For months the talk in Kyiv was of a much-anticipated Russian offensive that would aim to gobble up more of the Ukraine’s eastern regions. So far, it’s been underwhelming – but the Russians have made some gains and vastly reinforced their troop numbers in some areas.
Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to pursue territorial gains as ceasefire talks take a back seat. Last week he restated what has long been one of his key ways of justifying his unprovoked invasion.
“I consider the Russian and Ukrainian peoples to be one people,” he said. “In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours.”
Even so, the Ukrainians have launched counterattacks in some areas and are rapidly developing a domestic weapons industry. And Russia’s wartime economy is facing stronger headwinds.
Russian troops are trying to advance in multiple areas of the 1,200-kilometer (746-mile) frontline. Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said this week there are now 111,000 Russian troops in one part of the frontline alone – near the flashpoint city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk, where there are at least 50 clashes every day. That compares to about 70,000 Russian troops in the area last December, according to the Ukrainian General Staff.
Syrskyi also claimed that the Russian infiltration of the northern region of Sumy had been halted. The Institute for the Study of War – a Washington-based think-tank, says Ukrainian forces have regained some territory in Sumy and the pace of Russian advances there has slowed.
“We can say that the wave of attempts at a ‘summer offensive’ launched by the enemy from Russian territory is fizzling out,” Syrskyi claimed.
But it’s a mixed picture. In recent days Russian infantry assaults have gained ground on the border of Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions. The Russian defense ministry claimed on Saturday that another village, Zirka, had been taken.
DeepState, a Ukrainian open-source analyst, asserted that Ukrainian “defenses continue to collapse rapidly, and the enemy is making significant advances … with constant assaults” in that area.
The Kremlin has long insisted its campaign will continue until it holds all of the eastern Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. (It already occupies all but a sliver of Luhansk).
At the current rate of progress that would take many years. But with the Trump administration apparently less committed to driving ceasefire negotiations, the conflict seems likely to drag on through the end of the year and into 2026.
The three-dimensional battlefield is now an unlikely combination of ingenious drone-led special operations and very basic infantry assaults.
At one end of the spectrum, Ukraine’s audacious attacks at the beginning of June on Russian strategic bombers used drones operated from trucks deep inside Russian territory – a mission that took out about a dozen aircraft used to launch missiles against Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Security Service reported another drone attack Saturday that it clamed had caused extensive damage to a Russian airbase in Crimea.
By contrast, Russian soldiers on foot and motorbikes – sometimes in groups of a dozen or less – push into abandoned villages in eastern Ukraine, with drones for cover but no armor in site. It’s an approach that is forcing a change in Ukrainian tactics: to smaller fortified positions. Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said last week that defenses were being camouflaged to match the terrain and made smaller to avoid detection.
The Drone War
While infantry defend or take territory, drones continue to play a greater role in shaping the conflict. The Russians are churning out cheap, mass-produced drones designed to overwhelm air defenses and allow some of their missiles to get through. The Russians have increasingly used this tactic to hit Ukrainian cities, especially Kyiv, which has sustained considerable damage and higher civilian casualties in recent weeks.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that overnight “477 drones were in our skies, most of them Russian-Iranian Shaheds, along with 60 missiles of various types. The Russians were targeting everything that sustains life.”
The Russians use “up to 500 (Iranian designed) Shaheds per night, combining them with ballistic and cruise missiles — aiming to exhaust our air defenses,” says Umerov.
Zelensky has reiterated pleas for more Patriot missile batteries and other western systems, which Trump said last week that the US “should consider” because of large-scale attacks on Ukrainian cities.
Zelensky has said Ukraine is prepared to buy Patriots directly or through the fund established by the US-Ukrainian minerals deal.
Both sides are producing drones of all types at an astonishing rate. Ukraine’s Security Service reckons Russia is producing nearly 200 Iranian-designed Shahed drones every day, and has an inventory of some 6,000, in addition to about 6,000 decoy drones. Over the last week, the Russians have used more than 23,000 small “kamikaze” drones on the frontlines, according to the Ukrainian military’s General Staff.
It’s a never-ending race in design and production. Syrskyi said recently that Russia had developed an edge in fiber-optic-controlled drones, which are more difficult to track and intercept.
Drone warfare is a “constant intellectual struggle — the enemy regularly changed algorithms, and Ukraine adapted tactics in response,” Umerov said. “Solutions that showed high effectiveness at the beginning of the war have lost it over time as the enemy changed tactics.”
For its part, Ukraine is stepping up production of the long-range drones it has used to attack Russian infrastructure, such as airfields, refineries and transport. Umerov said “tens of thousands” would be produced, in addition to more than four million battlefield drones this year.
The longer term
Both sides continue to build defense industries that allow them to keep fighting – even if the scale of Russian production far outstrips that of Ukraine. Russia’s huge military conglomerate Rostec is producing an estimated 80% of the equipment used against Ukraine.
Its CEO Sergey Chemezov claimed at a meeting with Putin this month that Rostec’s production has grown tenfold since 2021, and its revenues rose last year to an eye-watering $46 billion.
But there are darkening clouds on the horizon. Russia’s military budget is some 40% of its total public spending – more than 6% of its GDP. That’s stoked inflation, and Putin acknowledged last week that growth this year would be “much more modest” to combat rising prices. He even suggested that defense spending would decline next year.
One senior Russian official, Maksim Reshetnikov, who is Economic Development minister, said that “based on current business sentiment, it seems to me we are on the brink of transitioning into recession.”
The head of Russia’s Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, disagreed with Reshetnikov but warned that financial buffers like the national reserve fund are nearly depleted.
“We must understand that many of these resources have been used up,” she told the St. Petersburg International Forum.
Putin himself acknowledged the risk, saying that while some experts predicted stagnation, it should “not be allowed under any circumstances.”
While the longer-term prognosis for Russia may be gloomy – economically and demographically – it can continue in the short-term to fund an army of more than half-a-million men that’s in Ukraine or close to its border, taking a few kilometers here and there. Despite hundreds of thousands of casualties, the Russian military can still generate forces far greater than Ukraine.
His eye still very much on the prize, Putin said last week: “We have a saying … where the foot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours.”