There seems to be a recurring point made in the current discussion around the Russo-Ukrainian War. Ukraine will always struggle with manpower as a smaller, democratic country. And Russia will always thrive in the manpower fight because it is larger and run by an autocrat.
So Ukraine and Russia are two battling animals, and Russia can bleed for longer than Ukraine can fight.
But...what? Did we all forget that Russia announced a conscription of 300,000 last year and saw hundreds of thousands of Russians flee the country? Indeed, over 1 million Russians entered Georgia in the nine months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So, let's interrogate the idea that Russia has an endless pool of manpower.
But first, we should acknowledge that Ukraine also faces real manpower shortages.
Ukraine's manpower struggles
KYIV, UKRAINE - NOVEMBER 27: People stand around a memorial to fallen Ukrainian soldiers after a snowfall on November 27, 2023 in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Photo by Danylo Antoniuk/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
We should get this out of the way because, while the author unabashedly supports Ukraine, it would be quite dishonest to discuss Russia's manpower woes without admitting that Ukraine faces a lot of the same problems.
Ukraine has the much smaller population of the two countries. Ukraine has just shy of 14 million men aged 15-64 years. Russia has over 45 million. Ukraine's pool is literally less than a third of the size.
And Ukraine has faced problems with draft dodging. An estimated 20,000 fighting-age men fled by November of 2023. That's five brigades worth, an entire division, if Ukraine was into divisions.
Meanwhile, it has already lost an estimated 200,000 casualties among its troops and over 26,000 civilian casualties.
Ukraine, in theory, has millions more men that it can press into service. But in practical terms, its military has tripled in size since February 2022 but probably couldn't double again without major strain.
Russia's manpower struggles
So, yes, Russia's population is nearly triple the size of Ukraine's. And it's taking losses at just 1.5 times the rate of Ukraine (an estimated 300,000 Russian casualties to 200,000 Ukrainian ones). If Russia and Ukraine both poured their men's blood into a pit at the current rates, Ukraine would run out long before Russia.
But Russia is fighting a war of choice and aggression very poorly. And its poor and disenfranchised masses understand that they're being used as fodder for Putin's vanity war. Russia's population is surprisingly diverse, with five minorities representing over 1 percent each of the population, and over 23 percent of Russians not claiming Russian ethnicity.
But Russia is disproportionately calling up its ethnic minorities, and they've noticed. And, believe it or not, oppressed minorities would typically rather not die subjecting other ethnicities to oppression.
Remember, when Russia called up 300,000 men for military service and an estimated more than 200,000 fled the country in a week?
And AP just released phone calls of Russian soldiers who want to flee their units.
Russia can barely keep up the bonuses needed to keep drawing volunteers into the military, and that's without paying many of the death bonuses. Because, yes, Russian families are supposed to get death gratuities, but Russia is reportedly hiding many deaths to prevent paying out.
Meanwhile, the Russian economy continues to flash warning signs, the economy that's needed to provide those bonuses. As well as pay for the massive amounts of destroyed war material.
A conscription further damages the economy, requires more money for training, money for enforcement, and then more money for death bonuses and funerals. Indeed, Putin is reportedly afraid to call another mass mobilization precisely because of the damage to the economy and popular sentiment.
The Russian economy is in the toilet
Most media credulously prints whatever economic numbers that Russia claims. But more skeptical economists have double-checked Russia's claims. First, the bulk of Russia's income, as always, comes from the sale of Urals Crude. But Urals Crude is trading at less than $62 a barrel as of the time of writing. And that's despite massive OPEC production cuts and Russia restricting exports. So Russia is collecting little per barrel while also selling fewer barrels.
The exact numbers are hidden since so much Russian oil is smuggled on a "dark" tanker fleet, that Russia had to buy, but oil revenues are definitely down.
Meanwhile, Russia claims that its economy has grown while admitting that large portions of it now exclusively produce war goods instead of consumer goods. But even those numbers are suspect, since researchers at the European Central Bank found that Russia claimed its factories were humming at full-strength even as air quality data and energy consumption showed quite clearly that Russian factories must have either gone entirely solar or else were sitting dormant.
