The main danger – not the russian advance, but the air terror

Russian forces have no means, resources and real chances to achieve any strategic breakthroughs on the ground of the frontlines in Ukraine – at least in the foreseeable future.

Ukraine Defence Forces this year even slightly improved in solving most severe and existential issues – first of all, the manpower deficit and organizational mismanagement.

But it is too early to claim that Ukraine has turned the tide in the war and started winning. There is still no solid ground for this narrative, despite the successful deep-and-middle range strikes campaign of Ukrainian forces.

This is the assessment of current war trends of military analyst Michael Kofman, senior fellow of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In the conversation with „Arch Frontline" about the ukrainian frontline dynamics M.Kofman stresses, that the main threat to Ukraine now is not the tactical shifts on the frontlines, but the russian ballistic missile airstrikes to ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure.

„Ukrainian people overall are tired of war, but still quite determined. I don't think, that russian airstrikes campaign has any chance to break ukrainian, but it's important not to forget the other aspects of the war, while we focus on the tactical level of the fight. We have to understand, that this war has increasingly moved from the war of attrition to the war of exhaustion“, -- says military analyst.

- Not really. I think that In some areas Ukraine is contesting the initiative with Russian forces like Zaporizhzhia, and that in important contests such as the contest for control of operational depth, Ukraine has finally started to come to its own with missile strike options and creating a lot of problems for the Russian military. That said, it's too early to claim that the frontline is stabilised. Especially in such parts of the frontline, as in direction of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, where, obviously, it is not.

On the other hand, the main offensive period and the intensity of fighting that we usually witness in this war is from spring, through summer till about October. And it has just started. So these proclamations should actually wait a couple of months. I think that this narrative is running a bit ahead of the evidence.

But we have to say, that in general, situation along the front had been improving since last year. Military analysts agree, that Ukraine ended last year having performed much better than expected, and the whole thing stabilized over the course of the winter. So, I think that is what's really happening at first. The Russian military is visibly underperforming. This year, the rate of advance is about half of what it was in 2025. I think there's a reasonable explanation for that, too. They're dealing with compounding problems, and they are still largely fighting, as best I can tell, the same way they were last year.

And Ukraine has optimized its forces already to defend against the way the Russian military has been trying to advance. The situation with Ukrainian manpower has slightly improved and stabilized a bit over the course of the past few months. Not remarkabl, but it's not deteriorating either. Last year, the Ukrainian military at the front line was slowly shrinking in terms of combat effectiveness.

And now, I think, you can see much less of this. And if you look at the continued contest for superiority in employing drones, I think definitely Ukraine has moved forward in expanding the drone deployment zone further over the Russian forces at greater range and depth, not across the whole front.

I think, this „victorious" narrative is being very much driven by Ukrainian strikes deep into Russia territory, also beyond the front line towards Mariupol, towards the main highway routes connecting Crimea across Zaporizhzhia, the rest of the supply routes of Russian forces. But one way or another, the trajectories become positive for Ukraine, right? It's become more visibly positive for Ukraine. And that's been the case, I think, frankly, from March of 2025. And this merits a story or framing that Ukraine has turned the tide.

Maybe so, but it's still a little early to claim that Ukraine has the overall initiative in this war. I don't think that's the case. I think just it's fair to assess it as Ukraine is performing much better. The Russian military is visibly performing worse. And it's been clear not as of this year, but as of last year. If we recall some of my writing back then, I was stressing, that time is no longer on Russia's side in this war, certainly not the tactical level.

-I think mostly it's an issue of retention and greater return rate of AWOL, those who are absent without official leave.

And there's also reduced casualty pressure on the Ukrainian military. If you look at the fighting from last fall through the winter and about the spring, the attrition ratio to Ukraine has been increasingly favorable.

Although, you're right, manpower remains a leading problem. Ukraine continues to invest in ground UVs and trying to reduce the amount of personnel involved in support roles. And last year, the casualty rate had probably switched to at least 50/50 between those in combat infantry and those in supporting roles. The casualties are now increasingly amongst drone units and those in supporting roles. So basically, the extent to which Ukraine can employ automation and technology to offset manpower requirements is thereby enabling them to hold the front line.

