Russia’s mass advantage against Ukraine should start declining by 2025, war expert says

• Russia is flooding Ukraine with men and equipment, but that should soon slow, analyst Michael Kofman said.
• Its high losses indicate its military is strained under its current level of aggression, he told the Intelligencer.
• While Kofman doesn’t think Russia will run out of steam, he said the Kremlin will be forced to recalibrate.

Russia’s numbers advantage against Ukraine is likely to start diminishing as soon as the end of this year, said US-based military analyst Michael Kofman.

Speaking to Intelligencer’s Benjamin Hart in an interview published on Tuesday, Kofman said that while the Kremlin has sustained pressure on Ukraine while suffering high levels of attrition, it’s now starting to struggle under “very significant constraints.”

“And if anything, its advantage on the battlefield is likely to decline as we get into this winter and look further ahead into 2025,” said Kofman, a Kyiv-born senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace whose work focuses on Russia.

Kofman was careful to tell Hart that he didn’t think Russia would soon run out of equipment or men. But he believes that Moscow can’t keep up its offensive pace for long.

Such a development could be a ray of hope for Ukraine, which faces a slow yet brutal Russian advance in the east, largely attributed to Moscow expending vastly more manpower and military hardware.

Russia’s equipment can’t last forever

Kofman’s first explanation is that Moscow has been replacing high equipment losses with Soviet-era weaponry, but even these reserve stocks can’t last forever.

“Russia is eating through its Soviet legacy, and its rate of equipment production is quite low relative to the numbers being lost on the battlefield,” he said.

“What it does mean is that the Russian military has increasingly been forced to adjust tactics to minimize their losses,” he added. “And that also reduces their ability to achieve any operationally meaningful breakthroughs.”

High payouts show recruitment is under strain

Kofman also believes that the Russian government can’t sustain the surge in bonuses and benefits it’s offering en masse to new recruits.

As it continues trying to overwhelm Ukraine by flooding the battlefield with troops, Russia has been offering abnormally high payouts for new soldiers, such as when Moscow touted sign-up bonuses on par with the US military’s in July. And that’s for a city where the average wage is less than a fifth of the median wage in the US.

“It’s clear that at this rate of loss, the Russian contract recruitment campaign is unable to keep up,” Kofman said. “This, too, does not mean that Russia is going to run out of manpower, but it’s clear that they’re struggling.”

The UK Defense Ministry posted an update on Monday saying it’s likely that Russia has suffered its highest daily casualty rate since the war began, with the average scale of losses rising significantly with every passing year.

British officials estimated that the Kremlin stands to steadily lose 1,000 troops a day throughout the coming winter, after already sustaining record daily losses in May and September.

That’s happening as Russia pushes intensely on the eastern front, besieging the key towns of Vuhledar and Pokrovsk in Donetsk while attempting to retake Russian land seized by Ukraine in Kursk.

Putin’s long-term strategy in question

The battles in the Donbas have been a slog, taking more than a year in the case of Vuhledar.

While Russian forces have advanced to the limits of Pokrovsk, Kofman told Hart it should take them more than just a few weeks of fighting to conquer the town.

His analysis of Russia’s pace of fighting presents implications not only for the frontline in Ukraine but also for Russia’s wartime economy, which Russian leader Vladimir Putin has refocused to rely heavily on defense manufacturing after the war began.

Draft policy documents reported by Russian media in September indicate that authorities plan to continue spending about 40% of the nation’s overall budget on its military and national security.

Russia posted GDP growth of 3.6% in 2023 after the pivot, despite international sanctions that the West hoped would scupper its economy. Putin and his administration largely took those numbers as a triumphant sign of Russian resilience.

But it’s unclear how long Moscow can maintain that strategy. Some economists say that if the war disappears or production slows down, the defense sector will no longer be able to prop up the Russian economy, allowing it to slide into a recession.

Ukraine’s supply of equipment and manpower is also far from assured, with a dependence on the West to send vital weapons and a lagging mobilization program that rushed to send reinforcements to the front lines after being enacted years after the war began.

Kyiv has, in the meantime, sought to develop its own formidable defense industry and has been manufacturing missiles, artillery systems, and an array of land, sea, and air drones.