Earlier this week, Jim Geraghty reflected on the state of the war in Ukraine after four years. He writes:

What I can’t understand is Americans who have bought into this line, pushed by the Kremlin and its allies, that Russia can and will win the war. (God help you if you’ve been listening to Douglas Macgregor for the past four years.) As bad as the Ukrainian casualties have been, the Russian casualties are stunning. The Economist’s model “suggests that Russian casualties are now between 1.1 million and 1.4 million, of whom 230,000–430,000 are dead. That would mean one in 25 Russian men between the ages of 18 and 49 may have been killed or severely wounded since the start of the full-scale war.” The CSIS estimate is in the middle of that range, calculating that Russia has suffered 1.2 million casualties, with as many as 325,000 killed.

What I can’t understand is Americans who have bought into this line, pushed by the Kremlin and its allies, that Russia can and will win the war. (God help you if you’ve been listening to Douglas Macgregor for the past four years.) As bad as the Ukrainian casualties have been, the Russian casualties are stunning. The Economist’s model “suggests that Russian casualties are now between 1.1 million and 1.4 million, of whom 230,000–430,000 are dead. That would mean one in 25 Russian men between the ages of 18 and 49 may have been killed or severely wounded since the start of the full-scale war.” The CSIS estimate is in the middle of that range, calculating that Russia has suffered 1.2 million casualties, with as many as 325,000 killed.

Those numbers, if they are accurate or even close to accurate are very sobering.

But there is something about the Russian way of war. Nobody disputes that the Red Army was victorious on the Eastern Front. It confronted the German Wehrmarcht, the Royal Romanian Army, the Royal Hungarian Army, Italian 8th Army, Slovakian armed forces, and the armed forces of Croatia.

Approximately 80 percent of Germany’s casualties, including 5.2 million military deaths, were on the Eastern Front.  And 200,000—300,000 Hungarian soldiers were killed, many at the River Don in 1943. Also, 300,000–370,000 Romanians died, most early and then at Stalingrad (160,000), before Romania joined the Allies in 1944. And 30,000 in the Italian 8th Army were killed, again many in the catastrophe at the Don River. The numbers go down from there.

The Soviets lost somewhere between 8.7 million to 10.7 million soldiers in the war.

The war was a disaster for the Soviet Union and its people and a disaster for those who became captive nations in the wake of the Soviet victory. Similarly, Russia may pay an absolutely absurd and unjustifiable price in human life while yet achieving its most important war aims: keeping Ukraine out of NATO and annexing the territory its government claimed at the start of the war in 2022.

Its possible for two things to be true at once. Russia may yet achieve its goals, but it may do so by inflicting a disaster on itself.

© National Review