Russia's strategy of trying to advance on the front and strike powerful blows at Ukraine's critical infrastructure, seeking to freeze people, is not working.
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This is written by BILD military columnist Julian Röpke.
“The fact is that Putin is realizing his goal – to drive all Ukrainians into darkness and cold. In previous years, he has already tried to do this, but now his army is succeeding. Russia is producing and importing more and more missiles, cruise missiles and terrorist drones, while Ukraine has almost completely used up all its Western-made air defense missiles and, due to the halt in supplies from the US, is almost not receiving new ones,” the columnist notes, adding that despite this, Ukraine is holding on, and its citizens are not taking to the streets with protests and demands to agree to the aggressor country's conditions.
Analyzing the situation at the front, Röpke writes that the successes of the Russian occupation army “remain limited” – over the past two weeks, the invaders managed to occupy three small villages in the Zaporizhia region.
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“The front in the Donetsk region, on the contrary, remains relatively stable, and in the Kharkiv region, the Russian General Staff has been inventing successes around the front-line city of Kupyansk for several weeks now – a propaganda lie that is regularly exposed by Ukrainian soldiers, who confirm with their own videos that the settlements allegedly captured by Russia are still under Ukrainian control,” he notes.
Röpke states that towards the end of the fourth year of the large-scale aggression launched by Russia in February 2022, the offensive of the Russian army “has largely stalled.” Comparing the pace of the Russian advance, the columnist writes that in January 2026 they managed to capture 250 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, and in December and November of last year, 445 and 505 square kilometers were occupied, respectively.
“The numbers show: no matter how cruel Russia acts, Putin cannot break Ukraine’s will to resist and its front line,” the journalist adds.
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Recall that NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte recently announced figures according to which every square kilometer of captured Ukrainian land last year cost Russia 93 eliminated soldiers.
Photo from DTEK's social media page