Hope and Determination on Ukraine’s Front Lines

(Photo Illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)

THIS MONTH, AMONG THE SLAG HEAPS, lush tree lines, and industrial cities of Donbas, I witnessed firsthand how Ukraine is getting closer to winning, but could still lose, its existential war against Russia.

Summer has arrived in the Donetsk region, and this war-scarred land, which the Trump administration thought it could convince Kyiv to hand over into Russian occupation in exchange for a vague promise of peace, is still nowhere near being taken by Russian forces.

But unlike this time last year and the year before, when Russia’s spring offensive caused at least part of the Ukrainian defense to buckle and fall back chaotically, this time, the front is largely stable.

In a village outside the key fortress city of Sloviansk, entangled from all directions by the fiber optic cables of Ukrainian and Russian drones, I saw a scene that explains a big part of the reason for this stabilization. An elite Ukrainian drone team was hunting Russian soldiers day and night as they tried to infiltrate through the kill zone toward Ukrainian positions.

The team was led by a young pilot, a former soccer player called Roman, who often worked for weeks at a time on positions without the need to rest. Weaving between pine trees, he flies his weapon in the direction of Russian soldiers spotted by the unit’s reconnaissance drones, zeroes in on his targets through his first-person view goggles, and crashes into them to end their journeys into Ukraine. The camera feed cuts out just before the explosion.

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Baby-faced and covered in hipster tattoos, 24-year-old Roman stopped counting his kills somewhere in the hundreds. Most of them he achieved while wearing sweatpants and sliders from the relative comfort of his front-line dugout.

War fatigue is a foreign concept to the young ace, who hails from the destroyed and now occupied city of Sievierodonetsk, just thirty miles from where he now fights.

“For sure it motivates me to be working so close to my home, and I am sure that after this is all over, the young generation will rebuild everything,” he told me. “But for now, after so many years at war, one becomes like a robot, you just work and work.”

Roman’s perspective seems to be widely shared. In the twenty-four hours I spent with the drone teams, the supply of drones, the sense of urgency even on the mostly static front lines, and the competition among units and pilots were all so great that several teams would often compete to try and reach the same Russian soldier first. This went on all day and all night without a moment’s pause.

With time, the battlefield in Ukraine is becoming more and more saturated with drones that fly deeper and deeper behind the front line.

Both sides continue to try to scale up and improve their drone capabilities, but Russia is still bound by a political imperative from the very top to try to assault and take territory on a daily basis, even in conditions where the payoff is diminishing and the cost is rising.

Ukraine, on the defensive, is also boosted by a qualitative edge: better, more motivated drone pilots, and access to Western technology, most crucially Starlink.

In the current conditions, any attempt at a mechanized assault is dead on arrival, and even Russia’s attempts to infiltrate with small groups of infantry through the front line are achieving less and less.

Last month, Ukrainian forces took back more territory than they lost for the first time since the 2023 counteroffensives, according to the independent mapping and analytics group Deep State.

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In another dugout of Roman’s same unit, an American-designed Hornet drone, built by the secretive company of Google co-founder Eric Schmidt, was flying much farther, using an unjammable Starlink internet connection to prowl the skies above Russian logistics routes that just a few months ago were considered safe. With the rise of the Hornet and its relatives in the so-called “middle strike” range, Ukraine has wrought havoc on Russian supply lines in recent months, forcing officials in the occupied territories to close traffic along key highways.

Beyond that, the added pressure on Russia caused by Ukraine’s deep strike campaign against military targets, infrastructure, and energy infrastructure across European Russia and beyond is putting even more pressure on Vladimir Putin.

If the tide is turning in the war, and it may be, but it may turn again, it’s not because of one-off spectacular achievements or some game-changing new technology. The differences made by technological improvements and new capabilities matter when they can be reproduced at scale, because this is still, first and foremost, a war of attrition, where the most important factor remains the battlefield.

For Ukraine, the path to victory is paved by building the most rock-solid defense possible, by making the cost of every mile taken by Russian forces unsustainably high, and thereby forcing Putin to overextend militarily, demographically, economically, and possibly politically.

That would require a total-war footing, which would have to begin with a mass forced mobilization, something the Russian dictator has done everything to avoid for over three years of war.

The alternative, the decision that Ukraine is waiting for, is eventually to wind Russia’s war down and accept a ceasefire with no victory parade, no new territories, and a strong, democratic, and independent Ukraine intact.

Here is Ukraine’s theory of victory: Breaking Moscow’s conviction and ability to break Ukraine, kinetically and psychologically, now and in the future.

But Putin has his own theory of victory.

More than the “human wave” attacks themselves, the core of Russia’s strategy remains the destruction and degradation of Ukraine’s outnumbered and overstretched military. For the last three years of war, Ukraine’s main concern has been manpower, specifically, the struggle to cover hundreds of miles of front line with combat-effective infantry.

Now, infantry losses are down, because for many brigades, there are little to no infantry left. Instead, Russia’s main targets are those same Ukrainian drone teams, and there is still plenty of firepower to hit them with.

Further south from the Donbas “fortress belt” lies Dobropillia, once a quiet, leafy mining city that was alive and buzzing as recently as last summer. Here, failing to take the city in a head-on assault, Russia has essentially besieged the city from a distance, choking logistics with drones of their own while flattening the urban area with glide bombs, each often carrying over half a ton of explosives.

Hunched over a table, twitching as he flicked a laser pointer at a huge map of the area, Ukrainian drone battalion commander Valentyn ranted to me about how difficult it is to replace his battlefield losses. Those of his men that had been with him since the beginning were tired, but resolved to keep fighting for as long as necessary. The new forcefully-mobilized draftees, drawn from a shrinking and increasingly unmotivated pool of eligible Ukrainian men, were a different story.

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Vadym, another ace pilot, with whom we had embedded in Dobropillia, spoke of no longer understanding any life other than one spent at war.

“I have neither a girlfriend, nor a wife, nor a family. I have nothing,” he told me, “My family is my guys, my brothers.”

He also told me: “War with Russia has gone on for hundreds of years, just in different forms, and it won’t end anytime soon. We can be here on the front line or in the rear, but either way, the war will continue. It is our decision to either be part of it or sit on the sidelines.”

A week after my conversation with Vadym, that same position in Dobropillia was struck by a Russian glide bomb. He had rotated out of there a few days earlier. His replacements on the shift change weren’t so lucky.

This year, the war of attrition is shifting to one of exhaustion.

The current battlefield dynamic is the most favorable as it has been for Ukraine for years, and by the end of 2026, Moscow will be almost certainly pushed into making ever more unpleasant decisions.

But for those of Ukraine’s partners who might now think that the end is in sight, that achieving peace is just a matter of time, overlooking the people that make it happen on the ground is a grave mistake.

The huge effort made day in, day out in Ukraine to hold back the Russian war machine is not a simple function of money and weapons delivered to Kyiv. Survival, then victory, is and will always be first and foremost the product of the Ukrainian people.

Those people are in short supply, physically and mentally exhausted, but continuing with the knowledge that letting go still means annihilation.

In a war that has now outlasted the Eastern Front of World War II in duration, positive trends of a few months matter little in the grand scheme of things.

Ukraine’s recent successes show a clear path forward to a secure peace. But they should not open the door for complacency.

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Francis Farrell is a senior reporter at the Kyiv Independent, a journalist-owned, reader supported newspaper committed to independent, on-the-ground reporting on Ukrainian news.