Russia’s winter war strategy in Ukraine has collapsed. Instead of breaking Kyiv, Moscow suffered devastating losses—over 92,000 casualties and massive equipment destruction in just three months. As Russian forces stalled, Ukraine launched a powerful counteroffensive, liberating territory and shifting the battlefield momentum. But the war is far from over. With a massive Russian spring offensive looming, the next phase of the conflict could determine everything.
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00:00Russia has, officially, lost the Winter War in Ukraine.
00:03What was supposed to be a period where Russia's long-range strikes against Ukraine's energy infrastructure
00:08facilitated a push forward on the ground, turned into a bloodbath for Putin's forces.
00:14Thousands upon thousands of mangled Russian bodies now lie in the fields and roads of Ukraine.
00:21And in the wake of the winter bloodbath, Ukraine has gone on an all-out offensive that changes everything.
00:27Ukraine can't afford to get complacent.
00:30There is still a looming threat from Russia, which will arrive in the spring and be covered later in the
00:34video.
00:35However, Ukraine turning its own territory into a winter wonderland of Russian destruction is huge,
00:40and Russia has felt the effects in the bloodbath that Ukraine has created.
00:45The numbers are in, and they come from the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine's armed forces, Oleksandr Siersky.
00:50He says,
00:51Over the three winter months, we eliminated more enemy soldiers than the enemy managed to bring into its ranks.
00:56And there's no denying that when you see the numbers.
00:59Between December 2025 and the end of February 2026, Russia has suffered a staggering 92,850 casualties,
01:08which means soldiers who have been killed or wounded.
01:10That amounts to an average of 1,031 troops daily, Siersky explains.
01:15And it's the main reason why Russia has failed to make any meaningful progress in the winter,
01:19and why Ukraine has made such extensive gains during a time of the year that Russia thought
01:24would lay the foundation for a successful 2026 campaign.
01:28And it's not just soldiers that Russia lost in the winter bloodbath.
01:31Thousands upon thousands of units of Russian equipment have been burned up, destroyed,
01:35and rendered utterly useless for the push that Russia wants to make in 2026.
01:40Another 322 tanks have been lost during the three months of winter,
01:43which indicates that even with Russia's more limited mechanized assaults,
01:46it's still losing a little over 100 tanks per month.
01:49That's not ideal for a country that is only building and rebuilding about 400 tanks per year,
01:54of which some are refurbished T-80s rather than the newer T-90s that Russia manufactures
02:00at a rate of about 250 annually.
02:02Along with the massive tank losses, Russia also lost 430 of its armored combat vehicles during the winter,
02:08along with 110 multiple launch rocket systems and 2,967 units of artillery.
02:14Ukraine also crippled 55 of Russia's air defense systems,
02:17which has enabled Ukraine to open up safer aerial corridors
02:20that it can use for drone and missile strikes inside Russia and the occupied territories.
02:25Five Russian aircraft went down under Ukrainian fire, as did a helicopter,
02:28and even on the drone front, Russia lost 65,269 drones that were vital for its operations in Ukraine.
02:36It keeps on going.
02:38Ukraine also took out 65 units of unspecified special equipment during the winter months.
02:43And on the vehicle front, Russia lost much more than the already impressive numbers
02:46of tanks and armored vehicles that Ukraine destroyed.
02:49Another 11,927 vehicles have disappeared from the Russian military forever.
02:54These would be vehicles like motorcycles, trucks, and other forms of transport
02:58that Russia has increasingly relied upon to shuttle troops and soldiers around
03:02after Putin's war has taken such a massive toll on its tank and armored vehicle stockpiles.
03:07Oh, and Ukraine, the country that barely has a navy, was effective in the water during the winter too.
03:12It took out one ship and one submarine, further dismantling the Black Sea fleet
03:16that has already been forced to withdraw so far away from its former base of operations
03:19that it has almost no presence in the Black Sea anymore.
03:23None of this has gone according to Russia's plan.
03:25As the Atlantic Council reported on February 26th,
03:28Russia has a very specific strategy in mind for the winter months of 2025 and early 2026.
03:34Constant missile and drone barrages plunged Ukrainian civilians into freezing cold and inky darkness
03:39as power and heating infrastructure were devastated.
03:43Russia's goal was to freeze Ukraine out,
03:45to force its leadership into conceding the war by placing such a heavy burden on non-combatants
03:50that Ukraine would have no other option.
03:52As the Council puts it,
03:53Ukraine was supposed to become unlivable,
03:56a shell of a country that wouldn't be worth defending
03:58because Russia would have systematically dismantled everything
04:01that made Ukraine a sovereign state in the first place.
04:04The end goal is to deprive Ukraine of the industrial capacity to defend itself
04:08and destroy the basic amenities to sustain even a minimum standard of living.
