Ukraine Is Losing the War

Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Trump administration is pressing Kyiv to agree to painful territorial concessions as the price for peace. In a draft peace agreement first reported by Axios in November, the administration proposed that the entire regions of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk be recognized as de facto Russian territory and that Russia retain control of the parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia its forces now occupy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is pushing back, refusing to do anything that would violate his country’s territorial integrity. Yet the realities of the battlefield are not on his side.

Ukraine has been putting up valiant resistance, but its determination cannot disguise the fact that it is losing the war. Russia controls a large swath of Ukrainian territory, and Kyiv has little chance of dislodging it, as Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive in 2023 demonstrated. To be sure, recent Russian gains have come very slowly and at significant cost; over the last three years, Russia has taken a mere one percent of additional Ukrainian territory. But that does not change the reality that Russia now holds almost a fifth of the land within Ukraine’s 1991 borders—or that Russia’s greater resources and population mean that Moscow can fight on for years to come. Overcoming those Russian advantages and clawing back lost land on the battlefield would require time and investment that Ukraine doesn’t have. Current circumstances are therefore pushing Kyiv toward a compromise peace—one that will necessarily include the surrender of Ukrainian territory.

FALLING BEHIND

Judging by sheer numbers, the trajectory of the war does not favor Ukraine. The rates of battlefield losses on each side are one example. The Russian media outlet Mediazona tracks Russian military deaths using social media, obituaries, and official government notices and provides the most reliable estimates. (Estimates by Western intelligence agencies vary dramatically and often correlate with government policy preferences.) As of the end of 2025, Mediazona’s analysts identified 156,151 Russians who have been killed in the war and, because not every death is publicly reported, used population data to estimate a total of 219,000 dead. The Ukrainian nongovernmental organization UA Losses, employing a similar methodology, has reported 87,045 Ukrainians killed in action and 85,906 missing in action, a figure that likely includes unacknowledged deaths and desertions.

Although Ukraine is suffering fewer losses in absolute terms, the war is depleting a greater proportion of its manpower. Ukraine’s population today is just under 36 million, which is about 26 percent of Russia’s population of 140 million. Ukraine has just under 9.5 million men between the ages of 25 and 54, and it has lost between one and two percent of that cohort. For Russia, which has a little over 30.2 million men in the same age group, somewhat higher losses account for just 0.5 to 0.7 percent of the total. Ultimately, Russia, with its much larger population, can sustain larger total losses than Ukraine can.

Moreover, Russia is fighting mostly with contract soldiers—people who have volunteered—and keeping conscripts away from the front. The result is more motivated Russian soldiers. So far, Moscow is not having much trouble meeting recruitment needs. Ukraine, in contrast, relies heavily on conscription. Recent recruitment shortfalls and desertions have prompted increasingly draconian efforts to meet conscription a goal of 30,000 men per month. These include “busification,” the practice of grabbing men off the street and taking them in minivans to the local recruitment office. In addition to being unpopular, harsh methods are netting mostly older, less healthy, and clearly unwilling soldiers, many of whom desert at the first opportunity. Those who remain contribute little to the war effort.

When it comes to major weapons systems, Ukraine is outgunned across the board. As of 2025, Russia’s tanks outnumbered Ukraine’s at a ratio of nearly five to one, including the equipment Moscow has in storage. Russia had more than three times as many infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers as Ukraine. It had 670 pieces of towed artillery to Ukraine’s 543. It had five times as much mobile artillery, nearly ten times as many multiple launch rocket systems, and nearly five times as many mortars. Russia had 163 combat aircraft; Ukraine had 66. Although Russia’s huge advantage rests, in part, on older, stored equipment, much of the Western equipment sent to Ukraine is also old, coming from partner countries’ stockpiles. But even excluding stored equipment, in most categories, Russia’s stocks are at least double Ukraine’s.

Economic power is foundational to military power, and Russia has an advantage there, too. Russia’s 2024 GDP (measured by purchasing power parity) was almost $7 trillion. Ukraine’s, in contrast, was almost $657 billion, less than ten percent of Russia’s. Nominal measures show the same substantial gap. Spending around seven percent of GDP, Russia can allocate $484 billion to defense. Even if Ukraine spends 30 percent of its GDP, it will be able to muster a defense budget of only $197 billion, less than half of Russia’s.

Admittedly, this figure underestimates Ukraine’s long-term military capacity because it excludes the substantial financial and in-kind assistance the country has received from western Europe and until recently the United States. But Ukraine is more dependent on foreign partners than Russia is. Russia has a large indigenous defense industry and massive military stockpiles, although it, too, has come to rely to some extent on allies, including China and North Korea. Russia may not have all the cards, but it has big battalions and deep pockets.

Finally, consider each side’s strategic objectives. Although there is debate about what Russia’s goals may be, statements by members of the government emphasize two: control of some or all of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia and keeping Ukraine out of NATO.

