into signing up. Meanwhile, wounded soldiers are routinely “recycled” back to the front lines before they are fully recovered—in some cases, while still on crutches—and beaten or otherwise abused if they refuse to go.
None of this suggests a country or an army confident of its ability to recruit “motivated” volunteers, as Desch suggests. And Desch’s article has other blind spots. He argues, for instance, that Russia can absorb its higher casualties because of its larger population. (Desch cites estimates of some 219,000 Russian combat deaths and at least 87,000 on the Ukrainian side; the latest assessments put the fatalities at 275,000 to 325,000 for Russia and 100,000 to 120,000 for Ukraine.) But he does not mention that in 2025, when Russian forces made a concerted push to step up their offensive in Eastern Ukraine, casualty rates skyrocketed. There are reports that nearly 90,000 Russian soldiers may have been killed in just the first eight months of 2025. An intelligence assessment provided to the British military found that Russian casualties in the fighting over Kupiansk—a town Russia repeatedly claimed to have taken—exceeded Ukrainian ones a staggering 27-to-1.
In fact, Desch’s article treats facts the way Russian officers treat their conscripts. Russia’s GDP (in purchasing power parity) is more than ten times Ukraine’s, so it can spend more on defense easily. True enough, but Desch fails to account for Russia’s extensive borders with hostile or semi-hostile states that have to be defended; its enormous nuclear force that has to be upgraded, exercised, and guarded; the ever-rising salaries and benefits it has to offer to meet recruitment goals; and the other drains on its military budget that Ukraine doesn’t share. Nor does he consider that, as has been demonstrated time and again in this war, a ruble spent buying military equipment in Russia does not buy the same quality as an equivalent number of euros, pounds, or dollars spent on military equipment in the West.
The latest reason to question Desch’s confidence in Russia’s capacity to spend more on defense comes from Russian Prime Minister Sergei Mishustin, who reported to the State Duma last week that last year’s federal budget deficit, which had been projected at 1.17 trillion rubles, was actually 5.64 trillion rubles. This year’s deficit is projected to be 3.8 trillion rubles—you do the math.
I could go on.1 And even if Desch isn’t wildly overstating Russia’s capacity to out-spend Ukraine, money won’t buy victory for Russia in Ukraine any more than it did for the United States in Vietnam or Afghanistan.
A FAR MORE STRIDENT version of the “Ukrainian loss” narrative has been penned for Al Jazeera English by Leonid Ragozin, a Riga-based Russian émigré who writes extensively for American and European media. Ragozin valiantly strives to make the case that Russian political elites look at the war with “a sense of achievement.” (Yes, that’s why they were positively breaking out the champagne on Russian propaganda TV on February 22.) He also asserts that Russia’s leaders “have good reason to believe that the war is ending on their terms, perhaps even soon.”
Like Desch, Ragozin blithely waves aside the Russian death toll (without mentioning that when severely wounded men and missing men are counted, estimated casualty estimates range up to 1.2 million). He also suggests that Vladimir Putin’s failure to take Kyiv was not a failure because he never really wanted to take it—only to create “a tangible existential threat to the Ukrainian leadership in Kyiv” in order to strong-arm Ukraine into a new version of the 2015 Minsk agreements, which promised significant autonomy to the Russia-controlled Donetsk and Luhansk enclaves in Eastern Ukraine. But that’s pure, and dubious, speculation: The Russian offensive aimed at Kyiv in late February and March of 2022, including the assault on Hostomel Airport and the attempts to encircle the city, certainly looked serious—and likely had as its goal Zelensky’s removal and the installation of a puppet regime. (The most likely contender for its figurehead was pro-Kremlin Ukrainian pol and Putin crony Viktor Medvedchuk, then under arrest in Ukraine and later traded to Russia in a prisoner swap.)
Ragozin’s account has many other oddities. He mentions that the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive failed—but doesn’t say a word about that of 2022, which recaptured significant territories. He writes that “the Russians chose to regroup, abandoning loosely controlled and difficult-to-hold areas” to focus on the Donbas after the collapse of the Istanbul peace talks; in fact, Ukrainian forces had forced Russian troops out of the Kyiv area and from two other provinces (Sumy and Chernihiv) by April 4, 2022—more than a week before the Istanbul negotiations concluded in mid-April. He considers Putin’s formal annexation of four Ukrainian provinces as a Russian triumph, even though the capital city of one of those provinces, Kherson, was liberated by the Ukrainians less than six weeks after its annexation. He touts the fact that the Russian economy did not collapse under the weight of sanctions and trade embargoes, but does not mention that its war-fueled growth has stalled and even seems headed toward prolonged exhaustion. (Discounting Russian GDP growth that comes from military expenditures, the picture is even darker.)
