The story's lede states bluntly what may be Vladimir Putin's greatest enemy — material attrition. "Russia has been burning through equipment, ammunition and weaponry at rates that have raised questions about how effectively and for how long it can continue to prosecute its war against Ukraine," writes The Wall Street Journal.
Both sides are expending massive quantities of weaponry, of course. But while Ukraine can rely on a flow of fresh munitions from the West — especially from the Biden administration — Russia is left to its own failing devices. Because of technology-denying sanctions and a severely constricting economy, the Russians have been unable to adequately resupply their killing machines.
"They are running low on everything," says Eliot Cohen of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Moreover, a fair amount of the armaments that Russia had stashed away in storage "has deteriorated because of corruption, mismanagement and poor maintenance, he said."
Putin's depletion of, particularly, missiles threatens his ability to sustain the war. His army is too incompetent to fight much of a soldier-to-soldier ground war in Ukraine, so he has opted for either slaughtering civilians or freezing them into merely hoped-for submission. Stalin's famed Red Army of the Second World War, which accounted for three-fourths of German army casualties, has, under Vladimir Putin, devolved into nothing more than a terrorist organization.
Russia's known or estimated expenditure of missiles tells the story. "The rate at which these missiles are used has dropped significantly from an average of two dozen daily launches in the first months of the war," reports the Journal. A spokesman for the Ukrainian air force "said last week that just 15 Kalibr cruise missiles were launched in the entire month of October."
One sign of Russian desperation is that it's using missiles in ways for which they were never designed. Antiship missiles, for instance, are being deployed against land targets — remember, Putin has millions of Ukrainian citizens to murder, however he can. These missiles are meant to compensate for Russia's draining supply of low-precision ammunition; for months its forces had been firing thousands of artillery shells each day, yet the rate of fire, say analysts, has now plunged.
Unknown to Western analysts is "the significance" of Iranian weapons being shipped to Russia; their quantity and future guarantees remain a mystery. What is known is that the Kremlin, which was once among the world's leading arms dealers, is having to plead for outside armaments. This is just "another indication that the Russian military-industrial base is struggling to resupply the country’s forces," observes the Journal.
The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, now estimates that Russia has suffered more than 100,000 soldiers killed or wounded, and probably about the same number of Ukrainian troops, he added. And yet civilian casualties are one-sided. As of Monday, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated that 16,784 Ukrainian civilians have been killed or wounded, including 1,170 children.
Then, as always, comes the even more heartbreaking disclaimer: "However, OHCHR specifi[es] that the real numbers could be higher." Much higher.
And so Russia will lose this war while having lost a lesser number of lives while expending a greater amount of missiles to murder a vast and ever-increasing number of Ukrainian civilians.
The America Civil War is known by military historians as the first Total War. The Russia-Ukraine War will be known to more than just military historians as the first true Terrorist War.
And for what?