Turning a corner

Has Russia missed its chance of victory in Ukraine?

At various low moments in 2025, President Trump tried his hardest to carve up parts of Ukraine and hand them on a silver platter to Russia. Ukraine’s determination, including the determination of President Zelenskyy not to be bullied by Trump, meant that the Moscow-Washington DC axis failed, defeated by Ukraine and its European allies (I wrote about this at the time). But there was an odd way in which Putin’s implacability was to Ukraine’s advantage: for all that Trump tried to give into Putin, it was never quite enough. Putin wants a world in which Ukraine ceases to exist, not just a world in which he gets to keep the Donbas. Trump offered him a win and he wouldn’t take it.

Putin won’t be likely to engage in much self-reflection so he probably isn’t thinking too hard about his missed opportunity. But my recent conversation with Kyiv-based correspondent Euan Macdonald crystallised something for me - how the battlefield dynamics which looked bad, but manageable, for Russia. Now look bad and terminal. It’s important not to overstate all of this: you can live with terminal illness for many years, after all (some rumours suggest that Putin had done exactly this). But it is still terminal. For a long time, Russia had the upper had in a war of attrition against a smaller opponent. This is no longer the case.

Two basic bits of arithmetic support this view. As Euan explained in our conversation, the Russians are now losing soldiers faster than they can recruit them. This is a hugely significant development, because Russia’s method of warfare is to send huge numbers of infantry into the ‘kill zone’, grinding forwards at an almost imperceptible pace. Numbers have fluctuated, but in a normal day in the war, Russia loses about 1,000 troops, killed and injured. Every. Single. Day. The total of Russian losses is now over 1.3 million, of which around half a million are dead, according to a recent statement from the head of GCHQ. So if a strategy that relies heavily on manpower starts to run low on manpower, that is a major problem for Putin.

Up until now, the Russian president has been able to rely on bonuses (perhaps we should call them bribes) paid to the poor young men from Russia’s provinces that sign up, ensuring that the Russians from well-to-do places such as Moscow and St Petersburg aren’t killed in this senseless war. Putin has shown that he has few limits on how Russia fights this war, but one of them is avoiding general mobilisation of Russian citizens. Shielding better-connected Russians from the consequence of the war has been one of his major priorities, but it may be one he has to confront at some point in the future.

Russia’s problems aren’t just about manpower: it has also been starting to lose territory, having made gains (albeit very slowly) throughout 2025. We shouldn’t overestimate this - Ukraine is making back territory at a similar rate that it was losing it previously, which means it isn’t going to be able to retake all of its occupied lands in any foreseeable timeframe. But it is still gaining ground and that is an important shift. According to some western officials I spoke to recently, Ukraine has significantly improved its targeting of Russian logistics in recent weeks, making resupply for the Russians increasingly difficult. At the same time, an important development from February this year has been the Ukrainians successfully persuading Elon Musk to ensure that all Starlink terminals operating on Ukrainian territory were ones authorised by the Ukrainian government. This means that terminals in the hands of the Russians no longer work, denying them the ability to use Starlink to guide troops, drones and other activities. This shift continues to give Ukrainians a battlefield communications advantage.

But it’s not just short and medium-range strikes where Ukraine is making progress. Its ability to strike at long-range against Russian targets is now widely seen and, given the vastness of Russia’s territory, makes it incredibly hard to defend against. However good Russia’s air defence (and it is a lot better than the UK’s, for example) it has to defend the world’s largest territory, and that is more or less impossible, particularly given the fact that Russia, as a major fossil-fuel exporter, has a lot of targets. The plumes of black smoke rising from St Petersburg’s oil refinery at the very moment that international delegates had flocked to that city to attend the Economic Forum (‘the Russian Davos’) would have been a teeth-grinding humiliation for Putin.

But the realities of war have seeped into other areas of Russian life: the Victory Day celebrations, normally a major parade in Moscow on 9 May were decidedly muted this year, as Russia worried about Ukrainian attacks (even as President Zelenskyy rather cheekily gave ‘permission’ for the event to go ahead). More significantly, ordinary Russians are losing access to the internet via their mobile phones, or can only use it via a special Kremlin-approved super app called MAX which reliably passes all data back to the Russian government. Telegram, one of the most successful Russian internet innovations which combines social media, messaging and business, is now largely blocked (although there are workarounds, tens of millions of people aren’t using them). Middle-class Russians, who might not care very much about the millions of young men lost in Ukraine and the destruction meted out against their neighbour, care very much that their taxi apps no longer work.

All the while, the Russian economy isn’t getting any better. It isn’t about to collapse (something people have been predicting for years), especially not with the benefit of oil prices pushed up thanks to the Iran war, but it is always getting worse, with inflation increasing, taxes being pushed up and the long-term impacts also increasingly difficult.

Finally, with every day that passes, Ukraine becomes less dependent on foreign weapons (particularly US weapons, which it still depends on for certain things, such as air defence). All the evidence suggests that Russia’s position, which steadily improved from the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023, can now only worsen. Even with its ally in the White House, it has failed to take the chance offered it to win and is now slowly losing this war.