For 18 months, Russia slowly advanced across Ukraine, gaining ground village by village despite mounting losses. Then, in spring 2026, the trend suddenly reversed. In this video, we examine the key factors behind Ukraine’s growing momentum—from communications failures and logistics strikes to drone warfare, manpower shortages, and economic pressure. Has Russia’s offensive finally run out of steam, or is this only a temporary shift? Watch to find out.
00:00 - The War Shifts in 2026
02:56 - Weather & Terrain Challenges
05:40 - Russia's Communications Collapse
09:49 - Deep Supply Line Strikes
13:28 - Economic & Manpower Crises
18:25 - What Happens Next?
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SOURCES: https://pastebin.com/w0zjxpJe
00:00 - The War Shifts in 2026
02:56 - Weather & Terrain Challenges
05:40 - Russia's Communications Collapse
09:49 - Deep Supply Line Strikes
13:28 - Economic & Manpower Crises
18:25 - What Happens Next?
Support us directly as we bring you independent, up-to-date reporting on military news and global conflicts by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMilitaryShow/join
#militarystrategy #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis
#themilitaryshow
SOURCES: https://pastebin.com/w0zjxpJe
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NewsTranscript
00:00For almost 18 months between the start of 2025 and June 2026, the war in Ukraine was arguably still in
00:07Russia's favor.
00:08Yes, it was slow, and at any given week, most of the news you get was a village taken here
00:13and a tree line taken there.
00:15After all, Russia slowed down significantly in how much territory it covered with each passing week.
00:21And yet, months of those slow advances added up.
00:24Stack enough imperceptible gains on top of one another, and the line on the map starts to bend.
00:30That was the war.
00:31Russia pushed, Ukraine bled to slow it down, and the front crept to the west.
00:36Then something happened in March 2026.
00:39The net gains just stopped.
00:41And not stopped in the sense of slowing to a crawl, which we had seen before, but actually began reversing.
00:47Russia continued advancing in some sectors, but Ukraine more than clawed it back in others.
00:52The numbers, depending on which map you trust, tell a story that runs from a tentative few dozen square kilometers
00:59in Ukraine's favor in March,
01:01to something well over 100 in April, to an even larger figure in May,
01:05to the point where we're mainly talking about how much Ukraine is pushing back.
01:09The first is obvious, the military itself.
01:12We're talking men, machines, fuel, ammunition, the physical capacity to keep throwing an army at a wall.
01:18The second is less obvious, but just as important.
01:22The Kremlin is running out of believable stories.
01:25For 18 months, every setback had an explanation ready to go.
01:29The war was still on schedule, and Russia's economy, although falling short of optimistic projections,
01:35was still technically growing and managing to fuel the conflict despite the overwhelming sanctions.
01:40For most of 2025, Russia insisted that Ukraine kept losing more and more,
01:45even though it had negligible gains and needed to increasingly use up its reserves.
01:50What we're watching in 2026 is the moment when both material reserves and the propaganda start showing holes at the
01:58same time.
01:59The tank runs dry, and so does the excuse for why the tank is empty.
02:03Now, one main point to keep in mind is that all the data we have for early 2026 comes from
02:09various sources and might be skewed towards Ukraine.
02:12Public trackers don't agree on the magnitude, and on the narrowest readings, they barely agree on the direction.
02:18But Russia's entire method is nevertheless to push out, and then rush reinforcements in to consolidate.
02:24If Ukraine is recovering the places Russia is trying to push into faster than Russia can reinforce them,
02:30then the Russian offensive is failing on its own terms.
02:33It doesn't matter how the control ground is actually referred to by Russian media.
02:38The offensive is not achieving its objective, and the side that was supposed to be defending is the side setting
02:44the tempo.
02:45Back in March, you could squint and call that seasonal.
02:49By the time you get to May's figures, the seasonal story has run out of road, which conveniently is exactly
02:55where we start.
02:56Factor 1 is the weather.
02:59Moisture, rain, snow, melting ice can be deadly for moving heavy vehicles.
03:04And even in a war defined by drones and tiny infiltration teams, armored vehicles still matter,
03:09and everyone, drone operator or not, has to be resupplied.
