In the early hours of February 24, 2022, on the icy rooftop of a Kiev hotel, the idea that Russia would launch an all-out invasion against Ukraine despite the massing of troops on the border still seemed almost impossible to imagine.
Yes, Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin’s strongman, had developed a taste for using Russian “hard power.” Putin’s wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, as well as military actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, have brought him success at a relatively low cost.
But invading Europe’s second largest country, behind only Russia itself, would be a potentially catastrophic prospect that would certainly give pause to a cold strategist like Putin.
Apparently not, I remember thinking as I struggled to put on my bulletproof vest under a hail of missiles in the Ukrainian capital.
The past four years of conflict have exposed more than one mistaken assumption, notably the widely held belief — even among Kiev’s allies — that Ukraine would be too weak and disorganized to resist an all-out invasion.
Likewise, the reputation of invincibility that surrounded Russia’s vast military forces was also shaken. According to research from the think tank RUSI (Royal United Services Institute), when the Kremlin launched what it called a “Special Military Operation”, it expected its forces to take control of Ukraine in just 10 days.
More than 1,450 days later, that timeline seems hopelessly naive and has proven to be a fundamental miscalculation that has taken a devastating toll in pain, destruction, and bloodshed.
High number of casualties in almost four years of war
The true cost, of course, is carefully suppressed in a Russia where information is under increasingly tight control. Official casualty figures are kept strictly out of public view, although estimates from various sources indicate sky-high losses.
Recent research by the US-based CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies), for example, puts the number at almost 1.2 million since the start of the large-scale invasion.
This staggering number of dead and injured, which of course does not include the staggering Ukrainian death toll, estimated at between 500,000 and 600,000 people, is higher than all the casualties suffered by “any major power in any war since World War II,” according to the CSIS report.
Of that estimate, up to 325,000 Russians, the report adds, have been killed in the past four years. To give you an idea, that is three times the total combined losses of US forces in all the wars fought by Washington since 1945, including the battlefields of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
And as the conflict in Ukraine enters its fifth year, the military bloodbath – as President Donald Trump frequently points out – is only likely to get worse, rising steadily as the months pass.
Again, the Kremlin has not confirmed the numbers, but Ukrainian officials recently boasted about having killed 35,000 Russian soldiers in December alone. The stated goal of military planners in Kiev now is to kill Russian soldiers faster than new recruits, who for now are mostly volunteers, can be trained and sent into combat.
“If we reach 50,000, we will see what happens to the enemy. They see people as a resource and the shortages are already evident,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told journalists at a recent press conference.
In more ways than one, this war has turned into an ugly numbers game.
Blow to the Russian economy
Whenever I visit Moscow, a city from which so many friends and colleagues have left or been ostracized, it is striking how distant the brutal war in Ukraine seems.
At least on the surface, the glamorous Russian capital, with its shops, cafes and traffic jams, is well insulated from the horrors of the front lines, save for the occasional interception of Ukrainian drones, which few Muscovites, frankly, spare a thought about.
Following the 2022 invasion, Russian military spending soared, and its economy prospered.
Driven by oil and gas exports, Russia has defied Western predictions of economic collapse, becoming, by 2025, the world’s ninth-largest economy, according to the International Monetary Fund, ahead of Canada and Brazil. This is an improvement from 11th place before the war in Ukraine began.
But there are growing signs of financial pain, linked to a distorted war economy.
One problem is the increasingly expensive practice of offering large signing bonuses to Russians who agree to join the military, plus even larger payouts if they are killed in combat.
Furthermore, military conscription and the prioritization of military industrial production have led to what a pro-Kremlin newspaper, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, called a “severe labor shortage” in other essential industries.
“The economy doesn’t have enough machine operators or assembly workers. We need to find 800,000 manual workers somewhere,” the newspaper reported.
Skyrocketing food costs have been a growing focus of pain for consumers, with cucumbers becoming the latest target of popular dissatisfaction.
Official statistics show that cucumber prices have doubled since December, while some stores are selling them at an even higher markup, wartime prices for a salad staple, as the Russian economy slows.
“The prices of cucumbers and tomatoes are absurd. Before, they said the eggs were “golden”. Now it’s the cucumbers,” posted a woman who gave her name as Svetlana, in a rare public criticism of the authorities.
Elsewhere, stories of economic doom and gloom – from runaway inflation to restaurant closures and the impact of severe tax hikes – describe the many ways in which the protracted war in Ukraine is hitting Russians hard in the pocketbook, at home.
International position
The war has not been very advantageous for the Kremlin abroad either.
Preventing was one of the main reasons Russian officials said the invasion of Ukraine was launched.
The fact that Sweden and Finland joined the alliance as a direct result of the full-scale invasion is a clear failure of this objective, with Finland’s membership alone more than doubling the land border between Russia and NATO countries.
Furthermore, Western sanctions and political isolation have forced Russia to reorient eastward, especially toward China, which it now increasingly depends on for essential trade, from energy exports to car and electronics imports, giving Beijing an advantage over Moscow.
“The relationship is unbalanced because Moscow is more dependent on Beijing than Beijing is on Moscow,” commented a recent CEPA (Center for European Policy Analysis) report.
“Russia has clearly become the junior partner, mainly due to its limited economic alternatives,” the CEPA report added.
Moscow has also proven unable to prevent the erosion of its traditional influence elsewhere.
In 2024, the Kremlin was forced to extract and grant asylum to its Syrian ally, Bashar al-Assad, when he was overthrown by rebel forces. The new president of Syria, where Russia still maintains two military bases, has repeatedly called for Assad’s extradition from Moscow.
Last summer, Russia stood by helplessly as U.S. and Israeli warplanes attacked Iran, another key Kremlin partner in the Middle East, targeting its nuclear facilities.
Russia was also unable to protect Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a figure with strong ties to the Kremlin, from being captured in a raid by US troops last month on his Caracas room.
It may be that Russia would never have been able to prevent these events from unfolding, even if it had not already been overwhelmed and bogged down in Ukraine.
But after four years of a grueling war that took a horrific toll on Ukraine, Russia was exhausted at home and diminished on the international stage.
Back on that Kiev hotel terrace in February 2022, I was wrong, as were many others, about the likelihood of Putin ordering a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
But, unfortunately, we were right about the catastrophic consequences of doing so – for the Ukrainians, of course, and for the Russians too: it was a prediction that, unfortunately, turned out to be terribly accurate.
