The Trap of Advantage: Why Russia Failed to Win a War of Attrition

The failure of the blitzkrieg in 2022 was a serious but, as it seemed at the time, entirely recoverable setback for Putin. Russia held a manifold advantage over Kyiv in terms of human resources and economic capacity, making its victory in a prolonged war of attrition appear almost inevitable. Four years later, it is possible to state with confidence that this logic has failed and has largely run its course. Russia’s military costs are rising significantly faster than its army is advancing towards the borders of Donetsk region.

Both the blitzkrieg and the war of attrition were launched by the Kremlin from a position of confidence in its overwhelming superiority and the relatively low cost of the coming campaign. Yet the expectation of low costs was not so much the result of a realistic assessment as an argument in favour of war, directed at the population and elites, and therefore a political instrument to maintain their loyalty to the war effort.

The resource advantage that was supposed to guarantee victory became a source of strategic inertia. The ability to replenish losses allowed Moscow to maintain its existing strategy, despite the fact that these losses were translating into territorial gains with diminishing effectiveness. As a result, the Kremlin missed the moment when both the balance of factors determining military success and the economic environment shaping the relative cost of replenishable resources had changed significantly.

Finally, adherence to a strategy based on resource pressure led to an underestimation of technologies that were transforming the very architecture of warfare. From Moscow’s perspective, these remained merely supplementary tools that did not alter the significance of its strategic advantages. Yet today the Russian army finds itself engaged in a different type of war, in which the value of those advantages has been substantially diminished, while in the areas where new advantages have emerged, Moscow’s position appears far less convincing, and in some cases even weaker.

Two setbacks

Vladimir Putin is now losing his second military campaign in his long-running war with Ukraine.

His first failure was the collapse in 2022 of the planned blitzkrieg, something intended to resemble Hitler’s forty-day French campaign. The plan unravelled within a month, when, after losing elite units and withdrawing from Kyiv, Sumy and Chernihiv regions, the Russian command announced that it would focus on capturing the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. By the summer, when it became clear that even this objective could not be achieved with limited resources, Putin was forced to begin the systematic construction of a military machine designed to secure victory in a new campaign, this time in the form of a war of attrition.

It is now possible to say with confidence that this campaign has also failed to achieve its intended outcome, and this is itself a striking fact. Four years ago, Moscow’s victory in such a war appeared almost inevitable. At the time of the invasion, Russia exceeded Ukraine by 3.5 times in population, nine times in GDP and eight times in federal budget expenditure. During the unfinished blitzkrieg, Russia also deprived Ukraine of approximately one fifth of its total resources, while itself receiving a huge trade surplus in 2022 ($330 billion, or 15% of GDP). The liquid component of the Russian government’s financial reserves in the National Wealth Fund reached $150 billion, a figure almost equivalent to Ukraine’s GDP. Given these starting conditions, it seemed obvious that Moscow could afford a methodical offensive in which time was entirely on its side.

However, of the approximately 13,000–14,000 square kilometres of territory in Donetsk and Luhansk regions that remained under Kyiv’s control, Moscow has managed to occupy only two thirds, around 9,000 square kilometres, over four years. Expectations of the collapse of the Ukrainian front have not materialised, and Ukraine’s military machine now appears to be one of the most powerful in Europe. Russian advances on the ground are stagnating, while Ukraine has created a new theatre of operations in the low-altitude domain and is developing strikes against Russian infrastructure in several directions. Finally, Russia’s economy and military machine are facing mounting pressures, including budgetary constraints and shortages of manpower required to sustain offensive operations.

All of this indicates that the logic of four years of war of attrition has run its course. The clock is now ticking in both directions, and Russia’s costs are increasing faster than its army is advancing towards the borders of Donbas. This does not, however, mean that Putin has definitively lost the war. On the contrary, he continues to signal his intention to pursue the conflict until reaching what he considers victory. Yet this is unlikely to be possible in the previous format and instead suggests a transition to a new stage requiring the mobilisation of additional resources and capabilities. Before discussing possible scenarios and prospects for this new, third military campaign, however, it is important to answer a more fundamental question: why did Putin fail in the first campaign and, especially, in the second?

‘It won’t cost you a thing’: between planning and propaganda

The conventional explanation for the failure of the blitzkrieg rests on two arguments: that military generals misled Putin about the actual combat effectiveness of the Russian army, and that the FSB misinformed him about the mood of Ukrainian society and elites. Both of these arguments are, at the very least, incomplete.

