Putin Is Throwing Human Waves at Ukraine, But Can’t Do It Forever

One of the bleakest places on Earth today is the central processing facility for the remains of dead soldiers in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the logistical hub of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Designed to process hundreds of corpses at a time, this sprawling mega-morgue has been hopelessly overwhelmed for many months. Footage from the inside, posted by witnesses on social media, shows hundreds of bodies in various stages of decomposition and limbs strewn across the corridor floors. In wooden boxes lining the walls from floor to ceiling, row after row after row, are the lucky ones: those whose bodies were recovered from the battlefield, identified, sealed in zinc-lined caskets, and prepared for dispatch to their grieving relatives in the farthest corners of Russia. Many more corpses have been abandoned to rot in Ukrainian fields because evacuating them is impractical under the constant barrage of the defenders’ artillery and drones.

To be sure: These soldiers’ deaths are the necessary consequence of Ukraine’s right to defend itself against an illegal war of conquest. What’s more, many of these ordinary Russian soldiers likely committed despicable brutality and war crimes against Ukrainians, including defenseless civilians. But the horrific rate at which Russians are getting killed at the front—much higher than corresponding Ukrainian losses, although exact numbers are kept secret by both sides—points to two disturbing truths about the Russian way of waging war. First, a cruel disregard for human life extends to Russia’s own forces, which the Kremlin systematically deploys in so-called meat grinder and human-wave attacks. Second, mass death among Russian troops has become part of an increasingly explicit eugenics policy, by which the Kremlin seeks to rid Russia of undesirable elements and reconfigure the Russian population. The eugenics aspect of Russia’s war has long been an open secret, widely discussed on Russian talk shows and social media. Now, a high-ranking Russian politician has made it plain for the first time.

To be sure: These soldiers’ deaths are the necessary consequence of Ukraine’s right to defend itself against an illegal war of conquest. What’s more, many of these ordinary Russian soldiers likely committed despicable brutality and war crimes against Ukrainians, including defenseless civilians. But the horrific rate at which Russians are getting killed at the front—much higher than corresponding Ukrainian losses, although exact numbers are kept secret by both sides—points to two disturbing truths about the Russian way of waging war. First, a cruel disregard for human life extends to Russia’s own forces, which the Kremlin systematically deploys in so-called meat grinder and human-wave attacks. Second, mass death among Russian troops has become part of an increasingly explicit eugenics policy, by which the Kremlin seeks to rid Russia of undesirable elements and reconfigure the Russian population. The eugenics aspect of Russia’s war has long been an open secret, widely discussed on Russian talk shows and social media. Now, a high-ranking Russian politician has made it plain for the first time.

The numbers boggle the mind. With an estimated rate of 1,500 casualties per day, October was the bloodiest month of the war for Russia as President Vladimir Putin throws everything he has into battle. Estimates for total Russian war deaths range from 115,000 to 160,000, more than 10 times Soviet combat deaths in Afghanistan. Total Russian casualties—killed and wounded—are estimated at around 800,000. According to Anastasia Kashevarova, a rabidly pro-war Russian journalist, the average Russian infantry soldier lasts less than one month at the front before being killed. With casualties exceeding Russia’s ability to recruit fresh soldiers, few of the troops receive any serious training before they’re sent to assault the Ukrainian lines.

It’s not just lives that Russia is losing in astonishing numbers—equipment, too, is being lost at a rate far beyond what’s possible to replenish from weapons production or dwindling stocks. According to WarSpotting, an open-source intelligence project that uses video confirmation to track Russian equipment losses, Russia lost more than 500 pieces of heavy equipment—including tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and aircraft—twice as many as during the Battle of Grozny from 1994 to 1995, whose catastrophic losses in men and equipment demoralized Russian forces and society at the time. Today, some of the largest Russian military storage bases have almost been stripped clear of equipment, with even old Soviet-era tanks and armored vehicles dragged to the front.

Russian politicians, pundits, and ordinary citizens, who fantasize publicly about mass murdering Ukrainians, make no secret of the view that their own soldiers’ lives are worth hardly more. The shift to World War II-style meat grinder tactics has been widely and passionately discussed on pro-war Telegram channels since the battle for Bakhmut, which began in the summer of 2022 and lasted almost an entire year. The battle marked a doctrinal shift from the failed concept of battalion tactical groups—composed of some of the most elite and efficient Russian units, such as paratrooper and special forces regiments—to Soviet-style mass frontal assaults.

