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Russia's Grinding War – Massive Losses and Tiny Gains for a Declining Power

(csis.org)
29 points by breve 2 days ago|23 comments
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general1465 2 days ago
You can see the decline in combat footage videos through the years. Videos from 2022 to 2024 are showing tanks, IFVs and other armored vehicles striking Ukrainian positions (or being wiped out by drones, artillery) after 2024 there is steady decline to IFVs only, then MRAPs, then Chinese ATV (called golf carts) started showing up while logistic lines were held together with lot of Buchankas (UAZ-452 Civilian van). By the end of 2025 we hit another milestone where Russians are starting to use horses and donkeys for logistic lines and attacking in trucks, ATVs and dirt bikes and very rarely there is a tank heavily covered in garbage to protect against drone strike.
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pseudohadamard 4 hours ago
Same as Germany in late 1944, they were using horses and oxcarts to move military equipment around. The latest ME-262 jets were pulled out onto the runway by oxen.
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pu_pe 2 days ago
The article's conclusion is that Russia's slowdown and high casualties are due to its poor economy and military power. However, another interpretation is that drones have changed war greatly, and have essentially brought back the trench warfare of WW1 with heavy casualties for little territorial gain. Time will tell if this situation is unique to the Ukrainian war or not.
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Arnt 22 hours ago
During WW1 the front moved rapidly from west of Ukraine's western end to east of its eastern. There's a fine map at the top of https://www.britannica.com/event/Eastern-Front-World-War-I-h...

That trench warfare was a feature of one front of the war, a rather special case. It wasn't even unique to WW1.

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alecco 2 days ago
Two countries with extremely low fertility rates just wiped out hundreds of thousands of their young boys. And hundreds of thousands of people fled including a significant fraction of young girls. I wonder who actually benefits from this?
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general1465 2 days ago
It is not some insidious entity in the background trying to destroy Russia. It is just Putin, thinking that he can take over Ukraine like USSR took over Czechoslovakia in 1968. But unexpectedly for Putin he got full scale ware which he can't back off from because that would be political end of his. So he can only continue to fight and hope that Ukraine folds first.

Unlucky for him, Ukraine is being economically kept alive and still fighting after 4 year by the blue elephant in the room called EU, which Russians are so desperately trying to ignore.

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tim333 16 hours ago
From the comments I've seen they seem to curse the EU/Europe more than ignore it. See Putin calling the leaders little pigs and the like.
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general1465 15 hours ago
They do curse EU, but then they will avoid talking to EU. I believe they do that because negotiation with EU would mean recognition that EU is a power. And by Russian logic powers have spheres of influence. So now by Russian logic, EU could have a legitimate claim on Ukraine, Kaliningrad and Belarus as they are in the EU's sphere of influence. So let's close our eyes and pretend that EU does not exist.

See below Peskov from few days ago:

"Russia will never discuss anything with EU Foreign Policy chief Kaja Kallas and so Moscow will simply wait for her to leave her post, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said."

https://english.alarabiya.net/News/world/2026/01/25/russia-w...

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tim333 15 hours ago
It's a completely different system really - Russia with it's ruler in Moscow commanding a large army and dictating what happens vs the EU with no central army, no central ruler, governed by local democracies and human rights laws and the like.

It doesn't fit with their way of thinking much really. With Trump they can kind of say we get this bit of Ukraine you get that, we both get rich from iffy minerals deals but the EU doesn't work like that.

Kaja Kallas for example recently announced "the first €10 million for the establishment of a Special Tribunal for Crimes of Aggression." She wants to prosecute the Russians for war crimes, not make a deal with them. So you can understand why they are not keen to chat there.

Not sure how that all works out.

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tim333 15 hours ago
The whole business of invading neighboring countries to grab their land seems a bit out of date these days. After WW2 most countries decided it was a bad idea and signed agreements to not do it and there hasn't been that much since.

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait but that didn't work out well for him. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan didn't work out that well for the invaders. About the only one I can think of that worked ok for the invaders was China taking Tibet in 1950.

