Russia’s Army Is Collapsing—and Putin Knows It
Ukraine now strikes inside Russia’s heartland, as Moscow purges its own generals, arms the secret police, and watches its soldiers desert and die. The Kremlin is unraveling from within.
By July 2025, for the Russian Army, the situation is disastrous. Entire brigades are surrendering or vanishing in suicidal assaults. Ammunition is running dry. Soldiers are fleeing. But the real collapse isn’t at the front—it’s in the Kremlin.
Now we see that Putin is no longer fighting Ukraine alone, his attention has turned domestic: The dictator, gripped by fear, purging commanders, arresting aides, and isolating himself behind layers of mistrust.
This is the inflection point every dictatorship reaches before it falls: When the tyrant fears betrayal more than defeat, the end is already in motion.
What began as a war of conquest has become a regime devouring itself.
Paranoia, not patriotism, now drives the Russian state—and that is the death knell of any dictatorship.
“Over 400,000 Russian troops have required treatment, but military hospitals discharge them early to maintain combat strength amid sustained heavy casualties.” This includes sending men on crutches into combat.1
The Army Is Bleeding Out
The Russian military has lost its ability to replenish manpower. Since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russian courts have processed over 20,500 criminal cases against soldiers for desertion, unauthorized absences, or disobeying orders¹. This figure—confirmed by UK Defense Intelligence in spring 2025—doesn’t reflect the early chaos of the war, but the sustained collapse of Russia’s manpower three years in. And that’s just the official number. The true total may be double.
By mid-2025, total Russian casualties—killed, wounded, or missing—were estimated at over 1,000,000². Frontline units in multiple sectors now refuse to advance. One Russian soldier, in a call intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence and released by CBS News in 2024, said plainly:
“There’s no one left. Everyone’s been killed.”³
In early 2025, near the city of Pokrovsk, Russian commanders reportedly began handcuffing soldiers together before assaults to prevent desertion⁴. These aren’t tactics of cohesion—they’re the rituals of desperation.
See the video report on this topic, above, on YouTube.
Rot at the Top, Hunger at the Bottom
While infantrymen die wearing looted gear and eating expired rations, Russian generals steal billions.
In July 2025, Putin’s own Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov was sentenced to 13 years in prison for embezzling over 4 billion rubles through fake construction contracts⁵. His wife, even during peak mobilization in 2023, was photographed vacationing in Courchevel and Monaco—posting luxury photos while conscripts went to the front without helmets⁶.
At the same time, entire Russian battalions rely on public donations for basic necessities: medical kits, boots, water filters, and food⁷. That same June 2025 report revealed that Russian field hospitals were so overwhelmed that wounded soldiers were returned to the front lines without treatment⁷.
In an earlier war-phase audio leak, widely circulated in late 2023, one conscript admitted:
“Everyone is doing drugs. Everyone is looting. We’re just waiting to die.”⁸
And the dysfunction isn’t just in the trenches. In late 2024, Ukrainian forces captured a Russian supply truck filled with rations expired since 2015⁹.
Putin Is Turning on His Own Generals
The Russian military is being gutted from the top down.
In May 2024, Vladimir Putin fired longtime Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, replacing him with a civilian economist—Andrei Belousov—who had no military background or combat experience¹⁰.
Since then, nearly every major Shoigu-era figure has been arrested, disappeared, or pushed out. One of them, General Ivan Popov, commander of the 58th Army and highly respected by Russian troops, was detained in mid-2024 after criticizing Russia’s lack of artillery and rotation policies. The official charge was “corruption”¹¹.
By July 2025, three of Shoigu’s deputy ministers had been arrested. As Newsweek reported, these purges have “unnerved Russian elites” and stoked fear among Kremlin insiders who now wonder who will fall next¹².
Keep in mind, it was not too long ago that Evgenii Prigozhin, during June 23-24, 2023, a leader of the Wagner Group, rebelled against the military elites and sought to ride to Moscow, making it to Rostov. Incredibly, not only was Russia’s military leadership visibly afraid of him - in a bad sign for Putin - common people in the streets greeted him.
