Volodymyr Zelensky is talking about Russia’s battlefield deaths and has asked his new defense minister to make it a priority.
More than 35,000 Russian soldiers were killed or seriously wounded in December alone, Ukraine’s leader said, and the goal should be to increase the number to 50,000 per month.
“Make the cost of war for Russia unsustainable, thereby strengthening peace through force” – this was the task assigned to him by the president, Mikhail Fedorov told reporters at his first briefing as defense minister.
The suggestion that Russia suffered huge losses is not new. A new report last week estimated that 1.2 million Russians have been either killed, wounded or missing since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago — the worst casualty figure suffered by a major military power since World War II. Reports put Ukrainian casualties at between 500,000 and 600,000.
“The data suggest that Russia has barely won,” the report’s authors wrote.
Maybe not, but as senior officials from Ukraine, Russia and the United States prepare for the next round of face-to-face talks in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday, it will be a mistake for Ukraine’s supporters.
“Highlighting the large Russian death toll is an indicator that Ukraine’s main strategy is attrition. But we need more than that if we want to shift the dynamics of the war in a positive direction,” a former Ukrainian official told CNN.
On the one hand, focusing on the headline-grabbing numbers provides an important perspective on Ukraine’s refusal to give up Donetsk as part of any “peace” deal with Russia.
The logic behind Kiev’s stance is simple: very few Ukrainians believe that Putin has any goal other than the complete subjugation of their country. So, why hand over any land at all if Ukraine can expect to kill hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers as Moscow tries to take Donetsk by force?
Ukrainian troops still hold about 20% of the eastern region, including heavily fortified cities such as Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, and the latest estimates by the Institute for the Study of War suggest it could take another 18 months for Russia to capture it all.
If those Russian soldiers are not killed in combat – the argument goes – they will be ready to resume the war in occupied Ukrainian territory, from a more advantageous position, as the Kremlin pretends to do.
Few in Ukraine believe Putin will abandon his territorial demands, and many have lost faith that US President Donald Trump will put the necessary pressure on him to change his mind.
“Although the government negotiated in good faith, many feel that the entire process was designed to ensure the support of the US government,” said the former Ukrainian official.
“People are extremely skeptical about the negotiation process.”
But if talks are unlikely to go anywhere, what about Ukraine’s battlefield strategy? Is collecting the other party’s body bag the best way forward?
A US ex-combatant, Ryan O’Leary, who led an international volunteer unit called the Chosen Company, doesn’t believe it, sparking a heated debate after he laid out his arguments in a social media post.
He took issue with the much-vaunted “e-point” scheme, in which units in Ukraine earn points for every Russian soldier killed or piece of materiel. The points are exchanged for new equipment, and the Ministry of Defense says the scheme provides a wealth of data to help shape future plans.
But O’Leary suggested that they create the wrong incentives, leading Ukrainian commanders to prefer more direct drone strikes against infantry targets around the battle lines to harder but more important deep strikes against Russian logistics — such as vehicles and communications centers, as well as Russian drone crews operating from positions behind them.
“Drone warfare today is not about who kills more soldiers … operational depth is where wars are decided. If the enemy can move fuel, ammo, drones, crews and vehicles 10 to 40 kilometers behind lines without fear, they lose 5 times as many men in trenches as they have depth,” O’Leary wrote in X.
In fact, his accusation lays bare two of Ukraine’s major structural challenges.
First, in drone technology, operating strategy and countermeasures, Russia has caught up and is likely ahead.
Writing on Facebook, Oleksandr Karpyuk, an aerial research officer with the 59th Separate Assault Brigade, complained that Ukraine had failed to capitalize on its initial advantage in this space, particularly by not diversifying the number of radio frequencies its drones use to transmit signals.
Consequently, once Russia improved its electronic warfare (EW) techniques, only two frequencies needed to be jammed to put a significant dent in Ukraine’s ability to fly drones behind Russian lines.
Additionally, Karpyuk writes, Russia’s strategic air defense forces are greatly improved, and Moscow is benefiting from taking the lead in developing fiber-optic drones, which are impervious to Ukraine’s own EW countermeasures, as they do not transmit signals.
And then there’s Ukraine’s manpower issue.
The lack of infantry is well known. Rob Lee of the Institute for Foreign Policy Research estimates that there are fewer than 10 Ukrainian infantrymen per kilometer of the front line. He also estimated that most brigades had more than 10% of their total personnel in infantry. Traditionally, that number would be above 30%.
Lee told KI Insights, a strategic intelligence unit run by the Kyiv Independent, that even those low numbers are enough to prevent a major breakthrough by the Russian military, which has only managed to make small, incremental advances.
But in a war where drones — not infantry — matter most, it’s Ukraine’s lack of drone crews that is most pressing, especially in a key battle for operational depth — the destruction of targets up to 25 miles (40 kilometers) behind combat lines.
In an apparent defense of the fighters under his command, Robert Brovdi, head of Ukraine’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) force, said last week that the number of drone operators would need to be tripled. Only 30% of the frontline – which stretches 745 miles – is currently covered, he wrote on his Facebook page.
Fedorov, the new defense minister, acknowledged the scale of the problem, telling the Ukrainian parliament that about 2 million people were ignoring their call-up papers, while 200,000 others had left.
Much now depends on his ability to address manpower issues and regain Ukraine’s technological edge, ensuring that he is hitting Zelensky’s goals.
“Unless we stay ahead of the Russians in technology and combat strategy, I can’t say that we have a high chance of winning,” the former Ukrainian official warned.
CNN’s Victoria Butenko and Daria Tarasova-Markina in Kiev contributed to this report.