The leaked death toll that shows how Putin’s Russia could unravel

Detailed summary

Vladimir Putin’s fascination with rewriting the past explains one of the central paradoxes of the war against Ukraine: how it can yield so many casualties without securing a…

Vladimir Putin’s fascination with rewriting the past explains one of the central paradoxes of the war against Ukraine: how it can yield so many casualties without securing a victory after nearly five years – but with no imminent danger to his grip on the Kremlin and a determination to pour more Russian lives into the fray?

Even by the Kremlin leader’s tendency to produce photo negative versions of the truth, Putin’s recent resort to comparisons of his “special operation” in Ukraine with the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s are bizarre – and telling.

The invasion which began as a show of Brezhnev-era Soviet bravura and tank warfare failed to subdue the Mujahideen, sacrificed some 15,000 combatants on the Russian side to fatal guerilla attacks and exposed the weaknesses of Soviet military doctrine, emboldening revolt in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. The dreadful aftermath – tens of thousands of wounded and PTSD-afflicted veterans was duly relegated to the margins of the Kremlin’s narratives.

But as Putin has reclaimed the Soviet past as a template for his rule today, school visits and commemorations cite Afghanistan as embodying “military brotherhood traditions” and deploy veterans more openly than in the neglect of previous decades for “military and patriotic education of young people”.

The war which Mikhail Gorbachev termed a “bleeding wound” is also a reminder that what happens on battlefields carries long shadows. I was a Moscow correspondent in 1996, when the news broke that Mohammed Najibullah, the former Communist backed leader had been assassinated by the Taliban in a raid on a UN compound – his body hung from a pole in Kabul in the final gesture of defiance to Moscow. By then, the Soviet system itself had crumbled. This last week marked 37 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe.

For Putin today, these conjoined events are not warnings from history against military interventions.

That…

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