OPINION:
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With America’s renewed aid, Ukraine’s victory over Russia is inevitable and will embolden the United States and the free world.
Since Vladimir Putin launched his illegal invasion in February 2022, senior U.S. officials estimate that Ukraine has lost between 70,000 and 100,000 troops, while the United Nations reports that Moscow has killed about 10,000 civilians, including hundreds of children.
While these numbers are disturbing, Russia’s invading forces have sustained nearly half a million troop losses, eliminating about one-third of the federation’s active military. That’s the assessment of Leo Docherty, the British minister for the armed forces, who estimated that “approximately 450,000 Russian military personnel have been killed or wounded, and tens of thousands more have already deserted since the start of the conflict.”
Mr. Docherty added that “over 10,000 Russian armored vehicles, including nearly 3,000 main battle tanks, 109 fixed-wing aircraft, 136 helicopters, 346 unmanned aerial vehicles, 23 naval vessels of all classes, and over 1,500 artillery systems of all types have been destroyed, abandoned, or captured by Ukraine since the start of the conflict.”
Moscow’s losses in Ukraine this year also appear to be on course to outstrip those from last year. In 2023, Russian forces sustained 252,570 casualties, according to statistics from the Ukrainian armed forces and a report from Newsweek security and defense reporter Ellie Cook. And from January to April 1, the Kremlin has already sustained 82,870 losses.
“If Moscow continues to lose the same number of troops each day for the rest of the year, Russian forces would be on track to sustain 331,480 casualties by the end of the year, by Kyiv’s count. This far exceeds the number of purported Russian casualties for 2023,” Ms. Cook writes.
The U.K. Defense Ministry has also reported that the daily average for Russian casualties continues to rise each year of the war. In 2022, an estimated 400 Russian troops were killed or wounded per day. In 2023, that number rose to 693, and so far in 2024, the number has escalated to 913. On May 2, the New Voice of Ukraine reported that more than 1,000 Russian troops were killed in a 24-hour period, and 20 tanks and 20 artillery systems were destroyed.
It is telling that Ukraine still managed to inflict this level of damage against the Russian invaders with scarce ammunition even after U.S. aid was halted in the wake of Kevin McCarthy’s removal as House speaker by the self-destructive, isolationist faction of the GOP.
Ammunition was so scarce at the time that Ukrainian military commanders told CNN in February that they had to order their troops to fire only at priority targets such as tanks and rocket systems, despite having Russian infantry in their line of fire, placing the small country in an even more untenable position than when it was first invaded.
But thanks to strong Republican leaders such as House Speaker Mike Johnson, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who helped pass the Ukraine Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, Kyiv’s ammunition rationing is at an end. Just before the bill passed, Frederik Mertens, an analyst at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, told Newsweek, “Everything will depend on whether Ukraine will get sufficient artillery ammunition to counter the Russian attacks and inflict sufficient attrition to blunt their offensive.”
Now, $60.8 billion in aid to protect Ukraine’s 38 million population will be disbursed, with $23.2 billion to replenish U.S. weapons, stocks and facilities and $11.3 billion for current U.S. military operations in the region. While the U.S. does not have any troops fighting in Ukraine, it is training Ukrainian soldiers to defend their homeland.
None of this is good news for Mr. Putin, whose self-destructive path should come as no surprise since he has styled himself as the living embodiment of the failed Soviet Union.
On Christmas Eve 1979, then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev made the irreparable error of ordering Moscow’s forces to invade Afghanistan. Nearly a decade later, after 15,000 Russian soldiers were killed and 35,000 were wounded, Moscow was forced to withdraw, suffering a humiliating defeat on the world stage for the second most powerful nation on Earth. Two years later, the Communist Party collapsed, along with the entire Soviet infrastructure.
Mr. Putin has called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” His illegal invasion of Ukraine is a transparent attempt to rebuild the USSR from the ashes of a once-feared military empire that wreaked havoc and violence throughout the world. But three years into his reckless, senseless war with Ukraine, Mr. Putin’s incompetent leadership has led Russia to suffer nearly 10 times the number of casualties the Soviet army did in Afghanistan in just one-third of the time.
In an almost predictable fait accompli, Mr. Putin’s mercilessness will lead him to the same fate of the Soviet empire he reveres, buried in the ashes of history in humiliating defeat.
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a former Washington prosecutor and presidential appointee of the Trump administration (2017-2021) who has reported extensively on Russia. Last year, he was categorized No. 467 on a list of 500 Americans who were banned from entering the Russian Federation.
Correction: In a previous version of the story, the title for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was listed incorrectly.
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