Which side is winning the Ukraine war?

Russia carried out its heaviest aerial bombardment of Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, firing more than 800 drones and missiles on Sunday night.

Among the targets was Kyiv's main government building – the first time the Ukraine administration's offices have been struck during the war. At least four civilians were killed in the attacks, including a young woman and her baby who died when their apartment block was hit.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned what he called "a deliberate crime and an attempt to prolong the war", and said Ukraine was coordinating with its allies in order to deliver a "strong response".

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Can Ukraine win the war?

The strikes were the "latest in a relentless offensive that has continued unabated despite the Trump administration's efforts to mediate peace talks", said The New York Times.

Despite claiming he would bring about an end to the war "within 24 hours", Russian attacks on Ukraine have more than doubled since Donald Trump took office in January, according to the BBC.

With talks between the US and Russia having stalled even as Ukraine battles to slow the advance of Russian forces further into its territory, the outcome of 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 yet another massive conscription drive last month. Putin's aim is to have a bigger army than America's, with 1.5 million active servicemen, "a sign of Russia's relentless militarisation", said Sky News' Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett.

Data from the Ukrainian military revealed that Russia has increased its production of ballistic missiles by 66% in the past year, and has ramped up the scale of its barrages consistently through the summer.

Its superiority in personnel and materials – along with the use of new "infiltration tactics", reported by Deutsche Welle – has seen it make slow but steady progress on the battlefield, gradually expanding the amount of Ukrainian territory it controls over the past year.

In August, Russian forces took the key strategic town of Chasiv Yar in the eastern Donetsk region after months of fighting. Now its focus is on Pokrovsk, described by the BBC in August as "the hottest spot on the front line at this point of the war".

Yet optimism in Moscow that the thinly stretched Ukrainian army was close to collapse has, for now at least, proved to be wide of the mark. Putin had hoped a summer offensive would finally break Ukraine's resistance but the Russian army "has been unable to secure any front line breakthroughs", said the Atlantic Council. "The Kremlin's ambitious plans to expand the war into northern Ukraine's Sumy and Kharkiv regions have also fallen flat."

What does victory look like for each side?

Before Russia launched its invasion in February 2022, 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 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 – but Moscow has made little progress in achieving this aim.

Russia has since scaled back its objectives. The Kremlin's "minimum requirement" appears to be "occupying the entirety of the Donbas region (comprising the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk)", said The Economist. It also wants to regain "control of Russia's own Kursk region, which Ukraine has partly occupied", and hold on to "the 'land bridge' it seized in the early stages of the war connecting Crimea to Russia".

The Russian leader has repeatedly reiterated that the root causes of the conflict must first be eliminated before any ceasefire agreement. This is the language Putin "often uses as code to mean the removal" of Zelenskyy "and the installation of a Russian proxy government, as well as the incorporation of five illegally annexed Ukrainian regions into Russia", said Sky News.

As it stands, there is "no reason" to believe Putin wants long-term peace, said Sky News military analyst Michael Clarke, because "that's not good for his rule".

Ukraine's main objective remains the liberation of its occupied territories. That includes not just those held by Russia since the February 2022 invasion, but a return to its internationally recognised borders, including Crimea. Recently, however, Zelenskyy appears to have softened this red line, suggesting he might be open to freezing the war along the current frontlines, formalising Russian control over the territory it occupies in exchange for an end to fighting and security guarantees from the West.

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".

More than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 380,000 injured on the battlefield, Zelenskyy said in an interview with NBC in February, with "tens of thousands" missing or in Russian captivity. However, as of July, UALosses, a web project that records Ukrainian casualty data from open sources, lists 77,607 as having been killed in the war so far.

Moscow has fared even worse. Figures released in the summer by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank put Russian military deaths at up to 250,000 and total casualties, including the wounded, at over 950,000. In June, 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.

Even Russia's recent "extremely modest recent gains have come at a terrible price", said the Atlantic Council. "While the Kremlin does not release information about its war dead, conservative estimates of Russian casualties based on open source data suggest catastrophic losses during the summer months numbering tens of thousands."