03:13This past winter was colder and wetter than the year before, which meant a lot more snow.
03:19By March, that snow melted, and it set up a genuinely brutal mud season that turns Ukrainian and Russian dirt
03:25roads into something closer to soup.
03:27So the offensive bogged down.
03:29Russia's winning play here was to blame the weather.
03:32Nobody made a bad decision, they argue.
03:34The ground just got soft, regardless of the fact that it was Russia that arguably set the tempo for advances
03:40for the past year.
03:41But then we have to look at the inconsistencies.
03:44The mud theory suggests a frozen, stalled front, rather than Ukraine advancing.
03:49If this were the whole story, you'd expect both armies to be stuck in place, cursing the weather equally.
03:55After all, both countries technically had decades of training on similar terrain,
03:59as the climate near Ukraine and Russia's southwestern regions is practically the same.
04:04So the weather is real, and it helps stall Russia's pace.
04:08But it's the first example of a pattern you can see over and over,
04:11with a comfortable Kremlin-friendly explanation that accounts for why Russia stopped,
04:16but conspicuously fails to account for why Russia is now losing ground.
04:20Factor 2 is the treeline, genuinely one of the most beautiful sights in the country.
04:26Endless golden fields under enormous blue sky.
04:29It's pretty much the inspiration for the Ukrainian flag,
04:32and showcases Ukraine's role as a major wheat and grain producer and exporter.
04:37But look at the edges of those fields, and you'll find rows of trees.
04:41The technical term is a windbreak.
04:43These exist because without them, the wind strips the topsoil,
04:47and Ukraine stops being the breadbasket of Europe.
04:50Those same windbreaks make excellent cover for advancing infantry,
04:54trying to hide from the drones overhead.
04:56In a way, that soil conservation program from the 1930s
05:00has actually been helping Russian assault groups creep forward unseen.
05:04But even in 2024, Ukraine started using fire,
05:08equipping drones with makeshift flamethrowers to burn the windbreaks
05:11and expose Russian positions.
05:13While the scale of Ukraine's efforts to remove cover in 2026 is unclear,
05:18any scale of it could be enough to remove one of Russia's few advantages
05:21when moving between highly populated places.
05:24And even here, there's an element where the Russian stall doesn't make sense.
05:28Burnt tree lines should choke off the flow of Russian infantry,
05:32but it'd also make it harder for Ukraine to advance through the same ground
05:36because cover cuts both ways.
05:38Which brings us to factor 3,
05:40the one where the tempo actually shifted.
05:43Internet connectivity and Starlink.
05:46Now, Russian troops actually ran their frontline communications
05:49on smuggled and captured Starlink terminals,
05:52which is the same satellite internet that kept Ukraine connected since 2022.
05:57Russia was never supposed to have them since SpaceX won't sell in Russia.
06:02But in early February 2026, that ended.
06:05Following talks between Elon Musk and Ukraine's newly appointed defense minister,
06:10Mikhailo Fedorov,
06:11SpaceX moved to kill unauthorized Russian access.
06:15Ukraine submitted a whitelist of its own terminals,
06:17while everything else in the occupied zones went dark.
06:20Musk, in his characteristic way,
06:23posted that the steps taken to stop Russia's unauthorized use
06:26appear to have worked and publicly asked if more was needed.
06:29The effect was immediate.
06:31And this is where the propaganda thread gets sharp.
06:34Ukrainian officials reported assaults grinding to a halt almost overnight,
06:38and the Center for European Policy Analysis
06:41argued it could collapse Russia's entire military communications.
06:45And the Pentagon itself later assessed that Ukraine retook roughly 400 square kilometers
06:50after those terminals were deactivated,
06:52marking Kiev's first real gain since 2023.
06:56Now hold that against the official Kremlin 9,
06:59which for months had been that Russian soldiers never used Starlink
07:02or had access to the network.
07:04That claim was never quite credible,
07:06and the instant the terminals died and the assault stalled,
07:10it became impossible.
07:11You can't simultaneously insist your army doesn't depend on a thing
07:15and then visibly seize up the moment that thing is taken away.
07:18And the cleanup story is almost worse for Moscow than the original problem.
