Volodymyr Zelensky spoke about Russia’s battlefield deaths and asked his new defense minister to make it a priority.
In December alone, more than 35,000 Russian soldiers were killed or seriously wounded, Ukraine’s leader says, and the goal should be to increase the number even higher – to 50,000 a month.
“Make the cost of war for Russia one that it cannot sustain, thereby forcing peace by force” – that was the task the president set, Mykhailo Fedorov told reporters in his first conference as defense minister.
The suggestion that Russia is suffering heavy losses is not new. A new report last week estimated that 1.2 million Russians have been either killed, wounded or missing since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago — the highest number of casualties suffered by a major military power since World War II. The report put the number of Ukrainian casualties at between 500,000 and 600,000.
“The data suggest that Russia is hardly winning,” the report’s authors wrote.
Perhaps not, but as senior officials from Ukraine, Russia and the United States prepare for the next round of direct talks in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday, it would be a mistake for Ukraine’s supporters to get carried away.
“Highlighting the huge death toll in Russia is an indicator that Ukraine’s primary strategy is attrition. But we need more than that if we’re going to turn the dynamics of the war in a better direction,” a former Ukrainian official told CNN.
On the one hand, the focus on headline-grabbing numbers provides important insight into Ukraine’s refusal to give up Donetsk as part of any “peace” deal with Russia.
The logic behind Kiev’s position is simple: very few Ukrainians believe that Putin has any goal other than the total subjugation of their country. So why surrender territory for nothing if Ukraine can expect to kill hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers while Moscow continues to try to capture Donetsk by force?
Ukrainian soldiers still hold about 20 percent of the eastern region, which includes heavily fortified cities such as Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, and the latest estimates from the Institute for the Study of War suggest it could take another 18 months for Russia to capture it all.
If those Russian soldiers are not killed fighting – the logic goes – they will remain in occupied Ukrainian territory ready to resume the war, from a more advantageous position, as soon as the Kremlin finds a pretext to do so.
Very few in Ukraine believe that Putin will give up his territorial claims, and most have lost faith that US President Donald Trump will apply the necessary pressure to make him change his mind.
“Although the government is negotiating in good faith, many believe that the whole process is done to secure the support of the US government,” the former Ukrainian official said.
“People are extremely skeptical about the negotiation process.”
But if there is no confidence that the negotiations are going anywhere, what about Ukraine’s battle strategy? Is collecting each other’s body bags the best way to go?
A former American wrestler, Ryan O’Leary, who ran an international volunteer unit called the Chosen Company, thinks not, sparking a heated debate after laying out his arguments in a social media post.
He disputed the much-vaunted “electronic points” system, whereby Ukrainian units earn points for every Russian soldier killed or piece of materiel destroyed. Points are exchanged for new equipment, and the Ministry of Defense says the scheme provides a wealth of data to help shape future plans.
But O’Leary suggested it creates the wrong incentives, leading Ukrainian commanders to prioritize more direct drone strikes against infantry targets around the battle line, rather than tougher but more significant deep strikes against Russian logistics — such as vehicles and communications centers, as well as Russian drone crews operating from the rear.
“Drone warfare is not about who hits more soldiers today…Operational depth is where wars are decided. If the enemy can move fuel, ammunition, drones, crews and repair vehicles 10 to 40 km behind the line without fear, they own the depth even if they lose 5x the men in the trenches,” O’Leary wrote on X.
Indeed, his accusation highlights Ukraine’s two key structural challenges.
First, in drone technology, operational tactics and countermeasures, Russia has caught up and is very likely ahead.
Writing on Facebook, Oleksandr Karpyuk, an aerial reconnaissance officer with the 59th Separate Assault Brigade, complained that Ukraine had failed to capitalize on its early advantage in this space, particularly by not diversifying the number of radio frequencies used by its drones to transmit signals.
Consequently, once Russia improved its electronic warfare (EW) technologies, it only had to jam two frequencies to significantly reduce Ukraine’s ability to fly drones behind Russian lines.
In addition, Karpyuk writes, Russia’s tactical air defense crews are vastly improved, and Moscow continues to benefit from taking a lead in the development of fiber-optic drones, which are impervious to Ukraine’s own EW countermeasures because they do not transmit signals.
And then there is the problem of Ukraine’s workforce.
The lack of infantry is well known. Rob Lee of the Institute for Foreign Policy Research estimates that there are fewer than ten Ukrainian infantry soldiers per kilometer of front line. He also estimates that most brigades have no more than 10% of their total personnel in infantry. Traditionally, this number would be over 30%.
Lee told KI Insights, a strategic intelligence unit powered by the Kyiv Independent, that even those low numbers were enough to prevent a major breakthrough by Russian forces, who were only able to make small, incremental advances.
But in a war where drones — not infantry — matter most, Ukraine’s deficiencies in drone crews are most pressing, especially in the key battle for operational depth — destroying targets up to 25 miles (40 kilometers) behind the battle line.
In a direct defense of the fighters under his command, the head of Ukraine UAV, Robert Brovdi, said last week that there must be a threefold increase in the number of drone operators. Only 30 percent of the front line — which stretches 745 miles — is currently covered, he wrote on his Facebook page.
Fedorov, the new defense minister, acknowledges the scale of the problem, telling the Ukrainian parliament that about 2 million people are ignoring their conscription papers, while another 200,000 have deserted.
Much now rests on his ability to address the labor issue and regain Ukraine’s technical edge, while ensuring that it achieves Zelensky’s targets.
“Unless we stay consistently ahead of the Russians in technology and combat tactics, I can’t say the chances of winning are high,” the former Ukrainian official warned.
CNN’s Victoria Butenko and Daria Tarasova-Markina in Kyiv contributed to this report.