More than four years after Russian columns first crossed the border in force, the question that procurement officers, investors, and government planners keep returning to is deceptively simple. Is Ukraine winning? The honest answer is that the war has reached a state where neither the word "winning" nor the word "losing" fits cleanly, and the temptation to pick one is exactly what leads to bad forecasts and worse purchasing decisions. Russia is advancing on the map. Ukraine is defending far more efficiently in human terms. Both economies are under strain, but in very different ways and from very different starting points. To understand the trajectory, you have to look at three things together, the ground, the human cost, and the money, because in a war of attrition it is the interaction between them that decides the outcome, not any one in isolation.
This analysis sets the two sides side by side as honestly as the available figures allow. The numbers that follow are estimates, and the ranges are wide, because both governments treat their own losses as state secrets and inflate the enemy's. But the orders of magnitude are clear enough to draw real conclusions, and the conclusions matter for anyone whose business depends on reading this war correctly. The pattern of record Western defence orders that the conflict has driven is, in the end, downstream of exactly the dynamics examined here.
On the map, Russia is the side moving forward. Russian forces captured Pokrovsk and the neighbouring stronghold of Myrnohrad in early 2026 after more than a year of grinding assaults, and Moscow controls something on the order of a fifth of Ukrainian territory. By the crude metric of who is taking ground, Russia is winning. But the crude metric is misleading, and the detail is where the real story lives.
The pace of that advance is extraordinary in its slowness. Between late February 2024 and early January 2026, Russian forces advanced just under fifty kilometres along the main axis of effort, an average of roughly seventy metres a day. Analysts have pointed out, accurately and damningly, that this is a slower rate of advance than the Allied forces achieved at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, one of the most notoriously costly and grinding offensives in the history of industrial warfare. Worse for Moscow, having taken Pokrovsk it has not been able to convert the prize into a breakthrough. Russian forces have made no significant progress west of the city since December 2025. The much-advertised "winter breakthrough" did not happen. What happened instead was a great deal of dying for very little ground.
"In a war of attrition the map is the most misleading scoreboard there is. The side that is advancing can be the side that is losing, if it is paying for each kilometre in a currency it cannot replace."
If territory flatters Russia, casualties indict it. This is the single most important asymmetry in the entire conflict, and it is the strongest argument that Ukraine, while not winning in any triumphant sense, is at the very least not losing the contest that ultimately decides attritional wars.
| Estimated military losses (Feb–May 2026 Western assessments) | Russia | Ukraine |
|---|---|---|
| Total casualties (killed + wounded) | ~1,200,000 | ~500,000–600,000 |
| Estimated killed | ~230,000–500,000+ | ~55,000 (Kyiv's figure) to far higher (Western) |
| Casualties added in 2025 alone | ~415,000 | not disclosed |
| Trend | Rising, front-loaded onto assault infantry | Lower, weighted toward defensive operations |
The figures deserve caution. The roughly 1.2 million Russian casualty estimate comes from Western officials and is echoed, with variation, by the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and Dutch military intelligence, the last of which put Russia's permanent losses at around 1.2 million including more than half a million dead. British signals intelligence assessed nearly 500,000 Russian soldiers killed by May 2026. Ukraine's own losses are genuinely contested. Western estimates cluster around 500,000 to 600,000 total casualties, while President Zelensky has publicly claimed only 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed, a figure most independent analysts regard as too low. Even taking the least favourable plausible reading of Ukrainian losses and the most conservative reading of Russian ones, the ratio still runs roughly two to one in Ukraine's favour, which is what you would expect from the side that has spent most of the war defending prepared positions against frontal assault.
This is the heart of why the map deceives. Russia is buying its seventy metres a day with a casualty stream that, by some Western counts, has at moments exceeded a thousand men a day. That is sustainable only as long as Russia can keep generating manpower, and the demographic and financial cost of doing so is precisely where the war on the ground connects to the war over money. The grinding character of it all is something we examined in our look at how Europe's ammunition gap has shaped the tempo, and at how North Korean shells have been pulled in to feed Russian guns, a clear sign that even the world's largest artillery park has had to look abroad to keep firing.