04:11Kremlin officials hope this will break Ukrainian morale
04:14and enable Putin to dictate the terms of peace, the Atlantic Council reports.
04:19However, the Russian winter war strategy has failed.
04:22With spring approaching,
04:23Ukraine will be able to spend the upcoming warmer months
04:25rebuilding its shattered energy infrastructure and industrial capacity.
04:29As for Russia,
04:29its focus on taking Ukraine out of the war by terrorizing its people
04:33and the state as a whole
04:34has clearly led to the Kremlin taking its eye off the ball when it comes to its military.
04:38Over 90,000 Russian soldiers have died or been wounded in just three months of fighting.
04:44For context,
04:45it's estimated that Russia only lost a sixth of this number
04:48during its decade-long war with Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989.
04:52So, well done, Putin, we suppose.
04:55You've managed to create a military that is less effective
04:57than the one that utterly failed to take Afghanistan
04:59during the height of the Soviet Union.
05:01And it's not like General Winter finally leaving Ukraine
05:04has meant that things have gotten better for Russia as we move into the spring.
05:08Putin has to deal with the Ukrainian pushback,
05:10which we'll be diving into very soon.
05:12Plus, even as the warmer weather descends on Ukraine,
05:14Russia is still losing a catastrophic number of soldiers.
05:18The New Voice of Ukraine reports that the Ukrainian army's general staff
05:21reported that Russia lost 960 of its soldiers on March 1st up to March 2nd alone.
05:27Sure, that's a touch below the 1,031 troops it was losing on average during the winter,
05:31but it's still in the 1,000 soldiers per day region,
05:34which tells us that the winter bloodbath is going to be extended into a spring slaughter.
05:40But hey, Putin might think to himself,
05:42losing vast quantities of soldiers is nothing new for my invasion of Ukraine.
05:45As long as Russia is taking territory in return for these losses,
05:48then the winter bloodbath is all worth it.
05:50Sorry, Putin, but that's an even bigger problem for Russia.
05:53Not only is Russia failing to take anywhere near the amount of territory that it needs to take
05:57in order to justify these losses,
05:59but it's losing occupied territory at such a massive rate
06:02that Ukraine has overtaken Russia in terms of territory taken.
06:05We'll get to that turnaround soon.
06:07Before we do, let's look at Russia's territory capture figures for December, January, and February,
06:12bearing in mind that 92,850 casualties in that three-month period amount to 30,860 casualties per month.
06:19In December, Russia captured 445 square kilometers, or 171.8 square miles of Ukraine, per Ukraine Breaking News.
06:29That leads to a casualty rate of almost 171 soldiers per square mile.
06:33It's difficult to get confirmed figures for January and February.
06:37However, according to an assessment by the Institute for the Study of War, or ISW,
06:41Russia had only managed to seize 572 square kilometers, or 220.85 square miles, between January 1st and February 19th.
06:51That's about 4.4 square miles per day,
06:53so a little bit of math tells us that if Russia continued at the same rate for the rest of
06:56February,
06:57it would have captured a further 39.7 square miles of Ukraine.
07:00Add up all of the figures and you get about 260.6 square miles in exchange for 61,720 casualties,
07:07or 237 casualties per square mile captured.
07:12In other words, Russia slowed down during the winter,
07:14and it started losing more soldiers per square mile than it captured in Ukraine.
07:19That alone would be grounds to declare the Winter War I for Ukraine,
07:22especially as such pathetic Russian gains do very little to set Putin up for the spring and summer offensives
07:27that we're going to be covering toward the end of the video.
07:30But as Russia was laboring to make these tiny gains,
07:33Ukraine was doing something that Putin never expected.
07:35Toward the end of February, Ukraine's air assault forces,
07:38along with key drone units and assault groups on the ground conducting search-and-destroy operations,
07:42began pushing their way into the gray zones and occupied territories in southern and southeastern Ukraine.
07:47A major offensive in the Oleksandrovsk Axis took place and is still underway,
07:52but seeing Ukraine make remarkable gains against Russia in the direction of Zaporizhia
07:56and, slowly but surely, in the direction of Crimea.
07:59The purpose of this offensive was the total destruction of Russian groupings,
08:03likely small units of infiltrating soldiers maintaining loose footholds in occupied territories,
08:08to allow Ukraine to build up its defenses in Zaporizhia and Dnipropotrovsk.
08:12Aided by Russia losing access to Starlink,
08:15which it had used for drone operations and communications across the front line,
08:19Ukraine has spent February turning what was already a failing winter war for Russia
08:23into a spectacle that is so humiliating that Putin may never recover.
08:27How?
08:28We'll answer that question in just a moment, but before we go deeper into that,
08:31you're watching The Military Show, and we bring you the full picture, not just the headlines.
08:36Hit subscribe if you want to stay ahead of the curve.
