Key Points and Summary – After more than three years of war, the Russian Army is arguably a “spent force,” having suffered an estimated 1 million casualties—a number that rivals its entire active-duty strength.
-The death toll is 15 times higher than the Soviet Union’s decade-long war in Afghanistan.
Main battle tank T-14 object 148 on heavy unified tracked platform Armata. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
-These horrendous losses are compounded by widespread desertions and a crippling economic impact that is stalling the development of Russia’s next-generation weapons.
-With casualty numbers projected to nearly double if the war continues, the long-term sustainability of Russia’s military is in serious doubt.
Russia’s Army Is a Spent Force
Despite US President Donald J. Trump’s sincere and concerted efforts thus far to end the war in Ukraine, Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin’s actions remain ever recalcitrant, not only continuing to kill Ukrainian troops and innocent civilians, but also continuing to waste the lives of his own troops in a massive meat grinder.
One cannot help but wonder how much longer the Russian Army can continue to sustain such horrendous battlefield losses. Will these losses be fixable and sustainable, or will they soon lead to a hollowed-out Russian Army?
RUSSIAN CASUALTIES IN UKRAINE COMPARED WITH PREVIOUS WARS
As of June 2025, the Russian Army has suffered an estimated 1 million casualties during its so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine, including approximately 250,000 killed in action. To put that in perspective, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) states that the Russian military death toll in Ukraine is 15 times higher than the losses the Soviet Union sustained in Afghanistan, and 10 times those of the brutal conflict in Chechnya.
Those casualty differentials become even more mind-boggling when you consider that the First and Second Chechen Wars lasted a combined 12 years, whilst the Soviet-Afghan War lasted 10 years, contrasted with the 3.5 years that the Russo-Ukrainian War has dragged on thus far—those 1 million casualties in the current conflict average out to 285,714 losses per annum.
What about the Second World War, or as the Russians still prefer to call it, “The Great Patriotic War (Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna)?” Therein, the Soviet Union suffered an estimated 10 million KIA over four years, thus averaging out to 2.5 million deaths per year. Ergo, both the aggregate and yearly average death tolls are way higher for WWII than for the Ukraine War. But then again, the Soviet Union had a far bigger manpower pool to draw from, since the Sovetskiy Soyuz consisted of 15 republics with a combined population of 195.4 million people in 1941 (it dwindled to 170.5 million by 1946).
NOTE: The Russians only use the label “Great Patriotic War” in reference to their fight against Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. Their official histories treat the Soviet-Japanese War as a separate conflict; therein, the Red Army suffered roughly 30,000 casualties over 25 days (8 August – 2 September 1945).
CURRENT CASUALTIES IN RELATION TO THE RUSSIAN POPULATION
By contrast, the post-Soviet Russian Federation has an estimated population of 146.0 million as of New Year’s Day 2025. As for military manpower, World Population Review (using 2024 figures) estimates overall personnel strength as 3,159,000 troops; this is broken down further as 1.1 million active-duty troops, 1.5 million reservists, and 559,000 paramilitary personnel.
In other words, the Russian Army’s cumulative casualty totals over 3.5 years nearly equal that of their current active-duty manpower strength.
THE DESERTION FACTOR
Besides the killed and wounded, the Russian Army is also being plagued by deserters. According to David Axe in an 8 March 2025 article for Forbes, 50,000 Russian troops had deserted by the time that article was written: “The desertion rate was low early on and climbed as the war ground on and Russian fortunes reversed with Ukraine’s successful fall 2022 counteroffensive, reserved again with Ukraine’s unsuccessful summer 2023 counteroffensive and then became more mixed as Russian forces advanced again—albeit slowly and at staggering cost.”
Mr. Axe hastened to add that “The 5% of Russian troops who desert at some point in their military service roughly match the 5% of American troops who deserted during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early ‘70s. The US Army didn’t collapse then, and the current dynamic in the Russian army does not indicate a total military collapse or a breakdown in command authority,’ Frontelligence Insight concluded.”
Maybe so, but American troop desertions during the Vietnam War were reflective of the poor morale afflicting the force, and the US eventually ended up losing that war.
IT COULD GET EVEN WORSE
One of Vladimir Putin’s sticking points is his stubborn refusal to make peace with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, stemming from the former’s demand that Ukraine withdraw from the four eastern regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson. Indeed, the Russian autocrat reportedly bragged to President Trump that he could still capture the territories anyway if the peace deal negotiations collapse.
There’s a wee-bitty problem with that scenario, however. A recent intelligence briefing from the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) suggested it would take Russia another 4.5 years to achieve that lofty objective based on its current advances, which “would lead to approximately 1,930,000 further Russian casualties.”
ECONOMIC IMPACTS
The proverbial butcher’s bill hasn’t only cost heavily in terms of blood for the Russian military; it has also inflicted a heavy cost in terms of treasure. Not just to the Russian Army, mind you, but their armed forces as a whole.
For example, the Russian Aerospace Forces’ prospective 6th Generation stealth bomber, the PAK DA Poslannik (“Envoy;” NATO reporting name “Flatback”) is slated to finally make its maiden flight in prototype form sometime this year or next year, which equates to a six- or seven-year delay from the planned initially maiden flight date in 2019; with serial production expected to commence by 2030–2032. However, even those projections may be overly optimistic, as the cash-strapped Russian aerospace industry lacks the microchips necessary to get the bomber off the ground (literally and figuratively alike). Meanwhile, the Sukhoi Su-75 “Checkmate” stealth fighter program is also being stymied by a lack of funds.
(NOTE: As of April 2024, Russia had lost about 10 percent of its aircraft, according to General Christopher Cavoli, the commander of the US European Command and NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe.)
As noted in the concluding section of an April 2025 report by the Research Centre for Security and Geopolitical Studies (RCSGS), “The war’s financial burden is increasingly unsustainable, as the sharp drop in oil prices and ongoing military costs threaten to weaken Russia’s ability to continue its military operations.”
About the Author: Christian D. Orr, Defense Expert
Christian D. Orr is a Senior Defense Editor. He is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU).
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JC Byrne, MD, USNR (ret)
August 25, 2025 at 4:26 pm
We didn’t “lose” the Vietnam War; the Democratic congress surrended!
Off-CNN
August 25, 2025 at 4:58 pm
If russian army now a spent force, then putin needs to answer for it.
The russian people must get hold of vladimirovich ASAP and hang him in the center of Red square.
The conflict was sparked by the four horsemen, the EU, biden, NATO and the western media. But putin failed to catch them and their plan.
If he had caught them right on the nail, He’d hit kyiv with a nuke or two to Finish them off there and then.
But he didn’t and the army now has to carry its cross for his blunder. Yet the army has done well.So far.
But now, today, in 2025, it’s time to use nukes to end the War.
Russia has already developed the topol-m(r), sarmat, bulava, burevestnik, and poseidon (status-6) and others to counter america’s withdrawal from the ANTI-ABM or OFF-ABM treaty.
So now is the time to use nukes before trump’s golden dome comes into existence.
Use of nukes will save the Army, destroy the nazis once and for all, and ensure peace on the south-western border for the next 500 years.