Ukraine’s strategy is to kill 50,000 Russian soldiers a month. A sign of confidence or an indicator of weakness?

Volodymyr Zelensky talks about Russia’s battlefield deaths and asked the new defense minister to prioritize the issue.

The Ukrainian leader said more than 35,000 Russian soldiers were killed or seriously injured in December alone and that the goal should be to raise that number even higher, to 50,000 per month.

“To turn the cost of war for Russia into a cost it cannot bear, thereby forcing peace through force” – this is the task the president has given him, Mykhailo Fedorov told reporters at his first briefing as Minister of Defense.

The claim that Russia suffered heavy losses is not new. A new report published last week estimated that 1.2 million Russians have been either killed, injured or missing since the all-out invasion of Ukraine almost four years ago; this was the highest number of casualties suffered by a major military power since World War II. The report puts the number of Ukrainian casualties between 500,000 and 600,000.

“The data suggest that Russia is not winning by much,” the report’s authors wrote.

Maybe not, but it would be a mistake for Ukraine’s supporters to get carried away as top officials from Ukraine, Russia and the United States prepare for the next round of direct talks in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday.

“Highlighting the large number of Russian deaths is an indication that Ukraine’s main strategy is attrition. But we need more than that if we want to move the dynamics of the war in a better direction,” a former Ukrainian official told CNN.

On the one hand, focusing on the headline figures offers an important perspective on Ukraine’s refusal to give up Donetsk as part of any “peace” agreement with Russia.

The logic behind Kiev’s stance is simple: Few Ukrainians believe Putin has any other goal than the complete subjugation of their country. So why give away territory for free if Ukraine can expect to kill hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers while Moscow tries to seize Donetsk by force?

Ukrainian troops still hold about 20% of the eastern region, which includes heavily fortified cities such as Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, and the Institute for War Studies’ latest estimates suggest it could take another 18 months for Russia to capture it all.

If these Russian soldiers are not killed fighting – the logic goes – they will remain in occupied Ukrainian territory, ready to restart the war from a more advantageous position as soon as the Kremlin finds an excuse to do so.

Few in Ukraine believe Putin will abandon his territorial claims, and many have lost faith that US President Donald Trump will apply the necessary pressure to make him change his mind.

“Although the government is negotiating in good faith, many people think that the entire process is being done to ensure the support of the US government,” the former Ukrainian official said.

“People are extremely skeptical of the negotiation process.”

But what will Ukraine’s battlefield strategy be if there is no confidence that the negotiations will go anywhere? Is piling up the other side’s body bags the best way to move forward?

American ex-combatant Ryan O’Leary, who leads an international volunteer unit called the Chosen Company, believes he triggered a heated debate after making his claims on social media. to post.

He objected to the much-vaunted “e-points” plan, under which Ukrainian units earn points for every Russian soldier killed or material destroyed. The points are being replaced with new equipment, and the Department of Defense says the plan provides rich data to help shape future plans.

But O’Leary argued that these created false incentives, causing Ukrainian commanders to prioritize simpler drone strikes against infantry targets around the battle line over harsher but more significant depth strikes against Russian logistics such as vehicles and communications centers, and Russian drone teams operating from rear positions.

“Drone warfare today is not about who hits the most troops…Operational depth is where wars are decided. If the enemy can move fuel, ammunition, drones, crew, and repair vehicles 10 to 40km behind the lines without fear, he has depth even if he loses 5 times the men in the trenches,” O’Leary wrote to X.

In fact, his accusation clearly reveals Ukraine’s two fundamental structural problems.

First, Russia has caught up and is probably ahead in drone technology, operational tactics and countermeasures.

Writing on Facebook, Oleksandr Karpyuk, an airborne reconnaissance officer in the 59th Separate Assault Brigade, complained that Ukraine had failed to take advantage of its initial advantage in this area, especially because it did not diversify the number of radio frequencies used by drones to transmit signals.

As a result, after Russia developed electronic warfare (EW) technologies, it only needed to jam two frequencies to significantly reduce Ukraine’s ability to fly drones behind Russian lines.

In addition, Karpyuk writes that Russia’s tactical air defense teams are much improved, and Moscow continues to benefit from leading the development of fiber-optic drones, which are impervious to Ukraine’s own electronic warfare countermeasures because they do not transmit signals.

And then there is Ukraine’s manpower problem.

Infantry shortages are well known. Rob Lee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute estimates that there are fewer than ten Ukrainian infantry soldiers per kilometer on the front line. He also estimates that most brigades have at most 10% of their total personnel in the infantry. Traditionally this number will be above 30%.

Lee told KI Insights, a strategic intelligence unit backed by the Kiev Independent, that even those low numbers were enough to thwart a major breakthrough by Russian forces, who managed to make only small, incremental advances.

But in a war where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), not infantry, are paramount, Ukraine’s deficiencies in drone crews are most pressing, especially in the key battle for operational depth, the destruction of targets 25 miles (40 kilometers) behind the battle line.

Ukrainian Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Forces Chief Robert Brovdi said last week that there should be a threefold increase in the number of drone operators, in an open defense of the fighters under his command. Only 30% of the 745-mile-long front line is currently covered, he wrote on his Facebook page.

New defense minister Fedorov acknowledges the scale of the problem, telling the Ukrainian parliament that nearly 2 million people have ignored their summons, while 200,000 have deserted.

It now largely depends on his ability to resolve the manpower issue and restore Ukraine’s technical superiority, while also enabling Zelensky to achieve his goals.

“Unless we consistently stay ahead of the Russians in terms of technology and combat tactics, I can’t say we have a good chance of winning,” the former Ukrainian official warned.

CNN’s Victoria Butenko and Daria Tarasova-Markina in Kiev contributed to this report.