The numbers, Putin.
Dear God, the numbers.
They paint a terrible picture of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as over four years of fighting have taken a toll on Russia unlike anything that Putin could have imagined.
These numbers are brutal.
The real death toll for the war has shocked the world and shaken Putin to his very core.
What Putin is overseeing right now is a wholesale change in what makes Russia what it is, as his war worsens a demographic crisis that was already well underway.
But the death… If you thought Stalingrad was bloody, it has nothing on what Putin has inflicted on his own people in Ukraine.
In a July 2 report, CNN laid it all out for the world to see.
Since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, up to 450,000 Russian soldiers have been lost.
We don’t mean injured or surrendered here.
This is the number of Russian soldiers who have died in Ukraine.
That’s an average of about 110,000 dead per year, give or take.
And when you add other types of casualties, such as those wounded or captured, the numbers get worse.
Putin has overseen 1.
4 million casualties and counting on Russia’s side, with the war costing Russia and Ukraine as a whole more than two million people.
That’s another slice of bad news for Russia.
Ukraine’s losses are tragic, but they’re also smaller.
Less than half, in fact, as Ukraine has lost a little over 600,000 to Russia’s 1.
4 million.
For Russia, these numbers tell a simple story: 1% of the country’s entire population dead, injured, or captured for a war that is still nowhere near achieving Putin’s goal of conquering Ukraine.
Some areas of Russia feel these losses more intensely than others, which only goes to show Putin’s combination of bias and callousness.
The jewels in the Russian crown, such as Moscow and St.
Petersburg, have been protected from the war as much as Putin could possibly protect them.
Of course, both will have provided soldiers.
However, the bulk of the Russian recruits fighting and dying in Ukraine come from poorer areas and locations that contain large numbers of ethnic minorities.
There are stories of entire towns essentially being wiped out in Russia, not by Ukraine and its drones, but by Putin’s never-ending thirst for more soldiers.
The Guardian reported on one of these villages in March, following the story of a Russian woman named Alina as she made the journey from the town of Syktyvkar to her home village of Kerchomya.
“When I go out for a walk now, I barely run into anyone,” Alina told the outlet, adding, “Over the past four years, my village has become deserted.
The men are all fighting in Ukraine.
” Kerchomya only had a population of 700 to begin with.
It is unlikely to survive Putin’s war.
This is a story that has played out all over Russia’s poorer and more remote regions, as the Kremlin offers insane amounts of money to poor people who had never dreamed of earning so much.
All they have to do is sign up and die in Ukraine.
But with the numbers growing so large, not even this approach is working anymore.
The communities that the Russian recruitment machine has targeted since Putin launched his invasion have dried up, and even the offer of record-breaking amounts of cash isn’t enough to tempt as many people as Putin needs into his war.
United24 reports that Russian volunteer soldier recruitment declined by a third in May 2026 compared to the same month in 2025, and some Russian units on the front are now being manned at 30% or 40% of their strength.
This isn’t a one-off.
Russia is recruiting about 27,000 soldiers per month at a time when its monthly casualty rate has ballooned well beyond 30,000.
“We have no people here; the fools willing to go for money have run out,” one unnamed Russian soldier says.
“So it’s either mobilization or a deal with loss of face.
” The last thing that Putin wants to do is mobilize.
He knows just how severe the outcry would be if he did.
But he’s running out of options.
The Ukraine war has become too costly for the approach that the Kremlin is currently taking to keep up.
Russia is currently losing eight soldiers to every one Ukrainian casualty.
On the death side of things, the 625,000 estimated Ukrainian casualties include 150,000 fatalities.
Russia has lost three times that many soldiers to death, along with well over double the overall casualties.
It’s all too much.
Not even Stalingrad was as bad as this for Russia.
Stalingrad was one of the bloodiest campaigns in Russian history.
Many in Russia both mourn the sheer number of losses in that battle and laud it as one of the greatest examples of Russian will overcoming the enemy.
