We are now just past the one hundred day mark of Vladimir Putin’s insane invasion of Ukraine. But even as the Ukrainian forces are fighting ferociously for Severodonetsk, with president Volodymyr Zelensky making an amazing visit to troops right on the edge of the front lines of the eastern salient, a few Western leaders marked the occasion by suggesting that it’s getting on time for them to think about giving up.
According to Zelensky, Russian forces currently control around one fifth of Ukrainian territory, mostly in the east and the south. As he pointed out last Thursday in an address to the Luxembourg parliament, this is an area that is much larger than the entire Benelux region.
For Russia, this has come at a considerable cost. Reliable open source intelligence estimates put Russian losses at over 31,000 soldiers killed, 3,300 armoured vehicles and another 2,500 trucks destroyed, 200 lost aircraft, 175 helicopters, and 13 ships or boats. All of this for a “special operation” that was supposed to take no more than a long weekend including the victory parade, with the invaders welcomed as liberators.
Dear as this has been for Russia, for Ukrainians the price has been much, much higher. Reliable estimates of Ukrainian military losses are hard to come by, but something around half of the Russian figures is probably in the ballpark, though they could easily be much higher. Zelensky has not been totally shy in talking about losses; the other day he said the Ukrainian forces were losing 60-100 fighters a day, with another 500+ wounded, in fighting in the east.
These are staggering losses (recall that Canada lost 158 soldiers over the course of more than a decade in Afghanistan), but they don’t even begin to compare with what has happened to Ukraine’s civilians and to its cities. This war has been going on for so long, reports of Russian outrages and war crimes now so numerous, that history-making acts of outright barbarism have come and gone from the news pages in a matter of days: Bucha, Kramatorsk, Mariupol … the list goes on and grows. When all this is done, how many dead, deported and disappeared Ukrainians will there be? If it is 50,000 dead in Mariupol alone, a million or more is not out of the question.
For a few days and even weeks, the narrative was that Putin had gravely miscalculated. He clearly expected the Ukrainians to roll over and for the neighbours to just shrug and look the other way. Instead, the Ukrainians fought back and NATO and the West were galvanized into support and action. If Putin was worried about Ukraine bringing NATO and the EU to his doorstep, well, his worst nightmare had come true, with Sweden and Finland applying for expedited admission to the alliance.
But as degraded his army, as inept his generals, as degenerate his kleptocracy might be, Putin has always had a couple of aces up his sleeve: The abiding and reliable perfidy of the Germans and the French, and the increasing inability of the American-led anglosphere to maintain its focus. As Putin sees it, as this war stretches on the Americans and the Brits will lose interest, and the burning desire of Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz to help Putin “save face” — i.e. give Russia some Ukrainian territory — will grow increasingly appealing.
