Who is winning the war in Ukraine?

Russia launched its largest drone attack on Ukraine since the start of the war, just hours after Donald Trump announced the US would resume weapons shipments to Kyiv.

This week's barrage, which involved 728 drones and 13 missiles, focused on the city of Lutsk in northwestern Ukraine. It was "so intense it caused Poland's military to scramble aircraft in its airspace", said CNN.

"Moscow's scaled up assault on Kyiv follows a remarkable 48 hours in the White House, where Trump vented his anger about Russian leader Vladimir Putin's lack of commitment to a peace deal and pledged more support for Ukraine."

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Trump told a Cabinet meeting that "we get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth. He's very nice all of the time, but it turns out to be meaningless."

Can Ukraine win the war?

With peace talks continuing to stall 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: supply of soldiers and maintaining international support.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has already lowered the age of military conscription in Ukraine to 25 in an attempt to boost troop numbers. But conscription remains a touchy topic in Ukraine, and officials have had to tread lightly amid dwindling enthusiasm for military service. Last year, Al Jazeera reported "feared patrols" hunting for potential conscripts, as officials searching for recruits "stalk nightclubs, concerts and subway stations". There were accusations that some were employing "dubious measures", including efforts to "round people up randomly".

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.

Yet despite its manpower advantages, Russia's gains on the battlefield have "slowed dramatically" in recent months, said The Telegraph. Western officials and analysts say Ukraine was able to stall Russia's "potentially war-winning offensive" in the east of the country "through a combination of improved drone tactics and defences".

Its superiority appears to finally be paying off. Last month Russian forces made their biggest land grab of the year, seizing 215 square miles according to the open-source DeepState monitoring website in Ukraine. An area roughly the size of Liverpool or Chicago, the "goal is to cut off supply routes used by Ukrainian troops in the east, and create a buffer zone inside Ukraine's northern borders", said the BBC.

"But its advance remains relatively slow. At this pace it would take more than 70 years to capture the entire country."

Putin is "convinced that Russia's battlefield superiority is growing, and that Ukraine's defences may collapse in the coming months", said The New York Times, citing two people close to the Kremlin. "Given Russia's ongoing offensive, they say, Putin views it as out of the question to halt the fighting now without extensive concessions by Ukraine."

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.

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. According to an April 2025 estimate in Russia Matters, which keeps a daily tally of battlefield casualties, more than 790,000 Russian personnel had been killed or injured.

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.

This corresponds with figures released by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank, which puts Russian military deaths at up to 250,000 and total casualties, including the wounded, at over 950,000.