explainers

Why Meduza’s map of the front line in Ukraine doesn’t look like DeepState’s or ISW’s, plus answers to dozens more questions from readers

Source: Meduza

This is the second installment of answers to Meduza readers’ questions about the Russia-Ukraine war. In the first, we collected your messages on two main topics — the two armies’ strategies and the strikes each side launches deep behind the other’s lines. This time we’ll take on three more big clusters of questions. The first covers the current situation at the front; the second, the drone war that is deciding the course of the whole conflict; the third, both sides’ losses and the unpopular mobilization decisions those losses might prompt.

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What’s happening at the front right now?

It’s advancing — but in some places it’s retreating, too.

Yes, a victorious end to Russia’s Donbas campaign this year looks unlikely, and there’s no guarantee of one over the medium term, either.

If you’re not sure which maps these readers mean, you can find them at this link. We draw them solely from geolocated video; roughly 100 new clips surface each week. We use geolocations produced by numerous research projects, checking each one ourselves, along with geolocations of our own.

To go by its own write-ups, the Ukrainian project DeepState prefers data from anonymous sources inside Ukraine’s military. Pro-Russian counterparts such as LostArmour draw on information from the Russian military instead. We have no such sources on either side, and no way to assess other projects’ sources for reliability or hidden motives — so we work exclusively from open data.

The front lines drawn by pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian projects often contradict what’s visible in published videos. Sometimes that’s because clips are posted late — a lag occasionally detectable from the weather, the damage, and other details — but more often the cause is unreliable information from sources. Projects backing one side or the other needle each other over these discrepancies, often not gently at all: “Ukrainian soldiers in Kupyansk, which Gerasimov supposedly captured a year ago…” or “DeepState still holds Bakhmut…”

Even so, we don’t claim our rendering of the front line is the only correct one — every map is an approximation. Assessing objective data such as geolocations comes with its own difficulties, and those difficulties are growing. Beyond publication delays, there have been attempts at manipulation, from dropping flags from drones behind enemy lines (both sides have done this) to photos and videos in Russian sources that look suspiciously like AI-generated content. The only drone footage that can be fully trusted shows identifiable ground features or enemy personnel — and even then, the clips could be archival.

The war’s changing character also affects how we read video. In 2023–2024, spotting infantry or equipment from one army in a given location almost certainly meant that army controlled it. But as infiltration tactics and drone-based resupply have spread, those sightings no longer tell us nearly as much. That’s why “sleeves” and “pockets” have started appearing on our maps — areas where one side holds on to territory behind enemy lines.

The geolocations of these videos — and what they show — only make sense if both armies are increasingly willing to operate deep behind each other’s lines. In Kostyantynivka, for example, where Russian troops have long moved through nearly the entire city, Ukrainian positions held on at least until early August, as numerous videos of Russian drone strikes show. The same was true farther south in Toretsk in 2025, where Ukrainian positions sat deep behind Russian lines for months. Some may have been, and may still be, completely surrounded, resupplied only by drones or ground-based remote-controlled vehicles. But because front-line formations on both sides are so thin, it’s often possible to slip out of such an encirclement relatively safely.

Infiltration depth during offensives has also grown. A year ago, assault troops might unexpectedly turn up a couple of kilometers beyond the previous front line; now those distances reach 10–15 kilometers (6–9 miles), because so little infantry remains on either side’s front-line positions. These aren’t isolated cases — the phenomenon has spread, at least on the Russian side, to many sections of the front.

Assessing these geolocations, and especially plotting them on maps, isn’t simple. Analysts biased toward one side or the other are tempted to explain away enemy assault troops turning up behind their own lines as suicide fighters sent in for show. But in most cases, the goal of these infiltrations isn’t to manipulate public opinion — it’s to shake loose the enemy’s defenses, for instance by knocking out drone operators behind the lines. When infiltrations in a given area keep recurring in growing numbers, that can fairly be called an attempt to establish control.

We believe our rendering generally captures both the dynamics and the nature of the fighting: the more “sleeves” there are, the more unstable the situation in a given area.

