Ukraine marked parliamentary elections in Russia by launching its largest drone attack on Moscow since the start of the war four and a half years ago.
As voters headed to polls on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed Kyiv’s missiles had hit a “key” Russian oil facility and a logistics site in the Moscow region, representing “billions of dollars that sustain the war machine”.
Despite Ukrainian missile strikes, huge battlefield losses, and economic difficulties including widespread petrol shortages, results suggest Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party was on course to secure its constitutional two-thirds majority in Russia’s parliament, the State Duma.
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The Kremlin is “likely to use the result to claim that most Russians have rallied behind the president, and to justify future policies and subsequent decisions on the course of the war”, which shows no sign of ending, said BBC Russia editor Steve Rosenberg.
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 – allowed it to take the initiative on the battlefield from 2024 to the start of this year.
That changed in the first half of 2026 when, bolstered by a €90 billion (£77 million) loan from the EU that allowed it to replenish its air defences, weapons, and ammunition, Ukraine not only managed to halt Russia’s spring-summer offensive, but in some areas regained territory it had lost. At the same time, Kyiv ramped up its targeting of oil refineries in Russia with drone strikes that have sparked an energy crisis across the country. Ukraine 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.
Yet, in another swing of momentum, Ukraine is now “increasingly finding itself on the backfoot in many spots along the eastern front line”, said CNN.
Jennie Olmsted, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based conflict monitor, said that while a quick breakthrough remains unlikely, there has been a shift.
What does victory look like for each side?
Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion on Ukraine on 24 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 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.
Outside Russia, the invasion “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 Rosenberg. “The Russian leadership envisaged a short and successful military operation. It didn’t go to plan.”
With Russian forces forced to retreat from the suburbs of Kyiv and Chernihiv, about a month into the invasion, the Kremlin shifted its objectives to 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.
The Institute for the Study of War has calculated that at their current pace, Russian forces would not take Donetsk, the strategic and symbolic capital of Donbas, until 2032.
“This is a glacial pace, and it comes at a massive cost to Moscow”, said CNN. However, Russia is “chipping away at the so-called ‘fortress belt’” made up of four industrial cities – Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka – “that form the backbone of Ukraine’s eastern defences”. Russian forces have been menacing Kostiantynivka for almost a year, with troops also active around Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. Were one of these cities to fall, it could force Kyiv to sue for some sort of peace before Russia’s forces fully broke through.
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.”
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 Two”, said the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) think tank.
Western intelligence services cited by CNN estimate Russia is losing some 40,000 troops a month – a rate of roughly 340 casualties for every square kilometre, with the vast majority of these caused by drones.
Last week, Polish PM Donald Tusk said Ukraine’s losses had risen to record levels and predicted that autumn and winter would bring the worst phase of the war, in a “surprising and unusual statement” given Kyiv and its allies tend to keep data on casualties a secret, said EUObserver.
“Our partners from Ukraine informed me that recently, there have been 27,000 killed and wounded each month, and these are, of course, unfortunately, records in the saddest sense of the word during this war. At this rate, winter in Ukraine could be catastrophic,” Tusk said.
An unofficial project currently records 212,974 Ukrainian losses including: 103,418 killed, 97,938 missing and 11,618 captured. This does not include the wounded, which experts say could bring the total number of Ukrainian casualties since the war began to more than half a million.
