Dismissing Vladimir Putin’s offer of a brief ceasefire in May as yet “another attempt at manipulation” is an understatement. The Russian president is – according to the former head of MI6 – intent on taking much more than just Ukraine.
Far from being worried by recent mini-threats from Donald Trump to increase sanctions or stung by the US president’s irritation at Russia’s stalling over a ceasefire, Putin is cupping his ears in a pantomime of attention and carrying on doing as he pleases.
Such behaviour chimes with the uncharacteristically stark message from ex-spy chief Sir Alex Younger who, after a lifetime in the shadows of espionage, has a simple message: “If you don’t stand up to him, he comes back for more – how many more times do we need to be told this?”
Putin’s latest play is a three-day ceasefire from 8 May to mark the Russian anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany. His last Easter ceasefire was ignored by his own troops.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has, again, called his bluff by asking for an unconditional cessation of hostilities while wider talks get underway.
But that idea has been hobbled by American negotiators who have already adopted most of Russia’s aims as first principles ahead of any talks. Lately these have, again, included repeated statements by Trump that Crimea, captured by Russia in 2014, was a lost cause for Kyiv.
Zelensky will be buoyed by the signing of a minerals deal with Trump after a flurry of diplomacy between Kyiv and Washington, ensuring that the US has some financial skin in the game when it comes to the future of his country.
Any US military aid, from whenever the deal is ratified by the Ukrainian parliament, will be assigned a dollar value and given a credit in a joint US-Ukraine investment fund in a minerals-for-weapons swap. It will only be valid on future resource exploitation, so the US has a financial incentive to continue to back Ukraine.
But Russia will hope, at the end of any future peace talks to secure an agreement to hold on to the parts of Ukraine it has already captured.
The US and Russia have agreed in advance that Zelensky will have to accept that from the very start of any discussion. The stakes are, however, considerably higher for the wider region.
In its most recent annual report, the Danish foreign intelligence service agrees: “The war in Ukraine will define European security, even beyond 2025. Russia will further intensify its use of hybrid means, including sabotage and malign influence campaigns.
“Furthermore, Russia is likely to become more willing to challenge Nato countries with its military means. Consequently, the military threat from Russia will increase over the coming years.”
Right now, on the front lines in Ukraine, soldiers are exhausted and battered but also deeply frustrated by the assumption that they are losing a war of attrition and that a Russian victory is inevitable.
Here, The Independent takes a closer look at the state of the conflict, the motivations on either side and its wider impact on the world.
Is Ukraine winning, losing – or stuck in a stalemate?
Three years since the full-scale invasion by Moscow’s forces, Kyiv’s allies, as well as the US, appear muddled about whether Ukraine is losing, stuck in a stalemate, or could actually win.
The evolution of Ukraine’s military since 2022 can be characterised by an initial period of daring incompetence followed by dashing success but, as Ukraine settled into dependency on Nato, this moved to failed incursions and subsequent longer-term despondency.
This has led many in Europe, notably experienced Nato generals, to conclude that Ukraine will have to accept the loss of some of its land in return for peace, even as European nations rush to fill the gaps left by a newly unreliable former ally in Washington.
The point they are missing is that Ukraine is now leading the world and winning the latest cutting-edge phase – the drone war.
Misled by his own intelligence services who were convinced that invading Russian forces would be greeted with flowers, Putin ordered his army into a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
Having been at war there since 2014 after seizing Crimea and joining proxy forces in the eastern Donbas provinces, Putin should have known better.
Ukrainians remember Crimea. They have harnessed the knowledge that Moscow’s “fraternal” love for the mythical homeland of the Rus people translated into genocide in the 1930s, with the deaths of more than three million and up to seven million Ukrainians during the Holodomor, the deliberate mass starvation of Ukrainians by the Soviet Union, while Ukraine’s history, language and arts were also purged.
Kyiv’s military structures may have been woefully unprepared to defend the nation at the start of 2022, but its people were not.
Land lost and gained
In the early days of the war, as Putin’s military formations strode into Ukraine, small groups of volunteers leapt into pickup trucks and rushed to meet the invading columns, ambushing the hapless Russians, stealing their tanks with tractors.
Old ladies rained Molotov cocktails onto armoured columns in Sumy. In Kharkiv, lost Russian paratroopers were wounded by partisans and beaten to death by babushkas with broom handles.
Russia’s two-pronged attacks on Kyiv, from the north and east, stalled and turned tail. In the Donbas, Moscow drove hard towards Kharkiv, taking Izium – but was held at bay.
In the south, Kherson fell fast to invaders coming from Crimea. But they could not advance much further – held back by Ukrainian villagers and soldiers who combined to drive the Russians into the trenches.
Exploiting these successes, Ukraine was rapidly supplied with air defences, 155mm howitzer artillery pieces, and anti-tank rockets. Led by the US, Ukraine was given access to Nato’s best intelligence and set about destroying Russia’s command and control systems – including as many generals as they could find.
But crucially, Ukraine was not given the long-range weapons, cruise missiles and ATACMS that could have delivered victory quickly and broken the back of the Russian army at its most vulnerable.
