The Russian authorities mistakenly released an estimate of the number of Russian soldiers killed in action in Ukraine, as of February 1, 2015. It came to roughly 2,000. That is a larger number than I would have expected.
How intense is the fighting? In part, that depends on when the bulk of the troops arrived. If we date the start of the fighting from the first armed clashes on April 7, 2014, then the Russian armed forces have suffered a casualty rate around 7 per day. If, on the other, we date involvement from the first known large-scale Russian troop movements on August 22, 2014, then Russian soldiers have been dying at a rate around 12 soldiers per day.
How intense is that compared to other wars? Well, it depends on our point of reference. The Correlates of War database classifies war into three types: interstate, intrastate, and extra-state. Interstate wars are wars between states. Intrastate wars are (basically) civil wars. Civil wars in which foreign governments send forces become internationalized intrastate wars. Extrastate wars are wars between a state and a non-state actor fought outside the metropolitan territory of the state.
Wars can and do shift categories. For example, a civil war can start off as an internationalized intrastate war. But if a foreign government takes over the bulk of the fighting from local forces, it switches to an extrastate war. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan provides an example. Similarly, if a foreign government takes over the bulk of the fighting from an insurgency, an intrastate war will switch to an interstate war.
So far so good? The Donbass War, then, looks like an interstate war. (Is there is a political component to the choice of the number of “s’s” to put at the end of Donbass?)
How does it stack up to other post-1945 interstate wars in terms of Russian battle deaths?
Short answer: A battle-death rate between 7 and 12 per day is surprisingly intense.
Longer answer: Israel lost 3 soldiers per day during the 146 days of the First Lebanon War (1982); their Syrian opponents suffered around 8. The United States lost 4 soldiers per day in Gulf War 1 (considering all 86 days, not just the 100 hours of intense combat) and 3 per day in Gulf War 2 (over the 44 days of the 2003 invasion). Vietnam took 6 losses per day over 471 days of fighting during the 1977-79 pacification of Cambodia. The Second Ogaden War of 1977-78 may be almost forgotten outside Cuba and the Horn of Africa, but it was not low-intensity by any measure: Ethiopia lost 8 soldiers per day and their Cuban allies lost 6. India lost 7 soldiers per day over 70 days of fighting in the 1999 Kargil War; Pakistan lost 10. Argentina suffered 9 battle deaths per day over the 81 days of the Falklands War. Ecuador took 11 deaths per day over the short 48-day Cenepa War in ‘95; Armenia suffered 12 per day during the (rather longer) 463-day Azeri-Armenian War of 1993.
Putin can take some solace that the fighting is less intense than the 20 battle-deaths per day inflicted on American soldiers during the 2,912 days of the Vietnam War. (Which was an interstate war, by the way.) But it is in the range of the 12 per day suffered by Soviet forces during the 3,280 days of its fighting in Afghanistan. (Which was a classic extrastate war.) And it is at least as bad as the 7 deaths per day that France suffered over the 2,695 days of the Algerian War of independence.
As bad as the French in Algeria!
On the other hand, France fought for a long time in Algeria, and an annual average conceals a lot: by 1960 its battle-deaths were almost nil. And we need not mention the Russians in Afghanistan or America in Vietnam. These casualty levels can be tolerated for a long time with enough political will.
Does the relative intensity of the fighting say anything about the ultimate result in Ukraine? Probably not. Considering only the three wars listed in the above paragraph, the foreign government only lost one of the three.
By 1959, France had pacified Algeria to a level of violence below that which many nations have endured for decades and then (wisely) decided over the next three years that the game was not worth the candle. The context for that decision does not apply to the Donbass, where continuing inter-ethnic violence after the end of the war appears unlikely.
In Afghanistan, the Soviets turned the fighting over to a client state which was capable of staying in power as long as it received continuing financial and logistical assistance. I do not know if the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk will ever reach that point, but it is not inconceivable. That would be a victory unless the Russian Federation suffers a USSR-like collapse.
Only the United States can be clearly said to have lost its war against North Vietnam. The U.S. could no longer politically sustain a troop presence after 1973, but had no credible local force over to which to turn the effort. SVN forces started to crumble almost immediately after 1973. By the time Congress pulled the plug, South Vietnam was doomed.
Perhaps that could happen in Ukraine ... but consider how long the United States tried to win a war fought thousands of miles away amid a people to which we had no historical ties. The Donbass is right next door and populated by Russian speakers. No comparison.
To sum up: the Russians are surprisingly taking it on the chin in Ukraine, but that says very little about the ultimate outcome of the war. Even if the Ukrainians keep up the good fight, success is not guaranteed. If I had to bet, I would say the Donbass is lost ... and it is a tragedy that Ukrainian internal politics makes that outcome impossible to accept.
IIRC, Russian speakers have one 's' in Donbas and Ukrainian have two.
For comparison, the Ukrainians have claimed they have lost (KIA) 2,800 soldiers so far.
The Battle of Ilovaisk makes up for ~36% of Ukrainian losses (~1k troops). This was over a 22 day period. That's approximately 45 soldiers/day. Many of these were during the retreat when the Russians and DNR had the avenues of retreat zeroed in with artillery.
The Ukrainians have long claimed they had caught a lot of Russian soldiers in similar artillery traps (note: Soviet artillery was to be feared). Their GRAD systems are similar to our MLRS (aka the grid square remover). They did hit one battalion that way and swooped in to gather up Russian survivors to display to the world. They claimed to have caught several other units the same way, but were in retreat at that point.
