4 Years Later: What Russia’s Aggression in Ukraine Has Cost It and What It’s Gained

Introduction

Is Vladimir Putin a rational actor who weighs costs and gains before making a momentous decision, such as whether to invade another country? Multiple scholars of Putin assert he is. If so, the fourth anniversary of Putin’s announcement of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine is an appropriate opportunity for Russia Matters’ staff to revisit¹ the costs and benefits of the ongoing invasion for the Russian dictator and the country he rules. 

Before we do so, however, we must note that providing quantitative estimates of these costs and benefits is, predictably, very challenging; as it is difficult to find rigorous research that separates the impacts of the aggression on aspects such as, for instance, Russia’s economic output, from other factors that impact its GDP. It is also difficult to estimate the duration of many of these costs, given varying degrees of the Kremlin’s success at reducing them through, for instance, the evasion of sanctions imposed on Russia in the course of the invasion, which has already been underway longer than the Soviets’ war against Nazi Germany. 

While trying to estimate the “pros” and “cons” of the invasion for Russia, we of course acknowledge the horrendous costs which have been endured by Ukraine and Ukrainians, many of which we refer to below.

RUSSIA’S COSTS

Humanitarian impact: casualties, displacements, depopulation, veteran crime 

• Civilian losses: Russian authorities estimate that at least 7,254 Russian civilians have been killed in the conflict.² In contrast, the U.N. estimates 15,954 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the conflict.
• Military personnel losses: Estimates of the number of Russian servicemen killed or wounded or missing vary, ranging from 600,000 (late 2024) to 1,200,000 (January 2026, includes not only killed and injured, but also missing in action). The highest estimate of Russian KIAs has been so far made by Donald Trump: almost 1,000,000 killed (January 2025). If Trump’s estimate is accurate, then the daily rate of KIAs in the Russian army fighting in Ukraine was 3,488 per day in the period from Feb. 22, 2022, to Jan. 31, 2025, which is almost three times higher than, for instance, higher estimates of the casualties suffered by communist China’s People’s Liberation Army during the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 (see more estimates of the Russan-Ukrainian war’s military casualties in Table 1). Additionally, 84,568 Russian soldiers are missing, according to an April 2025 estimate by the Ukrainian Coordination Center for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, while 35,000 Ukrainian soldiers are missing, according to Trump's December 2024 estimate.
• External displacement: 1,000,000 (0.7% of Russia’s 2022 population) are estimated to have left Russia for economic or political reasons in the first year of the full-scale war. Between 15% and 45% have returned since then, so, between 550,000 and 850,000 Russian nationals remained in self-exile as of 2025. In comparison 3,700,000 Ukrainians are externally displaced.
  • All the Russia-specific factors described above have played a role in Russia’s depopulation. In 2021, Russia’s population according to World Bank figures was 144.7 million. By 2024, the latest year for which the World Bank has data, that number had dropped to 143.5 million. In 2024, Russia had 1.22 million births, barely above the lowest birth rate on record of 1.21 million births in 1999. In the first quarter of 2025, births fell to a low of 288,000 for the period, a figure not seen since the late 18^th to early 19^th centuries. In 2024, deaths outnumbered births by roughly 600,000—the steepest natural decline since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Rosstat (as reported by Bloomberg). 

In addition, the war has contributed to the following negative demographic and labor developments inside Russia:

• Internal displacement: At least 120,000 fled from Russia’s Kursk region, with 3,000 staying to live in the Ukrainian-controlled parts of this region (estimate in February 2025). With Russian forces recapturing most of the land that Ukrainian armed forces had captured in the Kursk and Belgorod regions of Russia, the number of Russian IDPs declined to 5,000 as of August 2025. This internal population displacement, when at its peak, and criticism of the authorities’ handling of these individuals’ plight created additional social and political pressure on Putin’s rule. In comparison, 6,900,000 Ukrainians are estimated to have become internally displaced persons.
• Violent crimes involving veterans, including offenses committed by convicts who were released from jail on the condition that they would join combat on the Russian side for 6 months or more: at least 551 individuals were killed by veterans while another 465 individuals endured grave bodily injuries at the veterans’ hands, according to a December 2025 estimate.
• Mental health: The number of Russian veterans suffering from PTSD is unknown, but we know that according to Russia’s official statistics, diagnosed cases of anxiety and depression rose 21% from 2020 to 2024. Prescriptions of antidepressants were up 18% year-on-year in January, The Economist reported in February 2026.
• Labor shortage: Russia's labor minister is reported to have told Putin last year that Russia will have a shortage of 2.4 million workers by 2030, according to RAND. To offset labor shortages, Russia issued roughly 240,000 work permits to foreign workers in 2025, recruiting labor from countries such as Cuba, India, North Korea and Sri Lanka, even as it has conscripted or intimidated many existing migrant workers, according to a February 2026 report by The Economist.³

