After years of slowly losing ground, Ukrainian forces started the month of March with some rare momentum.
Mounting a counterattack on the open steppe of the southern Zaporizhzhia region, one of the most fluid parts of a largely frozen front line, Ukraine in February gained more ground than it lost, for the first month since 2023, according to analysts.
While the fuzzy nature of the front in Ukraine makes it difficult to assess territorial gains, analysts estimated that Kyiv’s forces clawed back about 100 square miles of territory during the first two months of the year. A small assist came from Elon Musk’s unexpected decision in February to block Russian troops’ access to his satellite internet service, Starlink. That gave Ukrainian forces a brief reprieve from drone assaults and more ease of movement, analysts said.
Ukrainian officials applauded what they called a successful operation in Zaporizhzhia. President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Kyiv’s aim had been to thwart Russia’s plans for a new offensive starting in the spring.
Now those efforts are being put to the test.
As Moscow’s offensive begins to unfold, Kyiv’s forces are still slowly advancing in places where they had made gains this year. But Russian troops are pushing forward in other areas and are looking to retake land they recently lost, analysts and the Ukrainian military say.
“They are massing in these places,” said Lt. Col. Vitaliy Gersak, a Ukrainian commander in Zaporizhzhia, “and want to push us again.”
Russian forces are taking advantage of more favorable weather as the region emerges from a brutal winter, and they have intensified assaults over the past week, Mr. Zelensky said on Sunday.
Analysts and Ukraine’s military have noted an uptick in Russian combat activity in the direction of the town of Huliaipole, which was the focus of Kyiv’s recent counterattack in the Zaporizhzhia region.
Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s top military commander, said after a visit to the front line on March 15 that “the intensity of offensive operations in the Huliaipole area is significantly higher compared with that in other sectors.”
Mr. Zelensky said Russia was also trying to advance in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine and in the Sumy region near the Russian border. And General Syrskyi added on Monday that Ukrainian troops were under “colossal pressure,” including in the eastern Donetsk region, as Russia continued to resort to so-called meat-grinder assaults resulting in heavy losses.
General Syrskyi and Mr. Zelensky have asserted that Russia is suffering sky-high numbers of casualties as Ukraine tries to inflict greater losses than Moscow can replace through recruiting. Their claims could not be independently verified.
Ukraine’s gains in recent weeks followed a darker period on the battlefield. Russian forces were mounting assaults in Donetsk, while advancing in the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions in the south.
The Russian advances in Zaporizhzhia came in part because Ukraine, which is outnumbered and outgunned by Russia, had moved troops from that area to shore up its defenses in the Donetsk region. The fate of Donetsk is one of the main sticking points in American-mediated peace talks that have been largely paused in recent weeks as the United States has focused on its war against Iran.
Eventually, Ukraine moved more troops back into Zaporizhzhia, and at the end of January it launched its counterattack.
While the counterattack was successful, it was limited in scope.
“Just because for one or two months Russia has slower gains than Ukraine does not necessarily mean there’s been a great shift,” said Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst with the Finland-based Black Bird Group.
As Russian forces open a spring offensive — a yearly push that in the past has continued through the summer and into the fall — they may make tactical shifts, Mr. Kastehelmi said.
Because drones make it difficult to move on the battlefield, Russia has turned to infiltration tactics, in which soldiers move in very small groups, on foot or sometimes on motorcycles. Mr. Kastehelmi said that Moscow might look to move away from that approach, which left its forces vulnerable.
With the skies filled by drones, Russia and Ukraine have long abandoned large-scale mechanized warfare. But if either side wants to make significant operational gains, Mr. Kastehelmi said, it “will need to somehow find the way to utilize armor again in a successful way.”
A recent Russian mechanized assault near Lyman in eastern Ukraine could indicate an effort to try that tactic again.
In Zaporizhzhia, where the front line is more fluid, “we are likely to see a set of seesaw battles, rather than just the Russian forces trying to advance against an entrenched Ukrainian defense,” said Michael Kofman, a military analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Once the trees turn green and the ground dries out, Colonel Gersak predicted, “we will have very active fighting.”
The back-and-forth battles have put the regional capital itself, also called Zaporizhzhia, in potential danger. Small first-person-view exploding drones, which are equipped with cameras and piloted remotely, have started to reach the city, a sign that Russian forces have moved closer.
While the arrival of those drones has been a death knell for other places, they have yet to change the rhythms of Zaporizhzhia.
“Our situation is not that critical yet,” a resident, Liza Lotsman, 37, said as she sat in a bustling Zaporizhzhia coffee shop with young families brunching at the tables around her. “Look at how many people, how many cars are in the streets,” she added. “Zaporizhzhia is alive, and wants to live.”
Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting.
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