Follow this authorDavid Ignatius's opinions

Two events last weekend underlined Putin’s macabre momentum. The death of heroic dissident Alexei Navalny in a Siberian prison camp shows that Putin is conducting a “no limits” assault, as Russian mobsters like to say. Russia’s capture of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine showed that Putin will sacrifice tens of thousands of soldiers in his “meat assaults,” as Zelensky described them.

Avdiivka matters not because of its strategic importance, but because Ukrainian troops there were running out of artillery ammunition and air defenses — a sign of their growing vulnerability. The shortage of air defenses is especially worrying: Russian planes could drop precision bombs on Avdiivka at will. If Ukraine doesn’t get new air-defense supplies soon, that threat could extend to cities across the country.

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Russian troops are grinding forward using their two great national resources — warm bodies and coldblooded patience. That’s how Russia fights its wars, from Napoleon to Hitler to now. “They are crazy, they are raging … tens of thousands of their soldiers. That’s what they have,” Zelensky told the conference. Ukraine, in contrast, was struggling to protect its troops, whom he described as “our main weapon.”

“This war is going Russia’s way now,” warned a European ambassador who’s one of the West’s wisest observers of the Kremlin. He remembered cautioning U.S. officials when the war started that “it will take 500,000 dead before Russia stops.” Their estimated casualties total more than 300,000 dead and wounded, according to U.S. officials.

Putin can keep sending troops not just because of Russian stoicism, but because he has cleverly drawn his forces from the poorest and most disadvantaged areas of the country. Those dying are disproportionately ethnic minorities from backwaters such as Chechnya and Dagestan, U.S. analysts say. The pay for soldiers at the front is three times what they would normally earn, and the families of dead soldiers receive a bonus worth more than $50,000, noted the European ambassador. “The war has brought a kind of prosperity for poor Russians,” he said.

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Navalny’s death displayed Putin’s calculus. He doesn’t care about elite public opinion because it doesn’t threaten his control. Demonstrators laying flowers or staging small marches don’t faze him. “Anything below a million we can handle,” a Kremlin official told the European ambassador several years ago. The message, the diplomat told me, was that “thousands of demonstrators are a drop in the ocean.”

Yet even Putin knows he can’t keep the killing machine operating indefinitely.........

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