Let’s start with the dead. A former British army special forces officer passing through Kyiv this week offered his analysis: “They’re not looking after their dead, and an army that does that tends to lose.” Morale of the Russian soldiers is low, poor, rotten — pick an adjective. The proof of that is the litter of corpses in Russian uniform after any major battle. A British man who has been serving in the Ukrainian army for some years said that five years ago, when the Russians attacked in the east, near Donetsk, one of the Ukrainians was killed and his body was in no man’s land. An officer insisted on a raiding party going in to get the body. “After that, our morale was very strong. We knew that even if we were going to die, our mates would look after us.”

The Russian army doesn’t look after its own. What goes for the dead goes for the injured too. Five years before the 2022 invasion, U.S. Army Capt. Nic Fiore wrote in a study of the Russian-Ukrainian war from 2014: “Medically, BTGs [Russian Battalion Tactical Groups] have very limited professional medical-evacuation (medevac) and field-treatment resources. Their inability to quickly get wounded soldiers advanced care increased deaths due to wounds, which had a large psychological effect, made their commanders more adverse to dismounted risk and reduced a BTG’s ability to regenerate combat power.”

In war, quantity is quality. The Russians hit Ukraine with 200,000 troops. But the Ukrainians have 200,000 in their armed forces and a further 100,000 in the police and other trained militia, even before you start counting the tractor drivers among the many willing volunteers. Invaders need a 3:1 ratio to defenders, so the Russians needed close to 1 million troops to have a good chance of winning. Which is why they are losing.