FROM LATE 2023 UNTIL LATE 2025, I got a jittery feeling every time I pushed back against the prevailing narrative of Ukraine’s inevitable defeat. That line was quite common in mainstream punditry, but most assiduously promoted by Donald Trump and his worshipers, who assured us that Ukraine doesn’t “have any cards” and in any case Russia always wins its wars. What if I was just engaging in wishful thinking and cherry-picking the facts to fit my own preferred narrative of Ukrainian resilience?
Well, here we are in the spring of 2026, and no one (except Vladimir Putin, still trapped in a news bubble of his own making) is talking about Ukrainian defeat anymore. We’re seeing more and more headlines like “How Ukraine Turned the Tide Against Russia” and “Shifting Momentum in the Russia-Ukraine War.” Ukraine is even having remarkable successes in operations that could set the stage for the recapture of Crimea, which even most Ukraine sympathizers, myself included, only recently regarded as an impossible fantasy.
In recent weeks, the Russian “land bridge” to Crimea—including the 300-mile-long “Novorossiya” highway—has become what observers have called a “deathtrap” for trucks carrying essential deliveries. In May alone, 125 trucks have been incinerated, mostly with cutting-edge drones like the artificial intelligence-assisted Hornet. (In addition to striking at vehicles, the drones have also been mining the highway from the air.) While traffic still goes through, the Ukrainians are likely hoping that the “highway to hell” becomes dangerous enough that truckers will refuse to undertake such transport. The effect is not only to impose a partial blockade on Crimea itself, causing severe shortages of gasoline and other essential goods on the occupied peninsula (and threatening to kill the upcoming tourist season); it is also to choke off a vital supply route for Russian troops in southern Ukraine. Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has announced a “‘logistics lockdown’ for the Russian army.”
Drone warfare also includes regular and devastating strikes at oil refineries and other military-related infrastructure, often deep inside Russia—what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has wryly called “long-range sanctions” against Russia’s energy sector. But that’s not the only area where Ukraine is reversing the narrative of defeat. Expatriate Russian political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov, an honorary professor at University College London, noted in a YouTube interview that since late 2024, the Russian army had been very advancing very slowly and at tremendous human cost, but still gaining ground—“perhaps three feet a day, but steadily and along nearly the entire line of contact.” For the last three months or so, this has not been the case. Russian troops are still attacking, but generally failing to make any gains, and the Ukrainian counteroffensive is succeeding in recapturing more territory. Virtually everyone now acknowledges that the Russian ground offensive in Ukraine is stalled.
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A notable exception, of course, is Putin, who asserted only last week that “this situation” (a delicate euphemism for the war) is “nearing its conclusion” and then explained that his claim was based on “an analysis of what is happening on the battlefield”: “Our troops are advancing in every direction. Everyone can see it, every blessed day.”
Even many of Russia’s hawkish “milbloggers” reacted with extreme skepticism. Expatriate Russian journalist and YouTuber Michael Nacke says that there is now “a whole constellation of fairly popular [pro-war bloggers] who explain at some length why Russia isn’t winning, no matter what Putin may say.” Putin, in fact, may be genuinely deluded. The Institute for the Study of War suggests, on the basis of leaked documents from the Russian Ministry of Defense, that his optimism likely stems from “a false perception of the Russian military’s successes in Ukraine based on heavily exaggerated maps from the Russian high military command.” It’s Potemkin villages all over again.
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UKRAINE’S ABILITY TO REGAIN THE MOMENTUM has been especially impressive given the extremely complicated environment in which it has had to operate since January 2025—namely, the extremely tenuous state of its partnership with the United States, including interruptions in arms deliveries and even in vital intelligence-sharing. The Trump administration’s dubious “peacemaking” amounted to de facto pressure on Ukraine to acquiesce to a bad deal that would have allowed Russia to keep the territories it had unlawfully seized.
In large part, Ukrainian success has been due to its cutting-edge drone program—and the incredible ingenuity, creativity, and entrepreneurship that have made it a leader in the field. (Corruption in Ukraine is unquestionably a real problem, but the fact remains that it’s Russia’s drone program that has been plagued and set back by cronyism and corruption.) Ukraine’s superior flexibility may also account for its recent successes in seizing the initiative on the ground: British warfare researcher Jack Watling credits reforms in the Ukrainian military that have allowed more troop rotation and improved the quality of basic training.
Meanwhile, Russia continues to struggle with manpower problems: According to recent Western intelligence reports, it is now losing more people than it’s able to recruit, despite major carrot-and-stick incentives. (Among the carrots: Putin has just signed a law offering new recruits and their spouses up to 10 million rubles, or $140,000, in debt forgiveness. Among the sticks: Conscripts are routinely pressured into “volunteering” to fight in Ukraine as contract soldiers.) The prospect of mobilization, which caused major discontent—and a wave of emigration—when it was tried in 2022 looms again. And Bloomberg reports that Russian finance officials are telling Putin the war has become economically unsustainable.
Ukraine supporters, including Pastukhov and Watling, caution about overconfidence and premature optimism. The fortunes of war could change again, especially if Russia manages to close the drone gap and/or get better at intercepting Ukrainian drones. (Some Ukrainian commanders, and Western experts, believe that Ukraine now has a unique but relatively short window—perhaps six months—to achieve a genuine and lasting breakthrough.)
Russia’s losses are also likely to make the Kremlin more determined to try to bring Kyiv to its knees by raining terror on Ukrainian urban centers—as Russian forces did in the early morning hours on Tuesday, unleashing 73 ballistic missiles and 656 drones on Kyiv, Kharkiv, and several other cities. While Ukrainian air defenses intercepted the vast majority of these projectiles, enough of them got through to kill at least seventeen people and injure about a hundred. And the situation may get more dire, since Ukrainian air defense missile stocks are depleting—and for some systems, the United States is the only source of resupply, with Europeans footing the bill. Zelensky has already appealed to the Trump administration and to Congress for new missile deliveries; but, with U.S. missile stocks also down because of the war in Iran, the likelihood of delivery is even lower than it was last year.
This raises another question: Where is the Trump administration right now, and where is Trump himself, regarding Russia and Ukraine? Secretary of State Marco Rubio has recently more or less admitted that the administration’s peacemaking effort has been a bust, saying that “there are no such talks occurring at this time” and that “not a lot of progress was being made” in recent months. Trump, who has a lot of other things on his mind, has been silent on Russia and Ukraine. And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth goes back and forth between seething about the Biden administration giving Ukraine too much money and praising Ukrainian courage and European aid to Ukraine. Most recently, at least, Hegseth asserted that the United States would do what it could to ensure Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. Whether this seeming pledge means anything is another matter.
Against all the odds, Ukraine is, in fact, winning right now. It would be tragic, and grimly ironic, if this historic opportunity was squandered because the United States has become at best an unreliable ally in Ukraine’s defense, and at worst an obstacle more than a partner.
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