The Big Attack, Sturm und Drang in the AFU, Opinion Poll and Loss Speculation

The big war news this week was that finally Russia launched the long-awaited massed missile attack on Kyiv, plenty of details on that below, eyewitness too.

The big battlefront news of the week was that Elon Musk – not a person always supporting Ukraine – was approached by Kyiv with complaints that the Russian army was using gray Starlink terminals for its troops invading Ukraine, and in 48 hours Musk and his companies shut the terminals down.

This is a developing news story but generally loss of Starlink in the Russo-Ukrainian War I would say would be roughly equivalent to losing encrypted FM radio comms in a legacy war like Afghanistan or Desert Storm. It could be disastrous for the Russians tactically but again, developing story. I spare you the pic of Musk so I can post a Starlink aerospace image. Here’s two updates.

There also is a section at the bottom that isn’t news, it’s a discussion of casualty counts and where we are in attrition warfare.

Russia finally launched its massive strike on the power grid and heating plants. How bad was it?

Bottom line, pretty bad. But people had been expecting it for some time, it was no surprise.

If you look at it with a peacetime mindset, it’s catastrophic and impossible to grasp, time to give up, quit, get a snack from the fridge, change the channel, scroll right, do something.

But of course if you look at it with a wartime mindset, particularly a four-years-of-conventional-against-a-peer-adversary mindset, busted stuff can be fixed. This is a country at war. There’s a section below with an honest-to-Gallup public opinion poll on that very subject, but first things first, what happened?

What happened was that Russia launched its third-biggest missile+drone strike of the entire war overnight Monday-Tuesday, Feb. 2-3, and objectively it’s the worst damage of the war.

Here are the numbers from the big strike overnight Monday-Tuesday. For the record, by most measures this was Russia’s most ambitious and largest-scaled bombardment strike of the war so far:

Launched/Intercepted:

• 4/4 “Zircon”/“Onyx” hypersonic missiles, launched from air space above Crimea
• 32/11 Iskander-M/S-300 ballistic missiles, ground launched from Bryansk region and Crimea
• 7/3 Kh-22/Kh-32 cruise missile, air launched from above Bryansk region
• 28/20 cruise missiles “Kh-101/Iskander-K”; bomber launch above Caspian Sea and ground launch from Kursk region
• 450/412 Shahed drones, launched from all directions but west.

Damage – the Ukrainian internet seems to agree with the Ukrainian Air Force that the Russians scored 25-30 hits, among which were:

• Two Kharkiv heating plants, one demolished
• A Kharkiv substation
• Kyiv substation
• Two Kyiv heating plants
• Kyiv power and heating plant, badly damaged, repairs to take at least two months. According to Zelensky the Russians fired five ballistic missiles at it.
• Dnipro power plant
• Substations hit in Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Odesa

Personal observations in Kyiv from where I was, southern district of the city

• Air defense networks were well-informed of the incoming strikes, first warnings went out about three hours before.
• Some of the air defense info networks this time were tracking coveys of Shaheds and reporting shootdowns as they proceeded through Ukrainian air space. As an aside, this is a level of detail and granularity no air war in history has seen. If you imagine a little bit it’s like the Battle of Britain scene with the pretty Royal Air Force sergeants pushing around blocks on a big table with Southern England and places like Biggen Hill and 303 Squadron on it.
• I think five or six individual RU ballistic missile launches flashed across networks, plus launch site and probable target (us in Kyiv, mostly).
• Launches of Patriots (yes plural Patriots, and my personal thanks to the European taxpayers that bought them for the AFU) observed.
• Launches of either NASMS or IRIS-T observed, not sure which.
• One for sure and two probable intercepts heard but not seen. No idea what was hit but it was loud.
• Moderate autocannon and/or heavy machine gun observed.
• One Shahed heard at long distance but it went away.
• Power stayed on, but, in subsequent days available electricity dropped from about 10-12 hours a day to about 6-8 hours a day.
• Heating stayed on.
• Power company seemed to be still operating on pre-planned rolling blackout schedule.
• Shops and stores functioning normally but most with generators.
• Light traffic.
• Authorities reported about 1,600 buildings not heated; prior to the strike it had been about 700.
• Metro kept running.
• It bears mentioning that some of the damage was cumulative with damage caused a week previously, when – thanks to pay delays and America wanting cash up front – there were interceptor missiles in the supply pipeline but they weren’t in the hands of troops. So air defenses were very short of ammo in the previous strike.

