The Russian Army Offensive Has Slowed Down Threefold
- 21.05.2025, 19:21
Contrary to Putin's demand to seize more territory.
Russian forces have made only minor territorial gains in Ukraine in 2025, despite Vladimir Putin's ambition to establish full control over four partially occupied Ukrainian regions - Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson - by the end of the year. This is reported by Bloomberg with reference to data from the analytical project DeepState.
According to this data, since January 2025, the Russian army has seized only 0.15% of Ukrainian territory. The pace of the offensive in eastern Ukraine has fallen threefold compared to the end of 2024. While Russian forces were advancing about 125 square kilometers per week then, the figure has now dropped to 41 square kilometers per week. Despite the numerical advantage, the Russian armed forces remain far from achieving Putin's military goals, the agency noted.
According to Eric Chiaramella, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Putin's view that it is possible to quickly seize all four regions has no real basis in reality. He noted that strong Ukrainian defenses allow the AFU to hold back the onslaught, resulting in Russia achieving only "local tactical successes."
Sources close to the Kremlin told Bloomberg earlier that Vladimir Putin remains convinced of the Russian army's ability to break through Ukrainian defenses and complete the seizure of all the claimed territories by the end of this year. According to the agency's interlocutors, Putin is ready for a protracted war and does not take seriously the threat of increased Western sanctions.
At the same time, according to a Bloomberg source close to the Russian Defense Ministry, there are doubts even within the Russian defense system that Putin's stated goals are achievable. According to him, the use of Ukrainian drones makes large-scale offensive operations not only difficult to realize, but also excessively costly. Western military analysts hold a similar viewpoint. For example, Ben Barry, a senior expert on ground warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said that "if Ukrainian defenses collapsed, Russia would indeed have an advantage, but under current conditions such a scenario is highly unlikely."
At the first direct talks between Russia and Ukraine since 2022, held in Istanbul on May 16, Moscow, according to The Economist, issued an ultimatum: withdraw Ukrainian troops from the territories of four regions that Russia has declared its own. The head of the Russian delegation Vladimir Medinsky, according to the publication, claimed that Russia is ready to "fight indefinitely."
According to analysts at the ISW (Institute for the Study of War), by May 2025, Russia will have less than 20 percent of Ukraine under its control. This figure includes Crimea, as well as the territories of the "DNR" and "LNR." However, almost all of these territories were occupied in the first weeks of the full-scale invasion or in 2014. Meanwhile, at the peak of the offensive in 2022, the Russian army controlled up to 27% of Ukraine's territory.
Now, according to Reuters calculations based on ISW data, almost all of Luhansk region is under the control of Russian forces, as well as about 70% of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions. For the entire year 2024, 4,168 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory - mostly rural areas and sparsely populated areas - have come under Russian control.
But these "successes" have come at a high price. According to ISW data, during the same period, the Russian army lost about 420,000 people killed and wounded, which translates to about 102 people for every square kilometer captured. The most intense battles were fought between September and November 2024: Russia then secured 56.5% of its total conquests for the year, while losing 125,800 troops.