08:38By February 20th, Ukraine had made so many breakthroughs
08:41that it had managed to liberate 300 square kilometers,
08:44or about 115 square miles of territory from Russia, in a matter of weeks.
08:49Along the way, Ukraine retook eight settlements,
08:51which it can now use both as fortified defensive nodes and launching pads for deeper pushes into the south.
08:57And the latter is precisely what Ukraine has done.
09:00The winter counterattack into Ukraine's south had yielded even more results by February 22nd.
09:05CSG reported that Ukraine held 400 square kilometers,
09:09or 155 square miles, of liberated territory by that point,
09:13which included some regions that it had retaken toward the end of January.
09:16All of this means two things for Russia,
09:19the second of which our more attentive viewers may have already figured out just from hearing those figures.
09:24First, what was meant to be a Russian push into Ukraine during the winter
09:27has transformed into a Ukrainian counterattack,
09:30even as Russia feeds more of its soldiers into the meat grinder.
09:33Not only is Russia failing to break Ukraine's defenses,
09:36but it's being forced to watch as Ukraine shows Russia how it's done in the south of the country.
09:41Second, and more importantly, the winter turnaround is so extensive that it means that,
09:45for the first time since August 2024, when Ukraine counter-invaded Kursk,
09:49Ukraine is liberating more territory than Russia is capturing.
09:53Euromiden Press reports,
09:55the Deep State Open Source Intelligence Monitoring Project claims that Russia took even less territory
09:59than the ISW reported in January and February.
10:02According to Deep State, Russia captured 245 square kilometers,
10:06or 94.5 square miles, of Ukraine in January,
10:09and it followed that up with a pitiful 126 square kilometers,
10:14or 48.6 square miles, in February.
10:17If those figures are accurate, it means that Ukraine liberated more territory
10:21between the end of January and February 2022
10:23than Russia managed to take over approximately the same time period.
10:26What this means is that a bad winter has become disastrous for Putin.
10:31Russia's best-case scenario would have been a stagnant few months,
10:35with perhaps some minor gains here and there.
10:38Instead, Russia is dealing with Ukraine roaring back in the south
10:41to the point where it's taking perhaps more than triple the territory
10:44that Putin's ailing and dying forces are capturing.
10:47The bloodbath was for naught.
10:49The balance has shifted in the Ukraine war,
10:51and it's squarely in Ukraine's favor.
10:54Taras Chmut, who is the head of the Come Back Alive Foundation,
10:57as well as a member of Ukraine's supervisory board of the Defense Procurement Agency,
11:01said as much in a March 1st Facebook post where he said,
11:05Russia has lost the battle for winter, and we won.
11:08The first day of spring, the sunny day is getting longer.
11:11It keeps on getting warmer.
11:12Ukraine continues its fight.
11:14On the front line for the first time in months, or maybe years,
11:16we've started to free up more territory than we lost.
11:19This is the de-Russification of Ukraine on the grandest scale we've seen in years.
11:24Ukraine turned the winter bloodbath into an all-out offense,
11:27that proves that Russia is an increasingly spent force,
11:30as Putin tries to prepare for a spring and summer
11:33that is supposed to deliver massive gains to Russia's forces.
11:36However, there is a caveat to all of this.
11:39As impressive as Ukraine's winter campaign has been,
11:42this is not the time to get complacent.
11:44As we've mentioned several times already,
11:46Russia has big plans for the rest of 2026,
11:49though you'll soon be learning about the big question marks
11:51that hang over those plans
11:52in the wake of Ukraine's winter warriors achieving so much in three months.
11:55Zelensky himself has outlined those plans,
11:58noting that they start with the increased Russian missile and drone strikes
12:02that Ukraine absorbed throughout the winter.
12:04As Russia's forces capitulated, or in most cases, died on the ground,
12:08Russia maintained its airstrike strategy against Ukraine's cities and energy infrastructure.
12:13During the three months of winter,
12:14Zelensky claims Russia launched 738 missiles,
12:1814,670 guided aerial bombs,
12:22and almost 19,000 attack drones at Ukraine.
12:25Among the largest of Russia's single strikes
12:27was a December 6th attack with 700 aerial targets,
12:30including more than 50 missiles,
12:33all as part of the terroristic campaign that we discussed earlier.
12:36The one saving grace that Russia has as the war moves into the spring
12:39is that it can continue to bomb Ukraine from afar,
12:42even as its ground forces are being pushed back or dying in droves.
12:46However, not even these missiles and drones are going to do much
12:49to help Russia's army ahead of the ground offensive that Russia has planned.
12:52The ISW and TVP World have both reported on this planned offensive.
12:57According to the latter, which reports on figures from Deep State,
13:00Russia is planning a major push into Ukraine's east with over 100,000 soldiers.