What is really critically minimal – forward force presence. If you look the overall combat density of Ukrainian forces at the front line, you have a situation where very low density of forces holding well over 1200km of the frontline. The front is essentially being held by what is a combination of prepared defences and minefields, artillery, which shapes the battlefield dynamic. And drone units, which effectively establish what everyone has been calling a kill zone, but a zone of pervasive surveillance, reconnaissance, and fire strike capabilities that make it very difficult for Russian forces to get through.

Lastly, you know, Russian infiltration tactics are are simply not conducive to achieving any kind of breakthrough. There's no way to generate momentum or to exploit a localized breach with those tactics. So typically where you see Ukrainian forces giving terrain, it is usually because of weakness of specific units. They're weak brigades who are unable to effectively organize or coordinate the defense. It's much less because the Russian forces figured out something new.

Russia did steadily decrease Ukraine's advantage in the drone component of the fight, that is the both in quantity and quality, Russian drone units got a lot better. Everybody has already heard about the effect of employment and scaling up of the use of Rubicon units, which are more capable drone formations. So, in the end of last year, there was relative parity between Russia and Ukrainian forces and use of drones, but they weren't able to capitalize on it. Meaning if you look at what Russia actually was able to do with the fact that they had achieved relative parity in the use of drones, which was Ukraine's main advantage from 2023 and onwards. Honestly, is not much.

-It's a good question. It's a bit of a harder question to answer. At least for me, because, you know, I do a lot of field work in Ukraine. But I spend as much time as I can with Ukrainian forces. And so in some ways, it's easier to see what's going on in your own side.

On the on the Russian side, the Russian military continues to tactically underperform, even though they plan these advances and operations at higher command levels. The reason for is, first, I think their overall objectives and rate of advance are highly unrealistic to begin with. The command is therefore pressured to show results. They are fairly consistently lying to each other at the tactical level and claiming that they've advanced to hold positions that they never took.

-Yes, it's a problem on both sides, but on the Russian side, I think the problem is quite worse.

We can talk about some of the reasons for it. On the Ukrainian side in general, folks should understand that after four years of prolonged conventional war, particularly when the battle space is relatively static, the war is defined by positional warfare and high levels of attrition. There is a degree of cynicism that creeps in and it's unavoidable. That said, if you look what's happening on the Russian side, they consistently misrepresent the rate of advance. Then when they're forced to prove it, they send somebody with a flag and try to take a video of them there. This person invariably gets killed. And so then they tried to claim that they actually have proof that they've advanced somewhere where they don't actually control any of the terrain. There's a broader issue for analysts, who are trying to map what's happening in this war, because presence does not mean control. And often you have a co-mingling of Ukrainian and Russian troops where neither of them actually control the terrain. What's been happening over the last year and a half is a widening gray zone on the battlefield that nobody really controls, because a couple people in the basement don't control the section of the city, or a couple people in the tree line don't control the tree line or the area around them either. And most of the mapping discrepancies between different local groups are due to the fact that folks are not sure of how to portion the gray zone.

I'll give you a good example. So amongst five different groups of colleagues, I asked a question. This was maybe a week or two ago, and I basically asked: how do we assess the the number of square kilometers captured by the Russian military in April? Every group gave me hugely different numbers, the spread was several hundred kilometers.

And here's the thing. None of them are wrong, because how much Russian forces advance depends on where you thought the gray zone was before this and how you confer territorial control. Okay. But just giving folks a sense that if they think it's very easy, that all analysts and local groups can just look at the map and tell you, you know, the Russian rate of advance is „exactly this“. This is what it was last month. It is not. Just asking the question gets you about five different numbers from five different groups of people who are all I want to be clear trying to objectively assess the situation.

Okay,I apologize for this digression from your question on why the Russian military is having advance issues. There's a couple other big factors. One is a steady decrease of available assault infantry on the Russian side, particularly after the losses in fall and winter. The unrecoverable loss on the Russian side roughly being equal or slightly in excess of their current recruitment rate, which doesn't mean that they're running out of people. It means that specific units are having a deficit of people.

