When Russian forces crossed into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the invasion was organized as a campaign of political decapitation. Airborne troops moved toward Hostomel Airport outside Kyiv. Armored columns descended from Belarus. Russian units pressed toward Kharkiv, Chernihiv and the Ukrainian capital as the Kremlin sought to destroy the government in Kyiv and impose a new political order.

That opening campaign failed.

The Russian army did not seize Kyiv. Its northern columns stalled, suffered severe logistical breakdowns and withdrew. A subsequent U.S. Army analysis concluded that Moscow had overestimated its military capabilities and pursued a strategy that its forces could not execute. Russia then reorganized the war around artillery, attrition, fortified defenses and repeated infantry assaults in the east and south.

By July 19, 2026, Russia’s full-scale invasion had lasted 1,606 days. World War I lasted 1,567 days from Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on July 28, 1914, to the armistice on November 11, 1918, as recorded in the Library of Congress timeline. Russia’s invasion surpassed that duration on June 10, 2026.

The comparison does not mean the wars are equal in scale, geography or historical consequence. It reveals something narrower and deeply damaging to the Kremlin’s image. A state that inherited much of the Soviet Union’s military-industrial system, nuclear arsenal and claim to superpower status has spent longer fighting Ukraine than the great powers spent fighting the First World War, yet Moscow still has not achieved its central political objective of subjugating the Ukrainian state.

The Invasion Failed Before the War Became a Grind

Russia’s military weakness is not the same thing as military helplessness. Russian forces remain capable of launching missiles, producing drones, striking electrical infrastructure, constructing extensive defensive belts and inflicting enormous damage on Ukrainian cities. Moscow has adapted parts of its army, expanded weapons production and learned to combine surveillance drones, glide bombs and artillery against fixed Ukrainian positions.

But military power must ultimately be judged against political objectives. Russia invaded seeking rapid domination. Instead, it lost the initiative around Kyiv, withdrew from northern Ukraine, lost ground around Kharkiv and Kherson, and settled into a war in which advances are frequently measured in villages, tree lines and fields.

The contradiction at the center of Russia’s campaign is that it has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to continue fighting while repeatedly demonstrating an inability to win efficiently. Endurance has substituted for operational excellence. Manpower has substituted for maneuver. Destruction has substituted for political control.

The Russian military’s preferred solution to battlefield failure has often been to add more soldiers, more ammunition and more time. That approach can eventually produce territorial gains, particularly against a Ukrainian army constrained by ammunition shortages, manpower problems and uncertain foreign support. It is nevertheless a ruinously expensive way for a self-described great power to wage war against a smaller neighbor.

A Great Power Importing Soldiers From North Korea

Russia’s reliance on North Korea became one of the clearest signs that the war had exceeded the Kremlin’s original military assumptions.

In October 2024, NATO formally confirmed that North Korean military units had been deployed to Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops had entered Russian territory. The Pentagon subsequently estimated that approximately 10,000 North Korean soldiers were positioned in Kursk, with roughly 11,000 to 12,000 North Korean troops then believed to be inside Russia.

The deployment was no longer deniable by April 2025. Vladimir Putin publicly thanked Kim Jong Un and praised North Korean troops who had fought in Kursk. North Korean state media likewise acknowledged that its forces participated under the two countries’ mutual-defense agreement.

These soldiers did not constitute the majority of Russia’s army, and their deployment does not prove that Russia had run out of Russians. It does show that Moscow was willing to internationalize its manpower pool to recover territory inside its own internationally recognized borders.

That is an extraordinary reversal. Russia began the invasion presenting itself as the senior military power capable of dictating Europe’s security order. It later required troops from one of the world’s most isolated dictatorships to help expel Ukrainian forces from part of Kursk.

North Korea also became a major supplier of artillery ammunition and missiles. The arrangement benefited Pyongyang by providing money, technology, diplomatic protection and battlefield experience. Russia received shells and soldiers. North Korea received a closer relationship with a nuclear power and an opportunity to test its military personnel in modern combat.

The partnership may be strategically useful to both governments. It is still an indictment of Russia’s original war plan. A campaign advertised as the restoration of Russian power became dependent on imported ammunition and foreign troops.

African Recruits Entered Through a Murky Pipeline

Russia’s recruitment of African nationals has followed a less centralized but often more troubling pattern.

There is no evidence that African governments collectively dispatched organized armies to fight for Russia. The documented cases instead involve individual men recruited from several countries through military contracts, promises of employment, security-training programs, university pathways or intermediaries offering unusually high salaries.

