This week we talk about drone warfare, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and total war.

We also discuss casualty numbers, population superiority, and lingering munitions.

Recommended Book: The Burning Earth by Sunil Amrith

Transcript

Eight years after Russia launched a halfheartedly concealed invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, under the guise of helping supposedly oppressed Russian-speakers and Russia loyalists in the area, in February of 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

This invasion followed months of military buildup along the two countries’ shared borders, and was called a special military operation by Russian President Putin. It was later reported that this was intended to be a quick, one or a few day decapitation attack against Ukraine, Russia’s forces rapidly closing the distance between the border and Ukraine’s capitol, Kyiv, killing or imprisoning all the country’s leadership, replacing it with a puppet government loyal to Putin, and that would be that.

Ukraine had been reorienting toward the European Union and away from Russia’s sphere of influence, and Russia wanted to put a stop to that realignment and bring the country fully back under its control, as was the case before 2014, when a series of protests turned into an uprising that caused their then-leader, a puppet of Russia, to flee the country; he, of course, fled to Russia.

On paper, Ukraine was at a massive disadvantage in this renewed conflict, as Russia is a global-scale player, while Ukraine is relatively small, and back in 2014 had one of its major ports and a huge chunk of its territory stolen by Russia.

Russia also has nukes, has a massive conventional military, and has a far larger economy and population. Analysts near-universally assumed Ukraine would collapse under the weight of Russia’s military, perhaps holding out for weeks or months if they were really skillful and lucky, but probably days.

That didn’t end up being the case. Despite Russia’s substantial and multifarious advantages, Ukraine managed to hold out against the initial invasion, against subsequent pushes, and then managed to launch its own counterattacks. For more than three years, it has held its ground against Russia’s onslaught, against continuous land incursions, and against seemingly endless aerial attacks by jets, by bombers, and by all sorts of rockets, missiles, and drones.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to determine actual casualty and fatality numbers in this conflict, as both sides are incentivized to adjust these figures, either to show how horrible the other side is, or to make it seem like they’re suffering less than they are for moral purposes.

But it’s expected that Russia will hit a milestone of one million casualties sometime in the summer of 2025, if it hasn’t actually hit that number already, and it’s estimated that as many as 250,000 Russian soldiers have already been killed in Ukraine.

For context, that’s about five-times as many deaths as Russia suffered in all the wars it fought, post-WWII (as both the Soviet Union and Russia), combined. That’s also fifteen-times as many fatalities as they suffered in their ten-year-long war in Afghanistan, and ten-times as many deaths as in their 13-year-long war in Chechnya.

It’s also estimated that Russia has lost something like 3,000-4,000 tanks, 9,000 armored vehicles, 13,000 artillery systems, and more than 400 air defense systems in the past year, alone; those numbers vary a bit depending on who you listen to, but those are likely the proper order of magnitude.

The country is rapidly shifting to a full-scale war footing, originally having intended to make do with a few modern systems and a whole lot of antique, Soviet military hardware they had in storage to conduct this blitzkrieg attack on Ukraine, but now they’re having to reorient basically every facet of society and their economy toward this conflict, turning a huge chunk of their total manufacturing base toward producing ammunition, tanks, missiles, and so on.

Which, to be clear, is something they’re capable of doing. Russia is currently on pace to replace this hardware, and then some, which is part of why other European governments are increasing their own military spending right now: the idea being that once Russia has finished their reorientation toward the production of modern military hardware, they’ll eventually find themselves with more tanks, missiles, and drones than they can use in Ukraine, and they’ll need to aim them somewhere, or else will find themselves have to pay upkeep on all this stuff as it gathers dust and slowly becomes unusable.

The theory, then, is that they’ll have to open up another conflict just to avoid being bogged down in too much surplus weaponry; so maybe they’ll try their luck in the Baltics, or perhaps start shipping more hardware to fellow travelers, terrorists and separatists, in places like Moldova.

In the meantime, though, Russian forces are continuing to accrue gains in Ukraine, but very, very slowly. This year they’ve captured an average of about 50 meters of Ukrainian territory per day, at a cost of around 1,140 casualties per day, of which about 975 are fatalities.

That’s a huge and horrific meatgrinder, but there’s little pushback against the invasion in Russia at this point, as speaking out against it has been criminalized, and a lot of high-profile fines, arrests, kidnappings, and seeming assassinations of people who have said anything even a little bit negative about the war or the Russian government have apparently been effective.

Ukraine is holding its own, then, but Russia still has the upper-hand, and will likely have even more weight behind it in the coming months, as its manufacturing base pivots further and further toward a total war stance.

What I’d like to talk about today is a seeming renewed effort on the part of Ukraine to strike within Russian territory, taking out military assets, but also destabilizing Russian support for the war, focusing especially on one such recent, wildly successful asymmetric attack.

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In addition to all the other advantages Russia has in this conflict, Ukraine’s population is about one-fourth the size of Russia’s, and that means even if Ukraine is, by some measures, losing one soldier to every two that Russia loses, over time Russia is still gaining firmer and firmer footing; that’s a war of attrition Russia will eventually win just because their population is bigger.

By some indications, the Russian government is also using this conflict as an opportunity to clear out its prisons, offering prisoners a chance at freedom if they go to the front line and survive for a period of time, many of them dying, and thus freeing up prison space and resources that would otherwise be spent on them, but also sending a disproportionate number of their poor, their disliked ethnic and religious groups, and their young radicals into the meatgrinder, forcing them to serve as cannon fodder, as most of those people will die or be grievously wounded, but those people also, as a side-benefit, will no longer be a problem for the government.

Russia is also bringing in troops from its ally, North Korea, to fight on the front lines, alongside all the weapon systems and ammo it’s been procuring from them and other allies, like China and Iran.

So while this is obviously not great for Russia, losing that many fighters for relatively small gains, they’ve also figured out a way to make it not so bad, and in some ways even a positive development, according to their metrics for positive, anyway, and again, if they can keep warm bodies flooding to the front lines, they will eventually win, even if it takes a while—at their current rate of advance, it would take about 116 years to capture the rest of the country—and even if the body count is shockingly high by the time that happens.

To counter this increasing advantage that Russia has been leveraging, Ukraine has been leaning more heavily on drones, as the invasion has progressed.

In this context, a drone might be anything from the off-the-shelf, quadcopter models that hobbyists use to race and shoot aerial photographs, to higher-end, jet or missile or glider-like models similar to what major military forces, like the US military, use to scout and photograph enemy forces and terrain, and in some cases launch assassination attacks or bombing raids on the same.

They can be low-flying quad-copters, or they can be something like lingering, unmanned missiles or jet fighters, then, and they can be completely unarmed, or they can be rigged with grenades to drop, bombs to use in a suicide attack, missiles to fire, shotguns to blast enemy fighters in the face, or nets to ensnare enemy drones.

Drones of all shapes and sizes have been fundamental to the way modern militaries operate since the 1990s, when early, remotely piloted aircraft, like the Predator drone, were used for aerial reconnaissance purposes in mostly Middle Eastern war zones.

Later versions were then equipped with bombs and missiles, and in some cases have even been used for the assassination of individuals, as was the case with a drone that fired a modified Hellfire missile that was reportedly use to kill an al Quaeda leader in Afghanistan in 2022, the missile deploying six large blades before hitting its intended target, shredding him instead of blowing him up, and thus avoiding civilian casualties.

Mexican cartels have also been enthusiastically adopting drones in their attacks and assassinations, their so-called dronero drone-operators often rigging off-the-shelf drones with deployable bombs, allowing them to fly the drone into an enemy’s home or other supposedly safe space, killi...