Economist Dr. Joeri Schasfoort held a YouTube live with one of the European Central Bank researchers on his channel Money & Macro. He said academics largely trusted Russia's numbers before the war, but its data since sanctions started are entirely suspect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZMi9QZqy6M
So, yes, Russia is the larger country with the larger population. But with its economy already strained, its men already fleeing conscription at nearly the pace that men are accepting it, and it taking heavier losses than Ukraine, it's not actually clear that it has some endless pool of soldiers.
Instead, we should see Russia as an already wounded animal. We may not know how much blood it has left. But we also know it will pass out or die before it hits zero. Imagining that Russia can bleed forever is a weird, dark fantasy.
Logan Nye was an Army journalist and paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. Now, he’s a freelance writer and live-streamer. In addition to covering military and conflict news at We Are The Mighty, he has an upcoming military literacy channel on Twitch.tv/logannyewrites.
It’s mud season again in Ukraine, a phenomenon with such significance there that it has a special name: “bezdorizhzhia”, the season of bad roads. The Russians say “rasputitsa”. It’s most severe in the spring, when melting winter ice makes the earth muddy, but it generally happens with the autumn rains too.
Bezdorizhzhia has a paralysing effect on armies, especially armies on the attack. Even tanks, which are specifically designed for off-road mobility and exert much less pressure on the ground than cars or trucks do (the enormous weight of the tank is spread over a much greater area by the tank’s tracks), frequently can’t move off paved roads during mud season.
They often can’t move at all, as paved roads laid across mud country may break up if you drive heavy vehicles on them during bezdorizhzhia.
Most soldiers and most of an army’s supplies move in wheeled vehicles, rather than tracked vehicles such as tanks. Almost all wheeled vehicles are strictly road-bound in mud season and often the rest of the time too. A marching soldier also can’t cross the mud with any ease.
Attacking during mud season, then, is a terrible idea.
The Russian army, reinforcing the impression of incompetence it has given ever since the invasion, is of course mounting a huge attack in the Avdiivka area right now.
Reportedly a third assault wave of 40,000 men is about to be thrown in. Ten days of rain are forecast, with temperatures remaining well above freezing. British military intelligence has already suggested that Russian losses in Avdiivka will be the worst in any operation this year, and that’s saying something.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, under intense international pressure, has sought to give the impression that his army’s counter-offensive has not come to a halt as was strongly suggested by his commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, last week. But despite Zelensky’s upbeat tone, Zaluzhny will certainly not be attacking for the next few weeks unless the weather is unusual: it would be simply throwing his men away.
Bezdorizhzhia doesn’t last into the winter: as it gets cold the rain gives way to snow and the ground becomes firm again. But winter brings its own problems. Again, it favours the defender over the attacker, especially in eastern Europe. “General Winter” was famously always the deadliest Russian commander that French and German invaders had to face.
All across the Western world this is being treated as some kind of failure by the Ukrainians. It’s unfortunate that many Western commentators, often former military officers, have previously given it as their opinion that Western tanks, used correctly, would enable a brilliant Blitzkrieg-style breakthrough and end the war in a matter of weeks.
A Blitzkrieg-style breakthrough hasn't quite materialised in Ukraine - Efrem Lukatsky/The Associated Press
They argued that Russia’s huge, well-equipped tank forces failed in the initial invasion because the Russians were doing it all wrong: they didn’t know how to coordinate their tanks, infantry and artillery in “combined arms” warfare the way Western soldiers can.
Western tanks have been promised to Ukraine: the German Leopard, the US Abrams and British Challengers. But the actual delivery took a long time. Just 87 Leopards and 14 Challengers had reached Ukraine as of August and precisely zero Abrams. Denmark and the Netherlands’ contributions won’t arrive until next year.
Even so, a hundred tanks is a lot of tanks: it’s enough for an armoured brigade. The Ukrainians also had lots of decent Soviet-pattern ones. They had managed to pull a lot of troops out of the line to be rested, re-equipped and trained – often by Western instructors from the same armies that produced the confident ex-military commentators. They had the division-sized armoured force that Western officers had said could win the war.
