{"id":17949,"date":"2026-07-17T06:42:05","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T06:42:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/17949\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T06:42:05","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T06:42:05","slug":"putin-is-fast-losing-the-energy-war-against-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/17949\/","title":{"rendered":"Putin is fast losing the energy war against Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the military front, Putin is running out of human drone fodder. He has deployed more troops than the entire British Army in a nine-month battle to capture the small town of Kostiantynivka in the Donbas<\/a>, so far without clear success.<\/p>\n

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies estimates that Russia has suffered 1.4 million casualties<\/a>. It is losing 30,000 to 35,000 a month in the kill zone. This, too, drains the budget. The family payout per death is \u00a390,000. A lost leg costs \u00a328,000.<\/p>\n

A rush of recruits signed up last year to lock in the enlistment bonus \u2013 betting on easy barracks duty \u2013 when Donald Trump seemed eager to betray Ukraine.<\/p>\n

The online investigative journal Verstka, run by diaspora journalists with clandestine sources inside Russia, says recruitment since then has plummeted. \u201cIt\u2019s as if we\u2019ve run out of people. There are no more fools for money,\u201d said one soldier, claiming units in his regiment were below 40pc strength.<\/p>\n

Another told Verstka that the 2026 intake is \u201cunfit to fight\u201d and often press-ganged. \u201cSome are taken from prison, others from the streets, literally homeless, already so old and ill that they can barely stand.\u201d They are put through three days of \u201ctraining\u201d and sent straight into the kill zone.<\/p>\n

The mood is mutinous. \u201cIt\u2019s already hatred, but not yet rage, and that\u2019s where it\u2019s all heading. Honestly, I\u2019m scared for the country,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Putin faces the choice of military failure or rolling the dice on a general mobilisation, which would be politically explosive. Verstka reports that the army is already preparing camps to train tens of thousands at a time.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody knows it\u2019s a meatgrinder. If Putin goes for mobilisation, there could be half a million people protesting on the streets,\u201d said Prof Riley. \u201cYou could see a situation like 1917, when Russian troops refused to go to the front.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the military front, Putin is running out of human drone fodder. He has deployed more troops than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17950,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7145,634,906,43,268,1903,375,25,1324,26,33],"class_list":["post-17949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-ambrose-evans-pritchard","tag-business","tag-comment","tag-donald-trump","tag-economy","tag-energy","tag-opinion","tag-russia","tag-top-story","tag-ukraine","tag-vladimir-putin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}