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Joseph Stalin famously said that quantity has a quality of its own. Yet the course of the Russo-Ukrainian War shows both the benefits and the eventual limitations of that approach. As the quantitative advantage grew on the Russian side, its ability to employ force at scale decreased. The resulting dynamic became a paradox: As Moscow fielded more forces, the value of that mass steadily diminished. The quality that the Russians expected to come from attaining quantitative advantages did not appear on the battlefield but was, over time, offset by Ukrainian adaptation, technology, and Western capital. Russian force expansion offered a window of opportunity to attain battlefield gains, but this advantage proved indecisive, eventually yielding diminishing returns. Russian mass ran into an effective counter: mass precision mixed with traditional capabilities (land mines, prepared defensive positions, and artillery), as Ukrainian units invested in drones and other capabilities that minimized the traditional advantages offered by manpower overmatch.
One of Russia’s main successes in the war was its ability to establish a recruitment pipeline and dramatically expand the military, having grown its deployed force by several times since early 2022. Russia began the war with one of the smallest armies it had fielded in well over 100 years. Following its initially disastrous invasion attempt in 2022, the Russian military generated a vastly larger ground force to conduct operations in and around Ukraine, growing to over 700,000 personnel. Despite the high casualties taken, by some accounts approaching 500,000 killed in action, the Russian military grew significantly over the course of the war.
And yet, despite impressive wartime expansion, sustaining a manpower advantage through most years of the war, Moscow has been unable to convert this into significant battlefield gains or major breakthroughs.
Why?
First, cycles of technological innovation and tactical adaptation led to greater dispersal on the battlefield, negating much of the traditional advantage derived from superiority in manpower and materiel. Second, the Russian military chose to double down on a cost-ineffective approach to conducting offensives, assuming that quantitative advantage would eventually result in increasing battlefield gains.
We seek here to explain how Russia expanded and changed the structure of its force, as well as why it failed to deliver the results the Kremlin and General Staff hoped for. However, it is likely that much of this expanded force is here to stay, and that one legacy of this war will be Russia’s return to a larger, more mobilization-dependent force structure after three decades of focusing on relatively small, high-readiness ground forces, underinvesting in reserves, and its mobilization system.
What the future holds for this expanded military is uncertain, but planners across NATO ought to take note of the transition and its implications for future contingencies with Russia. Despite its inability to attain operationally significant breakthroughs in Ukraine, the Russian military invested heavily in assimilating tactical drones and deep-strike capabilities. After the war, Russia will deploy a much larger ground force on the border of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland, including new and significantly expanded precision strike capabilities that give Moscow more flexibility and could prove a challenge for NATO member states if they have not sufficiently learned from the battlefield experiences of this war.
Much is known about the flaws of Russia’s invasion plan and the problems Russian forces faced upon encountering Ukrainian resistance. Although Moscow fielded a large, mechanized combined-arms force, it was short of infantry and proved too small for the task of occupying a country the size of Ukraine. For the invasion, Russia committed nearly all of its peacetime force structure: more than 150 battalion tactical groups. The military designed these task-organized, reinforced combined arms battalions with various supporting attachments from the parent brigade or regiment and made them the basis of Russia’s peacetime force construct — an attempt to balance manpower constraints, Russia’s expansive geography, and the greater threat of smaller-scale contingencies along the Russian periphery.
The Russian military optimized battalion tactical groups to employ contract personnel in an armed conflict or a local war of a relatively short duration. By staffing a unit with contract soldiers, the Kremlin could avoid the politically thorny issue of employing conscripts, which, because of political realities, Russia would probably only use in a time of a major, declared war. Moscow also did not develop a system of personnel replacement for this small force structure, leading to a force ill-suited to attempt the occupation of one of Europe’s largest countries. Moreover, the military staffed Russian maneuver regiments and brigades at between 70 and 90 percent, which — after exempting conscripts (roughly one-third of their manpower) from combat — was adequate to organize only two reinforced battalions out of their four-maneuver-battalion structure. Even so, in several cases, the parent formation was only able to fill one battalion tactical group, leaving the second understaffed. The combat support and service support elements of the battalion tactical groups could be as large, if not larger, than the infantry component, further highlighting that Moscow did design them for large-scale, intensive offensive operations or the occupation of large territory.
