Vladimir Putin’s losses after three months rival toll of ten-year Afghan war
Russia has lost as many soldiers during the first three months of the war in Ukraine as during the ten-year Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, according to British intelligence.
Defence experts said the conflict in eastern Ukraine had turned into a “war of attrition” with President Zelensky warning that his country was losing up to 100 troops a day in Donbas, the coal-mining area that has become the main theatre of the war.
The Soviet Union suffered about 15,000 deaths during the conflict in Afghanistan between December 1979 and February 1989. Some historians have argued that public anger over the invasion contributed to the dissolution of the USSR.
The MoD said the Russian army had already suffered a similar death toll after invading Ukraine and predicted that Russian tolerance over the deaths was wearing thin. “As casualties suffered in Ukraine continue to rise they will become more apparent, and public dissatisfaction with the war and a willingness to voice it may grow,” it said.
Zelensky denounced an attack yesterday on the village of Desna in the northern Ukrainian region of Chernihiv, where he said 87 people were killed in an airstrike last week.
Yesterday Russian forces attempted to storm the towns of Severodonetsk and Lyman to try to achieve a breakthrough in Donbas. Western intelligence suggests that Russian forces are making “slow, incremental progress” in the area and are on the verge of encircling the area around Severodonetsk.
Even though the Ukrainians appear to be losing ground, western officials believe that by stalling the invasion, they have succeeded in reducing the Russians’ ability to conduct large-scale offensives.
“They are fulfilling an important military function, degrading Russian capability to advance and creating time for Ukrainian forces to continue to improve their defences elsewhere,” one official said. “It is inevitable that the Russians, having secured the Severodonetsk pocket, will then try and move on Kramatorsk. That is a big and challenging target and will cost them heavily.”
Professor Phillips O’Brien, a military historian at the University of St Andrews, said that Russian troops might capture more parts of Donbas, but would struggle to hold them without reinforcements. “It doesn’t matter who took this village or that village. What matters is the relative loss on either side,” he said. “We are in a war of attrition and we’ve been in one since the battle for Donbas started.”
There are parallels between the present conflict and the war waged by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, where the mujahidin made guerrilla raids on Soviet forces with US-supplied missiles, much in the same way that Ukrainians have employed “fire and forget” tactics with portable western anti-tank weaponry.
Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian affairs at Mayak Intelligence, said Ukraine had become like the Soviet-Afghanistan war on “fast forward”.
He said the scale of the losses meant that President Putin would struggle to maintain the Donbas offensive for much longer without full mobilisation.
Information about the scale of casualties was drip-feeding through to the Russian people with the risk that it could become a focal point for anger in the same way as it did in Afghanistan.
He said: “The importance of Afghanistan was it became a case study of all that was wrong with the Soviet Union — a stupid decision made by a bunch of geriatrics out of touch with what’s really happening in the world and in their own country.”
Dr Robert Johnson, director of the Changing Character of War Centre at the University of Oxford, said Putin was facing “a reckoning” over the death toll in Ukraine. “In the Soviet Union, the steady flow of dead gave rise to the expression “zinkies” — men were transferred home in zinc-lined coffins. As the numbers grew to 15,000, it became harder to keep it quiet,” he said. “The mobile crematoria have been busy in Ukraine, but the number of families affected cannot be silenced for ever.”
