Chapter 1
An attrition war is decided as much behind the lines as at the front
An attrition war is decided as much behind the lines as at the front. Russia and Ukraine are both spending down finite stocks — money, men, and the public's willingness to keep going — and the side that runs short first loses the ability to continue whatever is happening on the battlefield. This is the account of that spending on both sides: how Ukraine pays for its state and its war, each country's manpower decisions and the economics behind them, the evidence about what its population will tolerate, and the governance moves that reveal strain or consolidation. Nothing here is a reading of morale or a forecast of collapse; it is the record of what each state has actually decided, spent and been told by its own numbers.
Chapter 2
Russia's strain shows first in its people and its politics
Russia's strain shows first in its people and its politics. On manpower, Moscow has so far avoided a second formal mobilisation since September 2022, relying instead on contract recruitment at rising cost; Ukrainian intelligence has warned repeatedly that a new wave is being prepared, and senior Russian figures including Dmitry Medvedev have denied it. Consent is the quieter of the two and the harder to read: Russia's independent pollsters record support for the war drifting down and economic pessimism spreading, while the space to express any of it has narrowed to the point that the only registered party opposing the war was struck from the ballot and its deputy leader imprisoned before the parliamentary election of September 2026, which returned the ruling party with a record majority on the authorities' own count.
Chapter 3
Ukraine's constraint is the mirror image
Ukraine's constraint is the mirror image. Its own revenues cover the war but not the state: essentially all civilian budget spending is financed from abroad, which makes the reliability of external partners a war-fighting variable rather than a diplomatic one. That money now arrives through an increasingly institutional architecture — the IMF's Extended Fund Facility, the EU's Ukraine Facility, and the Ukraine Support Loan drawing on profits from immobilised Russian assets — and each of those channels attaches conditions, so reform progress in Kyiv translates directly into whether the next tranche lands. That architecture no longer covers the whole bill: the government's own accounting now puts the following year's uncovered gap above thirty billion dollars against an annual external need of about fifty, and the finance ministry has begun saying out loud that payments unrelated to the war may have to wait. Manpower is the harder account. Ukraine has lowered the conscription age, tightened penalties for draft evasion, and repeatedly reworked the rules that let critical enterprises exempt employees, balancing an economy that needs workers against an army that needs soldiers; mobilisation remains its most politically costly subject. Its wartime politics have been strained rather than closed: elections are suspended under martial law, and the sacking of a defence minister in July 2026 produced street protests and the largest shake-up of the military command of the war.
Chapter 4
The two sides' accounts are not converging on the same timetable
The two sides' accounts are not converging on the same timetable, and that asymmetry is the substance of the story. Russia's pressure is internal and gradual — losses replaced by ever costlier recruitment and a slow erosion of stated public support, none of it yet forcing a decision. Ukraine's is external and scheduled, and it has begun to bite ahead of schedule: its financing holds through 2026 and falls short in 2027 by more than thirty billion dollars on its own government's reckoning, a gap donors could close and reform delays could widen, while the liquidity pressure has already reached the parts of the budget that are not the war. Two questions remain genuinely open. Whether Russia orders a formal mobilisation, and what its politics look like if it does. And whether Ukraine's partners fund the gap they have already been shown — including whether the immobilised Russian assets that would cover much of it are ever moved from a legal question into a funding one.
And now
Europe has agreed on the size of Ukraine’s 2027 hole but not on how to fill it. EU leaders ended their October 15–16 summit by asking the Commission for a proposal to cover the extra €70 billion Kyiv says it needs; officials set no date, Sweden saw no movement on frozen Russian assets, and Slovakia said it and Hungary would not join another loan. Kyiv’s own figure is $32.6 billion of unconfirmed foreign financing, and the IMF says its year-end reviews depend on partners filling it.
The manpower fight moved to parliament. On October 16, 63 lawmakers registered a resolution asking the government to reverse its plan to cut the share of staff that defence and energy firms may shield from the draft. The prime minister said the rules were still being finalised and that full exemptions were being abused.
In Russia there is still no mobilisation order. Contract sign-ups ran about a tenth behind 2025 through September as average bonuses rose 30%, the autumn draft is smaller than last year’s, and the confirmed Russian dead now number 281,753 by name.
Where it stands today →