Ukraine's bold incursion into the Kursk region of Russia on August 6 has—as one correspondent covering the conflict described—"upend[ed] assumptions" about Russia's capacity to continue prosecuting this war.
This is not an outlook prompted by Ukraine's surprising territorial gains. In February 2022 Russians were promised a lightning-speed takeover of Ukraine that never came to pass. Hundreds of thousands are now dead, and among the Russian population, there are increasing negative impressions of the efficacy of President Vladimir Putin's rule.
A first-order consequence of this public mood is a dampening effect on Putin's efforts to mobilize more military manpower. The Russian Army requires 25,000 new replacements per month, which are increasingly difficult to come by.
In parallel, a shortage of 400,000 workers for the defense industry slows down replacing military hardware destroyed in battle. The combination could force Moscow to either reduce its war effort or risk a collapse of its military—or even a breakup of Russia itself.
Historians are fond of saying, "Russia is a country where everything changes in five years, but nothing changes in a hundred." Slightly more than a century ago, another Russian leader found himself with an underequipped army being crippled by insufficient supplies of ammunition—causing tens of thousands of battlefield losses per month.
These astronomical numbers became one of the final nails in the coffin of Russia's last Romanov ruler, Tsar Nicholas II. His decision to leave the imperial capital St. Petersburg to take personal command was another, as he was a poor military leader and was then blamed for every defeat.
The worst problem was World War I-era Russia's industry could not produce enough ammunition. Its primitive transport network could not meet wartime demands for massive deliveries of munitions, food, clothing, and medical care to the front.
By March 1917, the nation was in revolt and the tsar forced to abdicate. Troops began deserting the front to join the revolutionaries in St. Petersburg. In November, a government led by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks took control of the nation, founded the USSR, and the rest is history.
Russian regimes have been toppled by revolutions on three occasions—1905, 1917, and in 1990—each time due to the state trying to sustain a war or a military buildup for which it lacked resources. The dilemmas of Putin's military to date have thus increased speculation the Ukraine war could make this a fourth time.
In an interview for Frontline, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former British Army officer and tank commander with 23 years of service who fought in the First Gulf War, describes Putin's losses in Ukraine as at "industrial scale" and "unsustainable." Furloughing convicts in Russia and sending them to the front, where many are soon killed, is Putin's latest desperation move to compensate, de Bretton-Gordon said.
"I shouldn't think that there's virtually a prison in Russia with any people in it because they're all at the front," said de Bretton-Gordon.
This relentless military manpower mobilization is one inititative that has staved off a 1917-style revolt. Another is myriad efforts—some just pure improvisation—to replace destroyed equipment by any means possible.
As the Economist reported in mid-July, "Russia seems able to go on finding another 25,000 or so soldiers each month to retain around 470,000 men at the front, although it is having to pay more for them. Production of missiles to strike Ukrainian infrastructure is also surging."
"But for all the talk of Russia having become a war economy, with some 8% of its GDP devoted to military spending, it is able to replace its staggering losses of tanks, armoured infantry vehicles and artillery only by drawing out of storage and refurbishing stocks built up in the Soviet era," the Economist went on. "Huge though these stocks are, they are not infinite."
Stepping into the breach to alleviate this deficit are China, North Korea, and Iran.
At a meeting with Putin prior to the February 2022 invasion, Chinese Communist Party dictator Xi Jinping declared that the friendship between the two states "has no limits, [and] there are no 'forbidden' areas of cooperation." Since this "no limits" partnership was inaugurated, Beijing has supplied a steady and expanding stream of materiel and other military items to Russia.
The Carnegie Endowment's analysis of Chinese customs service data show Beijing exporting in excess of $300 million per month in dual-use items to Moscow. These include vital shipments of electronic components. Last year, trade between the two nations reached a record high of $240 billion, an increase of more than 64 percent since prewar levels in 2021.
In July 2023, a report issued by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that Beijing is "pursuing a variety of economic support mechanisms for Russia that mitigate both the impact of Western sanctions and export controls."
The same document concludes that Chinese defense enterprises have shipped "navigation equipment, parts for fighter jets, and other dual-use technology to Russian defense companies." As of March 2024, China had shipped more than $12 million in drones and drone parts to Russia.
