How Ukraine Is Winning the War Against Russia • OP News

Despite over three years of war and staggering Russian losses (approaching one million casualties claimed by some sources, with vast materiel destruction), Vladimir Putin remains committed to achieving victory in Ukraine.

While President Trump pushes for a negotiated peace, potentially involving significant Ukrainian concessions, Ukraine has preserved its sovereignty and inflicted severe damage on Russia’s military.

Ukraine can still win. A popular strategy suggested by the National Security Journal is a robust three-pronged approach: increased Western military aid including longer-range weapons to defeat Russia on the battlefield, tougher coordinated economic sanctions to cripple Russia’s war economy, and unwavering political resolve from the West, including leveraging Russia’s frozen assets.

Russian Casualties

According to the British Defence Ministry, Russia has suffered 950,000 casualties (dead and wounded) in the war, as of May 3rd. It should be noted that Russia’s casualties in 2024 were the highest of any year of the war.

Here are the numbers in terms of armored vehicles, armor, artillery, aircraft, and material, as of September 20th:

Tanks — 11192 (+1)

Armored fighting vehicle — 23280 (+2)

Artillery systems — 32927 (+31)

MLRS — 1492

Anti-aircraft warfare — 1218

Planes — 422

Helicopters — 341

UAV — 61045 (+365)

Cruise missiles — 3718

Ships (boats) — 28

Submarines — 1

Cars and cisterns — 62168 (+124)

Special equipment — 3968

Military personnel — approx.. 1100600 people (+1070)

The plus (+) numbers to the right show the increase from the day before.

Ukrainian losses have also been high – more than 400,000 total. Civilian deaths are estimated to be about 13,000, but that number is sure to rise.

A Drone Superpower

In June, the British government announced a new aid package for Ukraine, pledging to deliver 100,000 drones by the end of the current financial year in April 2026.

The move marks a tenfold increase in drone shipments and reflects how unmanned aerial vehicles have reshaped the nature of battle in Ukraine. British officials say that drones have transformed the way Ukraine fights, giving its military an effective means of disrupting Russian operations far beyond the front lines.

Defense Secretary John Healey is expected to formally unveil the plan at a 50-nation Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting in Brussels, which will be co-hosted by Germany.

Since the beginning of the war, the United Kingdom has consistently positioned itself as one of Ukraine’s most committed Western allies, and Healey reinforced his country’s commitment to helping Ukraine in a statement.

“The UK is stepping up its support for Ukraine by delivering hundreds of thousands more drones this year and completing a major milestone in the delivery of critical artillery ammunition,” Healey said.

Expanded Military Support

The drone commitment is just one part of a much larger £4.5 billion British military aid program, within which £350 million has been allocated specifically for drone procurement and delivery. According to the British Ministry of Defence, the drone supply will include a variety of models suited for reconnaissance, targeting, and direct attacks on Russian assets.

Beyond drones, the UK has also completed the delivery of 140,000 artillery shells to Ukraine since January 2025. The ammunition has proven critical in Ukraine’s ongoing defense efforts.

The government further announced an additional £247 million in spending this year for training Ukrainian forces, suggesting Britain – and perhaps other NATO members – are not convinced a peace deal is forthcoming. The funds will go toward enhancing operational capacity and equipping Ukrainian soldiers with vital skills.

A Better Economy

Ukraine’s economy is outperforming the Russian economy in several key respects for the first time since the onset of the full-scale invasion in 2022, although it is still a quarter smaller than it was in 2021.

In contrast, in Russia, interest rates may soon rise to 23% to curb the rouble’s decline. Banks are in a fragile state and GDP growth is projected to be just 0.5-1.5% in 2025.

However, Ukraine is facing serious challenges: an escalating war, dwindling domestic resources and the influence of US President Donald Trump.

Russia declined to extend the Black Sea Grain Initiative, also known as the grain deal, in July 2023. In response, Ukraine established its own maritime corridor, securing it through a maritime deterrence campaign involving drones and missiles. This enabled the resumption of not only grain shipments but also metals and minerals, which are the country’s second most important exports.

These measures, along with Western assistance, have prevented Russia from stripping Ukraine of the resources and morale needed to continue its struggle. However, the economy is now entering a phase where it faces its greatest challenges: severe shortages of energy, human resources, and finance.

In December, Ukraine increased its electricity import capacity from the EU by nearly a quarter, reaching 2.1 GW.

Many food producers are fermenting residues into biogas for their own use, while industrial facilities are combining these sources with imports to prevent catastrophic blackouts.

Continuous repairs to the power grid are expected to keep Ukraine’s average electricity deficit at 6% of total demand in 2025 and 3% in 2026, according to Andrii Pyshnyi, governor of Ukraine’s National Bank.

Another challenge is the labor shortage. Since 2022, mobilization, migration and war have reduced the workforce by more than a fifth, to 13 million people. Demand for labor remains high, with the number of vacancies reaching 65,000 per week, compared to just 7,000 in the early weeks of the war. However, there are only 1.3 applications per vacancy, down from two in 2021.

