A Stoppable Force and a Movable Object: Mutual Exhaustion in Russia and Ukraine

More than three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the frontlines in the conflict have become increasingly stagnant. Constant high-intensity combat along a frontline hundreds of kilometres long has taken its toll on both Russian and Ukrainian forces. Heavy losses in manpower and materiel have degraded the ability of both sides to achieve significant breakthroughs in offensive operations, while the past 18 months of the war have been marked by near-constant Russian assaults against beleaguered Ukrainian defenders.

The policy problem faced by Western decision-makers is to enable Ukraine to win this war of attrition against Russia – a goal that remains achievable. To do this, Western policymakers should embark on three key policies. Firstly, they should fund the ongoing expansion of Ukraine’s domestic weapons manufacturing industry. Secondly, they should seek additional sources of artillery ammunition in the international arena for purchase and transfer to Ukraine’s armed forces. Finally, Canada and other Western countries should aid Ukraine in reforming both the conditions and public image of military service in Ukraine’s armed forces to make personnel recruitment more attractive and sustainable. By accomplishing these objectives, Ukraine can be placed in a position to exhaust and attrite Russia and, eventually, exploit new battlefield opportunities that will arise as a result.

Background

The relative impact of compounded attrition and force exhaustion has shifted many times over the course of the Russia-Ukraine war. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, both sides brought to bear essentially fresh forces against one another. Each were hampered by their own issues – a lack of readiness and coherent amidst Russian units, most of whom had only learned of their deployment to active combat hours ahead of the invasion, and poor force disposition and deployment among the Ukrainian side, which had incorrectly assumed that Russia would not attack Kyiv. Importantly however, neither of these factors provided for significant exhaustion in this early stage of the war.

The first stages of burnout began to occur among Ukrainian fighters in the spring of 2022, exacerbating by the summer months. In late March 2022, Russia made the strategic decision to withdraw its forces from the stalled offensives near Kyiv, Chernihiv, and other northern Ukrainian cities. Moscow instead threw the full weight of its forces at the Donbas region, seeking to slowly grind down and obliterate Ukrainian-held settlements in the country’s east. The first major population centre to experience this was Popasna, whose destruction and capture by Russian forces in mid-April marked the first significant territorial advance in this stage of the war. While most observers and media continued to revel in the success of repelling the Russian advance on the Ukrainian capital, the mood among the rank and file in Donbas was starkly different. Ukrainian soldiers holding the twin cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk described being heavily outnumbered and outgunned by the attacking Russian forces, who surrounded their pocket on three sides and fired artillery at a rate of ‘three shells to every one of ours,’ as one commander said. The situation worsened as Russian troops continued to press into other areas of Donbas, with soldiers near Bakhmut speaking in near-mutinous tones by early June as they described feeling abandoned by Ukraine’s political and military leadership. 

At the same time, across the line, Russian forces were becoming quickly attrited by months of continued offensive actions. Moscow’s initial force, comprising roughly 190,000 troops organized in 120 ‘battalion tactical groups (BTGs), was not significantly reinforced throughout the first six months of war and was instead redeployed across the battlespace as political and military needs dictated. The strain of costly assaults against heavily fortified positions took its toll on Russian units, while formations in quieter sections of the front were further depleted as their manpower was steadily redirected towards hot spots. By September 2022, some Russian units were operating at as little as 23% of their intended strength, enabling the stunning success of the Ukrainian offensive in Kharkiv oblast that liberated nearly the entirety of the province in days. The critical need for manpower would spark Putin’s announcement of a partial mobilization that, while chaotic, did eventually accomplish its goals in restoring Russia’s manpower advantage on the front. Ukraine scored another success in November, recapturing the provincial capital of Kherson in the country’s south, but Russian forces were largely able to withdraw in good order across the Dnipro river. From early 2023, the war began to settle into dynamics that look familiar until today. The winter of 2022-23 was dominated by the battle for Bakhmut, in which increasingly beleaguered Ukrainian defenders were ground down by Russian frontal assaults for eight months until the city’s fall in May 2023. During this period, Kyiv conserved much of its manpower for its much-vaunted summer counteroffensive, a sweeping operation that aimed to drive into Russian-occupied southern Ukraine and cut off, or at least interdict, Russia’s ground links with Crimea. The offensive instead became a notable failure, with dense Russian fortifications of minefields, trenches and anti-vehicle obstacles limiting Ukraine to the capture of a handful of villages at heavy cost. Shortly after the operation’s unsuccessful conclusion in late 2023, Russia would again restart its own offensives, taking the fortress city of Avdiivka in February 2024 and continuing to attack across much of the frontline until early 2025.

