Those who argue that the tide of war has turned point to several factors, but two in particular. Firstly, the pace of the Russian advance has slowed significantly compared with 2025, and secondly, Ukraine now has long-range drones and missiles that have inflicted extensive damage, particularly on Russia’s oil refineries, thereby creating a crisis in the supply of petrol and diesel in the country, and furthermore, have almost brought shipping traffic in the Sea of Azov to a standstill through missile and drone attacks. There are even sections of the front line where Russian troops have been driven back several kilometres, particularly in the Zaporizhzhia province.

A more dispassionate analysis, however, shows that this is an illusion.

Firstly, the Ukrainian army continues to lose ground, even during the period when it is claimed that the tide of war has turned (see, for example, this analysis by Simon Saradzhyan from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs, based, amongst other things, on data from the Ukrainian semi-official ‘Deep State’). Now, territory has never been the crucial factor in this conflict between Russia and Ukraine/NATO, but I shall return to that below.

Secondly, the impact of Ukraine now being able, with NATO’s help (and Elon Musk’s Starlink), to send long-range drones and missiles deep into Russia is greatly exaggerated. However, most of the refineries that Ukraine has targeted are at least partly operational again, and there is now petrol shortage in only a few regions, including Crimea. And as the former BBC correspondent, Leonid Ragozin (who left Russia in 2021, was granted asylum in Latvia and is now a freelance journalist based in Riga), writes, it is a ridiculous notion to “imagine modern Russians, or at least the Russian establishment, as snowflakes who will turn against Putin the moment they have to wait a full 20 minutes to fill up their car”. And he adds: “Russians have experienced far worse economic and security conditions in living memory”.

Ukraine is having great difficulty recruiting men to send to the front to compensate for the losses. One of the less pleasant methods is what is known as ‘bussification’, whereby men are violently apprehended on the street and shoved into a van. Photo from https://sfg.media/en/a/ukraine-ombudsman-tcc-systemic-constitutional-violations/

I can also see that some people are mentioning that Ukraine is now reportedly doing much better at recruiting new soldiers. I’m sorry to be a killjoy, but do have a read of this recent article from the BBC, featuring hair-raising stories of violent forced conscription, or ‘bussification’ as it’s known in Ukraine, which has previously been glossed over in the Western press. As is well known, Denmark strongly supports this forced conscription – these deserters are cowards who do not want to fight for their country, and who therefore certainly should not expect to be granted asylum in the future. But as the BBC writes: “Ukraine openly admits that it has a problem, which is new (…) and for which it has not yet found a solution.” But if asylum seekers can be sent back, then perhaps the problem can be solved, the NATO countries think hopefully. The right to asylum? No, they’re just a bunch of whingeing sissies.

Finally, there are those who argue that the deaths of Russian soldiers are now reaching an intolerable level, while Ukraine cleverly have spared their own soldiers. Of course, none of the warring parties wants to tell us their real losses, so it is difficult to get to the truth. But when you look at the repeated interchange of bodies of deceased soldiers, it doesn’t look particularly good for Ukraine. The general picture is that Russia hands over around 1,000 bodies and gets less than 50 in return. This does not automatically mean that the Ukrainian losses are more than 20 times bigger, as other factors may affect it (for example, that it is easier for an advancing army to pick up the dead than for a retreating one). Still, it is an indicator that doesn’t look favourable for Ukraine. The other observation is that the Russian army doesn’t seem to have serious problems recruiting new soldiers and volunteers to replenish their ranks on uncoerced contracts. At the same time, this is not easy for Ukraine even through coercion. If Zelensky’s claims regarding the enormous Russian fatalities were true, it is difficult to imagine that anybody would want to sign up of their own will to serve in the military.

It is worth bearing in mind that, following the meeting between Putin and Trump in Anchorage in August 2025, Russia offered Zelensky the ceasefire along the current line of contact that he had been seeking, but on condition that Ukrainian troops withdraw from the Donetsk region (where they still hold 15 per cent of the territory). This was flatly rejected, and the argument usually put forward was that Ukraine controls a heavily fortified line of defence in the Donetsk region, built up over a decade. If they were to abandon these trenches and high ground, they would lose their strategic advantage, it is said. That would amount to a capitulation. Incidentally, the offer has now been taken off the table.