Some recruits appear to have understood that they were accepting military work. Others have said they were deceived about where they were going or what they would be required to do.

The South African government announced in February 2026 that a group of its citizens had returned after being “lured into the battle lines” in the Russia-Ukraine war. South Africa’s foreign ministry later described the circumstances as suspicious, called the recruitment methods predatory and said two South Africans had died. Authorities opened investigations into the people responsible for sending the men abroad.

The Africa Center for Strategic Studies has documented a broader recruitment system involving misleading employment offers, trafficking-like practices, coercion and contracts that recruits may not fully understand. The exact number of Africans serving in Russian formations remains uncertain, and claims made by either belligerent should not be treated as independently verified totals. The documented cases nevertheless reveal a recurring strategy: Russia searches beyond its own population for men who are economically vulnerable, politically unprotected or unfamiliar with Russian military law.

Foreign recruits can be particularly expendable. They may speak little Russian, lack family connections inside the country and have limited access to consular assistance. Once placed under military authority, they can discover that leaving a Russian contract is far more difficult than signing one.

Mobilization Became a System of Pressure

The manpower problem begins inside Russia itself.

Putin’s September 2022 partial-mobilization order called reservists into service after Ukrainian forces shattered Russian positions around Kharkiv. The decree also extended existing military contracts for the duration of mobilization, with discharge permitted only under narrow conditions. For many soldiers, a supposedly limited commitment became indefinite service.

The mobilization triggered a rush of Russian men attempting to leave the country. It also exposed stark regional and class inequalities. Recruitment pressure fell heavily on poorer republics and remote areas where military pay could exceed ordinary civilian wages. Families from regions such as Dagestan, Buryatia and Tuva endured losses far removed from the wealth and political influence concentrated in Moscow.

Russia later avoided another publicly announced nationwide mobilization by expanding contract bonuses, recruiting prisoners, pressuring defendants and detainees, accelerating citizenship pathways for foreigners who enlisted and using regional governments to meet military recruitment quotas.

The system blurs the boundary between voluntary enlistment and coercion. A man offered a large signing bonus may technically consent. A prisoner promised release, a migrant threatened with deportation or a defendant offered military service instead of prosecution faces a very different choice.

Russia has imposed an even more legally serious form of coercion in occupied Ukrainian territory. Human Rights Watch documented Russian efforts to compel Ukrainian civilians in occupied areas to enter Russian military service. Forcing protected residents of occupied territory to serve in the occupying power’s armed forces is prohibited under international humanitarian law.

The Kremlin has therefore filled its ranks through overlapping systems: formal mobilization, economic inducement, prison recruitment, pressure on foreigners and unlawful recruitment in occupied territory. Each system supplies another layer of manpower for a war that Russia originally expected its standing forces to win.

Russia Is Trading Casualties for Meters

Russia has gained territory since regaining the initiative in parts of eastern Ukraine, but the speed and cost of those gains undermine claims of overwhelming military superiority.

A February 2026 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that Russian forces advanced approximately 31 miles from Avdiivka toward Pokrovsk between February 2024 and January 2026. That amounted to an average of roughly 230 feet per day. CSIS estimated that Russia suffered nearly 1.2 million battlefield casualties, including between 275,000 and 325,000 fatalities, through the end of 2025. Such estimates are necessarily imprecise because neither Moscow nor Kyiv publishes complete, independently verifiable loss figures.

British officials offered another measure of the imbalance, estimating that Russia suffered approximately 420,000 casualties in 2025 while capturing about 0.8 percent of additional Ukrainian territory. Those figures come from British intelligence and should be treated as government estimates, but the broader pattern is visible on the map: enormous losses have produced incremental movement rather than strategic collapse.

This is where the phrase “fighting for inches” becomes more than rhetoric. Russian assaults frequently seek control of narrow defensive positions through repeated small-unit attacks. Drones identify movement. Artillery and glide bombs strike Ukrainian positions. Infantry groups advance, often with motorcycles, civilian vehicles or small armored detachments. Survivors establish a foothold, and another group follows.

The method can work. It can also consume extraordinary numbers of soldiers for terrain with little independent strategic value.

Russia may eventually convert cumulative local gains into larger operational pressure. Ukraine faces its own severe manpower and resource constraints. But an army that requires years and hundreds of thousands of casualties to approach cities it expected to reach rapidly in 2022 is not displaying effortless strength. It is displaying the ability of an authoritarian state to absorb losses that would politically destabilize many other governments.

