Can Russia Win in Ukraine on its Current Trajectory: Assessing Russia’s 2025 War Effort
A comprehensive assessment of Russia's 2025 war against Ukraine, how it might measure its strategic success or failure, and what this means for the direction of the war in Ukraine.
May 2025 be our year. The year of Ukraine. We know that peace will not be given to us as a gift. But we will do everything to stop Russia and end the war. This is what each of us wishes for. President Zelenskyy, 2025 New Year Message.
Russian advances on the ground in Ukraine this year, while limited compared to the resources expended to secure them, provide an insight into the mindset of the Russian military leadership and importantly, President Putin. This war is much less about territorial gain than it is about political gain. That should not be a surprise. But too much of the reporting on the war is reduced to square kilometres gained or lost, and numbers of drones used in Russia’s nightly, continuous aerial assaults against Ukrainian infrastructure, defence industry and civilian targets.
Throughout the course of this war, I have proposed measures of success and failure to provide more illumination about how Russia, and Ukraine, are going in this war, and to inform debate on its trajectory. These measures are also important because, if used consistently, they can also yield political and military lessons about Russia and Ukraine for western military and civilian analysts of the war.
Over the past year, Russia has built strategic momentum with its ground and aerial assaults on Ukraine. While this has been insufficient to deliver a decisive military victory for Russia, it has underpinned its diplomacy to gain limited support from the Trump administration for forcing a ceasefire on Ukraine that is advantageous to Russia. While Putin’s efforts in this regard have stalled of late, they have not been entirely wasted.
Russia retains has the strategic initiative in this war. And, over the past three years, it has learned to learn better, to adapt systemically and harness its relationships with Iran, China and North Korea to support its war effort. And, as I wrote in a just-published white paper for the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “It is very likely that Russian efforts to “learn how to learn better” in the past three years have achieved critical mass and are now paying dividends at the tactical and strategic levels.”
But what does that really mean for Russia’s prospects in the war? And what is the possibility of President Putin achieving his political and strategic objectives of subjugating Ukraine, keeping Ukraine militarily neutral and ensuring Ukraine is not able to provide a democratic model of governance visible to the repressed Russian people? To that end, this essay examines Russia’s likely measures of success for its 2025 war efforts, and assesses the degree to which it may have achieved its objectives.
Russia’s Strategic Objectives: No Change
To assess Russia’s 2025 campaigns in Ukraine, it is necessary to explore what Russia set out to achieve.
Putin’s 2025 objectives for his war against Ukraine are hardly a mystery. And they have not changed since February 2025. He aims to do everything possible to ensure that the world understands that Ukraine is not a sovereign nation. Additionally, Putin, wants to reassert what he describes as Russian civilisation in his part of the world. He has also has consistently portrayed Russia as the victim of a NATO plot and Ukrainian “Nazis”. This is a narrative that he continues to employ.
As a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes:
While the war has strayed from the Kremlin’s initial plan, Putin’s core objectives appear unchanged. There is little to no evidence to suggest that the Russian president is prepared to accept the loss of Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence…Strategically, the Kremlin remains determined to subjugate Ukraine, and prevent it from aligning with the West, until it can be reincorporated into Russia’s sphere of influence… Moscow continues to seek “regime change” in Ukraine.
Assessing Progress Towards its Strategic Objectives: Measuring Russia’s 2025 Success
Russia in 2025 sustained its ground campaign along multiple axes of advance. The Main Effort on the ground for Russian forces in Ukraine was their operation to secure the city of Pokrovsk through the execution of a double envelopment. This has been slow going for the Russians, and while they are close to achieving a marry-up of the two wings of this double envelopment, this axis of advance – and other ground operations - has come at the cost of around 350,000 casualties in 2025 (casualty figure from British Intelligence at @DefenceHQ).
Russia has also prioritised its Lyman Axis of Advance as a supporting effort (SE1), and with its Pokrovsk operation, this is part of a larger Russian campaign to envelop the Donetsk fortress cities. In doing so, Russia aims to make all of the Donbas region untenable for Ukrainian ground forces.
Three other secondary axes of advance have come into play throughout 2025. The first is the Sumy Front (SE2), with Russia seeking to establish a buffer zone along its border and remove Sumy as a foundation for any further Ukrainian operations into Russia.
The next secondary effort (SE3) for Russian ground forces has been their advance into Kharkiv. For some time, the Russians made progress in advancing to the Oskil River. And while they have made some additional territorial gains, this front has slowed over the past month or so.
The other secondary effort (SE4) is in southern Ukraine. While this front has not been as active as the other Russian axes of advance, it has hardly been static. There have been minor gains of territory by both sides, which the maps below show.