As for the ratio of “control zones,” that’s not the most useful metric. Taken at face value, it would rank August 2024 as one of Ukraine’s most successful months — when Ukrainian troops seized vast territory in the Kursk region even as they kept losing ground in the southern Donbas at an accelerating pace. By the same logic, the Russian army’s record stretch would be late February and early March 2022. The metric does convey something — it reflects the slowdown in the Russian advance in 2026, for instance — but the details are more complicated. Right now, Ukrainian gains at the junction of the Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk regions are canceling out the Russian advance in the Donbas. But Russian advances still seem to carry greater “value” in terms of their effect on the strategic situation.

The gap in the absolute area each side is credited with capturing comes down to two things: the differing information sources noted above, and DeepState’s use of a huge “gray zone,” behind which actual Russian territorial gains are often hidden. We don’t count the “gray zone” — though it certainly exists, and its depth varies considerably from one part of the front to another.

Numerous videos show positions in Kostyantynivka being supplied by drones and unmanned ground vehicles. Ukrainian forces did fail to hold the flanks, but that didn’t stop them from maintaining a presence in the city and even bringing reinforcements into the northern outskirts and the city center as late as the end of July. Ukrainian commanders used the same tactic in Pokrovsk over the winter to keep Russian forces from setting up drone operator positions and the rest of what they need to spot and hit targets before advancing on Dobropillia.

The most recent videos of Ukrainian positions and Russian strikes inside Kostyantynivka appeared on August 11 (northern outskirts), August 10 (western part), and August 3 (eastern part). Clips like these are growing rarer. Russian assault troops have already pushed north of the city, where they were spotted and came under fire on the outskirts of Oleksiievo-Druzhkivka.

Judging by videos from recent weeks, the initiative in Lyman has shifted to Ukraine. Russian forces stormed the city in July and were spotted in every district except the western outskirts. But subsequent videos show dozens of Russian strikes on those same districts, and several recent clips reportedly show Russian troops still fighting inside the built-up area. Even so, there’s no objective confirmation that Ukrainian forces have retaken southern Lyman — one recent video shows Russian troops on the southeastern outskirts. Ukrainian forces are also still attempting counterattacks north of the city toward Zarichne, while Russian forces try to push through to the Siverskyi Donets River at various points around Lyman.

Russian forces are pushing toward Zaporizhzhia independent of the Donbas offensive, and the reasons are political. First, under the “spirit of Anchorage,” the Zaporizhzhia region is to be split along the line of contact as it stands when a ceasefire is signed — giving Vladimir Putin an incentive to seize as much of it as possible beforehand. Second, the Kremlin has said repeatedly that if Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t hand over the Donbas voluntarily, “the demands could change” once it’s captured. Advancing as close as possible to the Zaporizhzhia region’s capital now would lay the groundwork for a new ultimatum.

For now, Russian forces lack the strength to break through to Zaporizhzhia. That could change if the Donbas falls.

This is where the Kakhovka Reservoir comes in — or more precisely, the offensive by Russia’s “Dnipro” group of forces, which was reinforced with airborne units moved up to the shore of the former reservoir. In the spring, Russian forces reached Richne on the Konka River, 12 kilometers (7 miles) from Zaporizhzhia’s southern outskirts. But a Ukrainian counterattack — including a push into the open flank across the former reservoir bed — drove Russian troops out of Richne along with Prymorske and most of Stepnohirsk. Ukrainian forces advanced up to 12 kilometers (7 miles) from north to south. The attack also eliminated a dangerous Russian wedge east of Stepnohirsk that threatened the Orikhiv–Zaporizhzhia road. Ukrainian assault troops are now operating south of Stepnohirsk. The upshot is that Ukraine has retaken nearly all the territory it lost in this Russian offensive, except for part of the village of Kamianske.

Ukraine’s success here may owe something to Russian troop rotations. In recent months, only one regiment of the 7th Mountain Air Assault Division has been spotted in the area — not the rest of the airborne forces that took part in the offensive. The Russian force there now consists mostly of reserve regiments, the equivalent of Ukraine’s territorial defense units.

