President Trump, with television cameras whirring, is telling reporters that “Putin is destroying Russia by not making a deal.” Referring to the high human and economic toll caused by the Russian leader’s attack on Ukraine, the newly-minted American president chides: “That’s no way to run a country.”

It may have been a negotiating gambit, but Mr. Trump’s bluntness also presented the Russian leader with an “emperor-has-no-clothes” moment. Only days earlier Mr. Putin was reveling in his gilded cocoon, greeting Iran’s president in the halls of the Grand Kremlin Palace, attended by ceremonial guards dressed like toy soldiers.

On the battlefield, the scene is not so pretty. By Ukraine’s daily tally, Russia suffered 430,790 casualties last year — more than double the total lost during the first two years of the war. The total number of Russians killed and wounded — 822,030 as of Tuesday — is generally accepted by American and British intelligence services.

“This year of combat has cost them more than the previous two years of the war combined,” Ukraine’s commander in chief, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, tells TSN TV on Monday. Of Russia’s casualties in 2024, about 150,000 are deaths. 

Last month, President Zelensky said that 43,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed in the war so far and that 370,000 injuries have been recorded. He said the wounded figure includes soldiers who had been hurt more than once. Ukraine says that about half of injured soldiers return to duty.

For Russians, their yardstick is their most recent big war — the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. In that near decade long war, the Soviet Union suffered 75,000 casualties — 20,000 dead and 55,000 wounded. Mr. Putin’s war, not yet three years old, has racked up 16 times the number of casualties. And the Soviet Union had a population twice as large — and younger — than modern Russia’s 144 million.

“The average life expectancy of a Russian assault trooper after signing a contract is from two weeks to a month,” an Estonian military analyst and reservist, Artur Rehi, posted recently on X.

On the armaments side, Russia is burning through its once-bottomless Cold War stockpiles. Last month, Britain’s Ministry of Defense published “before” and “after” satellite photos of three big Russian weapons depots. After two years of war, rows and rows of tanks and armored personnel carriers had magically disappeared.

“Russian military equipment losses in Ukraine continue to increase,” the Ministry posted on X. “This has led to a reliance on outdated and poorly maintained Soviet-era equipment from strategic storage depots. Armored equipment is being hauled out of storage, upgraded where possible and sent to the frontline.”

The tally of Ukraine’s military indicates that Russia has lost 9,833 tanks, 20,477 armored personnel carriers, and 22, 134 artillery systems. Compared to the Afghan decade, this 16 times the number of armored personnel carriers, 51 times the number of artillery systems and 67 times the numbers of tanks. This helps explain Iran and North Korea’s booming arms exports to Russia.

Without even Korean War-era tanks, Russian battlefield tactics have shifted to high casualty, human wave infantry assaults. Frontline supplies are increasingly carried in by “camels” — unarmed foot soldiers who try to avoid Ukraine’s ever-present drones.

For all this blood and treasure, Russia conquered 1,609 square miles of Ukraine last year. This is less than one percent of a nation nearly the size of Texas.

Mr. Putin “can’t be thrilled. He’s not doing so well,” Mr. Trump tells reporters Monday evening, popping the mainstream press narrative that Ukraine is on the back foot. “Russia is bigger. They have more soldiers to lose. But that’s no way to run a country.” 

Signs abound of the Kremlin’s desperation to fill its military ranks. After rumors of “crutch battalions,” a Ukrainian soldier posted a video last weekend showing Ukrainian drones killing two Russian soldiers who were hobbling into combat aided by canes.

In another video destined to damage Russian Army recruitment efforts, a military policeman is shown viciously clubbing and tasering two disabled soldiers who apparently refuse to return to the front. Although officials announced that the policeman has been arrested, the video has gone viral in Russia.

“Russia is turning into a version of North Korea — a country where human life means nothing,” Mr. Zelensky tells the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday.

With Russian casualties expected to approach 50,000 this month, authorities are going to extremes to find replacements. After drawing down on Russia’s prison population, the government took a step further last fall, offering all debtors and men in pre-trial detention the chance to clear their records by going to the front.

International recruitment agencies have targeted Cubans, Indians, Nepalis, and Yemeni Houthis. After 12 Indians were killed in combat last year, India’s government demanded the release of all Indian nationals in the army. Inside Russia, military recruiters press gang migrant workers from Central Asia, focusing on those with Russian passports.

The largest group of foreign mercenaries comprise an estimated 12,000 North Korean soldiers on loan by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. Unfamiliar with drone warfare, the North Koreans have fared poorly. In the last two months, 4,000 have been killed or wounded, Mr. Zelensky says. At this rate, the entire North Korean contingent could be wiped out by mid-April, estimates the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

Ukraine faces its own manpower issues. To replenish ranks, it has lowered the draft age to 25 from 27, allowed prisoners to sign up for military duty, started recruiting among the estimated 1 million Ukrainian refugees in Poland, and allowed the roughly 100,000 soldiers who went absent without leave the chance to rejoin the army without reprisals.

In Russia, where information is tightly restricted, keeping casualty figures secret are at the core of Mr. Putin’s strategy for political survival. On November 26, the deputy defence minister, Anna Evgenyevna Tsivilyova told a Moscow round table that 48,000 soldiers’ relatives had submitted their DNA to an Interior Ministry database.

According to a recording of the event, the Duma’s defense committee chairman, Andrei Kartapolov, immediately cautioned, saying: “Anna Evgenyevna just gave some figures, including for those missing in action. I strongly ask you not to mention these numbers anywhere. This is classified information, quite sensitive. And when we draw up the final documents, we don’t want these numbers to be floating around anywhere.”