Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started with an eruption of firepower last winter, as its forces poured across the border and launched a multipronged assault. In late summer Ukraine launched a lightning offensive of its own, routing Russian troops from the northeast.
Now, 10 months into the war, the tempo of the fighting has has been slower for both sides. Even as Russian forces claimed gains on Monday around the eastern city of Bakhmut, which it has been trying for months to seize, there was little sign that dug-in Ukrainian forces would relinquish the city any time soon.
“We are moving forward little by little, step by step,” Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Hanna Maliar, said on Sunday in a post on the Telegram social messaging app. While she was referring to fighting in the eastern area known as Donbas, her assessment could be applied to the conflict as a whole.
As the one-year mark of the war approaches, less territory is changing hands. Autumn rains turned ground into mud, a challenge for fighting vehicles. But both sides have signaled an intention to carry out new offensives, not least Ukraine, which seeks to recapture all of the territory Russia has seized since 2014.
Military experts say that several factors explain the slower pace and seemingly smaller gains. Among them are the relative density of Russian forces in Donbas; the natural barrier posed by the Dnipro River in the south of the country, which has impeded Ukraine’s advance; the need by Ukraine to conserve and reconstitute its forces after a series of battles; and the winter weather, which has posed difficulties for both sides.
“It felt going into the winter that the Russian military was the most vulnerable and the job of the Ukrainian military was to press the Russian military, to prevent force reconstitution, to maintain the initiative heading into the winter and the spring and then conduct an offensive at the time of their choosing,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Va. “That’s not how things have played out.”
He said that Russian forces have imposed on Ukraine a “difficult, grinding fight” around two cities in Donbas: Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region, and around Kreminna in the Luhansk region. The regional governor of Luhansk, Serhiy Haidai, told Ukrainian television on Sunday that weather was posing a challenge to both sides, with heavy equipment getting stuck.
“In a day or two, it will freeze seriously, and it will be possible to drive normally without worrying about the fact that a tank or other equipment might get stuck,” he said. “I hope that the advantage will be on our side.”
Russian forces are still inflicting great pain on Ukrainians, unleashing waves of missiles and exploding drones aimed at crippling the country’s energy infrastructure. While President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a brief cease-fire over the weekend to observe Orthodox Christmas, there was little change in the scale of fighting. Ukraine, too, has delivered significant blows, including a strike on a Russian military barracks in Donetsk over the New Year holiday that Moscow acknowledged killed at least 89 Russian soldiers, although Ukraine claimed the toll was in the hundreds.
Ukrainian officials have warned that Russia might sharply escalate the war in a winter offensive. And the new armored vehicles Western allies offered to Ukraine last week signaled they were gearing up for another bloody year of fighting, as Ukraine seeks to dislodge dug-in Russian forces.
On Sunday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, acknowledged that “the situation on the frontline has not changed significantly in the first week of the year.” In his nightly address, he stressed the need for “resilience.”
