Who is going to run out of men sooner and have to end the war? Russia or Ukraine? Much has been made of the slowdown of Russia’s volunteer recruitment drive which is now unable to replace the estimated 30,000 dead and wounded a month, but little reporting is devoted to the same problem that Ukraine is facing with its forced conscription problem.

It’s an important dynamic. Once the numbers fall too far armies tend to collapse. The psychology of a soldier is if say 3% of your compatriots die on the frontline then that is seen as an acceptable risk, but if as many as one in four are being killed at some point the soldier starts to believe death is inevitable and will try to leave.

There has been a spate of “Russia is losing the war” commentaries of late as the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) battlefield progress has slowed to a standstill in the last month and has even reversed.

However, according to a note from Peter Turchin, the Project Leader at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, who developed a Attritional Warfare Model, or AWM (based on the Lanchester equations), the model suggests that the Russian forces continue to hold the advantage in the war in Ukraine and quantitative models of attritional warfare suggest it is the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), not Russia, that may be approaching a critical manpower threshold.

"The AWM is quite straightforward–essentially, an accounting device. The key assumptions are (1) future dynamics of war materiel production by the contenders, (2) how materiel is translated into casualties, and (3) how the end point is determined," said in the original paper. "But the overall message is very clear. Once the war settled into the attrition phase (by the end of 2022), and it was clear that Western sanctions failed to shut down Russian productive capacity, the eventual outcome became, essentially, a mathematical certainty... ultimately, Russian victory."

A simplified version of this argument is that Russia is bigger and has more people than Ukraine, so without effective sanctions eventually it will just steamroll Ukraine's resistance as it can fight for longer. Turchin points out that a black swan event, like drone innovation, could up-end this assumption, but so far there has been no major breakthrough to give either side a definitiave advnage after over four years of war.

Writing on May 21, Turchin argued that coverage of the conflict had been overshadowed by the escalating confrontation involving Iran, the US and Israel, while western commentary continued to portray the war as either stalemated or turning against Moscow.

“But quantitative models of attritional warfare say otherwise: Russia continues to dominate the battlefield and the eventual outcome, barring a Black Swan event, is inevitable defeat of Ukraine,” Turchin wrote.

Turchin said more recent analysis by Warwick Powell had reached broadly similar conclusions, although using different assumptions about the point at which Ukrainian military capacity would begin to collapse.

Powell’s model assumes “that the beginning of the end for Ukraine will happen when its army size declines below a certain threshold (0.65-0.73 of the initial size of 550,000)”.

“From that point, Ukrainian losses will accelerate and the full collapse will happen once the army size is below 50% of the prior peak,” Turchin wrote, adding that Powell’s model projected “the tipping point will happen in July-September”.

Of course a lot of uncertainty remains as the assumptions are dependent on variables that are difficult to measure, especially the growing role of drone warfare on the battlefield, which are increasingly replacing men. As IntelliNews reported, Ukraine has just introduced robo-soldiers, fully autonomous fighting robots, that have already successfully won one encounter with the AFR.

“What’s important is the casualty rate inflicted on the Ukrainian army by the Russians, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a result of artillery, air bombing, or drones,” he wrote. Those numbers remain a closely guarded state secret.

Ukraine is struggling much harder to replenish troop numbers after more than four years of war than Russia is. Recent research shows with some confidence (based on budget spending on wages and bonuses) that Russia’s voluntary recruitment drive has fallen to some 20,000 per month, or around 70% of those that have been removed from the fighting.

There is no reliable official figure for Ukraine’s current monthly casualty or recruitment rate. Both Kyiv and Moscow tightly control casualty information, and outside estimates vary widely. Still, Ukraine is believed to be losing as many men as Russia, somewhere in the range of 20,000-35,000 total casualties per month in periods of heavy fighting. At the same time Ukraine is generally estimated to be recruiting or mobilising about 15,000-30,000 personnel per month – again on a par with Russia. However, those are forced recruits who are very reluctant to fight. Separately, Ukraine has reported at least 100,000 cases have been brought against deserters, the total number of which experts estimate to be around 250,000 – significantly higher than Russia’s problem with soldiers going AWOL.

Clearly Bankova is growing increasingly desperate to find fresh troops. Kyiv lowered the mobilisation age from 27 to 25 in 2024 and has intensified recruitment efforts, while European allies continue to pay lip service to the idea of ejecting male military age Ukrainian refugees sheltering in their countries, without taking any action. At home, footage of the increasingly violent snatch squads grabbing men from the street are widely circulating on social media and the violence of the reaction to the press gangs is also escalating.

An article by Branko Marcetic in Responsible Statecraft, reports a sharp rise in complaints against enlistment officers received by Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets. Complaints rose from 18 in 2022 to 6,127 in 2025, while violent attacks against enlistment officers increased from five incidents in all of 2022 to 117 just during the first four months of 2026. At least three recruitment officers have already been killed by men resisting recruitment.

2022 — 18

2023 — 514

2024 — 3312

2025 — 6127  

Source: Kyiv Independent

“Warwick estimates that (as of May 14) that on the Ukrainian side net daily loss rate is 900–1,700 units,” Turchin wrote, adding that Powell estimated Ukraine’s effective force had declined to between 320,000 and 380,000 personnel from a peak of 550,000.

“When will these pressures reach the breaking point?” Turchin asked. “Powell thinks by September of this year. But I would be much more cautious, because the nature of such dynamical processes resists precise predictions.”