For now, residents of Zaporizhzhia face no added danger beyond “routine” drone and missile strikes. The signs that the city risks ending up in the front-line zone would be a new offensive along the reservoir’s shore that puts Russian forces on the Konka, or the capture of Orikhiv and an advance north of it. Even short of an assault on the city itself, either move would make life difficult, at least in Zaporizhzhia’s southern districts — much as it has been in Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, where Russian forces can already strike with first-person-view (FPV) drones and artillery, sharply worsening conditions across the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk metro area.

Capturing Orikhiv is clearly part of Russian commanders’ near-term plans, though the fighting is still confined to the city’s outskirts. Alongside the “Dnipro” group of forces, units from the “Vostok” group of forces are approaching from the east — but again, these threats remain a distant prospect.

We’ve already covered the full backstory of the fighting around Mala Tokmachka.

In short, the fighting in this area — the front south of Orikhiv in the Zaporizhzhia region — is smaller in scale than the meme’s fame would suggest. The meme grew out of that place name being repeated for months on end in pro-Russian battlefield reports — and out of the fact that the name is hard to forget.

In recent days, the situation for Ukrainian forces around Mala Tokmachka has sharply worsened. Russian troops from the “Vostok” grouping are gradually closing in on Orikhiv from the east, and — likely as a result — Russian units have broken through to the city’s outskirts from the south via Novodanylivka, reaching a stretch of the Mala Tokmachka–Orikhiv highway. It’s not yet clear whether they’ve established a foothold there, but recent videos show Russian assault troops still fighting within Orikhiv’s city limits, on the outskirts. It’s worth remembering that similar crises in Ukraine’s defense have occurred before without leading to Russian success — which is partly how the meme about “eternal battles for a strategic village” got started.

Both armies are developing new combined-arms tactics centered on heavy drone use.

The principles are the same on both sides: drones and artillery locate and destroy the enemy’s drone operator positions, a process that takes several weeks. Once enemy fire has been weakened, assault groups move in — and lately, these groups have also been used directly in combat against drone operators.

The drawbacks are shared too: offensives unfold slowly, broken into stages that each require separate preparation.

As for Ukraine’s own offensive operations, they have lately been concentrated almost entirely in the Zaporizhzhia region, ever since the winter counteroffensive at Kupyansk ended. Russian forces are attacking at Kupyansk again. We described the successful Ukrainian attacks against the Russian “Dnipro” grouping south of Zaporizhzhia above. At the junction of the Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk regions, a larger Ukrainian offensive has been underway for several months, with forces roughly the size of an army corps that commanders pulled in from near Dobropillia and the Sumy region. The operation amounts to repeated strikes against the flank of the Russian “Vostok” grouping where it meets the “Tsentr” grouping. The latter is mainly advancing on Dobropillia.

Ukrainian forces have pushed 10–15 kilometers (6–9 miles) into Russian defenses in several areas. Russian commanders have shored up that flank, moving in forces from near Dobropillia and from the western flank of the Kramatorsk offensive. In recent days, Ukrainian forces have fought their way to the intersection of the Donetsk–Zaporizhzhia highway and the road to Velyka Novosilka, a town vital to Russian rear-area logistics and to supplying the “Vostok” grouping.

Ukrainian commanders’ next moves are unclear: they could push toward Velyka Novosilka to get behind the “Vostok” group of forces, or along the Zaporizhzhia-Donetsk road to get behind the Russian 90th Tank Division from the “Tsentr” grouping. The “Vostok” grouping’s Telegram channel recently published dozens of videos showing Russian assault troops in villages Ukraine had previously liberated, and it’s still unclear who actually controls that territory.

So far, the offensive has partially achieved two goals — pulling some Russian forces away from the Kramatorsk sector, and slowing, though not stopping, the “Vostok” grouping’s advance west toward Orikhiv.

The military significance of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk — not their political significance — is overstated. The two cities do serve as the “last fortresses” on Russia’s path deeper into Ukraine. That’s not because they’re weak “fortresses,” but because of their geography: to their north and northeast lie woodland and the Siverskyi Donets River, an obstacle that stopped Russian forces cold when they tried to storm the two cities from the north in 2022. In effect, the cities defend themselves — and with them, Ukraine’s sovereignty over the Donbas.

