Kathrine Frich
The war against Ukraine has taken on a grim distinction.
Measured against Russia’s own history, analysts say the conflict stands out less for victory than for the scale of its costs.
Those costs, they argue, place the war among the most destructive Russia has ever fought, even as its political consequences remain tightly contained.
Grim milestones
According to analysis cited by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Russia’s war with Ukraine is now the longest conflict waged by Moscow since the 17th century.
The fighting, which began in 2014 and intensified sharply after 2022, has dragged on longer than tsarist wars against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire.
What makes the conflict especially inglorious, analysts say, is the ratio of losses to gains.
Never before have Russian forces suffered such heavy casualties for such limited territorial progress, particularly in eastern Ukraine, where Donbas has not been fully retaken after 12 years.
Losses in context
CSIS estimates place the number of Russian soldiers killed at around 300,000 to 325,000, with total losses including wounded and missing exceeding 1.2 million.
This makes the war in Ukraine the third-deadliest conflict in modern Russian and Soviet history, behind only the two world wars.
By comparison, the Soviet Union’s decade-long war in Afghanistan resulted in about 15,000 fatalities and up to 70,000 total casualties.
Even the Chechen wars, which were politically traumatic for Moscow, did not approach today’s scale of losses.
Analysts cited by CSIS note that, among European wars of the past 200 years, only the Napoleonic Wars and the world wars surpass the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in terms of human cost.
Echoes of the past
In its scale, the war increasingly resembles early 20th-century conflicts.
The number of dead and wounded is approaching levels seen during World War I, when the Russian Empire lost between 1.7 and more than 2 million soldiers.
Historians often link those losses to the collapse of the imperial system in 1917.
Yet the author argues that a similar revolution is unlikely in today’s Russia, at least in the short term.
Why revolt hasn’t come
Unlike in 1917, today’s losses are unevenly distributed. Casualties fall disproportionately on poorer regions and remote republics, while Moscow and St. Petersburg remain largely insulated.
The article argues this is a deliberate Kremlin strategy.
Modern Russia is also described as politically passive and heavily policed. Independent parties, mass movements and free media capable of mobilising dissent have been dismantled over two decades.
Protest, the author writes, is widely seen as futile and dangerous.
Sources: Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), WP.