The invasion force, surprisingly, lacked a reserve. At first, Moscow appeared to be preparing to use reservists in 2021, ahead of the invasion. The Ministry of Defense announced a surge of resources for the “Mobilization Personnel Reserve” or Boevoy Armeisky Reserv Strany that summer, and appeared to be activating it. The Russian reservist system had been under consideration in various forms since 2006, but remained chronically underfunded and buried under myriad other priorities. This system, similar to the reserve systems in many Western armies, called for volunteers to sign contracts as reservists who would train regularly and could plug into their assigned unit quickly. The program struggled to get off the ground because of low pay, although several thousand recruits still signed and were activated for training in several military districts, including exercises practicing the generation of reserve infantry units. Ultimately, Moscow did not include the reservists from this program in the initial invasion force, either because it could not produce the necessary numbers or because Russian leadership thought it unnecessary given their assumption of a speedy victory.
The only mobilization that did occur prior to the invasion was a general mobilization in the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics), declared on Feb. 19. This process generated at least 20 new infantry regiments and another 20–30 infantry battalions, augmenting the Russian invasion force by about 20 to 25 percent. These units proved to be a vital infusion of infantry for Moscow, although still inadequate given the limited capabilities of the mobilized units, Russia’s ambitious territorial objectives, and the scale of Russian losses in the first few months of the war. Titularly, the Russian military organized these units into the 1st and 2nd Army Corps, subordinated to Russia’s 8th Combined Arms Army. In the first two years, Moscow also offset a percentage of its battlefield casualties onto these mobilized formations, which were generated from occupied Ukrainian regions.
With the expectation of a relatively short conflict, Moscow had not planned a system of personnel replacement. Instead, rapid decimation of the invasion force in the spring of 2022 compelled a desperate search for replacements. At this point, Moscow called up reservists in the ‘Combat army reserve of the country’, but strangely did not use them to replace losses in active-duty units. Instead, the Russian General staff used these reservists form new infantry battalions called “detachments.” Moscow turned to private military companies like the well-known Wagner Group, and formed a variety of regionally-based volunteer and militia units for operations in Ukraine. Russian regions funded and stood up these units, often employing their own resources to form them.
By the summer of 2022, after months of scrounging for personnel, forming militia and volunteer units, using private contractors and reservists from the Donbas, and with the tattered remnants from the initial invasion, Moscow fielded a hodge-podge of units with low morale that was too weak to sustain offensive operations. Russian units were fighting as company tactical groups and weak ‘breakthrough groups,’ which could not overcome what were in effect larger Ukrainian formations. At this point of the war Ukraine held a manpower advantage, forcing Russia to rely on concentrated artillery fires to compensate for the shortage of infantry. This tactic worked in the spring, as fire superiority forced Ukrainian forces to disperse, at times giving Russian units a significant localized advantage. However, by the summer this approach, too, ran out of steam as the United States introduced High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems that disrupted Russian logistics and worsened Russian ammunition shortfalls. It was at this point that the Russian military formed its first large, newly generated “regular” unit, the 3rd Army Corps, out of a maw of recruits and equipment pulled from storage.
In September 2022, after Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast, the Russian military’s personnel situation was glaringly dire, so much so that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a partial mobilization of 300,000 reservists in September 2022, which he had clearly hoped to avoid. Over the next three months — and despite widespread problems associated with the call-up, training, and equipping of the reservists — the Russian military organized about 70 reserve tank, artillery, and infantry regiments, four sapper regiments, and several dozen separate infantry, antitank, and artillery battalions. Using rough personnel numbers for each type of unit (including an average of about 2,400 troops for each infantry regiment), these units probably accounted for roughly 170,000 personnel out of the total mobilization levy. The General Staff used the remaining 130,000 reservists to bring units already in Ukraine to full strength, filling out existing regiments and brigades that initially deployed only with a partial table of equipment.
