As the Russia-Ukraine war drags on, the Russian military is suffering severe losses of combat power, the Financial Times (FT) reported on the 9th (local time). With casualties surging and desertions rising to their highest levels since the outbreak of the war, analysis suggests that ‘Russian-style human-wave tactics’ are increasingly reaching their limits.

According to European and Ukrainian officials, the number of Russian troops killed or missing in Ukraine has been rising sharply. In a recent media interview, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asserted that Russian forces are seeing 30,000∼35,000 killed and seriously wounded every month. He added that the share of “irrecoverable casualties” among Russian losses, those unable to return to the battlefield, is increasing.

Zelensky said, “If this attrition continues, they (the Russian military) will lose 100,000∼120,000 troops in just a few months, and they will not be able to fill the gaps easily.” Analysts attribute this to the recent “drone war.” As damage to heavy equipment from drone strikes has mounted, the Russian military has begun employing infantry- and infiltration-centered tactics, which has in turn increased personnel losses.

The think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has estimated at least 325,000 Russian soldiers killed in this war, a figure five times greater than the total number of deaths in all wars fought by Russia and the former Soviet Union since World War II.

As a result, there are forecasts that the Russian military’s ferocious offensives built on human-wave tactics will no longer be sustainable. In fact, the pace of Russian advances on the Ukrainian front has recently slowed markedly, to about 15∼70ｍ per day.

The number of Russian soldiers leaving the front is also increasing. Frontelligence Insight, a Ukrainian war analysis group, said the Russian military’s desertion rate has reached the highest level in the war that has continued for nearly four years since 2022.

Russia’s recruitment system, which signs up tens of thousands of new soldiers each month, has effectively reached its limit. Until now, Russia had maintained its ranks by offering large financial rewards to soldiers. However, after a prolonged, cumulative economic downturn, the budget for such compensation support has been exhausted.

For this reason, Russia is restricting compensation payments to families of the missing, and instead of discharging wounded soldiers after treatment, is redeploying them to the front, the FT reported. The Ukrainian side assessed that last year 90% of new Russian recruits were assigned to replace casualties, indicating that the Russian military has not been expanding its force but merely maintaining the status quo.