Moscow Tightens the Noose
Starting with the Prigozhin Rebellion, the Kremlin now trusts no one—not even its own generals.
In July 2025, a new law granted Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) authority to create its own pre-trial detention centers—bypassing courts and the Justice Ministry entirely¹³. These FSB-run prisons are designed not for criminals, but for enemies of the state.
Since 2022, treason and espionage charges have surged dramatically. Western intelligence agencies estimate that the FSB has opened over 800 such cases since the invasion began¹⁴. This is not a crackdown on spies. It is an institutional purge.
The FSB gaining its own prison system echoes Stalin’s decision to empower the NKVD—the KGB’s predecessor—with unchecked authority during the Great Purge. Now, the FSB is becoming a law unto itself, equipped to carry out its own purge without involving the military or civilian justice system. And that’s no accident—because members of both may soon find themselves on the receiving end of a midnight knock.
As British press reported in July 2025, Putin’s paranoia has reached a fever pitch, with new security powers used not against foreign agents—but against his own regime’s inner circle¹⁴.
Ukraine Now Strikes at the Heart of Russia
While Putin arrests his officers and builds secret prisons, Ukraine is rewriting the battlefield.
Instead of attritional trench warfare, Kyiv now targets Russia’s deep infrastructure: drone factories, weapons depots, naval command centers, and senior officers—often hundreds of kilometers, or more than a thousand kilometers (620 miles) from the front line.
On July 3, 2025, a Ukrainian strike killed Major General Mikhail Gudkov, the Deputy Head of the Russian Navy, in the city of Kursk—deep inside Russian territory¹⁵. This wasn’t a fluke. It was the continuation of a strategy.
Earlier in 2025, Ukraine struck the Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol, targeted oil facilities in Ryazan, Rostov, and Volgograd, and disabled multiple radar and air-defense sites in Bryansk and Belgorod.
These are not symbolic attacks. They are a coordinated doctrine: to bleed Russia faster than it can recover—industrially, psychologically, and politically.
Conclusion: The Collapse Has Begun
Putin is not behaving like a man winning a war.
He’s arresting his generals. Giving the FSB its own prisons. Watching his troops starve, desert, and die while Ukraine hits command nodes in Kursk and headquarters in Crimea.
What began as an invasion of Ukraine has metastasized into a crisis inside Moscow itself. The Kremlin is no longer directing the war—it is consumed by it. Infighting, silence, and sudden disappearances signal a regime cracking under pressure. Dictators in decline do not become cautious—they descend into paranoia, delirium, and violence. The battlefield has shifted—and now, the fight is for control of Russia’s future.
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Jason Jay Smart, also known as Jason Smart and Jason J Smart, is a political adviser who has lived and worked in Ukraine, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Latin America. In 2010, he was banned for life by the Kremlin for supporting Russia’s democratic opposition to Vladimir Putin.
FOOTNOTES
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-drone-attacks-kharkiv-0869f159a0b1b0b073dd139a94cffdc1
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/audio-intercepts-russian-soldiers-ukraine-war-dead-wounded-awol
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/06/30/russia-military-challenges-summer-offensive
YouTube, “Intercepted Call: Russian Soldier Describes Drug Use and Looting,” uploaded by a Ukrainian intelligence-linked source. Available at: youtube.com/watch?v=5UBMPQS86RA
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/11/3/7430089
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-military-purge-sergei-shoigu-vladimir-putin-2016561
Zoria, Y. (2025) British Intel: Russia sends injured troops back to combat, Euromaidan Press. Available at: https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/02/02/british-intel-russia-sends-injured-troops-back-to-combat/ (Accessed: 10 July 2025).
May the defeat and death of Putin and his war criminals be swift. May the stolen Ukrainian children be united with the ones who love them. May Ukraine begin to heal and rebuild. May this be a lesson for the Rapist in the oval office of the white house. May the US stop the Christofascist technocracy from cementing and build a just society for us all.
Thank you Jason for another informative and fascinating video. I never miss one.