Four years on, Russia is still paying for a fatal miscalculation in Ukraine

By Matthew Chance, CNN

(CNN) — In the early hours of February 24 2022, standing on the freezing roof of a hotel in Kyiv, the idea that Russia would launch a full-scale assault on Ukraine, despite a troop buildup on the border, still seemed almost impossible to imagine.

Yes, Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin strongman, had developed a taste for wielding Russia’s hard power. Putin’s wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, as well as military action in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, had delivered him success at a relatively low cost.

But invading the second biggest country in Europe, after Russia itself, would be a potentially catastrophic prospect which would, surely, give a cold strategist like Putin pause for thought.

Apparently not, I remember thinking, as I grappled with my flak jacket while missiles rained down on the Ukrainian capital.

The past four years of conflict have exposed more than one faulty assumption, not least the previously widespread belief even among Kyiv’s allies that Ukraine would be too weak, too disorganized, to resist a full-scale invasion.

Likewise, the reputation of invincibility surrounding Russia’s vast military has also been dented.

According to research by one think tank, The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), when the Kremlin launched what it dubbed its “Special Military Operation,” it expected its forces to take control of Ukraine within just 10 days.

More than 1450 days later, that timeframe looks hopelessly naïve and has proved to have been a fundamental miscalculation that has taken a devastating toll in pain, destruction and bloodshed.

Casualties

The true cost is, of course, carefully suppressed in a Russia where information is under increasingly tight control. Official casualty figures are kept strictly out of the public gaze, although estimates from multiple sources indicate losses that are eye-wateringly high.

Latest research from the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), for example, puts the number at nearly 1.2 million Russian dead and injured since the full-scale invasion was launched.

That appalling body count – which does not, of course, include the staggering Ukrainian toll, thought to be between 500,000 and 600,000 people – is higher than all casualties suffered by “any major power in any war since World War II”, the CSIS report says.

Of that estimate, as many as 325,000 Russians, the report adds, have been killed in the past four years – for some context, that’s triple the combined losses inflicted on US forces in every war Washington has fought since 1945, including on the battlefields of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

And as the Ukraine conflict enters a fifth year, the military bloodbath – as President Donald Trump frequently points out – is only getting worse, climbing steadily upwards as every month passes.

Again, the Kremlin has not confirmed the figures, but Ukrainian officials recently boasted of killing 35,000 Russian troops in December alone. The stated aim of military planners in Kyiv is now to kill Russian soldiers faster than new recruits – who are for the moment mainly volunteers – can be trained and sent into battle.

“If we reach 50,000, we will see what happens to the enemy. They view people as a resource and shortages are already evident,” Ukraine’s defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, told journalists at a recent news conference.

In more ways than one, this war has mutated into an ugly numbers game.

Economy

Whenever I visit Moscow, a city so many friends and colleagues have now left, or been excluded from, it’s striking how distant the brutal war in Ukraine seems.

On the surface, at least, the glitzy Russian capital, with its shops and cafes and traffic jams, is well-insulated against the horrors of the frontlines, save the occasional interception of Ukrainian drones, about which few Muscovites, frankly, spare a passing thought.

Following a brief sanctions shock after the 2022 invasion, Russian military spending surged, and its economy boomed.

Fueled by oil and gas exports, Russia defied Western predictions of economic collapse, instead becoming the 9th-biggest economy in the world in 2025, according to the International Monetary Fund, ahead of Canada and Brazil. That’s up from 11th place before the war in Ukraine began.

But there are growing signs of creeping financial pain, linked to a distorted war economy.

One problem is the increasingly expensive practice of offering large signing bonuses to Russians who agree to join the military, plus even bigger payouts if they are killed in action.

In addition, military recruitment and the prioritizing of military industrial production have led to what one Russian pro-Kremlin newspaper, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, has called a “severe labor shortage” in other essential industries.

It may be that Russia would never have been able to prevent these events from unfolding, even if it were not already stretched and bogged down in Ukraine.

But after four years of grinding war, that has taken a horrific toll on Ukraine, Russia has been left depleted at home and diminished on the international stage.

Back on that hotel rooftop in Kyiv in February 2022, I was wrong – along with many others – about the likelihood of Putin ordering a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

But we were unfortunately right about the catastrophic consequences of doing so – for Ukrainians, of course, and for Russians too – it was a prediction that has unfortunately proved all too accurate.

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