Chapter 1
In February 2022
In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, escalating the conflict that began in 2014. Russia claims the invasion (a "special military operation") was necessary for its security and to "de-Nazify" Ukraine. Ukraine, backed extensively by NATO and Western allies, maintains it is fighting for its sovereign right to exist and reclaim occupied territories.
Chapter 2
As the war evolved into a grinding war of attrition
As the war evolved into a grinding war of attrition, Ukraine's initial reliance on Western stockpiles exposed critical vulnerabilities in allied defense industrial bases. In response, Ukraine launched unprecedented initiatives like the "Weapons of Victory" program and decentralized procurement, allowing frontline brigades to directly purchase domestically produced drones.
Chapter 3
Domestic production has scaled up sharply through state-funded orders
Domestic production has scaled up sharply through state-funded orders, yet funding and supply-chain bottlenecks remain severe across weapons platforms. The daily burn rates of 155mm artillery shells and interceptor missiles continue to outpace allied delivery schedules, forcing Ukrainian commanders into difficult tactical rationing on the eastern front — and, increasingly, over its cities.
Chapter 4
By 2026 the war has settled into two contests running at different…
By 2026 the war has settled into two contests running at different speeds. On the ground it is close to static: advances are measured in single square kilometres a week, drone saturation has made massed assault suicidal, and both armies take ground by infiltration and glide bomb rather than by manoeuvre, so the fighting concentrates on a handful of fortified towns in Donetsk Oblast that change hands over months rather than days — the sharpest exception a months-long Ukrainian counteroffensive that cleared the Oleksandrivka salient on the southern flank, the largest recapture by area since 2022, followed by a second near Lyman that by October had led the Institute for the Study of War to judge Russia’s 2026 campaign for Donetsk defeated, though no city of the fortified belt had changed hands and the main-effort Donbas towns stayed contested. At depth it is anything but static. Ukraine's long-range campaign now reaches beyond two thousand kilometres into Russia, against refineries, substations and the commercial logistics the Russian economy runs on, with costs that have begun falling on countries not party to the war; by late August that campaign had forced fuel rationing back onto Moscow's own forecourts and drawn a rare public admission from Putin that the strikes were denting Russia's growth; Russia answers with packages of dozens of missiles and hundreds of drones against Ukrainian cities and power generation, and the United Nations recorded July 2026 as the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since May 2022. Air defence has become the sharpest asymmetry in that exchange: the Patriot is the munition best able to down ballistic missiles, it is in critically short supply (in October 2026 Ukraine was reported to have none left), and interception rates over Ukrainian cities have fallen even as Russian launches climb — a gap the United States has so far declined to close from its own stocks. Running beneath both contests is a hazard neither army controls: the Zaporizhzhia plant, the largest in Europe, has been held by Russian forces since 2022 and now depends on the last of the ten external power lines it had before the war, having lost all off-site power two dozen times since the invasion and fallen back on emergency diesel generators each time. Diplomacy sits between the two and has gone backwards. A trilateral negotiating format under American mediation did open in early 2026 and produced three rounds — twice in Abu Dhabi, once in Geneva — before it stalled in February; the Kremlin has since returned to the maximalist terms it set out in June 2024, and in October added a border “security zone” in Sumy and Kharkiv regions that it says is not for negotiation, and the levers now being reached for are coercive rather than diplomatic: European sanctions packages, an American sanctions law — signed in September, authorising tariffs of up to 100 per cent on buyers of Russian oil, followed three weeks later by a waiver for Russian diesel and, in mid-October, by a presidential waiver of the law’s own tariffs and sanctions; an energy truce Washington announced in October collapsed within three days — and Ukrainian strikes aimed at the revenue that pays for the war. Two questions hang over the rest of it — whether Russia can keep manning the front without a formal mobilisation, and whether Ukraine can hold its grid and its own recruitment together through another winter.
And now
Washington and Kyiv are at odds in public. On October 16, two days before it was due to bite, Donald Trump waived the tariffs and sanctions of the Russia sanctions law he signed in September. A day earlier he called Ukraine’s resumed refinery strikes a “disgrace” and Zelensky “not a good guy for us to deal with”. Zelensky called the waiver a reward for Putin, and says Kyiv’s tests show the Starshield speed cap grounding Ukraine’s fastest drones applies in Ukraine but not in the EU, “a planned operation”; who ordered it is disputed.
Russia hardened its terms: Putin said the border “security zone” his forces are cutting in Sumy and Kharkiv will not be negotiated. Moscow has not confirmed the three-president meeting Washington floated. Russia’s generals claimed 1,800 square kilometres since September; ISW measures a net Russian loss of 122.
Russian strikes on October 16–17 hit energy sites in ten oblasts and the Zaporizhstal steel works; a Ukrainian strike halted a crude unit at Ryazan. Zelensky says Ukraine is badly short of Patriot missiles. EU leaders accepted a €70 billion hole in Ukraine’s 2027 financing but left it unfilled. UN monitors verified 328 civilians killed in September.
Where it stands today →