Next. If you look at the quality, it's been consistently decreasing across the Russian military. And Russian desertion rates have been climbing last year, meaning a percentage of those that they enlist to fight, they enlist not through contracts and money, but through various side schemes like they were charged with crimes. They were coerced in other ways. And then those people ultimately end up leaving. And the persistence of essentially two militaries within the Russian force is starting to create very visible problems, because Russia spent the last two plus years fighting with a layer of assault troops that they replace every two weeks. I'm happy to get into this in details if you're interested, but this essentially created two militaries. One military that is fighting and taking most of the casualties. The other military is supporting this force and consolidating behind it. But internally, there's a whole host of corruption and corruption issues where one part of the force is essentially charging the other part of the force and to pay them to not become part of this assault layer.

And this is kind of the cynicism that's crept in over the last couple of years.

-I think generally, yes, but with a couple caveats. I know caveats are annoying, but we have to get into the the details.

So typically Russian losses spike over the course of the winter because there's no terrain cover. And drones are most effective in this time period. And Russian recruitment dips from fall to winter. Russian casualties then tend to decrease. Russian recruitment tends to increase in spring period.

Last year the Russian recruitment quota was 403,000 and they met or slightly exceeded this quota overall. Perhaps we can subtract some percentage of people that didn't show up that deserted. So then they were maybe slightly below the overall quota in real numbers of personnel that entered the force. But nonetheless, even though across some months they recruited less and other months they recruited more, on average, they were at around 35000 member crew last year. Do I think they will meet the same number this year? Probably not, because the overall trend for them has been somewhat negative. But we have to consider the fact that the Russian military expanded dramatically from 2022 to 2026, and the overall force expansion has been over 50 percent, and the ground force expansion has been over 100 percent. The Russian military has probably gone from total force of 850,000 at the start of this war to somewhere around 1.3 million now.

So, we have to understand that this improved trend and that the rate of attrition and unrecoverable losses is slightly higher or equal to recruitment rate, doesn't mean that tomorrow the Russian military is going to start running out personnel.

Of course, it will create pressure for them. But folks also need to see how much larger the Russian military is now as a result of this war than it was when the war began. It still has a very significant ground force advantage over Ukraine in terms of overall personnel deployed.

Lastly, we do need to be a bit careful with the numbers. Yes, it's true, that the challenge for Russian forces is that they can't create reserves and they can't keep expanding the force. But also as analysts we know that we always have to be careful whenever any government or officials establish a metric as a target. Because usually as soon as a measure becomes an objective target, it stops being useful as a measure – people will find ways to kind of get you this number. And increasingly, it starts to tell you less and less about what's happening. So we also have to be careful with this, with this number and not to read too much into this number.

-Honestly, it's very hard to say. Depends on what happens with the continued expansion of Ukraine's middle strike campaign and efforts to control operational depth and how Russian forces will react to it. Typically in this war, there are 3 to 4 months adaptation cycles between the two sides. So the Russian military is now under heavy pressure and it's quite visibly in trouble. The question is, can they adapt or can they not? That remains to be seen. It's hard to extrapolate from any current trend, you can't extrapolate in a straight line for what the war will look like six months from now.

My general sense is that overall, the trends now at the tactical level favor Ukraine. If they can resolve some organizational coordination issues, which continue to be a problem for the Ukrainian armed forces, they can be much more effective.

Especially – in controlling operational depth. Many of these problems are not due to lack of capabilities there. They are more due to a lack of effective coordination between different parts of the force. And then yes, I do think that this year is going to go worse for the Russian military than last year.

But that said, the Russian forces do continue to steadily crawl forward towards advancing Kramatorsk through Konstantinovka imposing the fire control over these cities.

So it's not possible to say that across the entire front line, things will be stable. It's very difficult, I think, for Ukraine to stabilize the entire front line, but increasingly it's visible that the Ukrainian military is under less pressure and is likely to be under less pressure.

Plus, there are increasing opportunities for at least localized counterattacks. Ukrainian forces have been experimenting since last summer with various types of drone enabled assault, and they had started to do much better in finding a coherent way to combine drone and assault units to counterattack where the Russian military has advanced. And you've seen basically a lot of the area retaken since last fall.

The local counterattack in Zaporizhzhia this winter was also fairly, at least partially successful, and most of that is due to the fact that the russian military advances here were achieved via infiltration and actually without the established control of the terrain. It takes a long time to consolidate, so it creates opportunities for the ukrainian military, if they have the forces in place to try to counterattack and roll back some of those gains.

So now the battle space has actually become more dynamic, which is ironic because the media is describing it much more as a stalemate. Actually, the battle space has become more dynamic this year and less static.

