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) frontline as developments in tactics and technology slow 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 war 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 kilometres 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.
The frontline 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 frontlines are blurry and troops may be intermingled in a certain area of presence.”
Today’s “drone dominated battlefield” has “demechanised” the frontlines, 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% of the total in 2022 to up to 80% 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 km sq).
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 frontline 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.
