Russia’s Battlefield Woes

“The stark reality is that the Russians really aren’t doing well on the battlefield, and their economy is also in pretty tough shape.” CSIS experts examined several indicators of Russia’s battlefield performance and found that it has been performing poorly since January 2024. Russia’s rate of advance on some fronts has been as slow as just 50 meters per day—the slowest rate since World War II. It has also only seized around 5,000 square kilometers, less than 1 percent of Ukrainian territory, over the same time period. Russia is also losing equipment at a significantly higher rate than Ukraine, and is nearing the 1 million casualty mark by summer 2025, including 250,000 fatalities—more than five times the number of fatalities in all Russian and Soviet wars between World War II and January 2022.

Seth G. Jones, director of the CSIS Defense and Security Department and Harold Brown Chair, joins the podcast to discuss the state of the war in Ukraine and break down the data on Russia’s battlefield performance, which is included in an upcoming CSIS report.