For all its faults, and the rust in the mobilization system it exposed, the partial mobilization proved vital to stabilizing Russia’s defensive lines and giving the military desperately needed mass, even if of relatively low overall quality. Russia used these newly formed infantry units to shore up defensive positions and augment existing units, arriving in time to halt Ukraine’s advance near the Luhansk Oblast administrative border in northeastern Ukraine (after the Kharkiv offensive) and bolster Russia’s defenses along the Dnieper River and across central Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk Oblast. This began the process of Russian force expansion during the war, which would eventually grow to over 700,000 deployed personnel in and around Ukraine. It represented Moscow’s political commitment to a ‘long war,’ recognizing that it would require not just partial mobilization, but militarization of the economy as well. Alongside this effort, the Russian military began to pull large amounts of equipment out of stocks, establishing a robust pipeline for equipment repair and refurbishment to kit out the growing military with tanks, armored fighting vehicles, and artillery.
While Moscow intended the partial mobilization to be a short-term remedy to the force size problem, at the same time, it rolled out an ambitious new long-term military expansion — a reaction to burgeoning requirements in Ukraine as well as the accession of Finland, and later Sweden, into NATO. At the December 2022 Ministry of Defense Collegium meeting, then-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced that Putin had approved a 50 percent increase over the armed forces’ pre-war end strength — to 1.5 million — and that Russian ground and aviation forces would undergo a major expansion. As part of this, the military would create at least 14 new divisions, many on the basis of existing brigades. These new measures represented the most significant Russian military expansion plan in decades. How realistic they were is another matter, but it is clear that Moscow sees the war in Ukraine and NATO’s reaction to its aggression as requiring a change in force posture.
The political outcry that surrounded the abruptly announced autumn 2022 partial mobilization — resulting in tens of thousands of Russian citizens fleeing the country in tandem with the Kremlin’s continued opposition to using conscripts in Ukraine — left Moscow with a single viable option for additional force expansion while replacing losses in Ukraine: contract soldier recruitment. In 2023, the Ministry of Defense planned to recruit an additional 420,000 contract soldiers for the war. In contrast, the Russian Armed Forces had no more than 400,000 contract soldiers annually in the years running up to the war. The military had never been able to reach its stated goal of close to 500,000 contract soldiers, which highlighted just how ambitious this new 2023 target was, particularly for a wartime recruiting effort. When added to the newly mobilized 300,000 personnel, the additional 420,000 were intended to not only sustain the force in Ukraine but also support significant new force growth. Russian officials announced that the armed forces recruited 420,000 contract soldiers and accepted another 80,000 volunteers in 2023. Even if these numbers were artificially inflated through various forms of double counting, we assess that Moscow came close to meeting its recruitment plans for 2023.
In light of the successful recruitment on the heels of the partial mobilization, 2023 proved to be Moscow’s most successful year of the war in terms of expansion. Based on our calculations, the General Staff created two new combined-arms armies, two new motorized rifle divisions, and 27 new maneuver brigades and regiments. The military also expanded the 31st Separate Landing Assault Brigade into the 104th Landing Assault Division and filled out another nine divisions with several additional maneuver regiments, largely executing previous pre-war expansion plans. Moreover, the military formed new specialized assault detachments or companies and extra reserve rifle battalions within maneuver regiments and brigades. Russian units were also given new types of assault companies comprised of convicts, called Storm-Z, and then Storm-V, based in part on the Wagner Group’s experience. A motorized rifle regiment that initially deployed into Ukraine with two battalion tactical groups may have had about 500–600 infantry on hand. After this augmentation, the same regiment could have as many as 2,000 infantrymen. This began the steady process of Russian forces orienting around different types of assault detachments, with some of the tactics informed by the Wagner Group’s experience. By 2023, regiment and brigade commanders had far more personnel to intensify offensive operations and replace combat losses.
