The war in Ukraine has reached a turning point. Since the failure of Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, Russia’s full-scale invasion settled into a predictable rhythm of summer and winter offensives, between which the pressure of attacks would ease while Russian units rotated and regrouped. At first glance, this year looks no different. With spring edging into summer, Ukrainian troops in their dugouts along the front are once again seeing the steady rise of Russian strikes and attempted infiltrations. The mood among Ukrainian commanders, however, has changed. Russian attacks are putting less pressure on their units than they did in previous years. Although drone strikes and shelling remain constant, Russian combat performance is waning. In Kyiv, there is a growing optimism that Ukraine can fight Russia to a cease-fire.
Ukraine’s mood shift is not the result of a radical transformation of how the war is being fought but rather stems from a subtle turn in several trends that together point to a major change in the war’s trajectory. For all of 2024 and most of 2025, Russia was able to recruit more soldiers than it was losing, such that Russian forces could increase the intensity of assaults on Ukrainian units even as they suffered high casualties themselves. Ukraine, by contrast, was suffering slightly more casualties than it could offset with new troops, with defensive lines getting thinner and thinner every month. In Moscow, this led to a complacent belief that, even if progress was slow, the Russian military would eventually occupy the entirety of the Donbas, the contested region in eastern Ukraine that Russia laid claim to in 2022. At some point, the Kremlin believed, its gains would accelerate, as international support for Ukraine dried up and as Ukraine struggled to find the combat troops to hold the breadth of the front. This led Moscow to adopt an intransigent stance in negotiations brokered by the United States following the reelection of Donald Trump. If talks failed, after all, the Kremlin anticipated getting what it wanted on the battlefield.
Russia, however, is no longer on an inexorable path to achieving even its minimal military objective of securing the Donbas. As Ukraine manages to make gains along the frontline and frustrates Russian offensives, and as the Russian military increasingly feels the strain of the war and the deterioration of its combat power, what has long seemed so implausible has become more likely. Kyiv and its partners could convince Moscow that a cease-fire is its best option.
UKRAINIAN REVIVAL
Over the last two years, Ukrainian commanders have been hampered by dwindling manpower. Monthly casualties exceeded the number of personnel dispatched to combat units from training centers. The inability of units to rotate, allowing soldiers breaks from combat duty, led to exhaustion among the infantry. Ukraine has been able to mobilize some 30,000 new soldiers a month, but fewer than half of these troops tend to make it to the front. Many were not medically fit for service in battle. Others were demoralized by the poor standard of training provided.
Troops become significantly less effective if required to remain more than 40 consecutive days in the combat zone, according to a study performed by the office of the Inspector General of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Rotating troops, however, has been dangerous, as soldiers moving back and forth from positions on the frontline became vulnerable to enemy drones and artillery. As a result, soldiers have spent more than 200 consecutive days in the combat zone. This has led to fatigue within brigades and a perception that service is a one-way ticket to the infirmary or the morgue, encouraging new recruits to desert during training. By the beginning of 2026, over 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers were listed as absent without leave.
The Ukrainian military, however, began to take steps to address these problems in the middle of 2025. Previously, the highest level of tactical formation in the Ukrainian army was the brigade. In 2025, Ukraine established over a dozen army “corps,” each responsible for several subordinate brigades. The corps also became tasked with training so that troops were being taught by those who would lead them into battle. Although this process is still being implemented, it has already boosted the quality of the training and discouraged new soldiers from deserting. Some Ukrainian units have also moved from requiring five weeks of basic training to eight, better preparing soldiers before they are committed to combat.
The Ukrainian military has turned the corner in its manpower challenge.
At the same time, a number of Ukrainian units began to better integrate infantry, uncrewed systems, artillery, and armor. On the frontlines, they were able to create periods of dominance over the Russians that allowed the rotation of troops and even offensive gains. These combined arms tactics helped Ukrainian forces make advances in Kupyansk in the fall of 2025 and in Huliaipole in the spring of 2026. More important, the Ukrainians maintained a favorable casualty exchange ratio, losing fewer soldiers than the Russians, even when they were on the offensive. Ukrainian UAV units have also become better able to engage in what the Ukrainian army calls “middle strike,” attacking Russian logistics targets as far as 60 miles from the frontline. The growing density of Ukrainian reconnaissance and strike systems on the battlefield makes it harder for Russian forces to try to infiltrate Ukrainians lines and to be resupplied. That limits the combat power that Russia can mass at any point on the frontline, reducing the pressure on Ukrainian units.
