Ukraine's major victories and defeats against Russian forces

Russia's war in Ukraine has been going on for nearly three years; in that time, tens of thousands of people have died on both sides of the conflict, and entire cities such as Bakhmut have been reduced to rubble and largely abandoned. Ukraine, led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has been able to hold off a complete Russian takeover of his country far longer than most — including Russian President Vladimir Putin — anticipated.

Ukraine has hinted that there could be an end to the "hot war" with Russia in 2025, but this has not occurred yet, even as new U.S. President Donald Trump claimed he would have the war ended within 24 hours of taking office. For now, the war continues, with Ukraine seeing major wins and losses.

WIN: Battle for Kyiv

The beginning of the war was "supposed to bring the existence of a 40-million European nation to an end," said The Kyiv Independent. Russia's invasion plan centered around a surprise lightning strike on Kyiv, toppling Ukraine's government while taking out its air defenses and military strongholds, Britain's Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) assessed per captured Russian documents. Ukraine was supposed to have been pacified within 10 days — but the country held strong.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Russia came dangerously close to succeeding, though, as noted by Foreign Affairs. Kyiv — and Ukraine — were saved through a combination of Putin's hubris, Zelenskyy's unexpected pluck and wartime leadership skills and Ukraine's years of planning and forewarning from Western intelligence.

"One of Putin's initial mistakes was trying to conquer a country the size of France with a force that Western estimates suggest was barely larger than the Allies' D-Day army in World War II," said The Associated Press. Thanks to this mismatch between ambitions and resources committed, retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling said at The Washington Post, "it took about six weeks for Phase 1 of Putin's campaign to fail."

LOSS: Siege of Mariupol

Ukraine derailed Moscow's Kyiv blitzkrieg, but Russia had more immediate success in the south. "Ukrainian failures helped Russia quickly seize Kherson," then Berdyansk and Melitopol, which "paved the way to the tragic destruction of Mariupol," said The Kyiv Independent.

Russia's main goal was to seize Mariupol given its strategic position; the city sits on a natural "land bridge" between Crimea and Russia, making it valuable to both sides. Russian forces were able to shell the city repeatedly, then send in infantry to finish the job.

Mariupol's defenders, outnumbered and isolated, made some mistakes, like dividing defense of the city between naval, ground and territorial defense forces, RUSI assessed. But they held on from late February through mid-May of 2022, when the final Ukrainian surviving forces surrendered at the sprawling Azovstal steel plant. "The longevity of the defense of Mariupol reflects the extraordinary bravery of its defenders," RUSI added. "Ukrainian forces not only exceeded the expectations of the Ukrainian General Staff, but also inflicted heavy losses on the Russian attackers."

WIN: Destruction of Russian battalion at Bilohorivka

The surrender of Mariupol bled into the Battle of the Donbas, where Russia redeployed patchwork forces from the north and south to try and capture the rest of Ukraine's industrial east. At this point, Ukraine had home-field advantage, grit, valor, and a mobilized population girded for war, but it needed bigger and better weapons and lots more ammunition. And before it could obtain them, it needed to convince Western allies they wouldn't be throwing good weapons at a lost cause.

Ukraine's armed forces proved they were up for the fight by destroying what amounted to an entire Russian battalion tactical group at the Siverskyi Donets River near Bilohorivka in Luhansk Oblast. For Ukraine, the strike helped open the floodgates of Western weapons and deflated the specter of an invincible Russian army. This ended up "limiting Moscow's options in a region it very much wants to control," said The Wall Street Journal.

LOSS: Capture of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk

Russia abandoned its efforts to encircle Ukraine's Donbas forces and pivoted to a frontal push for full control of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts. And Russia successfully, if temporarily, captured all of Luhansk with its grinding assault on the twin cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk in late June and early July 2022.

This blow to Ukraine was the start of the "attrition" stage of the Battle of Donbas, said The Kyiv Independent. In Severodonetsk and then Lysychansk, Russian artillery pounded the cities to rubble, and Ukraine defended them in close combat until they couldn't hold them any longer and fell back to new battle lines. However, the victory also meant Russia was "so exhausted that it couldn't gather" new offensive capabilities for more than six months.

WIN: Kharkiv blitzkrieg

In Phase 3 of the war, from July through September 2022, "Ukraine's army forced a large-scale withdrawal in the northeast in the Sumy and Kharkiv oblasts, using small-scale counterattacks directed at just the right locations," Hertling said in the Post. As Ukrainian forces routed Russian forces in Kharkiv, liberating some 3,000 square miles in a matter of days, the humiliated Russians "sustained casualties that far exceeded those suffered during the disastrous Phase 1 and 2."

The scale of Ukraine's victory in Kharkiv Oblast "stunned the entire world, but perhaps nobody was as surprised as the Russians themselves," former Ukrainian defense minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk said at the Atlantic Council. "The speed of events and the sheer scale of the collapse" thwarted the Kremlin's efforts to suppress the military disaster and delivered a "huge psychological blow for the Russian public, who learned for the first time that their soldiers in Ukraine were demoralized and beaten."

WIN: Recapture of Kherson

The last major battle of the first year of Russia's invasion of Ukraine was for Kherson, the only provincial capital Russia managed to capture before Ukraine turned the tide. And this battle ended in another humiliating defeat for Russia, which rewarded Ukraine's steady and surgical destruction of its supply and reinforcement lines by withdrawing across the Dnipro River rather than face another costly rout like Kharkiv. Russia abandoned Kherson weeks after "annexing" its namesake province.

LOSS: Battle for Bakhmut

The battle for Bakhmut, a once-bucolic city of 80,000, remains the longest and bloodiest of the war. Russia's year-long drive to seize the city "began as part of a theoretically sensible but overly ambitious operational effort" to encircle Ukraine's eastern forces and capture the strongholds of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) recorded, but it "ended as a purely symbolic gesture that cost tens of thousands of Russian casualties."

Russia started advancing on Bakhmut in May 2022 as part of a three-pronged attack on Slvovyansk, but the city lost most of its strategic significance when Ukraine recaptured the northern fork, Izyum, in its Kharkiv blitz, ISW said. The city had always been seen as being minimally important strategically, and was desired by Russia only for its symbolism of overtaking a major city. After this, in the fall of 2022, the Kremlin "desperately needed any battlefield victory," and mercenaries from the Wagner Group took on the task of capturing Bakhmut. But Ukraine decided to defend the city and used the battle to grind down both hardened Wagner forces and the Russian soldiers and commandos that stepped in when Wagner's offensive lost steam in February and early March 2023.

By the time Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, then the Kremlin, declared victory in May, the Russian army had "suffered such high losses and [was] so worn out around Bakhmut that ... it [could not] go forward anymore," Phillips O'Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, said to the AP. And Ukraine wasn't even done fighting. In the months after Moscow declared victory, Ukraine has pushed Russian forces out of Bakhmut's northern and southern flanks and captured strategic highlands overlooking the destroyed city, but the bulk of Bakhmut remains under Russian control.