Zelensky, explaining his reluctance to surrender the Donbas, has said Russian forces could push north from Kramatorsk and Sloviansk into the Kharkiv region by crossing the Siverskyi Donets — though Russia already holds better positions for attacking that region.

There have also been suggestions that Russian forces could advance on the city of Dnipro from Kramatorsk. But here too, better routes exist, from the Zaporizhzhia region and Pokrovsk — so Russian commanders clearly have no such plans for now.

Ukraine has been building fortifications in the west and north of the Donetsk region for several months now. If the Ukrainian army avoids defeat at Kramatorsk, the prospects for defending new lines will be at least as good as they were for the line west of Pokrovsk, a city Russian forces captured more than six months ago. The catch is that if the Donetsk region falls entirely, Russian commanders would be free to redeploy troops elsewhere along the front — which is exactly why there’s a real military logic for Ukraine in tying those forces down in front of well-defended “fortresses.”

Drone videos get published so often not just because the entire war runs on drone strikes, but because this footage is easy to obtain. The “kill zone” isn’t actually impenetrable to everything living, and the gray zone doesn’t run 50 kilometers (31 miles) deep.

Because drones saturate the front line and the ground just behind it — up to 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the line of contact — concentrating troops really is impossible. That’s not so much because everyone “will inevitably be killed”: those who don’t need to move constantly have learned to hide, though equipment is harder to conceal. The real problem is that large forces can’t be supplied, since the units handling resupply have to move across open ground. So troops are spread out in depth as much as possible. Most troops are behind the lines or tied up in supply work, and they take heavy losses.

Almost no large strongpoints remain, given the danger from glide bombs — Ukraine’s air force uses these too, though on a smaller scale than Russia’s. The best way to hide is to disperse, so enemy reconnaissance doesn’t judge a position worth one of these munitions.

The front line itself is very thin. A tree line or a farm might be held by no more than a handful of troops, attacked in turn by groups just as small. Drones and sensors — cameras — handle surveillance and target identification, while other drones and artillery strike the targets. Artillery’s range is limited because gun positions have to sit far behind the lines.

Units and entire formations spend weeks destroying each other’s weapons systems and surveillance equipment, all to create an opening for small groups to advance and dig in. To that end, every unit and formation fields its own assault detachments.

Most troops spend their time building positions behind the lines, maintaining supply routes, handling resupply — including on foot — and evacuation.

Offensives often manage to breach the first line of defense but never achieve a breakthrough on an operational scale. In 2025, assault detachments from two brigades of the 51st Army broke deep behind Ukrainian lines between Dobropillia and Druzhkivka, but supplying them proved impossible.

Russian forces now storm cities, as Colonel Abdulaziz Shikhabidov put it to Putin, “through the active use of new techniques and methods of conducting combat operations.” The core approach is unchanged: drones for reconnaissance, and strike drones, aviation, and artillery to suppress the enemy’s weapons systems, followed by assault troops — for whom operating in cities is often easier than in other terrain, thanks to the abundance of places to take cover.

Artillery has grown far more accurate and now expends fewer shells per target, chiefly not because of precision-guided munitions but because it has been folded into a single loop with reconnaissance drones. But it has fewer targets available and has been pushed far back from the front, which keeps it from firing deep into enemy territory. Its role has shrunk as a result, and drones have taken over much of its work.

Sometimes it’s because the front has stayed static in certain areas. But there’s another reason: identical place names are common across eastern Ukraine. In 2024–2025, for instance, Russian media reported three separate times that Russian forces had captured the village of Shevchenko, home to Ukraine’s largest, still-undeveloped lithium ore deposit. Only the third time was it actually that Shevchenko — all three villages happened to be located in roughly the same district.

As Russian forces approach, Ukrainian authorities order the mandatory evacuation of children and, together with volunteer groups, try to move everyone else out too. A small number of residents, mostly elderly people, stay behind, and Russian forces then try to evacuate them. Many villages and towns are destroyed almost completely during the fighting and can’t be rebuilt — yet people often remain in them.

