The Scales Begin to Tip: Assessing Ukraine's New Strategic Momentum in 2026
A special assessment that reviews whether Ukraine has developed new strategic momentum in 2026 through the lens of eight measures of success the encapsulate the character of this war.
The task of Ukrainian units is to ensure a level of destruction of the occupier at which Russian losses exceed the number of reinforcements they can send to their forces each month…We are talking about 50,000 Russian losses per month, this is the optimal level. President Zelenskyy, January 2026.
Over the course of the war in Ukraine since 2022, I have offered periodic assessments about the progress of Ukraine’s campaigns, as well as how Russia might be measuring its progress in its ongoing invasion and occupation of Ukrainian territory. Now that the Russian spring offensive has commenced, and early Ukrainian responses have become clear, I wanted to provide an assessment of what the trajectory of this war looks like from here.
To put it plainly, Russia’s 2026 operations have not been going well, and Ukraine is performing well on the frontline, in its deep strike operations and in its diplomatic efforts. Ukraine appears to have built strategic momentum this year. To confirm or reject this hypothesis, I have broken down the Ukrainian war effort into eight separate dimensions that together might determine whether 2026 represents a genuine shift in who holds the strategic initiative in the war. Those dimensions - diplomacy, information operations, alliance management, new supporters, ground operations, long-range strike, technological innovation, and defence industry - have been chosen because they collectively encapsulate the war’s character: a multi-domain contest of will, attrition, national resilience, diplomacy and adaptation.
What follows is an assessment of the eight measures of success for Ukraine, as well as an assessment of the measures of failure. These measures of failure, or the conditions that could still allow Russia to recover strategic momentum, provide an important complementary assessment as issues that Ukraine must guard against, and have strategies for, in 2026.
Ukraine’s 2026 Strategic Campaigns: Measuring Success
Measure 1: Ukraine achieves a credible diplomatic posture that isolates Russia internationally.
Diplomacy in this war has always been as much about denying Russia a false legitimacy as it has been about achieving peace. The measure of success here is not a ceasefire — which Russia can use as a recuperative pause — but a diplomatic posture in which Ukraine retains the initiative, demonstrates good faith, and forces Russia into the role of the spoiler.
Assessment. This has largely been achieved. The Geneva peace talks in February 2026 collapsed after two hours on day two. Russia launched a missile strike on Ukrainian cities on the opening day of the talks. Zelenskyy accused Moscow of deliberately stalling negotiations “that could already have reached the final stage.” Russia has demanded that Ukrainian forces withdraw from Donetsk as a precondition for talks, and this was framed by Peskov as something that should have happened “yesterday”.
Ukraine, on the other hand, accepted President Trump’s unconditional ceasefire proposal in Riyadh in March 2025 and has presented a 20-point peace framework to the United States. The record now shows that it is Russia that has rejected ceasefire after ceasefire. That is a significant diplomatic achievement, particularly given the scepticism of elements of the Trump administration toward Ukraine earlier in the conflict. And while this has reinforced Ukraine’s supporters in Europe, it appears to have made little impact on President Trump’s negative views of Ukraine or Zelenskyy.
Measure 2: Ukraine and its supporters maintain the information initiative against Russian cognitive operations.
Russia’s information warfare has evolved considerably. Its cognitive operations are now synchronised with missile strikes, AI-generated disinformation, and coordinated Telegram ecosystems. The measure of success here is not that Russian disinformation disappears — it will not — but that its effectiveness is sufficiently degraded that Western political will and Ukrainian civilian morale remain robust.
Assessment. This has been partially achieved. Russia is sustaining its extensive use of cognitive warfare. Its GRU bot farms continue to generate false narratives about Ukrainian unit mutinies and fabricated evacuation orders. A deepfake video of Zelenskyy calling for capitulation, produced with AI by the 72nd Information-Psychological Centre in Sevastopol, demonstrated the growing sophistication of synthetic command deception.
However, there are two countervailing forces to these Russian efforts. First, the open-source intelligence ecosystem with platforms like DeepState, trackers like @ShahedTracker and journalists such as @FrancisJFarrell, maintains a level of transparency about progress in the war that makes Russian narratives of triumphant advance and inevitable victory hard to sustain. Second, ISW has assessed that Russia’s limited cross-border raids in Sumy and Kharkiv are now primarily cognitive operations designed to shape peace negotiations rather than achieve military advances. This is an indication that Russia’s strategic narrative is increasingly decoupled from its battlefield reality.