In Bakhmut, Wagner Group commander Yevgeny Prigozhin introduced what is now the standard Russian tactic of sending human wave after human wave of disposable infantry into the assault until the Ukrainian defenders’ guns jam or run out of bullets. In Wagner’s case, these were mainly convicts recruited from prisons with promises of freedom and mercenaries lured by exorbitant pay. Russia finally won the yearlong fight over the city’s smoldering ruins at the cost of at least 20,000 Wagner mercenaries alone. Later, the meat grinder policy was adopted for the entire Russian army, with each major unit setting up assault groups for that purpose.

It has been a terrifyingly effective tactic, but Russian casualties incurred by it are beyond comparison in recent military history. The battle for the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka alone may have cost around 16,000 Russian lives—and that appears to be a very conservative estimate circulated by Russian pro-war bloggers, who generally have an incentive to downplay their own side’s losses.

But Russian disregard for life is not just a question of battlefield tactics. What stands out is the deliberate cruelty. The Russian military has stunned the world with its wanton brutality toward Ukrainian civilians—including widespread rape, torture, killings, and abductions—and prisoners of war. (The latter are now routinely executed, another in a long list of Russian war crimes.) But the cruelty dispensed by officers on their own subordinates is also shocking. Russian Telegram channels are full of accounts of soldiers tortured for refusing or questioning orders, of seriously wounded troops sent to a certain death in an assault, and of Soviet-style barrier troops behind the front line, whose sole job is to shoot shirkers and deserters—also known as nullification. Suicidal human-wave attacks are both a means and an end: Commanders have reportedly assigned soldiers to these expendable units as a punishment for various disagreements or for the failure to pay a bribe.

Under these circumstances, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many Russian soldiers choose to end their lives. By now, there are hundreds of videos online showing Russian soldiers shooting themselves through the mouth to spare themselves an even grislier death, knowing that there is little hope for medical evacuation on the Russian side.

An even more sinister aspect of Russia’s disregard of the value of life is the increasingly open framing of the war as a national eugenics project. “Spare people” with low “social value” is how Russian parliamentarian Aleksandr Borodai described his compatriots sent as cannon fodder to Ukraine in a leaked tape, the authenticity of which he later confirmed. Expendable manpower, he explained, can be thrown at Ukraine’s “bravest [and] boldest,” and “exhaust the enemy to the maximum.” Borodai isn’t just anybody: He’s a political consultant from Moscow who declared himself prime minister of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic in Ukraine in 2014, and he’s now a member of the Russian parliament for the ruling United Russia party. Coming from someone this prominent, it is essentially a confirmation of how Russia is running the war.

That the war has changed the composition of the Russian population has long been clear from the incomparably higher rates at which non-Russian ethnic minorities—Buryats, Tatars, Tuvans—are dying in the war. But these are not the only disfavored parts of the Russian population while the Russian leadership shields the politically important populations of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where unrest could endanger the regime and where much of the Russian elite resides. Prisons have been virtually emptied as inmates are sent to the bloodiest sections of the front. And the protection of the major urban populations in European Russia means that the more remote, poorer, and less ethnically Russian regions are bleeding out.

To compensate for the deliberate loss of “expendables” at the front, a crucial part of Moscow’s eugenics program is played by Ukrainians. Several million Ukrainians have been removed from the occupied territories and resettled in Russia, a disproportionate share of them women and children. In their place, Russian settlers are moving in. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of these abducted children are now being Russified to strip them of any Ukrainian identity, a clear echo of the Nazi eugenics policy of shipping blond Polish children back to the Reich to be adopted and turned into Germans. Some of the Ukrainian boys are now old enough to be forcibly conscripted into the Russian army—yet another war crime on an already long list.

Russia still has numerical superiority, but its resources are not infinite. The suicidal Russian strategy of waging war, while effective, is not sustainable in the long term, especially with the Russian economy already showing signs of immense strain.

The fate of Russia’s invasion now effectively hinges on Western willingness to commit to Ukraine’s push for independence from Russia’s neo-imperialist aspirations. U.S. President Joe Biden’s final weeks in office may yet prove to be critical: His decision to grant Ukraine permission to strike key military targets inside parts of Russia with U.S.- and British-supplied weapons has already elicited an angry response from Moscow, even if there is nothing new about Ukraine using Western arms to strike vital targets in what Russia considers its lands, including illegally annexed Crimea. It’s up to the West to help Ukraine make sure that Putin loses his gamble as he throws everything he has against Ukraine before his equipment and trained soldiers run out. Catastrophic human losses won’t deter him, as they are deeply ingrained in Russia’s cruel way of waging war.