Rising Ukrainian losses
War fog, counterattacks, Rubicon, Ru/Ukr losses comparison
What’s happening in the war? It’s hard to say.
What can be said is that in the effort to demonstrate the reward on investment to its European allies, endless Ukrainian counterattacks seem to have led to higher losses on their part than for the Russians. No wonder mobilization has been intensified in recent months, with men snatched off the street sent straight to the high-casualty assault units, which have expanded by 10 times over the past year.
In short, western audiences demand more ‘great news’ about the liberation of 3 square kilometers in Xeve village.
But given Ukraine’s demographic realities compared with Russia, this hardly bodes well for the future.
Territory
To begin with, there are quite vast differences on how much territory Russia and Ukraine took over the past month. And that’s just on the Ukrainian side.
Let’s begin at the upper end of the spectrum. On May 22, Zelensky claimed that Ukraine retook 590 square kilometers over the course of 2026, which is apparently forcing Moscow to the negotiating table.
You also have the likes of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), run by ultra-atlanticist Americans like Kimberly Kagan. They claim that April saw Ukraine take more territory than Russia.
But Ukraine’s most popular mapping group, DeepState, which works partly in cooperation with the Ukrainian army, is much less optimistic. According to them, Russian forces took 141 square kilometers of territory in April — slightly less than in March, slightly more than in February. Note that this graph does not show Ukrainian advances.
And DeepState’s map mainly shows Russian advances over the course of April and May.
Finally, paradoxically, it is the young antipodean military blogger AMK mapping who believes that Ukraine’s 2026 counteroffensives have indeed taken a great deal of territory. This, despite the fact that he is often accused of being ‘pro-Russian’ on Twitter.
In a May 17 post, the New Zealander claimed that Ukraine retook 65 square kilometers in a recent counteroffensive in the southern Zaporizhzhia oblast. When asked by a pro-Ukrainian follower why DeepState has said nothing about this significant advance, the following exchange took place.
Unfortunately, X.com’s automatic translation doesn’t do justice to DeepState’s vitriol. ‘Rooster’, ‘petukh’, is the Russian/Ukrainian prison slang for the caste of untouchable homosexuals in prison camps. ‘Roosters’ are ruthlessly used for sexual gratification, must clean toilets, and are subject to all other sorts of humiliation. Calling one’s opponent a rooster is popular among post-soviet militarists.
Anyway, it’s also worth explaining the rest of the exchange.
DeepState seems to be claiming that yes, these glorious Ukrainian counter-offensives are winning back territory, but we can’t talk about them because of operational security.
AMK, meanwhile, claims that DeepState isn’t talking about Ukrainian advances because DeepState had overly optimistic estimates of the territory controlled by Ukraine to begin with. In other words, AMK is saying that Ukraine is retaking territory hitherto controlled by Russia, but which was denoted as ‘Ukrainian held’ all along by DeepState.
Now, I find this claim of ‘we cannot talk about advances because of opsec’ somewhat of a cop out. It’s unclear to me how updating a map would put Ukrainian troops in danger. It makes sense to delay map updates by a few days because you don’t want to enemy to know that your troops have infiltrated their positions. But within a few hours or days of the infiltration, the enemy will find out, whether through surveillance drones or reports from soldiers on the ground.
Supreme commander-in-chief Zelensky and his chief of army Syrsky certainly don[‘t have such qualms about opsec — in March, they claimed Ukraine had ‘liberated over 400 square kilometers’ in the Dnepropetrovsk oblast over the past two months.
Zelensky made this claim in early March. However, in its May 2 post, DeepState wrote that Ukraine retook 89 square kilometers over the course of three months the Dnepropetrovsk oblast. Back in early March, they suggested Ukraine had only retaken around 79 square kilometers in this region. As you can see from the following January-May compilation of the Dnepropetrovsk oblast, DeepState shows some Russian advances in January, Ukrainian advances in February/March, followed by Russian advances in April/May:
This contradiction between DeepState and Zelensky/Syrsky’s claims hardly looks like a difference due to ‘opsec’. These are simply different estimates of reality.
Why are there such diverging estimates? Obviously, political bias is partly to blame. The priority for Zelensky and western militarists like the ISW is to drum up support for funding the Ukrainian war effort, hence the inflated estimates. DeepState, meanwhile, is aimed mainly at domestic Ukrainian audiences, and tries to maintain its reputation of providing a more accurate version of reality than the one given by official military reports. The reputation isn’t always accurate, but it is at least more in touch with reality than the ISW.