Fighting in forests poses the greatest difficulties either army faces in this war. The chief problems are supplying one’s own troops, locating the enemy with standard reconnaissance equipment, and the ease with which wooded terrain can be mined. Large offensives, as a result, cannot be mounted in forests. Individual operations are still carried out there, however — in the forests of the Sumy region, for example.

As for the northern border regions specifically, neither side has enough spare forces to extend the front line in that direction.

By fall 2022, Ukrainian forces had completed their first waves of mobilization and deployment and held a significant numerical advantage — one Russian forces could offset only by launching their own mobilization and letting the Russian mercenary group Wagner recruit tens of thousands of convicts as assault troops.

The situation now is fundamentally different: there’s no numerical advantage. Ukrainian forces are fighting with even fewer formations than the Russian military fields, and many of those formations suffer from a chronic shortage of personnel and equipment.

We’ve written about this in detail.

In short, Drapatyi faces a choice: stick with his predecessor’s methods, or push through a sweeping reform that changes tactics and operational practice at the front. Whichever path he takes, he’ll face major political and military problems.

It appears Drapatyi has decided — as had been discussed in former Defense Minister Fedorov’s circle — to dismantle Syrskyi’s main instrument: assault regiments that had swelled to the size of divisions and served as “fire brigades.” The military has begun transferring “surplus” personnel from some regiments to regular brigades, and there’s also talk of moving out the entire roster of brigades judged unfit for combat.

The reform has advantages: it unifies and simplifies command, and it eases tensions within units that resented what they saw as an unfair distribution of resources to the assault regiments. It also has drawbacks. Restructuring the system in the middle of a Russian offensive and cutting the number of formations could cause trouble at the front.

Who’s winning the drone war?

There’s no major gap between Russian and Ukrainian forces in the number of drones, whether FPV, reconnaissance, or long-range — at times Russia has even led, for example when it was first to deploy fiber-optic drones. But Russian forces have fallen significantly behind in the number and quality of interceptor drones capable of countering long-range strike drones, and are now trying to catch up.

The two sides copy each other’s solutions. Ukrainian manufacturers and the military quickly adopted fiber-optic drones; Russia, in turn, has copied many of Ukraine’s organizational moves in recent months, including the creation of a separate drone branch of the armed forces. Both armies are working to introduce and improve machine-vision drones, and Russian forces are also developing combined-arms tactics built around drones at the front — again, largely mirroring Ukraine’s approach.

Innovation in Russia appears to have stalled in recent months, as development has gradually been centralized under state control. Coordination between drone operators and other units at the front has also sharply worsened since the shutdown of smuggled Starlink terminals, which Russian forces had relied on heavily.

The impression that Russia is falling behind comes from the past year’s increase in Ukrainian strikes on targets deep inside Russia. Ukraine, meanwhile, has been living under constant drone attack for far longer.

Russia continues to use piston-engine drones even as it rapidly ramps up production of jet-powered ones. It deploys the “Geran-2” wherever Ukraine lacks dense air defense, while relying more often on jet-powered “Geran-3Ts” and “Geran-4” drones against the Kyiv and Odesa areas.

On the whole, Russia has fallen behind in developing specialized counter-drone defenses — both interceptors and the reconnaissance and control systems behind them.

That’s exactly what Russian and Ukrainian forces are doing — drone operator positions rank among the priority targets. But identifying them is extremely difficult. Operators site their control antennas away from where they sit, avoid anything that could give away their position, and work from basements where they can. Strikes on their positions still happen regularly, though Madyar’s own location is likely even harder to pin down.

Low-flying drones really are hard to detect — American troops who have themselves come under attack from Iranian “Shahed” drones say the same thing. Tracking drones along their entire flight path is even harder: that takes a dense network of sensors — not just radars — or airborne radars, or both. And the quality of Russia’s air defense information system, which is supposed to pull together data on every target, leaves a great deal to be desired. The Russian Defense Ministry has promised to build a new system by November.

Fully autonomous drones aren’t in widespread use yet, but the drones you describe, with autolock-on and self-guidance onto a target, are already common on both sides.

