Russian troops have begun to lose ground in the war against Ukraine. Recently, the nature of the fighting has been gradually changing, but the high intensity of the fighting remains.
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The spring offensive of Russian troops has effectively stopped, and personnel losses remain very high, according to an article in The Economist.
As of mid-May 2026, between 280,000 and 518,000 Russian soldiers had been killed. Total losses, including wounded, range from 1.1 to 1.5 million people.
This means that about 3 percent of the pre-war male population of Russia of draft age were killed or wounded, the journalists of the publication note.
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The battlefield is complicated by the active use of Ukrainian drones, which strike targets far beyond the contact line. This makes it difficult to redeploy Russian units.
Also, for the first time since October 2023, the Russian army has suffered small but significant territorial losses — this year it has captured about 220 square kilometers, which is only 0.04 percent of Ukraine's territory. At the same time, Ukrainian forces have recaptured about 189 square kilometers over the past month.
As we will recall, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov recently stated that Moscow considers the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from Donbas and other territories that Russia considers its own to be a prerequisite for the start of peace talks. However, the Kremlin's demands to hand over all of Donbas to it do not correspond to the real situation on the front.
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