The blitzkrieg plan relied not so much on confidence in the combat effectiveness of the Russian army as on confidence that Ukraine itself believed in that effectiveness. This belief was expected to paralyse Ukrainian resistance. There was no Plan B in case this assumption proved false, as demonstrated, among other things, by the absence of unified command over the invading forces at the time of the invasion (→ Re:Russia: The Regime of Civilian Militarism). The absence of a Plan B is not a problem of the quality of information, but a problem of planning and decision-making mechanisms. In reality, the lack of a contingency plan was not accidental. The assertion that the war would be quick, easy and victorious was not so much an analytical assessment as an argument for launching the war, directed at the military and Putin’s inner circle. Doubts about this argument were treated as cowardice and an attempt to ‘shirk responsibility’ (as Putin rebuked Foreign Intelligence Service chief Sergei Naryshkin during a public meeting of the Security Council on the eve of the invasion). The issue, therefore, was not inaccurate information but the costs of ‘civilian militarism’, which fails to distinguish adequately between a military campaign and a parade, combined with an authoritarian echo chamber where agreement with the leader is regarded as a more important quality than any other.

As for the failure of Putin’s second campaign, the war of attrition, there are also two popular but insufficient explanations. The first argues that the mobilisation of resources for such a war was inadequate from the outset. Russian Z-bloggers have advanced this argument throughout the four years of the war, calling for a genuine large-scale mobilisation of both manpower and economic resources. The second explanation is that Russia has faced not only Ukrainian resistance but also that of ‘the entire West’, fighting on Kyiv’s side.

This second argument is, to a large extent, disingenuous. Western support for Ukraine has indeed been extremely significant, but it has also been limited in scale, both financially and militarily. As the most comprehensive estimates to date by the Ukraine Support Tracker project show, in monetary terms this assistance amounted to slightly more than $100 billion annually, or roughly 5% of Russia’s GDP. Without this support, Ukraine would not have been able to withstand the invasion, but its scale still raises the question of why Putin failed to defeat Ukraine despite having access to substantially greater resources.

As for the first argument, the question of transitioning to a mobilisation model was highly salient at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. It was promoted by Prigozhin-aligned military bloggers, and Prigozhin himself even outlined its political instruments (‘hang Shoigu in Red Square’, as he suggested in his final interview), intended to discipline elites opposed to such a scenario. Moreover, Putin partially adopted elements of this approach by promoting the image of ‘Prigozhin and his sledgehammer’ and announcing a ‘partial mobilisation’ in autumn 2022. But only until it became clear in 2023 that the military machine whose construction had begun in summer 2022 was, however imperfectly, functioning.

The central argument presented to the Russian population and elites during the transition from blitzkrieg to war of attrition was, in substance, the opposite of the mobilisation argument and repeated the message used at the previous stage: ‘It will cost you nothing’. The model of a war of attrition with a restrained mobilisation regime was a conscious Kremlin choice, balancing military objectives against the preservation of stability and cohesion within Putin’s broad coalition. The enormous resources available to the Kremlin were divided between these two objectives.

By investing vast sums of money in import substitution programmes and preferential lending schemes between 2022 and 2024, Putin compensated elites for the losses associated with the failure of the blitzkrieg and the introduction of broad sanctions, thereby purchasing their loyalty for his second attempt to seize Ukraine. For a significant part of Putin’s coalition, the message was not even ‘It will cost you nothing’, but rather ‘You can still make good money from this’. Indeed, the coalition of those ‘profiting’ from the war in 2023–2025 ranged from the widows of contract soldiers and their commanders, who learned to ‘shake down’ their newly enriched subordinates, to arms manufacturers and developers of ‘domestic’ software or the ‘Sber’ ecosystem. Meanwhile, the most fervent advocates of the mobilisation model were subjected to repression.

In mid-2023, Putin made a clear choice between the ‘anti-corruption patriotism’ of the mobilisation faction and the ‘corrupt patriotism’ of the war economy, in which the war of attrition was presented to a significant degree as a ‘commercial project’. This choice broadly corresponded to the governing practices to which he has consistently been inclined and was again determined more by domestic political considerations than by purely military ones. In both cases, the blitzkrieg and the war of attrition, the underestimation of costs did not so much reflect marginal calculations as serve to convince the population and elites of the rationality of a decision whose objectives appeared unclear or unconvincing to them.

The resource curse of a war of attrition

Putin began both campaigns from the same starting point: confidence in Russia’s overwhelming superiority in resources, both material and human. The central strategy of the second campaign was the accelerated deployment of these resources to force a breakthrough in Ukraine’s defensive lines. Artillery and glide bombs reduced fortified positions to rubble, while infantry assaulted Ukrainian positions wave after wave, regardless of losses. The main investments were directed towards those capabilities perceived as sources of advantage: shells and manpower. As a result, for example, spending on ‘human resources’, meaning the contract army, reached approximately 2.5% of GDP in 2025, according to Re: Russia’s estimates (→ Re: Russia: The Price of Donbas).

