According to the New York Times this morning, Russia Has Lost More Than 350,000 Soldiers in Ukraine. The text of the story goes on to say that number is for just the number of Russians dead. Over a less-reliable source says that one is wounded for every two killed. (But we do not know how many of the wounded are returned to duty.) That would mean something like 180,000 wounded or about 528,000 casualties (dead + wounded).
Take any of those numbers and compare them to other wars.350,000 dead is in the same league with the about 400,000 US dead in World War II. This is the closest approximation to Russian losses in Ukraine.
It is about half of killed in the US Civil War (maybe about 750,000).
352,000 does not compare to total Soviet losses in WWII, maybe 25,000,000. It also does not compare to Russian losses in WWI (about 2,000,000)
There are no good numbers for the Russian Civil War. But 352,000 is at the lowest end of estimates.
More recently, the Soviets in Afghanistan lost only about 15,000. The US in Vietnam lost 58,300 dead or about 200,000 total casualties. (Of course Vietnamese losses were much higher about 500,000 killed depending how much you trust the numbers.)
I would be interested to know how this is affecting Putin’s hold on power. Is his hold on the media and ability to blind the population with propaganda still doing the trick? Let’s say 500,000 families affected, so 1.5 million people who have either lost or have injured loved ones. Is it considered impolite (or impolitic) to mourn for one’s son or daughter in a public way?
Reporting the past week or so suggests that he is losing his hold on the nation. I saw a news report that the security around him has increased, with fears of assassination, so that he is confining himself to limited well-guarded locations and staff like the cooks who prepare his food are denied cell phones.
As I understand it these are overwhelmingly from the poor remote Asian regions of Russia, which generally the urban elites don’t care about. These are not the well off middle class Moscow or St Petersburg families who are losing their children in a pointless war (though the other side of that is if you are a poor Russian family in a remote Asian region of Russia then the chances of you or someone you know very well losing a child are much greater than even these numbers suggest) .
Of course the way these things work historically is no one cares about remote rural masses until they turn up pissed off at your front door in the big city en masse.
That was a.) based on Ukrainian estimates and both Russian and Ukrainian estimates should be ALWAYS taken with a HUGE grain of salt because as combatants in a war propaganda/fudging numbers is de rigueur. More importantly b.) that was only referring to the most recent spate of fighting - just a couple of lines below: “Until 2025, roughly 35% of all Russian losses were lethal losses,” the source said, a ratio of 1:2.
Estimates of total Russian casualties are all over the map and should all be presumed to be pretty rough. But north of 1 million seems to be likely. How far north being the most uncertain part. Note that many of these will not have been urban Russian conscripts, but assorted Russian minorities plus for awhile that little army of convicts. Putin et al seems to have been trying to limit the impacts on his most immediate constituencies to lessen internal pressure. But that will/is increasingly become less viable as losses mount.
I suspect the North Korea regime will be happier with fewer returning veterans full of stories of how they got three meals a day just for getting shot at. Or maybe they’re not getting fed that much, perhaps their minders/commanders are under orders to keep them starved.
To the OP, you got to bear in mind that Russian tolerance for casualties is orders of magnitude higher than America’s. To Russia, losing men only becomes a problem when it literally begins to impede war progress and when scraping the barrel doesn’t produce enough men on two legs to walk and shoot a gun. PR, morale, popularity, is irrelevant over there and always has been. These are people who have a much-less developed concept of emotion or feelings.
What makes Russia truly panic is the loss of land on the battlefield, not men. Which is, also, frankly quite farcical considering that Russia was already the world’s largest by surface area before the invasion of Ukraine and could only add a bit more by attacking Ukraine, another example of the lack of critical thinking in the Russian psyche.
Do you make a distinction between “Russian leaders” and the “Russian people” when you speak of “Russian tolerance” and “these are people who have a much-less developed concept of emotion or feelings?”
What do you mean by “Russian tolerance for casualties”? If you’re talking about Putin’s criminal regime, that’s been true for all warring dictatorships throughout time, notably Hitler’s and Stalin’s. But the personal effect on families who lose loved ones is just as great as anywhere else, and perhaps even greater, because the loss was so unnecessary, based entirely on lies, and is not broadly associated with patriotism. There’s a very moving bit in the Oscar-winning documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin showing a mother’s grief over the loss of her fallen son.
The amount of hate against Putin that must be building up is incalculable. Hence this comment by @Dewey_Finn that l’ve also read about:
Kind of both. On the one hand, Putin is totally fine with death as long as he’s got caviar and vodka. But the fact that Russian people would give less outcry about massive casualties is a reason why Putin can keep up the war in Ukraine long past a point where a Western nation would have quit. There is no way the U.S. public would have allowed Bush to keep up the invasion in Iraq had 700,000 American soldiers been killed in Iraq during 2003-2007.
(700,000 is to extrapolate for larger size of US population to Russia)
Edit: To be sure, they’ve got feelings and emotions. But they seem much more numbed-down, muted and clammed-in about it than how the West would react.
Morale might not matter to Putin, but it definitely matters to the grunts on the ground. If you have no love for Putin or his cause, and you find out that conditions in Ukrainian POW camps are much better than those in Putin’s army, what are you going to do?
Planet Money had a grim episode on Russia’s “smertonomika”, or death economics. Apparently the death benefit for dying in combat is greater than a poor person could earn in a lifetime, so that is used to bribe people into compliance.