Experiments are certainly underway. But according to limited open-source information from drone manufacturers and operators, key questions remain unresolved — how to distinguish military from civilian targets, and how reliably drones can find camouflaged ones — and experienced human operators still perform these tasks better. Manufacturers, moreover, find it more cost-effective when mass-producing drones to rely on ready-made commercial solutions, like cameras with built-in autolock and object tracking.

So one of the main problems with drones — guidance difficulties at low altitude caused by lost communication — is being solved. Another — the need to assign a dedicated operator to every remotely piloted drone — is not.

On the exact number of drones, the authorities can’t be trusted. Most likely, they don’t know themselves how many drones were in each wave, and the summary reports they hand to the media, drawn from air defense information systems, are often quite inaccurate. Authorities also tamper with the numbers, and sometimes stop publishing them altogether — signs of manipulation show up not just in Russia and Ukraine but also, for example, in the public communications of Persian Gulf states.

Still, there’s no doubt both Russia and Ukraine use hundreds of drones in each “salvo.” Their main advantage is low cost — both of producing each individual unit and of organizing production at scale. They rely on standard commercial electronics, parts made from simple composites and 3D-printed components, and engines that are almost all foreign, usually mass-produced Chinese piston and turbojet motors. Drones are often delivered to their launch sites by civilian trucks.

As for “payoff,” it depends on which metric you use. Drones certainly destroy military and civilian property worth far more than the drones themselves cost, and more than was spent building the production capacity behind them. Could those resources have been spent differently for a greater military effect? Possibly.

Ukraine uses aircraft like these for exactly that purpose — both the Yak-52 and the L-39. Negotiations are underway to purchase a large batch of L-39s upgraded specifically to counter drones, and Russia may be using the L-39 as well. Aviation, including helicopters, is a necessary element of counter-drone defense — only aircraft are mobile enough to cover a large area.

This is a well-known urban legend, likely spawned by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) “Spiderweb” operation, in which small FPV drones were smuggled by truck across Russian territory to military airfields and used to strike long-range bombers. Relatively large drones — some of which, early in the war, were built on light-aircraft airframes — are far harder to move overland than by air. There’s no evidence these drones have ever been launched from Russia or any neighboring country other than Ukraine, though Russia’s Foreign Ministry, of course, is happy to keep the legend alive.

Every night, Russian monitoring channels that draw on air defense unit reports show the same picture: Ukrainian drones appear over the Bryansk and Belgorod regions, over the Donbas, Crimea, the Sea of Azov, and the Black Sea, then punch deep into the country and fly their planned routes to their targets.

Authorities took up blocking mobile communications after the “Spiderweb” operation too, since Ukrainian FPV drones were indeed controlled via GSM modems at the time. But the long-range drones that Ukraine’s military and the SBU use to strike Russia daily mostly don’t rely on mobile communications — so the shutdowns are useless against them.

Starlink isn’t used for strikes either, since it doesn’t work in Russia — except in the coastal zone of the Krasnodar region, where Ukraine has managed to build mesh networks centered on a satellite communications terminal. But Kyiv is trying to persuade Elon Musk to switch on Starlink coverage over Russia for Ukrainian military devices, which would let drones strike mobile military targets such as “Iskander” ballistic missile launchers, fighter jets, and bombers sitting on airfields.

The main control channel for long-range drones is an inertial system that receives corrections from a satellite navigation receiver.

The control system for long-range drones periodically receives GPS corrections to fix errors in its inertial navigation. Systems that feed drones a false GPS signal — “spoofing” — are widespread in both Russia and Ukraine, and anyone who uses digital maps has probably run into one. If that signal is substituted at the moment it’s received, the drone’s onboard computer recalculates its route to the target from the false location. Sometimes that leads to incidents in which civilians are killed.

Drones can indeed maneuver, following waypoints programmed into their flight path, with routes plotted to avoid detected air defense systems and mobile anti-drone gun teams.

Metal nets make strikes on equipment more expensive, since hitting a single target now takes more drones. There have been attempts to cover individual refinery units the same way, but no data showing it helped. Hiding a huge object under metal netting is obviously neither as simple nor as cheap as covering a tank, and drones attacking plants and warehouses carry tens of kilograms of explosives — far more than the few kilograms carried by the FPV drones that hunt armored vehicles.