The Ukrainian side, by contrast, has faced an existential threat from the outset of the conflict, combined with a critical shortage of resources, both personnel and weaponry. This forced Kyiv to rely on innovative technologies capable of compensating for traditional resources and to grant military units maximum autonomy. This was not the result of a deliberate institutional choice but of necessity. Yet the combination of networked techno-optimism and ‘partisan warfare’ (a form of military libertarianism) ultimately transformed the nature of the war itself, particularly through the rapid development of its drone component, while simultaneously making the conflict far cheaper on the Ukrainian side (→ CSIS: Ukrainian Innovation in a War of Attrition). As many analysts have noted, Russia demonstrated considerable adaptability and was able to adopt and scale Ukrainian innovations relatively quickly. However, the initiative in changing the character of the war consistently remained with Ukraine and was driven by the constraints limiting its options (→ ISW: Russian Drone Innovations).

Ultimately, ‘flexing its muscles’ in areas where it held the advantage turned out to be a kind of trap for the Russian side. Greg Whisler and Michael Kofman, in a recent in-depth review, show that after the failures of 2022–2023, the Russian command created more than 70 tank, artillery and infantry regiments, resulting in a Russian force grouping four times larger than the initial invasion force. However, by the time this army had been assembled for a classical ground offensive, the combination of minefields and drones had made large-scale breakthroughs disproportionately costly or even practically impossible. For Russia, therefore, the cost of war increased proportionally because traditional resources were being converted into territorial gains with steadily diminishing returns (→ Jones, McCabe: Russia’s Battlefield Woes in Ukraine).

At the same time, as Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds astutely noted in their reviews from early 2024 and 2025, the Kremlin’s strategic objectives in reality extended beyond capturing the declared territories and remained almost identical to those of the failed blitzkrieg. Moscow sought, through the gradual exhaustion of the Ukrainian army’s mobilisation capacity, the political resources of Ukraine’s leadership and flows of Western assistance, to force Kyiv into signing an imposed agreement limiting its military and political sovereignty. For this reason, prolonged battles involving significant losses and limited territorial gains were long viewed in Moscow not as evidence of military failure or tactical miscalculation, but as the implementation of a longer-term plan that would lead to Ukraine’s partial capitulation and a form of revenge for the failed blitzkrieg. From late 2024, these expectations were reinforced by Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the suspension of US assistance and the negotiation process, which Moscow hoped to exploit for its own purposes. As a result, the modest outcomes of the 2024 offensive did not prompt a reassessment of military strategy or Russia’s own resource capabilities, and the logic of the Russian advance against Ukraine’s ‘fortress belt’ remained unchanged.

Meanwhile, by the spring of 2025, military analysts were increasingly inclined to conclude that Russian tactics were failing. The ‘drone wall’ had created an ‘attrition zone’ that prevented forces from reaching the line of contact while retaining sufficient resources for a breakthrough. Russian pressure along the front no longer appeared continuous, as it had previously, but fragmented, allowing the Ukrainian Armed Forces to adapt by reallocating forces. At the same time, by slowing the pace of the Russian offensive, Kyiv gained the opportunity to develop its own ‘strategy of attrition’, aimed at systematically increasing the costs Russia incurred from continuing the war (→ Watling: Ukraine’s Hardest Winter). By the first half of 2026, this had evolved into a large-scale asymmetric air counteroffensive, aimed at systematically targeting Russian infrastructure across several fronts.

The course and development of the Russia-Ukraine military confrontation partly resemble the paradox of soft and hard budget constraints. A firm operating under soft budget constraints, despite possessing initial advantages, ultimately increases costs faster than productivity, while a firm facing hard constraints is forced to seek efficiency reserves and, over the long term, outcompetes the first. The Russian leadership became overly focused on its perceived advantages and the strategy derived from them. When faced with diminishing returns from its efforts, it began placing hopes on geopolitical instruments, such as the ‘Trump factor’. As a result, it missed the moment when, on the one hand, the balance of factors determining military success had fundamentally changed, and on the other, the economic environment shaping the relative cost of resources had shifted.

Two types of interconnection and critical advantages

Moreover, the focus on perceived advantages and traditional determinants of victory led Moscow to make significant miscalculations in developing those elements of military infrastructure that proved to be the most, or even critically, important under the changed conditions of warfare. Russia encountered a genuine technological gap which it appears unable to overcome in the short term and which to a large extent determines the evolution of the theatre of operations.

In March 2026, during a conversation with signals officer Irina Godunova to mark International Women’s Day, Vladimir Putin asked about the state of communications at the front and remarked that ‘the use of types of communication that we do not control poses a danger to personnel’. Putin was seeking support for a decision he had already made, and which had provoked fierce criticism among frontline soldiers and Z-bloggers, to block Telegram. Godunova described Telegram as an ‘enemy means of communication’ and agreed that ‘something should be developed of our own’ or that the messenger app MAX should be ‘improved’. Her remarks therefore suggested that although Telegram was considered ‘enemy’ technology, there was currently no alternative available at the front. Putin merely clarified whether military secure communications were functioning properly, received an affirmative response and ended the conversation.

