How Putin Could Lose Another 1,900,000 Soldiers in Ukraine War

PUBLISHED on August 15, 2025, 6:56 PM EDT – Key Points and Summary: On the eve of his Alaska summit with President Trump, Vladimir Putin has reiterated his “maximalist demands,” insisting Ukraine withdraw from four of its own oblasts.

-According to a UK intelligence report, this move is a deliberate ploy to frame Kyiv as the obstacle to peace when it inevitably rejects the impossible terms.

T-90M from Russia. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

-With over a million Russian casualties, analysts believe Putin cannot afford to end the war without a significant territorial victory to justify the immense losses, a victory his military has been unable to achieve on the battlefield.

Putin’s Nightmare: 1 Million Casualties and Nothing to Show For It

WARSAW, POLAND – A UK Ministry of Defense intelligence briefing on Aug. 15 reported Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his war aims on the eve of his summit with U.S. President Donald Trump.

His statement could sink the summit between the two in Anchorage, Alaska, regardless of what happens there.

According to the UK Defense Intelligence Service, on the eve of his meeting with the U.S. president, Putin “reiterated longstanding maximalist demands regarding Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, including for the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the four internationally-recognized Ukrainian oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson.”

Russia announced the illegal annexation of these four Ukrainian oblasts in September 2022. The announcement included claims to areas in all four oblasts that remain under Ukrainian control. Such territorial claims contradicted Moscow’s own formal recognition of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The inviolability of Ukraine’s borders was signed off by the government of then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1994 in the Budapest Memorandum. In return for Moscow’s recognition of Ukraine as a sovereign state and its borders, the Ukrainian government agreed to relinquish its nuclear arsenal – the world’s third-largest at the time – which it had inherited from the collapsed Soviet Union.

The warheads were all then transferred to Russia for decommissioning. This act additionally enabled Ukraine to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear state.

Putting Pressure on Zelenskiy

Repeating his position that these territories belong to Russia, Putin was setting conditions for the meeting that he knows full well the Ukrainians will reject.

Putin’s hope is that his demands will prompt Trump to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to cede land in exchange for a cessation of hostilities.

“There are a couple of very clear ploys that Putin is engaging in,” said a former senior NATO official who spoke to National Security Journal on the subject today.

“As a reaction to him repeating his claim to these four provinces, Trump may try to convince Zelenskiy to accept what he has been referring to as ‘land swaps,’ which will be refused,” he said.

“When that happens, Putin will say that he and the American president had a formula to end the war and stop the killing, but Zelenskiy will not agree. In this way, he and the Moscow elite can then say Zelenskiy is the obstacle to peace, and not Russia. It is a trick typical of someone with Putin’s background in the KGB,” he continued.

Putin Could Lose Almost Two Million More Soldiers

Putin is assessed to be in a bad position politically, because his military has lost more than 1 million personnel killed, wounded, or missing since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

“His problem now,” said the same former NATO official, “is he has nothing he can present to the Russian people in the form of territorial gains that can justify the sacrifice of lives on this scale. His military cannot take the rest of these oblasts – the areas under Ukrainian control. Putin has been trying to conquer the rest of Donetsk since 2014. If his army could gain these territories under their control by force they would have done it by now.”

Continuing military operations to completely occupy the four regions would result in losses that are probably unacceptable even for Russia. Based on the rate that Russia has been gaining territory to date, it would take Russian forces approximately 4.4 more years to gain 100 percent of the four Ukrainian oblasts’ territory.

Russia’s average daily casualty rate in 2025, as reported by the Ukrainian General Staff, would create approximately 1,930,000 more Russian killed or wounded if it continued for 4.4 years. This would be in addition to the approximately 1,060,000 casualties Russia has already suffered since 2022. These numbers include around 250,000 killed or missing and presumed dead.

About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson 

Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.

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