Russia is continuing to pay a “huge and horrific” price for Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine almost three years on from his full-scale invasion, a military expert has said.
And, speaking in a week in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed Russia has suffered almost 40,000 casualties in the Russian oblast since August, James Black cited the collapse of Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime as an example of how support for authoritarian leaders can disappear “very, very quickly”.
Ukraine has conducted incursions into Russia‘s Kursk region for five months, breaching Russian defences and taking control of more 92 settlements in Kursk Oblast and 1,250 square kilometres of Russian territory.
Russia claims to have retaken much of the land previously lost – but on Sunday, it revealed that Ukraine had launched a fresh wave of attacks at the weekend, something to which Mr Zelensky previously referred in his regular televised address on Saturday night.
In a clear indication that Kyiv still regards the region as an important one strategically, the Ukrainian General Staff, posting on Telegram yesterday, said it had carried out a “precision strike” on a Russian 810th Separate Marine Brigade military command post near Belaya as part of “new offensive operations”.
Mr Black, assistant director of the Defence and Security research group at RAND Europe, told Express.co.uk: “This is a highly significant year and both sides as trying to maximise their negotiating position and leverage ahead of any potential brokered or encouraged negotiations or even just a ceasefire.
“On the one hand, the Ukrainians are struggling militarily; they are pretty heavily stretched in the east of Ukraine, where Russia has been using superior numbers and their general greater weight of equipment and firepower to grind down Ukrainian positions in particularly in Donetsk and Luhansk.
“At the same time, Russia is seeing its economy in an increasingly fragile position and is also seeing its stockpiles of military equipment starting to run out.
“So there is this kind of race between both sides to try and maximise their position.”
With specific reference to Kursk, Mr Black said the Ukrainian offensive had been “quite a big strategic surprise” for Russia.
He continued: “It’s obviously a kind of personal affront to Vladimir Putin‘s authority within Russia to see internationally recognised Russian territory, rather than just stuff it claims to be Russian territory, like Crimea and eastern Ukraine, seized by the Ukrainians.
“It was obviously a morale boost for Ukrainians after some, you know, some operational setbacks. I don’t think what we’ve seen recently is as dramatic as the original offensive into Kursk, but it does show that Ukraine still capable of offensive operations, and it’s still capable of achieving some level of deception of the Russian defenders in that region.”
The so-called “fog of war” has made it notoriously difficult to verify casualty numbers on both sides, not least Mr Zelensky’s latest claims about Kursk, where he puts the number at 38,000, including 15,000 killed.
He also noted significant losses among North Korean troops fighting alongside Russian forces, with over 3,000 killed or wounded.
Mr Black said: “Clearly, the war has had a huge and horrific human toll on the Russian side.
“And obviously, many of the troops that have been sent in to fight for Russia in Ukraine have not done so terribly willingly – there are conscripts, or indeed, and some of them have come from prisons.
“We are starting to see the costs of the war adding up, and a vast proportion of the government spending in Russia is going on the war and on the military more generally.
“This means less money for everything else, like public services, schools, hospitals and all the other ways that an authoritarian regime can keep people kind of broadly happy with.
Mr Black did not anticipate a Palace coup – but he added: “Russian political support for Putin is not infinite.
“When political support does eventually go for a leader, it can go really, really quickly, as we saw in Syria where the Assad regime seemed to have won the Civil War, and then in the space about six weeks, suddenly, he is living in Moscow as an exile, and there’s a whole new regime in Syria.
“We saw that at the end of the Soviet Union. We saw the fall of the Berlin Wall. So we shouldn’t think that people, even if they’ve been there for 25 years, like Putin, are necessarily around forever.
“And that’s without even layering in, you know, natural causes and health concerns and all the other things that can affect leadership.”
For both Russia and Ukraine, the clock was ticking, Mr Brown stressed.
He explained: “Obviously, the Trump administration coming in has just added more time pressure to this, of working towards a specific window, which is probably the first year of a Trump administration.
“I think the final thing is Donald Trump has repeatedly shown himself pretty able to, you know, change positions on things.
“We’ve already seen a bit of a change in his rhetoric around Ukraine. On the election campaign. It was ‘right, I can fix this on day one’.
“Now he’s being a bit more robust towards Russia, and looking at maybe increasing NATO defence spending.
“There are slightly more moving parts – now that he’s actually going away from political campaigning mode into preparing to govern mode things are kind of obviously getting serious.”