Table 1: Estimates of military casualties on Russian and Ukrainian sides

Military equipment losses: As of February 2026, open-source analysts at Oryx estimated that 24,044 Russian military vehicles and other equipment have been destroyed, damaged or captured. Oryx’s February 2026 tally for Russian tanks and armored vehicles reached 13,864, reflecting grinding attrition on the ground. At least 361 Russian aircraft and 29 naval vessels have also been visually confirmed lost, according to Oryx.⁴ In comparison, Ukraine is estimated to have lost 11,380 military vehicles and equipment, including 5,596 tanks and armored vehicles, as of February 2026.

Damage caused to infrastructure: In March 2025, an RFE/RL investigation estimated that Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s energy sector had caused at least 60 billion rubles ($714 million) in damage. By August 2025, Ukrainian drone attacks had forced about 17% of Russia’s oil refining capacity offline in that month alone, according to Reuters calculations. The cumulative impact grew: As of October 2025, nearly 40% of Russia’s oil refining capacity had at some point been forced offline, with at least 70% of shutdowns directly linked to Ukrainian strikes, even though a November 2025 Reuters estimate put the actual fall in oil processing at just 3%. In January 2026, weeks-long Ukrainian strikes on energy infrastructure in western border regions such as Belgorod Oblast left heating at only 50% capacity and thousands without power. On Feb. 9, 2026, around 100,000 Belgorod residents lost running water after strike-induced power surges shut down two pumping stations. (For more details on infrastructure damage see the infographic below.)

Economic costs generated by Western sanctions: Russia, reportedly, remained the most heavily sanctioned country in the world in 2026. As of 2025, over 28,595 sanctions have been levied by 50 countries on Russia, according to Vladimir Putin himself and Forbes. The punitive measures, which include the freezing of $340 billion of Russian Central Bank reserves that remain frozen as of 2026, are estimated to have caused the following outcomes, arranged chronologically:

• A journalistic investigation estimated in March 2024 that Ukrainian strikes had rendered facilities which accounted for 1/6^th of the production of gasoline and diesel fuels in Russia non-operational.
• An April 2025 analysis by CSIS confirms that along with direct losses, Russia has suffered reduced foreign financing flows and higher financing costs.
• Russia’s energy sector lost an estimated $78.5 billion in exports earnings compared to a no-sanctions scenario from December 2022 to June 2024, according to the Kyiv School of Economics. Russia’s oil and gas revenues fell by almost 25% last year as prices dropped and sanctions forced discounts on Russian crude, according to Paul Sonne of the New York Times in a Feb. 24, 2026, assessment.
• Russia’s financial sector suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in “direct losses” from sanctions, according to an internal Russian Finance Ministry document obtained in the fall of 2024 by Bloomberg.
• As of Jan. 1, 2025, a total of 467 companies have completely exited Russia, according to the Kyiv School of Economics. An additional 80 companies left the Russian market in 2025, according to KSE.

The punitive measures are likely to have contributed to the following economic outcomes:

• Russia’s GDP declined by some 2.3% in 2022 before growing by 3.6% in 2023. The IMF estimates that the Russian economy then grew by 3.8% in 2024, but this growth slowed to 0.6% in 2025, according to IMF. IMF foresees Russia’s economic growth slowing down to 0.8% in 2026. We could not find any rigorously researched estimates of how much Russian GDP would have grown in a no-sanctions scenario, but macroeconomic research and trend analyses consistently conclude that sanctions have imposed cumulative costs, including reduced access to technology, capital and markets, which collectively suppress growth relative to pre-war trends, according to an April 2025 analysis by CSIS.
• The number of new businesses registered in 2025 was the lowest in 14 years and about 20% lower than in 2024, indicating a sharp deterioration in the climate for entrepreneurship during the war, according to a February 2026 report by The Economist.
• Defense and war‑related spending has risen to roughly 6% of GDP for the “national defense” line alone, and close to 7–8% of GDP when broader military outlays are included, with around 40% of the federal budget now allocated to defense and security at the expense of the much-needed development of the high-tech civilian sector, according to a February 2026 report by The Economist.

