Russia Is Destroying Itself to Destroy Ukraine

A special military operation that was the way that russian president vladimir putin described the campaign he launched exactly four years ago today on february the 24th 2022 and if you didn't know any better you might think he was describing some targeted strike on a weapons depot or an extraction of russian nationals from a conflict zone something that

Would barely make the news he wasn't and look if you clicked on this video then you already know that the three-day nature of this operation was just a little bit optimistic we're now four years on from what has become europe's deadliest conflict since the second world war and if the sheer scale of what this invasion kicked off doesn't stun you the fact that

It has managed to produce the exact opposite of virtually every strategic objective putin launched it to achieve just might great expectations now to understand how we got it we first got to go back to what the world looked like on february the 23rd 2022. on the eve of the invasion russia had what looked like the upper hands in this case a giant raised fist

That it would soon bring crashing down onto kiev putin had spent over a decade selling the world on his sweeping military modernization program and the world had largely bought into it the modernization drive had been sparked by russia's previous invasion of a close neighbor the five-day war with georgia in 2008 while from the outside that had looked like a

Lopsided victory for the kremlin from the inside it had been characterized by serious mistakes and embarrassments for russian forces and so moscow poured trillions of rubles into restructuring its armed forces replacing the soviet era divisions with supposedly modern units parading new weapon systems through red square and publicly boasting by 2020 that 70

Of their equipment had been overhauled and brought into the 21st century virtually everyone bought it too especially given the lightning-fast operation by little green men back in 2014 to seize crimea western intelligence agencies think tanks and defense establishments alike all relied heavily on what analysts called the correlation of forces essentially

Counting tanks artillery and fighter jets on a spreadsheet and by that metric russia's advantage over ukraine was enormous the global firepower index ranked them as possessing the second most powerful military on earth behind only the united states it was against this backdrop the cia assessed that ukraine's resistance would crumble within days and the u.s

Even reportedly held back sending heavy weaponry out of fear that it would simply become a donation to the russian armed forces within a matter of days by the time the invasion launched in the early hours of february the 24th 2022 western embassies had long since evacuated to either lviv or poland and the united states had offered to airlift zelensky out of

The capital entirely and then within 48 hours the shock of the invasion was very nearly eclipsed by the far bigger shock of russian incompetence ouch that hurt let me say that nothing worked the way it was supposed to we really do mean nothing much of the kremlin's strategy in the opening days hinged on capturing and all that airport in Hostomel, just

Outside of Kyiv.

The thinking was that if Russia could seize the airfield and land-heavy transport planes, it could bypass hundreds of kilometers of rural Ukrainian territory entirely and deliver their forces directly to the capital's doorstep.

From there, Russian forces would move to capture or kill Zelensky and install a puppet government before the West could even organize a response.

To state the obvious, things didn't quite go according to plan, did they? Ukrainian artillery cratered the runway before the transport could even land, throwing off the entire operation.

With this initial plan denied, Russia's advance was forced onto the roads, and that is where the fiction of a modernized military met the reality of what Russian corruption had gathered such an infamous reputation for.

The column of Russian hardware that formed heading to Kyiv stretched over 60 kilometers. Now, the thing with lengthy convoys like this is that they're rather difficult to defend. They're stretched out in a narrow column, only three or four units across, where a single destroyed lead tank could gridlock everything behind it.

Ukrainian special forces figured that out almost immediately and began picking them apart. The convoy's only defense, Russia's air force, was almost non-existent from the entire operation, leaving them completely open to attack. You probably remember the images from that time.

The videos of Russian armor trapped in the column being destroyed by artillery, the eventual retreat from around Kyiv and the north as the Kremlin withdrew its forces to focus on the Donbass, the euphoria that maybe, just maybe, Ukraine might win this war.

Those hopes only intensified in autumn of 2022, as Ukraine launched a series of counter-offensives that recaptured nearly 20,000 square kilometers of occupied territory, including the major city of Kherson, at a speed and scale that stunned just about everybody.

At that point, the conversation went beyond Kyiv just reclaiming what Russia had seized in the war's opening days.

Indeed, giddy talk appeared online of Ukraine even retaking Crimea. But if 2022 was the year of miracles, then 2023 was the year that reality reasserted itself. When Kyiv launched its much-hyped counter-offensive in June 2023, Ukrainian forces lost roughly a fifth of their western-supplied armor in the opening two weeks.