But there are objective reasons as well. Paradoxically, the battlefield is both clearer and foggier than ever.
On the one hand, reconnaissance drones have made the battlefield more transparent than ever before, making it extremely difficult to covertly concentrate force in one area as part of an offensive. But on the other hand, drones have also made understanding the battlefield more difficult than ever. That’s because as drones improve in strike range and quality, the kill zone expands, and so does the gray zone.
The kill zone is the territory where any potential enemies face high threats of being destroyed by drones. It is now upwards of 20, even 30 kilometers wide. And because it is so dangerous to move around this area, there is no distinct frontline. Instead, there is a chaotic mix of positions, with both Ukrainian and Russian positions mixed up.
There is quite little hand to hand fighting between soldiers, as both are mainly focused on simply moving forward without being destroyed from the air. This means that it is very difficult to determine what territory is definitively held by either side. Instead, there is a large grayzone of indeterminate control, where both armies are present simultaneously.
The Pentagon analyst Michael Kofman said as much in an April 10 interview:
The Russians have a clear setup system for how they deploy their troops. They go from small assault groups of six to eight men, and then in 2025 you begin to see maybe a whole platoon, but advancing as individual soldiers or pairs — individual soldiers being guided by drone, by Mavics recon drones, through the frontlines.
Because Ukraine doesn’t have cohesive lines at this point, they’re trying to figure out: okay, where are Ukrainian forward positions? Then when they see anybody able to walk through them, they send more people along that path until they accumulate in the rear.
So what happened by the time we get kind of to this point in the war is that most of the fight is not between infantry or soldiers at all on the ground. It’s about the drone units of one side, their fire support, their artillery, but particularly their drone units being able to displace the drone units of the other side.
And once they’re able to suppress them and push out that support, then the line shifts — because there is no line. There’s just a gray zone between two sides. There aren’t the sort of cohesive defensive lines between Russian and Ukrainian forces.
This trend further progressed into 2026.
Now when you talk to colleagues on who took how much territory last month in March, the answer varies considerably. Deep State, a Ukrainian site, shows Russia taking maybe 160 square kilometer, because they rated the Russian advance in a certain way and had most of the advances previously be a gray zone.
Finnish colleagues who also do mapping rated the Russian advance at 25 square kilometers net total advance because they mapped it differently. There’s such a large gray zone that three different mapping organizations can look at it and give you very different numbers.
Nevertheless, it is probably true that Russia is advancing more slowly now than throughout 2025. So much for the big fear among Ukrainian military bloggers in January/February, namely that the regrowth of frontline vegetation would make it easier for the Russians to infiltrate into Ukrainian positions without being spotted by enemy drones.
What’s behind the slower Russian advances? According to Ukraine’s largest military analyst platform, DeepState, the main factors are the exclusion of Russia from Starlink in February 2026, along with the development of Ukraine’s drone strike abilities in the middle strike (~50-200 km) range, damaging enemy logistics. Since Ukraine’s own drones are highly dependent on Starlink, particularly for longer missions, this extension of middle strike capacity is also partly due to the generous decision from Elon Musk.
Counterattacks
It is undeniable that Ukraine has been mounting a number of counteroffensive operations over the course of 2026. I won’t go into them in detail, but some of them certainly have retaken some territory. Putting all the operations of 2026 together, it seems to be of the order of dozens of square kilometers, possibly 100-200. However, it also seems highly likely that Russia has taken upwards of 100 square kilometers monthly.
Regardless, Ukraine’s western partners are most enthused. On May 20, the ISW posited that Ukraine ‘appears to be regaining the tactical initiative in different sectors of the frontline’.
But the question is, at what cost? Ukraine and the western media love talking about bleeding out Russia on the frontlines. But Ukraine’s current population of 20 million is around 7 to 8 times lower than Russia’s. And there is a great deal of evidence that Ukrainian losses are higher than ever.
One warning sign came on May 20 — commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrsky boasted that Ukraine’s army is now mounting more offensive operations than the Russian army is.
For example, yesterday (however, the general did not name the exact day – ed.), was characterized by the fact that the number of our offensive operations for the first time exceeded the number of offensive operations of the enemy
Need I remind you that Syrsky has the nickname ‘the butcher’, due to his attitude towards the lives of his troops?
And somehow, in the same interview, he still claims that Russia suffers 3.5 times more losses than Ukraine, and ‘seven to nine’ times more KIA. Indeed…
Other Ukrainian and western sources, however, point to the eminently more logical conclusion that the side which is attacking more, with less air support, is suffering greater losses. Let’s examine this data in more detail.