The New Battlefield Situation

While the fall of Avdiivka, a fulcrum of Ukraine’s defences in Donbas for nearly a decade, in early 2024 seemed to portend further Russian advances, it would instead mark the last major Russian operational gain until today. Russia continued offensive operations almost nonstop throughout 2024, but with increasingly little to show for it: Moscow’s forces have slowly approached the city of Pokrovsk from the south and seized the town of Velyka Novosilka, but little else. The scale, or lack thereof, of Russia’s advances throughout 2024 are evident in the total amount of Ukrainian territory Russia controlled at both the start and the end of the year: from 17.48% of Ukraine’s total land mass on January 1, 2024 to 18.14% on December 31, an increase of just two-thirds of a percentage point.

The operative factor in this slowing of the advance is the exhaustion of Russian forces, in both manpower and materiel. Both have required increasingly creative solutions as the war has dragged on. Recruitment from Russia’s prison population, a key element behind the success of the PMC Wagner mercenary group (as well as for the regular Russian armed forces), has largely been exhausted, while Putin is keen to avoid the chaos brought by another wave of mobilization. To compensate for this, the state has steadily increased payments to volunteer recruits, both in the form of heightened salaries and one-off payments for signing a service contract. As of July 2024, a monthly military salary was 2.4 times the average Russian salary, while one-time signing bonuses totaled thousands of dollars, with the Yamal-Nenets region topping the list at a 1.1 million ruble bonus – nearly $13,000 USD. Another novel tactic has been the introduction of foreign manpower, both in the form of state forces and mercenaries. North Korea has sent as many as 14,000 soldiers to fight on the Russian side, where Moscow has used them in its offensives to dislodge the Ukrainians from its Kursk oblast. Mercenaries are also a growing source of manpower, with the investigative outlet iStories identifying more than 1,500 foreigners fighting for Russia, with Nepal unexpectedly providing the highest quantity, followed by various post-Soviet, African and Middle Eastern nations. There are indications these efforts are still insufficient, most notably in the form of the remarkable videos of badly wounded Russian soldiers being forced back into combat, even while on crutches. Nevertheless, Russia has managed – for now – to sustain its troop numbers to a degree suitable to continue the war, with recent indicators showing that Moscow has exceeded its recruitment targets in recent months.

While replacing manpower is difficult but ultimately a question of finances, the same cannot be said for Russia’s other major limitation: materiel. The Soviet arsenal Russia inherited, including tens of thousands of tanks, artillery pieces and other armoured vehicles, is vast but not bottomless. The Oryx blog, which tracks visually confirmed losses of Russian materiel via open sources, has confirmed more than 21,000 lost pieces of heavy equipment to date, including such mind-boggling numbers as nearly 4,000 tanks, 2,100 armoured fighting vehicles, and almost 6,000 infantry fighting vehicles. Satellite imagery of Russian storage depots further confirms the scale of the losses, showing massive drawdowns as equipment is pulled back into service. The sheer quantity of heavy equipment lost by Russian forces on the battlefield over the past 38 months is beginning to manifest itself in changing tactics and capabilities. Where they once used BMPs and MT-LBs, Russian assaults now increasingly feature infantry mounted on electric scooters and civilian cars as resources dwindle. Decreasing rates of Russian armoured vehicle losses further suggest an increasing unavailability of sufficient heavy equipment for Moscow’s forces. The slowing of Russia’s progress on the ground dovetails with this trend, suggesting the two may be intimately related.

Despite Moscow’s many problems, Ukraine finds itself in a difficult position as well. For several years now, Kyiv has struggled with manpower issues, ones which it has yet failed to adequately solve. The problem is both political and demographic: Ukraine’s younger male cohort constitutes an already small portion of the population, while Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian leadership have been loath to take the unpopular action of lowering the draft age below 25 (where it currently sits). The result has been an increasingly aged and unfit selection of recruits, with most over 40 years of age and often suffering from a raft of health issues. To combat this, Ukraine has resorted to essentially press-ganging younger men almost at random from the streets of major cities. Kyiv also launched a campaign in February 2025 aimed at recruiting 18-to-24-year olds on a voluntary basis, offering inflated salaries and benefits, but this has so far failed, attracting fewer than 500 people in its first two months. This problem remains the most acute one facing Ukraine as the war enters its fourth year.

