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军事分析研究机构

The Myth of Inevitable Russian Victory over Ukraine

Russian military victory over Ukraine is not inevitable. It is extraordinarily unlikely, unless Western support for Ukraine collapses.

ISWStefaniia Bern查看原文 ↗
Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces Strikes Against Russian Logistics Vehicles, Engineering, and Special Vehicles (Horizontal)
Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces Strikes Against Russian Logistics Vehicles, Engineering, and Special Vehicles (Horizontal)

Russian military victory over Ukraine is not inevitable. It is extraordinarily unlikely, in fact, unless Western support for Ukraine collapses. Ukrainians are fighting an existential war against an adversary that openly seeks to subjugate them and eliminate their identity and language. The Kremlin constantly reiterates its determination to annex large parts of Ukraine, far beyond Donetsk and Luhansk, and to establish its full control over the Ukrainian government. Ukrainians have shown their determination to fight and die to preserve their independence for more than four and a half years, and recent polling continues to reflect that determination. Ukrainians will not surrender as long as they can keep fighting.

Ukraine has matched determination with incredible skill in finding technological and other solutions to offset Russia’s larger size and resources. It is not the first country to do so. Israel has defeated states and armies orders of magnitude larger than itself and its army many times. Ukraine’s military, industrial, and technical innovation is now on par with Israel’s. The Soviet and Russian empires have historically tended to lose to smaller foes, in fact. Japan defeated Russia in 1905; Poland fought the young Soviet Union to a standstill in 1920; Finland defeated a Soviet invasion in 1940; and, of course, the Afghan mujahideen defeated the Red Army in the 1980s. Nor are these examples particularly outliers in military history. Frederick the Great regularly defeated much larger states and coalitions of states. The Russian army in 1812 defeated a Napoleonic force twice its size. There is simply no inevitable correlation between the relative size of combatants and the outcome of a war—particularly when the war is existential for the smaller state but not for the larger one, as is true today.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is nevertheless trying once again to breathe life into the myth of inevitable Russian military victory in order to persuade the United States and other supporters of Ukraine to compel Kyiv to surrender. Putin constantly asserts that Russian forces are making gains along the entire frontline.[1] He makes claims of territorial gains so far from reality as to be fantasy. He hearkens back to the Soviet Union and the Red Army to evoke images of Soviet hordes overrunning the German Wehrmacht. But these claims, images, and maps of supposed Russian gains are all fictional. Reality is quite the opposite.

Russian forces have made effectively zero net gains in 2026 at the cost of over 40,000 casualties per month since July and around 458 casualties for every square kilometer of territory that Russian forces lost.[2]

Ukraine, not Russia, has held the initiative in key sectors of the frontline for much of the year. Ukrainian forces have decisively defeated the main Russian offensive intended to complete the seizure of Donetsk Oblast in 2026. Ukrainian forces operationally defeated the Russian northern pincer in the Lyman direction and defeated the Russian military command’s plan to conduct a wide encirclement of Ukraine’s Fortress Belt.[3] Ukraine’s Operation Vivaldi resulted in the liberation of around 277 square kilometers and 16 settlements north and northeast of Lyman over four phases that Ukrainian 3rd Army Corps Commander Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi began announcing in September 2026, although the operation likely began around March 2026.[4]

Vivaldi followed a less heralded but extremely successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south. Ukraine liberated over 627 square kilometers in the Oleksandrivka direction and cleared over 300 square kilometers of Russian infiltrators between January 29 and August 12, 2026, driving the Russians largely out of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and securing part of its southern flank.[5] Ukrainian forces liberated 26 settlements during the Oleksandrivka counteroffensive, emphasizing Ukraine’s ability to make relatively significant tactical advances.