Britannica adds that this battle was one of the most important of World War II, and it is also a key part of the myth of the Great Patriotic War upon which Putin often calls when he is trying to convince yet more Russians to
sacrifice themselves for his invasion.
Stalingrad was also bloody.
By the end of the battle, as many as 800,000 Axis soldiers were dead, wounded, or captured.
On the Soviet side, Russian historians estimate that around 1.
1 million of the Red Army were casualties of the fighting, along with 40,000 civilians.
You may have noticed a couple of things with these numbers.
We’ll start with the obvious.
1.
1 million casualties at Stalingrad are 300,000 below the 1.
4 million casualties that Russia has suffered in Ukraine.
But even more than that, if you add the 800,000 Axis casualties to the 1.
1 million Soviets, you get 1.
9 million – 100,000 fewer than the total casualties for a Ukraine war that is still raging.
Ukraine is officially worse for Russia than Stalingrad.
Of course, there is a major caveat to this statement.
The Battle of Stalingrad was a single battle that took place during a much larger war that engulfed the entire world.
Russia’s Ukraine casualties cover over four years of fighting, so this is an inexact comparison.
However, there is an element to this comparison that is horrific for Russia to the point where the Ukraine war will be more damaging to the country than Stalingrad ever was.
Beyond the numbers, it is this element that makes Ukraine worse for Russia than Stalingrad, and it all boils down to one word… But before we reveal what that word is, and explore the massive problem that Putin’s failed invasion has created for Russia, this is a reminder that you’re watching The Military Show.
If you’re getting insight from the channel, hit subscribe and ring the notification bell to make sure you see more of our videos.
So, that all-important word: Demographics.
We would be lying if we claimed that Stalingrad didn’t cause some demographic issues for Russia.
Of course, it did.
Over one million casualties in a single battle, especially when combined with all of the other casualties that Russia experienced during World War II, will inevitably have an effect.
And that’s what we saw.
The Stalingrad region saw its population decline by about 0.
5 million people due to a combination of casualties, evacuations, and occupation, which amounted to about a quarter of Stalingrad’s entire population in the 1940s.
The ripple effect from this demographic issue pushed into the surrounding regions, but it was still somewhat localized.
Russia itself didn’t face a mass demographic crisis as a result of the massive losses at Stalingrad.
But the losses in Ukraine are different.
Not only do they now exceed Stalingrad, but they are plunging all of Russia deeper into a demographic black hole that it has already been sucked into before the Ukraine war began, and has now become inescapable due to Putin’s foolish desire to keep his invasion going.
And it will only get worse from here.
Stalingrad is over.
The Ukraine war isn’t.
Russia’s 1.
4 million casualties need the words “and counting” thrown in.
Heck, based on Russia’s loss rate of more than 30,000 soldiers per month, including 39,490 casualties in June alone, we’ll be saying about 1.
6 million losses by the time that 2026 is through.
Putin isn’t just presiding over larger losses than Stalingrad.
He’s feeding a long-standing demographic crisis from which Russia may never recover.
This crisis isn’t anything new.
As far back as 1976, a French demographer named Emmanuel Todd delivered a prediction that what we now see in Russia would come to pass.
He claimed that the Soviet Union, which was still a monolith in the 1970s, would collapse within the next ten to thirty years.
That collapse happened bang in the middle of Todd’s projected timeline, and it brought with it another problem that the demographer highlighted.
The Soviet Union’s rising infant mortality rate, increasing numbers of suicides, and several other issues all pointed toward a dysfunctional system that would wreak havoc on Russia’s demographics in the coming years.
Again, Todd’s predictions came true.
In 1992, which is the year that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia’s population began a period of negative growth in which the number of people who died exceeded the number of births, combined with population increases due to immigration.
That was a first in peacetime-era Russia, and it set the stage for a demographic crisis that rages worse than ever in Russia to this day.
By 1999, Russia’s birth rate was just 1.
18 children per woman, which was nowhere near enough to keep up with the nation’s peacetime death rate.
Fast-forward to today, and Russia faces the same challenges that it faced in 1992 – too much death and not enough births.