07:23Russia's answer is a homegrown satellite network called RASVET, meaning Dawn.
07:28According to early reports, it should go commercial by 2027.
07:32But the trouble is the arithmetic.
07:34Analysts say a constellation like that needs at least 250 satellites
07:38to function as a reliable network.
07:41By June 2026, RASVET had 16 in orbit and even lost one of them,
07:46and the program is already behind its own schedule.
07:49SpaceX, for comparison, operates well over 10,000 satellites,
07:53so the reassurance from the Kremlin that the replacement is coming
07:57only gives a 2027 timeline.
08:00That means frontline troops are looking at command and control problems
08:03stretching into 2027, and even that's an optimistic projection.
08:08Factor 4 lands at almost the same moment,
08:10and it's a double blow that Russia remarkably dealt to itself.
08:14Telegram.
08:15Around the time the Starlink terminals went dark,
08:18the Kremlin's internet sensor, Roskomnadzor,
08:22moved to throttle Telegram's functionality.
08:24This was a political decision, not a military one.
08:27Telegram is where Russians share grievances,
08:30where dissatisfaction spreads,
08:32and even where protesters could organize.
08:34Throttling is a way for the state to manage the story by managing the platform.
08:38There was just one small problem,
08:41as Russian troops also ran their coordination on Telegram.
08:44So in the same window that the invading army lost its internet,
08:48it also lost the platform many troops relied upon for communication.
08:52Instead, Russia peddled its government-supported alternative called MAX,
08:56but while it was initially promoted in late summer of 2025,
09:00by 2026 the app was flagged to contain severe security issues.
09:04This prompted the government to change course and again recommend Telegram for frontline troops.
09:09But in June 2026,
09:11there's still no consensus on which app the troops are meant to use for communication.
09:16All the while, Starlink doesn't work and its replacement is still not ready.
09:20This is where exhausting the troops and the narrative stop being parallel lines
09:25and start feeding each other.
09:26The worse the battlefield looks,
09:28the more dissatisfaction builds among ordinary Russians.
09:31The more dissatisfaction builds,
09:33the greater the Kremlin's incentive to clamp down on the platforms where that dissatisfaction lives.
09:39But clamping down on those platforms degrades the army's own communications,
09:43which makes the battlefield look worse, which generates more dissatisfaction.
09:48Factor 5 is where things get genuinely interesting,
09:51because it suggests something deeper than a run of good luck.
09:55Railway strikes.
09:56For this, we need to step back from the front for a second.
09:59The entire theory of how you beat Russia has centered not on the trench line,
10:03but on the supply line.
10:05Whatever is happening at the literal front is irrelevant if the troops there can't get fuel,
10:09shells and food.
10:11In fact, Russian gains at the front make the supply problem worse,
10:14because now you have to push provisions even further forward.
10:18So you just have to starve the army and let the front collapse on its own.
10:22Ukraine's ability to apply that strategy has historically been limited,
10:26projecting destructive power dozens of kilometers behind the line,
10:30is historically the privilege of great powers, not of the country being invaded.
10:34Ukraine has landed opportunistic deep hits for four years, sure,
10:38but those were one-offs rather than a sustained campaign.
10:41This might no longer be true, and that's the real story here.
10:45The tempo of strikes on railways, junctions and logistics nodes has climbed sharply over recent months.
10:52How Ukraine pulled this off is not fully clear,
10:54and the honest answer is drones, with a lot of unknowns underneath it.
10:58One credible guess is that Ukraine eroded Russia's edge in fiber-optic drones,
11:03the jam-proof wire-guided kind that had let Russia dominate the deep gray zone,
11:07and that reversing that edge let Ukrainian systems reach much further into Russian-held territory.
11:13Regardless of the models being used, and a new one seems to pop out weekly,
11:17Ukraine has found a way to push destruction deep behind the line on a sustained basis,
11:23and that's starting to register at the front.
11:25Crucially, this is also a category the Kremlin can't easily narrate away,
11:29because a severed rail line is not something you can hide
11:32when the trains that are supposed to be using them simply aren't running.
11:36Factor 6 is the natural extension of that logic,
11:40culminating in longer-range strikes on Russia's military-industrial base.