The punitive measures are likely to have contributed to the emergence of the following financial and tax costs:

• The sanctions are also likely to have contributed to the emergence of a hole in Russia’s federal budget, with a deficit equivalent to 2.3% of GDP in 2022; in contrast, prior to the invasion, the Russian government had forecast a budget surplus of 1% for 2022. In 2023, the budget deficit hit 1.9% of GDP, according to the Russian finance ministry. And in 2024, the deficit of Russia’s federal budget was estimated at 1.7% of GDP, even though Russian authorities initially projected a deficit of only 0.9% of GDP in that year. In 2025, the deficit was 2.6% of GDP.⁵
  • At the same time, Russia’s low public debt (around 20% of GDP, about $300 billion) and current‑account surplus make it more difficult to impose effective sanctions on Russia, according to Ben Aris of BNE’s Feb. 24, 2026, assessment.
• The sanctions have contributed to the shrinking of Russia’s National Wealth Fund’s liquid reserves, which have fallen from $113 billion before the war to about $55 billion, according to Paul Sonne of the New York Times in a Feb. 24, 2026, assessment.
• The number of corporate bankruptcies in Russia increased by 26% in the first three quarters of 2024 compared to the same period of 2023, totaling 6,392, according to Interfax. One primary factor behind this increase was that the Central Bank’s key interest rate remained in double digits in 2023–early 2026. In 2025, however, Russian courts declared 6,477 companies bankrupt, which is 24.3% fewer than a year earlier, and the lowest figure in 10 years of data collection, according to Interfax.
• Whereas in the 2010s Russian prosecutors typically filed no more than one expropriation petition per year, since the start of the full‑scale war they have expropriated more than 500 firms, mostly Russian‑owned, including hotels, shopping centers, food factories and distilleries, according to a February 2026 report by The Economist. The prosecutor‑general has publicly claimed to have recovered 2.4 trillion rubles worth of assets “for the benefit of the state,” illustrating the scale of this wartime asset grab, according to The Economist.
• In 2022, Russia saw a notable spike in its inflation rate, which reached 13.75%. In 2023, it decreased to 5.86%, but then rose again in 2024, reaching 9.5%. In 2025, it slowed to 5.6%, according to Rosstat.
  • Despite the inflation spike, private consumption has risen in Russia by 17% since 2021 and real disposable household incomes have risen by 30%, Liam Peach, a senior emerging market economist with Capital Economics, was quoted by Ben Aris of BNE as saying.
• Recent wartime tax hikes are expected to shift roughly an extra 1–1.3 trillion rubles a year onto Russian consumers through a 2‑percentage‑point increase in VAT (from 20% to 22%) and related measures like higher excise duties, which will show up as higher prices and bills for households, according to a fall 2025 report by The Moscow Times. For Russian companies, especially large and profitable ones, raising the profit tax rate from 20% to 25% in 2025 cost businesses on the order of 1.7–1.75 trillion rubles a year in additional payments to the federal budget, according to a December 2025 report by Interfax. 

The punitive measures are likely to have contributed to the emergence of the following technological costs:

• In 2022, Russian semiconductor imports dropped 70% as the country became subject to broad Western sanctions and export controls after the invasion. However, China subsequently helped to compensate for this decline.
• In civil aviation, sanctions and security measures led to around 800 aircraft breakdowns in 2025, which is more than triple the number of breakdowns recorded the previous year, according to a February 2026 report by The Economist.⁶
• As of 2023, Russia planned to produce 1,000 passenger aircraft of all types by 2030, including 94 in 2023–2024. In reality, only 14 airliners were produced in those two years. In 2025, Russia was supposed to produce 20 airliners but produced only 1. The sanctions have also led to the seizure of 76 Russian airliners.
• Partially due to punitive reductions in exports of parts to Russia for car manufacturing, car production in Russia declined in 2022 by 60% compared to 2021, to 650,000. However, in 2023 production rebounded by 16% to 720,000. Car production kept growing in 2024, posting a growth of 33% with 1.07 million cars produced that year. In 2025, however, car production in Russia fell by 23% over the year to 830,000 units.
• Western sanctions curtailing Russia’s access to necessary hardware as well as a post-invasion brain drain are two of many reasons that explain why Russia is struggling to keep up in the AI race: the top-performing Russian AI model ranks 25th, behind older iterations of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and in a November 2025 Stanford University study measuring the strength of countries’ AI ecosystems, Russia ranked 28th out of 36 countries.
  • Russian officials estimate at least 100,000 IT specialists that left in 2022 have not returned, according to a December 2025 news report.
  • Due to punitive measures, Russia’s imports of GPUs and other computer chips is down 84% from before the war, according to a December 2025 news report. 