The combination of reforms with growing tactical proficiency and improvement in training has seen the Ukrainian military reverse the decline that characterized 2024 and much of 2025. For the opening months of 2026, there has been a net positive inflow of new personnel into the combat units. For now, these gains are fragile. With vegetation thickening from the spring into the summer, Russian troops will have more opportunities to infiltrate and press Ukrainian positions. While some Ukrainian units exhibit improved tactical proficiency, other brigades continue to struggle. Nevertheless, there are reasons to think that the changes adopted by the Ukrainian military over the past year will only keep strengthening it in the year to come.
The maturing of the new army corps should help to spread best practices to the benefit of struggling brigades. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also announced reforms to the mobilization system and terms of service that should help ensure that more mobilized personnel end up in combat units. These reforms include better pay, a defined duration of service, and the restructuring of training and of the process by which personnel are mobilized. Heavy fighting continues, but the Ukrainian military has turned the corner in its manpower challenge and is becoming more tactically proficient in combining the new tools of war with the old.
RUSSIAN WOES
In contrast to the subtle but positive improvements in the condition of the Ukrainian military, Russian forces have started to see their performance on the battlefield decline. This is the result of the confluence of several factors. Throughout 2024 and 2025, Russian advantages on the battlefield stemmed from Moscow’s commitment of vast reserves of manpower and the Russian military’s integrated application of firepower, which together imposed constant attrition on Ukrainian forces. In theory, with Russian recruitment exceeding Russian losses, the Kremlin could have put some troops through a more sustained period of training, raising the overall quality of the force. Instead, the Russian command appeared content to accept massive and sustained casualties, hurling troops with between two days and two weeks of training against Ukrainian positions. That led to some 23,000 Russian casualties every month through 2025.
Russian recruitment has kept pace with losses in large part because of the strong financial incentives offered by the Kremlin, including significant pay and debt forgiveness. Although this approach has proved to be an effective way of drawing unskilled new soldiers, it has not attracted a corresponding body of technical specialists who can command reasonable salaries in the civilian or military-industrial economy. The Russian army, for example, is far below its recruitment targets for drone operators.
Pay as the primary motive for service has also created an accumulation of personnel in Russian units who are eager to avoid combat. Officers accept bribes from soldiers who don’t want to be part of an assault. Meanwhile, soldiers who break the Russian military’s growing array of contradictory standing orders are punished by being thrown into assaults. This uncompromising approach often sweeps up important support troops, such as those responsible for logistics, who have run afoul of regulations. In a force where logistics is overwhelmingly coordinated through the social media app Telegram, but in which Telegram is banned, a conscientious logistician is at high risk of finding himself stopped by the military police and either being shaken down for money or reassigned to assault units.
Russian combat performance is waning.
The result over time has been a buildup of connected and fee-extracting soldiers at intermediate echelons, such as the regiment, and a hollowing out of personnel with any professional experience in subordinate units as they are killed or wounded in attempted assaults. The lack of quality at lower levels has seen a deterioration in performance and an inability to execute plans or orders. Many officers have received their promotions in the field, without having gone through extensive officer training, and their foremost task has been to psychologically prepare their soldiers for attacks rather than to plan and execute competent attacks in the first place.
In previous years, the devastating effect of Russian artillery, drone strikes, and glide bombs compensated for the poor performance of Russian infantry. But the battlefield now looks and functions very differently from how Russian military planners are used to imagining it. Today, the battlefield does not consist so much of opposing frontlines as it does a belt of contested territory some 18 miles wide in which both sides are intermingled. The cartographic tools that Russian planners use are not well suited to accurately reflect how forces are fighting. The result is a divergence in what Russian planners map, and what orders are actually possible to carry out. That has led to growing inefficiency in the coordination of strikes.
Nor do officers at lower levels necessarily know how to execute the orders they receive. Intermediate level officers, moreover, are encouraged to report success up the chain. These factors have brought about a growing discrepancy between where senior Russian commanders think their troops are, and the reality on the ground. As a result, the Russian military routinely makes mistakes in assigning artillery and drone assets and issues an array of orders, premised on bad information, that cannot be carried out. In short, Russian forces are increasingly unable to turn plans into military operations, with a corresponding weakening in their attacks.
Confidence Without Complacency
The combined trends of growing Ukrainian cohesion and the degeneration of Russian combat units might make it seem like a successful outcome for Ukraine is now inevitable. This is far from the case. The Russian military still has over 600,000 troops attacking Ukraine and it faces no shortfall of ammunition, thanks to its vast military industrial complex. Russian drones and glide bombs continue to trouble Ukrainian logistics, while Russian infantry still probe Ukrainian positions to find and exploit gaps. Dwindling Ukrainian air defenses are inviting more Russian drone and cruise missile attacks throughout Ukrainian territory.