Stuff I got told from credible people in other parts of the city

• Blackout schedules stayed in effect although on the Left Bank (eastern part of Kyiv) sometimes the power came on 1-2 hours after switch-on.
• By and large blackout schedules seem to have remained in effect although total hours without power increased by about 10-20 percent.
• Most Right Bank (western) locations seem to have had no change to power deliveries and heating, it was on before the strikes and it was on after the strikes.
• Some schools shifted to remote/online study for Tuesday because buildings wouldn’t be heated; I’m not sure this was a direct result of the strike.
• Trains kept running, couldn’t find reports of delays.
• Somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of the city is without heating, predominantly on the Left Bank but also on the Right Bank.

So what does that mean? Is Ukraine doomed?

As to what it all means, big picture, this is just like the Battle of Britain, it will come down to which side can put more firepower into the air tomorrow, this week, next week, this month, and next month. Quantity of material will be decisive, but as always, the defender has a home field advantage.

On the operational level, what jumps out at me is that by Russian standards I’m sure they felt they massed fires; but by real standards, considering they’re up against a peer adversary, it’s questionable. Heating and power in five cities was attacked, basically, but no location got hit with an overwhelming, unstoppable, killing blow.

Zelensky conducted a bunch of ambassadors and dignitaries to see the heating/power plant in Darnytsia district (Left Bank) that got smashed up, so we have pretty good imagery about damage done. There appear to have been a couple of hits on main buildings, but also, hits between buildings and in open space trashing concrete, blowing up pipes and cutting power transmission wires. It was excellent visual proof that the Russian Iskander-M missile with a CEP (circular error probable) of 7-9 meters is not a precision-guided weapon, it’s an area bombardment weapon even for a target as big as a Soviet-era heating plant. A giant crater in the dirt is scary, but it’s not damage. It looks like there were at least two.

I’m not sure the ambassadors noticed, but the morning after the strike, there’s still smoke rising from the debris, Ukrainian crews already were cutting away smashed pipe. If you looked, you could even see replacement pipe already on the scene. Also, I checked that to knock out one of these plants for good with a ballistic missile, you pretty much need to get a direct hit, through a roof and whatever protective material the Ukrainians have piled up, on all the main turbines, or, all the generators, or all the boilers. Partial damage means partial continued capacity.

This is not to argue Ukrainian repair crews are supermen and heroes… well, actually they are, in a lot of ways. Nor is it to argue that if the Russians come up with 200 more ballistic missiles they can’t blast the heating plants off the face of the Earth. It is, rather, to point out the basic truth that pretty close to never, ever, has a country conducted an air bombardment against a peer enemy in a long war, and the air force guys didn’t underestimate the ability of the people that they were bombing to repair the damage.

This is a near absolute rule for air war as long as there have been airplanes, it’s as iron-clad as the rule that fighter pilots always will overestimate the number of enemy they think they shot down. The bomber guys always, always, always underestimate how quickly the damage their bombs do gets fixed. So when will the 1,100 buildings serviced by the Darnytsia plant get back their heat? Well, my guess is it will be spring, but it may well be early spring. Spiffy image on that, not where you want to rent your Airbnb for a while.

On the tactical level, it’s not clear that the Ukrainians now have “enough” interceptor missiles, by which I mean the PAC-3s fired by Patriot and AIM-120/AIM-9 fired by NASMS platforms, (and AIM-200 missiles fired by IRIS-T) on the ground, as well as by F-16s in the air. It’s not possible to say whether Russian missiles got through because of Ukrainian ammunition shortages or because of Russian saturation of Ukrainian air defense networks. The easy guess is probably both reasons were factors, but we just don’t know.

The next strike will give us more data, and also data on how many ballistic and cruise missiles the Russians have saved up.

But also tactically, I flag for your attention the four shootdowns of the four Zircon missiles, which are scramjet-powered hypersonic cruise missiles, and designed to be too fast for conventional air defense networks to handle. If you believe the Ukrainians, somehow, now they have an effective counter to this weapon.

Again, there isn’t enough information to do more but speculate, but a good guess as to how the Ukrainians suddenly figured out a way to deal with Russian Zircon missiles is that they’ve recently received a NATO missile designed to deal with them. By midday on Feb. 3 the Ukrainians had published video showing what they said was an intercept by a Patriot PAC-3 missile of an incoming Zircon. Maybe. At minimum, we can say for sure that the Ukrainians had PAC-3 in the past and never did they shoot down all the incoming Zircons.