Yet the mighty Ukrainian armoured spearhead has advanced just 10 miles. Far from a Blitzkrieg, this has been more like erosion than lightning.
This is uncomfortable for the Western military commentators. One of two things must be the case: either they were wrong and tanks, even with Western training and tactics, are no longer a decisive weapon; or the Ukrainians, despite being trained by Western armies, must be doing something wrong.
Nobody likes admitting that they might be wrong, so Western military and ex-military opinion (not usually expressed in public, but nonetheless fairly universal and stated in writing) is that the Ukrainians have been doing it wrong and this is the real reason they haven’t defeated the Russians.
The suggestion is that if Western officers had been given an armoured division they would have done much better with it.
Even if one is an armoured warfare true believer, it’s still hard to picture a Western general really doing much better than Zaluzhny and his colleagues. In order to carry out a classic Blitzkrieg operation, after all, one must first get past the enemy’s front lines. This is extremely difficult to do if they are heavily manned, heavily fortified and protected by deep minefields and lots of heavy weapons.
Heinz Guderian, the German general generally credited with carrying out the first Blitzkrieg in the assault on France in 1940, was up against the heavily fortified Maginot Line. He solved his problem by simply going around it through Luxembourg and Belgium. It’s not usually possible for a defender to have strong fortifications everywhere.
Russia today certainly doesn’t have strong fortifications everywhere. The Russia-Ukraine border all the way from the battle front to Belarus is only lightly protected.
However, Ukraine can mount only minor, semi-deniable operations on Russian soil and cannot use any Western equipment in them, because that has been a condition of Western support.
Even the battle front itself from the border to Donetsk does not have to be very strongly held by the Russians, as Ukrainians breaking through that part of the lines would have the Russian border in front of them, where they would have to stop and the Russians wouldn’t. Any Ukrainian attack there would probably be a feint.
Then, from Zaporizhzhia to Crimea, the front line is along the Dnipro river, a formidable obstacle.
That just leaves a hundred miles of front, from Zaporizhzhia to Donetsk, where the Ukrainians are not blocked by the river and can drive for the Azov Sea. If they could get there they would have cut the Russian army in two, leaving the Crimean half totally dependent on the Kerch bridges for supply – bridges that would then be within range of some Ukrainian weapons. The war would be all but won.
But knowing where the Ukrainian attack has to come means that the Russians can build their Maginot Line – actually called the Surovikin Line – and the Ukrainians have to attack straight into it. Even Heinz Guderian might not have made much progress in this kind of situation.
Ukraine is hampered by the West's refusal to let its weapons breach Russian territory - Libkos/The Associated Press
But they can’t do any of these things because we won’t let them.They could mount a major attack across the almost undefended eastern border, or go around the eastern end of the battle front Guderian-style and roll the Russians up.
Both these options would force the Russians to pull troops and guns and construction effort out of the Surovikin Line. The Ukrainians could mount their real assault somewhere between Donetsk and Russia, ending their drive to the Azov on Russia’s coast. But they can’t do any of these things because we won’t let them.
First we forbid the Ukrainians from operating on Russian territory (or anyway, using our weapons to do so), which forces them to attack along a very limited front. Second, just to make sure they really have no chance of success, we dithered for months before agreeing to supply tanks and then took more months to actually send them, just to make sure that the Russians had lots of time to build the Surovikin Line.
Bluntly, there has been no Ukrainian military failure here. We in the West have forced them to fight with their hands tied behind their backs. The fact that they have made any progress at all is impressive.
Still, it remains a fact that the offensive is stopped for the winter. And it’s also pretty clear that if nothing changes, next year will be a lot like this year: grinding, attritional warfare.
“There will be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” General Zaluzhny admitted last week. “We have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate.”
Putin’s diminishing power
The prospect of stalemate, bizarrely, is seen by some in the West as a reason to reduce or cut off military support.
