Why Russia’s manpower advantage may not be enough to win the war in Ukraine

Joshua Keating

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The old saw that in war, “quantity has a quality all its own,” has been getting a workout in the recent commentary about the war in Ukraine. The quantity in question is people, and the concern among Ukrainians and their international backers is that Russia simply has more of them. The cold hard math is that there are about 100 million more Russians than Ukrainians.

If this war becomes a simple endurance test and President Vladimir Putin is willing to accept any number of Russian casualties to accomplish his goals, perhaps all the advanced weapons systems the West can send won’t make a difference. Russia has already suffered mind-boggling losses. A recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the number of Russian soldiers killed at 60,000 to 70,000, more than in all its wars combined since World War II. And yet a Ukrainian commander recently told NPR that he worries Russia simply has an “infinite” number of men to mobilize into his military.

Can Putin just keep throwing bodies into the fight until the Ukrainians are exhausted?

Wars are not won by population size alone, of course, or by leaders’ willingness to send young men to risk their lives. If they were, South Vietnam might be an independent, pro-American nation today. The numerical advantage doesn’t mean that Russian victory is inevitable. But unfortunately for anyone who would like the bloodshed to stop soon, this seems to be the calculus and the advantage that Putin is banking on.

Mobilization turns the tide

At the beginning of the war, it was actually Ukraine that enjoyed a manpower advantage. Russia invaded a year ago with an initial force of about 150,000 troops, facing an army of roughly the same size spread out over the second-largest country in Europe. The general rule of thumb is that invaders need a 3-to-1 advantage over defenders to successfully take and occupy a territory. And the Russians didn’t make things easier on themselves by often moving in small, lightly defended formations without logistics support or air cover, taking heavy losses in early skirmishes with the Ukrainians. By late summer, according to U.S. estimates, Russia had lost around half of the initial invasion force to death or injury. Putin’s “special military operation” was becoming unsustainable, and stopgap measures like raising the age limit for military service and offering lucrative signing bonuses to recruits weren’t enough to stop the bleeding.

Fighters from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group, mainly convicts recruited directly from Russian prisons, also took on an increased share of the fighting. (Wagner has since stopped recruiting prisoners, many of whom, it seems, had come to realize that life in a Russian prison was preferable to what might await them Ukraine.)

Everything changed again in September when Putin ordered a “partial mobilization” of 300,000 troops. This followed the Ukrainians’ stunning rout of the Russians’ lightly defended positions around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city; a large portion of the new recruits were sent to battle almost immediately, with little training and sometimes only partial equipment, to help bolster the front lines.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu declared the mobilization complete in October. By the beginning of February, Ukrainian intelligence officials estimated that more than 300,000 Russian troops were in Ukraine, with hundreds of thousands more waiting in reserve. Shoigu has laid out a goal of increasing the total number of troops in the Russian army from 1.1 million to 1.5 million.

For all the Russian military’s other difficulties, we can say it is no longer short on manpower. But by fixing one problem, it may have acquired some new ones.

The limits of people power

The new manpower has undoubtedly made a difference. Ever since the Russians retreated from the city of Kherson to move to defendable positions in November, the Ukrainians haven’t won any more significant breakthroughs. Meanwhile, the Russians have been making slow, grinding but steady territorial gains in eastern Ukraine. They are likely to soon take the city of Bakhmut, the site of brutal trench warfare since last summer.

But these gains have come at a stunningly heavy cost. In Bakhmut, the Russians have often relied on so-called human wave assaults by unsupported infantry, many of whom are simply mowed down by Ukrainian machine guns and grenade launchers. NATO estimated in early February that the Russians were losing as many as 2,000 men for every 100 yards of territory they gained.

Of course, the Ukrainians are taking heavy losses as well, but as always, the defender has a built-in advantage. The military historian Lawrence Freedman wrote recently that the two sides in this conflict represent two different styles of conflict: Russian “total war” vs. Ukrainian “modern war.” He writes: “Russia seeks to create circumstances in which the Ukrainian people have had enough. Ukraine seeks to make the position for the Russian military untenable.” The kind of “total war” the Russians are waging requires a huge number of soldiers, and at its current rates of losses, Russia is going to have to continue mobilizing men at a very high rate to keep its military operation “tenable.”

Pavel Luzin, a Russian defense analyst currently at Tufts University, is skeptical that a Russian strategy of indefinite mobilization will be effective. He noted to Grid that the “mobilization system in Russia has degraded for decades.” There aren’t enough qualified military trainers or enough equipment to keep turning drafted men into effective soldiers. And once they get to Ukraine, it will be hard to form them into units because “there is a deficit of bottom-level commanders — sergeants, noncommissioned officers, lieutenants — in the Russian army.”

Russia has also already lost many of its best-trained officers in the first year of the war. Moscow may be able to continue sending men to the front, but not all of them will be equally prepared to fight.

Political worries

Ukraine’s military intelligence service predicted at the beginning of this year that Russia was likely to order a new mobilization of 500,000 troops in January. As of early March, that has not happened.

