The numbers come first. Ukraine is killing or wounding between 30,000 and 40,000 Russian troops every month, a rate that exceeds the number of fresh recruits Moscow can muster, according to a recent note from RAND researchers Gian Gentile and Andrew Radin. Russian authorities are now coercing men into signing up to fill the gap.
The mechanism behind those numbers is, by design, corporate in character. 'Ukraine leaders use business principles to maximize both Russian casualties and economic costs,' Gentile and Radin wrote. Former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov's war plan sets explicit KPIs for the military: kill 200 Russian troops per square kilometer of territory seized and eliminate at least 50,000 enemy personnel each month. Fedorov also developed what RAND describes as a 'mathematics of war initiative' — a data-collection program built to improve the efficiency of Ukraine's attrition strategy.
The most operationally novel element is Ukraine's 'ePoints' system, which RAND calls the first of its kind anywhere. Drone operators submit battlefield videos to the government as competition entries. Targets carry point values — one soldier is worth 12 points — and high scorers redeem their points in an online government marketplace for additional combat drones. The loop is self-funding and self-accelerating: performance generates hardware, hardware generates performance.
Ukraine now produces millions of drones a year. Retired Gen. David Petraeus, former CIA director, has called the country's defense industrial base 'the most important military industrial complex in the free world.' Since Russia's 2022 invasion, thousands of companies have emerged to supply the front, driven by the competitive pressure of fighting a numerically superior force.
The economic damage is no longer confined to the battlefield. Ukrainian long-range drones have struck oil refineries, weapons factories, and e-commerce logistics hubs deep inside Russian territory. Russia's economy is already under strain from high inflation, elevated borrowing costs, and soaring debt. Ordinary Russians are now waiting in long lines at gas stations and finding online orders going unfulfilled — a direct cost of the war reaching the civilian interior.
Russian popular unrest remains limited. Social media complaints and grumbling from oligarchs about Kremlin asset seizures have not translated into organized opposition to Vladimir Putin's regime. Even so, RAND's researchers concluded that 'Ukraine could very well break Russia's will to continue fighting,' potentially forcing Putin to the negotiating table even if he remains in power.
RAND drew a historical parallel to World War I, where four years of attrition ended when Germany's army collapsed following the failure of its spring offensive. 'Whether the Russian Army faces a similar fate will depend on Ukraine's maintenance of its effective strategy of attrition and continuing if not increasing its long-range strikes into Russia, and the continued support of its partner nations,' the researchers added.
CEO Times take: Capital rewards clear rules, and Ukraine has built exactly that — a measurable, incentive-driven kill chain that treats battlefield efficiency as a management problem. The 'ePoints' marketplace is, in structural terms, a performance-based procurement system that cuts bureaucratic lag out of the supply loop. Washington's continued material support is not charity; it is investment in a proxy attrition campaign that is degrading a strategic adversary at a fraction of the cost of direct confrontation. The free-market architecture of Ukraine's defense industrial base — thousands of competing firms innovating under pressure — is outperforming the centralized Russian war machine. That is a data point worth keeping.