Within a month, Ukraine abandoned mechanized assaults in favor of infantry operations, absolutely brutal fights that crept forward yard by yard. By November of that year, Ukraine's top general admitted in an interview with The Economist what had become undeniable. The war had settled into more of a stalemate than anything else.

But that declaration was itself nearly two and a half years ago. And while there have been some developments on the front since then, most notably when Ukraine invaded and occupied Russia's Kursk region in 2024, there hasn't been a lot of movement since. Some frontline cities have fallen, yes, but none that have led to massive territorial changes.

In most respects, the front lines within Ukraine's borders have remained relatively static. And this lack of major changes has led the Ukraine war to drop out of the news cycle, reduced instead to occasional updates on indeterminable peace talks that Moscow seems to be trying to drag out. Yet that doesn't mean the war hasn't continued to rage.

If anything, it's now far deadlier and far more destructive than it was in 2022 or 2023. So the winner go the spoils? Despite the lack of progress land-wise, the death toll unfortunately can attest to just how active this war was, is, and in all likelihood will remain for the foreseeable future.

A report published just last month from CSIS estimated close to 2 million combined casualties across both sides, including as many as 325,000 Russians and up to 140,000 Ukrainians killed, while some reports estimate Russian forces are still losing over 1,000 soldiers a day.

In a recent briefing, Western officials told Fronts that Moscow's casualties, including wounded and missing, are now estimated at 1.25 million.

What all of that dying has actually purchased, in territorial terms, is a Russian advance near Pokrovsk that has averaged 70 meters per day over a two-year period, a pace slower than the Battle of the Somme in World War I.

And this has also taken its toll on the defenders in ways that will affect Ukrainian society for decades to come. Because the average age of a Ukrainian soldier is in their 30s to early 40s, these are fathers and husbands whose absence will ripple through families. And the civilian toll is almost certainly worse than anyone can document.

The UN has confirmed roughly 15,000 killed and 41,000 injured, but explicitly acknowledges that this is a massive undercount, since investigators simply cannot access destroyed or occupied cities to verify the dead. In Maripol alone, the site of a three-month siege at the beginning of the war, estimates of civilian deaths range from 8,000 to 20,000.

Beyond that, roughly 4,400 Ukrainian military personnel remain in Russian captivity as of early 2026, alongside at least 1,800 confirmed civilian detainees, another figure that the UN acknowledges is likely far higher.

And of former POWs interviewed by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission, 96% reported torture. The result is that Ukraine now holds the unenviable title occupying both the highest mortality rate and the lowest birth rate in the world, roughly three deaths for every newborn.

The fertility rate has collapsed from an already dangerously low, 1.16 before the invasion, to around 0.8, which is way below the 2.1 needed just to maintain stable population levels.

The nearly 7 million refugees who left skew younger, educated, and women or their children, and combined with the 100,000 or more men killed on the front, the country's reproductive and working-age foundation has been hollowed out.

But if you think that Russia is faring any better here, as the larger power and the one who initiated this conflict in the first place, well, you'd be mistaken. Moscow has seen its fair share of combat over the years, from Afghanistan to Georgia to Chechnya and beyond.

But in terms of losses, this tops every single war the Kremlin has undertaken since World War II, Maybe a good company would have been told, that the other party would have been wam viaggi концов. You may be unable toす anybody!

And when you were going to follow suit another car, ju, combined in just the first three months of the invasion of ukraine alone moscow lost more men than the ussr lost during its failed decade-long occupation of afghanistan amidst all of this it probably won't come as a surprise that recruits aren't exactly queuing up in red square anymore while there was a

Wave of nationalistic enlisting in the early days that ship has long since sailed as we've covered on our homefront channel moscow has increasingly had to rely on something called deathonomics that is making military service so overwhelmingly lucrative both the soldiers and families alike that it became the single most reliable path to financial security in

Some of russia's poorest regions meanwhile just shy of a million russians have fled the country entirely since the invasion began disproportionately younger urban and educated which consists of what's been described as the largest emigration wave since the bolshevik revolution the it specialists researchers and doctors who left are for the most part not

Coming back and while it's for different reasons than those who have been sent to the front and have not returned either it nevertheless has had a similar hollowing out effect on the country as a whole russia was already facing a slow-moving demographic crisis before 2022 but the war has transformed this into something of a freefall the birth rate has

Plummeted to its lowest level in roughly 200 years with women actively delaying or refusing to have children due to economic insecurity given everything going on in the country that is if there are men left to have children with this war has taken the insane gender imbalance found in china due to its one-child policy where families prioritized having a boy

