By Simplicius, Substack, 4/25/26
We return back to the Ukraine war with a continuation of the ongoing series spanning the last few premium articles which covered broader battlefield evolutions rather than tactical developments. The reason for the continued broader look is that the front has continued to be stagnant, tactically-speaking, and there are not enough newsworthy developments to justify the usual indepth coverage, as it would simply bore most readers to read about a few meters of nameless territory being captured, and the like.
But first, let us review what ‘stagnant’ may possibly mean and give a brief frontline update. Here is a recent Russian control graph showing most of March being fairly low, but with April again beginning to show spikes and implying a return to higher Russian advancement and overall activity on the front:
Much of Russia’s recent activity has come in unexpected quarters, particularly in the Sumy and Kharkov regions:
This month of april 2026, Russia seized 117km2, of which 55% are located on the UKR-RUS 🇺🇦🇷🇺 border Since the start of the year, Russian northern corps expanded its infiltrations in Sumy and Kharkiv regions This strategy is forcing Ukraine to defend the border 🧵THREAD🧵1/15⬇️
As the analyst states above: “The strategy is forcing Ukraine to defend the border”, and there have been recent reports of Ukraine sending reserves from other fronts to Sumy where Russia has been showing increased activity and territorial gains.
They provide a pro-Ukrainian version of Russia’s recent territorial gains:
As stated previously, one of the things these advancements on the border buffer zones does tell us is that Russia appears to not view the situation as critical, but continues to invest in the long-term development of the war by stretching Ukrainian forces in non-critical areas.
If Russia was focused merely on wrapping up the conflict as soon as possible, it would bolster its forces in the key regions that Putin has outlined as the main objectives, i.e. around Donbass. The fact that forces continue to be deployed and committed to these ‘hinterland’ zones means Russia is signaling it is in no rush, and intends to prosecute the conflict step by step by continuing the boa constrictor ‘squeezing’ strategy against Ukraine.
There has been a lot of buzz recently about Ukraine doing “better than ever”, and Russia facing various imminent collapses of both the economic and military sort. But Zelensky’s very vocal proclamations appear made to conceal more dire internal developments. For instance, Zelensky continues to press for an in-person meeting with Putin for some reason, while the Russian side no longer seems to care what Ukraine or the West wants, with Peskov stating multiple times recently that Russian-US talks are “on hold” and not currently happening.
Kyiv asks Turkey to arrange a meeting between Zelensky and Putin Ukraine is pushing for talks as soon as possible to give new momentum to diplomacy. “We have directly approached the Turks. But if such a meeting is organized in another capital — not Moscow or Minsk — we will take part,” said Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha.
Why is Ukraine so urgently pushing for direct talks with Putin to end the conflict, if Ukraine is doing so well as its backers suggest? And why is Russia so unbothered by it all, if Russia is the one supposedly seeing reversals on the battlefield and a collapsing economy?
At the same time, we can’t stick our heads in the sand and simply ignore the elephant in the room that Russia has in fact stopped advancing at “expected” rates, and the battlefield appears to have undergone an epochal shift to some new phase that analysts are only just scrambling to understand and explain to their readers.
As such, that is what I personally believe is happening. To summarize in a nutshell: it’s clear—as stated earlier—that Russia is not seeking a quick “out” or off-ramp, otherwise it would not have continued investing so many resources to backwater non-strategic regions like Sumy and even Chernigov. But then, why has Russia slowed down?
Let us examine a few of the key facts:
Firstly, the slowdown is not from some vast amount of attrition that has exhausted Russian forces. How do we know this? Because Russia is not even conducting assaults at scale, so there is little to even attrit. And this is part of the new epoch-shifting strategy which we will get to soon.
Secondly, Russia continues to destroy Ukrainian armor and materiel at greater disparities. If you follow this thread down, you’ll see over the past few weeks, even pro-Ukrainian bean-counters like Oryx have continued reporting that Ukraine is losing more hardware each day than Russia:
The trend of Ukraine suffering more equipment losses continues. I have noticed that almost always, a quarter of the Russian losses are only trucks, while Ukraine losses very few…
Russian and Ukrainian losses over the past 2 weeks, according to Jakub Janovsky, an account that updates Oryx. (Take it with a grain of salt) This has been a trend since the start of 2025. Even though Russia is on the offensive, Ukraine has been consistently losing more
The latest equipment loss sheet above shows 31 Russian losses versus 54 Ukrainian ones. The previous one showed 55 Russian equipment losses versus 166 Ukrainian ones—and this is from Oryx team member Jakub Janovsky.
Thirdly, even Ukrainian analytical sources have reported that Russian casualties are actually declining over the past year:
They write:
The situation could be considered “difficult but controlled” if a faster advance resulted in greater enemy losses, that is, if the two lines were moving synchronously. So it was in 2024. Since January 2025, the situation has begun to worsen, with Russians moving faster and dying less.
They are in effect admitting that Russian territorial captures are speeding up while Russian soldier deaths are slowing down. They do claim that recently Russian losses have spiked a bit again but it’s too small an interval for them to get “excited about” yet.