Emmanuel Macron summed up the strategic straitjacket that Ukraine was forced to wear. “We must not humiliate Russia so that the day the fighting stops, we can build a way out through diplomatic channels,” the French president said in June 2022 – as evidence of Russian war crimes was being collected in Bucha and Irpin on the outskirts of Kyiv.
Many leaders and generals feared that if Russia was defeated, chaos inside the Russian Federation would follow and Putin’s grip on power would be lost. They feared what the military calls “catastrophic success”.
Whitehall mandarins opined on the dangers of the federation falling apart. They were afraid of an outright Ukrainian victory because the Russian Federation is an empire held together by fear.
Significantly, the occupying Russian infantry units in Kherson province were largely Buryats, a Siberian people living under Moscow’s rule. Locals told of how few of them could even speak Russian. Moscow rules over at least 190 nationalities.
Its empire includes 21 republics who, no doubt, might welcome independence and have provided large amounts of the men fed into the drawn out Ukrainian war that the Kremlin started.
So, Kyiv fought on with one hand behind its back. In the late summer of 2022, it launched a devastating counterattack to free Izium in the north and later reclaimed the city of Kherson in the south. This was the last act of the dashing period of Ukraine’s defence.
Just as Ukraine had blocked the Russian advance, so the Russians were able to regroup, dig in, and adapt tactics mostly relying on Soviet-era mass attacks in which waves of Russian troops throw themselves against Ukrainian forces in what are known as “meat grinder assaults”, along the 1,300km front line.
They concentrated on towns like Bakhmut in the east.
One foreign volunteer said during the height of the battle for Bakhmut, where thousands of both sides were killed and which now remains under Russian control, that he was “shooting 20-40 Russians a day and they just keep coming”.
Casualties – and the problem of reporting them
The Independent knows from eyewitness reporting that Russian casualties have been huge on the eastern front. Ukraine has also been badly hammered.
Russia has a population of about 144 million. Ukraine has around 38 million – so, in theory, Russia has three times the manpower and can outlast Ukraine.
It also enjoyed a vastly superior firepower. Ukrainian frontline troops often spoke of a 20:1 advantage to Russia in the volume of artillery fired.
Estimates of troop and equipment losses on both sides are wildly inaccurate and do not reflect who is winning or losing.
Numbers of Russian casualties vary hugely from 95,000 killed, according to the BBC in January this year, to 200,000 dead, according to the UK government in May last year and double that in some Ukrainian media.
In Ukraine, Zelensky claimed in December last year that 43,000 soldiers had died and the UN reported 12,00 civilians killed. One wild Russian estimate said a million Ukrainians had died, showing the truth of the figures is almost impossible to assess.
In war what matters is who controls what territory. By that marker, neither side is winning or losing. Russia has made tiny tactical advances in Ukraine over the past year while Ukraine has changed the very nature of the war itself.
Ukraine has received enough equipment from allies like the US, Britain, Germany, France and Poland to bleed Russia but not to win.
The British media focused on 14 Challenger 2 tanks sent to Ukraine in the spring of 2023 as if they were strategic weapons. They’re good tanks but 14 isn’t quite a full squadron.
Ukraine was under heavy internal and external pressure to complete another dashing blow against Putin’s forces that summer.
Nato generals advised that it send the Russians reeling and, simultaneously, observed that Ukraine did not have the air force, the air lift, the artillery, or the three-to-one troop ratio superiority Nato troops would need for such an attack.
A series of assaults in the east and south not far from Zaporizhzhia in a drive towards Crimea, were a failure. Despondency set in, and the grinding in Bakhmut continued.
Ukraine’s supporters began to talk of the need to accept the inevitable – a partition of the country leaving Russia with the 20 per cent it had already taken. The casualty figures, generals and intelligence analysts agreed, were “unsustainable” for Ukraine.
Jens Stoltenberg, then Nato secretary general, said that Ukraine should get the aid it needed but that it would be “Ukraine that decides what kind of compromises they’re willing to do …to achieve an acceptable result around the negotiating table”.
Zelensky and his staff, his political opponents and the Ukrainian parliament have been adamant that the only acceptable outcome to the war is Russian withdrawal. So Ukraine held on.
The brutal financial cost of the war and conscription
The following year, in August 2024, Ukraine launched the costly but successful assault into Kursk, Russian territory, along its northern border. The dramatic move was done without informing allies and made use of the very limited agreement to, finally, allow Ukraine to fire its US and UK supplied missiles into Russian territory itself.
The blow was humiliating for Putin who by now was spending 40 per cent of the Russian federal budget on the war, 8 per cent of GDP. His control of the media and the narrative over the war in Ukraine has maintained popular support for the Kremlin’s long-standing tenant.
But there can be no doubt that even efforts on the battlefields to burn and bury Russian dead, then declare them as “missing”, must eventually come undone.
Ukraine’s GDP took a 30 per cent hit after the full scale Russian invasion of 2022, has since recovered to around 3 per cent but is struggling to get its debt obligations under control and in early May may default on $600 million in national debt payments.
