June 17, 2026, was a dark day for the Russian military.
Why? That was the day when the news broke about a grim milestone being reached.
1.4 million.
That’s how many casualties Russia has suffered since Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and it is a morbid figure that showcases just how much of a catastrophic failure the supposed “special military operation” has been.
Even a psychopath like Putin has to panic when he sees that number.
Not because he cares about the losses.
Putin thinks nothing of the troops who die for his cause.
No, Putin is panicking for a simple reason: He knows this isn’t sustainable.
And he’s turning to increasingly desperate options just to keep the meat moving into Ukraine.
Let’s start with the 1.4 million casualties.
We haven’t plucked that figure out of the sky.
It comes from NATO officials, who say that Russia has suffered somewhere between 1.3 and 1.45 million casualties since Putin started his war, and that around 500,000 of those casualties are deaths.
That’s 500,000 Russians who will never return to their army.
Never see their families again.
Never live to see an end to a fight that their psychopathic dictator only started so he could secure his legacy as one of the great conquerors of Russian history.
What a waste.
The numbers the NATO officials quote, which were reported by United24 Media, roughly align with the number of casualties Ukraine itself claims to have caused.
Ukraine puts the number at 1,388,050 as of June 18.
With Russia losing about 1,000 soldiers per day, and sometimes more, that means there are roughly 12 days from June 18 until the 1.4 million is reached, by Ukraine’s reckoning.
So, the last day of June is the big one for Putin.
June 30 will be the day when Russia reaches a milestone that marks the Ukraine invasion as the single most disastrous modern military campaign conducted by a supposed major power.
We know Putin cares only about his legacy.
But we didn’t realize he was so determined to write his name into the history books in literally any way that he could.
Perhaps the craziest thing about the sheer scale of these losses isn’t the 1.
4 million dead, but the fact that Putin doesn’t seem like he’s going to stop.
Yes, he’s panicking.
And he’s definitely desperate, as the litany of new measures he’s putting into place that we’ll share soon will show you.
But NATO says that despite the casualties, there is no sign of any sort of significant shift in Russia’s operational tempo or preparations for its summer offensive.
Putin wants to stay the course, despite the fact that even he should surely recognize just how many more will die due to his psychopathy.
A little more context goes a long way here.
On June 3, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte highlighted the dire state of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“Russia is losing about 30,000 troops a month.
That means it loses more in a single month than the Soviet Union did during its ten years in Afghanistan.
The figures are extraordinary,” Rutte declared.
“Extraordinary” is one way to put it.
We would use “insane.
” Rutte went on to call Putin out not only for the losses, which are indeed massive compared to Russia’s last major military campaign, but also for how Russia sends its soldiers to the front.
“You’ve been thrown into a rodeo.
You are being given gear and equipment that don’t meet your needs.
You are being sent [to the front] with a high chance of being wounded or killed.
” If Putin has a soul, that accusation would rattle him.
As it stands, he can’t really argue with anything that Rutte said.
If anything, Rutte is being a little generous to Putin when it comes to the losses that he oversees each month.
He’s absolutely right that Russia loses more soldiers each month than it lost in all of the Afghanistan War that the Soviet Union waged.
According to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, Russia experienced about 15,000 casualties during that ten-year conflict.
So, it’s not just “more”.
It’s twice as many casualties every single month as Russia experienced in a decade of war against Afghanistan.
And coming back to the 1.
4 million total, that’s more than any major power has experienced since World War II.
In fact, Russia is building on a record that it had already set months ago here.
On January 28, Euronews wrote about a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS, which exposed how the 1.
2 million casualties Russia had experienced at the time were a record for any major power in over 80 years.
It also offered some comparisons with the U.
S.
54,246 deaths in the Korean War.
47,434 in the Vietnam War.
Russia blew past all of that years ago in Ukraine, and these were wars fought decades ago, without all of the modern equipment that the U.
S.
brings to the table today.
If you want a more recent comparison, look to Operation Epic Fury in Iran.
By April 8, that war had cost the U.
S.
394 casualties, 13 of whom had been killed.
As tragic as this undoubtedly is, it shows the difference between a modern war machine and the ancient attritional strategy that Russia uses in Ukraine.
Russia isn’t fighting a modern war.
All it has done is create a meat grinder that kills its own soldiers for paltry gains in Ukraine.
The psychopath in the Kremlin hot seat has also officially fulfilled a prediction made back in January.
The same CSIS report that highlighted the true scale of the 1.
2 million casualties also said that it was likely that total casualties across both sides in the Ukraine war would likely hit two million by the spring.
According to The Kyiv Independent, Ukraine has suffered somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties since the beginning of Putin’s invasion.
Add Russia’s 1.
4 million to Ukraine’s high end of 600,000, and what do you get? Two million.
Just as the CSIS said.
Putin’s predictability is his biggest enemy in Ukraine, but the psycho can’t seem to steer away from the course on which he has set Russia.
And that’s a problem because none of this is sustainable.
At least, not anymore.
A few years ago, Putin could afford to sacrifice tens of thousands of soldiers because it looked like the well would never dry up.