Ragozin is correct when he says that after the failure of his initial shock-and-awe plan, Putin and his generals adapted to circumstances and shifted the focus to the grinding offensive in the Donbas. (TV-RAIN commentator Mikhail Fishman makes the same observation in his review of the four years of Putin’s war, which comes to the very different conclusion that “Putin is at a dead end.”) And it is almost certainly true that Putin, who has a complicated relationship with reality, believes he can view the war “with a sense of achievement.” But that hardly means it’s a rational view. The “achievements” include two new NATO members in Russia’s neighborhood (Finland and Sweden); the de facto dismantling of Russia’s fabled Black Sea Fleet (a third of its vessels were sunk by Ukrainian drones while the rest fled their Sevastopol base); a Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk province that led to a nearly eight-month occupation of Russian territory; the wrecking of Russia’s international standing, including the loss of allies or clients such as Syria and Armenia; increasingly frequent Ukrainian strikes on targets inside Russia … the list could go on. Putin may be a “happy grandpa,” as he was once dubbed by his late henchman-turned-nemesis Yevgeny Prigozhin, but even previously loyal segments of the Russian elites are showing signs of discontent.
And what does Russia have to show for all this? Since the beginning of 2024, it has captured some 1.4 percent of Ukrainian territory, most of it reduced to charred ghost towns; its total area of control in the country is around 20 percent, with much of that in Russian hands since 2014. What’s more, neither Desch nor Ragozin mentions the fact that the Russian offensive in Eastern Ukraine is currently stalled. That’s partly because Elon Musk’s move to block Russian forces from stealing access to the Starlink satellite network, coupled with Russia’s own crackdown on uncensored digital platforms, has wrought havoc on Russian frontline communications. But the other reason is that the literally suicidal pace of the Russian offensive simply couldn’t be sustained for long.
Whether Ukraine will keep the initiative remains to be seen—but a turnaround in Ukraine’s favor on the front lines is an odd time to proclaim a Ukrainian loss or Russian “vindication.”
RAGOZIN IS FAIRLY UPFRONT ABOUT his strong resentment toward Ukraine and its supporters over many Ukrainians’ lack of friendliness toward the liberal Russian opposition. By contrast, Desch sounds sympathetic to Ukraine’s quest for independence, though he too seems unreasonably and unrealistically credulous toward pro-Russia narratives. Thus, in an October 2023 Harper’s article, he blames Zelensky’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements and achieve a lasting peace with Russia after his election in 2019 entirely on pressure from far-right nationalist forces. A far more likely explanation for Zelensky’s change of heart is that he realized Russia could not be relied on to abide by those agreements, which it repeatedly and brazenly violated (above all, by continuing to sponsor pro-Russia insurgents in Eastern Ukraine).
Today, Ukraine is once again being criticized for being too unyielding in negotiations with Russia. Desch claims that Kyiv clings to a maximalist and unfeasible vision of victory that involves recapturing all occupied Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. But, in fact, Ukraine already has offered to cede not only Crimea but occupied lands in Eastern Ukraine; the stumbling block is the Kremlin’s demand for lands, towns, and fortifications in the Donetsk region, which Russia hasn’t managed to seize over the course of four years. Meanwhile, Russia also continues to staunchly oppose any meaningful security guarantees for Ukraine after the end of the war—such as the presence of U.S. or NATO troops as a shield against another Russian invasion—and its leaders consistently suggest that they have not backed away from the goal of regime change in Kyiv.
If the Ukraine-blaming narratives are misguided, so are the narratives of doom. Today, when the world is in flux, Ukraine’s supporters must continue to push for either a peace agreement that will create real security, or aid that will allow Ukraine to continue its defense.
Okay, I will. Desch writes:
Ukraine has only about 300,000 troops on the frontline, or 483 troops per mile. During the Cold War, Western planners thought that a successful defense of the border between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would require approximately one division (25,000 soldiers) per 16 miles, or some 1,500 soldiers per mile. By that rule of thumb, Ukraine has less than half the number of soldiers it needs to successfully defend the frontline.
A professor of international relations should be able to distinguish the Soviet Army with its Warsaw Pact allies from the Russian Army of the 2020s, supplemented by the odd North Korean unit. For one thing, the latter is just a fraction the size of the former.