On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the war in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky asserted that it was “only a matter of time” before his country recovered all of its lost territory.
But for months, opposing forces have been locked in a stalemate along a 1,200km (745-mile) front line as developments in tactics and technology have slowed progress to a crawl.
Diplomatic efforts are at a similar impasse, with neither side appearing to have the momentum on the battlefield to force the other into making concessions.
Ahead of an expected fourth round of direct talks this week, Russia still clings to its maximalist demands for territory, while Ukraine says it cannot and will not give its eastern provinces to the aggressor.
As the conflict enters its fifth year, Ukraine can celebrate a string of fresh symbolic victories in the south. But experts say the challenge now will be to consolidate its progress and find a way to break the wider deadlock.
Ukraine recovered control of 400 sq km of territory, including eight settlements, in February, the head of the military announced on Monday. Those figures improve upon the 300 sq km of land that Zelensky claimed Kyiv’s forces had recovered only last week – and will more than cancel out the 389 sq km Russia was assessed to have gained in January.
Experts say the problem for Ukraine is that most of the gains are in the southeast, away from the victories of strategic value to be had in the east. Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst and cofounder of Finland-based open source intelligence collective Black Bird Group, told The Independent that it would be difficult for either Russia or Ukraine to break the deadlock where it matters.
How have the front lines changed?
The front line today is “not like a coherent line, where there’s like a clear control, with two trench lines with a little bit of no man’s land in between,” Mr Kastehelmi explained. “Drones have made it so that front lines are blurry and troops may be intermingled in a certain area of presence.”
Today’s “drone-dominated battlefield” has “demechanised” the front lines, Mr Kastehelmi said, making huge advances difficult. The threat from the sky has made tanks unviable, leading Russia to fall back on trying to overwhelm Ukraine with infantry-heavy tactics in a gruelling war of attrition.
Even with plans to increase the size of the army to 1.5 million people, this has come at a huge cost for Russia.
Drone-inflicted casualties have jumped from less than 10 per cent of the total in 2022 to up to 80 per cent last year. Russia is expected to have suffered 80,000 losses in 2025, according to the BBC, in order to gain just 0.8 per cent of Ukraine’s territory (just over 4,800 sq km).
Analysts do not expect this to change for now. Mobile drone-hunting teams have become commonplace, and much of the war has morphed into an “air battle of mutual denial”, according to a report by the French Institute of International Relations published this month. But slow advances are still heavily dependent on infantry.
Tank platoon commander Valentyn Bohdanov, a senior sergeant in Ukraine’s 127th Separate Heavy Mechanised Kharkiv Brigade, said that scaled up drone warfare has made tanks effectively redundant. “They won’t enter an open field: they’ll be peppered by FPV drones and stronger ones,” he said.
His T-72 tank, which was seized from the Russians, remains hidden beneath webbing near the snowy front line in the northeast region of Kharkiv – reduced, effectively, to a static piece of artillery. He told Reuters he believes such weapons are being rendered irrelevant and should be scaled back in favour of more long-range artillery.
Can either side break the deadlock?
“Russia will probably, in 2026, continue to make slow progress month by month,” assessed Mr Kastehelmi. “Likely their approach is that they are trying to beat Ukraine in an attritional war, which means like bleeding out the Ukrainian army.”
While Ukraine is suffering from manpower issues and a problem with desertion, he did not predict any radical change on the front lines this year. “Last year, the Russians were able to advance roughly 400 to 500 sq km per month. That isn’t much … It says that the Russians haven’t really figured out a way to counter the current problems in the battlefield.”
Dr Jack Watling, senior research fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said Ukraine would have to apply the lessons of the south to the wider front in order to make progress this year.
“For the past year, Russia’s gains have been enabled by the growing lethality of Russian fires and dwindling Ukrainian troop strength allowing Russia to persistently infiltrate and thereby undermine Ukrainian defensive positions,” he said.
“Over the course of 2025, however, some of Ukraine’s better units worked out how to conduct offensive operations under modern conditions. This has enabled successful counterattacks in Kupiansk and in the south. The question for Kyiv is whether the tactics of these units can be taught more widely across the front.
“Fixing Ukraine’s training process is the key to addressing the challenge of force generation and thereby bolstering the strength of units at the front such that Russia cannot continue its infiltration tactics when vegetation returns in the spring.”
What happens next?
While current tactics have limited major frontline breakthroughs for now, the pace of change means tactics could soon shift again, according to military analyst Rob Lee at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, assessing it was still too soon to write off tanks for good.
“Right now, the current role is diminished, and I think we’re waiting for the next technological breakthrough that will enable manoeuvring again,” he told Reuters.
Russia’s ability to keep up pressure on Ukraine depends on its war economy, which has slowed massively since the jolt at the start of the war.
Its economy grew by just 1 per cent in 2025, and the budget deficit is growing. The defence sector accounts for 8 per cent of GDP, which does little to improve the lives of the public. Russia is increasingly reliant on foreign troops, aware that another mobilisation risks antagonising a war-weary population into open rebellion.
Sanctions against Russia help Ukraine, but there are obstacles to a unified European front; ahead of the fourth anniversary of the war this week, the EU failed to impose its 20th round of sanctions. Senior officials are expected to raise the matter with Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who still opposes the measures.
“The Russian economy can keep up the war, but as reserves dwindle and debt grows, it also becomes more vulnerable to shocks,” Dr Watling assessed. “The question is whether Europe is prepared to apply the pressure.”
