Ukraine’s envoy to the UN, Andriy Melnyk, has warned “our patience is not endless” and that Kyiv may revise its ceasefire offer to Russia if the UN security council fails to pass a resolution urging a full and unconditional end to the hostilities.
Melnyk told a UN security council session that Ukraine had changed the dynamic in the war with recent attacks, including damaging some 40% of Russia’s oil refineries with drone strikes.
“If the security council would further choose a wait-and-see approach, I cannot exclude that Ukraine may recalibrate and modify its offer. Ceasefire along the de facto front line is already a great compromise,” he said.
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Melnyk’s statement “reflects growing confidence that Ukraine’s war effort is on the front foot,” said The Guardian, “with Russian cities starved of fuel supplies and a ‘middle strike’ campaign seriously disrupting supply lines to Moscow’s occupying forces.”
But it is not all good news for Ukraine as Russian troops have infiltrated the strategic city of Kostyantynivka in eastern Ukraine and are now trying to surround it. The entire city is now effectively in a “grey zone”, controlled by no one, Ukrainian soldiers have told the BBC.
“They get into areas behind our backs and in urban conditions it's extremely difficult to push them out,” said a Ukrainian drone pilot. “Kostyantynivka is a gateway to the rest of the Donbas region,” said the BBC.
Outside Russia, the invasion on 24 February 2022 “was widely seen as an attempt to force Kyiv back into Moscow’s orbit and to overturn the entire post-Cold War security architecture in Europe”, said the BBC’s Russia editor Steve Rosenberg. “The Russian leadership envisaged a short and successful military operation. It didn’t go to plan.”
As the war “grinds on”, each side has claimed small victories but the overall picture has barely changed.
Can Ukraine win the war?
With fighting now in its fifth year, and still no sign of a peace agreement, the war is increasingly likely to be decided by two key factors: the supply of soldiers and maintaining international support.
Ukraine’s “inherent weakness is that it depends on others for funding and arms”, said the BBC’s international editor, Jeremy Bowen. On the other hand, Russia “makes most of its own weapons” and is “buying drones from Iran and ammunition from North Korea” with no limitations on how they are used. It also enjoys an advantage in raw manpower, bolstered by massive conscription drives.
Vladimir Putin aims to have a bigger army than America’s, with 1.5 million active servicemen. Its superiority in personnel and materials – along with the use of new “infiltration tactics”, reported by Deutsche Welle – has seen it take the initiative on the battlefield since 2024.
Yet 2026 has seen momentum swing again. Claims by Putin and senior Russian government and military figures at the start of the year that Ukraine’s front line faced “imminent collapse” proved to be a “false narrative”, said the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.
Instead, bolstered by a €90 billion (£77 million) loan from the EU that has allowed it to replenish its air defences and rapidly depleting stockpile of weapons, equipment and ammunition, Ukraine has not only managed to halt Russia’s spring-summer offensive, but in some areas even regained territory it had lost. At the same time, Kyiv has continued to target oil refineries in Russia with drone strikes that have sparked an energy crisis across the country. They have also launched a series of attacks on Moscow and St Petersburg which have proved hugely damaging to Putin’s standing among Russia’s elite and the wider public.
What does victory look like for each side?
Before Russia launched its invasion, Putin outlined the objectives of what he called a “special military operation”. His goal, he claimed, was to “denazify” and “demilitarise” Ukraine, and to defend Donetsk and Luhansk, the two eastern Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian proxy forces since 2014.
Another objective, although never explicitly stated, was to topple the Ukrainian government and remove President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “The enemy has designated me as target number one; my family is target number two,” said Zelenskyy shortly after the invasion. Russian troops made two attempts to storm the presidential compound.
Russia shifted its objectives, however, about a month into the invasion, after Russian forces were forced to retreat from Kyiv and Chernihiv. According to the Kremlin, its main goal became the “liberation of the Donbas”, including the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
The Trump administration has centred peace talks “around a core bargain”, said Samuel Charap and Jennifer Kavanagh in Foreign Affairs – that Ukraine cedes the roughly 20% of the Donbas region it still holds to Russia “in exchange for security commitments from the US and Europe”.
While Kyiv has raised the potential option of establishing a demilitarised “free economic zone” in eastern Donbas, it would never agree to hand over control of territory its soldiers have fought and died to defend.
To the surprise of many, earlier this month Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered to meet Vladimir Putin face to face. In an open letter he called for direct negotiations with the Russian president, writing that it was “wrong to simply wait” for the war to become the focus of US attention again. He also requested a ceasefire based on the current front line, but was quickly rebuffed by Putin, who called his note “rude” and reiterated his position that peace talks should precede any ceasefire.
How many Russian and Ukrainian troops have died in the conflict?
True casualty figures are “notoriously difficult to pin down”, said Newsweek, and “experts caution that both sides likely inflate the other’s reported losses”.
Russian authorities do not release official casualty figures but the “huge battlefield losses” are clear for all to see, said Rosenberg. “So many of the towns and villages I’ve visited in the last two years have had museums and monuments dedicated to soldiers killed in Ukraine, as well as separate sections for recent war dead at local cemeteries.”
In summer 2024, Russia’s wartime toll reached a “historic milestone”, said The Guardian, with more than a million troops killed or injured since the start of the invasion, according to the UK Ministry of Defence. Russia Matters cited MoD estimates for October 2025 that put the number of Russian soldiers killed or wounded at 1,118,000.
As of the start of this year, Russian forces had suffered “nearly 1.2 million casualties”, which would mark “more losses than any major power in any war since World War II”, said the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) think tank.
In April, Finland’s president claimed Ukrainian forces have killed or wounded as many as 35,000 Russian troops every month since the start of the year. Alexander Stubb told the Clash Report this equates to a “ratio of one Ukrainian dead to five Russians dead”. He said that 95% of Russian casualties were caused by drones.
Ukrainian casualty tolls – including deaths, injuries, and soldiers classified as missing – are believed to be around 500,000 to 600,000, said Brad Lendon of CNN.
It means that “at current rates, combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties” could have reached two million by the spring of 2026, said CSIS.