During the July NATO summit in Washington, D.C., China was denounced for its "large-scale support for Russia's defense industrial base," which the alliance assesses as a critical lifeline sustaining Moscow's war effort. North Korea and Iran were both charged with "fueling" Putin's war with "direct military support," and Pyongyang was singled out for its exports of "artillery shells and ballistic missiles."
In a recent interview, South Korean defense minister Shin Wonsik estimated 10,000 shipping containers had been sent by North Korea to Russia, containing up to 4.8 million artillery shells. Pyongyang has also shipped dozens of ballistic missiles that Russia now fires on mostly civilian targets in Ukraine.
In exchange, Moscow is sharing a cornucopia of defense technology with the North Koreans. These are items long held back from export to the country, which will now bolster dictator Kim Jong Un's spy satellite projects and facilitate production of new-generation main battle tanks and fighter aircraft for the Korean People's Army.
Now threatened by further U.S. and EU sanctions, Beijing has resorted to trans-shipping military items through Belarus, a former Soviet Republic that borders Ukraine and is Moscow's most pliable ally in Europe, in order to not leave any "fingerprints" of Xi's support for Putin’s war.
The Belarusian opposition group BelPol has obtained contracts, payment records, and other information from multiple industry sources detailing multiple transactions between companies in Belarus and China. One contract shows Shenzhen-based Green Cycle Energy company processing a large December order from the Belarussian defense firm BelOMO Holding. The order was for 3,000 components of the LAD-21T laser module, a state-of-the-art guidance system technology used for precision laser-guided bombs and missiles.
These and other Chinese-made electro-optics give Russian munitions manufacturers the ability to produce precision-guided, high-yield weapons that have serious effects on the Ukraine war effort.
Russia has long been dropping massive precision-guided glide bombs on Ukrainian cities and military targets. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has said 3,000 such bombs were dropped on his country in March 2024 alone. Experts who spoke to the BBC state these bombs give the Russians "much of the functionality of a multi-million dollar missile, but for a fraction of the cost," estimated at only $20,000 to $30,000 per unit.
The hope of millions of Ukrainians suffering from the war is that the strain on the Russian military will force it to "crack," as more than one retired senior NATO commander explained to the Washington Free Beacon, causing Moscow's war effort to collapse.
But writing in the Atlantic in June, Russian-born American historian Anastasia Edel explained why the Russian mentality works against this eventuality.
"In peacetime, conformism, nepotism, a weak rule of law, and corruption do not inspire the innovation and initiative necessary for economic advancement," Edel writes. "But when war comes, Russia suddenly starts humming along. The very things that hamper Russia in peace—the rigidity of its authoritarianism; its top-down, centralized system of government; its machinery of repression; and its command economy—become assets during periods of conflict because they allow the government to quickly and ruthlessly mobilize society and industry for its war effort, making up for the technological backwardness and social atomization that otherwise typify the country."
"For Putin, this war is like riding a bicycle," says a longtime Belarus opposition leader now based in Washington. "As long as he keeps 'pedaling'—a metaphor for maintaining the conflict at a high tempo—he stays upright. He is balanced, he is moving forward. The minute he stops, however, balance is gone and the bicycle and rider collapse to the ground. If the war stops, Putin and his system collapse. So, he cannot afford for Europe, the Middle East, the world in general to be at peace—for the chaos and destruction to end. That chaos keeps him in power."
On August 26, North Korean monitoring site NKNews.org reported a Russian government Tu-154 VIP passenger jet taking off from Vladivostok airport and landing in Pyongyang—carrying what was said to be a senior Russian trade delegation—the second such flight this month.
The Russian Far East region where the flight originated is home to defense enterprises that Kim has visited and from which he is counting on receiving generous technological assistance.
"This is the quid pro quo for those millions of artillery shells sent to Putin," said a NATO military analyst of North Korean developments. "This is what keeps his war machine from falling apart. But the weapons [North Korea] will now be able to build with this Russian assistance will be yet another problem for us all for decades to come."
Reuben F. Johnson is a correspondent for Breaking Defense who survived the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.