Ukraine, Russia are both suffering as war enters fifth year

Daniel DePetris, Tribune News Service

When the Russian army unleashed its large-scale air and ground invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there was widespread expectation that the war would wrap up in Moscow’s favour relatively quickly. During the war’s first week, the US intelligence community delivered an assessment to the administration of President Joe Biden that Russian forces could capture Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, in days. The projection wasn’t entirely outlandish at the time; the Russians, after all, had far more men and a federal budget that dwarfed Ukraine’s own, which meant that Russian leader Vladimir Putin could keep the conflict going until the Ukrainian army collapsed.

Those first assessments have proven wildly off the mark. The war in Ukraine will enter its fifth year later this month, a consequence of stiff Ukrainian military resistance, poor Russian decision-making, the emergence of drone warfare and the combatants’ inability to agree on how to settle it. President Donald Trump’s administration, meanwhile, continues to try to facilitate peace talks between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a process that is as laborious and unsatisfying as you might expect from two leaders who view each other as illegitimate.

At this point in the war, both sides are suffering greatly. Gone are the days when one side or the other makes spectacular territorial gains that change the contours of the map. The last time the Ukrainians recaptured large swaths of territory was in the fall of 2022, when their soldiers beat back unprepared Russian troops from a large section of Kharkiv in Ukraine’s northeast.

Moscow has managed to capture several midsize towns in the Donbas region since 2024, but not without massive personnel losses. The war has shown that the Russian army is far from the juggernaut many in the West assumed it was. War-games conducted that once anticipated a Russian blitzkrieg into Eastern Europe now look fanciful. Four years into Europe’s largest conflict since World War II, the trend lines aren’t particularly bright for either party. Ukraine may now be the envy of the West for resisting the big, bad Putin with such tenacity, but as the smaller party in a war of attrition, Ukrainian policymakers must be wondering how long the fighting can go on before they need to reassess their negotiating position.

The Ukrainian army continues to hold their defensive lines in the east of the country, and its mastery in drone warfare has forced the Russians to move away from the large-scale infantry assaults of previous years. Yet the relentless Russian bombardment of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in the dead of winter, combined with the Ukrainian army’s smaller pool of fighting-aged men, is having a terrible impact on the country’s morale. More Ukrainians are contemplating the unthinkable: ceding territory for peace. The Kyiv International Institute for Sociology found that 40% of Ukrainians would support handing over the Donbas in exchange for security guarantees, which suggests that with the right incentives, Zelensky could at least consider a trade he has been unwilling to make since the fighting started.

The Russians, however, aren’t exactly basking in glory. Despite the robotic-like confidence coming from the Kremlin’s top policymakers and propagandists, the Russian army’s territorial gains over the last year have been abysmally small. You would need a microscope to compare today’s battlefield maps with those of last year. The Russian army has captured less than 1.5% of Ukrainian land since the beginning of 2024, at a cost of tens of thousands of fatalities every month. There have been approximately 1.2 million Russian casualties, including dead, injured and missing, an astonishing figure in its own right that will have a detrimental effect on Russia’s long-term demographic outlook.

The Russian economy, which actually grew during the first few years of the war, is now flirting with recession. The Trump administration’s sanctions against Russia’s top two oil companies and Washington’s enforcement against unregistered tankers carrying Russian crude have forced Moscow to hike the discounts it’s willing to offer to potential buyers. Russian oil is now selling for $20 per barrel less than the international benchmark, which at roughly $67 per barrel is lower than it was a year prior. Russian oil revenue declined by 50% in January compared with the same month last year, and if the trend continues, Putin will need to start figuring out how to make up for the financial losses. His options range from a higher tax rate on the Russian population, shifting more money to the military from other areas of the Russian budget or taking on more debt.

For Trump, none of this is necessarily a bad thing. In an ideal world, the desperation the Russians and Ukrainians are feeling on the battlefield would induce them to settle the war diplomatically, which is one of Trump’s top foreign policy goals.

Last week, Ukrainian and Russian officials engaged in direct talks in the United Arab Emirates, a development that likely wouldn’t have happened if Putin and Zelensky didn’t feel at least some incentive to partake. But the bad news is that outside of a mutual prisoner exchange, both sides walked away muttering the same old positions. Putin wants the Ukrainian army to withdraw from the entire Donbas, hand it over to the Russians and formally acknowledge that the region is now officially part of the Russian Federation.