By 2025, Russia’s war against Ukraine had hardened into a grinding conflict of attrition, with neither side achieving a decisive strategic breakthrough. While the front line moved more this year than in 2023 or 2024, Russia’s advances remained slow, limited and highly costly, both in terms of materiel and human lives. Moscow has increasingly highlighted its wartime gains this year in an apparent effort to gain the upper hand in U.S.-brokered peace talks and portray its victory as inevitable. “Ukrainian forces will have to leave the territories they currently occupy, and then the fighting will stop. If they don’t, we will achieve this by military means,” President Vladimir Putin said in late November. But behind the official rhetoric, the reality of the war is more complicated. “Their progress so far has been lackluster, with high losses that didn’t achieve stated objectives,” military analyst Michael Kofman told The Washington Post of Russia’s battlefield performance in 2025. The war now resembles less a conventional campaign by a regular army and more a conflict sustained by small infiltration units, volunteer-funded supplies and the ma
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