Russia’s strength in Ukraine has started to wane and could run into serious shortages of manpower and weaponry by next year. Over the past year, Russia has taken only 0.6 percent of Ukrainian territory, at1,500 killed or wounded per day, "an unsustainably high cost." The rate of Russia’s advance has been slowed to a near-standstill, in part because of Ukraine’s 10-mile defensive zone with mines and trenches, drones attacking Russian approaches and being forced to divert resources to reclaim the Kursk region. “Russia is not able to take ground since the end of the Ukrainian counteroffensive” in 2023. They still have 3-to1 superiority in troops but it’s not enough. Russia is culminating in its ability to conduct offensives. It is very unlikely it has the equipment, people and logistics to break the Ukrainian line and even if they did to exploit it."
Rather than the U.S. leadership he promised, Trump has mused that he might just walk away and leave the negotiations to the Europeans — perhaps even the new pope — to sort out. His administration has not committed to additional military or financial aid to Ukraine.
But the timing for putting pressure on Moscow may be more advantageous now than at any point since the early days of the conflict, according to more than a dozen officials who discussed the current state of the war and the sensitive politics and diplomacy surrounding it, most on the condition of anonymity.
Absent a negotiated settlement or “robust” Western assistance, the war “probably will continue to slowly trend in Russia’s favor through 2025,” according to a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assessment presented to Congress 10 days ago by DIA Director Lt. Gen Jeffrey Kruse. But Russian gains “are slowing and continue to come at the expense of high personnel and equipment losses.”
Since its February 2022 invasion, the DIA assessment said, Russia has “lost at least 10,000 ground combat vehicles, including more than 3,000 tanks, as well as nearly 250 aircraft and helicopters and more than 10 naval vessels.”
Over the past year, Russia has taken only 0.6 percent of additional Ukrainian territory, at the cost of 1,500 killed or wounded per day, current and former Western officials said. “Russia is very gradually taking bits of territory still, but at an unsustainably high cost,” said Richard Barrons, the former head of Britain’s Joint Forces Command. Some officials have estimated Russia’s total casualties at more than a million.
In the meantime, Europe is struggling to find a way to increase supplies to Ukraine, and Kyiv has its own problems with both personnel and equipment despite steadily growing domestic arms output. Neither side has been able to advance significantly on the ground, and the war has evolved into an exchange of long-range fire with missiles and increasingly sophisticated drones.
Russia has pummeled Kyiv and other regions, launching 250 attack drones and 14 ballistic missiles overnight Friday, according to a statement by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Russian officials claimed more than 700 Ukrainian drones were intercepted over Russian territory within the past 72 hours, nearly 100 of them near Moscow.\
But drones and long-range strikes do not conquer territory and will not win the war for either side, officials and experts said.
“With every such strike, the world sees more clearly that it is Moscow that’s prolonging this war,” Zelensky said. “It’s clear now that much more pressure must be applied to Russia for any real diplomacy to begin. … Only additional sanctions targeting key sectors of the Russian economy will force Moscow to stop the attacks.”
Washington in denial
In public comments after his call with Putin, Trump did not mention either sanctions on Russia or aid to Ukraine. Speaking with European leaders, he indicated that the Russian leader did not seem inclined to halt a war he believes is going in his favor, a person familiar with the exchanges said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in Senate testimony Tuesday, defended Trump’s lack of action. Kyiv, he said, was “still getting armaments and shipments from us and our allies” — although the administration has not sought any new funding or drawdowns from U.S. stockpiles. “The European Union is about to impose additional sanctions,” Rubio said, while the United States was “looking for more” scarce Patriot air defense batteries from NATO allies to transfer to Ukraine.
Rubio denied one senator’s suggestion that Putin was “playing” Trump and said that all Biden-era sanctions against Russia were still in place. But “the president’s belief is … right now, [if] you start threatening sanctions, the Russians will stop talking. And there’s value in us being able to talk to them and drive them to get to the table.”
So far, Putin has ignored Trump’s call for a 30-day ceasefire and sent a low-level delegation to a negotiating session in Istanbul to which Trump had dispatched Rubio.
On Wednesday, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) introduced legislation, co-sponsored by 81 other senators, questioning the value of those talks and threatening to impose primary and secondary sanctions on Russia if it refuses to engage in good-faith negotiations with Ukraine. Graham, a stalwart Trump supporter, has been in constant and consistent conversation with the White House on the issue, a person familiar with the senator’s views said.