If the human ledger favours Ukraine, the economic ledger is more genuinely two-sided, and it is here that the case for Russian endurance is strongest. Russia entered the war as a roughly ten-trillion-dollar-a-year economy with deep reserves, a large hydrocarbon export base, and a state apparatus willing to mobilise the entire system around the war. Ukraine entered it as a far smaller economy that has since had its industry, energy grid, and population base hammered. The fact that Ukraine's economy functions at all in 2026 is itself remarkable, but it functions on a foreign-financed life-support that Russia does not need and Ukraine cannot escape.
| Macroeconomic picture, 2026 | Russia | Ukraine |
|---|---|---|
| GDP growth (2026 forecast) | ~1.0% (IMF), down from 4%+ in 2023–24 | ~1.2%–2.5% (World Bank to EBRD; IMF ~2%) |
| Inflation | ~5.5%, held down by a double-digit key rate | ~6%–7.4%, easing |
| Budget balance | Deficit, officially ~1.6% of GDP, widening | Deficit ~19% of GDP, foreign-financed |
| Defence spending | 12.93tn roubles (~$161.6bn); first cut (−4% y/y) since 2022 | Majority of own revenue; combat funded by allies |
| External dependence | Oil and gas revenue under sanctions pressure | ~$51bn allied disbursement expected in 2026 |
Read those two columns carefully, because they tell opposite stories that lead to the same place. Russia's economy is large and self-financing but stalling. Growth has collapsed from above four percent in 2023 and 2024 to around one percent, inflation is being suppressed only by a punishingly high interest rate that is itself strangling civilian activity, and for the first time since the full-scale invasion the Kremlin has actually announced a reduction in nominal defence funding, cutting national defence spending by roughly four percent year-on-year for 2026. Sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil that took effect in late 2025, combined with a widening discount on Urals crude that reached nearly thirty dollars a barrel below Brent, have eaten into the oil revenue that underwrites the whole enterprise. Russia is not collapsing, a point we made at length in our assessment of why, three years on, Russia's war economy is still running. But it is grinding down, and a war economy that has to cut its own defence budget is signalling something about its limits.
Ukraine's economy is the mirror image. It is small, battered, and running a budget deficit of around nineteen percent of GDP, a figure that would be catastrophic for any normal state. But it is held up by committed external financing of more than one hundred and ten billion euros across 2026 and 2027, with something like fifty-one billion dollars of allied disbursement expected in 2026 alone. On that foundation, and to the genuine surprise of many forecasters, Ukraine has maintained macroeconomic stability, brought inflation down toward six or seven percent, and is expected to post modest positive growth. The vulnerability is obvious and total. Ukraine's solvency is a political decision made in Washington, Brussels, and Berlin, not an economic fact generated in Kyiv. The reconstruction bill, estimated at close to five hundred and eighty-eight billion dollars over the coming decade, roughly three times the country's annual output, only deepens that dependence.
Put the three ledgers together and a clear, uncomfortable answer emerges. Ukraine is not winning the war in the sense of pushing Russia back and reclaiming its territory, and there is no realistic near-term path by which it does so. But Russia is not winning either, in any sense that justifies what it is paying. Russia is achieving a slow territorial creep at a human and economic cost that is bleeding its manpower, draining its reserves, and forcing it to trim the very defence budget that sustains the offensive. Ukraine, for its part, is succeeding at the only thing an outmatched defender can realistically aim for in an attritional war, which is to make the aggressor's victory so slow and so expensive that it stops being worth the price, while keeping its own state and economy functioning on allied support.
The most accurate description, then, is not victory or defeat but a grinding, costly stalemate that currently favours neither side decisively and whose outcome turns on two variables outside the trenches entirely. The first is whether Russia's economy and manpower reserves give out before Ukraine's will to fight does. The second, and arguably the more decisive, is whether Western financing and weapons keep flowing, because the moment that support wavers, the entire equation tilts. We explored that dependency directly in our analysis of whether, even with talk of the fighting easing, countries will keep arming, and the conclusion there applies with full force here.
For procurement officers and defence trading firms, the strategic ambiguity is itself the planning signal, and it points in one direction. A war that is neither won nor lost, that grinds on with no decisive end in sight, is the single most reliable generator of sustained, structural demand the defence market has. It is precisely this dynamic that has made the current period, as we argued, the defence industry's best decade since the Cold War, and it is the same dynamic that underpins our market projections through 2030.
The specific lessons are the ones attrition always teaches, and this war has taught them in their starkest form. Magazine depth beats peak capability. The side that can keep its guns fed, its drones flying, and its losses replaced outlasts the side with the more impressive single platform, which is why munitions, interceptors, counter-drone systems, and the unglamorous consumables of war are where durable demand concentrates. Supply-chain resilience is not a luxury but the core competency, because a war of this length punishes any buyer dependent on a single source, as Russia discovered when it had to reach to North Korea for shells. And speed of compliant delivery is worth more than marginal product superiority, because in a conflict that consumes inventory faster than anyone forecast, the firm that can source quickly and within the rules is the firm that gets the order. The Russia and Ukraine war has become the defining case study in what a long, indecisive conflict does to the global arms trade, and the answer, for those positioned to supply it, is that it sustains demand for far longer than any decisive victory ever would.