In Moscow’s offensive on Chasiv Yar, Putin’s forces have advanced at an average rate of 15 meters a day.
The phrase “past performance is not indicative of future results” — a mandatory disclaimer in investment advertising required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — is a good fact to keep in mind when contemplating what the future holds. Just because something has occurred a certain way for a long while does not guarantee that the trend will continue.
The fact that Ukrainian military has largely stymied the Russian efforts to conquer their homeland for the past four years does not mean that the months or years ahead are guaranteed to bring a similar stalemate and additional colossal losses for the Russian armed forces. The Ukrainians are always shorthanded in personnel, ammunition, and weapons, having to make the most of what they’ve got, and using innovations like drones to make up for shortfalls.
But . . . you probably wouldn’t want to bet a lot on a big, sudden Russian victory, now would you? The Daily Telegraph reports on a new assessment of just how slowly the Russians are advancing:
Russia’s army is advancing in Ukraine at the slowest pace seen in more than 100 years of warfare, new analysis shows.
Vladimir Putin’s forces have advanced between 15 and 70 metres per day since early 2024, slower than many campaigns during the First World War, according to a report from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Western intelligence believes Russia has also sustained more than 1.2 million casualties since the war began four years ago.
Moscow’s offensive on Chasiv Yar which began in Feb 2024, has seen Putin’s forces advance at an average rate of 15 metres per day, slower than a snail.
The top speed of a snail is 25 meters per day. But in Russia’s defense, those comparatively speedy snails are carrying only their shells and aren’t being fired on by Ukrainian forces.
After two years of fighting, Russian forces have moved 10 kilometres and have failed to take the Donetsk city.
Around 150km away in Kupiansk, Kharkiv, Russian forces have advanced at a rate of about 23 metres per day since the offensive began in Nov 2024.
CSIS estimates that about 75,000 square kilometres were captured during the ongoing conflict, which began nearly four years ago.
“Despite claims of battlefield momentum in Ukraine, the data shows that Russia is paying an extraordinary price for minimal gains and is increasingly a declining power,” CSIS said in its annual assessment.
“These results fall decisively short of Moscow’s goal to militarily conquer Ukraine,” the report continued.
An area of 75,000 square kilometers is about 29,000 square miles, so in nearly four years, the Russians have captured a span of territory roughly between the size of West Virginia and South Carolina.
Keep in mind, the CSIS report also calculates Ukrainian forces “likely suffered somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, including killed, wounded, and missing, and between 100,000 and 140,000 fatalities between February 2022 and December 2025.” That’s a massive cost in blood for a country with an estimated pre-war population estimated between 37 million and 42 million.
But after four years, the Ukrainians are still fighting like hellions and inflicting casualties at an astonishing rate: “Russia has suffered the highest casualty rate of any major power in any war since World War II. . . . Russian battlefield fatalities in Ukraine are more than 17 times greater than Soviet fatalities in Afghanistan during the 1980s, 11 times greater than during Russia’s First and Second Chechen Wars in the 1990s and 2000s, respectively, and over five times greater than all Russian and Soviet wars combined since World War II.”
That CSIS report notes that “President Putin and the Russian government have been adept in conducting an aggressive disinformation campaign that has convinced some policymakers, including in Washington, that Russian victory is inevitable, despite substantial evidence to the contrary.” Moscow is putting enormous effort into convincing President Trump, the American public, and the rest of the world that Russia is winning the war, and its complete conquest of Ukraine is just a matter of time. (If it is indeed a matter of time, it is time measured on a geological time scale.) U.S. policy toward Ukraine, Russia, and NATO ought to be based on a clear-eyed and accurate sense of the state of the war, with minimum influence from voices who have been predicting an imminent collapse of Ukraine’s defenses for several years.