Similarly, the commanders of the different Russian troop groupings in Ukraine had much more mass to conduct a broad offensive. By the end of 2023, Russia fielded more than 800 maneuver battalions in and around Ukraine, roughly four times the size of the initial invasion force. Of course, constant combat losses meant that few infantry units were actually at authorized strength until they were newly formed or replenished. Many of the newly formed units did not have their standardized table of equipment either. Even so, the sheer growth in a single year was massive. In December, Putin stated that Russian forces in the “zone of the Special Military Operation” numbered 617,000 personnel — roughly three times the size of the invasion force — highlighting the twin successes of mobilization and contract soldier recruitment. Putin also authorized an increase in the armed forces’ authorized strength to 1.32 million troops, reflecting the trajectory toward the 1.5 million goal. This overall force growth gave Moscow the confidence to resume large-scale offensive operations by October 2023, after the failure of Ukraine’s summer offensive.
In 2024, the Russian military announced that it would form several new divisions and brigades and a new army corps, and that it would recruit another 400,000–450,000 contract soldiers. It largely met those goals with around 430,000-440,000 recruited in 2024. Much of the force growth would be associated with the Leningrad Military District, re-established opposite Finland and the Baltic states. The General Staff intended to form the 44th Army Corps and its subordinate 72nd Motorized Rifle Division and 128th Motorized Rifle Brigade, and expand three brigades into new motorized rifle divisions. The Ministry of Defense also began forming new artillery, air defense, engineer, communications, and logistics units that would be directly subordinate to the military district headquarters. The creation of these units, as well as a separate district, will prove a planning concern for NATO after the war. It will yield a permanent force structure expansion along the borders of NATO members, along with associated supporting fires and strike capabilities.
In addition to the burden of creating new units, the new district headquarters also became the basis for a new Northern Grouping of troops that assumed responsibility for Ukraine’s northern border and began offensive operations into Kharkiv Oblast that May. Moscow’s stated goal was to create a buffer zone, but the more practical military objective was to stretch out Ukrainian forces on a longer front. The Northern Grouping, a mix of brand-new units and some deployed from other groupings, struggled to juggle its casualty-intensive operational assignments with surging manpower requirements to fill out the district’s force structure. The formation of the new 68th, 69th, and 71st Motorized Rifle Divisions stretched into 2025, in growing contrast to the Ministry of Defense’s ability to quickly generate several new units in 2023.
In the Central Military District, the General Staff recreated the 27th Motorized Rifle Division, which had been downsized into the 21st Motorized Rifle Brigade in 2009. The district also generated five additional reserve infantry regiments, each with a new designator as “assault” regiments. The Central Grouping of Troops committed these new forces to its offensives in central Donetsk Oblast, Moscow’s priority axis of advance in 2024.
Finally, in 2024 the Russian General Staff canvassed other service branches of the military — the Russian Navy, Aerospace Forces, Strategic Rocket Forces, and the 12th Main Directorate (responsible for nuclear weapons storage and security) — for manpower to generate additional units for the front line. Over the course of the year, the military formed about a dozen motorized rifle regiments. Personnel were drawn from a wide range of non-infantry military specialties to form these new regiments, each of which numbered about 2,500 personnel. The military named these regiments “territorial control” units, suggesting a primary role of securing rear areas or newly captured territory, which would free up “regular” combat units for offensive operations. However, such roles did not keep these regiments out of heavy combat, and Russian commanders have used some units to support offensive tasks.
By reducing the readiness of these important service branches, the General Staff showed its increasingly urgent desire to break Ukrainian defenses in light of growing casualties and slowing force growth. Still, officially the Russian military kept expanding. In September 2024, Putin approved another increase to the armed forces’ authorized strength, bringing it up to the previously stated goal of 1.5 million authorized personnel. This move was both politically symbolic and bureaucratic — the continued force expansion required new billets even if the military used a growing percentage of recruits as personnel replacements, rather than filling the new authorized positions.
