Western analysts say the monthly pace of Russia’s war gains has fallen below a third of its rate of advance from November.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, wrote on Sunday that it found Russia had seized 203 square kilometers, or 78 square miles, of Ukrainian territory in March.
That’s compared to its November assessment that Russia gained about 242 square miles that month. At the time, Moscow had pushed hard on the eastern front by relentlessly deploying troops in small ground assaults to exhaust Ukrainian munitions and drones.
The UK’s Defense Ministry reported an even steeper decline from that period — saying on Saturday that the total rate of advance had dropped to a fifth of November’s pace.
In an intelligence update, it wrote that it believed Russia had seized an additional 55 square miles in March, compared to about 281 square miles in November.
“Russia’s rate of advance has dropped month by month since November 2024, when its forces seized more than 700 sq km,” the update said.
The defense ministry didn’t say how it arrived at its assessment, and its intelligence updates have regularly relied on statistics and figures from the Ukrainian government.
Meanwhile, the ISW said it used geolocated footage to make its own comparison.
Neither addressed the factor of winter affecting the battlefield over the last few months, since the weather typically introduces logistics and terrain difficulties that reduce the intensity of fighting.
Both analyses partially credited the slowdown to Ukraine’s recent counterattacks, particularly around Toretsk and Pokrovsk — a key town in the central Donetsk region that provides supply routes to other Ukrainian positions in the east.
The attacks have reversed some of Russia’s gains from last year. In early 2025, Toretsk was considered to be largely under Russian control. Still, fighting has since returned to the city as Ukrainian troops pushed into Russian flanks in an attempt to pincer Moscow’s northern position there.
The UK Defense Ministry said Russia’s limited advances in March mostly occurred in the same region — Donetsk — though it added that Moscow “did not improve its operational position” in the area.
Moscow’s gains on the eastern front have notably come at great human cost. Ukrainian and Western estimates say an average of up to 1,500 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded every day when the fighting was fiercest in the fall.
Its ground assault tactic has worked somewhat, with Russia gaining an estimated 1,600 square miles of Ukrainian territory in 2024. But Ukraine said it’s come at the cost of some 427,000 soldiers wounded or killed.
That strategy has contributed to a rising narrative in Ukraine and Europe that victory for Kyiv stems from outlasting Russia’s heavy expenditure of personnel and weapons. The Kremlin has to pay families of its fallen and wounded troops while also forking out large bonuses to hire thousands of new replacement soldiers.
Russia’s defense ministry did not respond to a comment request sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