The Ukrainian economy and defense ministries are grappling with the balance of mobilization, trying to allocate resources effectively for the country’s future. So far, civilian leadership has refrained from meeting the maximalist demands of the military, which is detrimental to the war effort.

Even industries that are considered critical can now exempt only half of their employees from mobilization.

Another issue is the lack of funds. Small farms and businesses struggle to borrow enough money to finance their operations and long-term investments have become nearly impossible.

Rising business costs have reduced profits. Companies serving domestic customers are passing some of these costs onto consumers, contributing to inflation. However, exporters competing in global markets cannot afford to do the same.

The government is also spending far more than it receives. In 2025, the budget deficit is projected to be around 20% of GDP, with nearly all of this deficit – US$38 billion – planned to be covered by external financing.

Poll: Who is in the right, Russia or Ukraine?

A Powerful Psychology

The war’s most valuable territory is the space — or the moral vacuum — between Vladimir Putin’s ears. And by launching an offensive that has seized 500 square miles of Russian territory around Kursk, Ukraine has won a part of that psychological realm.

For dictators like Putin, there is no worse enemy than their own imaginations. It’s not what Ukraine can actually do. It’s what Putin fears Ukraine might do next.

Dictators and other authoritarians crave the certainty of absolute control. They like to boast that their form of government is more efficient than the cumbersome decision-making in democracies.

In reality, dictatorships are also more vulnerable to the fears and whims of their rulers. Even when the Third Reich was desperately short of manpower, Hitler insisted on keeping 300,000 troops in Norway because he was convinced the Allies planned to land there (they never did.) Stalin repeatedly misjudged German intentions and strategy in 1941-1942, and nearly destroyed his armies while making futile attacks against the advice of his generals. But woe to those who risk career — or life — to question tyrants who shield themselves reality.

By invading Russia, Ukraine is forcing Putin to face the unpleasant truth that he has failed to defeat — or even cripple — Ukraine. In that sense, the 20,000 Ukrainian troops at Kursk are a form of psychological warfare.

The irony is that for dictators like Putin, psychological warfare is the foundation of their rule. They wage it against their own populations to intimidate any potential political opposition. They wage it against other nations to convince rivals and potential victims that resistance is futile, and to corrode national debate. Putin has spent years trying to undermine Ukraine, including disinformation, grabbing Crimea at gunpoint, and terror bombing Ukrainian cities with missiles and drones.

And now the shoe is on the other foot. It is Putin who must react to Ukraine’s moves. It is Putin who has to wonder if he can trust his military to defend Russia’s borders. And it is Putin who has to explain to his people how the war that was supposed to forestall a mythical threat of NATO invasion ended up with foreign troops invading Russia.

What makes the failure to defeat Ukraine so striking is that in many ways, this has been an easy war for Putin. Russia has more troops and weapons than Ukraine, and it can draw on munitions and supplies from China, Iran, and North Korea.

The Kremlin has mostly controlled the initiative, determining where and when the most intense fighting will occur. Russia has also enjoyed the luxury of not having to substantially defend most of its 600-mile land border with Ukraine, allowing Russian troops to mass at will for offensives. Compare Russia’s strategic situation to that of Britain facing the Nazi empire in late 1940, or the Soviet Union reeling from German invasion in the summer of 1941. Conditions could hardly be more ideal for Putin’s War.

Many of those comforting certainties have now evaporated. Russia can no longer assume that its home territory is inviolate to ground invasion. Ukrainian drones hitting oil refineries inside Russia may damage the economy and embarrass the regime. But foreign boots on Russian soil undermine the most essential task of any government: protecting the sovereignty of the nation.

Critics of the Kursk operation point out that Putin has not redeployed troops from Eastern Ukraine, where Russians are continuing to advance slowly but steadily, village by village. They argue that Ukraine would have been better off using the assault troops at Kursk to reinforce its defenses in the east and south.

But that’s exactly what Putin wants: to keep Ukraine dancing to Moscow’s tune, wearing out its best troops and equipment responding to crisis after crisis. If Putin is certain that he can control the pace of the war, then he can assume that it is only a matter of time before Ukraine succumbs.

The Kursk operation allows Ukraine to inject uncertainty into the equation. Putin can continue to lightly defend the Russia-Ukraine border while concentrating his forces to advance inside Ukraine. But that option no longer provides certainty: it’s now a calculated risk that Ukraine won’t attack some other part of Russia.

And for all their bluster, dictators like Putin hate uncertainty more than anything else.

Significant Victories

Battle for Kiev

The beginning of the war was “supposed to bring the existence of a 40-million European nation to an end,” said The Kyiv Independent. Russia’s invasion plan centered around a surprise lightning strike on Kyiv, toppling Ukraine’s government while taking out its air defenses and military strongholds, Britain’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) assessed per captured Russian documents. Ukraine was supposed to have been pacified within 10 days — but the country held strong.

