Putin's Army In Ukraine Set An Anti-record That Had Been Held For 100 Years
- 28.01.2026, 14:57
The rate of advancement of the occupiers is 15 meters per day.
The pace of the Russian army's advance in Ukraine has become the slowest in more than 100 years of modern warfare history, experts from the Washington-based Center for Strategy and International Studies (CSIS) wrote in their annual report, noted the The Moscow Times.
At the cost of huge losses, which reached an average of 35,000 men a month, Russian General Staff generals were able to take control of 0.8 percent of Ukraine's territory in the past year At the same time, in key areas, the Russian offensive was even slower than the operations of World War I, which was famous for protracted trench fighting without moving the front line.
The offensive on Chasov Yar, which began in February 2024, is advancing at a rate of 15 meters per day, CSIS calculates: in less than two years, the army has passed only 10 kilometers and could not completely take control of the city.
The offensive on Kupyansk, which began in November 2024, was moving at a rate of 23 meters per day. The operation to capture Pokrovsk, which began in February 2024, after the bloody fighting for Avdeevka, is advancing at a rate of 70 meters per day, CSIS calculated. Having covered 50 km in 2 years, Russian troops now control "most of the city," the center's experts point out.
For comparison, during the Battle of the Somme, which is considered one of the bloodiest battles of World War I, the French army moved at a rate of 80 meters per day. And in the Battle of Belleau Wood in 1918, when the American infantrymen stopped the German offensive, the speed of advance was 410 meters per day.
The insignificant frontal gains were given to Russia at the cost of losses that no other army in the world since the Second World War, emphasizes CSIS: from February 2022 to December 2025, the troops lost 1.2 million people, including up to 325 thousand - killed. The center estimates the losses of the AFU at about 600 thousand people, including 140 thousand killed.
The Russian army has shown itself to be "weak," the report says: at the end of the last two years of the campaign, it has almost nothing to show as new territorial gains.
In the first 5 weeks of the invasion, Russian troops took control of 115 thousand square kilometers of Ukrainian territory. But already in April 2022, 35 thousand square kilometers were lost, and by November the AFU had recaptured a total of 75 thousand square kilometers. Now the Russian army controls 120 thousand square kilometers in Ukraine, or about 20% of its territory (including Crimea, "DNR" and "LNR", which were under Moscow's control before the invasion). Directly during the "SWO" troops seized 75 thousand square kilometers, point out the SSIS.
For 1394 days of the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army reached Berlin, the Russian army - barely reached Pokrovsk, located 500 km from Kiev. These results, the center's experts write, "fall far short of the goals of the campaign," which state propaganda claimed would end with the fall of Kiev in three days.
The Russian strategy, however, is a war of attrition, the SSIS says: the Kremlin is willing to accept high casualties in the hope of eventually overwhelming the Ukrainian army and society.