Is Ukraine losing the against Russia?

The Economist has published an article highlighting five maps and charts which illustrate the current state of fighting. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

The Ukraine war has become almost static. Both sides have dug in; the front lines barely shifted in 2023. As The Economist recently reported, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is still publicly claiming that Ukraine will recover all the territory the Russians conquered, even if he privately knows that this will not happen soon, if at all. His frustration with the lack of progress prompted him to reshuffle the leadership of the armed forces earlier in February. Our charts and maps below show where things stand two years into Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Roughly a month into the war, Russia controlled more than 22 per cent of Ukrainian territory (including the land it occupied in 2014). Ukraine, helped by supplies of advanced weapons from the West, hit back with two stunning counter-offensives. By late January 2023 it had liberated more than half of the territory that Russia had seized since February 2022.

But progress on the territorial front has since stalled. A counter-offensive last summer did not amount to much. In fact, our analysis shows that Russia has gained ground in the past 12 months, albeit a tiny amount. Including both gains and losses, Russia has increased its holdings of Ukrainian territory by 0.2 percentage points (see chart 1).

The stalemate has caused consternation among Ukraine’s allies. Data published on February 16th by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think-tank, show that total aid allocated for near-term delivery from Europe is outpacing that sent by America, though it lags behind in sending military equipment (see charts 2 and 3). Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign-policy chief, admitted that the bloc would only deliver around half of the 1m artillery shells it had promised to send to Ukraine by March. Russia is now producing more shells than Western countries are. It is also getting ammunition from North Korea.

Russia’s growing advantage in artillery fire is taking a toll on Ukraine’s forces. The Economist’s war tracker showed heavy fighting along the eastern and southern fronts in the 30 days to February 20th (see map 1). Russia captured Avdiivka, a small town in the eastern region of Donetsk, on February 17th, marking Ukraine’s worst defeat since the fall of Bakhmut last May. A major in Ukraine’s armed forces told The Economist that if they had had more equipment and ammunition, the battle for Avdiivka would have ended “entirely differently”. Towns in eastern parts of the country now fear they will be Russia’s next target.

Ukraine is having more success at sea. Even without much of a conventional navy, Ukraine is inflicting serious damage on Russia in the Black Sea. Missile and drone attacks have bombarded Russia’s fleet: 25 surface ships and one submarine have been destroyed; 15 are under repair. On February 14th Ukrainian officials said they sank another valuable ship, a claim supported by video footage. Russia’s remaining vessels have been forced to operate at much greater distances from Ukraine’s coast.

This has established a strategic corridor for grain and other exports, despite Russia’s withdrawal from a UN agreement (see map 2). That is helping the economy in important ways: total exports of grain, oilseeds and vegetable oils in January were higher than they were at the start of 2019 and 2020. Such successes have shown that Ukraine is still in the fight, and that its economy can develop even in wartime. But its allies will need to step up if they want Ukraine to hold Russia back on land for another year.