The thinking seems to be: well, we’ve spent a lot of money and given you lots of equipment with which our military men say they could have defeated the Russians and you’ve totally failed to defeat them, so we’re not going to give you any more. We’ll just let you run out of ammunition and die, and allow the same criminals who raped and murdered and tortured at Bucha and elsewhere, the same regime that steals children en masse and rounds people up for disappearance into the gulags, to take your country from you.
And we’ll just hope that we’re not next: that Russia won’t rest and rearm and then move in on somewhere else.
However, cutting support doesn’t make sense even if you don’t care at all about Ukraine. Even if we care only about ourselves and our own safety and want that safety at the lowest possible cost, we should keep sending aid.
As a few of the more perceptive commentators have pointed out, spending money on military aid for Ukraine is the most cost-effective defence spending anyone in Nato has ever done.
As long as he faces opposition in Ukraine, Putin’s threat to anyone else is shrinking - GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/AFP
The Ukrainians have destroyed the Russian army as it existed in 2022: its tough, volunteer “kontraktniki” contract soldiers are gone, as are all the better classes of conscripts and all of Russia’s best tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery pieces.
Putin is reduced to sending the dregs of his jails to war in ancient vehicles rescued from the scrapheap. Russian air and sea power, too, have been badly mauled – or else exposed as missing or ineffectual, in not a few cases. Russia’s entire ability to make war is tied up: even basic defence capabilities in places other than Ukraine have been degraded.
As long as the Ukrainians are fighting, Vladimir Putin’s threat to anyone else is hugely diminished. Westerners are spending small percentages of our normal defence budgets on Ukraine assistance in order to be more or less entirely safe from Russia. It would be madness to stop doing so, no matter how long the stalemate might last. As long as the Ukrainians are willing to fight, we should back them.
Sliding into a stalemate
Even still, a stalemate is undesirable. Ukraine will run out of men before Russia does and the more people of working age it loses, the harder it will be to rebuild its society and economy after the war.
The risk is there that large numbers of refugees taken in across Europe may not want to return home and this problem worsens with every Ukrainian killed or maimed and every Russian bomb, missile or shell fired. We need Ukraine back as a strong ally and the breadbasket of Europe as it was, not as a shattered, depopulated wasteland.
Given that the stalemate is our fault, we Westerners should end it. This is the more so as it would involve no difficult or dangerous action by us.
The clue is in General Zaluzhny’s remark: Ukraine has reached a level of technology that puts it in a stalemate. We have sent tanks, artillery, and armoured vehicles. We have sent missiles of certain types, but only Britain and France have dared to send long-range precision strike missiles – and we only had the Storm Shadow / SCALP to send.
The Storm Shadow / SCALP (“Système de Croisière Autonome à Longue Portée”) is a somewhat modified version of a French 1980s-vintage runway-buster weapon called APACHE. We in Britain like to claim it was jointly developed with France, but it is really just an APACHE with a British bunker-busting warhead that doesn’t work terribly well (as colleagues of mine in the bomb-disposal world discovered during the Iraq invasion).
As one would expect with such an old weapon, it’s not all that effective. In particular, being a subsonic cruise weapon – in other words, a small robotic jet aeroplane – it is relatively easy to detect and shoot down. Its makers nowadays like to claim that it has some kind of “stealth” attributes but this appears to be no more than marketing fluff.
The Ukrainians have managed to make Storm Shadow strikes on the Russian naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea, but they had to carry out various special-forces raids and other attacks beforehand in order to take down Russian air defences so that the missiles could fly in.
They have not managed to put the Crimean airbase at Saky out of commission and the Storm Shadow is simply not delivering the effect it theoretically should: that of putting all Russian-occupied Ukraine under Zelensky’s guns.
Despite the fact that the Kerch bridges ought to be well within the Storm Shadow’s reach, they are still standing – allowing supplies and munitions to flow into Crimea and the “land bridge” of Russian-held territory south of the Surovikin Line. It’s generally thought that the Storm Shadow’s British bunker-buster warhead, backronymed to be dubbed BROACH (“Bomb, Royal Ordnance, Augmented Charge”), can’t do bridges.