Russia’s birthrate has recovered somewhat since the terrible days of the 1990s.
But it’s still nowhere near the 2.
1 births per woman that are needed to maintain a stable population size.
And though better than 1999, Russia’s birth rate is falling again.
It has been for a decade – 2025 marked the 10th straight year of fertility rate declines, as Russia’s women had 1.
374 children per woman.
This isn’t enough for Russia at the best of times, but it’s especially not enough now that we’ve seen so much Russian death in Ukraine since February 2022.
This is the true legacy that Putin will leave, and the reason why Ukraine is now so much more damaging to Russia than Stalingrad.
It’s not just the numbers on the surface.
It’s the impact of a war that will be felt by Russia for decades afterwards.
Putin is well aware of Russia’s demographic crisis.
He has been since he rose to power in 2000.
The 2020s alone have seen Russia’s president try increasingly desperate moves to convince Russians that they should have more kids.
In 2020, Putin promised tax breaks for larger families as he tried to push Russia’s birth rate from 1.
5 to 1.
7 per woman.
State funding for new mothers was also promised, which was something that had previously only been provided to families that had at least two children.
There were also promises of free school meals made.
None of it worked, but Putin and his Kremlin cronies keep on trying.
The methods have grown increasingly bizarre.
The Week talks of strange campaigns, which include erecting pink banners in Moscow that contain the phrase “Still haven’t given birth?” in what seems to be an attempt to guilt childless women into pumping out some kids.
Russia’s Ministry of Education has publicly announced that it wants to create “conditions for romantic relations” in schools in what we can only assume will be a program of anti-abstinence for children who absolutely shouldn’t be having kids of their own.
Back in February, Putin called on Russian businesses to encourage their employees to have more children.
We don’t know how they’re supposed to do that.
Put on gloves and guide the man’s… let’s not finish that thought.
Putin has also called for families of three children by the age of 35 to become the norm in Russia, rather than an outlier, as though his saying it will magically lead to a frenzy of childbirth in a country that has had a birth rate problem from the moment the Soviet Union dissolved.
You could even point to solving Russia’s population problems as one of the reasons why Putin launched the Ukraine war in the first place.
After all, if Putin’s “special military operation” had succeeded in subjugating Ukraine in days, as it was supposed to do, that would have been around 40 million people added to Russia’s population, by Putin’s reckoning.
We even see evidence of Putin trying to use the Ukraine war as it stands today to solve Russia’s demographic issues.
This is a man who has claimed that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” to support his war, and he’s taking advantage of that faulty claim by having his army actively abduct Ukrainian children to send to Russia.
In a March 2026 report, the BBC revealed that Ukraine reports that nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children have been illegally sent to Russia by way of Belarus since the war began.
The United Nations Commission has the number at 1,205 confirmed cases, and it says that 80% of the children it identified haven’t been returned.
This is Putin’s twisted logic.
Steal Ukrainian children to make up for Russia’s demographic crisis.
But the irony is that Putin seems blind to the fact that the war he started is now the main reason why Russia stands no chance of recovering from this crisis.
1.
4 million casualties and 450,000 dead are pretty obvious numbers to cite.
Soldiers who die can’t go and have more children.
But put yourselves in the shoes of an average Russian family right now.
Would you want to have any kids? Would you want to introduce them into wartime Russia, where Putin has made it clear that he’s constantly looking for soldiers and he is ruining Russia economically to fund his war? Of course not.
For many in Russia, the prospect of having children right now is not realistic.
The war has to end first, and we know that Putin is too insane to do that.
He has dug himself into far too deep a hole with his own failures to capitulate in Ukraine, even if that would mean creating a new version of Russia where people might actually want to have kids.
So, when we see 1.
4 million Russian casualties in Ukraine, it’s not just the blood on the battlefield or Russia’s resolute following of a military strategy that simply doesn’t work that we should pay attention to.
It’s Russia after the fact.
A country already in the throes of a demographic crisis that is only getting worse with each day that passes in Ukraine.
