Two Million by Spring: Russia’s Slow Collapse

 

When casualties reach two million by spring, the Russia-Ukraine war stops being war and becomes a warning: nuclear powers can rot, panic, and explode outward.

I keep staring at the number because it refuses to behave like a number. Two million. It doesn’t sit quietly on the page. It paces. It sweats. It growls. By spring of 2026, this year, that figure may stop being a warning and start being a fact: 2 million soldiers killed, injured, or missing in the Russia-Ukraine war. Not rumors. Not vibes. A body count so obscene that history itself flinches and looks away.

This isn’t a war anymore. Wars have arcs, fronts, victories, endings. This is something colder and uglier, a slow-motion collapse of a nuclear-armed power bleeding itself dry in public while the world pretends the math still makes sense. I hear people say “attrition” like it’s a strategy. Attrition isn’t a strategy. Attrition is what happens when nobody knows how to stop the machine and nobody wants to admit they built it.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies didn’t scream when it released its numbers. It didn’t have to. The data did the screaming. By their estimate, Russia alone suffered about 1.2 million casualties between February 2022 and December 2025, including as many as 325,000 dead. Ukraine, with a smaller army and population, absorbed between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, including up to 140,000 deaths. Stack those numbers together and you’re already flirting with 1.8 million. Keep the current pace, and spring tips it over the edge. Two million. The kind of figure that turns generals into accountants and soldiers into inventory.

I have seen this movie before, just in black and white. In World War II, the Soviet Union lost an estimated 26 to 27 million people, military and civilian combined. That trauma became the spine of modern Russian identity. “Never again” wasn’t a slogan. It was a scar. And yet here we are, watching Russia rack up the largest military losses suffered by any major power since that war, all for territorial gains measured not in miles, but in meters. Fifteen to 70 meters a day in key offensives. That’s not a blitz. That’s a funeral procession inching forward while the band keeps playing.

I imagine a soldier on the line muttering to himself, half joking, half broken, asking what kind of empire moves at the speed of a parking lot. Nobody answers him. The drones buzz. The artillery answers instead.

What makes this worse isn’t just the scale. It’s the silence. Moscow hasn’t released meaningful casualty figures since September 2022, when it claimed just under 6000 deaths. That number has aged like milk in the sun. Kremlin spokespeople dismiss outside estimates as unreliable, insisting only the Ministry of Defense can speak the truth. But the ministry doesn’t speak. It locks the door and turns up the radio. In the gap, independent groups like Mediazona and the BBC have pieced together over 160,000 confirmed Russian deaths by name, using obituaries, social media posts, and local records. That’s not propaganda. That’s bookkeeping done with trembling hands.

Ukraine plays its own careful game with numbers, constrained by morale and security. President Zelenskyy said in early 2025 that more than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed. Even that figure, sober and restrained, points to a nation paying in blood for every square inch it refuses to surrender. When a smaller country absorbs half a million casualties, that’s not resilience alone. That’s existential hemorrhage.

People love to say Russia is in no rush to settle. Of course it isn’t. Empires rarely hurry to admit they’re shrinking. But the battlefield tells a different story. A 1000-kilometer front line locked into a grinding stalemate. Advances slower than almost any major offensive in the last century. This isn’t momentum. This is inertia powered by bodies. When the drumbeat doesn’t change, the march becomes a trance.

Meanwhile, the war leaks into everything. Apartment blocks on the outskirts of Kyiv turn into graves overnight. Ballistic missiles and swarms of drones trade places in the sky like vultures arguing over a carcass. Oil depots burn. Infrastructure bleeds. Civilians die in twos and nines, small numbers that add up to a permanent ache. The front line isn’t just a line on a map. It’s a pressure wave rippling outward, warping politics, energy markets, food supplies, and nerves.

And hovering over all of it is the unspoken nightmare. Russia is not just any wounded giant. It’s a nuclear-armed one. History tells us what happens when great powers feel cornered. Imperial Japan in 1945 kept fighting as cities burned. Nazi Germany fought street by street long after defeat was certain. The lesson isn’t that desperation guarantees escalation. The lesson is that rational cost-benefit thinking erodes under humiliation and loss. A drowning man doesn’t negotiate with the water.

I hear the counterargument already. Russia has manpower. Russia has depth. Russia can sustain this. That line worked in 1943. It worked because the Soviet Union was fighting for survival against an invading army that aimed to exterminate it. Today, the story is inverted. Russia is the invader, and the losses aren’t forging unity so much as hollowing out a generation. Demographers have warned for years about Russia’s shrinking population. Add hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed men of fighting age, and the long-term damage becomes structural. Economies don’t just lose workers. They lose fathers, engineers, teachers, and future births. You can draft men. You can’t draft time.

The truly terrifying part is how normalized this has become. Two million casualties doesn’t trigger emergency summits. It triggers panel discussions. Analysts talk about “sustainability” as if this were a supply chain problem. I catch myself doing it too, slipping into abstraction because the raw truth is unbearable. But abstraction is the luxury of those not being shelled.

By spring, when the ground thaws and the casualty count likely crosses that line history swore it would never see again, we’ll still argue about credibility and narratives. We’ll still debate who’s winning. But the ledger will be clear. A nuclear-armed power will have sacrificed more soldiers than any major power since World War II for gains so small they have to be measured with a ruler. That’s not strength. That’s decay with a flag draped over it.

I don’t pretend to know how this ends. Wars like this don’t end cleanly. They curdle. They metastasize. They dare someone to make a catastrophic choice just to break the stalemate. That’s the reckoning lurking behind the number. Two million isn’t just a count of the dead and broken. It’s a warning flare arcing into the dark, telling us the rules are dissolving. When the graveyard grows faster than the map, the map is lying.

And if we keep pretending this is just another conflict, history won’t forgive us. History already knows where this road leads. It’s been here before. It just hoped we’d learned enough not to walk it again.

 

 

I couldn’t let this go, so I wrote “Putin’s Dangerous Gamble: How the Invasion of Ukraine Backfired on Russia”  to work through it honestly and completely. Read it here on Google Play: Putin’s Dangerous Gamble.