In any event, by this point we can say that Storm Shadow isn’t going to break the stalemate for Ukraine. Nor is the obsolete, short-ranged M39 version of the US Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), which Joe Biden has grudgingly and belatedly sent.
This is a supersonic ballistic missile, which is much harder to shoot down. But the M39 cannot reach Saky, Sevastopol or Kerch and its cluster warhead cannot do bridges or hardened targets.
Breaking the deadlock
What the Ukrainians need is one of the proper, full fat versions of ATACMS that followed the original M39: one with a unitary warhead rather than cluster submunitions, meaning that it can take out concrete structures.
Joe Biden is afraid to send real ATACMS because he thinks the Ukrainians would use it to take out the Kerch bridges, once and for all. He’s afraid that this might lead Putin to nuclear escalation. Olaf Scholz is refusing to send Germany’s Taurus missile – much like Storm Shadow, but with a better warhead that can do bridges – for the same reason.
Appeasement is in the air. Biden, Scholz and their school of thought do not want to give the appearance of supplying a war-changing weapon because they are afraid it would make Vladimir Putin angry.
The arrival of American missiles helped the Ukrainians drive back Russian forces during the 2022 counter-offensive - Anadolu Agency
But this timid attitude isn’t terribly logical. War-changing weapons have been sent before.
The counter-offensive of 2022, in which the Russians were driven back across the southern Dnipro river, was a huge success because of the arrival of another American missile, the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS), mostly fired from the Himars vehicle. This can make precision strikes to ranges of more than 70km, much further than anything the Ukrainians had before. The Russians had not realised that the Ukrainians (or friends of theirs) had a way to locate all their field headquarters.
Multiple headquarters and other important targets like ammo dumps were duly taken out by volleys of GMLRS. The Russian army west of the Dnipro fell into disarray and the Ukrainians pushed it back across the river. A US-supplied weapon had changed the war.
Similarly, it was argued that sending Western tanks would provoke Putin. It took Britain’s offer of Challengers to show Biden and Scholz that sending tanks was safe.
Again, it was widely thought that supplying Storm Shadow missiles would lead to the Kerch bridges falling and Russian headquarters across the theatre being pummelled as the weapon’s limitations were not widely known. Yet the sending of Storm Shadow did not provoke Putin to anything more than bluster.
We should stop listening to the argument that the Ukrainians are fighting wrongly. Yes, Western tank armies have beaten Soviet-equipped ones easily in Iraq and Kuwait but this was not because they had Western tanks and Western officers: they won because they had total dominance of the air and thus could use precision strike weapons anywhere in theatre.
We should give the same capability to Ukraine, firstly in the form of proper full-fat ATACMS and then by making sure that the coming F-16 fighter jets are equipped with everything up to and including the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Munition (JASSM), which is everything that Storm Shadow is supposed to be and more.
It’s time to cease taking counsel of our fears and end the stalemate in Ukraine, by taking steps no more aggressive than those we have already taken.
The West needs to get this war wrapped up, so that we can look elsewhere.
An increasingly autocratic government is making bad decisions
Whatever has gone wrong? After China rejoined the world economy in 1978, it became the most spectacular growth story in history. Farm reform, industrialisation and rising incomes lifted nearly 800m people out of extreme poverty. Having produced just a tenth as much as America in 1980, China’s economy is now about three-quarters the size. Yet instead of roaring back after the government abandoned its “zero-covid” policy at the end of 2022, it is lurching from one ditch to the next.
The economy grew at an annualised rate of just 3.2% in the second quarter, a disappointment that looks even worse given that, by one prominent estimate, America’s may be growing at almost 6%. House prices have fallen and property developers, who tend to sell houses before they are built, have hit the wall, scaring off buyers. Consumer spending, business investment and exports have all fallen short. And whereas much of the world battles inflation that is too high, China is suffering from the opposite problem: consumer prices fell in the year to July. Some analysts warn that China may enter a deflationary trap like Japan’s in the 1990s .
