More Russian soldiers are dying than are being recruited for the first time since the Ukraine war began, western officials have said on the fourth anniversary of President Putin’s full-scale invasion.
About 30,000 to 35,000 Russian troops are recruited each month and thrown into the “meat grinder” along Ukraine’s eastern front, according to military intelligence. For the past three months, however, the number of casualties suffered by the invading forces has been greater.
Al Carns, the armed forces minister, compared the threat facing Europe from Russia to that posed by Germany on the eve of the Second World War. “If you were to go back to 1936, ’37, ’38, there’s definitely a lot of similarities,” he said.
Al Carns during his reserve training alongside British commandos in Norway this month
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Carns, who was in the Royal Marines and special forces, described the Ukraine war as “the most defining conflict of my 24 years of service”.
During a defence briefing on Monday, western officials said fewer Russian men were taking up financial incentives to fight on the battlefields of Ukraine.
“It’s not the first time the casualty rate has exceeded recruitment, but it’s the first time this has been sustained over three months,” one official said, describing it as a “critical” moment for the Kremlin.
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“That manpower calculus is really significant. It’s significant operationally and tactically, in terms of their ability to generate offensive power, but also, critically, it starts to raise the issue of coercive mobilisation within Russia,” they said. Such a move would have “huge” political ramifications, the official added.
Carns said Russian losses had reached the “unimaginable” milestone of 1.25 million killed or wounded.
That is “more than America suffered in the entire Second World War”, he said, adding that 87 per cent of casualties on the battlefield were now the result of drone attacks.
More than 4,000 tanks and 10,000 armoured vehicles have been destroyed over the past four years, while Russia’s navy has in effect been rendered inoperable in the Black Sea due to strikes from unmanned Ukrainian kamikaze boats and missiles.
By comparison, the Ukrainian side is estimated to have lost around 600,000 soldiers since Putin launched the invasion on February 24, 2022. Relentless Russian drone and cruise missile attacks have devastated Ukrainian cities.
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Delivering a keynote speech at Chatham House on Monday, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the country’s ambassador to the UK, said attacks on nuclear power and electrical plants had become “Russia’s main instrument of war” — leaving millions without heating and power.
President Zelensky told the BBC that Putin “had already started” a Third World War, and that the only answer was intense military and economic pressure to force him to stop. “The question is how much territory he will be able to seize and how to stop him,” the president said.
Zaluzhnyi warned that the Third World War would be fought by vast swarms of autonomous drones attacking targets simultaneously from the land, air and sea as battlefields became “controlled by robots”.
Valerii Zaluzhnyi
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He said the traditional and expensive weapons systems on which Nato nations relied were being “phased out” of modern warfare, while nuclear weapons were no longer decisive deterrents.
The number of people able to operate in combat zones was rapidly diminishing because the front line was transforming into a “robotic kill zone 25km deep”, he said.
Zaluzhnyi urged the western world to prepare for a new era of conflict by producing large numbers of cheap, mass-produced weapons designed for prolonged warfare.