There is a dangerous tendency in the West to look at Russia’s ability to continually feed men into Ukraine and conclude that Vladimir Putin’s war must somehow be going well.
The numbers suggest something very different.
Russia is now more than four years into an invasion originally intended to rapidly decapitate the Ukrainian government, Kyiv survived, Russia was also driven from northern Ukraine, Kherson was liberated and Russia subsequently mobilised 300,000 men, recruited prisoners, offered enormous financial incentives for military contracts and increasingly turned abroad for both weapons and manpower in response.
Now the scale could increase considerably.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that Russia could be preparing another expansion of its armed forces, potentially involving hundreds of thousands of additional personnel after September’s parliamentary elections.
Russia, with the help of North Korea, continues to exploit Ukraine's shortage of Patriot interceptors by launching ballistic missiles at a rate that exceeds its own domestic production. Night after night, missiles rain down on Kyiv and cities across Ukraine, while Europe and… https://t.co/YTcUtUshwg
— Shaun Pinner (@ShaunPinnerUA) August 5, 2026
At the same time, North Korea is becoming increasingly important to Putin’s manpower calculations.
Zelenskyy said on 9 August that as many as 50,000 North Korean troops could be deployed to Russia, increasing an earlier Ukrainian estimate of 30,000 additional personnel.
That would follow approximately 14,000 North Korean soldiers already deployed to Russia’s Kursk region since 2024, according to Ukrainian assessments reported by Reuters.
This matters because Russia’s biggest long-term military problem is increasingly simple: people.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated in July that Russia had suffered approximately 1.4 million battlefield casualties, including as many as 450,000 fatalities, between February 2022 and June 2026.
More importantly, CSIS estimated Russian forces were suffering approximately 30,000 to 34,000 casualties every month during 2026, while recruiting only around 27,000 new personnel monthly.
In other words, Russia’s current recruitment pipeline may no longer be replacing its battlefield losses.
That helps explain why North Korea matters, but Pyongyang cannot replace Russia’s enormous domestic manpower requirement, but it can buy Putin time.
An additional 50,000 North Korean soldiers would represent almost two months of Russian recruitment at current estimated rates, without Putin having to immediately extract those men from Russian society.
North Korea is supplying considerably more than infantry.
Pyongyang has already provided Russia with artillery ammunition and ballistic missiles. Ukraine also says a North Korean missile unit could deploy to western Russia with six launchers and as many as 120 ballistic missiles.
North Korean ballistic missiles have already returned to Ukrainian skies. A Russian strike on the Zaporizhstal steel plant in Zaporizhzhia on 10 August killed seven workers and injured at least 24 people; Zelenskyy said North Korean missiles were used in the attack.
This is therefore no longer peripheral military assistance, but to put things into perspective, North Korea is increasingly becoming part of Russia’s war machine, supplying ammunition, ballistic missiles and potentially tens of thousands of soldiers, while gaining something extremely valuable in return: experience of modern warfare against a Western-equipped military.
If the Ukrainian estimate of up to 50,000 additional North Korean troops is realised, we are talking about a force comparable in scale to, and potentially larger than, the actual fighting element the British Army could generate, rather than some token foreign contingent. The entire British Army currently has only around 70,700 trained regular personnel, and that figure includes the enormous supporting structure required to keep its combat formations operating: logistics, engineers, signals, intelligence, medical personnel, headquarters and other specialist roles.
Fifty thousand North Korean troops potentially entering this war is therefore an extraordinary number. We are effectively discussing a foreign troop contribution on the scale of the fighting manpower of one of NATO’s most capable militaries, being made available to Russia for its war against Ukraine.
And that is before considering the approximately 14,000 North Korean personnel already deployed, or Pyongyang’s increasingly important contribution of artillery ammunition and ballistic missiles.
However, even manpower on that scale cannot solve Putin’s underlying problem.
“I see nothing…”
This is what Putin’s so-called “land bridge” to Crimea looks like today.
Russia’s one major strategic territorial gain since 2022 is increasingly under threat and the corridor Moscow fought so hard to establish is becoming harder to protect, supply and… pic.twitter.com/hIQ3JTbZyx
— Shaun Pinner (@ShaunPinnerUA) August 7, 2026
Russia is fighting across a frontline hundreds of kilometres long. It needs infantry replacements, reserves, engineers, logistics personnel, air-defence crews and forces protecting occupied territory, including the increasingly vulnerable land corridor to Crimea.
That requires Russians.
In September 2022, Putin responded to battlefield disaster by announcing his so-called “partial mobilisation”, calling approximately 300,000 men into service.
It caused chaos. Russians fled across borders and the Kremlin’s antiquated bureaucracy struggled to identify, process and equip those being called up.
Putin has had nearly four years to make sure the next mobilisation is different.
Russia has since introduced electronic military summonses, expanded its ability to restrict draft evaders and developed considerably greater digital control over its population.
Russia today is much better prepared to find hundreds of thousands of military-age men than it was in 2022.
Another mobilisation would therefore be dangerous for Ukraine.
Half a million additional Russians, potentially supplemented by tens of thousands of North Korean soldiers, would not produce an effective new army overnight. Men still have to be registered, equipped, trained, organised and deployed.
But Russia has repeatedly demonstrated that it is prepared to substitute mass, time and casualties for operational elegance.
It does not need every soldier to be exceptional.
It needs enough men to replace losses, reinforce exhausted formations, maintain pressure along multiple axes and force Ukraine to continually expend its own far more limited manpower and ammunition.
This is why Western governments should stop interpreting Russia’s willingness to escalate as evidence its strategy is succeeding.
A military superpower effortlessly winning its war does not need to mobilise 300,000 citizens, recruit prisoners, import millions of rounds of ammunition, obtain ballistic missiles from North Korea, deploy North Korean regular soldiers and then contemplate another enormous expansion of its armed forces.
That isn’t what victory looks like, and ordinary Russian’s are seeing it.
It is evidence of the extraordinary resources Putin is prepared to consume rather than admit his original invasion failed.
But recognising that failure does not make what comes next any less dangerous.
If Russia is preparing its next army, with North Korea helping bridge the manpower gap, Ukraine and its Western partners need to prepare before those hundreds of thousands of additional soldiers reach the battlefield, not afterwards.
But perhaps the deeper and considerably more uncomfortable question is why does so much of the Western political world appear to be ignoring what is happening in plain sight?
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