-The main problem for the predictions on Donetsk oblast is the fact that in some places and periods russians just advance, in some areas they end up advancing fairly quickly, and then other areas are completely stopped and stalled, like what happened on the Dobropillia axis last year. So right now they are not in the position to take over Sloviansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration, but they're advancing close enough to them to start establishing drone based fire control, which is basically at hand.

I mean, even when I was there last year, the russian drones were already striking the very eastern edge of Kramatorsk. If they keep going at this rate, they will have a degree of high ground from which to operate drones and start striking the city streets in south-east of Kramatorsk, forcing an evacuation. This is what's happening.

Are they going to be able to take these cities? Not necessarily. If you recall, Russia had fire control over pokrovsk in October of 2024. When was Pokrovsk actually de facto taken? I would say probably maybe end of last year or beginning of this year, actually more like beginning of this year. So almost two years later now. So a lot of it depends on Ukrainian military performance. Where does Ukraine choose to concentrate forces to counterattack, stabilize the situation? Ukraine has a solid line of defense behind Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, south of Dobropylia, where they essentially plan to hold the line. So I think it's actually going to take the russian military quite some time to take the rest of Donetsk oblast.I think they're gonna have a hard time advancing there. But in some areas they can advance a lot more quickly than we anticipate.

And the other areas is going to be slow crawl like in Konstantinovka. They've been fighting there for a year now. And the question is, are they going to take it soon? Or, you know, is it going to become closer to, you know, some of the other battles in these areas, like like Chasiv Yar, Toretsk and others where it's going to, you know, essentially take them a very long time to, to try to consolidate control over the city.

So my honest answer is, I think they're still quite away from this. I don't think they're going to take it by the end of this year at the rate that they are visibly going. Now, if the year had started out differently in March, I would have then been, you know, more concerned. But now looking at where they are, I am far less concerned with the rate of advance in Donetsk oblast.

I think, the bigger issue is the fact that ever since Ukrainian forces gave up Siversk, russian military has been advancing now through Yampil and towards Svetogorsk. And essentially there's been ongoing battle to steadily encircle Lyman.

This sector is not stable, ukrainian brigades here are visibly weaker. It has allowed Russian forces to slowly advance over the past several months.

That's why the folks who are talking about stabilization of the front line, I think, are kind of now seeing the forest but missing the trees. You know, in some areas, the trees don't look good.

-Of course, several areas in Zaporizhzhia direction, where Ukraine has successfully localized counterattack in Stepnogirsk directly next to the Dnipro river. Russian forces were advancing closer and closer to the actual city itself. I'm sure you understand why this was a priority, because the Russian military was creeping closer to the city. It could start potentially operating drones over Zaporizhzhia.

Next is the battle all around, sort of north and southwest of Hulyapole where in some parts, the Russian military is advancing and other parts north Ukraine is contesting the initiative.

Next is the fight sort of against russian advance northwest from Pokrovsk, around Hryshine, towards the western edge of Donetsk oblast nd the fight around kind of the connector between Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk Oblast north from Velyka Novosylka.

We already discussed Konstantynovka, Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.

And things north of there around Yampil. Everything around Kharkiv and Oskil River is a fairly stable part of the front and the secondary part of the front. Ad is the buffer the Russian military has been trying to create around Sumy, where there is also kind of a negligible advance.

But to me, there's really the most dynamic fight has increasingly become one in Zaporizhzhia, which for some folks who have been paying main attention to Donetsk oblast might be surprising. But this has been the case since fall and winter of last year that I spent quite a bit of time on my last trip, February and March down in Zaporizhzhia. It was my first time coming back there, to be honest, since the end of 2023.

So, it was almost almost two years since I really spent a lot of time with units in Zaporizhzhia. Not much had been had been happening there. Russian military was still trying to advance towards Mala Tokmachka and essentially get around the rehab.

Folks, who were really very familiar with this area recalled the summer offensive of 2023, which was kind of the last time period when this part of the front line was very active. And then, you know, the axis has been held fairly well, Russian forces, you see, are trying to advance west of Pokrovsk.

Since 2024 to 2025 the russian military was attempting to take the constellation of cities Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkyvka and Konstantinovka into an operational encirclement, essentially come north of Sloviansk, behind Sloviansk, over the north Northern Access and then come around west of Kramatorsk via Dobropillia in this way essentially enveloping the entire region without having to fight for the cities itself.