The government’s reluctance to declare a new call-up is understandable; it’s likely that the last order in September resulted in more Russians fleeing the country — as many as 700,000 according to some estimates — than the number that actually went to fight in Ukraine. The order also provoked some of the largest anti-war protests seen since the war began.

“During the mobilization, people could see firsthand that it was orchestrated so poorly,” Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Grid. “It provided a moment in which the regime’s incompetence was exposed to Russians.”

Rather than repeat what was done in September, some experts believe the Russian government is carrying out a so-called silent mobilization: delivering draft notices to men at their workplaces or homes without formally declaring that a new conscription campaign is taking place.

A political advantage of such a “silent” approach is that it can be kept far from Russia’s centers of power. The majority of those fighting and dying for Russia in Ukraine have been from remote areas with high populations of ethnic minorities — places like Tuva and Dagestan, for example, rather than Moscow and St. Petersburg.

“Putin has been very good at sheltering the most politically important Russians” from the impact of the war, noted Kendall-Taylor. The “human wave” attacks in Bakhmut have not provoked much outcry in Russia, in large part because they were made up primarily of Wagner’s convict recruits.

The mass exodus of Russians fleeing mobilization could have a calamitous long-term effect on the country’s economy, but from the point of view of Putin’s regime stability, the departures weren’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, these citizens were most likely critics of the war and potential organizers of protests.

Kendall-Taylor, the director of a new ongoing project tracking Russia’s political stability, said that as long as the regime can avoid the shambolic display of last fall’s mobilization, there should be minimal political backlash from continuing to send large numbers of Russians to die in Ukraine. “As long as he can continue to divert the cost of casualties away from the groups he relies on,” she said, “I think he can do it for a really long time.”

On the Ukrainian side

At the beginning of the war, finding soldiers was not high on the long list of problems facing Ukraine. After the invasion, there were long lines of volunteers at recruiting offices, and Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces signed up 100,000 new members in less than a month. Ukraine doesn’t publish a running tally of its manpower strength, but by the summer, government officials claimed to have 700,000 troops on active duty. This was up from just 250,000 — including reserves — before the war.

The Ukrainian military still relies mostly on volunteers, but as the war has dragged on and casualties have piled up, Ukraine has also drafted thousands of men with military experience. This has not been a smooth or popular process; there have been widespread complaints that people who want to volunteer have been kept waiting for months due to bureaucracy and red tape, while people who don’t want to fight are being issued draft notices. Particularly unpopular has been the process of military recruiters and police officers serving draft notices to men in subway stations, bars and nightclubs, or as punishment for traffic violations or breaking curfew. (The last practice has been disavowed by the country’s defense minister, who has said military service should not be used as punishment.) Tens of thousands have joined a Telegram group that reports the locations of military recruiters so they can be avoided.

By law, all physically fit Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 are subject to conscription and forbidden from leaving the country. So far, the government has not had to make wide use of conscription in the general public, though some have speculated that given the number of soldiers Russia is deploying month after month, it may only be a matter of time. The prominent Ukrainian war correspondent Yuriy Butusov recently criticized the government for not doing more to prepare the public for this possibility.

“The state, unfortunately, is afraid to tell people the truth,” Butusov wrote. “It is afraid to say that every man who is suitable for military service could be called up.”

In addition to the large number of volunteers, there is another key difference between the two militaries when it comes to the pool of potential available soldiers: women. Though not subject to the draft, they make up about a fifth of Ukraine’s military, according to Ukrainian sources. In Russia, it’s less than 1 percent.

Incalculable losses

Russia’s “partial mobilization” hasn’t led to a major shift in battlefield momentum. It has now been several weeks since NATO and Ukrainian officials said they believed a “major” Russian offensive had begun in the east of the country, but progress has been underwhelming so far.

Russians have suffered heavy losses in what appears to be yet another chaotic and poorly planned offensive on the town of Vuhledar in Donetsk. Bakhmut — or rather what’s left of Bakhmut — is likely to fall soon, but as Grid has previously reported, the symbolic significance that battle has taken on exceeds the city’s strategic importance. There may be many more Bakhmuts — human wave assaults and devastating artillery barrages reducing places to rubble with high casualties on both sides — in the coming months.

Ukraine is expected to launch a major counteroffensive of its own this spring. It remains to be seen how well Russia’s newly reinforced positions will hold up, but most analysts are skeptical that rapid gains like those made in Kharkiv last fall will be repeated.

In short, it’s possible that Russia’s manpower advantage will not be enough to win the war, but that it will be enough to avoid defeat. And that’s a recipe for an even longer and deadlier conflict.

It’s not as if any country can ever exactly afford the kind of casualties we’re seeing in this war. But even before the war, both countries were in a state of precipitous demographic decline, with high death rates, low fertility and increasing emigration. The year before the war, Russia’s population fell by almost 1 million people, the fastest decline since World War II. And even before millions fled the war last year, Ukraine’s was one of the fastest-shrinking populations on earth.

What gets euphemistically called “manpower” in military terms is in fact a collection of human lives: mostly young men who might otherwise be starting families or contributing to their communities and countries. Their loss will be felt in both societies long after the guns fall silent.

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.