But in 2026, Russia is already fighting with a significant shortage of manpower, the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Andrii Hnatov, said on May 15.
“The enemy’s losses are approaching the number of contract soldiers being recruited to replenish their ranks, and at times even exceed it.
In fact, Russia is already conducting combat operations amid a significant manpower shortage.
And this situation, according to our estimates, will only intensify,” Hnatov said just a month before Russia reached its latest milestone.
And his claims of Russian recruiters struggling to find volunteers are backed by a June 14 CNN report, which says that Russian volunteer soldier recruitment during the first quarter of 2026 was down 20% compared to 2025, and that even ridiculous financial incentives that the Kremlin is offering to prospective volunteers aren’t enough to convince people who know that heading to Ukraine is a death sentence.
Somewhere in a Russian bunker, Putin is panicking.
But not for the reasons you might think.
Anybody else would look at the scale of the devastation being wrought on their own country and realize that it has all gone too far.
They would have some compassion.
They would realize that the time for pulling soldiers out of Ukraine is long past due.
But not Putin.
He doesn’t panic about the scale of the death or what people might do in response.
Putin is supremely confident in the power structure he has created.
No, what a psychopath like Putin truly panics over is simple: Where can he get more soldiers? That is all that Putin cares about as he forces Russia to endure a war that has led to 1.
4 million casualties and counting.
And Putin has some solutions.
His problem is that each is crazier than the last, and none are what he needs to win the war in Ukraine.
All they will do is provide more people for Putin to use as cannon fodder.
Nothing will change about the strategy Russia uses.
But before we reveal the ridiculous solutions to its manpower crisis that Putin has concocted, this is a reminder that you’re watching The Military Show.
If you’re getting value from the channel, then there’s a lot more where this comes from.
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In truth, Putin’s crazy methods of shoring up the Russian numbers started long before Russia hit its latest and most depressing milestone.
Several years ago, Putin came up with the “brilliant” idea to start recruiting soldiers out of Russian prisons.
The offer was always simple – serve in Ukraine and you’ll have your sentence commuted.
Become a hero of Russia, and your crimes will be forgotten.
Putin probably started rubbing his hands with glee when scores of criminals chose to sign up.
After all, he wasn’t just getting everyday people here.
Murderers, deviants, and people accustomed to brutality were going to stream into Ukraine thanks to his new scheme.
And, you know, people who got drunk in public.
But mostly the killers.
By January 2025, Russia had managed to recruit 180,000 convicts, per Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
And it didn’t matter that these criminal soldiers weren’t well-trained.
Quantity over quality has been Putin’s way since he started his way, and he had a whole lot of quantity entering the Russian ranks.
This strategy for making up the numbers was desperate enough a couple of years ago.
But even the prisoner pipeline is starting to dry up.
By May 2026, Russia’s prison population had fallen by about 40%.
Russia sending convicts into Ukraine was one of the main reasons why, but this decline in the prisoner population would have worried Putin.
Such a marked decline would mean that he’d soon start struggling to get more soldiers from the gulags.
And sure enough, that’s what’s happening.
As the few convicts who return from Ukraine contribute to rising crime levels inside Russia, Putin is having to find ever more ludicrous ways to prop up his army.
First, he came for the prisoners.
Now, Putin is coming for the students.
In early June, Ukraine’s “I Want to Live” project, which provides resources to Russian soldiers to help them to surrender to Ukraine and get out of the meat grinder into which Putin forces them, published a list that revealed that 1,059 Russian students have joined Putin’s military.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that these students are willing volunteers.
Many are pressured into joining the military by a stream of recruiters who are spending their time on college campuses to convince the coming generation of Russian men to sacrifice themselves to Putin’s ambition.
“In the fifth year of Russia’s invasion, agitators and military enlistment officers are walking through Russian universities to recruit yesterday’s schoolchildren for war.
Prison inmates have almost run out, so now they have to send children to the front,” the report declares.
The Kremlin is going all-in on this recruitment approach.
A June 7 report by Australia’s ABC news network says that Russian higher-ups have set a quota of 2% of all male students to be recruited into the military.
To convince these youngsters to sign up, Russia offers to wipe all of their tuition fees and to wipe poor grades off their records, thus dangling the carrot of a fresh start in front of students.
As long as they make it out of Ukraine.
1.
4 million of their comrades and counting have failed to do that.
CNN also looked into this student recruiting strategy, and the outlet received some direct messages from those whom Russia is targeting.
“The pressure is colossal,” one student claimed, with another adding, “Throughout the uni, there are posters about the UAV forces literally everywhere.
” Of course, recruiting young people who have just turned 18 to the military is hardly a new tactic.
But the desperation here is that Putin has already burned through a huge portion of Russia’s current generation of men, and he’s now targeting people who are supposed to be among Russia’s best and brightest to fight in the Ukraine war rather than go on to do whatever their educations would have allowed them to do.
The current generation wasn’t enough.
Putin is willing to sacrifice the next generation, too.
Still, a little over 1,000 students isn’t a great return for this particular strategy.
So, the desperation gets deeper in the mind of the Russian psychopath.
