In June, a grim milestone passed. The Ministry of Defence said that one million Russians had been killed or wounded in Ukraine. The Guardian reported that fatalities alone are ‘five times higher than the combined death toll from all Soviet and Russian wars’ after 1945. Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, stated that Russia had already lost ‘100,000 soldiers – dead – not injured’ this year. Yet the unmentionable odour of death offends the Russian night. In Moscow, the milestone passed without official remark.

The soaring butcher’s bill has not, as some naively still hope, been matched by large-scale public unrest. Although, like the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Putin’s war in Ukraine is an open wound slowly bleeding the country white, there is no comparable anti-war movement, mass protests, or anguished appeals from the mothers of soldiers. The wars in Ukraine and Afghanistan differ in their nature. Russia’s modern digital dictatorship is not the Soviet Union of the 1980s ‘collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions’. The Kremlin has effectively managed the impact of unprecedented losses by carrots and sticks or, as Russians put it, by gingerbread and whips.

A fundamental difference with previous conflicts in Afghanistan and Chechnya is that Russia’s war in Ukraine is being fought by volunteers, largely motivated by the prospect of life-changing amounts of money, and not by conscripts sent to fight against their will. In some regions, the gingerbread of signing on bonuses for new recruits now exceeds a year’s salary. Generational wealth is promised for the........

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