Frederick and Kimberly Kagan assess the Russian strongman’s military failures.
Four years into fighting back an unprovoked full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s army is keeping Russian forces to marginal gains while at the same time extracting exorbitant costs in lives and treasure. Though this winter has been particularly difficult for Ukraine’s civilians because of Russian attacks on the power grid that have plunged many cities into darkness, the front lines have remained stable.
The Kremlin’s claims that Russian forces are about to break through and overrun the fortified cities in Donetsk oblast — or any other region of Ukraine for that matter — are bluster. Data we track at the Institute for the Study of War bear this out. And military leaders we spoke to during a recent trip to Ukraine were increasingly confident they can continue to keep the Russians at bay as long as Western aid continues to flow.
Currently, Russian forces occupy 19.4 percent of Ukrainian territory. They had taken about 7 percent of Ukraine during the first phase of the war in 2014, and came to occupy a total of 26.8 percent shortly after the full-scale invasion began in 2022. Subsequent Ukrainian counteroffensives left the Russians holding only about 17.9 percent of Ukraine in November that year. Since then, Russia has seized only 1.5 percent more Ukrainian land while suffering over 1 million casualties in total. Let that sink in: Russia has needed three and a half years to seize 9,318 square kilometers, an area smaller than Lebanon or Los Angeles County. President Vladimir Putin’s supposedly inexorable march to victory has been proceeding, as others have noted, more slowly than at a snail’s pace.
Ukrainian forces have not only held Russian advances to a slow crawl, but they have begun to push Russian forces back in localized counterattacks since last autumn.
