“Just because a war has a positional nature doesn’t mean that it’s stalemated,” George Barros, the director of innovation and open source tradecraft at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), told TMD. “This has been a competitive war the whole time.”
On May 2, ISW—which publishes daily campaign assessments—estimated that in April, Russian forces suffered a net loss of territory in Ukraine for the first time since Ukrainian forces’ August 2024 incursion into Kursk Oblast. Russia’s military lost about 45 square miles to Ukrainian advances against roughly 10 square miles gained.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Ukraine is winning. Precise gains are difficult to calculate, since many advances are made by small units infiltrating gaps in the line and are quickly reversed; Russia’s progress also tends to slow during Ukraine’s muddy early-spring season before picking up again as the ground dries.
But even a return to Russia’s prior pace would not amount to imminent Ukrainian collapse. In the 12 months prior to April, Russian forces gained an average of 160 square miles a month—not enough, at that rate, to finish conquering the Donbas in another year, let alone the two other provinces Moscow has claimed.
Last year, supporters of Ukraine feared that increasing Russian drone proficiency would enable it to accelerate its advances into Ukrainian territory. But rather than focusing on repelling drone attacks, Ukrainian commanders have reoriented toward destroying “the machinery that gets [Russian drones] to us in the first instance,” Barros said. Ukraine’s military has developed new tactics to proactively strike the dugouts and command posts where Russian drone teams operate, often miles behind the front line.
Recent battles undercut the assumption that both sides are stuck, Dmytro Putiata, a member of Ukraine’s 20th Unmanned Systems Brigade, told TMD. Recent counter-offensives, he said, have been “a great example of [drones] helping your infantry to fight”—namely, using small assault groups that strike while operating under dense drone cover. “We managed to break through up to 12 kilometers,” in one operation late last year, he said. Putiata argued this model is one “way to bridge this kind of deadlock situation.”
Late last year, Ukrainian forces used variants of that approach to push Russian troops back from Kupiansk in the Kharkiv Oblast and, this March, made gains around Pokrovsk in the Donetsk Oblast. Doing so required moving large numbers of troops across open ground in armored vehicles, which would have been a suicide mission for most of the war.
But the limits Ukraine now faces are more traditional. “Manpower is still the issue,” Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who regularly tours the Ukrainian front, told TMD. When a Ukrainian unit punches a hole in a Russian line, “you need [it] to have enough guys ready to assault,” he said—and Ukrainian commanders are increasingly using their best assault units as a “quick reaction force” to plug Russian advances rather than to exploit Ukrainian ones. Zelensky says his country adds roughly 30,000 to 34,000 troops to the force each month through a mix of conscripts and volunteers, but the government has declined to draft men ages 18-25, the country’s smallest generation.
But some analysts argue the manpower debate is a mirage. For years, Western analysts and the U.S. government had pushed Ukraine to draft its18-to-25-year-oldss and pour mass infantry into the front—advice that, in Phillips O’Brien’s view, would have slaughtered the country’s most dynamic workers at the moment drone production mattered more than rifle counts. “The best thing Ukrainians did was stop listening to Americans and Europeans,” O’Brien, a military historian and professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, told TMD. Instead, O’Brien argued, the Ukrainians have successfully restructured their military around unmanned weapons. In April, Ukrainian forces captured a Russian-held position using nothing but drones and ground robots.
Zelensky has also been on a drone dealmaking spree, signing defense production agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar—which could be worth “billions,” he said—and inking a broader defense package with Germany. Officials value that deal at $4.7 billion, and it includes joint drone production.
This dealmaking—paired with steady European money—has helped offset the loss of direct U.S. budget support. “The Europeans have come through in terms of money,” Jim Townsend, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and former senior Defense Department official, told TMD. Last month, the European Union approved a $105 billion loan to Ukraine, meant to cover two-thirds of Ukraine’s estimated financial needs over the next two years. Britain moved this month to join the package, opening formal negotiations with Brussels.
Even so, O’Brien told TMD that the Ukrainians he spoke to were “actually more concerned about next winter, in some ways, than this summer,” and the prospect of more Russian strikes on energy infrastructure. Ukrainians now refer to the freezing winters, which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians suffer through without electricity or heat, as the kholodomor—a portmanteau of the Ukrainian word for cold and Holodomor, the Soviet-induced famine of the 1930s that killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians.
Russian civilians have been more insulated from the costs of war, but that’s now shifting. “For me, the most important thing that’s changed is the way Russian government officials talk about the economic situation,” Timothy Frye, a political scientist at Columbia University who studies Russia, told TMD. Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged the economy was not performing to expectations in a TV broadcast last month—during which he criticized officials for failing to anticipate the extent of the economic contraction—and the country’s GDP shrank during the first two months of this year. (In recent years, military spending had kept Russian GDP growing despite Western sanctions.)
“For the first time in modern history, our economy has faced shortages or limits on labor,” Elvira Nabiullina, the governor of the Central Bank of Russia, said last month. As Frye noted, “It doesn’t take a lot of math to get to why there’s a shortage of labor in Russia.”
“The only thing going well for Russia right now is the war in Iran,” Bob Hamilton, the president of the Delphi Global Research Center, told TMD. Oil and gas revenues fund roughly a third of the Russian federal budget, and since 2022, sanctions have squeezed its customer base down to a handful of buyers—chiefly India and China—willing to take its crude only at a steep discount. Due to the surge in oil prices caused by the Iran war, roughly $150 million more a day is going to Moscow.
Even so, oil revenue isn’t enough to overcome the state’s deficits. Last month, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov announced that—after regional governments recorded a record budget deficit of 1.5 trillion rubles ($20 billion) in 2025—the 2026 deficit is expected to spike to 1.9 trillion rubles ($25.3 billion). (In normal years, according to Siluanov, regional shortfalls run 200 to 300 billion rubles.)
That puts pressure on the very pipeline—federal money flowing out to the regions and then into recruits’ bonuses—that the Kremlin has relied on to keep volunteers coming. Army recruits in regions like Khanty-Mansi in western Siberia (where the average monthly salary in 2025 was $1,600) were receiving around $50,000 in cash bonuses, along with tax breaks and debt relief. “They’re just not able to do what they used to do, and throw money at people,” Hamilton said.
North Korea has sent around 14,000 to 15,000 soldiers to fight in Ukraine, and Africans, Indians, and Cubans have reportedly been lured to Russia with promises of work and then forced into the military. But even with foreigners entering the military, Russia is seemingly struggling to replace its losses, which Ukrainian officials claim are around 35,000 a month.
Ordering a mass mobilization to provide hundreds of thousands of fresh recruits would likely be too politically risky for Putin. “If they’re going to do it, they’re going to have to go into probably Moscow and St Petersburg,” O’Brien said, noting that Russia’s wealthiest metropolises had largely been spared from the worst effects of the war.
International pressure to end the war has also faded. During a March phone call, President Donald Trump told Putin to end the Russia-Ukraine war, but the U.S. has stopped holding diplomatic summits between Russia and Ukraine. And neither side seems interested in signing a peace deal.
Ukraine is betting that its newfound edge in drone warfare and Russia’s manpower struggles will eventually degrade the Russian army as a fighting force, even without much of a shift in the front lines. “At some point their [Russia’s] way of fighting will be unsustainable” if they don’t find an effective counter-strategy, O’Brien said.
Zelensky, backed by his European partners, is now holding out against a Putin who cannot, or will not, accept that the conquest of Ukraine isn’t coming. At a diplomatic conference in Armenia on Monday, Zelensky was unsparing: “[Russia is] afraid that drones can fly over Red Square. This shows that they are not as strong as they used to be.”