Frederick W. Kagan is the director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. Kimberly Kagan is the founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War.
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. Ukrainian forces liberated the town of Kupyansk in Kharkiv oblast in November and retook tactically important positions in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts last month. In fact, Ukrainian forces have made net daily gains more frequently over the past six months than they had in the previous nine.
Meanwhile, Russian weekly gains this year are below their highs from last year. Indeed, Ukraine liberated more land than Russian forces seized the last two weeks of February.
Nothing in the data supports Russian claims that Ukrainian lines are about to break.
Speaking directly with Ukrainians only underlines the point. Ukrainian commanders with whom we met on a recent trip seemed more confident about their ability to hold the Russians off than they have been since 2023. When we spoke with these same commanders last year, they were concerned about the prospects of renewed enemy advances. But the Ukrainian armed forces have held the Russian fall and winter offensive to limited territorial gains. And the commanders rightly pointed out that most of those gains were empty fields and tiny villages, not large cities or fortified positions.
Ukraine’s army has continued to improve and perfect its so-called “wall of drones” defense, which has managed to blunt Russia’s manpower advantage on the front. Ukraine has also embarked on a remarkable long-range strike campaign, using both drones and even a new type of domestically produced cruise missile. They are beginning to deploy midrange weapons to disrupt Russian offensive efforts before they reach the line of contact. And they have even been able to take advantage of Russian overextensions and missteps to retake ground.
We came away from our meetings concluding that Russia’s relentless advance is much less impressive and significant than Ukraine’s relentless defense. Estimates of how long it would take the Russians to complete the seizure of Donetsk at current rates of advance range from two to three years. But it’s far from obvious that the Russians can sustain their current rate of advance, especially as they try to take fortified urban areas that constitute the fortress belt.
The Russian negotiating position is based on a bluff and a lie. The bluff is that the Russians will overwhelm Ukraine and take what they want anyway. The lie is that they will be satisfied with less than what they continually demand: complete political control over Ukraine, the withdrawal of NATO forces from all states admitted after 1997, restrictions on U.S. weapons and exercises in Europe, and an end to NATO’s open-door policy. Whether or not Putin might ultimately compromise, the Russians have thus far refused to bend.
Even their territorial claims transcend Donetsk. They claim to have already annexed Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in addition to Donetsk and Luhansk and that their constitution requires them to seize and govern even the parts of those regions that Ukrainian forces still hold. They also claim a right to Ukrainian territory beyond that — Odesa, Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv oblasts.
U.S. pressure on Ukraine, to make territorial concessions and sue for peace, is encouraging Putin to keep fighting and refrain from making compromises necessary for an enduring peace. Pressuring Kyiv is not an act of mercy meant to avoid needless casualties in a hopeless defense. On the contrary, the Ukrainian defense is proving to be durable and it’s the Russian offensive that’s struggling. The way to end this war is not to rescue Putin from a failing campaign, but to help Ukraine make it fail faster.
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