And to feed Putin’s never-ending desire for more soldiers, the recruitment efforts are going beyond the study halls and into the workplaces.
Or, should we say, they’d gone beyond the study halls before the Kremlin was setting student recruitment quotas.
At the end of March, The Moscow Times reported that the governor of Ryazan, Pavel Malkov, has set military recruitment quotas that apply to all businesses operating in the region.
Any firm that had up to 300 employees or more had to nominate two “candidates” for the Russian military.
If a company had more than 500 employees, then the number of “candidates” went up to five.
Full disclosure – this doesn’t appear to be a Russia-wide, Kremlin-led policy.
But it’s a symptom of the disease that is Russia’s intense need to recruit soldiers.
Malkov wouldn’t be doing this if Russia hadn’t destroyed the lives of 1.
4 million of its own soldiers, thus creating a situation where volunteer recruitment is never enough.
Regional quotas have to be met to please the psychopath, and this seems to be the only thing Malkov can think of to stand a chance.
Malkov says that these workplace quotas have to be put in place by September 20.
We’re willing to bet that a few more Russian regions will have similar ideas of stripping workplaces for soldiers as they find Putin’s quotas impossible to hit.
How about we come back to policies that Putin actively approves? As Russia deals with its 2026 recruitment crisis, the Kremlin is doing more of something that it was already doing – throwing money at the problem.
Cash has always been the way that Russia recruits its volunteers, but the numbers now are ballooning well beyond anything that we’ve seen before.
In a June 14 report, RBC-Ukraine revealed that Russia is now advertising signing bonuses of up to $80,000.
These aren’t wages.
These are the one-off fees that Russia gives to any volunteer who signs up for the Ukraine war.
And on top of that, Putin’s desperation shines through with an offer to provide debt relief up to $140,000 for volunteers who have found themselves in financial holes.
Once again, the Kremlin is trying to appeal to those who are struggling by offering a way out of their problems.
The thing is, the route to that way out is patrolled by Ukrainian drones, and 1.
4 million people have already failed to get to the end of that particular road.
What makes these record-breaking sums even more remarkable is that it wasn’t long ago that many of Russia’s regions were having to scale back on their signing bonuses because of the terrible impact that they were having on the public purse.
Back in October, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that the likes of Tatarstan and Samara had pushed their bonuses down to the federal minimum of $5,000.
Less than a year later, the bonuses are 16 times that minimum.
This isn’t happening because Russia is suddenly rolling in cash.
This is all down to Putin’s desire to make the worst modern military losses even worse, to the point where he’s willing to cripple entire regional economies just to get a few more volunteers to sign up.
How about some more desperation? Beyond pressuring university students, forcing workplaces to nominate “candidates,” and offering money that Russia doesn’t have, Putin is also looking beyond his own territory.
Africa is a target.
Specifically, young African men that Russia believes it can lure into becoming the latest numbers added to the 1.
4 million.
On June 18, Euronews reported that Ukraine’s military intelligence has revealed that Russia has set up a growing network of “Russian Houses” throughout Africa.
Those houses have become a military recruitment pipeline, as the Kremlin offers jobs and education as a false pretense used to tempt young men through the door.
The lies continue all the way until the unfortunate person who listened to the sick siren call ends up in a UAV factory or, in many cases, on the front lines that have already claimed so many of Russia’s people.
The Africa Center for Strategic Studies says that this situation is “a confluence of disinformation, human trafficking, and foreign interference,” and it has led to Africa becoming a major contributor to the 30,000 foreign nationals who are fighting in Russia’s military.
Russia can’t even convince these people to fight.
It has to lie and deceive to get them to sign up in the first place, only to send them onto a battlefield that will almost inevitably claim their lives.
Every move that Putin makes reeks of his desperation.
The psychopath knows that he’s cornered.
He knows that he has humiliated himself on the global stage, and that 1.
4 million casualties are the worst that any modern military has suffered since World War II.
But he isn’t going to stop.
And the desperation that now informs every decision that Putin makes has become dangerous.
That’s the opinion of The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall, who asks the key question: “What will Putin do if and when his Kremlin bubble bursts and it suddenly dawns on him that a devastating strategic and personal defeat looms?” The answer isn’t what any normal leader would do.
Such a shot to the ego would bruise the Kremlin’s chief psycho so badly, Tisdall says, that his response wouldn’t be to withdraw.
Putin would expand.
A war that has been confined to Ukraine up until this point may grow to include NATO member nations in Europe, which, in turn, would lead to the triggering of Article 5 and a war that engulfs the entire continent.
Putin’s panic could result in him making the most stupid decision that he has made since he invaded Ukraine.
That would be devastating for Russia.
The largest military disaster in modern history would end up being the biggest crisis that has engulfed Russia since World War II.
None of this is going to get better for Russia, even if Putin doesn’t slide so deep into his own insanity that he extends the Ukraine war.
The death will keep on coming, and we know that because Ukraine is setting records all over.
Soldiers, artillery, armor, logistics – all are being destroyed in numbers never seen before.
And you can find out all about that, and why these numbers are disastrous for Putin’s dream of seizing the Donbas by September, in our video.
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