The Ukrainians defeat most Russian attacks, inflicting catastrophic casualties on increasingly under-equipped Russian assault groups.
But the Russians keep coming, and keep gaining ground. And the one person who can stop them—Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Mike Johnson—so far has refused to do so.
All Johnson has to do is bring to a vote an overwhelmingly popular bill that would send $60 billion in aid to Ukraine. Aid that would pay for the ammunition Ukrainian forces need to hold off Russian forces until the Russians finally deplete their reserves of old Cold War weapons.
In 26 months of hard fighting, the Russian military has lost 15,300 tanks, fighting vehicles, howitzers and other weapons in Ukraine, along with hundreds of thousands of troops. The Ukrainian military’s own losses are a third as heavy.
And yet the Russian force in Ukraine is bigger than ever. “The army is actually now larger—by 15 percent—than it was when it invaded Ukraine,” U.S. Army general Christopher Cavoli, NATO's top commander, told the House Armed Services Committee. “Over the past year, Russia increased its front-line troop strength from 360,000 to 470,000.”
That’s possible only because the Kremlin drafted more than 300,000 men starting in late 2022 in addition to increasing bonuses for volunteers. At the same time, Russian brigades have curtailed basic training for new recruits in order to speed fresh forces to the front.
But these unprepared new recruits don’t survive very long on the front line. Lately, between 800 and a thousand Russians have been dying every in the wider war, according to the Ukrainian defense ministry.
Russian soldiers die as fast as they arrive in Ukraine. The Estonian defense ministry concluded, in one recent study, that killing 100,000 Russians this year would permanently damage, if not collapse, the Kremlin’s mobilization effort.
Ukraine is on track to kill 300,000 Russians this year. It isn’t sustainable.
Nor are Russia’s vehicle losses sustainable. Russian industry produces 500 or 600 new tanks and maybe a little more than a thousand new fighting vehicles every year. The Russian military loses more than a thousand tanks and close to 2,000 fighting vehicles every year—and the loss rate is increasing.
There’s a gap—one the Kremlin fills by pulling out of long-term storage tanks and fighting vehicles dating back to the 1970s, or even the ’60s or ’50s in some cases. But these old vehicles are a finite resource. Built during the Soviet Union’s industrial heyday, they cannot be replaced with new production.
Ominously for the Russians, the most recent projections anticipate that, as early as mid-2025, there won’t be any more old tanks and fighting vehicles left in storage. “Time is running out for Russia,” wrote Artur Rehi, an Estonian solder and analyst.
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