Expansion of what Russia sees as a hostile bloc to additional stretches of Russia’s land borders and territorial borders: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has also created geopolitical costs for Russia that most Russians could not possibly welcome. Not only has the war prompted existing NATO members to commit to an expansion of their military capabilities, but it has also prompted long-neutral Finland and Sweden to become members of the alliance. Sweden’s and Finland's inclusion in NATO brought all of Russia’s Baltic Sea neighbors into the alliance and expanded the land border Russia shares with NATO members by 833 miles (1,340 kilometers). That expansion means only 488 miles (786 kilometers) separate southeastern Finland and Moscow as the crow flies. This cannot be good news for the country, whose leader stressed that one reason Russia cannot accept NATO’s expansion to Ukraine is that the time it would take for a NATO missile to fly from Kharkiv to Moscow, which are separated by the distance of 396 miles (638 kilometers), is 7 minutes (at this speed, it would take the same missile 8 1/2 minutes to fly the 488 miles that separate Finland and Moscow.) More recently, while not a member of NATO, Russia’s adversary, Ukraine, is reported to have developed a Flamingo cruise-missile that in late February 2026 hit Russia’s leading ICBM maker Votkinsky Zavod, some 1,300 kilometers away from the line of contact (LOC.)

Temporary diplomatic semi-isolation: Russia faced significant isolation from Western countries, which have imposed sanctions targeting its economy and political elite both following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. However, Russia has sought to strengthen ties with non-Western nations aiming to mitigate the impact of Western isolation at the time, with Putin holding regular meetings with China’s Xi Jinping (although long term Russia is unlikely to benefit from growing dependence on China). In its effort to engage the Global South, Russia has also achieved tangible success, with Putin holding annual summits with India’s Narendra Modi, among others.

In addition, U.N. votes on items related to the Russian-Ukrainian war also show that Russia has been able to avoid full isolation, even though its reputation did suffer from its aggression against a sovereign state, as well as evidence of Russian war crimes, which remain ongoing. About one-third of countries that voted on the following UNGA resolutions on the Russian-Ukrainian war failed to condemn Russian aggression:

• April 7, 2022 - UNGA Resolution ES-11/3: “Suspension of the rights of membership of the Russian Federation in the Human Rights Council”
  • 93 yes; 24 no; 58 abstentions.
• March 2, 2022 - UNGA Resolution ES-11/1: “Aggression Against Ukraine”
  • 141 yes; 5 no; 35 abstentions.
• March 2, 2022 - UNGA Resolution ES-11/2: “Humanitarian consequences of the aggression against Ukraine”
  • 140 yes; 5 no; 38 abstentions.
• Oct. 12, 2022 - UNGA Resolution ES-11/4: “Territorial integrity of Ukraine: defending the principles of the Charter of the United Nations”
• 143 yes; 5 no; 35 abstentions.
• Nov. 14, 2022 - UNGA Resolution ES-11/5: “Furtherance of remedy and reparation for aggression against Ukraine”
  • 94 yes; 14 no; 73 abstentions.
• Feb. 23, 2023 – UNGA ES-11/6: “Principles of the Charter… peace in Ukraine”
  • 141 yes; 7 no; 32 abstentions.

After taking office in January 2025, Trump’s decision to reverse his predecessor’s isolation strategy vis-à-vis Russia made Russia’s semi-isolation less certain. Three votes after Trump became U.S. president proved significant:

• Feb. 24, 2025 - UNGA Resolution 11/7: “Advancing a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine”
• 93 yes; 18 no; 65 abstentions.
• Feb. 24, 2025 - UNSCR Resolution 2774:
• 10 yes; 0 no; 5 abstentions.
  • On Feb. 24, 2025, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 2774 (2025), sponsored by the United States. The UNSCR omitted explicit references to Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and Russia’s aggression, reportedly catching several European allies off guard and exposing divisions within the transatlantic coalition.
• Feb. 24, 2025- UNGA Resolution 11/8: “The path to peace”
  • 93 yes; 8 no; 73 abstentions.
  • On Feb. 24, 2025, the United States abstained on UNGA Resolution 11/8 (“The path to peace”) but voted in favor of UNGA Resolution 11/9 (“Return of Ukrainian Children”), which passed with 91 votes in favor, 12 against and 57 abstentions.

In addition to becoming increasingly reluctant to back Ukraine at the U.N., the Trump administration has also proved to be much less willing to pursue Russia’s isolation in other diplomatic aspects. For instance, U.S President Donald Trump hosted Putin in Anchorage for the Alaska-2025 summit, while the Russian leader hosted Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Slovakia’s Robert Fico in the Kremlin for bilateral meetings that year. More recently, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has publicly argued that Europeans may need to re-engage in direct talks with Putin. As a result, French diplomatic engagement with Moscow has resumed at a senior level. Also, German Prime Minister Friedrich Merz has said the EU should remain willing to talk to Russia. In contrast, the U.K.’s Keir Starmer has said he has no plans/intention to talk with Putin, according to a January 2026 report by the Sweden Herald. Baltic/Eastern members of the EU and NATO also push for non-engagement. Thus, what’s emerged since early 2025 is therefore best described as a “fragmented Western approach,” rather than “semi-isolation.” 