Mostly the world didn't believe them. Both sides poured out inaccurate information about what was going on. However, in light of what the Russians oopsed for the troop losses in Ukraine, its more than plausible.
There's data point in support of the Russian losses above: Chechnya. The battle of Grozny in the First Chechen War. The Russians lost almost 1800 soldiers in 3 months. In July/August 1996, the Russians lost almost 500 soldiers in a month.
...And the Chechens were probably not nearly as well equipped as the Ukrainians.
Posted by: Will Baird | August 26, 2015 at 04:55 PM
Second data point for the post Soviet army's performance: the Russo-Georgian War. It lasted 4 days and the Russians lost 67 (3 MIA) soldiers. That's a rate of 17.5/day against the Georgians.
Posted by: Will Baird | August 26, 2015 at 06:57 PM
This, at least,
http://worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alexander-j-motyl/anti-donbas-sentiment-growing-ukraine
suggests that anti-Donbas sentiment is growing in Ukraine, perhaps enough to want an end.
The big question might be whether Russia would let the war end on relatively advantageous terms to Ukraine, shorn of two populous Russophone enclaves now dependent on support from Russia.
Posted by: Randy McDonald | August 26, 2015 at 09:25 PM
If reports are accurate, Ukraine just lost 21 soldiers yesterday.
Consider if the Russians lost soldiers at the same rate they did in Georgia last August and in taking the Donetsk airport. Each fight had its peak for about a month each. 17/day for two months gives you 1020. The Ukrainians have been losing around 2 to 3 per day (average) from skirmishes and artillery (it gets spiky at times as noted above). So just from 'normal' artillery losses over 6 months (August thru end of Jan), you get another 364 to 546. Let's split the difference at 455. Just right there, assuming no bad days and the Ukrainians were as effective as the Georgians and no better, you have 1475 dead Russian soldiers.
Catch two battalions in GRAD artillery traps and you have 2,000. Easy.
This is under the assumption the 2k soldiers were lost of 6 months, but, yeah, I can totally believe 2k now.
Posted by: Will Baird | August 27, 2015 at 01:03 PM
Russian secrecy on this point probably stems from the Afghan war, when the Soviet authorities were shocked and dismayed to be confronted with mothers using the media -- especially after glasnost -- to make public expressions of grief.
It was particularly jarring because the Soviets had internalized a narrative of themselves as stoically heroic, able to transcend massive casualties to defeat fascism. People freaking out over a relative handful of deaths in Afghanistan was completely unexpected and a major shock to the system. Demonstrations by mothers were bad enough; public support for those demonstrations was deeply disorienting. Putin and a lot of other senior people lived through that period and are working off those lessons.
So that's potentially a constraint on Russian behavior. I doubt they care about casualty figures per se. (In fact, one suspects there are probably a number of Russians in the Donbass that the Kremlin would be just as happy to see stay there, permanently, under the sod.) But they may well be wary of public reaction to casualties.
Possible additional wrinkle: this leaked report might be someone's idea of a trial balloon.
Doug M.
Posted by: Doug M. | August 28, 2015 at 04:45 AM
Well it seems that the leaked report might in fact be fake:
https://twitter.com/RuslanLeviev/status/636492934452523008 (Ruslan Leviev did a lot of work for the Nemtsov report on Russian participation in the war in Donbass and he calls the report a fake)
https://twitter.com/Bershidsky/status/636818562833870848 (Leonid Bershidsky of Bloomberg (and an opponent of Putin) also believes it is a fake, and notes that the original report on the bs-life.ru website used "v" to refer to Ukraine (the way Ukrainians refer to Ukraine apparently) instead of "na" to refer to ukraine, the way Russians do)
Posted by: J.H. | August 29, 2015 at 03:06 PM
My. The losses do seem high, although they are not beyond plausibility.
Where can we look for proper verification? Bershidsky seems good, but is that enough to declare it fake?
Posted by: Noel Maurer | August 29, 2015 at 09:53 PM
Well between Bershidsky and Leviev (in particular, his own investigation of the original source site sounds really damning as to it's credibility - see here for his investigation of it: http://www.stopfake.org/en/debunking-the-fake-article-on-2000-russian-soldiers-killed-in-donbas-everyone-fell-for/) and the fact that apparently the site it is originally from as reported by Forbes doesn't seem to have much in the way of any verifiable background information (apparently it has no info on the persons who own or run the site and has no contact info except for a standard online form), I think there is enough to doubt the veracity of the site and the report.
Posted by: J.H. | August 30, 2015 at 11:42 AM
The report is quite plausibly fake.
The number of deaths are also plausible.
It'd be best to call the source at best questionable and probably even false until some other info comes to light.
Posted by: Will Baird | August 30, 2015 at 12:43 PM
The first mistake is to compare the Donbass war with the Georgian cofnlict. In the Georgian conflict the Russian losses amounted mostly during August 9 when an entire mechanised battalion and army general of them was trapped between a Georgian special forces unit and infantry that rushed to help destroy them. Georgians suffered the same fate on their flanks the Ukrainians did. They got bombarded by superior artillery, yet most losses occured during retreat, as Russian 4th air army was relentlessly bombing Georgian convoys. Ukrainians had it even worse, entire convoys got ambushed and completly destroyed. In 2008 war both Georgia and Russia experienced only one such event respectively, but neither one was total anihilation. In each case some still got away with their lifes.
Posted by: Westnik | August 04, 2017 at 10:29 AM