If it wasn’t the Trump administration, I would guess maybe the Americans have given the Ukrainians a newer version of the PAC-3. Since it is the Trump administration – surely the White House doesn’t want to – but it’s quite possible subversive elements in the Pentagon have figured out a way to get the ammo to the Ukrainians anyway. There’s a lot of US military careers tied to continued US active participation in NATO, Hegseth can’t fire them all. But I have no idea, all I can say for sure is I know the Ukrainians had PAC-3s to fire and it seems probable that somehow they have a way to shoot down Zircons, which are hard to shoot down.

Ukrainians bombarding the Russians, and Kapustin Yar

The news item that you really are only going to read here is that if you look closely it’s clear the Ukrainians have for some reason dialed down the scope and range of their bombardment strikes against Russian oil and gas, and dialed up attacks closer to the front, and targeting of Russian power stations and heating infrastructure. Also, the overall number of long-range drones being launched into Russian air space are visibly less, call it by volume a reduction of 20-30 percent. This is based on daily tracking of what the Ukrainians hit, and where.

The only proper, long-range, cool special operations attack for the past two weeks was reported only in early February; according to the Ukrainians they hit the Kapustin Yar missile launch test site in the Astrakhan region of the Russian Federation and badly damaged it on Jan. 27-28. The SSO press release pressed all the cool, spy-guy buttons and claimed that local partisans helped out with intelligence, the AFU did good work clearing corridors in the Russian air defenses for the strike aircraft to use, that two buildings and equipment inside them were badly damaged, and that inside them were pieces of an undetermined number of Oreshnik intercontinental ballistic missiles being assembled.

Satellite imagery graciously made public by Ukraine’s special ops command placed building number one at 48.6494296,46.1939462 and building number two at 48.6480799,46.1946901.

Most reports are saying it was Flamingo missiles and the Ukrainian military published video of Flamingo launches. I’m still not convinced it’s a real system in production. However, and this is also usable evidence, the Russian mil-blogger response/comment on the Kapustin Yar attack has been pretty much crickets. This can be an indicator of a telling Ukrainian strike that caused real damage, because the Kremlin didn’t expect it and the content generators don’t know how to spin it.

„Das ist wirklich eine Wunderwaffe, und was für eine Wunderwaffe!“

AND once again this week Fire Point management appeared in the media and told us that a new, improved version of the Flamingo, this one called the FP-9 missile, will be “in AFU hands” this month. This is a missile that supposedly can reach beyond Moscow, has a warhead about 800 kg, and flies, don’t get mad at me, I am just repeating what I’m reading, at Mach 3.53.

Could it be that we are seeing institutional jockeying at the top of the Ukrainian military-industrial complex over whose companies get to manufacture what long-range strike weapons, and that is driving what is getting hit? Is there a vested interest trying to convince the public (us) that Fire Point products will win the war? Could it be there are parts of the AFU that believe behind-the-lines strikes should just focus on eroding Russian field combat power, starting with killed and wounded Russian soldiers?

We don’t know, but if a debate is taking place at the top of the AFU about strategic bombardment vs. tactical strikes, with vested interests and potential future profits skewing the arguments, it wouldn’t be the first time in history that has happened.

What we do know is that “conventional” Ukrainian meat-and-potato drone strikes targeting Russian’s oil and gas industry have fallen off in the last two weeks.

