The Issue

Four and a half years into its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has lost the military initiative even as the human and territorial costs keep climbing, according to new battlefield data compiled by CSIS. Between February 2022 and June 2026, Russian forces have suffered on the order of 1.4 million battlefield casualties, including as many as 450,000 dead — figures that dwarf any losses a major power has absorbed in a single conflict since 1945. Despite that toll, Russian-held territory in Ukraine actually contracted during April and May 2026, the first sustained monthly retreat since August 2024. Meanwhile Ukraine has widened a campaign of short-, medium-, and long-range strikes against Russian military and economic targets, leaning increasingly on AI-guided drones to do so. The authors note that 2026 has been a hard year at home for ordinary Russians as well: a weakening economy, rising prices, new taxes, tightening internet controls, and a harsher clampdown on dissent, layered on top of a war that has begun reaching cities far from the front, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, alongside sustained pressure on Crimea. In a telling signal of strain, Vladimir Putin significantly scaled down his annual military parade in May 2026, reportedly over fears of Ukrainian long-range strikes. To move past anecdote, the CSIS team built out several hard indicators of Russian battlefield performance — casualty and fatality counts, daily rates of advance, and net territorial change — and cross-referenced them against a dataset of more than 20,000 recorded Ukrainian strikes on Russian targets.

Russian Objectives and the State of the War

Putin's core aims have not shifted: pull Ukraine back into Russia's orbit, whether by outright annexation (as with Crimea and parts of the east and south already) or by installing a friendly government in Kyiv, while also discrediting NATO, blocking its further eastward expansion, and weakening the European Union. Putin has long framed Ukraine as historically inseparable from Russia — an argument the CSIS authors describe as resting on a false premise, since Ukraine has its own language, history, and culture, and the war itself has only hardened a distinct Ukrainian national identity. On the ground, Russia's main effort has run through northern Sumy, eastern Kharkiv, northwestern Donetsk, and the northern edges of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, backed by heavy drone and missile bombardment of Ukrainian civilian and military targets. Russia has exploited Ukraine's persistent shortage of air-defense interceptors, and units such as its Rubikon unmanned-systems center have gotten notably better at hunting Ukrainian drone crews and cutting rear-area supply lines. Ukraine, for its part, has gone on the offensive in places such as Oleksandrivka in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, while dramatically extending the war onto Russian soil. That Ukrainian campaign amounts to a modern air-interdiction effort fought with drones and missiles rather than aircraft. CSIS groups the targets into four buckets: energy infrastructure (refineries, pumping stations, fuel depots and tankers); the industrial base (missile and drone plants, microelectronics and semiconductor facilities); logistics (rail lines, roads, bridges, munitions depots, and the trains and vehicles moving military supplies); and military sites (headquarters, command posts, ships, aircraft, radars, air-defense systems, drone launch points, and electronic-warfare units). Long-range strikes — beyond 300 kilometers — have hit Moscow, St. Petersburg, and targets over 6,000 kilometers from Kyiv; medium-range strikes (30–300 km) have struck Kursk, Kaluga, Belgorod and other regions; and thousands of short-range strikes have hit just across the border and in Russian-held Crimea. The cumulative effect has been real — dented refining capacity, localized fuel shortages, a Russian navy largely pushed out of the fight, disrupted logistics, and battered industrial output — but not decisive; Russia's capacity to keep fighting remains intact. A large part of that campaign now runs on artificial intelligence. Ukraine's Hornet — a roughly $6,000, one-way attack drone developed with U.S. partners and capable of ranges up to 150 kilometers — uses onboard AI to read live video day or night, identify genuine targets versus decoys (based on shape, surface texture and heat signature), and fly itself into the target during the terminal phase, all without a satellite link that Russian jamming could sever. Ukraine has paired this with AI-assisted counter-drone systems, such as those built by SkyFall, to detect and knock down Russian first-person-view drones.

Russian Casualties and Fatalities

CSIS puts total Russian battlefield casualties — killed, wounded and missing — at roughly 1.4 million between February 2022 and June 2026, with fatalities in the 400,000–450,000 range. Those losses are now feeding back into Russia's manpower problem directly: 2026 monthly casualty rates of 30,000–34,000 likely exceed the roughly 27,000 new recruits Russia brings in each month. Set against history, the numbers are extraordinary. Russia's fatalities in Ukraine run to roughly four times all U.S. battle deaths across every war fought since World War II combined — Korea (36,574), Vietnam (58,220), the Gulf War (383), Afghanistan (2,581), Iraq (4,492), plus smaller losses elsewhere. Measured against Russia's and the Soviet Union's own history, the toll is more than 28 times Soviet losses in Afghanistan in the 1980s, more than 18 times the combined First and Second Chechen Wars, and more than nine times every Soviet and Russian war fought since 1945 combined. Ukraine has suffered far less by comparison — an estimated 525,000–625,000 casualties and 125,000–150,000 fatalities over the same period — pushing combined losses on both sides past two million. The casualty ratio between the two sides sat around 2:1 to 3:1 for most of the war, but the authors find it has climbed to nearly 8:1 in the first half of 2026, a shift they attribute largely to Ukraine's expanding use of drones, including AI-enabled types, within an aggressive interdiction campaign.

