JUNE 29, 2026 – We’ve all grown accustomed to “news inundation,” much of it arising out of outrageously bad governance in the nation’s capital. Some of the outrageous—the reflecting pool, for example—makes a mockery of the very real but unaddressed needs of Americans. Other aspects of the outrageous—the continuing campaign to round up people for cruel and unusual punishment in the form of detention and deportation under the red herring of “immigration law[1] enforcement” More outrageousness takes the form of industrial-gauge grift and corruption favoring Big Money contributors to Trump coffers, not to mention schemes that further pad the Trump family’s consolidated net worth. Swept away by the daily flood of outrages are hard questions about Iran, southern Lebanon and . . . raise your hand if you remember a place called “Gaza.” Oh, yes, and whatever was happening in Venezuela after Maduro’s capture but before the earthquakes?
Lost altogether in the current phase of this Era of the Outrageous are Putin’s fallen fortunes in Ukraine, thanks in part to the cutting edge drone technology of the plucky Ukrainians but in larger part to Putin’s own outrageously bad judgment.
By nature I’m not a cruel person, but my disposition in that regard doesn’t extend to harboring empathy for an especially cruel person whose dastardly inhumanity leads to the person’s undoing. This would be the case with Tsar Vladimir Putin.
I remember well the phony blustering in the run-up to his wholly unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Based on numbers alone—military personnel, weapons, ordnance, supplies—when Russian forces violated Ukraine’s sovereignty, Putin’s achievement of his objective appeared to be all but a fait accompli. How could a nation of 43 million people without much of a military and that had given up its nuclear arsenal (at the urging of the West), compete against a nation of 143 million people with an aggressive military built on a heavily propagandized ethic of self-sacrifice and that was bristling with nuclear armaments? News coverage, as we all will recall, was 24/7, as civilized countries of the world watched in horror, a redux of Operation Barbarossa[2], albeit in reverse. Urban centers were pommeled, along with civilian infrastructure—schools, power grids, hospitals, apartment buildings. Thousands of civilians were killed; millions were sent scurrying in search of refuge in neighboring countries.
The tally of destruction to date is gob-smacking, but again, given the Great Flood of other outrages, the losses suffered by Ukraine receive little attention—outside Ukraine itself and a few NGOs and UN agencies engaged in monitoring. So far, Putin’s war has taken the lives of 16,126 civilians and wounded another 46,590. Military casualties are estimated by Western intelligence sources at 400,000 to 600,000, including a conservative estimate of 100,000 to 150,000 deaths.
With respect to physical damage, housing alone has suffered a whopping $61 billion in losses, affecting 13% of the country’s total housing stock. Other property destruction amounts to an additional $134 billion, and the estimated cost of long-term recovery is $588 billion. Beyond calculation are damages to 586 cultural and historical sites.[3] Moreover, Ukrainian news sources estimate the cost of environmental remediation to be $85 billion.
All these costs are advancing, of course, as the war drags on.
Thus far, the EU has provided $130 billion in recovery costs, and the U.S., $50 billion, $20 billion of which is in the form of a loan backed by the interest on frozen Russian assets.[4]
If the loss of life and health and destruction of property are staggering on the Ukraine side of Putin’s war, the cost to Russia is proportionately higher. Thus far, Western intelligence estimates put the loss of Russian military personnel at 1.38 million, including 350,000[5] to 500,000[6] deaths. This is extraordinary, considering that in the USSR’s blundering invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Soviet military deaths reached 50,000 over a decade and in the assessment of some analysts, became a catalyst in the collapse of the Soviet system. Until recently, Russia suffered little in the way of property damage, but this is now changing with successful Ukrainian drone incursions against oil installations and other targets deep inside Russian territory.
Putin’s not-so-smart strategy depended on a quick victory back in the late winter of 2022. He grossly miscalculated several key factors, from the quality of his military to the anticipated lack of resistance by Ukraine. Nevertheless, he carried on, switching to reliance on an endless stream of human cannon fodder and workarounds reducing the effect of Western economic sanctions.
Now, four and a half years into his “special operations”—i.e. “Endless War”—Putin finds himself in a royal pickle. The endless stream of people willing to put themselves into a cannon barrel is no longer endless, and the economic poultry of his war of straight up aggression are coming home to roost. Inflationary pressures are mounting; investment is flagging; social spending, infrastructural development suffer under a federal Russian budget that allocates between 33% and 50% to military spending. Overall economic growth, meanwhile, slipped precipitously from 2024 to 2025, from over 2.0% annual growth to half that, with dismal growth predicted for 2026. These economic conditions are unsustainable—even when denied by the Tsar.
Worse, Russia is experiencing a demographic implosion, exacerbated by the personnel drain caused by the nonsense in Ukraine. It is now estimated that by 2030—less than four years from now—Russia will face a labor shortage of 10 million workers. The country is looking to immigration—mostly from Africa, Latin America, India, China, and SE Asia. Who knows where this will lead, but it runs counter to one express basis for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: Re-envisioning Slavic glory (led by Russia, of course). (Oops!)
The “death by a million (point three-eight) cuts” that Putin is now undergoing over Ukraine finds a bizarre parallel with Trump’s wholesale folly in Iran. Just as Putin thought Ukraine was a pushover, so Trump assumed that a week or two of incessant bombing of Iran would force capitulation, regime change, a handover of fissile material, re-destruction of the nuclear facility that was supposedly already bombed to smithereens a year ago, destruction of Iran’s stockpile of missiles, exclusive access to Persian pistachios . . . we aren’t really sure. In the first instance, Putin’s delusions of Tsarist grandeur are being drowned face down in his own bathwater as it drains from a tub after the plug is pulled. In the second, Trump is looking around for the stadium exit after he kicked a field goal, threw a touchdown pass, and got the extra point—but all in the wrong end zone.
Under normal circumstances, Putin would be removed by a palace coup and exiled to one of the 192 islands of the Franz Josef Land archipelago, and the stadium crowd would boo Trump off the field and ban him for life from the sport—both as player and spectator. But we’re not living under “normal circumstances.” Bets, anyone, on who will outlast whom as between the Tsar with the tin scepter and the King with the cardboard crown? (Note to wiseacres: In this round, no bets on President Xi will be recognized.)
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Never mind how hopelessly complex and broken immigration law and administration has been through multiple administrations.
[2] The code name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 (along an 1,800-mile front, the southern portion of which was along the border with Ukraine).
[3] Statistics cited by the UN (OHCHR; UNDP).
[4] Statistics cited by the Council on Foreign Relations.
[5] Mediazona, an independent Russian media outlet that ties deaths to probate records.
[6] GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the U.S. NSA.