However, Russian force expansion in 2024 did not translate into the ability to employ combat power more successfully on a larger scale. On the contrary, by late 2024, the growth of the Russian Armed Forces began to offer diminishing returns. In 2024 the Russian military had largely switched to dismounted infantry assaults of increasingly small unit sizes, often featuring 6–8 men. Airborne units would attack in 15-man formations, breaking down into three-man fire teams. Assault detachments conducted operations in increasingly smaller unit sizes. Russian forces still attempted larger mechanized attacks, especially in the fall, but these were typically unsuccessful as the battlefield became characterized by minefields, prepared defenses, and an ever-growing number of strike drones. Traditional assaults could not attain breakthroughs. Armored fighting vehicles served primarily as battle taxis, bringing dismounts to their assault positions, often at the cost of damage on their way to or from the attack. This resulted from the fact that Russian forces could not come up with a solution to the compound challenges facing them, and that they consistently pushed newly formed or replenished forces into offensive operations without taking the time to restore their capacity to execute.
Russia’s approach in 2024 was to try and stretch Ukrainian forces across a broad front, seeking to grind their way through it with superior numbers. This enabled Russian forces to sustain offensive operations for much of the year — from March to December — essentially one inexhaustible creeping offensive in place of discrete operations. But over time, the presence of pervasive intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and drone-based firepower forced them to disperse and spend much of the time attacking with small infantry groups of infantry. Russian forces could not easily concentrate to mount an assault without detection, attacking units were vulnerable to engagement before reaching the forward line of their own troops, and dismounted troops found themselves hunted by drones and artillery thereafter.
By 2025, Russian force growth had largely halted, as the number of those killed and seriously wounded mostly offset monthly military recruitment. Moscow sought to recruit 403,000 contract personnel in 2025, and even slightly exceeded this goal, but despite recruiting an average of 35,000 troops per month, was losing a similar number of killed and seriously wounded. This was due in part to Russian forces largely abandoning their use of mechanized equipment by 2025, focusing instead on infiltration tactics and light motorized attacks, and thus trading equipment losses for higher infantry. Ukraine’s approach, expanding drone units to control the terrain with minimal infantry while maximizing attrition to Russian manpower, was working. Employing infiltration tactics has made advances glacially slow and unable to generate momentum, leaving forward positions vulnerable to counterattack and making breakthroughs impossible.
In 2025, the Russian General Staff focused force generation on forming new unmanned systems units across the force, including new regiments at the district echelon and dozens of battalions and companies at army-echelon and below. This was in part successful, although the expansion of larger drone units often attracted pilots from within the force, robbing maneuver formations of their drone pilot expertise. The Ministry of Defense’s effort to expand Rubicon as the leading elite drone formation did pay dividends on the battlefield. However, the formation of new maneuver units was limited primarily to bringing the “holdover” Leningrad Military District divisions from 2024 up to strength. The Ministry of Defense announced the formation of two new naval infantry divisions on the basis of existing brigades, but by year’s end had formed only the division headquarters and several of their subunits (largely using the assets of the former brigades). The military has yet to create any additional maneuver components of these divisions.
Moreover, the Ministry of Defense postponed, probably indefinitely, several planned divisions, including new formations that would be permanently based in occupied Ukraine. In September and again in December, Putin said that the size of the force in and around Ukraine was about 700,000 personnel — the same level as in mid-2024 — essentially acknowledging nearly 18 months of negligible ground force growth. Moscow’s goal is to recruit 409,000 contract personnel in 2026, but it is not on track to meet that target. By early 2026, Russia faced several months of losses in excess of recruitment, and some formations began to run short of assault-capable infantry. The result was that some Russian advances stalled and Moscow lost ground in areas like Kupyansk and Zaporizhzhia, from Ukrainian counterattacks.
Despite significant force growth since 2022, the Russian General Staff generally avoids using new formations as operational or strategic reserves, preferring instead to deploy them immediately to offensives on different axes of advance. This is consistent with Moscow’s strategy to maintain and increase pressure along the entire front — rather than prosecute discrete offensives — but a departure from classic Russian operational art. The General Staff has consistently used its airborne troops and naval infantry formations as the de facto assault and quick reaction force, but their use entails regularly pulling these units off the front, rapidly reconstituting them, and then redeploying them to another priority axis, rather than holding them back.