Over a girl and flipped it on its head in an even more extreme way china's younger generations have roughly 110 to 117 men for every 100 women while russia is now sitting at 86 men for every 100 women and only getting worse by the day none of this means that russia is on the verge of collapse or even that the kremlin is imminently running short of soldiers

That prediction has been made many times and always turned out to be wrong but the trajectory is unmistakable and what makes it all the more devastating is that virtually every major strategic objective putin launched this war to achieve has produced its opposite and the only wins he can hope for aren't exactly prized possessions the deals that almost were

One of the more tragic parts of this story is the back in march of 2022 barely a month into the invasion and before the bulk of this ruin and destruction had even occurred russian and ukrainian negotiators met in istanbul and reportedly came close to a framework agreement the broad strokes involved ukrainian neutrality in exchange for security guarantees

From the us uk france china and turkey with crimea's status entering a 10 to 15 year consultation period rush for its part would have been expected to withdraw from at least some of its territorial gains whether those talks were genuine or a stalling tactic will never be known for sure as they ultimately fell apart what is known is that both russia and

Ukraine have turned down or walked away from numerous diplomatic off-ramps since four years on we're not particularly closer to peace now than we were then which is difficult to characterize as anything other than a failure of diplomacy on an epic scale the current us-led framework which has consistently but rather unsuccessfully been spearheaded by the

Trump administration since last year would have ukraine formally abandoned any ambitions to join nato cap the size of its armed forces in exchange for what american officials have described as platinum standard security guarantees and have the right to receive unlimited western military supplies and training moscow has held up the whole process and doesn't

Seem to be in any hurry to give way they fiercely resisted the security guarantees on the grounds that they would effectively make ukraine a nato member in orbit name russia's foreign minister has gone so far as to call any western forces stationed in ukraine as legitimate military targets and the guarantees themselves are contingent on finalizing a

Ceasefire line which neither side can agree on washington has pressured kiev to accept concessions in the donbass including withdrawing from territory russia has been unable to conquer militarily that would include giving up the so-called fortress belt of cities that serves as a last best line of defense on the edges of the donbass ukraine quite

Understandably worries that abandoning its best defensive positions in exchange for a security guarantee from an unreliable america would simply be inviting another invasion at some point down the line but the fact we're even having this conversation highlights an important point that russia has failed to achieve even its bare minimum goal of taking the

Donbass so far the invasion has managed to produce the exact opposite of virtually every strategic objective putin held in february of 2022 remember beyond the vague accusations of nazism in the country and oppression of ethnic russians in the donbass one of the key arguments that putin made was opposition to ukraine joining nato he was principally concerned

About western powers creeping up directly to his border while nato now holds almost twice as much territory along russia's border than it did in 2022 thanks primarily to finland joining meanwhile sweden's accession has helped turn the baltic sea into a nato lake one that could easily choke off st petersburg and kaliningrad in event of conflict then there's

The remarkable unity the invasion has so far created in europe russia's foreign minister admitted publicly that the kremlin never predicted that the west would freeze russia's central bank reserves roughly 300 billion dollars held overseas because they genuinely did not believe repercussions would come even close to that and while nato unity isn't exactly in

Vogue at the moment putin nevertheless puts to rest the more light on russia approach across countless european capitals nordstrom 2 which he had spent years working on as a project to foster deeper integration with the continent is completely dead and unlikely to ever return that is what close to two million casualties a quarter ukraine's population and the

Hollowing out of russia's own demographic future has been in service of a bunch of farmland and bombed out industrial buildings and as we covered earlier we're not just saying how bad this is from kiev's perspective but russia's as well even if putin was to get his way completely in all of this the benefit at this point is so disproportionate to the cost

That any objective analysis has to reconcile with the fact that in all honesty this conflict never should have kicked off in the first place were this video to be beamed back in time to kremlin officials in february of 2022 we can't help but think that even they would be horrified at how little their plans would have progressed by 2026. so four years into a

Three-day operation the maths has long stopped making sense by any rational measure but that's precisely the trap that the kremlin is now trapped in putin has invested so much political and financial capital into this war that walking away from it now would pose a greater threat to his safety than continuing to fight and so a conflict that has already

Consumed close to two million casualties seems destined to continue tearing through lives and cities all because one autocrat can't admit that he got it wrong the tragic part we may all be back here in february of 2027 to grimly marvel at how the war has now run five years still with no end in sight thank you for watching