Recommendations

The existing materiel conditions in the Ukrainian battlespace are thus characterized by an environment in which neither side has the necessary force superiority to achieve a strategic or operational breakthrough. For political reasons, however, Russia is expected to remain engaged in offensive activity for the foreseeable future. The goal for Ukraine, and for Kyiv’s western partners, should therefore be to enable Ukraine to both enhance its ability to attrite Russian forces at a favourable ratio and to build up its own capabilities to eventually relaunch offensive operations in late 2025 or 2026, when more favourable conditions present themselves.

Three primary recommendations are suggested to aid with these goals:

1. Provide funding for Ukraine’s domestic arms industry, in particular drones, which now account for the majority of battlefield casualties (about 70%). Over the past three years, Ukraine has massively expanded the amount of weapons systems that it produces domestically. Officials say the country is on track to manufacture three million drones in 2025, with plans to grow even further. Other systems are also on the rise: Ukraine now produces more than 20 155mm Bohdana 2S22 self-propelled howitzers per month, up from six monthly in 2023. The primary requirement for maintaining and further expanding these programs is additional funding. Canada and other Western partner countries and organizations, including the Ukrainian diaspora, already provide significant financing for such efforts, but more would help further tilt the balance in Ukraine’s favour.
2. Identify sources of compatible ammunition, particularly artillery shells, that can be purchased and transferred to Ukraine. While Western ammunition manufacturers, such as Germany’s Rheinmetall, have been ramping up production over the past three years, there is still much that can be done. This holds doubly true for Ukraine’s Soviet-era artillery systems, which often use ammunition incompatible with modern Western NATO-standard production. Global stockpiles of such ammunition have been seriously drained in recent years as Ukraine and its partners seek new avenues for purchase, but further opportunities are still available. One notable new opportunity is Syria, whose new government has been struggling with arms proliferation following the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024. Vast amounts of compatible Soviet-era ammunition exists in Syria, where government forces uncover new weapons caches almost on a daily basis. Purchasing such excess ammunition, and transferring it to Ukraine, is an eminently achievable goal for Canada and other Western countries, and serves as just one example of how new opportunities for sourcing ammunition can be found.
3. Support Ukraine in developing a more sustainable recruitment model, including clear pathways out of military service and support for post-service careers and quality of life. The enduring and overriding concern amongst young Ukrainian men, leading them to avoid signing up for the armed forces, is that a service contract is essentially a one-way ticket. The perception is that once one begins military service, he will remain at or near the front until he is either killed or, in the best-case scenario, lose a limb. This situation is a self-reinforcing one, as persistent manpower shortages force Ukraine’s military to keep individual servicemen in action almost indefinitely, thus further buttressing the impression that service is for the remainder of one’s (short) life. Canada and other Western partners should impress upon Ukraine’s political and military leadership the crucial importance of providing limited terms of service – conditions that are actually enforced, and not just on paper – for prospective military personnel. Following military service, individuals should be provided with physical and psychological care, as well as educational and career opportunities for a productive life after serving. Canada and other Western partners could help impart best practices from their own armed forces to enable Ukraine to win back the trust of its military-age male population and sustainably regenerate and grow its forces over the near- and medium-term.

Conclusion

After more than three years of war, mutual exhaustion by both Russia and Ukraine has seen Moscow’s territorial advances slow to a crawl. Russia’s ability to seize Ukrainian territory by force in pursuit of its military and political objectives has been increasingly degraded, but Ukraine faces manpower and materiel problems of its own. The ultimate outcome of the war is still in flux and can be influenced significantly by the actions of Ukraine’s Western partners, including Canada, in the coming year. 

Russia is not an unstoppable, inevitable juggernaut, but a declining power with a number of highly detrimental issues that grow more acute by the month. Contrary to the tone of some commentary, this war remains eminently winnable for Ukraine. Implementing the recommendations outlined above will help immensely with that goal.