Almost two centuries ago, the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz cautioned against the temptation to “shut one’s eyes to what war really is from sheer distress at its brutality.”

One milestone betrays the sheer scale of the butchery in Ukraine: by the end of June, Russian forces will, in all probability, have suffered their millionth casualty in this war.

When Vladimir Putin sent some 200,000 Russian soldiers into Ukraine in February 2022, he expected to seize Kyiv by the third day of a lightning offensive. Today, his troops remain hundreds of miles from the capital, while the number of Russian dead and wounded has grown to nearly five times the size of that initial invasion force.

“Overall, a high of 250,000 Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine, with over 950,000 total Russian casualties,” notes a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an American think tank based in Washington, DC.

Those numbers conjure an image of Putin casting the entirety of his first invading army into a furnace, then gathering another and doing the same – over and over again.