In late 2025, the Ukrainian army lost control of the Prokobsk-Myrnograd conglomeration in Donetsk. It had a prewar population of around 100,000.The Ukrainian army argued angrily that it still controlled the city for several months after being defeated. That is what they are doing presently for Konstantinovka too. Photo from wikimedia.

The so-called ‘impregnable’ line of defence comprises four towns lying close together in a chain from south to north: Konstantinovka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Before the war, these towns had a combined population of around 400,000, but today that figure is probably less than half that. Of these, Konstantinovka (67,000 inhabitants before the war) fell last week; Russian forces are now just a few kilometres from Druzhkivka to the south-east and south-west, and 5–10 kilometres from the other two towns to the north and east. Few doubt that it is merely a matter of time before they too fall. The disagreement is mainly over when. Some believe it will happen towards the end of 2026, others that it will take more than a year. The latter is probably the most realistic scenario. The outcome will anyway be the same. Only after tens of thousands more Ukrainian soldiers have been sacrificed. But they shouldn’t be sad about that, we’re told, because they’re defending Europe. Keep at it, lads!

It’s as if people constantly forget that every new successful Ukrainian attack on Russia ends up backfiring on Ukraine itself. We have been told several times that the tide has turned. That was the case with the (failed) Ukrainian offensive in mid-2023, followed by the disastrous intent to create a bridgehead in Krynky. The last time was in 2024, when Ukrainian troops launched a lightning offensive into the Kursk region from Sumy. There was applause across NATO countries. That’s what the Russians deserve! It took a half year before the Ukrainian troops had been driven out with heavy losses, and the Russians decided afterwards to create a buffer zone within Sumy province, which had previously been spared from hostilities. They are now 10–15 kilometres from the city of Sumy. That wasn’t exactly the plan. But that’s what often happens in war.

As is common in such conflicts, there is a continuing trend towards escalation. Previous ‘red lines’ are being swept aside. The philosophy behind the attacks Ukraine is currently carrying out deep inside Russia (co-ordinated with and supported by NATO) seems to be that “they must feel the war too”. The preferred target at the moment is the Wildberry online platform’s warehouses across the country. Several have been burnt down, and many workers have lost their lives. The claim that this is intended to disrupt the Russian military’s logistics sounds, to put it mildly, implausible. But it is undeniably true that it is making life more difficult for many small and medium-sized enterprises that sell on the platform. So they have come to “feel the effects of the war”. Previously, grain exports from both countries were exempt from military attacks, but this is no longer the case. Russia has retaliated against the attacks on shipping in the Sea of Azov with strikes on Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea (Odessa, Mykolaiv, Chornomorsk, Izmail, etc.) with the aim of halting all shipping, which at present appears to have succeeded. The successful Ukrainian attacks on oil and gas infrastructure in Russia have been met with systematic attacks on petrol stations in Ukraine, resulting in fuel shortages in many places.

Air Marshal Arthur Travers Harris (nicknamed “Bomber Harris”). The image is from warfarehistorynetwork.

Whether this will escalate further into systematic attacks on civilian targets, such as residential areas, is difficult to say. It would be a nightmare akin to that unleashed by Britain on Nazi Germany and by the US on Japan during the Second World War. Following the terror-bombing of Dresden in February 1945, which claimed the lives of around 25,000 civilians, the leader of Britain’s bombing campaign, Air Marshal Arthur Travers Harris (nicknamed “Bomber Harris”) said : “I personally do not consider all the remaining cities in Germany to be worth the bones of a single British grenadier.” It was this same philosophy that was cited as the justification for the US firebombing of Tokyo and the subsequent atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anything that can save the lives of American soldiers can be justified. Even when it costs the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians. As a curiosity, it is worth noting that Bomber Harris’s views were considered too demoralising for the British public. So, for them, Harris’s air offensive was presented as being directed at military and industrial targets, with civilians only being killed by accident. That was not what happened, but the public did not need to know that.

The war in Ukraine has not reached this extreme point yet. Fortunately.