Ukraine’s top spy says President Vladimir Putin will have brought Russia’s war machine to its knees within two years.
“Russia has military and economic resources for the next year, but we estimate it will end in 2028,” Oleh Ivashchenko, who took over the Ukrainian military intelligence agency HUR in January after leading its foreign intelligence agency SRZU since 2024, told The Times of London on Friday.
Ivashchenko backs that up with the imbalance between how quickly Putin can bring in fresh recruits and how quickly Moscow is losing them on the battlefield.
“Russia recruits roughly 1,000 people every day, sometimes 1,200,” he said. “But look at these casualty figures. Yesterday it was 1,410, the day before it was 1,551. Of those, 835, around 60 percent, are killed in action.”
The newspaper notes those figures are largely backed by assessments from Western intelligence agencies, who contend around 6,000 more Russian troops are killed than recruited each month.
It adds that if the general’s analysis of a 60 percent dead-to-wounded ratio among overall casualties is correct, another 18 months of conflict, combined with losses so far, would likely cost roughly 10 percent of all Russian men aged between 25 and 49.
“Morale is very low because nobody wants to fight,” Ivashchenko added of the toll those losses are taking among Russian ranks. “Also the morale of the Russian population is very low: most people do not really want war.”
Analysts have warned that Putin may be planning another mass-mobilization event after parliamentary elections later this month. Those sent out under any such initiative would arrive on the Ukrainian battlefield with a life expectancy of 20 to 30 minutes.
Four years of war have also taken a toll on Ukrainian forces. The country is thought to have lost as many as 625,000 troops since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
