Can Putin's Regime Be Defeated? If so, How?
The West has shown a profound lack of resolve and commitment to do what is right and in their societies self-interest. But the biggest failure in the West is the failure to contemplate Putin's defeat.
There are good reasons to believe that the Putin regime can be defeated simply by inflicting sufficient harm on the society that there is major social upheaval, perhaps culminating in revolution and the collapse of the regime. There are at least two historical precedents for this happening:
(1) the 1917 Revolution;
(2) the 1989 USSR Collapse, bringing the Soviet-Afghan war to an end.
The causal link between casualties and the associated regime change is substantially more clear in the case of 1917; but casualties in the Soviet-Afghanistan war are generally considered an important contributing factor.
The easiest means to use these historical precedents as empirical foundations, is to determine the average rate of daily casualties in both cases, and then to compare them to the present conflict.
In order of highest to lowest rate of casualties per day:
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Russian Empire in WWI (~175,100,000 Pop.)
1,185 days
8,261,000 casualties (4.7% of the total Pop. of the Russian Empire)
https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/reperes112018.pdf
6,971 casualties per day
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Putin Regime in Russo-Ukrainian War (between 24 February 2022 and 16 April 2024) (143,400,000 Pop.)
784 days
455,340 (as of 16 April 2024) (0.3% of the total Pop of the Russian Federation)
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/
580 casualties per day
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USSR in Soviet-Afghan War (286,000,000 Pop.)
3,703 days
92,243 (mid point between the est range) (0.032% of the total Pop of USSR)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War
24.9 casualties per day
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In November 1917, the Russian Empire (RE) had suffered approximately 8,261,000 casualties (killed and wounded). That scale of loss accumulated over a mere 1,185 days (approximately 3 years and 3 months). This works out to a mean rate of 6,971 casualties per day.
The Russian Federation (RF) has suffered about 580 casualties per day as of the time of editing this essay (16 April 2024). I have observed that rate increase three times in the last two months (from about 546 per day in Feb, to 569 in March and now 580 in April 2024). These anecdotal observations suggests that the daily rate suffered by RF is increasing by about 17 per month, or 0.567 per day (~206 per year). I presume if one were to go back to older data the pattern would likely hold true over much of the past two years.
It seems that this is a core feature of Ukraine's strategy to defeat Putin's regime: cause as many casualties as possible, while preserving as many of their own people's lives as possible, and simultaneously engaging in information warfare (e.g., videos of Orcs dying ignobly intended for Russian audiences) and economic warfare (bombing infrastructure and in particular petroleum industry) intended to worsen the living conditions of the average Russian.
Those 8.26 million casualties suffered by Tsar Nicholas regime back in 1914 through 1917--and which, along with dire economic hardship, eventually led to his downfall and demise and indeed the end of that entire dynasty of monarchic rule over the Russian Empire--represented approximately 4.7% of its 175.1m population. 4.7% of the population of the Russian Federation today (143.4m) would be 6,739,800.
With Ukraine claiming only 455,340 Russian casualties to date, there is clearly a good ways to go for Ukraine to impose a proportionally equivalent toll on modern RF as was imposed on early 20th century RE.
6,739,800 [4.7% of RF pop] - 455,340 [current RF casualties]
= 6,284,460 [casualties to reach ~4.7% of RF pop]
/ 580 [avg. RF rate so far] = 10,588 days which is roughly 29 years
Of course, this does NOT mean that "it will take Ukraine 29 years" to provoke a revolution in Russia, and moreover, it may be that Ukraine will never be successful in that undertaking. But Ukraine is clearly not intent on taking territory from Russia, advancing on Moscow, and forcing Russia to surrender by that path. It would seem that Ukraine's best hope is to inflict sufficient casualties and harm on Russian society and economics that Putin is forced to quit his war, or perhaps even overthrown.
The actual "breaking point" for Putin's regime could lie anywhere between the current situation and the 4.7% total losses outlined above. However, it seems unlikely that the RF of 2024 is as tolerant of losses as was RE in 1917. It seems more likely that the Putin regime would suffer a collapse well before 4.7% losses. So that is the "goal" Ukraine should strive for and hopefully the breaking point of Putin's Russia will prove to be far less.
My hunch is that the breaking point for Russian society is unlikely to be in excess of 3 million casualties or perhaps 4 million at most. I cannot offer a peer-review worthy analysis to support this hunch. But we do have the comparison to WWI to work from.
My hunch is that the relative standard of living in modern Russian Federation (RF) compared to 1917 Russian Empire (RE) is likely greater by a factor of 10x if all possible indices were aggregated. That scale of analysis is beyond the scope of this brief essay. However, it isn't hard to get a glimpse at one of the indicators of standard of living: GDP per capita.
In 1917 RE's GDP per capita was ~1,500 https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/russias-national-income-war-and-revolution-1913-1928
In 2005 it was more like 6,400 and it has likely stayed about the same or increased, at least up until 2014.
This suggests that GDP per capita is 4 to 5 times greater in early 21st century RF than it was in early 20th century RE. The simple expectation would be that the tolerance for senseless loss of life and limb in support of the Tsar/President's imperialistic fantasies correlates negatively with GDP per capita: people with more to lose are less likely to suffer from "corpse obedience," all else being equal.
If we divide that 4.7% (the total casualties suffered by RE in WWI) by 4 (how many times larger modern RF GDP per capita is than was 1917 RE) we get 1.175%.
Thus, if GDP per capita is a reasonable indicator of casualty tolerance, this would mean that, while it required a total of 4.7% of the population of the Russian Empire to become casualties in WWI in order to provoke the Russian Revolution, it may only require 1.175% of the population of today’s Russian Federation to become casualties to provoke a similar revolution.
If Russian population is 143,400,000 today and 1.175% of the total population as casualties is the threshold for the collapse, that would mean that 1,684,950 is the number of Russian casualties which Ukraine should seek to cause.
1,684,950 - 455,340 = 1,229,610
[Inferred total casualties to provoke Revolution] - [Total casualties to date] = [Casualties remaining to reach inferred threshold]
1,229,610 / 580 = 2,120.02
[Casualties remaining to reach inferred threshold] / [Current mean daily casualty rate] = [Days to reach inferred threshold]
2,120 days is only 5.8 years, and this does not take account of potential increases in the rate at which Ukraine is able to cause casualties in the Russian Federation Orc horde.
However, I think we should all be prepared for the possibility that the number is in the ballpark of twice that many = 3,369,900, or as I said "3 to 4 million."
What this means is that: the level of support Ukraine needs is easily 10 to 20 times higher than the highest levels which have ever been broached by any serious Western leaders. If Ukraine can increase its destruction of the Orc horde by a factor of 10x, then based on this abstract analysis, it may be possible to break the Putin regime within no more than 3 more years of war. It may also be that Putin's regime is actually far more fragile than this analysis has assumed and Ukraine might achieve victory in a reasonable time frame, even with the current modest rate of "580" casualties per day imposed on the Orc Horde. But that is not the proper way to contemplate success in warfare. The proper way to strive for success in warfare is, to put it quite simply "overkill.