Overdependence on China: As Sergey Radchenko of John Hopkins wrote in RM “critics have argued that Russia has become overly dependent on China’s market, or, even China’s vassal. Such criticism is unsubstantiated. First, the fact that Russia sells oil and natural gas to China does not make it China’s ‘vassal’ any more than selling oil and natural gas to Europe made Russia’s Europe’s ‘vassal.’ Yes, being unduly dependent on one buyer is not in Russia’s long-term interest (clearly, it would be to Moscow’s benefit if it could also sell its resources to the Europeans). It is also true that developing a dependence on China’s electronics can be problematic (but Russia is hardly the only country that has developed such a dependence—much of the world suffers from the same predicament.)” 

Decline in Russia’s influence: The Russian leadership’s inability and or/reluctance to divert resources from the war against Ukraine to help official allies has led to a dramatic decline in Russia’s influence over Armenia, Syria and Venezuela, with Cuba and Iran also facing the increased possibility of a regime change under U.S. pressure. The failure to come to the rescue of Pashinyan’s Armenia and Assad’s Syria as well as to prevent the extraction of Venezuela’s Maduro to the U.S. cannot help impacting the cost-benefit analysis by leaders of countries that are weighing whether to either continue allied relations with Russia or to enter such relations.⁷

Russia’s reputation as a world-class military power has been damaged: In advance of its second assault on Ukraine in 2022, Russia had spent months in preparation for a rapid multi-pronged offensive launched not only from its positions in Crimea and the Donbas, but also from the territory of its ally Belarus.  Less than two months following the Feb. 24, 2022, invasion however, Russian forces found themselves in retreat. That retreat prompted an alarming response by Putin, as later reported by multiple sources, including former director of the CIA William Burns: a threat to use nuclear weapons if Ukraine’s armed forces seemed poised to push Russian forces from Ukraine. While we have no way of knowing for sure, it is unlikely that Putin and his generals expected such a setback. If they had, they would not have told members of the invading formations to pack their dress uniforms. Nor would Putin have told visiting Pakistani prime minister, Imran Khan, when he asked Putin about the invasion a few days after its beginning: “Don’t worry about that. It’ll be over in a few weeks.” The fact that even some respected Western experts on the Russian military—who are arguably less susceptible to Potemkin narratives plied by some of Russia’s less scrupulous commanders—overestimated the capabilities of Russia’s war machine reaffirms the likelihood that Putin himself suffered from excessive optimism.  

Territorial loss: On Aug. 6, 2024, Ukraine undertook a surprise invasion of Russia’s Kursk region, soon capturing as many as 383 square miles of Russia, including the city of Sudzha, according to PBS reporting. As of Feb. 17, 2026, according to data from ISW, Ukraine only controls 4 square miles of its original salient, now divided between Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod oblasts, although Russia continues to deny the continued existence of these salients.

RUSSIA’S GAINS

Territorial gains: According to ISW data as analyzed by Russia Matters, after four years of brutal ground conflict, Russia has gained 29,191 square miles, or 12% of Ukraine’s territory in addition to the 7% it controlled before its second invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. Most of Russia’s territorial gains have been concentrated in the Donbas (which is made up of the Ukrainian oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk together), because Putin has claimed that the Donbas is Russian, not Ukrainian. As of Jan. 27, 2026, Russia controlled 89.7% of Donbas (99.7% of Luhansk, and 79.5% of Donetsk) according to Russia Matters’ War Report Card. In contrast, Russia’s control of the remaining two Ukrainian oblasts Russia illegally annexed in 2022—Zaporizhzhia and Kherson—was 75.2% and 65.4%, respectively, according to the card.

• Based on data from ISW, as of Feb. 17, 2026, the total square miles of Ukrainian territory under Russian control amounts to 45,816 square miles (roughly the equivalent of the U.S. state of Pennsylvania).

Seizing Ukraine’s natural and industrial resources: Russia’s aforementioned territorial gains have enabled it to seize more of Ukraine’s natural resources. Ukraine has large underground deposits of critical minerals, including lithium, graphite, cobalt, titanium and rare earths such as gallium, which are essential for an array of industries from defense to electric vehicles, according to estimates cited by respected British economist Adam Tooze. Also, as Robert Mugga and Rafal Rohozinski write: “The geographic focus of Russia’s occupation efforts is hardly coincidental. Indeed, Ukraine’s Dnieper-Donetsk region alone accounts for 80% of known conventional oil, gas and coal production and reserves. Most identified critical minerals, especially Ukraine’s 22 rare-metal formations, are concentrated in Donetsk, Dobra and Kruta Balka.”