The Russian government has long sought to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO on the grounds that Ukrainian membership in the alliance would constitute a military threat to Russia. At times, it has even seemed as if that objective outweighed larger territorial ambitions. When Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, it clearly wanted control of that territory. Russian-aligned militants, with varying levels of Russian support, took up arms in Donetsk and Luhansk, which together form the Donbas, to break away from Ukraine at about the same time. But Russia then supported the Minsk agreements, which ended the fighting but included no further territorial demands on Ukraine. One possible explanation is that by conceding that Donetsk and Luhansk would remain in a federalized Ukraine, Moscow hoped the pro-Russian regions would keep Kyiv from joining NATO or otherwise tilting toward the West. Indeed, Russia formally recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent only on the eve of its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In a September 2022 presidential speech and subsequent parliamentary action, Russia formally annexed those two regions, plus Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Russia now holds almost a fifth of the land within Ukraine’s 1991 borders.

Today, Russia controls 99 percent of Luhansk, 76 percent of Kherson, 74 percent of Zaporizhzhia, and 72 percent of Donetsk. Russian forces are advancing in Zaporizhzhia, low-level fighting continues in Kherson, and Moscow is conducting limited operations in the north to secure a buffer zone in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions. But Russia’s positive response to the Trump administration’s 28-point peace plan—which would deliver Moscow all of Donetsk and Luhansk but only parts of Ukraine’s other eastern regions—suggests that complete control of the Donbas is Moscow’s most consistent territorial objective. Its most consistent political objective remains keeping Ukraine out of NATO. In their ideal world, Russian leaders might entertain more ambitious territorial and political goals. After four years of grueling war, however, these more limited achievements appear to be all Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks he can get.

In contrast, Ukrainian leaders have been adamant that their goals remain the restoration of control over territory defined by the country’s 1991 borders, which includes Crimea, and the defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty, especially the freedom to join any alliance Kyiv wishes. But Ukraine has neither the military resources for a successful offensive nor the political will for a robust defense.

Given the length of the current frontline and Ukraine’s manpower problems, most Ukrainian units have to remain on the defensive. In June 2023, the Russian military broke the Ukrainian counteroffensive with its so-called Surovikin Line, a system of well-built fortifications supported by massive artillery and other indirect fire weapons. The Ukrainians, by contrast, have only belatedly begun digging similar defenses. Ukraine’s ambitious objective of territorial liberation has left its army few incentives to fortify the frontline or areas behind it. The provision of advanced Western weaponry may also have convinced the Ukrainians they could substitute technology or more Western support for operational innovation. And rampant corruption has undermined all aspects of Ukraine’s war effort, including the construction of fortifications. Russia is by no means free from corruption itself, but its size and economic advantages make the effects less damaging.

UKRAINE OUTMANEUVERED

Russia’s objectives seem reasonably compatible with its capabilities and trends on the battlefield. Ukraine’s objectives, in contrast, seem beyond its reach. The Ukrainian armed forces are stretched so thin along the 620-mile-long line of control that they cannot effectively defend it. Ukraine has only about 300,000 troops on the frontline, or 483 troops per mile. During the Cold War, Western planners thought that a successful defense of the border between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would require approximately one division (25,000 soldiers) per 16 miles, or some 1,500 soldiers per mile. By that rule of thumb, Ukraine has less than half the number of soldiers it needs to successfully defend the frontline.

Conversely, the Russian force in the occupied territory of Ukraine now numbers more than 700,000, which could provide a density of at least 1,129 troops per mile. By taking the offensive, Russia can further concentrate forces where it chooses and defend the rest of the line with lower numbers. Being on the defensive, Ukraine has to spread its forces relatively evenly along the entire frontline or risk having inadequate forces at a point Russia might attack. Ukraine must also keep an eye on the 674 miles of its border with the Russian ally Belarus, stretching its forces even thinner.

Military technology has not given Ukraine a clear edge, either. Working to modernize its military to NATO standards since 2015, Ukraine has relied on various sophisticated weapons, especially since the war began in 2022. The West has sent Ukraine everything from antitank guided missiles to multiple launch rocket systems to long-range cruise missiles, Patriot air defense missiles, and fighter aircraft. None have proved decisive, with the partial exception of first-person-view attack and reconnaissance drones.

When it comes to major weapons systems, Ukraine is outgunned across the board.

To be sure, the deployment of drones on both sides of the frontline has changed the nature of the fight dramatically. Roughly six miles on either side of the front has become a “kill zone” in which vehicles and large formations of troops can be spotted quickly and attacked relentlessly, reducing mobility under fire. But lately, there has been a dramatic shift in the balance of innovation. Western analysts have consistently questioned Russian military adaptability, but it is the Ukrainians who are now falling behind. Russia has greater capacity to scale up drone technology, resulting in an estimated ten-to-one advantage in the number of drones produced and deployed to the battlefield.

