The war in Ukraine has reached a turning point. Since the failure of Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, Russia’s full-scale invasion settled into a predictable rhythm of summer and winter offensives, between which the pressure of attacks would ease while Russian units rotated and regrouped. At first glance, this year looks no different. With spring edging into summer, Ukrainian troops in their dugouts along the front are once again seeing the steady rise of Russian strikes and attempted infiltrations. The mood among Ukrainian commanders, however, has changed. Russian attacks are putting less pressure on their units than they did in previous years. Although drone strikes and shelling remain constant, Russian combat performance is waning. In Kyiv, there is a growing optimism that Ukraine can fight Russia to a cease-fire.

Ukraine’s mood shift is not the result of a radical transformation of how the war is being fought but rather stems from a subtle turn in several trends that together point to a major change in the war’s trajectory. For all of 2024 and most of 2025, Russia was able to recruit more soldiers than it was losing, such that Russian forces could increase the intensity of assaults on Ukrainian units even as they suffered high casualties themselves. Ukraine, by contrast, was suffering slightly more casualties than it could offset with new troops, with defensive lines getting thinner and thinner every month. In Moscow, this led to a complacent belief that, even if progress was slow, the Russian military would eventually occupy the entirety of the Donbas, the contested region in eastern Ukraine that Russia laid claim to in 2022. At some point, the Kremlin believed, its gains would accelerate, as international support for Ukraine dried up and as Ukraine struggled to find the combat troops to hold the breadth of the front. This led Moscow to adopt an intransigent stance in negotiations brokered by the United States following the reelection of Donald Trump. If talks failed, after all, the Kremlin anticipated getting what it wanted on the battlefield.

Russia, however, is no longer on an inexorable path to achieving even its minimal military objective of securing the Donbas. As Ukraine manages to make gains along the frontline and frustrates Russian offensives, and as the Russian military increasingly feels the strain of the war and the deterioration of its combat power, what has long seemed so implausible has become more likely. Kyiv and its partners could convince Moscow that a cease-fire is its best option.

Over the last two years, Ukrainian commanders have been hampered by dwindling manpower. Monthly casualties exceeded the number of personnel dispatched to combat units from training centers. The inability of units to rotate, allowing soldiers breaks from combat duty, led to exhaustion among the infantry. Ukraine has been able to mobilize some 30,000 new soldiers a month, but fewer than half of these troops tend to make it to the front. Many were not medically fit for service in battle. Others were demoralized by the poor standard of training provided.

Troops become significantly less effective if required to remain more than 40 consecutive days in the combat zone, according to a study performed by the office of the Inspector General of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Rotating troops, however, has been dangerous, as soldiers moving back and forth from positions on the frontline became vulnerable to enemy drones and artillery. As a result, soldiers have spent more than 200 consecutive days in the combat zone. This has led to fatigue within brigades and a perception that service is a one-way ticket to the infirmary or the morgue, encouraging new recruits to desert during training. By the beginning of 2026, over 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers were listed as absent without leave.

The Ukrainian military, however, began to take steps to address these problems in the middle of 2025. Previously, the highest level of tactical formation in the Ukrainian army was the brigade. In 2025, Ukraine established over a dozen army “corps,” each responsible for several subordinate brigades. The corps also became tasked with training so that troops were being taught by those who would lead them into battle. Although this process is still being implemented, it has already boosted the quality of the training and discouraged new soldiers from deserting. Some Ukrainian units have also moved from requiring five weeks of basic training to eight, better preparing soldiers before they are committed to combat.

The Ukrainian military has........

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