Entirely different drones are used for strikes on front-line targets. They’re smaller and much cheaper, but they carry the camera needed to hit moving targets. For strikes on logistics — also moving targets, but dozens of kilometers back from the front — intermediate variants are being developed: drones built to strike targets deeper behind the lines. These are the drones hunting fuel trucks on the highway from the Rostov region to Crimea, or trucks and electric locomotives inside Ukraine. Russia does sometimes use “Geran” drones fitted with a video camera controlled over mesh networks for strikes closer to the front.

Long-range drones can also be used against military warehouses, and these strikes happen regularly. But unlike the online retailer Wildberries, the military long ago overhauled its logistics system in the front-line zone: instead of the huge, often open storage sites typical of 2022, a network of small, well-camouflaged warehouses now covers the area.

What losses are the two sides taking, and could this lead to another mobilization in Russia?

Ukrainian politicians have recently talked a lot about Russia preparing a new wave of forced mobilization, and naturally, you’ve asked us many questions about this scenario. This isn’t the first time — similar warnings after 2022 didn’t pan out — which makes it tempting to file this discussion under Kyiv’s psychological operations too. Still, the possibility is worth taking seriously, so we’ve laid out some brief context before answering your questions.

Over the past three years, the Kremlin has clearly been satisfied with how the regions have handled their contract-recruitment quotas. Russian authorities launched that campaign at full capacity in mid-2023, assigning each governor a quota, and those targets have barely changed since, even as Russian losses mounted. Russian forces could form entire new armies and corps from scratch in 2023 and 2024, but that process has all but stopped. Meanwhile, regions are paying more and more to attract new contract soldiers — regional “signing bonuses” keep climbing, even though the government has raised the federal bonus only once, back in 2024.

So it’s fair to say the conditions for replenishing the army with contract soldiers and volunteers have worsened, yielding smaller returns than three years ago. Yet the Kremlin has refused to shift to compulsory measures this entire time — Putin apparently judges the social and economic risks of a new mobilization wave too high relative to the potential benefits.

Could that calculation change? Two kinds of developments could push it in that direction.

A decline in the number of contract soldiers even as payments rise, and/or a rise in losses to a level where recruitment no longer offsets attrition

Ukraine reports that’s exactly what’s happening now. Kyiv’s “victory plan” in part assumes that Ukrainian forces will kill 30,000 or more Russian troops a month, matching the number Russia recruits over the same period, and that level, it’s claimed, was already reached in late 2025. But everything we know about Russian losses gives reason to doubt those estimates. We’ll soon update our own tally and report, with facts, what Russian losses in killed and missing have actually been.

Even if attrition exceeds the number of new recruits, the problem could clearly be addressed without compulsory mobilization — for example, by raising regional quotas. Right now, the Kremlin requires regions to supply 0.3% of their population to the army each year. Budget reporting from roughly 40 regions shows the quota barely varies from region to region and hasn’t changed over time. Governors would obviously find it harder to meet a raised target set in Moscow, but a new wave of mobilization would be harder still.

A Putin decision to speed up the offensive and/or reinforce the army

The problems with that decision have long been clear.

Contract-soldier recruitment quotas remain at their current level because that’s the most people the army can “absorb,” that is, train and equip. Individual soldiers don’t fight alone; units do, and units need officers, both combat and staff. Formations such as brigades, divisions, and armies need support elements, too: air defense, electronic warfare, logistics, artillery, and now thousands-strong drone-operator units.

The Kremlin has already seen what forced mobilization does — it caused public discontent and drove people to flee the country, so the social and political risks are real. There’s a financial dimension too. For 300,000 newly mobilized troops, say, the federal budget alone would have to pay more than a trillion rubles in the first year, by a conservative estimate — bonuses, salaries, additional payments, and death and injury compensation.

Still, the Defense Ministry is probably unhappy with the recruits it’s currently getting — it’s hard to build high-tech units for the “army of the future” out of people who are risking their lives for money because they’re desperate. That discontent may run deep enough that the Defense Ministry could persuade the Kremlin to recruit an entirely different pool of people by force.

