KYIV, After more than four years of war, a counterintuitive truth is emerging: Ukraine is winning. Russia is killing fewer Ukrainians, losing more of its own soldiers, and struggling to sustain the offensive momentum it built in 2025.
That is the argument laid out by RAND Europe analysts John Kennedy and Jacob Parakilas in Foreign Policy, published on the eve of the NATO summit in Ankara, and it runs against the grain of war fatigue narratives circulating in Western capitals.
The numbers on the ground
Ukraine’s deployment of robotized and automated forces has slowed Russia’s advance to a “bloody crawl” and, for the first time since 2023, Ukrainian forces have recaptured territory. The casualty ratio now favors Kyiv. In April alone, Ukraine’s defense ministry counted 35,200 Russians killed or seriously wounded based on battlefield footage.
Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov’s strategy is blunt: replace soldiers with machines. By substituting robotic assets for human troops, Ukraine preserves its limited manpower while bleeding the Russian army dry.
“As a result, a total Ukrainian collapse is looking less and less likely,” the authors write.
Ukraine takes the war to Russia
While the world watches Russian missile strikes on Kyiv, Ukraine has built its own long-range strike capability, targeting Russian oil refineries and military-industrial sites deep inside Russian territory. These strikes have prevented Moscow from fully capitalizing on the oil price spikes caused by the US-Iran war.
Ukraine’s defense sector has earned “a special status among the world’s defense producers as a uniquely experienced operator in contemporary conventional warfare,” according to the analysis. The country is no longer just a recipient of Western weapons; it is a battlefield laboratory producing its own systems.
Russia’s other vulnerabilities
Inside Russia, the mood is souring. Levada Center polling shows a declining number of Russians believe the country is heading “in the right direction.” German Gref, the head of Sberbank, was quoted saying: “I don’t think there is a single person in the country whose concerns are anything other than bringing the military actions to an end as soon as possible.”
Recent internet shutdowns reflect a growing separation between Putin’s war ambitions and the public mood. Russia’s military-industrial complex faces structural supply-chain challenges that its adaptation efforts have not fully solved.
How Putin might escalate
The authors argue Russia is unlikely to launch a conventional attack on Europe; its forces are too stretched. Instead, Moscow is expected to intensify hybrid warfare: cyber intrusions, political pressure campaigns, sponsored sabotage, attacks on critical infrastructure, and targeted assassinations on European soil.
The goal: coerce Europe into scaling back support for Ukraine without triggering a large-scale conventional response that NATO would be forced to answer.
No peace anytime soon
The sobering conclusion is that neither side believes it has achieved enough to negotiate seriously. Russia has rejected peace proposals that would let it keep captured territory while imposing neutrality on Ukraine. Ukraine will not accept terms that freeze the conflict on Russian terms.
“After four years, it is tempting to think that this conflict is simply grinding ever onward with no meaningful change,” the authors write. “But the reality is that Ukraine is winning.”
The challenge for Western allies is to sustain support, and to recognize that Ukraine’s growing strike capability is a reason to maintain aid, not a reason to reduce it.
Sources: Foreign Policy (July 7, 2026), RAND Europe