Four Years Of War

Tuesday is the fourth anniversary of the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine, that started on February 24, 2022, after an eight year respite following the Russian seizure of Crimea and Russian allied sympathizers trying to join Russia in parts of a couple of the far western provinces of Ukraine that were most ethnically and linguistically Russian.

Russia thought it would have a quick and easy triumph, just as it had had in Crimea in 2014. It didn't. 

* It has had 1.2 million casualties (including wounds not mortal, captured soldiers, and desertions), which is more than the size of the entire Russian Army it started with, and the losses have extended to officers and even the highest ranking generals. About 325,000 of them were killed.

* It is losing soldiers as fast as it can draft them, at a rate of about a thousand soldiers a day. It is replacing a large share of its seasoned soldiers with green conscripts that are ill-trained, ill-equipped, and ill-treated.

* The vast majority of it tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery, and the like gone. It's soldiers are resorting to using museum pieces and horses. Ukraine's estimates (below) may be slightly high, but they've largely been born out by third-party assessments. Here is there assessment as of yesterday:

Russia's losses in this war have been greater than all but a handful of entire military forces in the world, and greater than the entire amount of its ground forces and ground force equipment that was in active service four years ago.

* It's military tactics sometimes seem similar to the inability of World War I generals to recognize the futility of their approaches, trying the same things over and over to abject failures.

* Its Black Sea fleet suffered heavy casualties and neutered.

* Its air forces have suffered not insignificant losses.

* Its supplies of advanced drones and guided missiles has thinned.

* After the early part of the first year of the invasion, its territorial gains have been minuscule, and have come at immense cost in troops lives and equipment. The most recent assessment I could easily find was as of February 11, 2026:

Since Feb. 24, 2022: Russia: +29,210 square miles. 13% of Ukraine. (Area roughly equivalent to half the U.S. state of Illinois).

Total area of all Ukrainian territory Russia presently controls, including Crimea and parts of Donbas, Russia had seized prior to the full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022: Russia: +45,835 square miles. About 20% of Ukraine. (Area roughly equivalent to the U.S. state of Pennsylvania.) . . .

In 2025, the average monthly rate of Russian gains was 171 square miles. . . . 

According to RM’s measurements, using ISW data, Russia captured 2,171 square miles—about 0.93% of Ukraine including Crimea—in 2025.

Russia still controls less Ukrainian territory than it did in August of 2022, six months into the war.

Russia has gained 5,200 square miles of territorial control since November 2022, its low point in this four year long war. This is an average gain of 133 square miles a month in a war where it is currently experiencing 30,000 casualties or so per month.

* The territory taken, which was home to the strongest political opposition to Ukraine's government, has strengthened the political backing of Ukraine's government in the territory it still controls. And, Russia has alienated former pro-Russian Ukrainians in territory it does not control.

* Crimea was mostly as a summer resort for Russians and had been a key Black Sea fleet military base for Russia. It is neither of those things now.

* Its oil and gas infrastructure has been seriously ravaged. Its ability to sell its oil and gas abroad is also increasingly restricted.

* Its transportation infrastructure, especially en route to the front and to Crimea, has been seriously damaged.

* It has been isolated internationally and the restrictions have tightened, while the world, and especially Europe has embraced it. It has failed to win military support from any countries except North Korea and Iran. China and India have remained lukewarm towards it.

* It's oligarchs have been pinched and looted as sanctions.

* It's domestic economy has again been squeezed out for military demand.

* An estimated 7,254 Russian civilians have been killed.

* It's best and brightest young men have fled abroad to avoid conscription and likely death or disability in the process. 1,000,000 (0.7% of Russia’s 2022 population) left Russia for economic or political reasons in the first year of the full-scale war. Between 15% and 45% of those who had left have returned since then, so, between 550,000 and 850,000 people have not returned to Russia.

* It has withdrawn from other international military commitments, for example, in Syria (whose regime fell), and in a strip of land in Moldova.

* NATO has expanded and grown stronger.

* It's European neighbors have built up their own military might and military solidarity, at the same time that Russia's military might is a shadow of what it was four years ago.

* It has relied heavily on more or less random attacks with long range drones, glide bombs, and missiles on civilian targets of little tactical value that violate intentional laws of war. Ukraine's air defenses have been about 89% effective, which means that strikes do get through regularly and cause damage, but the air defenses make it about 9 times more expensive for Russia to do so than it would be without them.

In January 2026: 

Russia fired: 

* 4,838 drones

* 14 ballistic missiles

* 61 cruise missiles 

Ukraine intercepted: 

* 4,120 drones (718 not intercepted)

* 1 ballistic missile (13 not intercepted)

* 38 cruise missiles (23 not intercepted)

* Ukraine has proven to have more military industrial capacity, more allies, more competent troops, and more of a capacity to learn and change their tactics and technologies.

* Ukraine has managed to strike both military and economic targets deep in Russia, but has done so without indiscriminately harming civilians.

* Russia has found that its immense nuclear arsenal has been challenging to turn into practical military gains.

