During the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, Donald Trump had boasted dozens of times that, if elected, he would end the Russia-Ukraine War “before I even arrive at the Oval Office.” Unsurprisingly, settlement of the conflict was not that simple, and after a heated televised discussion between Zelensky, Trump, and Vice Pres. J.D. Vance on February 28, 2025, it seemed like the relationship between the U.S. and Ukraine was on the verge of breakdown. Within a week, Trump had suspended all military aid and intelligence sharing with Kyiv, and when Trump proposed a 30-day cease-fire in March, Zelensky accepted. Putin, however, refused, as he was eager to exploit the pause in U.S. support on the battlefield. By April, Russian and North Korean troops had driven Ukrainian forces from Kursk, ending their eight-month occupation of Russian territory.

In June, Trump proposed that Russia should be readmitted to the G7, and in August, Trump held a joint summit with Putin in Alaska. That such an event should happen at all was a victory for Putin, who had been held as a pariah in the West since the beginning of the war. Although Trump repeatedly threatened “consequences” for Russia if a cease-fire could not be reached, they failed to materialize. Throughout the year, Zelensky’s terms for a lasting peace appeared to have evolved to include territorial concessions in the Donbas, a position that had been unthinkable earlier in the war. Putin’s goals remained fundamentally unchanged from the start of the “special military operation,” however. Ukraine was to be demilitarized, all Russian territorial claims—even those in areas under Ukrainian control—were to be recognized, and there would be no foreign military guarantees to the peace.

At the front, Russia continued its offensive efforts with advances that were measured in tens of feet (meters) and thousands of casualties. From December 2024 through January 2025, Russia lost an estimated 100,000 troops, making it the bloodiest two-month span of the war thus far. The main Russian push continued to be in the Donbas, with the ultimate goal of overcoming Ukraine’s “fortress belt” cities (Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, and Kostiantynivka). Just to the south of the “fortress belt,” Pokrovsk (prewar population: roughly 60,000) remained contested into 2026. The city was the focus of Russia’s summer offensive, but tenacious Ukrainian defenders checked the Russian attack for 18 months. An analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that the Russian advance on Pokrovsk was moving at an average pace of 230 feet (70 meters) a day. This meant that the Russians were covering ground at a slower rate than the Allies had at the First Battle of the Somme more than 100 years earlier.

Costs and casualties: the price of Putin’s war

Predictably, neither Ukraine nor Russia was forthcoming with detailed casualty statistics. The United Nations estimated that the conflict in the Donbas had claimed 14,000 lives between 2014 and 2021; roughly a quarter of those killed were civilians. Nearly 40,000 people were wounded in the fighting.

From the start of the Russian invasion to the end of November 2023, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights documented that more than 10,000 civilians had been killed and 18,500 wounded, noting that the majority of these casualties were caused by Russia’s indiscriminate targeting of Ukrainian cities with artillery, missiles, and air strikes. An earlier report noted that the true count of civilian losses was likely “considerably higher,” as it did not address cities such as Mariupol, where it was believed that tens of thousands of civilians had been killed. The U.S. Defense Department estimated that some 40,000 civilians had been killed in the fighting.

An estimated eight million people fled Ukraine and nearly that many were internally displaced; in total, more than one-third of Ukraine’s population was displaced by the fighting. The Russian military also carried out the forcible transfer of between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens (including some 260,000 children) to Russian territory; this constituted a clear war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention. The mass kidnapping and “filtration” of Ukrainians in Russian-occupied territory was part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing that recalled similar Russian efforts in Chechnya and Georgia. In March 2023 the International Criminal Court concluded that Russia’s mass kidnapping campaign constituted a war crime under the terms of the Rome Statute.

In September 2022, in the Russian government’s only official statement on losses suffered during the “special military operation,” Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed that 5,937 Russian troops had been killed in action. Just before the two-year anniversary of the invasion, Western intelligence officials estimated that Russian military casualties had topped 320,000 killed and wounded; this represented nearly 90 percent of Russia’s total mobilized force prior to the war. In addition, some 40,000 Wagner Group mercenaries were wounded, and 20,000 were killed. By early 2026, it was estimated that Russia had suffered 1.2 million casualties, or a rate of some 26,000 losses a month since February 2022. Western analysts also estimated that Ukraine had suffered perhaps 400,000 military casualties.

Roughly two years into the war, Ukraine was visually confirmed to have lost nearly 3,000 armored vehicles, including some 740 tanks. Russia’s visually confirmed losses amounted to more than 8,000 armored vehicles, including some 2,700 tanks. Perhaps implausibly, in the first year of the war, Ukraine managed to recoup nearly all of its documented armored losses with captured Russian equipment; this included a net gain of more than 90 tanks. In less than a year of war, it was estimated that Russia’s conventional military capability had been degraded by half; by 2024, Western intelligence officials estimated that the war had set back Russia’s attempts at military modernization by nearly two full decades.