Synopsis: By likening Vladimir Putin’s campaign to King Pyrrhus’s costly victories over Rome, Russia is trading men for inches.
-With claimed losses approaching 1.2 million dead and wounded, the war risks becoming unsustainable if Ukraine can keep inflicting roughly 35,000 casualties a month—and raise that number toward 50,000 through faster, deadlier drone operations.
-An intelligence claim of a 27-to-1 exchange at Kupiansk is offered as a glimpse of what unmanned-heavy tactics can achieve.
-Even with Russia shifting from mass “meat-grinder” assaults to smaller infiltration teams, daily attrition remains punishing.
-At current rates, losses could reach 2 million before the end of 2027.
Vladimir Putin’s War Looks Like a Pyrrhic Victory: Russia Nears 1.2 Million Losses
Russian President Vladimir Putin would do well to study Roman history. If he did, the illegitimate leader would understand that the most he can hope for in his war against Ukraine is a Pyrrhic victory.
Pyrrhus, the King of Epirus, was called by Tarentum (modern-day Taranto) to assist it in its war with Rome. In the resultant intervention, which ran from 280 to 275 BC, Pyrrhus defeated the Romans at Heraclea and Asculum. But the heavy losses his army suffered led him to remark, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”
After some unsuccessful campaigns against the Carthaginians, Pyrrhus returned to Italy, where the Romans defeated him at Beneventum and forced him to retreat to Epirus. Importantly for Putin, Epirus lost all its Italian holdings and retained control only of Tarentum.
A similar fate is likely to befall Putin and his ragged armed forces. After four years of fighting, Russia has lost more than 1.2 million dead and wounded men, while capturing less than 1 percent of Ukrainian territory it did not already hold. Putin’s gains are far less than those of Pyrrhus, who managed to defeat the Romans twice. One is tempted to suggest that Putin is achieving Pyrrhic defeats.
Here’s the yearly breakdown of Russian dead and wounded:
2022 — 105,960
2023 — 359,230 (+250,000);
2024 — 789,550 (+430,000);
2025 — 1.2 million (+410,000).
If the Ukrainians can maintain the most recent kill/wound rate of approximately 420,000 per year, Russia will have lost 2 million soldiers before the end of 2027. That figure is, to use an overused adjective, staggering.
An annual loss of 420,000 translates to 35,000 per month, and 1,129 per day. According to Ukraine’s Defense Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, Kyiv’s goal is to kill 50,000 Russians per month. (Fedorov said kill, though he may have meant kill or wound.) That amounts to 1,613 daily casualties—a target Ukraine has reached many times in the past—and 600,000 per year.
In previous years, the Russian armed forces facilitated the kill rate by serving as cannon fodder in hopeless massed “meat-grinder” attacks that resulted in huge casualties. That tactic has changed. Small groups of Russians now are sent into frontline pockets not controlled by Ukrainian forces.
So, the Russians advance, but their gains are tenuous and their human losses, though high, are proportionally less than during mass assaults. Even so, the Ukrainians are killing or wounding 1,129 Russians per day.
CSIS estimates that up to 325,000 Russian soldiers may have been killed in Putin’s war. The estimate accords with the generally accepted view that the ratio of dead to wounded is usually 1:3. But it’s well known that wounded Russian soldiers often receive little to no medical treatment, so the actual ratio may be closer to 1:2, which would mean about 410,000 dead Russians.
Clearly, for Ukraine to increase Russian casualties by 500 per day would require either new battlefield tactics or a more efficient and deadly drone fleet. The latter appears to be under development, which may account for Fedorov’s optimistic projection.
The military historian Phillips Obrien puts it well: “The Ukrainians have basically stripped the front line of soldiers in many places, and relied on the unmanned forces and very small units (a soldier or just a handful of soldiers) to try and undertake the fighting. … What they are trying to do is limit the number of soldiers that they expose to danger while exacting the highest possible toll from the Russians.”
Apparently, “plans have developed to use 10 percent of the Ukrainian army to create 50 percent of the casualties for the Russians.” The Ukrainians “are almost there. This means that in 2025 Ukrainian casualties vis a vis the Russians have dropped.”
Consciously or not, the Ukrainians are learning from Pyrrhus’s misadventures in Italy. And they may just succeed. According to The Times, “Ukrainian forces killed 27 times as many Russians as they lost when they fought to regain the key city of Kupiansk, according to an intelligence assessment provided to the British military.”
The Ukraine War: What Happens Now?
Since Ukrainian forces managed to surround a large body of Russian troops in Kupiansk, the 27:1 ratio may not be easily replicable in other settings. But it does show what the Ukrainian Army is capable of.
If they manage to increase their quota by 500 per day, and if Russia continues to recruit about 30–35,000 monthly, Putin will be unable to replace Russia’s dead and wounded, and the war will become unsustainable.
It could even end with Putin’s flight to Epirus.
About the Author: Alexander Motyl
Dr. Alexander Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, including Pidsumky imperii (2009); Puti imperii (2004); Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001); Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (1999); Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (1993); and The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (1980); the editor of 15 volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2000) and The Holodomor Reader (2012); and a contributor of dozens of articles to academic and policy journals, newspaper op-ed pages, and magazines. He also has a weekly blog, “Ukraine’s Orange Blues.”