• Crimea/Dzhankoi, airfield/air defense?, Jan. 20
• Krasnodar?, falling interceptor missile?, apart. Building hit, Jan. 20
• Saratov?, Afipsky oil refinery, falling S-300, Jan. 20
• Belgorod, CHP plant, possibly jet drones, Jan. 20
• Krasnodar region, Taman port, Tamanneftegaz fuel loading terminal, Jan. 20
• Penza, oil refinery, Jan. 22
• Oryel, explosions, Jan. 23
• Mariupol, power transmission station or military base Jan. 23-24
• Belgorod, power plant, explosions and power outages, Jan. 24
• Krasnodar, Slavyansk-Na-Kubani, oil refinery, Jan. 25
• Luhansk, Kirov power transmission station, Jan. 25
• Rostov, Gukovo, air defense active, Jan. 25
• Moscow, power transmission station?, Jan. 26
• Taganrog, drones, air explosions (possibly air defenses suppressed prior to Kapustin Yar strike) Jan. 27
• Melitopol, drones, explosions, Jan. 27
• Voronezh, Khokholskaya oil depot, Jan. 27-28
• Bryansk, explosions, power production?, Jan. 27
• Mariupol, port, explosion, air defense?, Jan. 28
• Manhush/Novoazovsk, explosions, possible air defense?, Jan. 28
• Krasnodar, Siverskiy district, explosion, air defense, possible ground strikes?, Jan. 28
• Tambov/Astrakhan, Kapustin Yar missile test center hit by Flamingo missiles, Jan. 28
• Feodosia, something burning in port?, Jan. 28
• Donetsk region, Velyka Novosilka, military unit and ammo dump, Feb. 3
• Belgorod region, two power transformer stations, air defenses, missiles/artillery rockets, Feb. 3
• Rostov, power transformer stations, Feb. 4
• Belgorod, power transformer stations, probably HIMARS, big blackouts, heating lost, Feb. 5

For the Russians the city of Belgorod has been hit worst. On Feb. 3, the Ukrainians used something like 5-10 rare HIMARS rockets to hit air defenses around the city Belgorod, whose power grid has been pretty heavily hit over the years, not least because it’s very close to the border. As with the Ukrainians, the Russians have proved to be skilled at fixing damage. However, on Feb. 5-6, another salvo of “missiles” hit the city’s power station and some of its power transformers, and the result was a blackout worse than Kyiv’s, about 80 percent of the city without power, water shut off, no heating.

Belgorod is an order of magnitude smaller than Kyiv, 300,000 more or less vs. 3 million, but it’s pretty obvious this is the Ukrainian response to Russian attacks on the Ukrainian power grid and heating infrastructure. Donetsk region and Crimea likewise have seen pretty intensive attacks against their power grids since the New Year.

Why the change in Ukrainian tactics? Here are the standard possibilities

Ukraine could be running low or saving up on long-range drones.

It’s a political decision: hitting Russian power grid/heating infrastructure is preferable to attacking oil and gas infrastructure. (Reasons could be retaliation for Russian bombarding same in Ukraine, or, calculation that enough damage has been done to oil and gas, so now other targets are preferable.)

It’s an operational decision: to hit shorter-range targets for more efficiency, better bang for the drone buck. This would be my guess as that would be consistent with how Robert “Madyar” Brovdi runs operations, and he’s in charge of almost all of these strike units.

It’s a stretch but I think the Ukrainian strategy here is that they have admitted to themselves that those places will be on the far side of a ceasefire line, and if Russia is going to depopulate and destroy cities and towns on the Ukrainian side of that line, then the Ukrainians will do the same thing for them.

And a snarky remark that absolutely isn’t professional journalism:

All in all, it clearly would be nicer and less painful for everyone if NATO just extended a missile/drone no-fly-zone over western Ukraine, which it obviously can, and then Ukraine could defend the center and the east and the south, which would make Russian strikes close to ineffective, which would remove the Ukrainian need to retaliate for them, and that way you wouldn’t see tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians sitting in cold apartments in the middle of winter.

But of course NATO is concerned that if it used NATO air assets to prevent Russia from bombarding Ukrainian people with robot planes and guided missiles, Russia might get angry at NATO.

P.S. The NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Thursday gave a speech to the Rada in which he said Ukrainians were brave, spring is coming, and that NATO absolutely has Ukraine’s back.

About half the seats were empty. Applause was polite.

Guess what, if you actually ask Ukrainians if they’re ready to surrender like the White House and Kremlin say they are, they aren’t

The preface to this section of course has to be President Trump’s double-talk and mendacity on the one-week “energy ceasefire” that actually lasted three days, and all the talk about Russia bombarding Ukraine into the stone age, poor Ukrainians, those barbaric Russians must just about have the Ukrainians on the ropes, why can’t they just agree to Trump’s real estate brilliance and give the Donbas to Russia?

A poll came out this week, from one of Ukraine’s oldest and most reputable survey companies, and instead of wringing hands and declaring what the Ukrainians “must do” and how they “should see reason,” and so forth, the pollsters basically asked a representative sample of adults in the country:

• • You ready to quit?
  • Do you want to give up Donbas?
  • How do you feel about the war continuing?
  • So if America promises to secure Ukraine against Russian re-invasion, how trustworthy is that?
  • It’s really cold outside and Russia is blowing up heating plants. So how about cutting a deal with Russia.