Yet in some ways Japanification is too mild a diagnosis of China’s ills. A chronic shortfall in growth would be worse in China because its people are poorer. Japan’s living standards were about 60% of America’s by 1990; China’s today are less than 20%. And, unlike Japan, China is also suffering from something more profound than weak demand and heavy debt. Many of its challenges stem from broader failures of its economic policymaking—which are getting worse as President Xi Jinping centralises power.
A decade or so ago China’s technocrats were seen almost as savants. First they presided over an economic marvel. Then China was the only big economy to respond to the global financial crisis of 2007-09 with sufficient stimulatory force—some commentators went as far as to say that China had saved the world economy. In the 2010s, every time the economy wobbled, officials defied predictions of calamity by cheapening credit, building infrastructure or stimulating the property market.
During each episode, however, public and private debts mounted. So did doubts about the sustainability of the housing boom and whether new infrastructure was really needed. Today policymakers are in a bind. Wisely, they do not want more white elephants or to reflate the property bubble. Nor can they do enough of the more desirable kinds of stimulus, such as pension spending and handouts to poor households to boost consumption, because Mr Xi has disavowed “welfarism” and the government seeks an official deficit of only 3% of gdp.
As a result, the response to the slowdown has been lacklustre. Policymakers are not even willing to cut interest rates much. On August 21st they disappointed investors with an underwhelming cut of 0.1 percentage points in the one-year lending rate.
This feeble response to tumbling growth and inflation is the latest in a series of policy errors. China’s foreign-policy swagger and its mercantilist industrial policy have aggravated an economic conflict with America. At home it has failed to deal adequately with incentives to speculate on housing and a system in which developers have such huge obligations that they are systemically important. Starting in 2020 regulators tanked markets by cracking down on successful consumer-technology firms that were deemed too unruly and monopolistic. During the pandemic, officials bought time with lockdowns but failed to use it to vaccinate enough people for a controlled exit, and then were overwhelmed by the highly contagious Omicron variant.
Why does the government keep making mistakes? One reason is that short-term growth is no longer the priority of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp). The signs are that Mr Xi believes China must prepare for sustained economic and, potentially, military conflict with America. Today, therefore, he emphasises China’s pursuit of national greatness, security and resilience. He is willing to make material sacrifices to achieve those goals, and to the extent he wants growth, it must be “high quality”.
Yet even by Mr Xi’s criteria, the ccp’s decisions are flawed. The collapse of the zero-covid policy undermined Mr Xi’s prestige. The attack on tech firms has scared off entrepreneurs. Should China fall into persistent deflation because the authorities refuse to boost consumption, debts will rise in real value and weigh more heavily on the economy. Above all, unless the ccp continues to raise living standards, it will weaken its grip on power and limit its ability to match America.
Mounting policy failures therefore look less like a new, self-sacrificing focus on national security, than plain bad decision-making. They have coincided with Mr Xi’s centralisation of power and his replacement of technocrats with loyalists in top jobs. China used to tolerate debate about its economy, but today it cajoles analysts into fake optimism. Recently it has stopped publishing unflattering data on youth unemployment and consumer confidence. The top ranks of government still contain plenty of talent, but it is naive to expect a bureaucracy to produce rational analysis or inventive ideas when the message from the top is that loyalty matters above all. Instead, decisions are increasingly governed by an ideology that fuses a left-wing suspicion of rich entrepreneurs with a right-wing reluctance to hand money to the idle poor.
The fact that China’s problems start at the top means they will persist. They may even worsen, as clumsy policymakers confront the economy’s mounting challenges. The population is ageing rapidly. America is increasingly hostile, and is trying to choke the parts of China’s economy, like chipmaking, that it sees as strategically significant. The more China catches up with America, the harder the gap will be to close further, because centralised economies are better at emulation than at innovation.
Liberals’ predictions about China have often betrayed wishful thinking. In the 2000s Western leaders mistakenly believed that trade, markets and growth would boost democracy and individual liberty. But China is now testing the reverse relationship: whether more autocracy damages the economy. The evidence is mounting that it does—and that after four decades of fast growth China is entering a period of disappointment.
