In Time Since Putin's Ukraine Invasion, Russia Had Already Defeated Nazi Germany

An awkward historical comparison for Putin's Kremlin and military leadership - as well as for those ostensibly 'expert analysts and journalists' who continue to tout Russian power while denigrating Ukraine's prospects. JL

Stefan Korshak reports in the Kyiv Post:

From June 22, 1941, to May 8, 1945, with Josef Stalin at its head, the Red Army fought its way from Stalingrad to Berlin and Vienna, occupied and installed pro-Soviet governments in six Eastern European and three Baltic states and broke the back of Nazi German military resistance. The war launched by Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin on Feb. 24, 2022, to defeat and conquer the much more modest opponent, Ukraine and its Armed Forces, over the same time span has been spectacularly less successful – and for individual Russian soldiers, far more dangerous.

In a historic campaign from June 22, 1941, to May 8, 1945, with dictator Josef Stalin at its head, the Red Army fought its way from Stalingrad to Berlin and Vienna, occupied and installed pro-Soviet governments in six Eastern European and three Baltic states and broke the back of Nazi German military resistance.

The war launched by Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin on Feb. 24, 2022, to defeat and conquer the much more modest opponent, Ukraine and the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), over the same time span has been spectacularly less successful – and for individual modern Russian soldiers, far more dangerous.

French writer and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy, in a Dec. 3 interview with the magazine Rossiskaya Gazeta, summed up the Russian Federation’s military achievements in Ukraine to date:

 

“It’s not none at all, but it’s almost none at all. The enormous paradox, the terrible paradox of this war is that the Russians have lost nearly four years. In the end, they have at least one million casualties, probably between three hundred and four hundred thousand dead. And all of that – to gain one percent of Ukraine’s territory,” Lévy said.

“Today all experts estimate that Russia controls 19-20 percent of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. Look at the numbers from February 2022 – it’s almost the same, the difference is only one percent. So when we see the Kremlin celebrating victory over capturing a village, it looks both ridiculous and horrifying.”

 

According to official Ukrainian estimates, since thousands of Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers rolled across Ukraine’s borders from three directions in February 2022 to launch a still-undeclared war against Russia’s smaller neighbor, Kremlin forces have captured and established reasonably undisputed control over about 28,500 square kilometers (11,004 square miles) of Ukrainian territory.

 

That’s a land space about the size of Albania or Maryland. Of that real estate, only 6,000 total square kilometers (2,317 square miles) came under Russian rule between 2023 and 2025 – roughly equivalent, in annual wartime gains, to the size of Brussels or Hawaii’s Maui Island.

In 1944 (not its most successful year), the Red Army liberated and conquered around 1.1 million square kilometers (445,000 square miles) of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. By those figures, the Soviet Union’s armed forces and General Secretary Stalin as a wartime commander were about 500 times more successful than Putin and the modern Russian army.

Yet the human cost of Putin’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine – especially over the past 18 months fighting the AFU – has been catastrophic, and by some measures even bloodier than the losses suffered by the Red Army against Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War.

According to official numbers, in 1944, Soviet forces averaged about 6.4 million men and women under arms, of whom about one quarter – about 1.7 million uniformed personnel – were killed or seriously wounded and not returned to ranks.

 

In Ukraine, according to independent analysis published by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the British Ministry of Defence, the Russian Federation since 2024 has maintained a force in and near Ukraine numbering on average 500,000-650,000 men and officers, of which on average 900-1,200 are killed or seriously wounded every day, with peaks exceeding 2,000 Russian soldiers in a single 24 hour span.

In 2024 – the last year with full data – Icelandic researcher Ragnar Gudmundsson estimates that Russian forces in Ukraine likely lost around 427,000 men. Ukraine’s General Staff, citing drone imagery and battle intelligence, puts the figure at 430,790 personnel casualties.

Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky, in a January 2025 interview, said the number was “between 420,000 and 430,000,” noting that nearly one-third of the soldiers died on the battlefield.

If those figures are accurate – and Kyiv Post researchers and most other independent analysts have concluded they probably are – then a Russian soldier sent by the Kremlin to invade Ukraine is about two or three times as likely to be killed or wounded in combat than his Soviet predecessor during WWII.

All sources, including even official Kremlin media, agree that modern Russian assault tactics are brutally costly. Driven by a near-permanent Ukrainian drone presence over the battlefield, making it almost impossible to make attacks with armored vehicles without encountering drone swarms, the Kremlin across the front has advanced by sending small groups of infantrymen forward into no-man’s-land, over and over, and accepting the casualties from Ukrainian strike drones, mortars and artillery to gain a few hundred meters of ground.

 

In eastern Ukraine’s Pokrovsk – a major Russian objective for over two years – Russian forces in 2025 scored their biggest gain of the year using small-group infiltration tactics: about 1,000-1,200 square kilometers (386-463 square miles) of Ukrainian farmland and ruined villages (roughly the size of Lisbon or Austin, Texas). This advance came at a staggering cost of 180,000-200,000 casualties, or roughly 180-220 soldiers killed or wounded per square kilometer captured, according to most open-source estimates.

Putin and the Kremlin have repeatedly declared Russia can and will sustain that, and that Russian assaults might only possibly stop, when all of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions are fully under Moscow’s control.

Putin, in a Nov. 27 statement, made clear his intent is to keep attacking in Ukraine: “If Ukrainian troops leave the territories they occupy, then we will stop fighting. If they don’t, we will achieve our aims militarily.”But the conquest of that space covering about 22,500 square kilometers (8,687 square miles) of Ukrainian land, based on the Russian Federation’s pace of advance in the Pokrovsk sector, would probably cost the Kremlin at least four million more men dead and wounded and take at least two years, Kyiv Post calculations found.

 

Both Russian official and Ukrainian military intelligence announcements put Russia’s rate of recruitment of new soldiers, by all means, at around 600,000 men a year. Notwithstanding Putin’s declaration that the attacks will continue, that’s about half of the manpower Russia would need to keep making assaults and accepting losses in the future, as the Russian army has in the past 12 months.

Ukrainian Major Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) and overall commander of the AFU’s drone units, in a Dec. 2 announcement said that his troops had set a new one-day record of Russian infantry killed or wounded by Ukrainian drones – 365 casualties.

On Dec. 3, the record was broken again – 417.

Once the weather clears, those numbers will climb, he said in comments published on the USF Telegram channel.

 

Lévy said of the continuing Russian attacks: “Strategically it means nothing. It means a lot in terms of human lives, both on the Russian side and the Ukrainian side, because Ukrainians fight like lions, they resist like lions. So it is terrible in terms of human losses, but strategically it is worth nothing.”