13:05Interestingly, that's significantly less than the 170,000 soldiers
13:08that Russia deployed to take Pukrovsk alone during the summer of 2025 and into 26.
13:13How Russia thinks it's going to take on the rest of the Donetsk fortress belt,
13:16which is even more fortified than Pukrovsk,
13:19with 70,000 fewer soldiers is anybody's guess.
13:22Still, 100,000 troops in the east is still more than most active armies in Europe.
13:26The ISW adds that Russia has started to attempt artillery strikes in Ukraine's east,
13:31which it says are setting up for a deeper push into Donetsk.
13:34There are also hints that Russia intends to push towards Zaporizhia and Dnipro-Petrovsk,
13:38as we mentioned earlier, during the spring and summer of 2026.
13:42So what we're seeing Ukraine do in the south right now may be the liberation of territory
13:45in preparation for the second aspect of the upcoming Russian offensive.
13:49Plus, Ukraine's plan may involve forcing Russia to expend yet more of its reserves
13:54on retaking the liberated southern settlements,
13:56assuming that is even possible for Putin's forces,
13:59which will only further weaken an already smaller force in Donetsk
14:02than the one we saw Russia amass for the summer of 2025.
14:06Russia might have become even more ambitious than all of this suggests.
14:09According to Zelensky, Russia's plans extend through 2027,
14:13and in a body blow to Putin, Ukraine has gotten its hands on these plans,
14:17so it will know precisely what Russia intends to do.
14:20We understand that their directions remain relevant,
14:22the occupation of the east of our state, namely the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
14:26They undoubtedly want to continue in the direction of the Zaporizhia region
14:29and also toward the Dnipro direction.
14:31It is difficult for them, but they are looking at the Odessa region,
14:34Zelensky said on March 2nd.
14:36It's all well and good for Russia to have these plans.
14:39But as Zelensky points out,
14:40and the sheer toll that Russia's winter failures took highlight,
14:43Russia lacks the capacity to make any of this happen.
14:45We see these directions, but these maps for now have nothing in common with reality,
14:49because they cannot accomplish the tasks, Zelensky adds.
14:53And as the Times points out,
14:54Russia is now officially recruiting fewer volunteer soldiers for Putin's war
14:58than it's losing on the battlefield.
14:59The outlet points to figures shared by Western officials,
15:02which are even worse for Russia than those offered by Siersky.
15:05Those officials claim that Russia lost an average of 40,000 soldiers per month
15:10between November and January,
15:12giving it a recruitment shortfall of several thousand throughout much of winter.
15:15This is the lack of Russian capacity in action.
15:18For every volunteer soldier that Russia fails to recruit,
15:21it has to pull from its reserves.
15:23Those reserves were meant to be getting prepared for the spring and summer offensive,
15:26so their having to head into Ukraine now,
15:28likely to be killed like their comrades,
15:30is precisely what Putin doesn't want.
15:33Russia has lost soldiers during the winter
15:34that weren't even meant to be in Ukraine yet,
15:36and it's lost territory upon which it would have relied
15:38for its pushes into the Zaporizhia and Dnipropotrovsk directions.
15:42In other words, and we've said it before,
15:43Russia is a spent force, in more ways than one.
15:47As Putin is trying to deal with crippling manpower issues,
15:50he's also dealing with low oil prices and constraints on Russian resources caused by sanctions,
15:54all of which are causing major damage to Russia's economy.
15:58That economy is in the death zone,
16:00The Economist reported on February 16th,
16:02amid Russia's export revenues declining as budget gaps grow.
16:05What does this mean for a Kremlin that has spent so much of the war relying on making massive payments
16:10to volunteer soldiers just to maintain its manpower advantage in Ukraine?
16:14It can't be good.
16:16When the money runs out, all that Russia will have left are its reserves,
16:19which are already being deployed early and have spent much of the winter dying in Ukraine.
16:24With all of this in mind,
16:25the Russian bloodbath during winter has massive repercussions.
16:28Ukraine is liberating record-breaking amounts of territory.
16:31Russia is losing soldiers and equipment at such a rate,
16:34but whatever it has planned for its spring and summer offensives
16:36already looks like it's going to fail.
16:39Ukraine now knows precisely what Russia wants to do until the end of 2027.
16:43And you can guarantee that everything that Ukraine does from here on out
16:47will be designed to counter Putin's already faltering plans.
16:50And then there's still the Starlink issue for Russia to overcome.
16:53It's played a huge role in enabling Ukraine's winter counter-attacks.
16:57If you want to find out more about the Starlink shutdown
16:59and what it means for more than 700,000 Russians fighting in Ukraine,
17:03check out our video.
17:04And if you enjoyed this video, make sure you subscribe to The Military Show
17:08so you're always one step ahead when it comes to the latest Ukraine war developments.
17:12And thank you, as always, for watching.
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