Among other things, the legislation would impose a 500 percent U.S. tariff on goods imported from countries, including China, that purchase Russian oil, gas, uranium and other products. In a statement, Graham noted that Rubio had said Moscow agreed in the Istanbul talks to provide its terms for a ceasefire in the next few days. “If it is more of the same,” Graham said, “Russia can expect decisive action from the United States Senate.”
Moscow’s negotiating terms, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday, would be based on the “root causes” of the conflict, a reference to Moscow’s repeated insistence that Ukraine is historically a part of Russia that has become a corrupt, illegitimate and Nazi-ruled state. A true peace agreement, Lavrov said, could be negotiated and signed only by a “legitimate,” newly elected Ukrainian government.
“Putin believes that time is on his side, and Ukraine is bleeding faster than Russia,” said a senior European official. Amid growing concerns over how long Ukraine can hold out, proponents of increased pressure on Moscow have tried to focus attention on Russia’s growing weaknesses.
Moscow’s worsening outlook
The Kremlin has drawn a record number of recruits this year, although many have been enticed with cash payouts and the expectation the war will soon end. But the rate of Russia’s advance on the ground has been slowed to a near-standstill, in part because of Ukraine’s fortification of a 10-mile defensive zone littered with mines and trenches and the use of short-range drones to attack any Russian approach to the front lines, according to Jack Watling, a senior research fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in London.A Ukrainian security official said the stalled advance may also be partially due to Russia being forced to divert resources to reclaim the sliver of its land in the Kursk region along Ukraine’s northeastern border.
“Russia is not able to take any ground, and this is the situation pretty much since the end of the Ukrainian counteroffensive” in 2023, the Ukrainian official said. “Despite the fact that they still have three-to-one superiority in number of troops — and maybe even bigger in terms of [weapons] systems — it’s still not enough.”
While capable of producing at least 200 new tanks a year, Russia has depended heavily on the refurbishment of mothballed Soviet-era ones, an estimated 13,000-tank stockpile at the beginning of the war that Western experts calculate is likely to run out in the next few months.
“The Russians can continue fighting, but … the force will become more and more de-mechanized over time, and that does put a timeline on how long they can sustain the current way they operate,” Watling said.
If no ceasefire is arranged, Russia is likely to use its narrowing window of superiority to intensify attacks over the summer in a bid to break through Ukraine’s exhausted ranks, Watling and Barrons said. But it could be Moscow’s last opportunity.
“Russia is actually culminating in its ability to conduct an offensive,” Barrons said. “It is very unlikely now that the Russian military have the equipment, the people, and the training and logistics to mount an offensive that would break the Ukrainian line and — even if they did — to exploit it immediately.”
Even if Russia succeeded in gaining more Ukrainian territory, the Kremlin is unlikely to achieve its stated goal of seizing full control of the four regions it illegally annexed in the fall of 2022 — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — according to Dara Massicot, senior research fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
“There’s a difference between pushing the Ukrainians back five to 10 kilometers at a time at high cost versus having the assembled manpower and armor behind that to exploit a breakthrough and to occupy and push through all of those obstacles, even though the Ukrainians are having issues,” Massicot said. “That’s still a really large bill in terms of equipment that they need, and I just don’t see that concentration anywhere.”
When Putin visited the Kursk region Wednesday for the first time since it was retaken from Ukraine, a local official suggested to him that the Russian army should now occupy the bordering Ukrainian region of Sumy.
Putin joked in response that the Kursk governor “always wants everything bigger.” But as he seeks to drag out negotiations and fend off Trump’s blandishments, Western officials said that Putin’s confidence may be based more on rosy assessments from his subordinates than on reality. “I think they overestimate the current success of Russia,” a senior European official said.
Whether Putin genuinely believes he has “all the cards,” as Trump has put it, or is simply waiting for the West to grow tired of the seemingly unending conflict, dwindling stockpiles of Soviet-era equipment will make Russia increasingly dependent on new systems produced from scratch. That, a number of Western officials and experts said, makes it the right time to impose new sanctions and to continue to supply new weaponry to Ukraine.
“If Ukraine can deny Russia from reaching the borders of Donetsk between now and Christmas, and Kyiv’s international partners are diligent in degrading Russia’s economy, Moscow will face hard choices about the costs it is prepared to incur for continuing the war,” Watling said.
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