Over the past year, Russian forces have tried to recruit several tens of thousands of drone operators among students and other young people, offering a guaranteed short-term contract with no right of transfer to other branches of service. Students apparently didn’t trust the army, though, and the campaign failed.

The Defense Ministry made a similar attempt to staff the mobile gun teams that shoot down drones away from the front, this time driven by cost rather than skill: recruiters tried to draw fighters from the reserve pool, people who receive small payments from the army for showing up to short annual training sessions. There’s been no word of success there either.

It’s conceivable the Kremlin will eventually decide forced mobilization can solve the recruit-quality problem. For now, though, that remains purely speculative.

And now, your questions:

The problem is the same one: it’s not individual soldiers who fight, but units and formations, and those need commanders experienced in modern warfare, vehicles, and up-to-date weapons — all of which costs a great deal of money.

Creating 10–20 new combined-arms armies would certainly transform the situation at the front. That change wouldn’t even require extending the active front line — on many current sectors, Russian commanders are already clearly short of forces.

A familiar question, and a familiar answer: over the past three years, the tactical-level battlefield has generally stayed in Russian hands. That’s not very visible on the map, but “on the ground” it plays out exactly that way — Russian burial teams can collect both their own and enemy dead, while Ukrainian teams often can’t. The last time Ukraine handed over more bodies than it received was in late summer 2023, when Ukrainian forces were still conducting their major counteroffensive. The Russian offensive that continues to this day began on October 7, 2023.

That work continues, though its significance has diminished. Strictly speaking, these were never really forecasts — just a linear trend extrapolated forward. Had the Russian army kept losing tanks and infantry fighting vehicles at the rate of the war’s first two years, its armored vehicles would have run out by 2026. Commanders clearly recognized this and slowed the loss rate. Russian forces now have roughly as many tanks as they did before the war, thanks to new production and to restoring vehicles that had been damaged or mothballed at old Soviet storage sites. Current losses — the lowest of the war so far — are being offset by production. Slightly more videos of knocked-out Ukrainian tanks were published in 2026 than similar clips of Russian ones. But if Russian forces once again start using armored vehicles en masse in mechanized attacks, they’ll burn through their stocks quickly.

The same group of researchers is now counting losses of military trucks, a metric far more relevant given Ukraine’s campaign of strikes well behind the front lines.

We analyzed this report in detail, and we agree with your critical assessment.

Again: it’s units that fight, not individual soldiers. Those units are now spread out in depth, but they certainly don’t have a surplus of personnel — and mobilized troops would also be needed, among other things, to stand up new formations.

We’ve assessed Ukraine’s mobilization capacity in a separate piece.

In short, Ukraine’s capacity to keep mobilizing will remain intact for a long time — its problems there aren’t caused by a shortage of eligible people.

There are serious doubts about the Russian authorities’ ability to organize and pay for all that. The Kremlin appears to sense this too, which is likely why it isn’t trying to mobilize two million people.

The Russian army has to carry out tasks consistent with the war’s political goals, which Putin sets, and those tasks are unmistakably offensive. Set the Kremlin’s goals aside, and the answer is that Russia should stop the war immediately and stop taking losses altogether.

We largely answered the first part of this question at the start of this section. As for conscripts, they do take part in the war, but only after signing a contract — a fairly common practice. Sending conscripts to the front has been taboo for Putin since the start of his rule, though he’s never written it into law. Exceptions happen: the soldiers killed or taken prisoner in the Kursk region during the first days of Ukraine’s incursion were clearly not soldiers anyone had planned to send to war — the war simply came to them.

For the Russian army, desertion isn’t as significant a problem, or as large a share of losses, as it is for Ukraine’s. Russian authorities had opened just over a thousand desertion cases and 26,000 cases of refusing service as of mid-2025 — there’s no more recent data. During that period, about a thousand such cases a month came before Russian courts, compared to roughly 15,000–20,000 in Ukrainian courts. That gap probably has to do with how recruitment works: Russian contract soldiers want out not during training, but once they’re already at the front, where escape is far harder. Most who want to leave simply fail to return from leave, and the army sends the majority of them back to the front without even opening a criminal case.