This isn't to say that Ukraine has won. It has had about 600,000 military casualties (including wounds not mortal, captured soldiers, and desertions), of whom about 120,000 have been killed, and lost lots of military equipment too (although Ukraine has faired better at replenishing its equipment losses). An estimated 15,954 Ukrainian civilians have been killed (from the same source).

The vast majority of harm to civilians and the civilian property has been on its territory. 

It has lost significant amounts of territory. Millions of Ukrainians have been internally displaced or have become refugees. As the New York Times explains:

At the start of the full-scale invasion, excluding regions that were already occupied by Russia, it had a population of perhaps 36 million people, according to Tymofii Brik, a sociologist and the rector of the Kyiv School of Economics. (Other estimates tend to be higher.) Since then, Brik says, six million have been displaced inside the country and some four million — mostly women and children — have left Ukraine. More than 100,000 Ukrainians, troops and civilians, are estimated to have been killed. Millions of people live under occupation in areas Russia controls.

Ukraine's whole existence has become an existential fight for survival every day, with intense uncertainty.

But, at best, the Russo-Ukrainian war has been a stalemate for the last three and a half years, and Russia's military capacity to challenge anyone is profoundly depleted.

Russia's leaders have seized on the war to exert greater control on its people in an authoritarian style, but the cracks are showing.

The feckless "leadership", or lack thereof, by Trump and the Republicans in Congress has helped encourage Putin and extended the war, given Putin hope that his unilateral adventure unknown outside his inner circle until it happened, can prevail, at least into a treaty that leaves Russia better off. They have also cratered NATO.

In The Resistance We Drive Minivans

The left is resilient. We have strong communities. We care for our neighbors. We are the grown ups in the room and we prove it with our actions. Trump and the Republicans are doing immense damage to our nation, but at the grass roots, we are doing what we can to mitigate the harm.

In the resistance we drive minivans, we take ’em low and slow down Nicollet Avenue, our trunks stuffed with hockey skates and scuffed Frisbees and cardboard Costco flats. We drive Odysseys and Siennas, we drive Voyagers and Pacificas, we like it when the back end goes ka-thunk over speed bumps, shaking loose the Goldfish dust. One of our kids wrote “wash me” on the van’s exterior, etched it into the gray scurf of frozen Minneapolis slush. Our floor mats smell like mildew from the snowmelt.

In the resistance we play Idles loud, we prefer British punk, turn the volume up, “Danny Nedelko,” please and thank you — we cast that song like a protective spell across our minivans: Let us be bulletproof, let us be invisible. . . .

Everyone is doing his part here, each to his ability. This is easier to accomplish, it seems, when joy and love are the engines. Outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where detainees, some of them American citizens and legal residents, are being held without beds or real blankets, the grannies of the Twin Cities are serving hot chocolate to college kids in active confrontation with ICE. I know of an off-grid network of doctors offering care to immigrants, a sub rosa collective of restaurateurs organizing miniature food banks in their basements. A friend of mine is a pastor who went with around 100 local clergy members to the airport in protest. Another friend is an immigration lawyer who spends his days endlessly filing habeas petitions, has gotten 30 people released from detention over the last few weeks. He recently offered a training session on how to file habeas petitions and 300 lawyers showed up, eager to do the work pro bono. . . .

Here’s what you need to remember: There is no reward that comes later. No righteous justice will be dispensed, not soon and not ever. Renee Good and Alex Pretti don’t come back to life. The lives of their loved ones are not made whole again. Thousands of people will remain disappeared, relatives scattered, families broken. This story does not have a happy ending, and I can assure you the villains do not get punished in the end. If that is your motivation, try again, start over.

But you also need to understand — and this is equally important — that we’ve already won. The reward is right now, this minute, this moment. The reward is watching your city — whether it’s Chicago or Los Angeles or Charlotte or the cities still to come — organize in hyperlocal networks of compassion, in acephalous fashion, not because someone told you to, but because tens of thousands of people across a metro region simultaneously and instinctively felt the urge to help their neighbors get by." . . .

you slow down to the speed limit, you turn Idles a little louder, you play “Danny Nedelko” again. That song comes from an album called “Joy as an Act of Resistance.”

Today I’m driving a girl who never speaks other than to say thank you. She’s out of the car now and trying to clamber ungracefully over a dirty ice bank that walls off the roadway from her house. There is no entry point — she’d have to walk down to the corner to gain access — and I’m cursing myself for where I’ve dropped her off. The skies are an unsympathetic oatmeal. It is very cold, the dark dead of winter.

Out on the stoop of her building, the girl’s mom and little sister are waiting. The mother looks on nervously, wishing to minimize this vulnerable transition point between car and home. The little sister is probably 3 years old. She is in pigtails and wearing footie pajamas and she is radiant, leaping up and down, clapping, ecstatic to see her big sister come home. The quiet girl is stone-faced and stumbling, and eventually she makes it across the wall of gray ice to her stoop, where her little sister grabs her by the leg. 

I’ll admit: This was the only time I cried, throughout this whole disgusting affair, as I sat in my car watching the girl in the footie pajamas clapping for big sister’s safe return[.]

An excerpt from this New York Times Op-Ed essay.