• You ready to quit?
• Do you want to give up Donbas?
• How do you feel about the war continuing?
• So if America promises to secure Ukraine against Russian re-invasion, how trustworthy is that?
• It’s really cold outside and Russia is blowing up heating plants. So how about cutting a deal with Russia.

Bottom line, maximum 4 percent margin of error, a majority and sometimes a super-majority of Ukrainians is dead-set against concessions in exchange for promises, and ready to keep on fighting for the duration, even if that’s more discomfort. The most fanatical views are in Kyiv but the split between Kyiv and slightly more peace-minded regions, basically the east, is small. The poll makes absolutely clear that the Ukrainians have a lot more steel in their spine than most of their allies.

I would add, the results surprised outsiders living in Ukraine, like me, basically, not at all.

There are plenty of irritating and bothersome aspects of this war, but one of the worst has to be how people who aren’t being bombed and who aren’t having their family members and friends killed and wounded by Russia’s armed forces, are perfectly comfortable saying they can’t take the war any more, they have Ukraine War Fatigue, and because that Ukraine War Fatigue is so oppressive and unpleasant, why can’t the Ukrainians just do the right thing and surrender to the Russians? Then there would be less war news and more cat videos on people’s smart phones. And everyone who was making money, in Europe and the US, from Russian commodities, could go back to that. JD Vance doesn’t care about the Ukrainians. And he’s smart! Right?

For your use the next time you encounter someone saying Ukraine should give up, why don’t they give up, they’re so stupid not to give up, how can’t they realize their only option is giving up, this is polling data collected from a populace after four years into a conventional war against Russia.

Prying reserves and replacements out of Syrsky and the General Staff’s claws

Pavlo Palisa is one of Ukraine’s young, new generation generals. Right now he’s 40 and his job is deputy chief of the Ukrainian President’s Office; in other words, he’s Zelensky’s point guy on military matters. Palisa’s background is about as impressive as they come in the AFU, and, in his cohort there is a lot of very strong competition.

Military family, Lviv, active service since 2007, combat experience since 2014, studied at USGS at Ft. Leavenworth in the US, stepped into some huge shoes to take over command of the 93rd Mech Brigade “Kholodny Yar” at the age of 38, fought all over the Donbas and especially at Bakhmut/Chasiv Yar, added to the 93rd’s already tough, competent reputation. When I saw them in the field they looked like a squared-away outfit. Among the troops I talked to, his reputation was excellent, strong tactician, doesn’t waste lives, believes in firepower, and so on.

Almost certainly – this is me guessing – Palisa’s job is zeroing in on pieces of the AFU that aren’t doing what Zelensky wants fast and effectively enough, so he’s the civilian sitting at the meeting telling Gen. Syrsky and the General staff what the president wants or how said initiative or plan would or would not fit the president’s view of things. In past months air war and air defense have been a big priority, as has making sure the army is telling the truth when it says it can hold someplace like Pokrovsk or Hulyaipole. It is highly likely that when something goes wrong (cough) Hulyaipole on the front, it’s Palisa who shows up and asks unpleasant question.

So here’s an interesting news tidbit, Palisa just got back from another round of frontline unit visits, 7th Air Assault Corps and Pokrovsk was the venue, and the outcome of the visit was a very positive Palisa FB post that, guess what, the frontline units are getting replacement troops, they’re fitting in well, defenses are beefing up, and in general upbeat news from Pokrovsk, which by being upbeat is news just for that.

But the thing is, most AFU fans know that that’s not normally how replacement soldiers get deployed. As of about mid-2024 Gen. Syrsky effectively started forming his own units, subordinate not to any corps but the general staff, most of which are called Assault Infantry, meaning they’re recruited for youth, fitness and aggressiveness, and they are trained in classic skills like riflery, fire and movement, small-scale combined arms, urban, forest, field, trench tactics.

Syrsky deploys the assault infantry to hot sectors either to put out fires or more rarely to hit the Russians, and frequently successfully. Practically all the recent AFU successful counterattacks of the second half of 2025 – so 1st Pokrovsk, Dobropillya, Kupyansk, were carried out by assault infantry raised by Syrsky. They are subordinate directly to him, not the (usually younger generation) corps commanders, and like it or not he’s gotten some results with that set-up.