• Metals: About 40% of Ukraine's metal resources are now under Russian occupation, according to estimates by Ukrainian think-tanks, cited by Reuters.
• Rare earths: Ukraine’s deposits of 22 rare earth elements from the list of 30 substances the European Union defines as “critical raw materials,” accounted for approximately 5% of the world’s reserves, according to the U.N.
  • We have been unable to find estimates of how much of these deposits Russia may have seized, but the Donetsk region’s settlement of Shevchenko, which is home to one of the biggest lithium deposits in Ukraine, was occupied by Russian forces as of Feb. 11, 2026.
• Coal: Russian forces control more than 80% of Donbas, which is believed to account for 90% of Ukraine’s coal reserves, and are now within the city of Pokrovsk, which is home to Ukraine’s last remaining coking coal mine.
• Agricultural land: Southern Ukraine is known as the "breadbasket of Europe.” Russia controls most of the territory of two of Ukraine’s southern regions, Zaporizhzhia (75.2% under Russian control as of Jan. 27, 2026) and Kherson (65.4% under Russian control as of Jan. 27, 2026).
• Industrial facilities: Donbas, of which Russia controlled 89.7% as of Jan. 27, 2026, accounted for a quarter of Ukraine’s industrial production in 2013, the last full year before Russia’s de-facto separation of parts of these regions from Ukraine.
  • Control over these resources provides strategic economic benefits to Russia and significantly impacts Ukraine's economy and export capabilities. Transfer of control of these assets to members of the Russian elite strengthens their support for Putin and his war.

Adding population through conquest: The population of the Ukrainian territories under Russian control (including Crimea, and parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions) was estimated to total 5–7 million as of 2024. If accurate, this represent a 3.4%–4.8% increase to Russia’s 146 million (this number excludes the population of territories annexed by Russia in 2022). Ukrainians in Russian-occupied Ukraine and those whom Putin has illegally deported to Russia amount to roughly 7% of Russia’s pre-war population, according to ISW. 

• According to official Ukrainian sources from January 2022, the overall population of the areas now occupied by Russia was 6.4 million people, Nikolay Petrov writes for SWP, estimating that the current population of these areas is around 3.47 million people.  

Reducing the probability of Ukraine’s NATO membership and preserving the buffer against this alliance: The outcome of the February 2014 color revolution in Ukraine led to a significant increase in the Ukrainian government’s efforts to obtain membership in NATO. However, Russia’s demonstration of its willingness to use force to foil Kyiv’s plans, which Putin believes to be running counter to Russia’s vital interests, by invading Ukraine in 2022, seemed to have convinced some members of the alliance, which operates by consensus, to refrain from supporting Ukraine’s membership. As of October 2024, governments of at least seven NATO member countries reportedly opposed Ukraine’s membership, and at least one additional member country has joined them since then (the U.S. under the Trump administration). Speaking in February 2025, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth represented the U.S. position that NATO membership for Ukraine as unrealistic. “The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement,” Hegseth said. More recently, neither the U.S.-Russian draft plan for a peace deal nor the EU-Ukraine draft for such a deal contain clauses on Ukraine’s membership in NATO.

Gaining military experience in somewhat modern warfare: While Russia’s aforementioned claim to be a world-class military power has been dented, Russia’s armed forces did gain some valuable experience in modern warfare, and the war has in fact been a testing ground for new military technologies—in particular drones. Older technologies thought to be decisive in war—including especially heavy tanks such as models T-72, T-80 and T-90 main battle tanks—have not fared well, and this experience has proven valuable, incentivizing Russia to innovate new tactics to gain ground in its attrition campaign in eastern Ukraine. Russians have also proven adept at the use of sophisticated jamming technologies and other ongoing innovations (such as rear-facing cameras on long range strike drones to aid Russian operators in evasive tactics) to blunt the impact of Ukraine’s greater reliance on aerial, land and seaborne drones for surveillance and attack, as well as to develop a range of its own drones evolved from Iranian Shahed-136 designs. 

Ukraine has tended to lead in rapid battlefield-driven innovation cycles, while Russia increasingly compensates via industrial scale and the use of mass attacks to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses. Over time that scale can erase (or even reverse) the advantage in some drone categories. According to the Institute for Science and International Security, for example, based on Ukraine’s own Air Force data, Russia launched 54,538 drone strikes against Ukraine in 2025 alone. There is also no question that Russian forces—institutional inflexibility aside—continue to innovate technically and tactically to overcome and adapt to Ukraine’s equally innovative defenses. Ruslan Pukhov, a respected Russian defense analyst warns in Kommersant that long term, however, the misconception in defense circles that the military transformations of the “special military operation” are “some kind of ‘anomaly’” and things will “return to normal” when it is over, could “lead to the most catastrophic consequences for us in future conflicts.” 