Punishment Pits and Soldiers Tied to Trees

The videos circulating online of Russian soldiers being restrained, beaten or humiliated should be approached carefully. A clip stripped of its original location, date and chain of custody cannot establish who filmed it, what preceded it or whether the accompanying description is accurate.

The broader allegation, however, does not rest on viral footage alone.

Russian soldiers, deserters and relatives have described commanders using improvised detention sites known as “pits” to punish men accused of refusing assaults, drinking, disobeying orders or attempting to leave their units. A detailed Meduza investigation collected accounts of soldiers being beaten, blindfolded, confined underground and tied to trees. Some were allegedly denied food, medical attention or protection from the weather until they agreed to return to combat.

A later investigation by RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit, Systema, documented allegations involving soldiers beaten with hammers, handcuffed to radiators, stripped naked, thrown into pits and subjected to sexual violence. The reporting drew upon interviews, correspondence, photographs, audio recordings and material connected to Russian military-prosecutor proceedings.

These practices reflect both the pressures of the current war and a longer tradition of violent hazing inside Russian and Soviet military institutions. The practice commonly known as dedovshchina historically allowed senior conscripts and commanders to dominate younger soldiers through extortion, humiliation and assault.

The Ukraine war has placed that culture inside a military system that cannot easily release soldiers and must continually produce assault units. When persuasion, patriotism and money fail, violence can become a method of retaining manpower.

Not every Russian unit behaves this way, and available evidence cannot establish that every abuse was ordered from the highest level. The repeated appearance of punishment pits, beatings and forced exposure across separate units suggests more than a handful of isolated incidents. It points to a command climate in which soldiers can be treated as disposable property.

Russia’s military controversies extend beyond recruitment and internal abuse.

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova over the alleged unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children. It has also issued warrants for senior Russian military officials, including Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, over alleged attacks on civilian objects, excessive civilian harm and related crimes. Warrants are not convictions, and the accused have not been tried before the court. They do indicate that ICC judges found reasonable grounds to believe the alleged crimes occurred and that the named officials may bear responsibility.

A June 2026 United Nations report described increasing civilian deaths, repeated strikes on energy infrastructure, torture and ill-treatment of prisoners of war, and intensified restrictions within Russian-occupied territory. Ukraine has also faced allegations concerning the treatment of prisoners and unlawful conduct by individual personnel, but the scale of Russia’s occupation and its sustained attacks across Ukraine place Moscow at the center of the war’s international legal scrutiny.

The Kremlin dismisses much of this scrutiny as Western political warfare. Yet the evidence is not limited to Western news reports. It includes satellite imagery, burial records, intercepted communications, witness testimony, Russian documents, open-source video, court filings and statements by Russian soldiers themselves.

Weakness Does Not Make Russia Harmless

Calling Russia militarily weak requires precision.

Russia possesses the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. It can produce large quantities of ammunition, absorb sanctions, purchase foreign weapons and continue mobilizing men. It has adapted its drone warfare, improved defensive construction and demonstrated that it can sustain a major continental war despite casualties and economic pressure.

Ukraine has not defeated Russia. Russia continues to occupy substantial Ukrainian territory, and Ukraine remains dependent on foreign weapons, financing and intelligence. A collapse in Western assistance could alter the battlefield sharply in Moscow’s favor.

But Russia should not be judged against a fictional standard in which weakness means immediate collapse. It should be judged against its own objectives, resources and claims.

The Kremlin sought to overthrow Ukraine’s government and redefine the European security order. More than four years later, it has imported North Korean troops, recruited vulnerable foreigners, emptied prisons, pressured migrants, extended soldiers’ contracts indefinitely and tolerated brutal methods of internal discipline. Its army has suffered casualties measured in the hundreds of thousands to gain territory measured in fractions of Ukraine.

Russia’s strength is its ability to endure failure. Its weakness is that endurance has become its principal military achievement.

The war has exposed a state capable of inflicting immense destruction but unable to translate that destruction into the rapid political victory it promised. Russia is not winning through superior maneuver or technological mastery. It is attempting to outlast Ukraine by converting soldiers, prisoners, foreigners and allied troops into replacements for those already killed or wounded.

That strategy may still produce further advances. It may even secure concessions if Ukraine’s supporters lose patience. But it does not restore the image of an unstoppable Russian military.

It reveals an army burning through men to move a front line.