The Ukrainian military is having to fight hard to hold ground and, in some sectors such as Kostyantynivka, is losing territory. Ukrainian troops may be more optimistic, but they remain tired. Although some Ukrainian units have demonstrated a major improvement in their combat performance, there are also some brigades that are consistently underperforming. Russian troops are also dangerously close to key Ukrainian cities, such as Zaporizhzhia in the south of the country. The immediate tactical picture may favor Ukraine, but there remains little margin for error.
Nevertheless, Russia is not on track to complete the occupation of the Donbas by the end of the year, as mandated by the Kremlin. Without significant reorganization of Russian forces, it is not clear that Moscow would be able to achieve that objective in 2027, either. The war is taking its toll, and the Russian military effort is in trouble.
Ukraine’s partners must keep applying sufficient pressure on Russia.
There is, as yet, no indication that Russian President Vladimir Putin has changed his view that Ukraine should not exist as an independent country or that he no longer wants to subjugate it. But Putin has shown that he is responsive to battlefield realities when he cannot wish them away, such as when Russian forces withdrew from Kyiv and Kherson in 2022. The question, therefore, is how the Kremlin will react upon realizing that its prospects on the battlefield are dimming.
The great risk is that the Kremlin escalates and begins a more concerted process of military mobilization, allowing the forceful conscription of the specialists the Russian military needs as well as a large reserve of manpower. This may spur Russian military gains in Ukraine, but it is fraught with political and economic risk at home. The Russian central bank is already warning that the country faces a major labor shortage. With the Russian military having degenerated to such an extent, it is unclear whether the armed forces would be able to make effective use of a large injection of manpower. The Kremlin is likely mulling the consequences of such a drastic action. The military has recommended broader mobilizations at several points during the war and Putin has always resisted.
Another possibility is that the Kremlin pauses any major offensives and settles into a more defensive posture, offering no cease-fire while continuing to pound Ukraine with drones and ballistic and cruise missiles through another winter. Putin may judge that Russia can simply protract the conflict for longer than Kyiv can endure. But this path becomes harder for the Kremlin to pursue as the Ukrainians demonstrate the capacity to conduct more effective offensive actions. Ukraine’s growing use of long-range strikes to target sites important for the Russian economy will also make it harder for Moscow to wage a forever war.
Out of the Frying Pan
If Ukraine can reinforce the current trends over the remainder of the year—with its own forces on the up, and Russia struggling—it becomes ever more plausible that Kyiv and its partners might be able to convince Moscow of the merits of accepting an unconditional ceasefire. Ukraine’s partners should consider carefully how this path can be made attractive to the Kremlin, as there are many poison pills that could be thrown into the process that would encourage Putin to protract the conflict further. But there is also a growing opportunity to convince Putin that a cease-fire is his least risky option.
This does not mean that Putin would abandon his hostility toward Ukraine. But the Kremlin might be able to convince itself that a cease-fire offers the best path toward its ultimate objectives, having failed, so far, to achieve them on the battlefield. Putin would undoubtedly shift to seeking to capitalize upon Ukraine’s subsequent political and economic fragility to exert leverage over Kyiv. And the pause could allow Moscow to fix some of the problems with its military, leaving Ukraine threatened by the potential of being attacked again at any moment.
The Ukrainian public, for its part, would welcome a respite from the grind of the war. Should Ukraine and Russia agree to a cease-fire, it would constitute a major achievement for Kyiv and offer the opportunity to work toward a lasting peace. It would also carry a great many risks.
The Ukrainian public would press the government to demobilize or, at the very least, replace the experienced but exhausted soldiers on the frontline with fresher but greener troops. After years on a war footing, the country would suddenly have to reckon with the massive damage to its industries and infrastructure. The country’s political unity would fracture with demands for an election. With the sense that the immediate threat from Russia is receding, European partners may become less generous in underwriting Ukraine’s defense. In short, the country would find itself vulnerable, and Russia would find ample opportunity to destabilize its neighbor.
Although a successful conclusion to the war is far from assured, it is now a realistic possibility. Making that outcome more likely requires that Kyiv continue to strengthen its defenses by seeing through the reform and restructuring of its forces. Ukraine’s international partners must keep applying sufficient pressure on Russia by continuing to arm Ukraine and impose economic sanctions on the Kremlin. The political and economic risks of the conflict’s indefinite prolongation have begun to weigh on the Kremlin’s decision-making. Ukraine’s partners should evaluate how they can help alter Moscow’s calculus. And it is increasingly important that Europe, given Washington’s progressive disengagement from the continent, thinks hard about how it can win the fragile peace, should a cease-fire be reached. After all, a cease-fire is a necessary precondition for Ukraine’s security and prosperity, but it does not guarantee it.
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