Superior Russian tactical innovation has had even more serious consequences for Ukrainian forces. The watershed came during the Ukrainian invasion of Russia’s Kursk region in 2024. In response to that incursion, Russian forces started operating differently. They substituted fiber-optic guidance systems once Ukraine developed the capacity to jam radio-controlled drones, negating a potential Ukrainian advantage in antidrone electronic warfare. They began attacking Ukrainian logistics and drone operators rather than individual soldiers on the frontlines, making far more efficient use of their drones than before. And reconnaissance drones enhance Russia’s traditional advantage in artillery (and in other indirect fire systems such as guided bombs) by providing much more effective fire correction—direction for how to aim at a target—than observers on the ground can provide. This capability enables Russian forces to substantially weaken Ukrainian defensive positions and interdict Ukrainian forces far behind the frontline.

A related Russian innovation involves infantry tactics that resemble the infiltration tactics developed by the Germans late in World War I to break the stalemate on the western front. Small numbers of Russian troops—typically assault groups consisting of three or four storm troopers or slightly larger sabotage and reconnaissance groups—increasingly penetrate Ukrainian lines through the drone-infested kill zone. Penny packets of soldiers, unlike tanks or infantry fighting vehicles, are not attractive targets, and the Russians have learned to use bad weather and darkness to evade Ukrainian reconnaissance during their infiltrations. The Ukrainians have tried to adopt similar tactics, but given their smaller numbers, they remain heavily reliant on highly visible and vulnerable armored vehicles to deliver troops, limiting their effectiveness.

LEAST BAD OPTION

Ukraine’s European backers have urged Kyiv to reject Russia’s demand to cede all of the Donbas. Kaja Kallas, the EU high representative for foreign affairs, has called trading Ukrainian territory for peace a “trap.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have repeatedly declared that “international borders must not be changed by force.” Some worry that giving in to Putin now will, as happened after a previous generation of European leaders made a deal with Hitler in Munich in 1938, only whet the Russian leader’s appetite for more Ukrainian and even NATO territory down the road.

A more reasonable objection is that the remaining Ukrainian-held Donbas “fortress cities” of Kramatorsk and Slavyansk constitute critical links in Ukraine’s defense. Urban warfare is costly, making cities highly defensible, and in today’s drone-dominated battlefield, they offer cover and protection as concentration points for troops. Given Ukraine’s manpower woes, defending fortified islands may seem like a good option. But preserving the Donbas fortress cities is no reason to continue the war. It is possible to protect territory farther behind the frontline without them with dedicated fortifications. Russia has also demonstrated that even fortress cities can be surrounded, isolated, and cleared through the infiltration of small units, as it has done recently in Chasiv Yar, Huliapole, Pokrovsk, and Siversk—and may yet succeed in doing in Kostiantynivka and Kupyansk.

The loss of the rest of Donetsk, although assuredly a blow to Ukrainian self-esteem, would not necessarily open the door to Kyiv for Moscow. Between October 2024 and October 2025, the Russians took control of 1,703 square miles of Ukrainian territory. The remainder of unoccupied Ukraine east of the Dnieper River consists of 57,066 square miles of territory. At last year’s rate of Russian advance, it would take more than 30 years for Moscow to complete such a conquest.

Western European panic notwithstanding, Russia essentially claiming victory in the Donbas would pose little threat to the rest of the continent. The Donbas is not the Sudetenland because the current Russian tactics are nothing like the blitzkrieg, which garnered Nazi Germany huge chunks of territory very quickly. It would take Russia decades to conquer the rest of Ukraine, so any direct threat to most other countries in Europe would manifest itself far into the future.

Rampant corruption has undermined all aspects of Ukraine’s war effort.

Yet there can be little doubt that Russia can achieve more limited aims by force of arms. Roughly 2,866 square miles of Donetsk remain under Kyiv’s control. If Russian forces continue at last year’s rate of advance, they could take it in a year and a half, a reasonable time frame. They may also grab more chunks of Kharkiv, Sumy, and Zaporizhzhia. Doing so would cost Russia additional blood and treasure, to be sure, but it would impose greater relative costs on Ukraine, which Kyiv can ill afford.

The Ukrainians and their allies must now ask themselves what another year of war will achieve and at what price. There is evidence of a growing sense among senior Ukrainian officials, including Kirill Budanov, the presidential chief of staff and former head of military intelligence, that although Ukrainian deep strikes and attacks on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers—the unmarked vessels Russia uses to evade sanctions—hurt Russia, they will not end the war any time soon.

With its larger objectives out of reach, Ukraine faces the prospect of ceding territory, which would be painful for Kyiv. But it does not have to mean the end of Ukraine as an independent country. A Ukraine shorn of its eastern regions could continue Kyiv’s westward-looking state-building project. Even before the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine was already shifting its economic center of gravity away from the rust-belt Donbas and toward the postindustrial center and west. And with comprehensive political and economic reforms; a serious anticorruption effort, especially in the military sector; and a campaign to construct defensive positions optimized for drones and low-density warfare and to invest substantial funds and organizational effort into battlefield innovations, Ukraine could be in a stronger position to protect itself were it attacked again. Accepting a bad peace deal now would at least give Kyiv this chance at a better future. Rejecting one now would only prolong a costly and losing war.

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