Key Points – Despite Russia’s continued aggression, including recent massive missile and drone attacks (May 23-24), its offensive in Ukraine has largely stalled, incurring catastrophic casualties (e.g., 36,600 in April for minimal gain) for diminishing territorial returns.
-While Russia leverages manpower from North Korea and convicts, its war economy shows signs of long-term unsustainability, with official statistics likely masking true inflation and resource depletion, according to a recent Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics report.
-Ukraine, through improved drone tactics and defenses, has blunted Russia’s advances. If Western support for Ukraine remains firm and pressure on Moscow intensifies, Russia’s strategy of “playing for time” may fail.
Ukraine Still Has A Chance to Win the War Against Russia
Looking at the number of losses by the Russian military in the Ukraine war, it becomes hard to understand how their effort could keep going indefinitely.
It is not just that Moscow continues to lose thousands of troops per month, but that there is an inverse final result from these same casualties.
The trend line for months now is that the amount of Ukrainian territory being taken each month is dropping while the number of Russian soldiers being killed increases.
April 2025 was a perfect example. According to reporting from more than one monitoring group, Russia suffered 36,600 personnel killed and 48,00 vehicles destroyed in that one month alone, but managed to take control of only 68 square miles in exchange for those horrific losses.
And the 68 square miles is not a net, final number. It does not include the territory Ukraine managed to take back, so the real figure is lower – meaning a cost of hundreds of lives per each square mile.
The loss of life on both sides is what has prompted foreign leaders to push Russian President Vladimir Putin to the table to negotiate one-on-one with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That meeting was famously supposed to happen in Istanbul, Turkey, earlier this month. Putin never showed.
Speaking before a meeting with EU defense ministers in Brussels, Germany‘s Defence Minister Boris Pistorius accused Russia of “playing for time”, while continuing its assault on Ukraine.
Strong words from someone who was the right-hand man of Putin’s favorite German politician – German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
The second half of his statement is the part that gently summarizes the despicable and barbaric behaviour of Putin to date.
On the nights of 23-24 May, Russia unleashed some of its largest attacks since the war, including on the capital Kyiv.
After two days of bombardments that lasted as long as 7 hours in Kyiv the not shocking headline in the 25 May Washington Post reads “Russian missile and drone attack kills 12 in Ukraine, including children.”
April of this year was the worst month for deaths of children from Russian attacks since the war began in February 2022.
May is shaping up to be possibly even worse.
Why is Putin Playing For Time
The conventional assessment is that the outcome of the war is dependent on two major factors.
One is who can maintain a steady supply of soldiers. Russia has the advantage here by receiving thousands of North Korean troops, plus “volunteers” from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the thousands more convicts that Russia has been able to send the front lines.
But these manpower advantages notwithstanding, Russia’s gains on the battlefield have “slowed dramatically”, read a recent assessment in The London Telegraph. Western officials and analysts have collectively assessed that Ukraine has stalled Russia’s “potentially war-winning offensive” in the east of the country “through a combination of improved drone tactics and defenses.”
Which brings in the other factor in the war: which side can maintain the highest level of support from its international partners?
Ukraine’s “inherent weakness is that it depends on others for funding and arms”, said the BBC‘s international editor, Jeremy Bowen.
On the other hand, he continued, Russia “makes most of its own weapons” and is “buying drones from Iran and ammunition from North Korea” with no limitations on how they are used.
Russia also enjoys an advantage in conscripted manpower, which has seen a plus-up from yet another massive conscription drive last month.
The Collapsing War Ukraine Economy
However, Russia’s economy may not be up to the task, according to a recent report from the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE).
According to that assessment, which was presented at a meeting of European Union finance ministers on May 13, Russia’s economy faces mounting pressure due to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Western sanctions.
SITE researchers warned that the apparent resilience in Russia’s economy is misleading, and that “official” economic statistics are likely not accurate.
“The fiscal stimulus of the war economy has kept the economy afloat in the short term, but the reliance on opaque financing, distortionary resource allocation, and shrinking fiscal buffers makes it unsustainable in the long term,” the report read. “Contrary to Kremlin narratives, time is not on Russia’s side.”
Torbjorn Becker, who presented the findings, questioned the credibility of Russia’s economic statistics. He questioned the government’s claim of 9–10 per only cent inflation, compared to the central bank’s unusually high policy rate of 21 per cent.
“Which regular central bank would have a policy rate that’s basically 11.50 percentage points higher than the inflation rate? If any of our central bankers were doing something like that, they would be out of their job the next day,” Becker said. “If you understate inflation, you will then overstate real GDP numbers.”
In the coming weeks, Russia’s playing-for-time strategy will be tested.
There are signs that Putin cannot sustain his war indefinitely and that patience with him from the West is running thin.
If his massive attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine continue, that patience is likely to disappear altogether.
About the Author:
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
The Ukraine War
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