Russia’s battlefield position is worsening, NATO says

Russia’s military, economic and social position is clearly worsening even as it clings to the initiative on the battlefield, with its territorial gains this year proving far smaller and less steady than before, a senior NATO official has said.

Speaking to journalists at NATO HQ this afternoon, the official pointed to “a widening gap between battlefield realities and Moscow’s rhetoric” and said that, while “President Putin remains uncompromising on Ukraine”, the picture overall was “starting to look worse for Russia and better for Ukraine”, even as Ukraine continued to face significant difficulties of its own, particularly when it came to air and missile defence.

Russia retained the initiative but its advances this year had been “far less steady”, the official said, with “no indication of major changes in operational tempo or an imminent major Russian offensive”, and over the past twelve months Russian territorial advances had been on a downward trend that had become particularly pronounced since January, leaving gains whose strategic impact was not especially significant when set against what Russia had taken in the earlier phases of the war.

Russian forces nonetheless continued to operate with high intensity along the front, the official said, particularly around Pokrovsk, and pressed their infiltration of Kostiantynivka, which they were now said to half occupy in urban fighting likely to grind on with Ukrainian resupply severely threatened by drones, a pattern the official compared to the way Russia had first disrupted the supply routes into earlier strongholds before slowly encircling their defenders at an inordinately high cost.

The cost to Russia had been staggering, the official said, putting total Russian casualties since the start of the full-scale invasion at between 1.3 and 1.5 million, including around half a million killed, with losses running at roughly 30,000 to 35,000 a month, while against that toll Russian recruitment was weakening to the point that Moscow was “struggling to find new ways to fill its ranks”, particularly for its infantry assault groups, and was “increasingly relying on convicts, on indebted citizens, and on foreigners” to make up the numbers.

On the Ukrainian side, command and control and manpower had both improved since the winter, the official said, leaving Ukrainian forces better able to counter the small-unit infiltration tactics Russia favours, while the spread of effective drones had reshaped the close fight to the point that the official mused on what surrender now looked like for Russian troops, remarking that he could “imagine being a Russian soldier who’s forced to surrender to a Ukrainian drone” and that he would not “want to surrender to a robot”, and he added that Russian command and control had begun to degrade once Russia was “no longer able to use Starlink”.

Ukraine had also drastically improved its ability to strike Russian logistics deep in the rear, now reaching transport up to 200 kilometres behind the front line, the official said, though the most likely scenario for the next six months remained “one of continued positional warfare”, with Russian advances staying primarily tactical and sustained by recruitment drives, domestic industrial production and support from China, Iran and North Korea.

NATO continued to back efforts to negotiate a just and lasting peace, the official said, but saw no sign that Russia’s position had changed or that it was willing to make meaningful concessions, which was why, in the official’s judgement, “the time to keep up the pressure is now”, and the official expressed confidence that deterrence was holding, noting that “Vladimir Putin believes very strongly that Article Five is something that he has to worry about”.

The assessment was delivered as NATO’s defence ministers prepared to gather in Brussels ahead of next month’s summit in Ankara, where sustaining military support for Ukraine remains high on the agenda, and it lands amid a wider allied effort, co-chaired by the United Kingdom and Germany through the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, to keep weapons and ammunition flowing to Kyiv.