Russian forces have made swift and significant territorial gains in Ukraine, taking advantage of Kyiv’s military shortages and blunders as support grows among the Ukrainian public for a negotiated end to the war.
The eastern Donetsk region is the central focus of Moscow’s renewed offensive, which began late last year but has significantly increased in recent weeks. President Vladimir Putin’s main battlefield goal this year is to grab as much land as possible, according to senior Ukrainian officials who spoke to the Financial Times.
“Our defences are showing cracks,” said one senior Ukrainian official familiar with military operations. He warned that Russian forces had achieved “tactical success” in Donetsk and that more advances were likely unless the situation turns around.
Taken together, Russia’s advances have more than reversed the hard-fought gains made by Ukraine’s army last year. According to research by Pasi Paroinen of the Black Bird Group, an open-source military research group based in Finland, the amount of territory captured by Russian troops since early May is nearly double that which Ukraine’s military won back at heavy cost in terms of lives and military materiel with its summer offensive a year ago.

But some officials are optimistic that Russia’s offensive will slow as its forces near larger cities where Ukrainian defences are more solid.
A surprise offensive on Tuesday by Ukraine’s forces inside the Russian border region of Kursk seemed to indicate that Kyiv is trying to turn the tables on Moscow. But the move, which has not been officially acknowledged by Ukrainian leaders, also prompted criticism from analysts who questioned the wisdom of deploying overstretched soldiers on Russian soil.
Over the past week, the Russian army advanced within 15km of the garrison city of Pokrovsk and the outskirts of nearby Toretsk, according to military analysts, reviews of combat footage and interviews with Ukrainian soldiers and senior officials. It also captured part of the neighbouring town of Niu-York and is still pressing ahead.
Pokrovsk is a major logistical hub for Ukraine’s military that has become a linchpin for its defence of the rest of Donetsk region, while Toretsk and Niu-York have been bulwarks against Russian forces since 2014.
The Russians are just 5km from the main T0504 highway, bombarding it with artillery and drones, and threatening to cut it off.
Despite the “intensity” of the fighting around Pokrovsk, Serhiy Tsekhotskyi, a press officer for Ukraine’s 59th Brigade deployed to the area, said “the enemy is simply running out of steam”.
Russian troops over the weekend occupied parts of Chasiv Yar’s eastern district. The city is strategic in its geographical position on high ground, and as a gateway to other important cities.
The capture of any of these cities would hinder military logistics and threaten Ukraine’s control over the rest of the region, putting the remaining strongholds of Kostyantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk in Russia’s crosshairs, experts say.
“The Russians have managed to capture several key positions and terrain features within the past month, with the situation steadily deteriorating for the Ukrainians in these directions,” said Paroinen.
Kyiv’s forces liberated roughly 321 sq km between June 1 and September 1 2023, or an average of 24 sq km each week, Paroinen found. But Russia’s offensive this year has erased those gains: between May 3 and August 2 this year, the Russians seized about 592 sq km, or more than 45 sq km every week.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week that the eastern axis of fighting was the most difficult for his outmanned and outgunned army, which is stretched worryingly thin along the 1,000km-long front line.


Analysts and soldiers say Russia has also taken advantage of Ukrainian miscommunication and bungled battlefield rotations, which have enabled rapid advances in several instances, particularly around the Pokrovsk and Toretsk areas.
The recent Russian advances caught Ukrainian forces off guard, after slower but still steady gains through spring. They come two and a half years into Moscow’s all-out invasion.
Russia first invaded the heavily industrialised, coal-mining area of Donetsk and its eponymous regional capital a decade ago. Putin claimed to have annexed the whole region in September 2022. He has made an end to the war conditional on Kyiv conceding Donetsk to Moscow along with three other regions — Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — which his troops only partly occupy.
Polling last week by the National Democratic Institute and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology suggests that 57 per cent of Ukrainians want to begin negotiations with Russia to end the war. However, more than 60 per cent of Ukrainians are unwilling to cede territory in exchange for peace.
Zelenskyy has signalled an interest in opening talks with Moscow based on his peace plan and series of summits. The Kremlin, which was not invited to a first gathering in Switzerland in June, has said it might send an official to a second summit organised by Kyiv later this year.
Recent improvements in Ukrainian firepower have yet to make a difference on the battlefield. In April, the US Congress finally approved a long-delayed $60bn military aid package, and on Sunday, Zelenskyy announced the arrival of the first F-16 fighter jets, with more expected before the end of the year.
But experts say manpower remains the most pressing issue. Franz-Stefan Gady, an associate fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank in London, said the “most immediate cause of ongoing Russian progress” was Ukraine’s “prevailing lack of manpower, primarily infantry”.
“What we’re seeing now is essentially the Russians trying to exploit this weakness,” he said, adding that Kyiv had been “too slow” in mobilising more troops.
Zelenskyy and Ukrainian lawmakers dragged their feet for roughly a year before increasing conscription of men aged 25 to 60 to replenish their battered units. Kyiv has even resorted to recruiting convicts to bolster its ranks.
Tens of thousands of fresh troops are expected to finish training and be deployed to the front in the coming weeks.
More recently, a major challenge for Ukraine has been to respond to Russia’s strategy of expanding the front line with fighting around Kharkiv. That offensive “stretched Ukraine’s forces even further and left them with fewer reserves to respond to Russian advances towards Pokrovsk, Chasiv Yar and Toretsk”. said Rob Lee, a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia programme.
Gady expects Russia’s efforts in Donetsk to intensify this month.
“It is clear that the Russians are trying to push on to Kostyantynivka,” he said, describing the city as a “major objective” once Chasiv Yar falls.
He said Ukrainian commanders may need to revisit the concept of “active defence” that was employed at the start of the year but had since broken down.
“Is it really [better] to defend every inch of Ukrainian territory no matter what? Or would it not be better to pull back from certain more exposed positions?” he said. Even if it meant giving up territory, it could help to preserve limited manpower and might ultimately strengthen defences, Gady said.
“The major question is when will this front line really stabilise and where?”
Additional reporting by Isobel Koshiw in Kyiv
Cartography by Steven Bernard and data visualisation by Clara Murray