As the Russia-Ukraine war enters its fifth year, Kyiv’s Army is eliminating 25 Russians for each Ukrainian lost on the front line. Photo / AFP
At moments last year – in spring, and then again in autumn – “Navigator” worried that the Ukrainian front line might collapse.
Today, he holds a rosier view. In the bloodiest sections around the eastern city of Pokrovsk, Kyiv’s Army is eliminating 25 Russians for each comrade they lose.
“Objectively, it’s pure mathematics,” explains the chief of staff of the Dovbush Hornets, a drone battalion in the 68th Infantry Brigade. Russia cannot sustain an invasion at this rate.
In all wars, defenders can expect the casualty ratio to lean in their favour – perhaps three or four to one.
But drones have turned swathes of eastern Ukraine into a “kill zone”, where one step into the open invites a lethal strike.
Combine that revolution with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s disregard for the lives of his soldiers, and the result is a charnel house of historically freakish proportions.
Still, the Russian President has been allowed to shape impressions of the war.
In his telling, Moscow’s superior reserves of manpower and weaponry lead to an inevitable victory, with only the date of Ukraine’s surrender – and the number of its soldiers killed – yet to be decided.
On December 9 last year, United States President Donald Trump echoed that position.
“They’re much bigger, they’re much stronger,” he told a reporter. “At some point, size will win.”
But on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, that prospect appears a long way off.
Since 2024, Moscow’s forces have captured around 3130 square miles (8106sq km) of Ukrainian territory, or 1.4% of the country, according to analysis by the Black Bird Group, a Helsinki-based think-tank.
In that time, they have sustained more than 800,000 casualties, bringing the total from the invasion to 1.2 million.
Over the last two months, the Army has started to lose more men than it can recruit, according to Western officials said. The gap now stands at around 10,000.
Finance
The economy is bleeding, too. Moscow pours around half the state budget into the armed forces and servicing the debt taken on to fund the war, which by itself will absorb more cash this year than education and healthcare combined.
Inflation is in double digits.
Tank factories stay open 24/7 while carmakers shut their doors, and the only job market not facing rising rates of unemployment offers a peculiarly bloody form of “termination”.
Thanks to Western sanctions and falling prices, Russia’s budget receipts for oil and gas halved in the year to January.
“We always said, ‘No, nothing is collapsing’,” says Pyotr Mironenko, co-founder of the Bell, a Russian website run by exiled financial journalists. “But I think we’re closer to that moment.”
To be sure, Ukraine’s military suffers from fatigue, shortages of manpower and a high awol rate.
Cities endure prolonged blackouts after a year-long bombardment of 55,000 Russian drones and missiles knocked out nearly half of the country’s electricity-generating capacity.
But as freezing civilians rub their hands together and greet the return of spring, many share Navigator’s renewed sense of hope.
At the Munich Security Conference, held this month, Western spies and diplomats excitedly traded reports.
Russia’s slow, grinding offensive had picked up some speed in autumn. While the Army edged forward in Pokrovsk and its twin city of Myrnorhad, the crux of the push for the eastern Donbas region, the Vostok Regiment cut through weaker defences in Zaporizhzhia province.
Ukraine was forced to scramble troops to staunch a push into Dnipropetrovsk, the neighbouring region where Moscow’s forces captured their first toehold. By the end of the year, the offensive had slowed once more.
Then on February 1, the gears began to shift into reverse.
Starlink
Since Elon Musk barred Russian forces from his Starlink satellite-based internet service, many of their drones can no longer fly.
Troops must communicate via radio, which is easier to intercept. On social media, Ukrainian units have shared footage of mechanised assaults down open roads, something drones had largely consigned to history.
“The Russians’ intensity dropped when they were disconnected from Starlink,” says Ara, who drives the robots known as unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) with the 141st Infantry Brigade.
“In two days, we regained Sosnivka [in Dnipropetrovsk] and are on the way to Huliapole [in Zaporizhzhia].”
The Ukrainian hacker group InformParm tricked Russian soldiers with an offer to reconnect their Starlink terminals, revealing the location of 2425 systems.
For now, analysts warn it is too early to claim that Ukraine has recaptured large chunks of land; most thrusts appear to be in the contested “grey zone” controlled by neither side.
But “if Russia cannot access Starlink for two or three months – perhaps half a year – there will be a major improvement on our part”, hopes Ara.
