The leaked death toll that shows how Putin’s Russia could unravel

Vladimir Putin’s fascination with rewriting the past explains one of the central paradoxes of the war against Ukraine: how it can yield so many casualties without securing a victory after nearly five years – but with no imminent danger to his grip on the Kremlin and a determination to pour more Russian lives into the fray? Even by the Kremlin leader’s tendency to produce photo negative versions of the truth, Putin’s recent resort to comparisons of his “special operation” in Ukraine with the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s are bizarre – and telling. The invasion which began as a show of Brezhnev-era Soviet bravura and tank warfare failed to subdue the Mujahideen, sacrificed some 15,000 combatants on the Russian side to fatal guerilla attacks and exposed the weaknesses of Soviet military doctrine, emboldening revolt in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. The dreadful aftermath – tens of thousands of wounded and PTSD-afflicted veterans was duly relegated to the margins of the Kremlin’s narratives. But as Putin has reclaimed the Soviet past as a template for his rule today, school visits and commemorations cite Afghanistan as embodying “military brotherhood traditions” and deploy veterans more openly than in the neglect of previous decades for “military and patriotic education of young people”. The war which Mikhail Gorbachev termed a “bleeding wound” is also a reminder that what happens on battlefields carries long shadows. I was a Moscow correspondent in 1996, when the news broke that Mohammed Najibullah, the former Communist backed leader had been assassinated by the Taliban in a raid on a UN compound – his body hung from a pole in Kabul in the final gesture of defiance to Moscow. By then, the Soviet system itself had crumbled. This last week marked 37 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe.For Putin today, these conjoined events are not warnings from history against military interventions. They are, as he sees it, proof that the “bravery” and “brotherly solidarity” of Soviet forces in Afghanistan are a template for the “special operation” in Ukraine. On the Putin thesis, the lesson is not a warning from history about the difficulties of invasion – but that when Russia fails to project military force consistently, it ends up in a spiral of decline and weakness. That explains why, despite Russian fatality figures in Ukraine – at least 450,000 by summer 2026 according to a recent hack of the country’s main statistics body and borne out by Nato intelligence sources – Putin believes that he can win the war. A domestic death toll far greater than the war conflict in central Asia has made scant impact on the Putin worldview. Part of this is pure Kremlin Derangement Syndrome: Putin receives information through highly self-selected channels and the turnover of military leadership and assassination of the Yevgeny Prigozhin. Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner group who courted disfavor with the Russian leader, inter alia by being critical of the war leadership and accusing Putin of failing to seek a way out of the conflict in 2023, died in a convenient air crash. That has warned other major players that criticizing the war can have fatal consequences. The realities of the conflict are that Russia cannot make a major advance – because the technological nature of the war has changed since 2022. The emergence of what Finland’s President Alexander Stubb calls war by “mathematics” in a 20 kilometer “Killzone”– the hellish landscape, saturated by unmanned drones and a vast web of communications – translated into five Russian troops being killed for each Ukrainian. It can only “win” Ukraine if backing for the country in the US and Europe falter. So that is what it is relying on. This is not to say that Kyiv does not have its own weaknesses as the clear skies of winter reveal the weaknesses of its air defences. The exhaustion of defensive dig-ins and a fifth winter of privation and weariness are taking their toll – Ukraine also has recruitment shortages and draft evasions to contend with. An exhausted and emotional Zelensky showed as he commented on talks in Abu Dhabi that the bloviating of Jared Kushner, one of Donald Trump’s envoys, about an elusive ceasefire deal left him with a distaste for the whole process. The Ukraine war, however, has cost Russia much more than blood and treasure and downgrading its aims to possession of the Donbas. The conflict, like Afghanistan, bequeaths traumatised and brutalised cohort of veterans in the spread of gangster crime and spirals of domestic violence. That has been so well known about as to feature as a memorable episode in the terrifying mid-2000s Russian TV crime series The Method, the kind of socially critical material airbrushed from today’s media but well known to Russian viewers. Even in less dramatic impacts, the two conflicts sucked state funding away from national needs into the military-industrial complex, depleted the country’s stagnant health system and damaged its over-loaded pension funds (skewed increasingly towards the families of the military). A recent panic over possible freezing of private savings accounts or limiting withdrawals shows underlying anxiety about the war hitting domestic consumers. It also leaves modern Russia with male life expectancy 10 years behind women – and that is before the battlefield sacrifices are factored in. Some of grimmest legacies of Afghanistan have also revived in galloping rates of untreated HIV infection and drug addiction in the armed forces. My sense of Russia over many years has been that a battered society knows many truths at heart – but is systematised to accept very high levels of denial, in part because it has a long history of various forms of tyranny and because the Putin era did see the rise of a more prosperous middle class, who have been able to shrug shoulders about the horrors of life for dissidents in the country – and on the battlefields outside it The weakness of the Kremlin, in the wars of the 80s and today, is however exposed when it moves closer to everyday lives. Recruitment shortages mean prosperous families face the draft – with many younger men pouring into Georgia, Kazakhstan or discovering the urgent need to do business in Turkey or Azerbaijan. Propaganda can obscure a lot, but the comparison with Afghanistan is apposite in a way a man, who never served in Moscow’s searing conflict in the 1980s, cannot acknowledge. The Ukraine war, however it ends, will have all the same detriments for his country, but a large order of magnitude worse.