Which side is winning the war in Ukraine?

Russian forces continue to bombard Ukrainian cities and make slow but steady gains on the battlefield, even as Moscow says it is considering the latest US-brokered peace plan.

At least three people were killed this week after more than 650 Russian drones and three dozen missiles targeted energy infrastructure in Ukraine’s western regions. Since October, Moscow has “intensified its attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid, reportedly pushing it to the brink of collapse”, said The Telegraph.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the latest attacks – as people prepared to celebrate Christmas with their families – showed that Vladimir Putin was not serious about peace talks.

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Can Ukraine win the war?

“Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to mediate peace talks”, Russia has maintained a “relentless offensive that has continued unabated”, said The New York Times.

Russian drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities have intensified since the summer, while ISW data shows that last month Russia made its largest monthly territorial gains in Ukraine since November 2024.

With Ukrainian morale believed to be at breaking point, the outcome of the war is increasingly likely to be decided by two key factors: the supply of soldiers and maintaining international support.

Ukraine’s “inherent weakness is that it depends on others for funding and arms”, said the BBC’s international editor, Jeremy Bowen. On the other hand, Russia “makes most of its own weapons” and is “buying drones from Iran and ammunition from North Korea” with no limitations on how they are used. It also enjoys an advantage in raw manpower, bolstered by massive conscription drives. Putin aims to have a bigger army than America’s, with 1.5 million active servicemen, “a sign of Russia’s relentless militarisation”, said Sky News’ Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett.

Its superiority in personnel and materials – along with the use of new “infiltration tactics”, reported by Deutsche Welle – has seen it make slow but steady progress on the battlefield, gradually expanding the amount of Ukrainian territory it controls over the past year.

The average rate of Russian gains in 2025 has been 176 square miles per month, according to data from the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. Russia made its largest monthly territorial gains in November, but the suggestion by Putin and senior Russian government and military figures that Ukraine’s frontline faces “imminent collapse” is a“false narrative”, said the institute. Such claims are likely to be “an effort to coerce the West and Ukraine into capitulating to Russian demands that Russia cannot secure itself militarily”.

As autumn has given way to winter, Putin has “shifted the war to Ukraine’s energy and logistics systems”, said Sergey Maidukov on Al Jazeera. While this “looks like a replay of past winters”, where Russia “tried to freeze Ukraine into surrendering”, this year “the strategy has evolved”. Now, “the aim is not merely to punish Ukraine but to also destabilise Europe” via the influx of refugees who would be forced to flee across the borders if Ukraine’s energy system collapsed during the winter months.

What does victory look like for each side?

Before Russia launched its invasion in February 2022, Putin outlined the objectives of what he called a “special military operation”. His goal, he claimed, was to “denazify” and “demilitarise” Ukraine, and to defend Donetsk and Luhansk, the two eastern Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian proxy forces since 2014.

Another objective, although never explicitly stated, was to topple the Ukrainian government and remove Zelenskyy. “The enemy has designated me as target number one; my family is target number two,” said Zelenskyy shortly after the invasion. Russian troops made two attempts to storm the presidential compound.

Russia shifted its objectives, however, about a month into the invasion, after Russian forces were forced to retreat from Kyiv and Chernihiv. According to the Kremlin, its main goal became the “liberation of the Donbas”, including the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

The Trump administration’s initial 28-point plan to end the war suggests Russia’s “minimum requirement” remains “occupying the entirety of the Donbas region (comprising the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk)”, said The Economist. Most contentiously, this includes territory it has so far failed to take by force. Other provisions include limits on the size of Ukraine’s army and missile capability and barring it from Nato membership or hosting Nato peacekeepers on its soil.

Kyiv was quick to denounce these demands as amounting to capitulation, and has countered with its own 20-point framework, hammered out with US negotiators. Describing the plan as “the main framework for ending the war”, Zelenskyy has proposed security guarantees from the US, Nato and European countries to prevent further Russian aggression, with the potential option of establishing a demilitarised “free economic zone” in eastern Donbas.

While this represents a softening of Ukraine’s position, it is still unlikely to be palatable to Putin. The Russian president would gladly have taken as a win a “Kremlin-friendly peace plan that enshrines Ukraine’s perpetual subordination”, said The New York Times. But he’ll also see “a failed process” as a victory if it leads Donald Trump to “pull remaining support for Ukraine”. With his economy struggling and his troops mired in a slow advance that’s had a steep cost in “lives and matériel”, Putin’s capacity for continued war “isn’t limitless”. But he believes “time is on his side” and his goal hasn’t shifted: he “wants to break Ukraine”.

How many Russian and Ukrainian troops have died in the conflict?

True casualty figures are “notoriously difficult to pin down”, said Newsweek, and “experts caution that both sides likely inflate the other’s reported losses”.

In an interview with CBS in April, Zelenskyy confirmed that up to 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed. This tallies with the Centre for Strategic & International Studies think tank's June 2025 estimate that also put the number of injured at around 340,000.

By any measure, Moscow has fared far worse. Mediazona, working with the BBC’s Russian service and a team of volunteers to compile a named list of the Russian military dead, has put the number of Russian dead at more than 150,000. However, “Western estimates” suggest Russia’s overall losses are “significantly higher” than that, said The Moscow Times.

In August, Trump claimed there had been more than 112,000 Russian deaths since January this year alone, compared with about 8,000 Ukrainian fatalities.

Figures released in the summer by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank put Russian military deaths at up to 250,000 and total casualties, including the wounded, at more than 950,000. In June, Russia’s wartime toll reached a “historic milestone”, said The Guardian, with more than a million troops killed or injured since the start of the invasion, according to the UK Ministry of Defence.

Russia Matters cited MoD estimates for October 2025 that put the number of Russian soldiers killed or wounded at 1,118,000.

While Moscow has remained tight-lipped about how many of its soldiers have been killed or wounded, the recently concluded summer offensive “has come at an enormous cost” but “achieved no major objectives”, said The Economist.