Diplomacy
Last week, Russian and Ukrainian diplomats arrived in Geneva on a cold, cloudy day for a fresh round of US-brokered peace talks.
Putin’s choice of Vladimir Medinsky to lead Moscow’s delegation revealed his true feelings.
The 55-year-old Kremlin aide edited the long-winded article written by Russia’s President before the war, in which he reached into the annals to spuriously claim that Ukraine was never a sovereign nation.
In May, it was Medinsky who boasted that Russia could fight “forever”, reminding the Ukrainians of the 21-year war in Sweden.
Within hours, the Geneva negotiations ended in predictable acrimony. “I cannot stand this historical s***,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s President, told Piers Morgan the next day.
Present-day reality often stops short at the red walls of the Kremlin.
Western intelligence officials brief that Putin’s aides shield him from the worst of the front-line nitty-gritty.
He is not wrong to assume that Russia can continue to fritter away men and money for paltry territorial gains.
But if the war’s trajectory does not change in the next 12 months, senior officials told the Telegraph that he could be forced to consider a deal that leaves him short of his minimum price for ending the war: a Russian takeover of the battered, bombed-out section of the eastern Donbas region still in Ukrainian hands.
Recruitment
The Kremlin’s recruitment system is also under strain.
In 2025, around 400,000 men signed up.
Overwhelmingly drawn from poorer regions such as the North Caucasus and Samara, the volunteers were persuaded by life-changing sums of money – bonuses as high as US$50,000 in places where most could not expect to earn that much in their lifetime.
Regional administrations competed to funnel the most men to the war.
And while recent collapses in the sign-up bonus may indicate that a province has met its recruitment target, 67 of Russia’s 89 federal administrations ended the year in deficit, pointed out Liubov Tysbulska, founder of the Stratcom Centre, an NGO that monitors Russian social media. Accordingly, social services will take a hit.
Now, Moscow wields more of the stick to bolster its ranks. Authorities coerce foreigners and accuse locals of petty crimes to offer them a deal.
In 2025, death benefits absorbed more than one-third of the US$70 billion Russia spent on its 700,000-strong Army inside Ukraine, according to the Conflict Intelligence Team.
Corpses are being declared “missing in action” to avoid the payouts.
Families fortunate enough to receive their loved one’s remains face rising prices to dispose of them. Coffins cost 84% more than at the start of the war, while cremation – the cheaper, increasingly popular alternative – surged by 20,000 roubles last year.
Still, the Kremlin fears moving from the current “hidden” mobilisation to a more formal draft.
Thanks to the economic downturn, a raft of incentives and a switch from biannual processing to year-round conscription, Russia can probably manage to bring in another 400,000 soldiers this year.
If battlefield losses continue to outweigh recruitment, Moscow might consider a partial mobilisation, aimed at drawing in 700,000 recruits, says Tysbulska.
That could change the equation on the battlefield. But it would draw in richer, middle-class families in Moscow and St Petersburg, in a breach of Putin’s unspoken bargain to protect them from the “special military operation”.
Advances
Recruits join an Army smarter and more flexible than its meat-grinder assaults suggest.
Moscow has developed a complex ecosystem to train and equip troops with what they need on the modern, drone-saturated battlefield.
In the capital, 20 commissions work to implement recommendations from the front line, linking up university researchers with commanders and the defence-industrial base.
Last year, the elite Rubicon unit pioneered the fibre-optic drone, which bypasses electronic jamming.
Greater drone production helped to push back the about 15km-wide portion of sky that makes up the “grey zone” from squarely over Russia’s lines to a more equal spread, wrote Michael Kofman, an analyst, in Foreign Affairs.
That balance is key to progress on the ground.
At the same time, engineers improved Moscow’s long-range missiles and drones, penetrating Ukraine’s air defences more often and with more explosive consequences.
But such progress has yet to find a way to turn small breakthroughs on the front into grand, strategically significant advances.
Toll on battlefield
Last year, Navigator’s drone team witnessed the war shift via their monitors.
Unable to launch mechanised assaults, Moscow has turned to so-called “infiltrators”, groups of three or four who sneak through gaps in Ukraine’s porous front line.
If they survive long enough, they take cover, call in artillery and air strikes, and guide more troops to their position. But the vast majority do not.
While the casualty ratio can hit 25-one, it is usually “13 to one, 12 to one”, he says. “And never less than 10.”
In that ratio, more Russians are now killed outright.
