Greetings from Kyiv, where it is 52 degrees and sunny, and the winter and its energy crisis feels far behind us. The Russian winter 2026 campaign to break the will of Ukraine’s civilians appears to have failed as decisively as their military offensive campaign did. When I visited the field in January, morale among the soldiers was the highest I’d seen it since 2023. That trend has continued and the statistics convey why.
Bottom line up front: Over the past 90 days, Russia has gotten weaker while Ukraine has gotten stronger. This trend is likely to continue through the summer. Russia is showing signs of systemic weakness — in manpower, logistics, fiscal capacity, and command quality — that compound over time. On current trendlines, it is hard to see how Russia will be able to sustain large-scale offensive operations or defend its deep rear by 2027.
On March 17, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov briefed his commanders that Russian forces control more than 60 percent of Kostyantynivka, a key city in the Donbas. Geolocated evidence assessed by ISW shows Russian forces have operated in less than 8 percent of it. He claimed over half of Lyman. A Ukrainian brigade spokesperson reports zero Russian presence there.
This is what epistemic collapse looks like. The information system has broken. It can no longer correct itself, which means the decisions flowing from it will only get worse.
Most analysis treats Russia’s problems as separate: manpower here, logistics there, fiscal strain somewhere else. They are one problem. Drone losses degrade logistics, degraded logistics produce unsustainable casualties, unsustainable casualties exhaust recruitment, exhausted recruitment strains the budget, and the strained budget prevents closing the drone gap that started the cycle. The loop is closing.
Here is what the loop looks like in practice.
Ukraine’s drone forces have undergone a qualitative shift since the start of 2026. Ground drone missions surged from under 3,000 in November to nearly 7,500 in January. The 50-to-250-kilometer band behind the front — once a gap where Russian logistics operated with impunity — is closing. Mid-range strikes have quadrupled since November; Ukrainian forces have struck approximately 80 Russian air defense systems in the past season alone. Ukraine’s target is 50,000 Russian KIA monthly against recruitment of roughly 33,000. The trend through Q4 climbed from 26,000 to 35,000 monthly, and losses have exceeded recruitment for three consecutive months.
At the close-combat echelon, the integration is even more striking. The 1st Assault Regiment recently described a combined-arms operation in which 200 to 300 drones swarmed a four-kilometer frontage before infantry advanced, isolating positions and collapsing defenses that could not be reinforced. By available evidence, no other military on earth has demonstrated this capability at this scale. Russia has shown capacity for tactical improvisation — the Lancet program, mesh-networked Shaheds, Molniya mothership drones. But it has not matched the pace of Ukraine’s institutional integration across echelons. The same epistemic decay that produces Gerasimov’s distorted briefings prevents the honest feedback loops that drive systemic doctrinal change.
The operational consequences are visible. Russian forces in the Slovyansk direction have nearly exhausted frontline troops and are sending logistics personnel into assaults. In the Pokrovsk direction, engagement rates have dropped from over 50 per day to seven to ten. The February 2026 territorial balance favored Ukraine for the first time in 30 months. In the Oleksandrivka direction, Ukrainian forces have liberated over 125 confirmed square kilometers in a single month, and Russian airborne forces — their best-trained troops — reportedly cannot reach the frontline because of drone attrition en route.
These battlefield effects feed directly into the recruitment crisis. The economist Vladislav Inozemtsev has documented the failure of “deathonomics” — Putin’s system of monetary incentives to avoid mobilization. The original pool of recruitable men has been largely exhausted. Civilian incomes have outpaced military bonuses. Even a widely-read pro-war Russian commentator with over three million followers now describes a “chronic shortage of personnel” in which “losses can no longer be hidden.”
The recruitment failure intensifies the fiscal strain, because the Kremlin must either raise bonuses — requiring money it increasingly does not have — or mobilize, which carries political risks the regime has avoided for four years. Meanwhile, nineteen federal subjects have cut healthcare spending by more than ten percent this year, nearly quadruple last year’s figure. Moscow city is running the largest regional deficit in Russia — 229 billion rubles. According to Russian regional reporting, teachers in Zabaikal have gone unpaid since January.
And the fiscal strain limits Russia’s ability to address the drone and doctrinal deficit that started the loop.
My predictions for the next season.
Russia’s Spring-Summer offensive will seize less territory than the Fall-Winter campaign. The inputs are measurably worse across every dimension I track. Ukrainian counterattacks in the Zaporizhzhia sector are already forcing redeployments from offensive reserves. ISW assesses that Russian forces lack the strength to simultaneously pursue their stated objectives and cannot generate trained replacements in time.
Ukraine’s anti-personnel attrition campaign, which has already crossed the threshold where monthly losses exceed monthly recruitment, will likely approach its stated target of 50,000 KIA per month by mid-summer — driven by drone scaling, doctrinal integration, and the compounding effect of degraded Russian logistics. If sustained, that rate would shrink Russia’s deployed force by over 200,000 in a year.
If both assessments prove correct, Moscow will face a narrowing decision space: mobilization, with all its political risks, or de facto strategic stagnation. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s expanding domestic cruise and ballistic missile production is shifting the strategic calculus.
A sustained surge in oil revenue might fund a new mobilization wave — conceivable given current global energy disruption, though not yet visible in regional fiscal data. Or Russia could achieve a breakthrough in electronic warfare that restores its ability to contest Ukrainian drone superiority. Current reporting suggests neither is happening yet.
Without these developments, the feedback loop tightens. Russia can still fight for some time, but the instruments suggest it can no longer generate the combat power needed to change the war’s trajectory.
What to watch next: Whether Russian force generation stabilizes, whether the offensive materializes on multiple axes or narrows to one or two, whether Ukrainian strike campaigns continue expanding in range and effect, and whether the monthly attrition numbers continue their upward trend toward the 50,000 threshold.