As Ukraine invested into drones as the central mechanism by which they would deny mobility to the Russian military and offset their own thinning manpower across a vast front line, the Russian military continued to look for ways to overcome the drone-imposed defeat zone. In 2025, Russian forces increasingly switched to infiltration tactics and light motorized assaults, splitting infantry platoons into one to two men to move past Ukrainian positions and into the rear as Ukrainian drone crews hunted them relentlessly. Russian combat power trickled onto the battlefield in even smaller amounts, unable to concentrate, or to exploit breaches in Ukrainian lines. The battlespace became a drone-saturated grey zone without cohesive lines, and a low density of forces such that provided presence but not control. Russian adaptations led to modestly greater territorial gains compared to 2024, but at a higher cost and generally not along the axes they prioritized.
The rapid expansion of the Russian military during the war in Ukraine lends itself to competing interpretations. On the one hand, based on our calculations, Moscow achieved nearly 200 percent growth in the total number of tank battalions and about 400 percent growth in the number of infantry battalions assigned to the war, much of which Moscow accomplished in the first two years. This kind of force expansion and the ability to sustain it despite three years of intense, casualty-intensive offensive operations on a long front line is an organizational and logistical feat. It raises questions about earlier assessments regarding poor Russian logistics. If anything, Russia demonstrated a strong ability to generate forces and to sustain combat operations, including a high artillery and drone-fire rate throughout the war. The Russian problem was not logistical, so much as an inability to concentrate forces at the decisive point, i.e., an inability to translate mass on the battlefield into breakthroughs.
Moreover, Moscow achieved this growth without relying on the historical twin pillars of Russian force generation: conscription and reserve mobilization. Although mobilization never formally ended, it was not the main driver of Russian force expansion. The partial mobilization in autumn 2022 was vital to preventing defeat, but the 300,000 reservists called up pale in comparison to the roughly 1.3 million contract soldiers Moscow has since recruited. This is the first large-scale, extended war that Russia has fought using primarily contracted volunteers. Moscow contracted far more personnel in this war than previously in its history.
Whether this approach will prove to be a historical anomaly or portend Russia’s approach to future wars remains to be seen, but it is notable that Russian leadership was able to sustain the conflict without relying on the sort of mass mobilization seen in prior wars of this scale. In the past, Russian leaders were reticent to reach for mobilization and conscription to sustain their wars of choice, which also limited the scope and the forces deployed. This most recent war shows they may not face such constraints, and prior assumptions that Moscow cannot sustain a prolonged conventional war without mass mobilization could be wrong. Similarly, the view that Russians will not sign up in large numbers for an offensive war is demonstrably incorrect. Despite high losses, the Russian military demonstrated its ability to regenerate forces on the battlefield and to stay on the offensive for several years without resorting to mobilization.
What should NATO make of the Russian military experience and the changes to the Russian force? NATO plans have focused heavily on defending the Baltic states and Poland from a large-scale Russian ground invasion. The Alliance has already applied lessons from Ukraine by constructing extensive defenses and increasing force presence, and is looking at adopting drones to counter Russian numerical advantages. But it remains unclear which lessons the Russian military will inculcate from Ukraine — the General Staff may in the future rely more heavily on its burgeoning drone and deep-strike capabilities to inflict attrition on Allied forces. While NATO militaries are working on procuring counter-unmanned aerial systems capabilities and adapting traditional air defenses, their forces remain small and constrained in terms of the attrition they can withstand. Russia’s inventories of strike drones and long-range missiles are likely to be many times larger than before the war. Nor can the alliance afford to dismiss Russian mass entirely, either. Even with its successful drone employment, Kyiv has still had to field a very large mobilized infantry force, with heavy use of land mines and artillery, to sustain its defenses. NATO militaries are not pursuing the larger force sizes that would enable them to hold the line, or the mass adoption of drones and drone formations within their force structure that would allow them to achieve effects similar to those of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Arguably, they may not have to consider their traditional advantages in airpower and precision strike, but it would be careless to assume that nothing needs to change to address the changing Russian threat.