Evacuating “infiltrators” is close to impossible so far behind enemy lines.
Moscow lags behind Ukraine in the use of UGVs, which can rumble through drone strikes to retrieve the wounded.
The Russian Army also tends to send inexperienced, sick or elderly troops on these initial sorties.
As a result, the Russian Army was taking “disproportionately high deaths in the current exchanges”, one senior Nato official told the Telegraph.
Front line
Soon, Moscow is likely to gain full control of Pokrovsk. Only a handful of Ukrainian troops remain on the outskirts of the city, besieged for more than a year and a half.
On December 1, Putin prematurely hailed the capture, declaring it an “important” launch pad to achieve the “tasks” set out at the start of the war.
But it will be hard to speed up the pace of the offensive on the Pokrovsk axis, which has proceeded at 70m per day since January 2024, slower than the Allies in the Battle of the Somme.
Navigator’s team lies in wait further back.
To travel the 8km from Pokrovsk to the village of Grishne – a grim place strewn with fresh graves and echoing with artillery fire when visited by the Telegraph in July – Russian troops will have to cross open ground.
“It’s harder for them to hide,” smiles Navigator. “The land is practically bare, as they mowed down all the trees. It’s easy to spot them, easy to kill them.”
Tech changes
Ukraine has also not been left behind in the race to adapt on the front, which evolves every three to four months.
Today, the entire military uses the Delta platform, a live map accessible via smartphones and tablets that shows enemy positions, drone flights and defences.
It can be updated by a private huddling in a bush or the chief of intelligence in Kyiv, with photographic proof filtered via a network of hubs spread across eight cities.
If Russian movement is seen “in my sector, I get to work”, says Navigator, adding: “I can share my information with neighbouring units, even if I can’t reach them, with one click”.
On the interlinked Brave 1 system, soldiers log video footage of kills and strikes on enemy equipment. These earn points (eight for a soldier, 25 for a drone operator) that can be used to purchase new weapons.
Together, the technology has cut the gap between sensor and strike down to minutes, and similarly sped up the procurement process.
“It used to take six months for us to receive, say, a drone that flies on 2.6GHz,” says Navigator.
By then, the Russians would already have blocked the radio frequency, rendering the systems inoperable. “Now, from the moment you place an order, it’s not months but weeks, maybe even a week.”
All this enables tactical breakthroughs.
In December, clever commanders recaptured the town of Kupiansk after they found a way to roll back Russian infiltrators. Equally cleverly, they prevented the details from leaking to the press.
Weaponry
In 2026, Ukraine will continue to become more self-reliant, producing its own cruise missiles alongside more than seven million drones.
In Nato’s Hedgehog exercise last May, a small team of Ukrainian drone operators decimated an attack force shared between the British Army and the Estonian Army, knocking out 17 armoured vehicles in around half a day.
The results were “horrible” for Nato forces, one Estonian participant who joined the 10 Ukrainian drone pilots told the Wall Street Journal. The attackers “basically weren’t able to fight any more”.
But Western leaders still seem to underestimate Ukraine’s ability to hold off the Russian Army – and deny Putin his victory.
To stand the best chance, Kyiv needs more heavy weaponry, says Major Oleh Shryiaiev, commander of the 225th separate assault regiment.
Advancing Russian troops hide in multi-storey buildings that Ukrainian drones cannot penetrate. Kyiv’s forces, by contrast, are pushed back by air-launched glide bombs.
The time has come to use long-range ATACMS, Storm Shadow and HIMARS missiles on the front line, says the major, who was made a “Hero of Ukraine” for his role in the Kursk offensive.
“If we use a strategic missile to kill a commander of Russia’s Fifth Army 2000km behind the front line, it doesn’t make any tangible difference for me and my soldiers on the front.”
Blowing up drone pilots in their bunkers, on the other hand, could change the course of the war.
In his interview with Morgan, Zelenskyy cast his appeal for more Western support in terms of the casualty rate.
Putin’s claims of “success” were no longer fooling his nationalist base, the Ukrainian President said.
“Russia now loses 35,000 soldiers killed or wounded a month.”
Around 156 of its soldiers die for every 1.5km gained, and sometimes Ukraine takes that territory back.
“Putin does not care about these numbers now,” he told the world in Munich. “But there will come a time when he does.”
The question for the West is: will it help Ukraine get there, or risk the country’s defeat?
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