Additionally, Putin’s decision to avoid full mass mobilization in favor of contract hires for manpower in its special military operation is likely to make it difficult for Russia to capitalize on the hard-won tactical experience its soldiers have gained to date, because once contracts expire, survivors with the most relevant combat experience leave the military. Finally, while Russian conscripts are not allowed by law to engage in combat, there is strong evidence that many conscripts are bullied into signing contracts on their way to their assigned duties. Moreover, there are multiple reports of Russian recruits not being given sufficient training before being deployed. This increases the casualty rate per unit during operations, and again, mitigates against long-term service that can retain and pass on hard-won tactical lessons either in the field, or during training of new recruits.

The war with Ukraine has strengthened Russia's mutually beneficial cooperation with nations opposing the West, including Iran, China and North Korea, as well as other countries and non-state actors that maintain either highly competitive or actually adversarial relations with the U.S. and some of its allies. In conducting the aggression against America’s wishes, Russia has also sought to demonstrate that it is a great power capable of resisting the influence of the world's strongest state and its allies. Despite facing economic, military and geopolitical pressure from Ukraine's Western supporters, primarily (until recently) led by the U.S., Russia has shown its ability to stand firm against what has been the most powerful alliance globally.

Robust support for Putin’s rule: The resumption of economic growth in Russia in 2023, coupled with labor shortages, helped to fuel an increase in real incomes (more than 8.5% in 2024), which, in its turn, made common Russians less likely to revolt against Putin’s rule. In fact, Russians’ approval of Putin has hovered above 80% since November 2022. The Russian leader could also count on at least some of the countries’ business elites’ loyalty, as Russia’s rich got richer and more numerous in 2024, despite sanctions. The total wealth of the richest Russian businessmen has grown by $31 billion since the beginning of 2024, to $360 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index rating. The same year saw 19 new Russian dollar billionaires join Forbes’s ranking, which is the highest number of new dollar billionaires Russia has produced since 2011, according to Re: Russia. Russia’s richest continued to get richer in 2025, TASS reported in January 2026, citing the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.

Rise in domestic nationalism: The war has also bolstered nationalistic sentiments in Russia, from which Putin and the ruling establishment as a whole benefit. As stated above, Putin’s approval soared in the run-up to the invasion and as stated above, has hovered above 80% since November 2022. In addition to support for the commander-in-chief at 84% as of January 2026, support for the Russian military’s actions remains high at 76%, that month, according to Levada.⁸

Concluding remarks

It follows from the evidence presented above that several of the key benefits Russia has gained in the course of its full-fledged invasion of Ukraine have expanded, at least in Putin’s eyes, since we conducted our inaugural assessment of Russia’s costs and benefits, published on the third anniversary of the war in February 2025. For instance, Russia’s territorial control increased from roughly 43,700 square miles of Ukrainian territory in early 2025 to about 45,800 square miles by early 2026—a gain of approximately 2,100 square miles (roughly equivalent to the size of Delaware). Additionally, Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions was largely reversed, shrinking from a significant salient in 2025 to only a few square miles under Ukrainian control by February 2026. The war has also forced the Russian military to become more technologically adaptive, particularly in drone warfare, electronic warfare and battlefield integration of digital systems, which also constitutes a benefit.

As for domestic benefits, Putin’s regime stability has remained intact, with presidential approval ratings continuing to remain above 80%. Putin’s retinue have also been granted multiple chances to enrich themselves further: More than 500 Russian firms were expropriated since the invasion, and trillions of rubles in assets were transferred to state control so that they can then be sold to the “right” investors. 

In addition to the expansion of some benefits, Russia has also seen some of its costs shrink. Diplomatically, what had previously been described as “semi-isolation” in our 2025 assessment became harder to sustain as Western unity fragmented and multiple high-level political contacts resumed. Russia’s isolation was not full even at the time that our first edition of this analysis was published. Since then, even the notion of Western isolation has come to hold no water as Trump hosted Putin in Alaska in August 2025, while the Russian leader hosted Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Slovakia’s Robert Fico in the Kremlin for bilateral meetings that same year.