To boost his troops, in April Putin announced a renewed conscription drive for 160,000 men. The Kremlin’s forces have been made up of conscripts, contract soldiers – who sign up for salaries of up to $2,000 a month which is often far better than available in civilian life – prisoners and lately North Korean troops.
Several hundred Chinese mercenaries have also been in action alongside small numbers of African recruits.
Ukraine won’t reveal how many people it has conscripted and has kept the 18-25-year-old cohort out of the realm of compulsory military service. The average age of Ukrainian soldiers is 43.
But tensions have been increasing over conscription because draft dodgers have been snatched off the street which has offered organised criminals a lucrative line in extortion.
Russia is shot on artillery shells and guns. North Korea has stepped in, supplying ammunition that Ukrainians deride as “worse than useless” as firing them reveals artillery locations while the erratic flight of the missiles do no damage.
Some 12,000 North Korean troops were sent to reinforce Kursk and then thrown into the offensive earlier this year. A small number have been taken prisoner and video evidence shows large numbers dying in mass attacks.
Ukrainian soldiers spoke of being overwhelmed by the surge in numbers sent by Russia into Kursk and by the use of drones guided by fibre optic cables, rather than radio signals which can be disrupted.
Drone warfare
One key area where Ukraine now dominates is the new world of drone warfare. It has conquered the Black Sea and driven Moscow’s navy back into its ports.
Kyiv used home-grown Neptune missiles to sink the Moskva, Russia’s vast cruiser in April 2022. But since then, it has pioneered the use of underwater, surface and aerial drones that have meant that Kyiv, which has no navy to speak of, rules the Black Sea.
Ukraine makes more than 90 per cent of the four million drones it claims to manufacture each year. Long range drones have repeatedly hit Moscow. They evade air defences to target Russia’s energy infrastructure and supply lines.
Drone commander major “Kalas” told The Independent that frontline operations were now dramatically different from when Russia was able to throw huge volumes of armour and men at Ukrainian trenches.
“The drones have changed everything. We are ahead of the Russians – only just, but ahead. They now send small groups of infantry forward, they mostly get killed and a few get into a hole, then they send some more. That’s how they advance,” he said.
“Overall, the quality of their [Russian] force, especially their ground force, has been decreasing throughout the conflict,” the US general and Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Christopher Cavoli, told the Senate defence committee in early April.
“On the Ukrainian side, we see sort of the opposite. We see a military that started pretty much from an almost cold start. We had been helping them before the war, but not at the scale we began to after the war, and they’ve evolved and developed very, very quickly.”
In Toretsk, which Russia claims to have largely captured, drone video shows small groups of soldiers on both sides fighting in a landscape of rubble, isolated and desperately scanning the skies for the tell-tale buzz of a killer drone.
So what happens next?
Similar images may one day emerge in Lithuania, Moldova, even Poland, if Putin is able to prevail in Ukraine. The US is no longer prepared to shoulder the burden of Europe’s defence and is backing away from Kyiv.
The US has allocated about EU114 billion to Ukraine since 2022. The Europe, including the UK, has allocated E132 billion.
Trump has, so far, behaved as if he has changed sides and favours Russia. He even excluded Moscow from his latest round of worldwide tariffs.
He’s demanded a ceasefire on attacks against energy and in the Black Sea, which favours Putin. He’s said that the Kremlin could hang onto the land Russia has captured in Ukraine and that Kyiv can forget about joining Nato, ever, and about any US aid unless it does Trump’s bidding.
But analysis by the Kiel Institute concludes that the cost of replacing all US military support for Ukraine “would be possible with relatively little additional effort”.
“Currently, European governments contribute about €44 billion annually to Ukraine’s defence, or roughly 0.1 per cent of their combined GDP, a relatively modest fiscal commitment,” the study found.
But Putin’s designs on Europe continue.
Which is why backing Ukraine is Europe’s top priority now. Dr Rachel Ellehuus, head of the Royal United Services Institute and a former US staffer in Nato, summed up Putin’s agenda.
“It might be enough to achieve his objectives just to take pieces of Ukraine, take the ports, take the highways, take critical infrastructure – that is really important to Ukraine’s survival as an independent state,” she told Independent TV.
“That might be enough to achieve his objectives of preventing them from ever becoming members of NATO or the EU.”
This scenario is alarmingly close to the end-state that the US (and Russia) want to see in the peace proposals they’ve been tabling ahead of talks.
“Putin has a secondary objective which people sometimes overlook, and that is to challenge and undermine NATO and the European Union,” she said. “He is going to test the boundaries of what we call Article 5, which is the feeling or the commitment that an attack against one NATO ally is an attack against all of them.
“So, we’ve got that primary objective of preventing Ukraine’s full Western integration and viability as an independent state. And then we have that secondary, probably bigger objective of undermining Western structures”.
Putin has already stated work on “undermining the west” with cyber attacks and information warfare causing universal doubt in a “post-truth” age. Trump’s tearing up of Nato relationships, threats to annex Canada and Greenland, and causing economic turmoil also help the Kremlin.
Putin is waiting for the next stage – and he will pounce when things fall apart and the centre cannot hold.