11:43The barrier here has always been that weapons plants sit far from the front,
11:48in hardened buildings behind air defense.
11:50To hit them, you need something that flies a long way,
11:53carries a real payload, and survives the trip.
11:56Two things changed.
11:58One, Russian air defenses have been visibly crumbling for the better part of a year,
12:03and two, Ukraine managed to create a bird that could fly far enough to crush them completely.
12:08The bird is the Flamingo, or FP5, built by the Ukrainian company Firepoint,
12:14which earned its name from the Flamingo pink finish on its first rollout.
12:18According to reports, it's not a tweaked drone, it's a heavy cruise missile,
12:23reportedly carrying something in the range of a 1,150kg warhead out to roughly 3,000km.
12:30This is an order of magnitude more explosive than the long-range drones and mini-cruise missiles
12:35Ukraine had been making do with, which often carried only tens of kilograms.
12:39Confirmed Flamingo strikes already include targets like the Votkinsk machine-building plant
12:44and major arsenals belonging to Russia's main missile and artillery directorate.
12:49In other words, exactly the deep, hardened factory and magazine targets
12:53that were off the menu a year ago.
12:55What's more difficult to pin down is the precise damage and effect on Russia's production,
13:00and here the propaganda problem flips in the Kremlin's favor for once.
13:04A struck factory doesn't produce the dramatic fireball that makes neighbors film it and post it,
13:09so battle damage assessment is genuinely harder.
13:13Now, if you want to learn more about Ukraine's drones, like the FP5,
13:17make sure to subscribe to the Military Show.
13:20We post daily videos on new developments and every new drone model Ukraine showcases.
13:26But Factor 7 does tend to produce a lot of fire and mayhem.
13:30We're talking about Russia's oil industry, more specifically exports,
13:34and this is the one where the narrative is most in Ukraine's favor.
13:37As a reminder, this war has become the single largest financial undertaking of the Russian state
13:43since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
13:45Between 2022 and 2026, Russia has consistently had record-breaking military budgets,
13:51soaring to 40% of all government spending, and that was only for the publicly admitted funding.
13:57So, it can be argued that if Russia loses its income and the ability to pay soldiers and build shells,
14:03it could basically forfeit the war without outright losing it.
14:07And strikes on oil refineries, export ports, and the Shadow Fleet tankers attack that income directly.
14:13And because Russian air defenses are in such poor shape,
14:16the campaign has been working for months and is only getting worse for Moscow.
14:20In April 2026, Ukraine hit Russian oil infrastructure at least 21 times,
14:26and the Russian refinery throughput fell to the lowest level since December 2009.
14:31This was a 16-year low driven by drones.
14:34So, here's what the propaganda apparatus did with that.
14:37Faced with falling fuel output,
14:40Moscow simply stopped publishing the fuel output figures in 2024.
14:44Remove the data, remove the story.
14:46Except the drop was large enough that Rostat's own broader index registered it anyway,
14:51as oil products output went down more than 9% year-on-year in a single month.
14:57And then come the export bans.
14:59Russia banning gasoline exports, then jet fuel exports,
15:02ostensibly to protect domestic supply.
15:05Read that carefully.
15:06An export ban to guarantee your own population has fuel
15:09is a quiet confession of exactly the shortage the official line denies.
15:13In ordinary times, you don't ration what you have plenty of and can actively produce.
15:18And the oil slide bleeds directly into factor 8,
15:22because the money buys the men.
15:23With less revenue, the Kremlin has been forced to scale back recruitment,
15:27and recruitment is the other half of the equation that decides this war.
15:31Independent analysis built on Russia's own finance ministry and regional budget data
15:36indicates recruitment fell roughly 20% in the first quarter of this year,
15:40compared to the same period last year, to something on the order of 70,000 new contract soldiers.
15:46But Russian officials, including the defense minister,
15:49have publicly claimed recruitment is running ahead of plan.
15:52And over the same stretch, regions across Russia have been quietly increasing their sign-on bonuses
15:57to record highs, averaging around 1.5 million rubles, about $21,000.
16:03If recruitment were genuinely ahead of plan, you wouldn't need to keep raising the price.
16:07The bonus is the truth that the press release will not say out loud.
