Russia’s slow defeat – and Australia’s hard lesson

On 3 June, as Russian President Vladimir Putin prepared to open his flagship economic forum in St Petersburg, Ukrainian drones sent black smoke climbing over his home city (Opens in new window) and halted flights at its airport. A state that cannot protect the skies above its second city, during its premier investment showcase, in the president’s own birthplace, is not winning its war. The manner in which Russia is losing carries lessons for Australia.

The St Petersburg raid captures Russia’s trajectory in this war. Putin is losing in Ukraine – not in one or two dimensions but in every dimension by which strategic progress can honestly be measured: military, cognitive, moral, industrial and economic. His only remaining advantage is the disposition of the American president.

Begin with the battlefield. For the first time since the invasion began, Russia is losing more soldiers than it can recruit, with more than 160,000 killed or seriously wounded since January 2026 and a single-month record of 35,000 in March (Opens in new window), according to the Ukrainian General Staff (Opens in new window). The price of taking Ukrainian territory has soared. According to figures from Russia Matters and the Ukrainian General Staff, Russia suffered 200 casualties for each square mile taken in 2025. In the first five months of 2026, with a net gain of 17 square miles, it suffered over 9,600 casualties for each square mile. In the past three months, the capture of ground has moved in Ukraine’s favour (Opens in new window).

The cognitive contest, long Moscow’s strong suit, is slipping. In an age of open-source transparency, where anyone can follow the front line and nightly drone exchanges, it is hard to sell a story of advance when the data shows stagnation and constant long-range strikes by Ukraine. Russia’s disinformation machine is still busy, but it finds less purchase in European capitals than it did in 2022.

Morally, Russia’s position is weakest of all. The documented record of how it fights, from the executions at Bucha to the deportation of close to 20,000 Ukrainian children (Opens in new window), which is the basis of an International Criminal Court warrant for Putin (Opens in new window), has demolished any claim to a just cause. Ukraine has registered more than 210,000 criminal proceedings arising from the invasion. Russian influence is shrinking even in its own neighbourhood. Pro-European governments have held or won power in Moldova, Hungary and Armenia (Opens in new window) despite heavy interference, while the Gulf states once thought to lean Moscow’s way now sign defence deals with Kyiv.

Industrially and economically, the trajectories diverge. Russia’s defence output is hitting its ceiling (Opens in new window) as sanctions and lost components bite, while Ukraine’s industry, backed by European money, now meets more than half its needs and can build millions of drones a year. Russia’s wartime growth has slumped (Opens in new window) towards 1% and the Kremlin is raising taxes and cutting spending. Higher oil prices (Opens in new window) from the Iran war offer a reprieve, but Ukraine is busy striking the terminals and refineries (Opens in new window) that convert that revenue before it reaches the Kremlin.

None of this means Russia is beaten. It holds significant ground, strikes Ukrainian cities, and has a strained but unbroken pool of personnel. And Putin’s relationship with Donald Trump is an asset no battlefield metric can capture. But a leader who expected to take Kyiv in days, and who four years on is losing troops he cannot replace while his economy stalls and his standing erodes, is managing a slow defeat.

Russia’s failure offers lessons for democracies, including Australia, that may one day have to deter or fight a larger authoritarian neighbour. As I argued in my recent Lowy Institute Analysis (Opens in new window), nations like Australia are engaged in a global adaptation war against authoritarians – and must learn and adapt their systems accordingly.

The first lesson is that mass is not strength. Russia brought more people and more tanks but could not learn and adapt as fast as its enemy, while Ukraine’s edge has come from bottom-up innovation and the speed with which a good idea reaches the front. Institutional adaptability has been the decisive military quality of this war, and it must be built deliberately in peacetime, not discovered under fire.

The second lesson is that long wars are won in factories and budgets, as part of a mobilisation process that takes years to mature. Australia has kept its defence spending low, hollowed out its defence industries, holds shallow stockpiles, and studiously avoided the topic of national mobilisation in the 2026 National Defence Strategy. As the strategist Tom Mahnken puts it (Opens in new window), nations must prepare for a marathon, not a sprint, and Australia is built for neither.

The third lesson is that openness and legitimacy are strategic assets. Russia’s information dominance crumbled against transparency, its war crimes (Opens in new window) have stripped it of any moral claim, and its aggression only hardened the resolve of Ukraine’s supporters and drove once-neutral states such as Sweden and Finland into NATO (Opens in new window). Our democratic scrutiny, our allies and the legitimacy of a just cause are advantages to be pressed. But these must be defended and strengthened in peacetime to withstand the pressures and resist temptations of wartime, including censorship.

Authoritarian states are not ten feet tall and bulletproof. As history shows, and as Russia has demonstrated in Ukraine, they make catastrophic errors. They can be beaten, but only when democracies are clear-eyed about the threats, invest for the long haul, and sustain pressure long enough that an adversary’s losing becomes irreversible. Russia’s war has tested that proposition. Given the ongoing assertiveness from China, Australia’s politicians are being given a priceless education in what the defence of democracy looks like. Whether they learn from it is up to them.