However, a number of Russia’s costs did increase over the past year. For instance, military casualties rose from estimates clustered around 700,000–800,000 in early 2025 to roughly 1,000,000–1,200,000 by early 2026, with several hundred thousand killed. Russia’s military equipment losses have continued to pile up. In addition, the period of February 2025-February 2026 saw the number of Russia’s military vehicles, including tanks that have been destroyed, damaged or captured, rise by 18% from 20,382 to 24,044. The Ukrainian military’s technological innovation, particularly in use of unmanned aerial, sea and land vehicles, have made much of Russia’s Cold-War designed armor vehicles and attack helicopters increasingly obsolete, while also forcing the Russian Black Sea fleet to retreat from Crimea. 

In addition to damaging Russian military equipment, Ukrainian strikes have also tangibly affected Russian energy infrastructure in the past year, temporarily forcing up to 17% of Russia’s refining capacity offline, disrupting utilities in border regions and more recently hitting Russia’s ICBM-making plant some 1,300 kilometers away from LOC with a new cruise missile, the Flamingo. 

Meanwhile, demographic pressures also mounted in Russia, with large-scale emigration, low birth rates and labor shortages. Russia’s economic performance has also weakened. After economic growth of 3.8% in 2024 and expectations of gradual moderation, actual growth in 2025 slowed sharply to 0.6%. The federal budget deficit widened from 1.7% of GDP in 2024 to 2.6% in 2025. Technological constraints, such as Western sanctions on Russia’s imports, have also persisted. As stated above, due to punitive measures, Russia’s imports of GPUs and other computer chips is down 84% from before the war, according to a December 2025 news report. In addition, only 1 passenger aircraft was produced in 2025 (versus 20 planned). In addition, new business registrations fell about 20% year-on-year.

Having stated some of the changes in the more significant costs and benefits, we, nevertheless, cannot calculate some net value that would tell us what a rational leader should conclude about whether or not the aggression has “paid off” and what it means for the leader’s next steps.

More importantly, as stated in the inaugural assessment published Feb. 24, 2025, we do not know what value Putin assigns to each of these costs and benefits. For instance, for many, including the authors of this brief, the horrendous casualties suffered by the Russian armed forces as they failed in what Putin mistakenly believed (on the counsel of his advisers) would be a blitzkrieg, should have made any reasonable leader—who puts the interest of his subjects first—stop. 

But, as reality shows, Putin—whose insensitivity to Russian casualties was noted by one of us as early as 2015—does not seem to find such costs prohibitive, so long as the Russian public is not aware of the true scale of these casualties as they are duped by Kremlin propaganda into believing Russia is somehow fighting a just war.  

Thus, rather than assume that Putin would choose a policy option that, to paraphrase Trump, “common sense” would indicate, one should, as one of us has earlier suggested in an analysis of Putin's decision-making regarding the war against Ukraine, try to grasp what costs and benefits the dictator associates with each policy option available to him and, more importantly, what value he assigns to each of the pros and cons, no matter how misinformed his perceptions might be.

Endnotes

1. This brief is an annual update of “3 Years Later: What Russia’s Aggression in Ukraine Has Cost It and What It’s Gained,” Simon Saradzhyan, Ivan Arreguín-Toft and Angelina Flood, Russia Matters, 02.24.26.
2. 7,175 in 2022–2025, 79 in 2026, according to Russian authorities, which the authors cannot verify.
3. Official unemployment is extremely low at around 2%, but this is largely because hundreds of thousands of men have been mobilized into the war machine and hundreds of thousands of other Russians have fled abroad, rather than because of healthy private‑sector job creation, according to a February 2026 report by The Economist.
4. Oryx has not updated tallies of either Russian or Ukrainian lost aircraft and naval vessels since Jan. 7, 2026.
5. The army’s manpower bill increased from about 3 trillion rubles in 2024 to more than 4 trillion rubles in 2025, equivalent to roughly 2% of GDP and close to a tenth of all federal expenditure, contributing to the budget deficit, according to a February 2026 report by The Economist.
6. Because Airbus and Boeing aircraft account for about 90% of Russian passenger flights and spare‑parts imports are heavily restricted, safety and reliability problems have multiplied despite attempts to refurbish older Russian‑made jets, according to a February 2026 report by The Economist.
7. Russian influence has eroded in regions from Central Asia and the Caucasus to the Middle East and Latin America, as the war absorbs attention and resources, according to Paul Sonne of the New York Times in a Feb. 24, 2026, assessment.
8. Those who actively opposed the ruling regime have continued to face risks of jail time. At least 4,029 people in Russia have been targeted in politically motivated criminal cases since the war began, according to Paul Sonne of the New York Times in a Feb. 24, 2026, assessment.

Simon Saradzhyan is the founding director of Russia Matters. Ivan Arreguín-Toft is the editor of Russia Matters. Angelina Flood is the managing editor for Russia Matters. 

This is an evolving draft that may be updated.

Opinions expressed herein are solely those of the authors.