Russia came dangerously close to succeeding, though, as noted by Foreign Affairs. Kyiv — and Ukraine — were saved through a combination of Putin’s hubris, Zelenskyy’s unexpected pluck and wartime leadership skills and Ukraine’s years of planning and forewarning from Western intelligence.

“One of Putin’s initial mistakes was trying to conquer a country the size of France with a force that Western estimates suggest was barely larger than the Allies’ D-Day army in World War II,” said The Associated Press. Thanks to this mismatch between ambitions and resources committed, retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling said at The Washington Post, “it took about six weeks for Phase 1 of Putin’s campaign to fail.”

Destruction of Russian battalion at Bilohorivka

The surrender of Mariupol bled into the Battle of the Donbas, where Russia redeployed patchwork forces from the north and south to try and capture the rest of Ukraine’s industrial east. At this point, Ukraine had home-field advantage, grit, valor, and a mobilized population girded for war, but it needed bigger and better weapons and lots more ammunition. And before it could obtain them, it needed to convince Western allies they wouldn’t be throwing good weapons at a lost cause.

Ukraine’s armed forces proved they were up for the fight by destroying what amounted to an entire Russian battalion tactical group at the Siverskyi Donets River near Bilohorivka in Luhansk Oblast. For Ukraine, the strike helped open the floodgates of Western weapons and deflated the specter of an invincible Russian army. This ended up “limiting Moscow’s options in a region it very much wants to control,” said The Wall Street Journal.

Kharkiv blitzkrieg

In Phase 3 of the war, from July through September 2022, “Ukraine’s army forced a large-scale withdrawal in the northeast in the Sumy and Kharkiv oblasts, using small-scale counterattacks directed at just the right locations,” Hertling said in the Post. As Ukrainian forces routed Russian forces in Kharkiv, liberating some 3,000 square miles in a matter of days, the humiliated Russians “sustained casualties that far exceeded those suffered during the disastrous Phase 1 and 2.”

The scale of Ukraine’s victory in Kharkiv Oblast “stunned the entire world, but perhaps nobody was as surprised as the Russians themselves,” former Ukrainian defense minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk said at the Atlantic Council. “The speed of events and the sheer scale of the collapse” thwarted the Kremlin’s efforts to suppress the military disaster and delivered a “huge psychological blow for the Russian public, who learned for the first time that their soldiers in Ukraine were demoralized and beaten.”

Recapture of Kherson

The last major battle of the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was for Kherson, the only provincial capital Russia managed to capture before Ukraine turned the tide. And this battle ended in another humiliating defeat for Russia, which rewarded Ukraine’s steady and surgical destruction of its supply and reinforcement lines by withdrawing across the Dnipro River rather than face another costly rout like Kharkiv. Russia abandoned Kherson weeks after “annexing” its namesake province.

Conclusion

The Ukrainians have mainly been fighting a war of attrition, trying to inflict as many casualties on Russian military units as possible, in hopes of ultimately forcing them to give up their plan to conquer Ukraine.

A three-prong approach is needed to derail Putin’s dream of installing a multipolar world order that would reverse the verdict of the Cold War and create a world divided into spheres of influence.

First, militarily, Russia’s war machine is close to being spent. They can’t produce enough armor and armored vehicles to keep up with their losses. They began the war with vast reserves of men and armor, and while they still have plenty of manpower in reserve, they’ve been wasting their armor in poorly coordinated attacks that throw away men and machines to win a few yards of ground.

Worse, their reserve armor is increasingly older, less capable, and in poorer condition. The West has been needlessly cautious in its dealings with Putin, denying Ukraine the weapons needed to defeat Russia militarily. Putin has preyed upon this fear of escalation.

If the U.S. does cut aid to Ukraine, Europe must cut a deal with Washington to buy arms and ammunition and then turn them over to the Ukrainians. This means more fighters, artillery, and tanks, longer-range missiles, infantry fighting vehicles, and ammunition. Ukraine also needs more drones of all shapes and sizes.

The second prong is economic. Russia’s economy is already worsening due to the war, and its fall could accelerate if Western leaders are willing to take the necessary steps.

Greater coordination is needed among the United States, the UK, the EU, and other countries sanctioning the Russian war effort. Existing sanctions remain inadequate, while tougher measures are needed to target intermediaries.

Third, politically, Putin has been banking on the erosion of Western support. The West needs to harden its rhetoric and make it crystal clear that Russia will not win win this war militarily.

There should be no talk of allowing Putin to save face by claiming any kind of victory. As a further political action, the West should threaten Russia’s frozen funds. If Putin fails to comply with actual peace talks, then Europe should tell him all of those frozen funds will be turned over to Ukraine. Or, perhaps, do this no matter what Russia does.

It won’t be easy, but that’s how Ukraine can win.