On July 1, Russia unleashed a massive airstrike on Kyiv. Russian President Vladimir Putin no doubt intended it as a show of dominance to offset renewed claims that Ukraine is gaining ground on the battlefield. But Moscow’s continued reliance on such heavy-handed strategies is better read as a sign of weakness. Ukraine’s leaders, military, and people understand that whatever horrors Russia unleashes will not break them.
In recent months, Ukraine’s fortunes have rebounded dramatically. Kyiv’s increasingly robotized, automated armed forces have slowed Russia’s advance to a bloody crawl and in many cases even won back territory. At the same time, Ukraine’s ever more effective long-range strike campaign against Russian energy infrastructure has prevented Russia’s export-driven economy from fully capitalizing on oil price spikes. Globally, Ukrainian defense innovation and integration have earned the country a special status among the world’s defense producers as a uniquely experienced operator in contemporary conventional warfare.
On July 1, Russia unleashed a massive airstrike on Kyiv. Russian President Vladimir Putin no doubt intended it as a show of dominance to offset renewed claims that Ukraine is gaining ground on the battlefield. But Moscow’s continued reliance on such heavy-handed strategies is better read as a sign of weakness. Ukraine’s leaders, military, and people understand that whatever horrors Russia unleashes will not break them.
In recent months, Ukraine’s fortunes have rebounded dramatically. Kyiv’s increasingly robotized, automated armed forces have slowed Russia’s advance to a bloody crawl and in many cases even won back territory. At the same time, Ukraine’s ever more effective long-range strike campaign against Russian energy infrastructure has prevented Russia’s export-driven economy from fully capitalizing on oil price spikes. Globally, Ukrainian defense innovation and integration have earned the country a special status among the world’s defense producers as a uniquely experienced operator in contemporary conventional warfare.
As a result, a total Ukrainian collapse is looking less and less likely. But there are still many possible less-than-ideal endings for the war, including a cease-fire that would serve Russian interests. Putin has not given up his imperial designs, and even as his own victory slips away, he will be looking for ways to hurt his enemies. As Russia’s strategic position continues to weaken, Kyiv—and its partners in Europe—must prepare for new forms of escalation. This means continuing to hold the course, maintaining the moral high ground, and recognizing that whatever Putin does next, the tide is in Kyiv’s favor.
The course of the current war has followed a distinct pattern: months of violent stagnation, which many Western observers claim favors Russia, followed by moments of brilliant Ukrainian script-flipping, which resets the balance, and then a reversion to the mean.
When Russian forces poured across the Ukrainian border in February 2022, they did so on the assumption that they would achieve conventional victory in days. When this failed, Russia abandoned its attempt to immediately decapitate the Ukrainian government, withdrawing its forces to the north. It then switched to a well-worn approach: a grinding, indiscriminate assault from the east, pulverizing Ukrainian defenses and civilian infrastructure alike and slowly but surely advancing over the rubble and ruin. It took the willingness of Western powers to provide the first tranches of accurate, longer-range weapons (most famously the M142 HIMARS multiple rocket launcher), along with timely intelligence, to turn the tables on this strategy.
Once Russia’s second advance had run out of steam, Ukraine capitalized on its overstretched forces, launching a rapid counteroffensive in the fall of 2022 that pushed the Russians out of the outskirts of Kharkiv and liberated the city of Kherson in the south. This effort galvanized Western support and led to fairly substantial donations of armored fighting vehicles and support equipment—but, crucially, not combat aircraft or long-range strike assets.
Those absences were keenly felt when Ukraine attempted another counteroffensive in the summer of 2023. Despite the presence of modern Western-designed tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, Russian defenses soaked up the Ukrainian advance and brought the momentum to a halt. What followed was a protracted, bloody stalemate—a state of affairs that broadly favored Russia, given its numerical advantages over Ukraine and Putin’s focus on prosecuting the war no matter the cost. However, Ukraine once again reversed the strategic momentum with its audacious advance onto Russian territory in 2024. But Russia, with the aid of North Korea, managed to foil that over the course of a drawn-out but ultimately successful counteroffensive.
Yet there is reason to think this pattern is finally shifting. The new phase of the war is distinguishable from previous Ukrainian offensives in several ways. For one, the state of the battlefield has changed: Russia’s advance has slowed to its lowest pace yet. By some measures, Ukraine is in the process of retaking more of its territory this year than at any point since 2023. The number of casualties sustained by the Russian armed forces is also increasing, and the casualty ratio has turned more in Ukraine’s favor. This reflects a strategy embraced by Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who has sought to supplant soldiers with robotic assets to safeguard and preserve Ukraine’s limited manpower reserves.