Thus we can infer Russia is not taking inordinate losses which have “exhausted” its forces. Further confirmation of this comes from a new interview with pro-Ukrainian ‘expert’ Michael Kofman. He states the following, via Grok summary:
‘Light motorized tactics are not a sign of armor shortages—Russia actually has more armored vehicles now than at the start of the war, and its ground forces have grown over 50% larger. The real constraints are elsewhere (e.g., air defense degradation and manpower allocation).”
So what is truly happening?
Here is my take:
Strategic Shift
I believe that Ukraine’s strategy has worked to an extent: that being, the total focus on attritional drone defense, layered networks of entrenchments and traps, etc. It has created enough costs for Russian assaults that Russian command has simply heavily backed off on doing larger-scale vehicular assaults. I’m not referring to truly gigantic assaults like were seen in the opening days of the Battle of Avdeevka in October 2023—those have long gone. But even smaller scale ones, where columns of light vehicles mixed with motorcycles attempted to forcibly storm positions.
At first, these lighter assaults worked decently well, though with a certain casualty percentage built in. But they grew costlier and costlier, with several high profile disastrous results where most of the assault columns were destroyed over the past year or so. Russian commanders who continued such assaults developed a stigma and their reputations quickly tarnished. This led to the eventual decrease, and presumably a decree from general staff that such assaults have to be greatly minimized for the time being.
Granted, this also happened to coincide during winter where it was already assumed Russian forces would become more dormant, so many people still continue to believe Russia is simply “waiting out the weather”. But at this point, nearly in May it’s clear that something shifted beyond simple inclement weather related delays as in previous years. This is why, I believe it can only be a strategic decision to shift things into a different type of attritional approach. It’s no surprise that this coincided with the sudden increase in activity on the border regions, where Russia again began to double-down on the ‘boa constrictor’ strategy.
Kofman, from the earlier interview, mentions this:
“Russia prioritizes Donetsk but spreads pressure broadly (including flatter terrain in Zaporizhzhia) to tie down Ukrainian forces. It avoids major urban assaults on large cities but uses proximity to attrit them via fire, potentially rendering them non-functional without occupation (e.g., threats to Kramatorsk/Slaviansk via fiber-optic drone advances).”
In fact, he touches on a specific important detail of the new strategy which we are now witnessing: the lack of full-on assaults on major cities.
As most know, Russia now has several key strategic Ukrainian cities almost fully surrounded: Konstantinovka, Novopavlovka, Krasny Lyman, Kupyansk, etc. In the past, this would have entailed immediate Wagner-like assaults through both the outskirts and into the city centers. But for some reason, Russia has now completely abandoned these previous “frontal assault” tactics. This, I believe, is part and parcel to the new strategic shift.
As Kofman notes above, Russia has shifted toward bombing and droning them with only the barest infiltration of troops. Part of the reason could also have to do with Ukraine’s total shift toward Russian manpower destruction via drones as an attritional strategy. This may have created costs for advancing that are too large for now, and Russia is being increasingly cautious, leveraging more its broader war strategy of disabling Ukraine economically and politically, rather than simply territorial conquest.
I believe this to be a relatively temporary shift for the time being until further opportunities open up. This could be either 1. a new advancement or technological leap that would mitigate the drone threat just enough to enable previously acceptable casualty rates—i.e. let’s say 10-20% instead of 30%, or something along those lines. Or 2. further economic, political, and attritional weakening of Ukraine and its statehood to wear its armed forces down further before re-activating more “large-scale” style offensives.
The escalations with the situation vis-a-vis Europe and the Baltics could have played into the calculus here: i.e. Russia may have deemed the threat of true kinetic confrontation to be getting so close that more resources had to be redirected from the Ukrainian effort toward the effort of bolstering the strategic “rear” in case a true conflict with NATO breaks out, or the Baltics have to be taught a lesson via “boots on ground”.
Moscow is obviously privy to telegraphed plans far ahead of time, so much of the provocations we ourselves are seeing are just the tip of the iceberg of the fuller long-term plans that European elites are hatching in terms of provocations. This is most often seen via the official dispatches from the Russian SVR, which this year alone has announced various provocative plans which include transferring nuclear weapons to Ukraine from UK-France.
To summarize this section: I believe that for now, Russia has chosen to “bide its time” and essentially switch to a lowered-intensity style strategy favoring more the “constrictor” approach, as well as economic destabilization, over predominantly territorial capture. Keep in mind, it’s never been one or the other: we were first here in identifying the constrictor strategy from the onset, over three years ago now. But there are fluctuations in how strongly Russia leverages one approach over the other, and I believe for now we have seen a swing the other way, wherein for the time being Russian command is “playing it safe” so as to husband its forces and not lose manpower unnecessarily.
There is of course always the possibility they see something we don’t in the criticality of the Ukrainian situation, and know that pushing super hard and losing troops is not necessary as Ukraine may be facing enough dire prospects as to make the current approach satisfactory in achieving military objectives—i.e. defeating Ukraine—over the long term….