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Death By Numbers

  • Writer: Michael Baker
    Michael Baker
  • 3 days ago
  • 3 min read

One of the key narratives of the current Ukraine war is the staggering scale of Russian losses on the battlefield, not just of their troops but their military hardware as well. Losses, moreover, for very little gain, territorially or otherwise. How and why this has occurred is an interesting question but it's not my primary focus here. Rather I want to say a word about these losses in the context of other Russian wars in the modern era. It's been calculated (in a recent report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies) that in contested areas like Kharkiv, Russian forces have advanced on average no more than 50 metres a day. This is a slower rate of advance than on the Somme in 1916, when French and British troops pushed forward (at huge cost) an average of 80 metres a day, and far less than the 1914 Russian offensive in Galicia (over 1500 metres a day) or the Soviet attempt (which ultimately failed) to relieve Leningrad in January 1943 (1000 metres a day). Where the Russians have made gains in Ukraine, mostly in the previously part-occupied eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, for a long time now their advances have typically covered a few kilometres at best, some of which have been reversed by Ukrainian counter-attacks - reinforcing the impression of a stalemate along the front lines reminiscent of the Western Front in WW1. As for troop losses, a majority of specialist third-party sources now agree that, after over three and a half years of war, Moscow's casualties in Ukraine (killed, wounded and missing) number well over one million. Moreover, the number killed is reckoned to be roughly five times greater than the total combat deaths in all Russian and Soviet wars combined since the end of WW2. Or to put it another way, Russian battlefield deaths in Ukraine are 15 times larger than in the Soviet Union's decade-long war in Afghanistan and ten times greater than during Russia's 13-year conflict in Chechnya. This raises, not for the first time, the whole debate over the Russian way of warfare, for in both world wars even Moscow's victories came at an appalling cost for its soldiers as seemingly inexhaustible waves of infantry were hurled at the enemy in attritional 'meat-grinder' offensives. Thus in 1916 the successful three and a half month Brusilov offensive cost the Russians 1.4 million casualties as against 750,000 of their Austro-Hungarian opponents. Likewise, the 120,000 Russian losses suffered (to date) in Moscow's campaign to take the Donetsk city of Pokrovsk bears comparison with the 126,000 Red Army losses in its East Prussian offensive of January to April 1945 (or indeed the astonishing 80,000 Soviet casualties in just over two weeks at the battle of Berlin in April 1945). Of course, in the two world wars the major armies were far bigger and more extended than those in Ukraine today, with formidable fire power at their disposal - just one qualification of many when it comes to comparing battlefield losses, always a notoriously tricky exercise. It's also important to say that the Red Army of WW2 did over time learn to use its manpower less wastefully and became expert in combined arms manoeuvres, in particular using deception and massed artillery to great effect to overwhelm the Germans. Nevertheless the proportions are what's significant here. The fact is that Soviet military losses in the whole of WW2 (8 million is often quoted, some experts say over 10 million) far outnumbered their enemy's, on average by three to one, leaving the winner of the Great Patriotic War so destroyed in every way by 1945 that it looked more like a country which had been utterly defeated. Post-war Soviet propaganda kept these losses a secret, playing up the heroic aspects of the epic struggle and trumpeting Stalin's leading role. But nothing could hide the huge gaps in Soviet society left by the millions who never returned from the Second World War. Putin too - if he's around whenever the war ends - will have to confront the massive scale of Russian losses in Ukraine. That reckoning will be all the grimmer if, as seems increasingly likely, he will be unable to spin a victory narrative out of Russia's dismal performance in its 'special military operation'.

Russian infantry during the Brusilov Offensive of 1916. Note that none of them are wearing helmets. These were not standard issue even in the Red Army until the Second World War.
Russian infantry during the Brusilov Offensive of 1916. Note that none of them are wearing helmets. These were not standard issue even in the Red Army until the Second World War.

   If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again.

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