Four years on, Russia is still paying for a fatal miscalculation in Ukraine

In the early hours of February 24, 2022, on the frozen roof of a hotel in Kiev, the idea emerged that Russia would launch a large-scale attack. UkrainianDespite the troop buildup at the border, this still seemed almost impossible to imagine.

Yes, Vladimir PutinThe Kremlin’s dictator had developed a taste for using Russia’s hard power. Putin’s wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria, as well as military campaigns in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, have brought him success at relatively low cost.

But invading Europe’s second-largest country after Russia would be a potentially disastrous prospect that would surely cause a cold strategist like Putin to consider it.

Apparently not, I remember thinking, struggling with my flak jacket as missiles rained down on the Ukrainian capital.

The conflict of the past four years has exposed multiple faulty assumptions; especially the previously widespread belief, even among Kiev’s allies, that Ukraine would be too weak and disorganized to resist an all-out invasion.

Likewise, the invincibility reputation of Russia’s massive army has been tarnished.

According to research by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a think tank, when the Kremlin launched what it called “Special Military Operation”, it expected its forces to take control of Ukraine in just 10 days.

More than 1450 days later, this time period seems extremely naive and has proven to be a fundamental miscalculation that took a devastating toll on suffering, destruction and bloodshed.

Casualties

Of course, in Russia, where information is increasingly under tight control, the true cost is carefully concealed. Although estimates from many sources show losses to be eye-wateringly high, official casualty figures are kept strictly secret from the public.

For example, the latest research from the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) puts the number at around 1.2 million Russian dead and wounded since the launch of the full-scale invasion.

That grim body count, which does not include the Ukrainian death toll thought to be between 500,000 and 600,000, is higher than any casualty suffered by “any major power in any war since World War II,” according to the CSIS report.

The report adds that from this estimate, some 325,000 Russians have been killed in the last four years; In some contexts, this is three times the total losses inflicted on U.S. forces in every war Washington has fought since 1945, including the battlefields of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

And as the Ukraine conflict enters its fifth year, the military carnage is getting worse, climbing steadily upwards month by month, as President Donald Trump has frequently pointed out.

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 military planners in Kiev is now to kill Russian soldiers faster than new recruits (currently mostly volunteers) can be trained and sent into battle.

“If we reach 50,000, we will see what will happen to the enemy. They see people as resources, and shortages are already obvious,” Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov told reporters at a recent press conference.

This war has become an ugly numbers game in many ways.

Economy

Whenever I visit Moscow, a city where many of my friends and colleagues have now abandoned or been excluded, it is striking how distant the brutal war in Ukraine seems.

On the surface at least, the Russian capital, flashy with its shops, cafes and traffic jams, is well insulated from the horrors of the front line, save for the occasional interception of Ukrainian drones that few Muscovites temporarily avoid thinking about.

After the short-term sanctions shock following the 2022 invasion, Russia’s military spending increased and its economy boomed.

Fueled by oil and gas exports, Russia has defied Western predictions of economic collapse and become the world’s 9th largest economy by 2025, ahead of Canada and Brazil, according to the International Monetary Fund. This was the 11th before the war in Ukraine began.

But there are signs of increasing financial distress linked to a distorted war economy.

One problem is the increasingly expensive practice of offering large signing bonuses to Russians who agree to join the military and even larger payments if they are killed in action.

In addition, the prioritization of military personnel recruitment and military industrial production has led to what the pro-Kremlin Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta called “severe labor shortages” in other key sectors.

“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.

The rising cost of food items has become an increasing focus of consumer complaints; cucumbers have become the newest lightning rod for popular discontent.

While official statistics show that cucumber prices have doubled since December, some stores are reportedly selling cucumbers at an even higher price; Wartime prices for the salad staple as Russia’s economy slows.

“The prices of cucumbers and tomatoes are exorbitant. They once said eggs were ‘gold’. Now they are cucumbers,” a woman calling herself Svetlana said in a rare public post directed at authorities.

Elsewhere, stories of economic hardship, from galloping inflation to restaurant closures and the knock-on effect of heavy tax increases, tell how Ukraine’s protracted war is now taking a heavy toll on Russian pockets at home.

international stance

The war has not been much of a boon for the Kremlin abroad, either.

One of the main reasons Russian officials say the invasion of Ukraine was launched in the first place was to stop further expansion of NATO.

The fact that Sweden and Finland joined the alliance as a direct result of full-scale occupation is a clear failure of this aim; Finland’s accession alone more than doubles the land border between Russia and NATO countries.

Moreover, Western sanctions and political isolation have forced Russia to turn eastward, especially towards China, on which it is increasingly dependent on basic trade, from energy exports to automobile and electronics imports, and all this has given Beijing a huge advantage over Moscow.

A recent report from the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) comments: “The relationship is unbalanced because Moscow is more dependent on Beijing than Beijing is on Moscow.”

The CEPA report stated that “Russia has clearly become a junior partner, primarily due to its limited economic alternatives.”

Moscow also appears unable to prevent the erosion of its traditional influence elsewhere.

In 2024, the Kremlin was forced to evacuate and grant asylum to its Syrian ally, Bashar al-Assad, as he was overthrown by rebel forces. The new president of Syria, where Russia still has two military bases, has repeatedly called for Assad’s extradition from Moscow.

Last summer, Russia stood by impotently as US and Israeli warplanes targeted the nuclear facilities of Iran, another important partner of Russia in the Middle East.

It also failed to prevent the capture of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, who has close ties to the Kremlin, by US troops in a raid on his bedroom in Caracas last month.

Even if Ukraine had not already been tense and deadlocked, Russia might never have prevented these events from developing.

But after four years of crushing war that dealt a terrible blow to Ukraine, Russia is exhausted at home and diminished on the international stage.

When I returned to the roof of that hotel in Kiev in February 2022, I, like many others, was wrong about the possibility of Putin ordering a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

But unfortunately we were right about the disastrous consequences of doing so – for the Ukrainians and Russians, of course – a prediction that unfortunately turned out to be all too accurate.

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