Some Russian soldiers remained standing for only a few minutes in front of the Ukrainian planes, military bloggers said

Kyiv – If Russian troops reach parts of the war in Ukraine, they can expect to survive an average of just 20 to 35 minutes, according to a rough estimate by Russian military bloggers, cited by Oxford historian Peter Frankopan in a Foreign Policy report. CBS News has not independently verified the claim. But similar accounts are becoming more common in Russian military channels, suggesting that many Russians are becoming you know about war and its tolling on their part – a toll that Kremlin officials have long sought to shield from view.

The war has brought us in an incredible loss to the Russians. The director of Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency said last month that the death knell for Russia's war crimes is now over probably reached 500,000. Ukraine's Ministry of Defense says it has taken more than 1.4 million wounded or killed Russian soldiers into the battlefield.

With drones swarming the front lines – creating what is known as the “killing zone” – Russia is losing men at a rapid rate. Unable to rely on heavy weapons, now easily captured by inexpensive drones, the Russian military has turned to infiltration tactics: using small groups of soldiers on foot or on motorcycles to probe for weaknesses in Ukrainian lines.

This has resulted in bloody fighting. Drones now account for more than 80% of Russia's losses, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And estimates suggest that there are now more Russians killed in war than wounded, a first in modern warfare.

Ukraine faces its own manpower problems and must use similar penetration tactics to push back Russian lines.

“Manpower has been an issue since the end of the summer of 2023,” Rob Lee, a military analyst based in Ukraine, told CBS News. “We've had cases where babies have spent more than a year in position without changing.”

But the Ukrainian military has been able to successfully reduce its soldiers' exposure to danger by using drones to replace other soldiers in combat, medical evacuation and transport roles.

“We say there's no need to send a human where a robot can do the job,” Oleksandr Kamyshin, the head of Ukraine's defense industry, told CBS News in an interview this spring. According to some estimates, Russia is now losing eight men killed or seriously wounded for every one that Ukraine has abandoned.

Endless waves in Russia have produced some success on the battlefield. Although a Ukrainian general said his forces have recaptured more than 230 square miles of territory this year, Russia is still advancing in key areas in and around Ukraine's Donetsk region. Ukrainian officials said last week that Russian troops tried to enter the outskirts of Kostyantynivka, an industrial city in Donetsk.

But more and more Russians are beginning to experience the nature of war firsthand.

In a nationwide Russian public opinion poll released Monday by the Institute for Conflict Studies and Analysis of Russia, a Ukrainian think tank, 31% of respondents said one or more of their family members had been deported, an increase of 14% from 2022.

Oleksandr Shulga, head of the research center, warned that the findings should not be overemphasized: “Even after four years, the majority of Russians do not see this war as existing.”

Still, he said, “The majority of Russians know that someone has been killed in action since the beginning of the war: only 29% said that none of their relatives or acquaintances had died in combat.”