16:11The official story climbs, while the incentive structure underneath it screams the opposite.
16:16Now stack that against losses, and here we're going to hedge hard,
16:19because the casualty figures originate overwhelmingly with Ukrainian and Ukrainian-aligned sources,
16:25and should be treated as claims rather than confirmed facts.
16:28With reported losses of upwards of 1.3 million casualties by early 2026,
16:33Russia is losing soldiers faster it can sign new ones.
16:37For February 2026, the losses were estimated at 40,000 soldiers,
16:42while recruitment was estimated to be only 35,000.
16:45This is a 12.5% deficit,
16:48way more than what should be considered sustainable for a country that's suggesting it's winning the war.
16:52Even setting aside the specific numbers,
16:55the underlying logic is that the attacking army needs significantly more manpower than a defending one.
17:01And when going through manpower numbers,
17:03Russia actually started with only 190,000 deployed troops in Ukraine.
17:08By 2025, Russia had around 600,000 troops deployed,
17:12according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
17:15And even here, there's a major discrepancy,
17:17considering that Zelensky suggested Ukraine had 880,000 deployed troops.
17:22So even in early 2025,
17:25Russia ostensibly lost the manpower lead it had,
17:28and even that isn't counting the disparity in technological development and access.
17:32But throughout 2025,
17:34Russia lost more troops than it recruited.
17:37Most consistent estimates suggest 415,000 lost troops
17:40against a recruiting benchmark of 409,000.
17:44While that's a fairly insignificant loss,
17:46it cuts through any notion that Russia is actually amassing more troops against Ukraine
17:50and winning the broader conflict.
17:52And the most impressive gains by Ukraine
17:54are more easily explained by genuine control of the skies,
17:58including the drone supremacy, deep strike, and the comms collapse factors.
18:03This is even better for Ukraine,
18:05since the Kremlin's narrative for the past four years
18:07is that there's nothing to worry about on the front,
18:09and that the Russian population won't feel the effects of the special military operation.
18:14But if Ukraine has managed to achieve a semblance of air supremacy,
18:18while also having a more numerous force in the country,
18:21it means that Russia is arguably failing on both fronts.
18:24Now, where does this actually go?
18:26While the figures for May are not impressive,
18:28at only around 220 square kilometers reacquired by Ukraine,
18:32the scale and context are key here.
18:34In September 2022, during the Kharkiv counter-offensive,
18:39Ukraine took back something on the order of 6,000 square kilometers in a matter of weeks.
18:43Even the summer of 2023 counter-offensive,
18:46now remembered as a disappointment,
18:48netted around 377 square kilometers in June and 257 in July,
18:54before collapsing to under two square kilometers by September.
18:57But what the offensive has bought Ukraine is time.
19:00The first benefit is straightforward.
19:02If Russia regains the initiative,
19:04it will find the going much harder than before.
19:07But there's a subtler, more interesting benefit.
19:09A strong defensive backstop is an insurance policy,
19:12and insurance changes behavior.
19:14It lets Ukraine take risks on offense that it otherwise couldn't,
19:18because the downside of an attack going badly is no longer catastrophic.
19:22This, in fact, was one of the quiet reasons the 2023 offensive sputtered.
19:27Kyiv never fully committed because there wasn't much of a net beneath if it failed.
19:31And there is a final consequence worth considering,
19:34which concerns the negotiating table.
19:37Sustained Ukrainian success can shrink the bargaining gap that has kept this war grinding on.
19:42Russia can't credibly demand the rest of the Donbass
19:44if there's no plausible military path for Russia to take the rest of the Donbass in the field.
19:49That, in turn, makes it unlikely that Ukraine's concession of the Donbass
19:53would simply allow Russia to regroup and continue the conflict within a few years.
19:58But ultimately, Ukraine doesn't need to fully recover all of its territory,
20:02as Russia is slowly collapsing from the inside.
20:05And if that continues, it might not be able to sustain this war for much longer.
20:09The grind in 2025 and the breaking of the offensive in mid-2026
20:14just means that the internal collapse is much more imminent.
20:18To learn more, check out this video.
20:20And as always, make sure to subscribe to The Military Show
20:24for the news updates on global geopolitics.