I think Putin doesn't use the internet and was reading history books from a century ago before the invasion. I'm not sure the strategy works very well anymore.

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pseudohadamard 4 hours ago
He wasn't reading history books from a century ago, he was reading Aleksandr Dugin, a.k.a. Putin's Brain. A far-right crackpot whose ideology was about as grounded in reality as Alfred Rosenberg, although his ideas about destabilising the west, principally the US, have proven quite effective.
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tim333 3 hours ago
Not quite sure where I read that but from "What’s on Vladimir Putin’s reading list?" in the FT:

>Putin, though, likes to present himself as someone who has thought extensively about the past. It was not just Trump who has been treated to the Russian leader’s analysis of the history of Rus’, the Christianisation of Prince (later St) Vladimir in 988 or the impact of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on lands to its east in the late Middle Ages.

I'm not much of a Putinist but in the couple of minutes of Putin Tucker I watched he was going on about that stuff and how Hitler wouldn't have had to do so much war if the Poles had just been reasonable about him taking over. I'm sure he's familiar with Dugin but probably regards him as a bit of a crank.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC 2 days ago
Isn’t this how Russia always fights going back to the Czars?
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metalman 2 days ago
And before, to the founding of the Russian identity, when confronted with the Khans and the europeans, they (the princes of Kiev) fought for generations, seasonal wars of attrition. And now they are fighting europe, pointing to the dinipter saying "remember?" Plus this war is much more, as it is the first high tech war, and many outside partys are involved in every way. Just think how SK is shitting square ones knowing that NK has troops fighting on the front lines, and is totaly involved in planning, tacticts and strategy.
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orwin 2 days ago
Human wave isn't a viable strategy for NK, so I'm not sure what they learned really. Maybe they learned how to parade and to die gracefully from the VDV?
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mcphage 2 days ago
> Just think how SK is shitting square ones knowing that NK has troops fighting on the front lines, and is totaly involved in planning, tacticts and strategy.

I think if SK was seriously worried about that, they would send troops to support Ukraine.

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xenospn 2 days ago
It’s anyone’s guess how long they can keep at it. They’re one black swan away from imploding, but that day might be 20 years away.
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tim333 15 hours ago
Things seem to be getting hard for the Russians. The strikes on oil refineries and seizing of shadow fleet vessels are causing money shortages, apparently the Ukrainians are now killing their troops faster than they are recruiting and Ukraine is cranking it up:

>Ukraine will build 7 million drones in 2026—and it still won’t be enough Manufacturing volume has roughly doubled every year since 2023 https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/01/26/ukraine-aims-to-build...

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pseudohadamard 4 hours ago
Ukraine has some of the same problems with corruption that Russia does, although they've made more of an effort to fight it than Russia. However what this means in practice is that the claimed figure aren't necessarily the actual figures. So maybe the headline should be read as "Ukraine pays for 7 million drones" or "Ukraine certainly plans to build 7 million drones".
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general1465 2 days ago
They have not much choice than to keep at it. Target is control of whole Ukraine as vassal state, anything less is a defeat. They have already spent over 1 million casualties on frontlines. Claiming anything less than whole Ukraine for such price would be a political suicide.
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xenospn 3 hours ago
They thought the Ukrainians would welcome them with flowers and just roll over. I really don’t think they planned on controlling a hostile population, and they’re not set up for that.
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throwaway290 2 days ago
Is GDP growth useful? I heard it only considers production. if the produced stuff quickly gets blown up in the fields it still counts for GDP even if in reality it's a negative for economy.
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jauntywundrkind 20 hours ago
It's frustrating how much we need coverage like this. Because the us keeps trying to end the war by giving Russia a huge amount of what it wants.

Russia Russia Russia was correct correct correct. Watching the US attempt a pratfall of democracy to rival the fall of communism is the best returns on investment Putin could ever have hoped for. The USA bring hostile to Ukraine & constantly trying to adopt Russian terms & Russian framing is bonus. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-peace-plan-written...

The world direly needs good accounting like this article, to keep the delusional disreality of these Russian-agent madmen at the White House from demolishing Ukraine.