Second, Ukrainian drones and cruise missiles now rain down nightly on Russian targets hundreds of miles from Ukrainian territory. These strikes are damaging military assets, military-industrial facilities, and—more recently—targets of economic significance. The United States and Europe initially denied Ukraine long-range weapons and then gave them but denied Kyiv permission to use them on Russian soil. Now, Ukraine has drawn on its substantial aerospace and defense sectors to develop a long-range strike complex of its own. This is having a real and growing impact. Thanks to strikes on Russian oil facilities, Moscow was denied the full benefits of the sustained rise in prices that accompanied the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.
Ukrainian strategists have long maintained that it is only by imposing costs inside Russia that they can weaken Putin’s position. This judgment increasingly looks right. The compliance and submission of the Russian people—Putin’s most important asset—appear at risk as they face the mounting costs of war and a bleaker, more isolated future. Moscow’s recent internet shutdowns betrayed a callous disregard for the essentials of modern life. This is emblematic of growing separation between Putin’s ambitions and the public mood. While it is hard to be sure of public opinion in Russia, polling by the independent Levada Center shows a trending decline in the number of Russians who believe the country is heading “in the right direction” and a modest but discernible increase in the number who believe it is heading “in the wrong direction” over recent months.
In a sign of the times, German Gref, the longtime head of Russia’s Sberbank, reportedly stated last week that “I don’t think there is a single person in the country whose concerns are anything other than bringing the military actions to an end as soon as possible.” Even dictators need their people to stay onside, but Putin is offering neither ordinary Russians nor the elite much of anything to hope for.
Of course, the Russian military must not be written off. It may lack Ukraine’s defense ecosystem, but Moscow’s military-industrial complex has adapted both tactically and technologically despite its structural and supply chain challenges. Putin has not previously shown any interest in changing course. Doing so now not only would be out of character but could potentially entail real personal risks. Perhaps Putin is too blinkered to see what is in front of him and still believes he can achieve his original objective. In any case, de-escalation is unlikely to be his course of action. Worse, Putin may even try to escalate, especially if he feels constrained.
That escalation might include further violent attacks against Ukrainian civilian targets. But as we have seen, these attacks are not sufficient to break Ukraine’s will to resist or to disable its military-industrial complex.
Given the limited utility of simply adding violence, Russian escalation may instead spread horizontally. A direct conventional attack on Europe while Russian forces are overstretched remains unlikely, but the use of hybrid activities may increase. This includes political pressure, cyberintrusions, sponsored sabotage, attacks on European infrastructure, and targeted assassination attempts. The intent would be to coerce European countries but not trigger a larger conventional response. As momentum keeps shifting in Kyiv’s favor, European powers should work even faster to harden vulnerable targets and build out both their kinetic and nonkinetic means of response.
More broadly, as Ukraine’s partners consider how to respond to the shifting strategic ground, it is worth considering the constraints. First, for a negotiated peace to take hold, either both sides must feel as though they have achieved what they can or one side must have achieved a position of inarguable dominance over the other. Despite Ukraine’s advantages, neither of these conditions exists. Russia has repeatedly refused peace plans that were highly weighted in its favor. The outlines of a proposal discussed over the last 18 months, for example, would have allowed Moscow to hold on to Ukrainian territory taken by force and largely impose a “neutral” status on Ukraine that would preclude meaningful Western support for it.
What’s more, supposing Putin were to reverse course and accept a cease-fire that enabled Kyiv to deepen its political alignment to Europe, this would present a challenge to the West. There would be immediate pressure to lessen sanctions, reduce military spending, and otherwise revert to the pre-2022 norm. Meanwhile, the Russian economy, which has become geared toward producing capabilities that directly threaten Europe, would be given a chance to recover. At the same time, Ukraine would have to manage a massive demobilization and begin rebuilding its shattered infrastructure, all while maintaining sufficient military power to be prepared for a resumption of Russian warfare at any time.
All this means that Ukraine’s allies should not take Kyiv’s growing capabilities to strike Russian targets as a reason to lessen their political, economic, or material support to its defense. Instead, they must maintain a clear and consistent message directed at Moscow, Kyiv, and—crucially—domestic audiences. This entails highlighting Ukraine’s battlefield successes and its continued commitment to the laws of war. After four years, it is tempting to think that this conflict is simply grinding ever onward with no meaningful change. But the reality is that Ukraine is winning. Pushing for a just peace is still the morally and strategically correct course of action, and it is paying off.
