The tide is turning in Russia-Ukraine war

In the early hours of May 17, more than 500 Ukrainian drones punched through three of Moscow’s four air-defense rings. They hit oil infrastructure, military-industrial plants, and apartment buildings in and around the capital, killing at least four and wounding a dozen. Coming three days after a deadly Russian barrage that Ukrainian officials described as the largest combined air attack of the war – one that collapsed a nine-story apartment block in Kyiv and killed 24 Ukrainians, including three children – the attack on Moscow and its surrounding environs was the revenge President Volodymyr Zelensky had promised. (And as indefensible a war crime as when the Russians target civilians … but that’s for a separate column.)

It was also the culmination of a long-range campaign that’s evolved from symbolic pinpricks in 2023, when Ukrainian drones were shot down over the Kremlin days before Victory Day, to systematic, high-tempo, increasingly-effective economic and psychological warfare – able to pierce Russia’s air defenses, degrade the Kremlin’s war machine, and disrupt Russians’ daily lives. Ukraine can now carry out larger and more sustained attacks deeper inside Russian territory, and the Kremlin is unable to reliably defend against. Its long-range missile and drone strike capabilities are not only pressuring Russia’s economy but bringing the war home to ordinary Russians and, for the first time since President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, risking political trouble for the Kremlin.

Nothing illustrated this better than Victory Day. Putin’s request for a temporary ceasefire during the May 9 parade in Moscow was a recognition of Russia’s inability to secure its own capital. So was his decision to hold the most scaled-back celebration in nearly two decades, impose a full mobile internet blackout in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and suspend Telegram in favor of the state-surveilled Max app. A day meant to epitomize Moscow’s military might instead signaled Russian weakness. Ukraine would “permit” the parade to proceed in peace, Zelensky decreed, with the confidence of a leader whose country may not be winning but is definitively no longer losing.

For the first time since the Ukrainian counteroffensive three years ago, the tide of the war is turning in Kyiv’s favor.

The change is technology, specifically the shift to unmanned warfare. Ukraine is now routinely waging small frontline battles without any of its soldiers on the ground. A first wave of explosive unmanned vehicles, smaller than motorcycles, clears out Russian trenches. A second wave of air drones targets troops who flee. A final wave of armed robotic vehicles engages whoever remains. Ukraine’s most advanced drones use AI and fiber-optic cables to defeat Russian jammers – all of it controlled remotely by operators a few miles behind the frontline or as far as in Kyiv. On the other side: poorly-trained Russian conscripts, fighting for a land that isn’t theirs, going up against swarms of machines they can’t see and may not hear until it’s too late. The psychological effect is debilitating. The number of deaths has far exceeded any other Russian war since World War II. Russian desertions are surging accordingly.

Ukraine’s drone edge is partly homegrown – its defense industry is now producing millions of drones a year – but a large part of Russia’s inability to match it traces back to Elon Musk’s decision to cut off Russian access to Starlink. The most advanced communications hardware Moscow can now field is roughly the size of a dinner table – too large to mount on the lightweight drones deciding this war. Ukraine’s Starlink terminals are the size of a dinner plate. This asymmetry alone has set Russia back roughly a year in its unmanned capabilities. And while Ukraine has developed interceptor drones capable of shooting down the vast majority of incoming Russian Shahed attacks, Moscow has yet to produce anything equivalent.

The casualty numbers tell the story. Russia has by one estimate lost over 350,000 soldiers, with total casualties – killed and seriously wounded – surpassing one million. That’s somewhere between a quarter and a third of what the Soviet Union sustained during the most devastating conflict in human history. And the pace isn’t slowing: Russia is losing tens of thousands of soldiers a month, more than it can recruit to replace them without another 2022-style mobilization. The killed-to-wounded ratio – historically a useful proxy for how badly an army is being degraded – has actually inverted for Russia, with nearly two dead for every one wounded as of March. The reason is that the bulk of Russian casualties are now being caused by drones, which hunt wounded soldiers and make medical evacuation nearly impossible. Most of the Russian soldiers dying on the battlefield today would, in any previous war, have recovered and returned to the fight.