There will be fewer Russians, not just now, but for decades, and the impact of all of this is an even bigger problem for Putin.
He’s not just losing in Ukraine.
Putin has put Russia in the perfect position to lose its own territory to other nations.
Back in September 2025, the Carnegie Endowment labeled Russia’s current demographic crisis as “its most dangerous yet.
” It pointed to a lack of immigration compared to previous years as the reason why, as Russia can no longer fudge its population numbers by welcoming more and more people from abroad.
Key here is that there’s a lack of immigration by Russian-speaking people.
The fall of the Soviet Union, for all of the birth rate problems that it caused, saw Russian speakers returning to the “motherland” in their millions.
Over a million people immigrated to Russia in 1994 alone, propping up the population numbers.
But in 2026, the Russian speakers who would have moved to Russia already have.
That’s a crutch that Putin can no longer lean on.
A lack of immigration is a problem for Russia, but so is too much immigration.
Sounds paradoxical, right? But it’s true.
As the population of ethnic Russians falters, immigrants from other nations are not only arriving, but are setting the stage for Russia to lose territory, especially in the Far East of the country.
The vastness of Russia, which has so long served as a military advantage, has become a weakness now that Putin has Ukraine war tunnel vision.
According to an April report by the Jamestown Foundation, Russia is trying, and utterly failing, to fight against demographic collapse across Siberia and its easternmost frontiers in the Far East.
The number of people in Russia’s Far East has declined by 10% since Putin first became president in 2000, and it is projected to decline by a further 8% by the end of the 2020s, the foundation claims.
The Far East is being emptied of Russians, and it’s being filled up by the nation that gave so much of this territory to Russia decades ago – China.
Under the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Convention of Peking in 1860, China gave up over one million square kilometers of territory to Russia, including large portions of what are now Russia’s Far East.
Many in China think it’s about time this territory was reclaimed, and Russia is playing right into their hands.
In 2024, GIS reported that Russia has allowed China to start developing the Russian Far East, going so far as to set up a couple of special economic zones for China to encourage this investment.
Putin has weakened Russia’s grip on its own territory by allowing his country to become completely dependent on China.
Siberia alone accounts for 13,1 million square kilometers of Russia, and it is woefully underdefended after Putin pulled out so many people to fight in his war.
Could China invade? It could, though it seems unlikely.
It would certainly be easier for China to take Siberia than it would be to take Taiwan, The Hill argues.
But an invasion might not be necessary.
China could simply keep making Russia more dependent on Beijing to prop up Putin’s war, all the while creeping into the Russian Far East to the point where the territory can’t operate and loses massive amounts of investment if China pulls out.
A stealth takeover, of sorts, and one that is only made possible because of the demographic crisis that Putin has accelerated with his insane war in Ukraine.
And there’s nothing that Putin can do about any of this.
Not even ending the Ukraine war helps.
Russia’s population is believed to have peaked at about 146 million in 2020, and it’s on an inescapable downward spiral for the next few decades.
Russia will likely lose 300,000 people per year every year until 2050.
More, if the war carries on.
And it’s hard to see how Russia will recover for the next century afterward unless there is a wholesale change in its society that makes people actually want to have kids again.
That change won’t come under Putin.
It’s probably unlikely that it will change after Putin.
Russia is stuck.
So, when we look at casualty counts that are worse than what Russia experienced in Stalingrad, what we really see is a blood-soaked crystal ball that gives us a glimpse into Russia’s future.
Whether it wins or loses in Ukraine, Russia has decades of population pain in its future.
As for that plan to solve the problem by stealing Ukraine, that isn’t going all too well.
In Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, a mass exodus is underway.
Thousands upon thousands of Russians are trying to get out, which is the opposite of Putin’s goal of absorbing Ukraine into Russia.
Do you want to find out why Russian occupiers are engaged in a Crimea exodus? Check out our video.
And if you enjoyed this video, make sure you hit subscribe and ring the notification bell to see more of our videos charting the downfall of Russia, both in Ukraine and under Putin.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