Why the toll is so high

The report points to a mix of factors on the Russian side: a deliberate attrition strategy, weak combined-arms and joint operations, poor tactics and training, corruption, and low morale — compounded by an effective Ukrainian defense-in-depth. On the ground, Russian units typically probe forward in small, often poorly trained squads backed by armor, testing Ukrainian positions by drawing fire; once a position is located, it gets hit with artillery, FPV drones and glide bombs, and infantry are sent in again. Ukraine, meanwhile, has built a deep belt of trenches, minefields, and anti-tank obstacles, saturated with drones, that turns a 20–40 kilometer strip along the front into a lethal "kill zone" — by some estimates responsible for more than 90 percent of Russian casualties — that Russian forces must cross in small groups while Ukraine keeps most of its own infantry out of it. SpaceX's decision to curb Russian access to Starlink earlier in 2026 is cited as a further blow to Russian command and control that has helped enable Ukrainian counterattacks.

Rates of Advance

Both sides' most significant 2026 offensives crept forward at just 50–90 meters a day — speeds the authors compare to the grinding attrition of World War I's Battle of the Somme, and roughly 30 to 100 times slower than the war's opening weeks in 2022, when front lines moved thousands of meters a day. Concretely: Russian forces took roughly two years to move about 50 kilometers from Avdiivka to Pokrovsk (captured in late January 2026), averaging around 70 meters a day. Pushing toward Kostiantynivka from August 2025 to June 2026, Russian troops advanced about 16 kilometers, or roughly 50 meters a day; toward Sloviansk over a similar window they covered about 15 kilometers, or about 90 meters a day, still ending more than 20 kilometers short of the city. Ukraine's own counteroffensive along the Oleksandrivka axis, spanning January to June 2026, cleared about 12 kilometers at a comparable pace of roughly 90 meters a day.

Why the front barely moves

The authors trace this to the same defensive advantages noted above: dense minefields, layered fortifications, heavy artillery, and drone coverage across a wide kill zone that makes massing troops and armor for a real breakthrough extremely costly. Rather than attempt that, Russian forces have generally infiltrated in small groups, trading the catastrophic losses of a mass assault for a steady drip of casualties as those groups are detected and struck crossing the kill zone. Even Russia's most concentrated, sustained push — the two-year fight for Pokrovsk — never broke through Ukraine's defensive lines; it only ground forward in small pockets. The result along more than 1,000 kilometers of front is a war of attrition in which even the side with the initiative advances at some of the slowest rates recorded in the past century.

Territorial Gains

Russia currently holds around 118,000 square kilometers of Ukraine — roughly 20 percent of the country, an area about the size of Pennsylvania — a figure that includes Crimea and the parts of Donbas held before 2022. Of that total, about 75,000 square kilometers, or 12 percent of Ukraine, has been taken since the full-scale invasion began. But that expansion effectively stalled in spring 2026: Russian forces lost more ground than they gained in both April and May, a net loss of roughly 400 square kilometers, marking the first monthly net retreat since August 2024. Ukraine did the retaking: from January to mid-March 2026 it recovered about 400 square kilometers near Oleksandrivka and Huliaipole in the south, and through April and May its counterattacks extended from Kharkiv Oblast in the north down through Donetsk and into Zaporizhzhia. Set against the war's opening year — when Russia seized some 115,000 square kilometers in under five weeks in March 2022, and Ukraine reclaimed more than 35,000 square kilometers by that April and roughly 75,000 by November — these 2026 shifts are marginal in scale, a reflection of just how much harder rapid, sweeping territorial change has become once both sides dug in.

Implications for Ending the War

Across every metric the CSIS team examines, the picture is the same: the conflict now heavily rewards the side holding ground, which has stalled Russian offensives without opening much room for Ukrainian counterattacks either. Russia's on-the-ground performance — its casualties, its fatalities, its crawling rate of advance — ranks among the worst of any major power in any war since 1945.

Even so, the decision to keep fighting rests with one man, and Putin has given no public sign of easing off — even as the war's costs become harder to hide from a Russian public showing real signs of fatigue.

Russia, the authors argue, can keep absorbing losses for now: it still has a deep pool of manpower to draw on and a war economy that is strained but has not broken. Ukraine, for its part, shows no sign of collapse despite years of bombardment, though the same defensive dynamics that have blunted Russian advances also make it hard for Ukraine to retake everything Russia has seized since 2014. That leaves a negotiated stalemate — a ceasefire or peace agreement — as Ukraine's most realistic path forward. Historically, interstate wars since World War II have ended via ceasefire about 30 percent of the time, outright battlefield victory 21 percent of the time, and formal peace agreement 16 percent of the time, with the remainder ending through other means. On that basis, the authors' policy recommendation for Washington and European capitals is to keep raising Moscow's costs rather than easing off: sustain and even expand military and economic support to Ukraine, including more and better air-defense systems, while tightening economic pressure on Russia. They point specifically to Russia's "shadow fleet" — the large, opaque network of tankers Moscow uses to move sanctioned oil — as an area where stricter enforcement, including secondary sanctions on banks in China, Hong Kong and elsewhere that facilitate the trade, could meaningfully add to the strain on an already-distressed Russian economy. The authors close on a pointed note: despite Russia's battlefield struggles and economic vulnerabilities, the West has so far stopped short of applying the full weight of the economic and military pressure available to it — and without more of both, they conclude, Putin is likely to keep fighting even as he drives Russia further toward economic, political and military exhaustion.