Ukraine continued to adapt as the Russian military grew, countering Russian advantages over the course of a prolonged conventional war. This was in large part because Ukraine was able to withstand the initial shock of the invasion, and had a large enough force to absorb significant losses as it adapted over time. As appealing as it may be, taking lessons from the latter stages of the Russo-Ukrainian War and applying them to the opening days of a Russia-NATO conflict must be done with care, because it could lead to the wrong conclusions. Moreover, the Russian military is likely to remain much larger after this war, with far more forces deployed near NATO members’ borders. This means that NATO planners will need to come up with technological and tactical solutions to the challenge posed both by Russia’s innovations in Ukraine and its more traditional mass. Failure to do so could lead to unnecessary losses on the battlefield.
Russia’s force generation has failed to give Moscow the decisive advantage it expected. Faced with the challenge of overcoming a traditional prepared defense, Ukraine’s adaptation, and Western aid, Russian forces struggled to put the pieces together and attain meaningful breakthroughs or create localized Ukrainian collapse. The growing presence of mass precision on the battlefield further strengthened the defender’s advantage, as Russian force quality and ability to employ forces at scale declined. What the Russian General Staff would have assessed to be an increasingly advantageous correlation of forces over time has never materialized despite chronic Ukrainian manpower shortages. Hence, lofty operational goals consistently went unrealized, as Russian forces could not execute those plans at the tactical level.
Ukraine’s battlefield dynamics deny Russian forces many of the traditional advantages of numbers: Russian commanders cannot mass forces with sufficient speed or surprise to create localized overmatch, and the ubiquitous drone threat in combination with traditional prepared defenses compels Russian forces to attack at below platoon and even squad-strength in most cases. Russian leadership has pursued two and a half years of a broad grinding offensive, assuming that eventually the Ukrainian military would break, and they would achieve their operational goals. Instead, this effort yielded higher costs and diminishing returns as Ukraine consistently adapted over time and optimized to defeat the Russian approach.
Arguably, the steady pipeline of replaceable manpower made senior Russian commanders complacent, reinforcing a cost-ineffective approach. Many Russian combined-arms armies, which doctrinally would have an area of responsibility measured in hundreds of square miles, cover a 20- to 30-mile section of the front in Ukraine. This concentration stretches down to the lowest echelon — brigades of several thousand troops are now often responsible for advancing along a ravine or ridgeline or for seizing one or two small villages. Yet Russian combat power is so disaggregated by drone, mine, and artillery threats that only a tiny fraction of that brigade’s combat strength is usable at any given point in time. Furthermore, Russian force quality continued to degenerate from 2022. Its inability to progress on the battlefield is therefore a combination of being unable to overcome Ukrainian defense, and its own underinvestment in restoring the ability of the force to conduct more complex offensive operations. The Russian approach had a clear tradeoff, by focusing on sustaining a constant pace of offensive operations via replaceable low-quality assault units, the Russian military focused on mass at the expense of restoring force quality, which made it more vulnerable to Ukrainian counter-adaptation.
At this stage of the war, it is not clear if more forces would fix anything for Russia, unless its military changes the method of employment. Absent this additional mass, Moscow’s choices for breaking the battlefield stalemate are now limited. Furthermore, the cracks in Russia’s current force generation model started to show in late 2025. Russian regions must keep increasing bonuses to meet recruitment targets, which is becoming fiscally untenable. If casualty rates continue to increase, the Russian force in Ukraine will probably begin to contract, meaning that Moscow has moved past its high-water mark for offensive capacity.
How much of this force the Russian military will be able to retain also remains uncertain and subject to budgetary constraints. What is clear is that the Russian military seems to have made a profound miscalculation, assuming that force quantity would eventually offset Western support and Kyiv’s innovations and wear down Ukraine. In reality, how it employed force over time led to declining combat efficiency and effectiveness, closing a window of opportunity that was open in 2024 and 2025.
Greg Whisler is a retired senior U.S. intelligence analyst specializing in the Russian armed forces.
Michael Kofman a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment and the host of the Russia Contingency, a members-only War on the Rocks podcast. Prior to joining Carnegie, he served as director of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of Mr. Whisler and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.
Image: Savitskiy Vadim via Wikimedia Commons