They were successfully stopped last summer on the western axis in Dobropillia. They were not successfully stopped in my point of view, north of Slovyansk, but Lyman has proved a problem for them and there, essentially, Ukraine has been holding them on, and that's been slowing down the Russian advance ever since last fall and winter.

That said, unable to take this area in operational encirclement, the Russian military started to focus on advancing straight towards Slovyansk and Kramatorsk and establishing fire control over them. Over the past several months, and because of some of the issues in defense, there had been having some success in advancing. And so that's more problematic area now.

Is it going to lead to a big encirclement in Donetsk oblast?No, it is not. But it still is still a problematic area to watch on the front line. Yes, but I wouldn't overstate the the issues there. It's just a clear, visible change in sort of where Russian forces are advancing.

-No. Every year I get asked this, and every year there's a new story that there's going to be the Russian forces advancing from Belarus. And I'm afraid every year I have to say no, since 2022. The the buffer they've started to establish east of Sumy oblast is problematic, but they for l long had the goal of trying to establish a 15 kilometer deep buffer running all the way from Sumy, down and across Kharkiv oblast. And so this is kind of a patch they've added in terms of territorial control, but to me, it's not that significant or problematic for Ukrainian forces, it is just their attempt to stretch Ukrainian military. We don't see a looming Russian advance from Belarus or anything by Chernihiv either, even though I've seen Ukrainian political leadership say something about Chernihiv, and I just don't know what people are talking about there.

If anything, if you look at Russian manpower issues, the main problem is the lack of force generation capacity, thereby disabling the Russian military from creating additional operational reserves. So I guess my bottom line question is: where will these forces come from?

-What the Russian military has been doing last years – they traded off the ability to conduct discrete offensive operations for an ongoing grinding, offensive, or small scale operations across a broad front trying to pressure the Ukrainian military. But they are demonstrably unable to achieve any kind of collapse across the front. And that's been the case. We've been seeing that for over a years. So the answer there is no.

But here's the thing. Let me answer a question you didn't ask me.

-Which is not the can the Russian military somehow dramatically change this dynamic? Is there something that can happen to for them to achieve a breakthrough? The honest answer, from my point of view, is no. The only thing that can happen is Ukraine can mismanage the organization of defense. And every time we see a breach of Ukrainian defenses, it's because the defense was mismanaged, not because the Russian military did something new, interesting or amazing. Consistently.

Because what's happening in the front lines is interaction of two forces, not the interaction of one force with a map. So you have to remember that it takes two to fight. And sometimes one side simply mismanaged his organization of defense in a sector or the the leadership decides that's going to rotate one brigade with another brigade. And that rotation creates an opportunity for the Russian military. I've seen that happen plenty of times, actually.

But, again, the issue that concerns me is actually not what is happening at the front line right now. What concerns me is taht the russian strike campaign against Ukrainian energy infrastructure, which over the course of fall and winter inflicted a lot of damage, some of it frankly, irreparable. And I am concerned looking out to what this war looks like after another winter season. Yeah, I think Ukraine will get through it. But the strike campaign is quite problematic. And every year Ukraine has gotten through it. The past winter was much worse than previous years, if you look at temperatures.

But there's a degree of survivorship bias that creeps into analysis when the damage stacks over time. And missile defense is a thorny problem because Ukraine remains heavily dependent on the United States when it comes to ballistic missile defense, ballistic missile defense specifically. There is no cheap solution in this area, and Russia continues to increase the share of ballistic missiles it employs, and it strikes alongside a very large number of one way attack drones. And while Ukraine has done very well with its strike campaign against Russian energy infrastructure if there is no sort of agreement between the two sides to halt these strikes, I do worry about the situation. About the situation Ukrainian cities come to at fall and winter, because that's where the burden of the war shifts, much more so from the front line to the population and economy. So it's important to not overly focus at the tactical level. And remember, there's also other aspects to this war. And bottom line look, we both know the war doesn't get decided by who controls the next 20km of Donetsk oblast. This is not really the object in context. The war is not about this. So, as analysts, we might focus on it. And it's interesting conversation. But whoever controls Konstantinovka doesn't decide anything in this war, right?