Russia is also undertaking a large and expanding aerial assault on Ukraine. The magnitude of strikes has increased since the start of 2025. While most strikes still feature a mix of drones, ballistic and cruise missiles, Shahed drone variants are now the overwhelming majority of weapons used in these strikes. To give a sense of the change, in January 2025, the Russians deployed an average of 83 Shahed drones per day for targets in Ukraine. By the start of November 2025, this had more than doubled to 170 per day. At the same time, Ukraine is shooting down a lower proportion of Shaheds.
Russia also significantly increased its use of glide bombs, which by September 2025, had reached an average of 175 per day according to Ukrainian intelligence.
Russia therefore is undertaking many military operations against Ukraine and is continuing to expend enormous resources on the war. What is it getting in return for its investments in people, treasure, information and time?
To assess the Russian return on investment, I will again employ similar measures of success to those I proposed for Russia’s Ukraine campaign back in April last year ,and which I also used later in 2024. I have made two minor changes to these 2024 measures. First, I have combined the two different strike measures (against Russia and against Crimea) into a single measure. Second, I have aggregated the measurement of Russia’s destruction of Ukrainian tactical forces and operational reserves. Against each of the five measures of success, I again provide an assessment of Russian progress (or otherwise).
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Measure 1: Russia is able to neutralise Ukrainian strategic strike activities.
One of the key Ukrainian strategic capabilities employed to hurt Russia politically and to hinder its war-making capacity is its increasingly capable deep strike capacity. I have tracked the rise of this Ukrainian capability since the beginning of the war, which you can read in articles here, here and here.
The Ukrainians use this long-range strike capability to wage economic war on Russia by reducing its oil refining capacity and exports, degrade its defence industrial complex, and reduce Russia’s ability to build and launch long-range strikes against Ukraine. Importantly, Ukraine’s deep strike campaign seeks to enhance Ukraine’s strategic freedom of manoeuvre, such as the attacks on the Russian Black Sea Fleet that allow Ukraine the freedom to export goods through its southern ports, and to paint a picture of Russian military and political incompetence for the Russian people.
In 2025, Russia has gone backwards in combating this Ukrainian threat that is directly targeted at infrastructure and facilities deep inside the Russian homeland. While Russia has increased the amount of EW and air defences around many sites within Russia, and it has proven to be quite adaptive in reducing the opportunities for Ukrainian strikes to penetrate Russian airspace, there are probably too many potential targets for it to fully cover.
Ukraine has also deployed an increasing number of longer-range weapons with larger warheads in 2025. The new Flamingo missileis just one example of these new weapons. It has also better integrated the planning and conduct of strikes across its intelligence and military organisations, while gaining access to more U.S. targeting intelligence as the year has gone on.
In August 2025, I wrote that:
Ukraine’s long-range strike operations reinforce that Russia cannot win this war. Nothing demonstrates this more than the increasingly dangerous (for Russia) long-range strike campaign being executed with precision, focus and discipline by Ukraine. It is precise because the Ukrainian long-range attack systems employ a mix of indigenous and foreign intelligence and targeting assistance that ensures drones and missiles have the best chance of reaching and hitting their targets. It is focused because the Ukrainians are keeping a tight focus on just a few strategic classes of targets. And it is disciplined because despite the Russian focus on hitting civilian targets, Ukraine continues to avoid this practice as it has done throughout the war.
Measure 1 Assessment: The only assessment that can be made against this measure of success for Russia is that they are failing – and failing worse as each day goes on. As of October 2025, up to 40% of Russian oil refining capability had been taken offline. If that was achieved against America or Saudia Arabia, there would be panic in government and in the markets. With little indication that Russia is able to improve the defence of its airspace, and with Ukraine building a wider array of strike weapons in larger quantities more quickly, this is an area which demonstrates how unprepared for this war Russia was, and how unlikely it is to win the war.
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Measure 2: Russia seizes additional Ukrainian territory.
Seizing more Ukrainian territory is another measure of success for the Russian forces in Ukraine in 2025. Russia, which has prioritised its advance on Pokrovsk for the past year, has made progress towards achieving this goal. And while it may eventually secure this objective by the end of the 2025 calendar year, it will have taken Russian forces a year to advance just on 40 kilometres from Toretsk to the location of the forward line of Russian troops in the northern wing of their envelopment of Pokrovsk. Their southern wing was able to achieve a much smaller gain.
Since Jan. 1, 2025, the average monthly rate of Russian territorial gains has been 440 square kilometres. That adds up to a net Russian gain in 2025 so far of 4300 square kilometres. Given Ukraine has a total area of just over 600,000 square kilometres, Russia has gained a grand total of 0.7% of Ukraine in 2025.