Ukrainian forces have also stabilized the line in Kharkiv Oblast, clearing the city of Kupyansk (despite Putin’s claims to have seized it), and fighting off Russian efforts to establish a so-called “buffer zone” along Ukraine’s northern border. ISW has observed evidence that Russian forces control around 35 percent of the so-called “buffer zone” between the E101 Kyiv City-Hlukhiv highway and Velykyi Burluk northeast of Kharkiv City, whereas Russian Northern Grouping of Forces (GoF) Commander Colonel General Yevgeny Nikiforov claims that Russian forces control about 75 percent of the “security strip.”[6]

It is unclear whether Putin is lying about Russian gains or being lied to by his own military—or both. Russian military correspondents constantly complain of what they call “beautiful reports” that Russian military units send to higher headquarters, claiming gains they have not made.[7] Ukrainian forces say that they have been able to use the Russian military’s own internal culture of lying to their advantage, luring Russian troops into traps because the Russians think that they are moving through territory they control.[8] Leaked Russian military maps show phantom gains, often matching Putin’s claims.[9] The pervasive lying within the Russian military is a problem for Russian soldiers, but likely an advantage for Putin, as it supports his own efforts to present Russian forces as advancing and winning when, in fact, they are doing neither.

Discussions of Russia’s manpower advantage are also off the mark. The Russian population is, indeed, about 3.6 times as large as Ukraine’s, and the Russian armed forces, overall, are a little less than twice as large as Ukraine’s. Putin has not translated these numbers into overall numerical advantages for Russia itself, however—the Ukrainian armed forces are larger than the contingent of Russian troops within Ukraine and have been since 2022. Putin has used his population advantage, rather, to offset the horrendous losses that the Russian military’s tactics have imposed on the Russian Armed Forces—over 1.5 million killed and seriously wounded (more than one percent of Russia’s total population) since the start of the full-scale invasion.[10]

Putin has struggled to harness Russia’s manpower without triggering major social discontent within Russia, moreover. He has relied on voluntary or semi-voluntary recruitment to fill his forces’ ranks apart from a disastrous involuntary reserve callup in 2022 that brought about 330,000 men into the force but saw twice as many flee Russia to avoid fighting.[11] His voluntary recruitment efforts have cost the Kremlin and regional Russian governments a fortune in enlistment bonuses and benefits. Even with continually increasing bonuses, moreover, Putin is now struggling to find enough Russian men willing to go to near-certain death or maiming for money. Ukrainian forces have been consistently killing or seriously wounding more Russians than volunteer to fight each month since December 2025, although shortfalls in Russian recruitment relative to overall battlefield losses occurred at points as early as August 2024.[12] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is struggling to raise its recruitment rate to match the casualty rate, despite significantly increasing recruitment bonuses and more frequently utilizing coercive recruitment methods.[13] German Institute for International and Security Affairs economist Janis Kluge assessed on September 10 that 29,250 personnel per month signed Russian MoD contracts between January and August 2026, a 10 percent reduction from the 32,500 per month figure during the same period in 2025.[14]

Putin has thus been setting conditions for yet another involuntary reserve callup, but he continues to hesitate to order it.[15] He clearly fears sparking unrest in a country already tired of the war and increasingly frustrated with the financial and other costs it is being forced to bear. The Ukrainian long-range strikes campaign has complicated Putin’s decision-making in this regard. Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure have generated gasoline and diesel shortages throughout the Russian Federation and cause constant low-level irritation in Russian society.[16]

Ukraine, for its part, has developed a number of ways of offsetting the overall Russian manpower advantage. Ukrainian commanders today understand the importance of preserving their soldiers’ lives, whereas Russian commanders clearly do not care about theirs. Ukrainians thus avoid costly frontal assaults or tactics that are likely to generate large numbers of casualties.[17] They aggressively evacuate and treat their wounded, whereas the Russians often leave their wounded in the field to be captured or agonizingly die.[18]

Ukraine has, above all, used technology to replace manpower and to avoid putting humans at risk. The Ukrainians have advanced their drone capabilities to let small Ukrainian forces hold off attacks by much larger Russian groupings, often achieving casualty ratios of 10-1 or more.[19] Russian soldiers moving to the attack must run a drone gauntlet of scores of kilometers before they even reach the frontline. Ukrainian drones with ranges of 100-200 kilometers strike Russian troops attempting to approach frontline concentration points. Shorter range Ukrainian drones hit those Russians who made it to initial concentration areas as they move through the “kill zone”—an area 20-40 kilometers deep saturated by reconnaissance and strike drones. The small percentage of Russian troops that make it all the way through the “kill zone” are met with a combination of short-range drones, unmanned ground vehicles armed with infantry weapons and mines, and enough Ukrainian soldiers to stop them.

