Who is winning the war in Ukraine?

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has rejected as false a leaked plan detailing how US President Donald Trump plans to end the war against Russia in 100 days.

Details published in Strana, a Ukrainian outlet, and reported by Newsweek, suggest bilateral meetings with both leaders of Ukraine and Russia could deliver a ceasefire agreement along the frontline by Easter, followed by an international peace conference mediated by other global powers to forge a lasting agreement.

Attention may have shifted to "negotiations that have yet to happen" and the "contradictory signals from the Trump administration that one day look positive for Ukraine, and the next less so", said The Economist, but "for those doing the fighting, the agenda is less abstract".

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"As long as the frontline keeps moving," Russian President Vladimir Putin "appears to have little reason to compromise".

Can Ukraine win the war?

By the time Ukraine marks the third anniversary of Russia's invasion on 24 February, "the situation on the frontline could look very different" to how it was at the start of the year, said The Independent.

"Slowly but surely", Russian forces are continuing their advance in the east, while at the same time "shrinking Ukraine's partial hold of the border region of Kursk".

Recent Russian gains have followed a "familiar pattern", said The Economist: "relentless infantry assaults, devastating casualties, collapsing Ukrainian defences, and their eventual retreat".

As Ukraine battles to slow the advance of Russia further into its territory, the outcome of the war looks increasingly likely to be decided by two key factors: supply of soldiers and maintaining international support.

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. In October, Al Jazeera reported that "feared patrols" are hunting for potential conscripts, as officials searching for recruits "stalk nightclubs, concerts and subway stations". There are accusations that some are employing "dubious measures", including that they "round people up randomly".

Ukraine's "inherent weakness is that it depends on others for funding and arms", wrote the BBC's international editor, Jeremy Bowen. On the other hand Russia – in addition to an advantage in raw manpower – "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.

The prospect that the Trump White House cuts aid to Ukraine is very real and has focused minds on both sides. In the immediate aftermath of his father's election win, Donald Trump Jr. warned Zelenskyy he was 38 days from losing his "allowance".

Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, the former deputy head of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, told Al Jazeera that the armed forces are already bracing for the worst but cautioned it was still hard to predict what the famously unpredictable president would do.

If the "worst-case scenario" for Ukraine materialises, said CNN, namely if the US stopped providing aid, Europe did not step up its assistance and Ukraine was not able to access the $50 billion or so in frozen Russian assets promised to it by the G7, then Russia would "likely start to make much bigger gains" which could force Kyiv to the negotiating table.

This matters, said The Independent, because "each inch of territory lost or gained could prove vital in future negotiations."

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 the country's president, 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 Economist said the Kremlin's "minimum requirement" appears to be "occupying the entirety of the Donbas region (comprising the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk), regaining control of Russia's own Kursk region, which Ukraine has partly occupied, and holding on to the 'land bridge' it seized in the early stages of the war connecting Crimea to Russia".

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". But in September, The Wall Street Journal reported that about one million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed or wounded since the war began. The report also said that, in the first half of 2024, three times as many people died in Ukraine as were born.

Also in September, the BBC's Russian unit reported that for the first time, "volunteers – civilians who joined the armed forces after the start of the war" – made up the "highest number of people killed on the battlefield" since the invasion began in 2022.

Ukraine does not habitually release casualty figures, but as of January 2025 UALosses, a web project which records details of Ukrainian soldiers killed in the conflict, had gathered more than 68,000 names.