Syrsky’s critics, and they are many, accuse him of starving other units of replacements, lavishing the assault infantry units with kit that then gets tossed away, and not getting results by tactical skill but just by forming units ready to accept losses, and turning them loose. There’s some validity to all those charges, but again, it’s gotten results.

Plus, we should always remember that Syrsky doesn’t have a Prussian chain of command wearing pickelhaubes and clicking heels and giving snappy salutes and goose-stepping away, in jackboots, every time he decides he needs to tell some part of the AFU what to do. Syrsky is in charge of a people’s army that disciplines itself some, but by its very nature is resistant to outside discipline. Pretty much none of his subordinates, and outside of Kyiv even less of the officer corps, could give a hoot about officer efficiency ratings or career prospects.

The AFU isn’t Sparta. It’s an army of brigades commanded by majors and colonels who usually know better than Syrsky and his guys what is tactically possible, not because they’re geniuses and he’s a moron, because they’ve been on the line for the past four years. And even when they’re wrong, he’s still the general at the top and they’re the young guys at the front. Even when they’re wrong they know they’re right, this is how every army in history that had more than one fighting line has always seen things.

Besides, there is an officer shortage, if Syrsky or his people decide to sack someone in the AFU for not following orders, for the sake of global disciple, where’s the replacement coming from?

Second thing, if a man has the charisma and brains to rise to company or battalion even brigade command, then odds are he knows people in local government and often in national government. The AFU and Syrsky need government for supply, replacement, media support, and so on.

This is not taking into account the soldiers, all 800,000+ thousand of them, all of whom are volunteers in the service not because they like soldiering (though some may), but because they’re patriots defending their country. How do you get them to follow orders if they don’t like your orders? They all are armed and they are in a war, you can’t really scare them too much with MPs.

This is not to argue the AFU is a perfect military machine, but rather to say, that anyone pointing fingers at Syrsky should ask himself: Let’s be honest, in the AFU, just how easy is it to get a tough order carried out at any level of the AFU, if the orderee and his buddy disagree? These aren’t slave soldiers, they’re Ukrainians.

So the fact that Palisa reporting units at the front, not assault infantry, got a solid infusion of replacements is pretty interesting and a pretty clear indicator Zelensky and the national government are moving to strengthen the conventional AFU that thinks of itself as a volunteer army that will mostly become civilians after the war, rather than a professional army that just will exist, sometimes in peace and sometimes in war. Zelensky’s motivations are pretty obvious: first, all those soldiers can vote; and second, Zelensky has spent much of the war dueling with AFU leadership about strategy, and nagging the AFU to promote younger commanders.

The very fact that Ukraine has an entire military branch called the drone forces, and that a major who was a civilian grain trader before the war, without a minute of military training, is in charge of the drone forces, and that Ukraine’s drone forces are easily the most powerful and effective drone operations formation of any army, anywhere, is the direct result of Zelensky intervening in army personnel and promotion and pushing a young generation commander into a responsible position.

This is not the best way to run an army in a war, traditionally it’s better when the political leadership doesn’t interfere with the running of the army. But of course, in this war, arguably much of the AFU is voters and patriots first, and professional soldiers second.

The gaining units named by Palisa were 33rd Mech, 93rd Mech, and 155th Mech “Anna of Kyiv” Brigade. My sources tell me 25th Airborne (paratroopers) was beefed up as well.

The Ukrainian body count and attrition

This is not news, this is a discussion on casualty figures and implications for attrition strategy.

Zelensky in pre-recorded comments to France 2 TV, aired on Wednesday, said that approximately 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died since Russia invaded in February 2022. This was big news in that generally the Ukrainians don’t make public friendly casualty counts, but about once a year Zelensky announces a new figure. By way of background Zelensky in February 2025, talking with NBC news, put the figure at 46,000. In February 2024, this time at a Kyiv news conference, he put the figure at 31,000.

The figure Zelensky gave French television is certainly disputed. It’s about three times less than, for instance, a CSIS study that put the figure at 140,000 Ukrainian dead. The New York Times, citing CSIS, said it thinks those figures are accurate. The Kremlin, meanwhile, estimates it has killed or otherwise rendered combat-incapable every single combat unit fielded by the AFU at the start of the war, twice, and shot down the entire Ukrainian Air Force, by kill claim counts, just about four times.

