Ukrainian forces have been substantially slowing Russia’s advance and are seeing fresh battlefield gains not achieved in years, warfare experts said.
“The Ukrainians are gaining more ground,” George Barros, a conflict analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington DC-based think tank, told Business Insider.
“Notably, in February, the Ukrainians liberated more territory in the theater than the Russians seized,” he said.
“The last time we had seen Ukrainian forces make more ground than the Russian forces seized was in 2023” during its large but limited counteroffensive, he said. “This is new.”
Ukraine’s gains are not sweeping, but they mark a shift. The progress has been concentrated in specific areas, not across the whole front line, where Russia has continued to capture more territory in recent months. But Ukraine has also been able to slow Russia’s rate of advance, ISW told BI.
“It’s not accidental. It’s not circumstantial. There are reasons for it,” Barros said, attributing the progress to planning and the degradation of defenses to set the stage for successful attacks.
Ukrainian military officials have reported gains in the last two months, particularly around Oleksandrivka, a settlement in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region where Ukraine launched a counteroffensive push in January.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on March 17 that over the 30 days prior, Ukrainian forces had retaken more territory than Russia’s army had captured. He said earlier that Ukraine had retaken more than 177 square miles this year.
Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said later last month that his forces had liberated more than 185 square miles in the Oleksandrivka direction alone.
ISW’s Geospatial Intelligence team told Business Insider that Ukrainian forces had made net gains of more than 38 square miles in specific assessed sectors between December 1 and March 25.
That number, the team explained, “reflects isolated smaller operational areas of the frontline that Ukraine has counterattacked and made gains in within the time period, most significantly in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast area.”
Last year, Ukraine liberated territory, such as in the strategic city of Kupiansk, but lost more ground in other areas. “The amount of retaken Ukrainian territory was negative,” an ISW spokesperson shared. Across the entire front line, Russia seized a total of more than 1,891 square miles last year, including about 27 square miles assessed as infiltrations rather than fully controlled territory.
And while Russia has still taken much more territory in total than Ukraine has this year, Ukraine has increased its rate of gains while slowing Russia’s/
ISW said that from December 1 last year until March 25 of this year, Russian forces seized more than 330 square miles, more than 20 square miles of which were assessed as infiltrations.
That’s more than Ukraine in the same period, but “those numbers do not tell the full story,” an ISW spokesperson told Business Insider.
Russia’s daily rate of territory gain is just over one square mile a day, compared to over five square miles a day last year. Ukraine has more momentum, increasing its rate of daily gains by more than 1.8 square miles a day.
ISW said in an assessment last month that “Ukrainian forces have recently made the most significant gains on the battlefield since Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk Oblast in August 2024 and liberated the most territory in Ukraine itself since the 2023 counteroffensive.”
ISW figures are based on assessments of publicly available information, Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting, commercial satellite imagery, and other geospatial data.
The think tank said on Tuesday that Ukraine’s actions were likely impeding Russian efforts to advance, and that Ukrainian forces still had momentum in multiple areas.
Ukraine has become better at planning and exploiting
Barros attributed Ukraine’s gains to its “maturing in their operational planning.” He said Ukraine was now “demonstrating a more sophisticated and a deeper capability for operational planning and for preparing the battlefield to set the condition for exploits and then executing those exploits.”
Ukraine notably made its Delta system — an online battlespace management system that lets Ukraine view and share real-time battlefield data and make decisions — mandatory for all combat units.
That has helped a “maturation of command” that allows Ukraine to think beyond defeating the Russian forces immediately in front of it and also think “about the deeper depths of the battlefield and how do we degrade that,” Barros said.
“So really, this maturation of the command is working.” He said the Delta system is having effects. “These things take time, but it’s happening. And these reforms are what are slowly but surely enabling some of these Ukrainian successes that we’re seeing reported out on the day-to-day now.”
Barros said that Ukraine has also been intensifying its intermediate-range strikes to hit Russia’s positions and logistics that support its front-line forces. Doing that from late last year has been “degrading the Russian forces in the south,” he said.
He said the progress Ukraine made across February and March had been months in the making, with planning starting in late 2025.
Ukraine has also ramped up its attacks on Russian air defense systems. Barros said that meant the area Ukraine was attacking into “had already been softened and weakened and degraded at depth for a couple of months ahead of the February ground attacks.”
He said Ukraine’s forces were also able to achieve more tactical dominance with drones, using them in areas where they had degraded Russian forces, including targeting Russia’s Center for Advanced Unmanned Technologies’ “Rubicon,” a military unit focused on drone warfare.
While some observers have credited decreased Russian access to Starlink, the satellite internet provided by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for Ukraine’s battlefield gains, Barros said that narrative is “oversimplified.”
He said it was an “unexpected accelerator that further catalyzed Ukrainian success on this campaign,” but argued Ukraine would have likely still made these gains without it.
“In fact, the Ukrainians were planning to do this. They were preparing to do this for months,” he said. “The Starlink thing was sort of just a happy accelerant that further catalyzed the success in a very convenient and good way, but Starlink actually wasn’t the driver of this.”
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