Opinion: Ukraine’s winning strategy against Russia: Attrition

Ukraine is winning the war against Russia through a strategy of attrition.

That statement may come as a surprise. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 the assumption has been that attrition warfare in the conflict would undoubtedly favor Russia. Russia has a population three times as great, and President Vladimir Putin — and Russian society more widely — have demonstrated a tolerance for huge personnel losses to seize limited amounts of territory in Ukraine.

But recent reporting and analyses suggest that the tide has turned in Ukraine’s favor. Russia’s war economy is going underwater. Ukraine continues to strike industrial targets deep inside Russia with its long-range drones. The recent Russian declaration of emergency in Crimea due to Ukrainian strikes against logistics supply lines shows the increasingly precarious position Russia is now in. Importantly, there are very real signs of unrest within parts of the population and the Russian oligarchy.

On the battlefield, “attrition” has become a dirty word in warfighting today. Modern militaries aim to destroy the adversary’s military forces, creating leverage for a favorable political outcome. The German Army’s speedy victory against France in 1940, when it outmaneuvered French defensive formations and seized Paris and political control of half of France, is an example. Similarly, in several Napoleonic battles, the elimination of the adversary army forced a political settlement favorable to France.

But annihilating the adversary’s military forces doesn’t always lead to a positive political outcome. In the American invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, the U.S. military destroyed the Iraqi Army on the ground — and what was left simply melted away. That didn’t prevent the U.S. military from getting mired in Iraq for the next eight years fighting a nasty, multi-faceted insurgency.

Most wars in history, though, have been won by attrition — that is, exhausting the opponent through sustained loss of manpower and material on the battlefield. In the American Civil War, Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant realized that a strategy he had been taught to pursue as a student at West Point — ending a war by destroying the enemy army in a single decisive battle — was a pipe dream. Instead, Grant adopted a strategy of attrition, using military action to grind the Confederate Army down to the point where it was forced to surrender in April 1865. 

In the current Russia-Ukraine War, Ukraine’s smaller population and democratic government have been considered weaknesses by many analysts. They have argued that Russia’s size makes Ukrainian victory a remote possibility at best. Some have maintained that, to win, Ukraine must conduct offensive operations to seize key terrain and force Russia to come to terms. 

Over the last two years, however, Ukraine has developed an effective, if not necessarily novel, strategy of attrition: kill more Russian soldiers, faster. Ukraine leaders use business principles to maximize both Russian casualties and economic costs. The key performance metrics in former Minister of Defense Mykhailo Fedorov’s war plan for Ukraine has been to make Russia suffer 200 killed for each square kilometer of territory seized and eliminate at least 50,000 Russian soldiers each month.

Ukraine’s defense sector is making these goals attainable, including its domestic drone industry, its internally developed command-and-control systems and its training and organization of drone forces — in particular the specialization of the Unmanned Systems Forces. Fedorov’s mathematics of war initiative also collected data to improve the efficiency of attrition. The ePoints system, for example, incentivized units to submit video evidence of their kills to receive points they can use to buy additional drones. 

Ukraine’s attrition strategy also extends deep into Russia’s interior, where it continues to strike oil and gas infrastructure. Such attacks provide propaganda value — as demonstrated by a recent hit near St. Petersburg, where Putin was hosting an economic conference in early June. More crucially, such attacks reduce oil exports, weakening the capacity of the Russian economy to fund the war.

The question is whether this can force Putin’s regime to accept defeat. During the Tet Offensive in February 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, about 350 U.S. service members were killed in action during one week of combat. The Russian Army is currently suffering over 300 soldiers killed in action every day and yet sees little effective domestic opposition. 

But Ukraine could very well break Russia’s will to continue fighting. History offers an example of that, too. In 1918, the allied armies of France, Great Britain and the recently arrived Americans had defeated the German Spring Offensive on the Western Front. After four years of bloody attritional warfare, the German Army collapsed on the field of battle, leading to the November armistice and peace treaty that ended World War I.

Whether the Russian Army faces a similar fate will depend on Ukraine’s maintenance of its effective strategy of attrition and continuing if not increasing its long-range strikes into Russia, and the continued support of its partner nations. 

Gian Gentile, an adjunct military historian at RAND, is a retired U.S. Army colonel with 32 years of active service who previously served as director of the Military History Program at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Andrew Radin is a senior political scientist at RAND and associate director of the Master of National Security Policy program at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

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