In reality, this conversation took place shortly after Russian troops in Ukraine found themselves cut off from Starlink satellite communications, which they had been using extensively without authorisation since late 2023 to coordinate operations and communicate with drones. At the same time, the secure communications system that particularly interested Putin is primarily an instrument of vertical command and control. It is the kind of system familiar to people of Putin’s generation from Soviet films about the Second World War, where a formation commander typically shouts into the telephone: ‘I order you to take the position!’ The conversation therefore concerned two different types of communication: horizontal communications, provided by the unmentioned and disconnected Starlink system and the mentioned but partially restricted Telegram, and vertical secure communications, which maintain the chain of command. Putin’s concern about external control over the first type of communication therefore appeared somewhat misplaced, because in reality Russia has no domestic system capable of providing it. The Unified Tactical Command and Control System (ESU TZ) ‘Sozvezdie-M2’, developed by Rostec since the mid-2010s, was never completed, despite its planned deployment initially for 2019, and then for 2021, in the run-up to the war. Ultimately, this circumstance was largely responsible for the emergence of a spontaneous horizontal communications infrastructure based on WhatsApp, Telegram and Starlink, as experts have noted.

That said, the Russian leadership was fully aware of the importance of Starlink satellite communications as early as 2022, when it appeared in the Ukrainian military’s arsenal, and even threatened Elon Musk with shooting down his satellites. By 2023, these threats had ceased, and Russia began quietly purchasing Starlink terminals through ‘neutral’ countries. This was likely one reason why projects for developing Russia’s own low-orbit broadband satellite communications system, which had existed since 2018, were not treated by the Russian leadership at that stage as a critical priority. The apparent assumption was that the objectives of the military campaign would be achieved through traditional resource advantages before such a communications system could technically be deployed.

It was not until the end of 2024, as part of the national ‘Data Economy’ project, that a state programme to create a satellite constellation emerged, with state funding and a specific deployment schedule. According to this schedule, 18 satellites were to be launched in 2025, 156 in 2026 and 318 by 2028, representing the full operational constellation including replacement satellites. In practice, the first 16 satellites were placed into orbit only in March 2026, with one subsequently lost. In July, the second launch took place; however, the lack of information regarding the number of satellites indirectly suggests that the figure is likely significantly behind schedule. In any case, the emergence of a Russian equivalent to Starlink is unlikely before 2028, even under fairly optimistic expectations (→ Re: Russia: Disconnected From Reality).

Meanwhile, Starlink has become the critical technological advantage that allows Ukraine to dominate the theatre of mid-range strikes, meaning drone attacks at medium distances. The disabling of Russian Starlink terminals occurred precisely at the moment when Russian drones began operating at depths of up to 80 km inside Ukrainian territory beyond the front line. This was not accidental: drones are gradually transforming the battle for the rear area into the decisive space of warfare, against which the significance of the line of contact is becoming increasingly blurred, and the line itself is effectively disappearing. The Ukrainian command regards strikes against rear logistics as a priority that will mark the transition from a purely defensive war to tactical operations aimed at weakening the enemy’s front line. Ukraine’s possession of a communications system that provides an advantage in this contest is undoubtedly a result of Western assistance. However, Russia’s lack of such a capability is not primarily the result of fundamental technological backwardness, but rather of patterns of implementing complex technological innovations that become endless budgetary ‘unfinished projects’, combined with failures in understanding the development of military technologies.

This error, in turn, stemmed firstly from the belief that Russia’s traditional advantages in resources were sufficient to achieve the desired outcome and secondly from an outdated understanding of the critical importance of vertical military communications, which enable command over forces, and the secondary, non-critical role of communications enabling horizontal coordination. This perception was clearly reflected in the attempt to restrict Telegram, despite military claims that no substitute existed. Yet the episode appears to be a symptom of a broader worldview in which the challenge of low-orbit broadband communications was for a long time not regarded by the Russian command as a priority.

In this new picture of warfare, therefore, the size of a drone army matters more than superiority in manpower, the battle for the rear matters more than firepower along the line of contact, and broadband satellite communications matter more than the possession of systems such as the Oreshnik. Four years ago, Russia began its conventional war with Ukraine from a position of undeniable superiority in the capabilities it considered essential to success. Although these advantages proved largely illusory during the failed blitzkrieg, over the following eighteen months the Kremlin managed to reproduce and scale them sufficiently to sustain a war of attrition. Today, however, the Russian army and political leadership find themselves in the midst of a fundamentally different type of war, in which the value of those advantages has been substantially diminished, while in the areas where new critical advantages are required, Moscow’s position appears either insufficiently convincing or even weaker, particularly in communications, innovation and tactical adaptation.