So whom to believe? I think it’s relevant to recall that at the start of the war both Western governments and Western institutions, CSIS among them, said that Ukrainian estimates of Russian losses were silly, wrong, exaggerated and propaganda. No one “serious” believed the Ukrainians were killing Russian soldiers and destroying Russian equipment the way the Ukrainians said they were, and since Ukraine obviously was going to collapse, the Ukrainians “obviously” were lying.

Fast forward four years, the West basically has backed off on that and generally considers Ukrainian estimates of Russian losses as basically accurate. That’s the pre-history we need to bear in mind if we’re discussion loss statistics from the war. There was a time when the Ukrainians claimed Russian losses were ridiculously high and Ukraine’s allies said that couldn’t be true. The Western allies/institutions have reversed that view. Look it up.

But of course, there is a fairly substantial and even louder portion of the Ukrainian public discourse that asserts that Zelensky and his team always lie to protect themselves politically. For sure he and his administration are skilled at presenting information to their best advantage, after all Zelensky didn’t volunteer to French television numbers of Ukrainian soldiers missing in action, or wounded so badly they could no longer serve.

It is quite clear, I think, to everyone involved in or watching Ukrainian politics that governments that lie to the Ukrainian public about important issues in the first place leak the lie very quickly, because there are too many “insiders” who see themselves as patriots first and servants of the state second. And if the lie is something society deeply cares about – and the issue here is the lives of husbands, sons and fathers – then Ukrainian society is activist, it is backed up by an energetic independent media, and the citizens are better-armed than the police.

If Zelensky says “53,000,” even if CSIS and NYT disagree, I am positive Zelensky feels he won’t get contradicted by his own government and voters. He could care less about the foreigners, they can’t throw him out of office (or worse, look at Yanukovych). Again, this is not to say he won’t parse the information, so, I (and most of the Kyiv chattering class) assume that 53,000 is “confirmed dead” and there are tens of thousands more missing in action, which would make sense because Russia has advanced, so it has captured most of the remains.

But working numbers, assuming you buy the argument it’s hard for Zelensky to lie in a big way about soldier deaths – and there will be people who simply don’t buy that – the AFU has probably lost between 80,000-100,000 soldiers killed in the war so far. That is shocking and appalling, but there are something like 1.2-1.4 million Ukrainians in uniform at any one time, and in four years a big number has served and got out. Add in wounded and the picture is not an army gutted and a destroyed, but of an army taking sustainable losses, and the proof is this picture hasn’t changed much in four years.

So conclusion one: There are some serious problems with the theory that the AFU is about to collapse from losses. The image is not a boxer with weak knees and a glass jaw, who will drop at the next hard shot. The image is a lightweight in a fight with a heavyweight but the lightweight has better wind, is moving faster; and every time the heavyweight takes a swing, fatigue becomes a stronger ally for the lightweight.

Since we have a much, much better picture of Russian losses (drone video), and since we know Russian casualty evacuation is primitive, then a fair estimate of Russian killed has to be at least 400,000 dead, and it could be as high as 600,000. In other words, in the attrition war, four years into it, the Russians are losing 4-6 soldiers dead for every Ukrainian soldier killed in action, and probably, another 2-3 soldiers who survive but because of poor treatment can’t return to service.

So conclusion two: The implication is that, in brutal numbers, even if you account for Ukraine’s smaller size, and assuming both countries are able to mobilize men equally, the AFU is killing Russian soldiers so much faster than the Russian army is killing Ukrainian soldiers that eventually Russia must lose that war of attrition. You read that right. “Lose,” as in be defeated.

If you assume the Ukrainians are more willing to sacrifice because it’s their country, then barring some kind of miraculous advance in Russian combat efficiency, the outcome is unavoidable. At these exchange rates Russia cannot prevail.

I know those conclusions probably seems overly arbitrary and optimistic to some of you. I can only respond: This is exactly how the big country was defeated, in attrition, in the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and both Afghanistan Wars. The bigger aggressor country eventually reached a point of political recognition it could not win, enforced by casualty counts it could justify.

As an aside, this is exactly why the Kremlin is so insistent that the war must continue until Russia controls Donbas. If the war ends at any point short of that, then Putin and his supporters will have to face up to leading the country into a war that failed, and the death counts will make it impossible to argue it wasn’t a failure.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.