Moscow has lost up to half a million soldiers in a grinding conflict that the Russian leader expected to end within weeks

By Charles Moore

Charles Moore covers politics with the wisdom and insight that come from having edited The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator.

Published 12 June 2026

I do not know whether John Healey chose the exact date of his resignation with Ukraine in mind. Coincidence or not, Thursday this week was the day the war in Ukraine outlasted the First World War – 1,569 days. The length of this war is, yes, a reproach to Nato but, even more, a mark of Vladimir Putin’s failure.

True, Russia holds about 20 per cent of Ukraine – including Crimea, which it invaded without serious Western objection in 2014. True, Putin frightened the West and, to some extent, divided us. He enjoys, presumably, the death and destruction he has brought. But his campaign makes the First World War trenches look like a war of movement.

Russia has lost 350,000-500,000 men dead, maybe three times more permanently out of action, without any definite victory or game-changing innovation. The incremental gains achieved at the front last year have stalled. The current death rate of Russian soldiers is thought to be 30,000 a month. James Sherr, the veteran Estonia-based expert on the conflict, puts it thus: “Russia is not collapsing but it is rotting.”

To understand Putin’s situation, recall the attack that began on February 24, 2022. He called it a “special military operation” not merely to play it down for propaganda purposes. That is how he saw it. In his mind, Ukraine did not really exist: it was just a chunk of Russia that had fallen to “Nazis”.

For more than 15 years, he had been delegitimising Ukraine. For eight, he had held Crimea and parts of the Donbas. He was emboldened by how little the West seemed to mind and how preoccupied we were by our self-lacerating “civilisational” decline over subjects like Black Lives Matter. He was delighted by President Joe Biden’s shocking overnight scuttle from Afghanistan. For Putin to say he was “invading” Ukraine would have meant admitting its independence. Besides, he expected its leadership to fold. So, a “special military operation” was all that was needed.

Only five weeks later, however, Putin had to turn his tanks round before the gates of Kyiv. At about that time, I was talking to ex-Air Marshal Edward Stringer, now at the think-tank Policy Exchange. “I think,” he told me, “that Putin has already lost this war.”

He did not mean that Russia would not go on fighting or that the Nato allies, led by the United States, would respond decisively. But Putin’s coup de main had failed. With that failure, his entire concept – military, political, optical – crumbled. His wrong history had led him to expect Ukrainian people to welcome Russian troops with flags.

Putin had been right, perhaps, that the instinct of the West after a lightning invasion would be to wail but let him have his way. President Zelensky’s famous refusal of a ride out changed all that. Putin accidentally forged the spirit of the nation he sought to obliterate.

He also achieved the opposite of the domino effect which the invasion intended. All those other places, such as the Baltic states, which, he believed, rightly belonged to Russia, were galvanised against him. Adjacent countries, previously quiet, became alarmed. During the Cold War, the word “Finlandisation” meant coming to an accommodation with the Soviets. Today, Finland is a member of Nato and has 50,500 air-raid shelters able to accommodate 4.8 million civilians (out of a total population of 5.6 million). We, in Britain, have none, and now we know from Mr Healey, who was privy to the facts, that we definitely are in danger.

Since February 2022, many terrible things have happened. More than 20,000 children have been seized by Soviet troops. There have been millions of civilians displaced, thousands tortured, hundreds massacred, chemical attacks, bombings, kidnappings. Hardly a day passes without an atrocity. Last week, a friend reported that the Russians were trying to blow up the underground shelter in Kherson specially constructed so that children could play in safety, where she was working.

Some terrible things have been done by other political leaders. The scene in the Oval Office in February last year, in which the president and vice-president of the United States publicly bullied President Zelensky was the most degrading moment in Western diplomacy since 1945. The withdrawal of American aid has unnecessarily lost many lives and prolonged the conflict.

The flattery offered by Donald Trump in the Anchorage summit last August rekindled Putin’s hope that he could get whatever he wanted. Trump lazily chose to accept Russian propaganda lines, including the idea that Ukraine is to blame for the war. The very structure of the Alaskan summit allowed no seat at the table for the country whose future the two great-power leaders were discussing.

Feeble though many European leaders have been in their responses, they decided not to put up with that. They have partially dispelled another Putin illusion – that all members of Nato are mere satrapies of the United States. European help for Ukraine is trying, though much too slowly, to fill the Trump-shaped hole. The contradiction by which Trump presents himself as the peacemaker while washing his hands of the consequences has been exposed. Having got nowhere and got bored, he has transferred his attention to Iran.

Ukraine is escaping its suppliant trap. Its Armed Forces are, along with the Israelis, the most innovative and experienced on the planet. While our Government is so laggard that its own defence secretary feels he must resign, Ukraine has become ever more self-reliant. 

The war landscape is transformed by drones, most of which are made in Ukraine at high speed and low cost. Ukraine is even making good money by exporting drones and know-how to the Gulf states. Its Command is devolved so that units are given the freedom to try out bright ideas and sometimes fail. As the Ukrainians themselves point out, this is an incentive: “Putin simply kills people who make a mistake”, so no one dares do anything brave.

As long ago as June last year, with Operation Spider Web, which successfully targeted five airbases deep within Russia, Ukraine proved its technical superiority and freedom of operation. It struck without permission from Nato allies, and succeeded. Ever since, in production, execution and political will, it is proving its own master.

Mastery is the right word for its technological advantage over Russia. I asked Edward Stringer about the First World War comparison this week. In 1918, he said, the final allied breakthrough was the “all-arms warfare” of the Battle of Amiens in which a conscript army and the scientific use of spotter planes talking to artillery by radio telephony combined to outsmart the Germans.

In 2026, a modern equivalent is happening. Ukraine is combining its land and maritime flanks to dislocate Russia’s strategic economic base and its supply lines. Drones are destroying Russia’s “battlefield enablers” such as fuel trucks and ammunition way behind the lines. Russia’s Black Sea fleet is bottled up and its front line neutralised. Ukraine can even spoil a Putin showcase, as it recently did in St Petersburg.

Last week, I heard Sir Richard Knighton, Chief of our Defence Staff, try to reassure the public that our defences were ready should Putin “try to do something daft”. A trivial choice of words, rather like Neville Chamberlain, in April 1940, saying Hitler had “missed the bus”.

Putin is much worse than “daft”. He is trying to destroy the European defence on which our security has rested for more than 80 years. The way it looks now, Ukraine is likely to be our saviour, not the other way round.