Russia’s oil and gas sector, the lifeblood of its economy, has been damaged, too. Since March, Ukrainian deep strikes have hit over 20 Russian oil refineries and export terminals, knocking more than 500,000 barrels a day of capacity off the market. The Kremlin’s oil revenues have nonetheless surged in recent months as Iran-war crude prices more than offset the production losses, so Putin isn’t being financially strangled … not yet at least. But Ukraine has found a meaningful counterweight to Trump’s partial lifting of sanctions on Russia, which originally looked like a windfall for Moscow: with its oil infrastructure under sustained attack, the Kremlin can’t fully capitalize on the higher prices to fund a long war. Meanwhile, GDP contracted in the first quarter for the first time in years, weighed down by a moribund civilian economy, and the budget deficit already exceeded the entire full-year forecast. Russia has since cut its 2026 growth forecast to just 0.4%, with interest rates at a punishing 14.5% and the banking sector straining under bad loans. Higher oil revenues can’t fix any of that – and they certainly can’t fix Russia’s military performance, which is constrained not by money but by technological capacity and skilled labor.

What does this all mean for the war going forward?

The fighting will grind on. Both sides retain the capacity to fight and to hold their negotiating positions. The country that was supposed to fall in three days, then three weeks, has become the most capable drone-warfare force on earth and is fast approaching full military self-sufficiency – with US weapons now accounting for only about 20% of Ukraine’s arsenal and declining. Ukraine’s main remaining weakness heading into next winter is air defense against ballistic missiles, the one area where US-provided Patriot interceptors are irreplaceable and supply is stretched thin by the Iran war. But this won’t hand Russia a decisive advantage when the cold returns, as Ukraine and its European partners work to repair infrastructure and build more decentralized, resilient power systems. And Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary has unlocked a long-stalled €90bn EU loan package for Ukraine – a significant breakthrough for Kyiv’s funding outlook.

Putin’s theory of victory – that Russia can outlast Western will and Ukrainian capacity – is looking weaker than at any point since the invasion began. His spring offensive has yielded nothing. Ukrainian forces even retook territory in April. Barring a major reversal, Ukraine is now likely to hold the parts of Donetsk still under its control through the rest of 2026 and into 2027. That’s not a breakthrough, but for a country that was widely expected to be on its knees by now, it’s a major achievement. As a result, Zelensky will be far less inclined to make territorial concessions – still rejected by more than half of Ukrainians – than he was even a few months ago, when US President Donald Trump declared that he didn’t “have the cards.” The war has grown past the point where Washington can dictate its terms.

Putin, meanwhile, shows no sign of moving from his maximalist goals – the full Donbas, Ukrainian neutrality, no NATO – despite mounting military and economic challenges. He appears confident that Ukraine will face collapse before Russia faces a crisis, even as the evidence increasingly says otherwise. The oil windfall and US sanctions relief (however temporary) are cushioning the economic pain, and the security services keep a tight lid on elite dissent and popular unrest. But after a decade purging every advisor capable of giving him accurate information, there’s no one left in the room to tell him so.

Deep down, though, Putin surely knows he’s in trouble. Reports have him spending more time in bunkers amid heightened assassination fears. The comms shutdowns, the scaled-back parade, the vanishing public appearances – these are the moves of an anxious autocrat. Ultranationalist military bloggers have been getting louder in their criticism. Former generals have been speaking up. The mothers of soldiers fed into the meat grinder are harder to manage as losses accumulate. None of this threatens Putin’s hold on power. But they are unmistakable signs of his narrowing room to maneuver.

The biggest risk is that a cornered, increasingly isolated Putin becomes more willing to escalate rather than compromise. He doesn’t want a shooting war with the United States or NATO. But he may conclude that stepped-up hybrid operations in Europe – targeting arms manufacturers or weapons convoys to Ukraine, something uncomfortably close to direct confrontation with NATO – are preferable to accepting defeat, raising the risk of a dangerous accident or miscalculation. It’s not likely. It won’t lead to World War III. It shouldn’t deter Ukraine or NATO from standing firm. But it’s a non-negligible, growing risk that we wouldn’t attach to Xi Jinping, who is more confident, more risk-averse, and by most measures doing better long-term than at any point since he took power. Nor, despite everything, would we attach such risks to the United States, where checks and balances still function and decision-making remains transparent (see Trump’s reluctance to resume bombing in Iran). The danger is specific to a leader who is losing, knows it, and has systematically destroyed his own feedback loops.

Putin set out to erase Ukraine from the map and weaken Europe. He may have forged the world’s most formidable new military-technological power instead – and in doing so, handed Europe its most important long-term strategic asset: a battle-hardened, drone-manufacturing, AI-forward Ukraine that is increasingly capable of defending itself and the continent. That’s a big win for Ukraine. It’s a big win for Europe. And it’s a big win for democracy and rule of law, despite all of Ukraine’s very real corruption and institutional inadequacy – none of which comes close to what we see in Russia.

I wrote in April 2022 that Putin might win the battle but would lose the war. Four years later, even Xi Jinping is starting to think so.