The Russians now advance in tiny groups of 1-3 soldiers at a time, hiding in brush or rubble, and holding out in hidden positions for weeks, hoping that enough reinforcements will get to them to allow them to continue to move. More often than not they wait in vain, and small Ukrainian groups eventually kill or capture them. When they can advance at all, they do so in tiny increments over long periods of time.

Putin could order a large-scale mobilization and try to flood the battlefield with troops, but it is far from clear what effect such an effort would have on the course of the war. The majority, likely the overwhelming majority, of such Russian masses would die before they ever made it to the front. Those who got across the “kill zone” would likely be able to infiltrate more and resume the limited advances Russians were making in 2025 at some level, at least for a time, but at an even more hideous cost in Russian lives. Putin clearly fears imposing that cost on his people, for all his bombast, a fact that speaks volumes about the hollowness of his rhetoric even in his own ears.

Even restoring the 2025 Russian rates of advance, however, would leave Russian forces moving at a snail’s pace . It would take the Russian forces 378 days to seize the rest of Donetsk Oblast at Russia’s 2025 rate of advance of 14.4 square kilometers per day.[20] At their average rate thus far in 2026, which is approximately 0.25 square kilometers per day, Russian forces would need 60 years to seize the remainder of Donetsk Oblast, or until June 2086. Ukraine’s successful counteroffensives in 2026 have made Russia’s objective of seizing the remainder of Donetsk Oblast increasingly unrealistic.

Putin would have the world, and especially the United States, believe that he is somehow holding back from crushing Ukraine, but that he could do so at any moment of his choosing. The opposite is the case. If Putin had had a way of ending the war quickly, he surely would have used it. The effort to field an army large enough to make virtually no gains is costing Putin a fortune, driving up inflation in Russia, and generating increasing social discontent. Fielding a larger army would cost more with no guarantee of materially changing the situation on the front. That is why Putin is holding back at least for now.

Putin has likely recognized the folly of trying to drown Ukraine in Russian blood and has instead opted to try to hammer Ukraine into submission with a strategic bombing campaign. The Russians have secured a temporary advantage in the skies over Ukraine through their jet-powered drones and the shortage of Patriot missiles that can intercept their ballistic missiles. But Ukraine is fielding solutions to defend against the jet-powered drones, and it is hardening and decentralizing its infrastructure to survive the ballistic missile strikes (as well as developing its own ballistic missile interceptors, although that effort will take time).[21] The Russian strikes are currently devastating Ukrainian energy and other infrastructure and imposing a brutal cost on Ukrainian civilians—as Putin intends. But there is no reason to think that this strategic bombing campaign will be any more successful than every other strategic bombing campaign in history—all of which have failed to compel a country holding its own on the battlefield to surrender.

Russia’s population and relative (but diminishing) wealth will let Putin continue his war for a long time, to be sure. But Ukraine can also continue fighting for its existence as long as Western support continues. Russia could win this war, of course. Western support could indeed collapse or, less plausibly, the Russian military could find the necessary innovations in technology and tactics to overwhelm Ukrainian defenders.

But Ukraine is at least equally likely to hold off Russian attacks while raising the cost to Russia high enough to force a compromise peace—which is the stated aim of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian government. The latter outcome—a sustainable compromise peace—is also the stated aim of the US government and of Ukraine’s other supporters. It is only Putin who opposes compromise. The task of Ukraine and its partners is to continue to increase pressure on the Kremlin and raise the cost of pursuing Putin’s unbridled ambitions high enough to convince him to accept peace that he does not dictate. That task will be very challenging, but it is feasible, and it should be the focus of all policy aimed at ending this horrible war.

[1] https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-2-2026/; https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-16-2026/ [2] https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-1-2026/; https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-1-2026/; https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-1-2026/; https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-1-2026/ [3] https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-15-2026/; https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/ukraine-disrupts-russias-donetsk-offensive/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=UkraineDisruptsOffensive [4] https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-15-2026/; https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-20-2026/; https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-28-2026/; https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-14-2026/ [5] https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-12-2026/; https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-10-2026/; https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-13-2026/ [6] https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-16-2026/ [7] https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-9-2026/; https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-26-2026/; https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-17-2026/; 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