Since early October 2025, Russian authorities have stepped up their claims of battlefield success. Vladimir Putin has held seven public meetings with military officials to hear their apparently triumphant reports. In reality, Russia’s armed forces captured only about 1,000 square kilometers more Ukrainian territory in 2025 than in 2024 — roughly 4,300 square kilometers in total. On a map of Ukraine, that amounts to very modest gains. At the same time, the resources expended to seize that territory were enormous: Russian fatalities alone exceeded 100,000, and up to 20 troops were killed for every square kilometer captured. Sustaining combat operations at this intensity will be difficult, not least because the Kremlin lacks the financial reserves to keep up such an effort for long.

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  • 2025 was the bloodiest year for Russia’s armed forces since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The pace of recruitment in Russia last year remained at about 30,000 to 35,000 people a month — but up to 90% of those recruits were put towards replacing ongoing losses in frontline units. As a result, forming new units and building strategic reserves proved impossible.
  • The Kremlin still fully controls only one of the four Ukrainian “new regions “ it illegally annexed in October 2022. Control in the Kherson Region remains unchanged at about 72%, as the sides are firmly separated by the Dnipro River. No major river-crossing operations are expected in the foreseeable future.
  • During a briefing by Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov at a meeting on Dec. 17, 2025, officials for the first time presented an estimate of expenditures “directly related to the special military operation”: 11.1 trillion rubles, or 5.1% of GDP. With total budget spending under the “national defense” line item set at 13.5 trillion rubles for 2025, this means more than 80% of defense outlays are going toward the war.
  • Russia’s territorial gains achieved in 2025 — about 4,800 square kilometers — came at the cost of more than 20 fatalities per square kilometer. Despite these gains (and these losses), in the Donetsk Region alone, roughly 6,000 square kilometers remain under Ukrainian control. A linear extrapolation suggests it would take about 1.5 years and 120,000 military lives to capture that territory, though numerous factors could significantly slow or accelerate the pace of any hypothetical Russian advance in 2026.