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Extract from this week's Economist:
JUNE IS turning into an ill-fated month for Russia’s armed forces. It started with a daring Ukrainian drone attack on airfields stretching from Siberia in the east to Murmansk in the north that Ukraine claims destroyed 41 large planes, or about one-third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. But another, more momentous, statistic looms. Before the month ends Russia will probably suffer its millionth casualty since its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, based on current trends of about 1,000 soldiers killed or injured per day.
Russia’s staggering losses—which far exceed those it suffered in all its wars since the second world war—are a testament to Ukraine’s stubborn defence against a far stronger power. Yet Russia’s ability to shrug them off and to keep recruiting men to throw into meat-grinder attacks ought to also pose sobering questions for NATO’s European members: how can democracies that value the individual deter an adversary so unconcerned about the lives of its soldiers that it will sacrifice them, year after year, in a punishing war of attrition?
......
Even so, it is remarkable how Russia continues to absorb such staggering losses (it needs to recruit 30,000-40,000 new soldiers each month to fill the lines). To put them into context, Russia’s losses to date are on a par with the entirety of Britain’s losses in the second world war. They are approaching America’s losses in the same conflict, when its population was a similar size to Russia’s today. The numbers killed in Ukraine are probably more than four times those suffered by America in the eight years of its direct involvement in the Vietnam war, a toll that led to mass protests. Russia’s losses are also about ten times higher than the total number of casualties suffered by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Whereas Ukraine is fighting a war of national survival, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president has choices. Yet he appears to be under little domestic pressure to call it a day. Having lost most of the mainly professional army that set out to defeat Ukraine over three years ago, the Kremlin has come up with an almost entirely novel way of replenishing manpower at the front without risking social destabilisation. It combines the ideological militarisation of society, by convincing most Russians that they are engaged in a war against an imperialistic NATO and that there is glory in death, with increasingly lavish contracts for those willing to sign up.
“Putin believes that the Afghan War is one of the main reasons that the Soviet Union collapsed,” says Aleksandr Golts of the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies. “He has come up with a revolution in Russian military thinking. I call it ‘market mobilisation’, others have called it ‘deathonomics.’”
The sums being paid to soldiers, the majority of whom come from poorer provincial towns and are in their thirties and forties, are genuinely life-changing for many families. By the end of last year, according to Elena Racheva, a Russian former journalist who is now a researcher at Oxford University, the signing on bonus had reached 1.19m roubles ($15,000), while the average annual pay for a contract soldier was between 3.5m and 5.2m roubles, or up to five times the average salary. If a contract soldier is killed, his family will receive between 11m and 19m roubles.
For now, believes Ms Racheva, Russian society accepts that the system is an alternative to full mobilisation. There is 88% approval of contract soldiers receiving money and benefits for going to war “instead of us”. For the families of the dead and injured, huge payouts “alleviate…their grief, such as feelings of injustice … and allow society to avoid moral responsibility for the casualties and injuries they endure,” Ms Racheva wrote. In other words, the contract is not just between the soldier and the state. The question which nobody can answer is how long that contract will hold.
JUNE IS turning into an ill-fated month for Russia’s armed forces. It started with a daring Ukrainian drone attack on airfields stretching from Siberia in the east to Murmansk in the north that Ukraine claims destroyed 41 large planes, or about one-third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. But another, more momentous, statistic looms. Before the month ends Russia will probably suffer its millionth casualty since its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, based on current trends of about 1,000 soldiers killed or injured per day.
Russia’s staggering losses—which far exceed those it suffered in all its wars since the second world war—are a testament to Ukraine’s stubborn defence against a far stronger power. Yet Russia’s ability to shrug them off and to keep recruiting men to throw into meat-grinder attacks ought to also pose sobering questions for NATO’s European members: how can democracies that value the individual deter an adversary so unconcerned about the lives of its soldiers that it will sacrifice them, year after year, in a punishing war of attrition?
......
Even so, it is remarkable how Russia continues to absorb such staggering losses (it needs to recruit 30,000-40,000 new soldiers each month to fill the lines). To put them into context, Russia’s losses to date are on a par with the entirety of Britain’s losses in the second world war. They are approaching America’s losses in the same conflict, when its population was a similar size to Russia’s today. The numbers killed in Ukraine are probably more than four times those suffered by America in the eight years of its direct involvement in the Vietnam war, a toll that led to mass protests. Russia’s losses are also about ten times higher than the total number of casualties suffered by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Whereas Ukraine is fighting a war of national survival, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president has choices. Yet he appears to be under little domestic pressure to call it a day. Having lost most of the mainly professional army that set out to defeat Ukraine over three years ago, the Kremlin has come up with an almost entirely novel way of replenishing manpower at the front without risking social destabilisation. It combines the ideological militarisation of society, by convincing most Russians that they are engaged in a war against an imperialistic NATO and that there is glory in death, with increasingly lavish contracts for those willing to sign up.
“Putin believes that the Afghan War is one of the main reasons that the Soviet Union collapsed,” says Aleksandr Golts of the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies. “He has come up with a revolution in Russian military thinking. I call it ‘market mobilisation’, others have called it ‘deathonomics.’”
The sums being paid to soldiers, the majority of whom come from poorer provincial towns and are in their thirties and forties, are genuinely life-changing for many families. By the end of last year, according to Elena Racheva, a Russian former journalist who is now a researcher at Oxford University, the signing on bonus had reached 1.19m roubles ($15,000), while the average annual pay for a contract soldier was between 3.5m and 5.2m roubles, or up to five times the average salary. If a contract soldier is killed, his family will receive between 11m and 19m roubles.
For now, believes Ms Racheva, Russian society accepts that the system is an alternative to full mobilisation. There is 88% approval of contract soldiers receiving money and benefits for going to war “instead of us”. For the families of the dead and injured, huge payouts “alleviate…their grief, such as feelings of injustice … and allow society to avoid moral responsibility for the casualties and injuries they endure,” Ms Racheva wrote. In other words, the contract is not just between the soldier and the state. The question which nobody can answer is how long that contract will hold.
