Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
It hardly seemed like good news for Ukraine when Donald Trump won in November, but the reality has been worse than most expected. While pursuing a thus-far illusory Russia/Ukraine ceasefire, Trump labeled Volodymr Zelenskyy a “dictator,” embraced Vladimir Putin’s version of the war’s history, demanded that Ukraine hand over much of its mineral wealth, and castigated Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. Yet as the U.S. pulls back from its role as Ukraine’s central backer and Europe struggles to fill that void, the actual battlefield in Ukraine has not changed very much. Given the international headwinds, can this equilibrium last much longer? To get a picture of the military and political reality in Ukraine and what the rest of 2025 may bring, I called Michael Kofman, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, whom I have spoken with several times since Russia launched its full-scale invasion three years ago.
When we talked in October, Russia had the clear momentum on the battlefield, and it seemed like they might be on the verge of seizing at least one more significant city, Pokrovsk. But that hasn’t happened. They haven’t really made significant progress since then, except in Kursk, the small area of Russia Ukraine invaded. Can you explain why that is and give an overview of where things stand on the battlefield in Ukraine?
We’re talking about the past several months, not necessarily about how things are likely to evolve in the spring and summer. But if we go back to the fall, things are looking quite a bit more grim. Russian forces were making accelerated gains on the ground, and they were taking more territory each month from July until November. Then their momentum slowed down considerably over the course of the winter.
The first and foremost reason for this, from my point of view, was weather. That may seem a bit of an obvious point, but it did significantly affect Russian operations over the course of the winter. The second was a degree of exhaustion. The Russian military paid a high price for those gains we saw in the fall, both in terms of manpower and equipment. Russian losses in September and October were high, and they pulled units out to reconstitute or regroup.
The third, which I found most interesting from my field work in Ukraine, was that the Ukrainian military began to successfully adapt to how Russian forces were fighting. If we take a wider look at 2024, the Russian military had made a general trade-off in how they were prosecuting the fight. They were essentially grinding their way through the front, and pressing Ukrainian forces from their positions in a way that wasn’t going to achieve operationally significant breakthroughs for the Russian armed forces, but could make use of their fairly poor force quality and their significant advantage in manpower and matériel. On the ground, what that looked like in practice was essentially assault groups of small numbers of men, fire teams, light motorized attacks, alternating with mechanized attacks — but generally staying away from attempts at large-scale combat operations or big developments.
And Ukraine adjusted?
The Ukrainian military made significant investments in countering that approach. First, they very effectively mined themselves in, particularly employing drones to distance-mine. They also expanded drone units in an effort to lock down the front. This has been the main part of the Ukrainian effort — that is, expanding the drone part of the force, such that drones of various types are now responsible for probably 60 to 70 percent of the Russian casualties, compared to earlier periods of the war where it was chiefly artillery or small arms fire, those types of means. And then there’s still traditional artillery fires. This combination of effective defensive/offensive mining, using strike drones to trick Russian forces at the tactical level such that most Russian attacks don’t get to Ukrainian defensive lines, and to some extent, artillery fires — I won’t say it successfully countered the Russian approach, but took away many of its advantages, and has more effectively compensated for Ukraine’s deficit of infantry and the lack of manpower at the front to hold the front lines.
So from late 2023 through ‘24, Russian forces focused on assault groups, detachments, and essentially a means of attacking that was difficult to exhaust, on the one hand, but on the other hand wasn’t conducive to making big breakthroughs. Ukrainian forces then adapted in a way that allowed them to compensate to a degree for the lack of infantry at the front line, but also specifically to counter how Russian forces were fighting.
Is this approach going to ultimately address Ukraine’s mobilization manpower issues? I’m not sure, but it is certainly buying Ukraine time this year, it’s cost-effective, and it plays to Ukraine’s comparative advantage. That said, I don’t know if the trends we’ve observed the last couple of months will hold, as Russian forces are likely to resume offensive efforts over the course of the spring and summer. So it’s still unclear if we are seeing the beginning of a successful approach that will stabilize the front line for Ukraine, which I think is possible — especially looking at personnel changes and leadership changes, in combination with the technological innovations and tactical adaptations we can observe — or if this might end up being the best period of the war for 2025. The jury on that, I think, is still out.
What do you think a new Russian offensive might look like? Would it be similar to what they were doing when they had the momentum last year? Or a different approach?
The Russian military has been intensifying offensive efforts since the middle of February, and they’ve not been especially successful outside of Kursk. Although I think we should caveat that by saying that a percentage of Russian effort was very much focused on Kursk, and it was a priority for them. At this point they’ve largely pushed the Ukrainian military out of the Kursk pocket. Ukraine is still holding a wedge there on fairly advantageous terrain, but nonetheless, Kursk at this point I think is largely a defensive operation for Ukraine meant to protect the Sumy region. I suspect the Russian military is going to redeploy a lot of forces from Kursk back down towards Donetsk, and also try to stretch the Ukrainian military by conducting attacks in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia. That’s already been taking place over the last two weeks.
The question is whether the Russian military is actually able to adapt once again this year. Because Ukrainian armed forces, in the investments they’ve made, are trying to lock down the front line and do have a chance of holding the Russian military to incremental gains. It’s just a question of — can they sustain it? And can they count on external material assistance? Although here too, it’s worth mentioning that in 2025, Ukraine is far less dependent on the West for day-to-day battlefield needs than it was in previous years.
Trump briefly cut off military aid and intelligence sharing to Ukraine before restoring it, and may do so again. But as you say, Ukraine is better equipped to fend for itself these days. So how alarmed are people you speak to on the ground about the prospect of another U.S. cessation of arms, and how long could Ukraine hold out for if that happened?
The first question is easier to answer than the second. As you know from our past conversations, I’m reticent to give hard timelines and predictions — I hold to the adage that military analysis, while it has to try to be predictive, is not fortune-telling.
To your first question, the main areas where Ukrainian forces are dependent on the United States in particular are precision strike capabilities. That is, employment of GMLRs missiles fired by primarily HIMARS systems or M270s. This allows Ukraine to hold the Russian rear at risk — that is things beyond thirty-kilometer depth on the front line. I think that if Ukraine were to run out of missiles for HIMARS systems, it would certainly affect the course of fighting this year, because it will substantially free up Russian forces and how they organize logistics and command and control behind the front. The secondary dependence is in air defense, specifically Patriot missile batteries, which depend on not only western support, like parts maintenance, but also the actual interceptors. And there I can’t say how many months worth of munitions Ukraine has, but it would become quite problematic for Ukrainian air defense, I think, because there is no substitute for the missiles the U.S. has been supplying.
You mentioned intelligence support and various other forms of, let’s say, non- matériel systems. There I think it’s a bit debatable how much allies could take over, but it would certainly be an additional factor. How long could Ukraine hold out? This depends on a couple of factors. First, what is the offensive potential of the Russian military and what kind of offensive do they intend to launch in the spring and summer? Second, to what extent can Ukraine’s other Western partners step in? I think when it comes to artillery production, Europe is in a much better position now than it was in previous years. I think in many categories, other than the ones I just outlined, the Europeans could step in and help sustain the Ukrainian military effort.
And Ukraine itself now makes many of the munitions and drones that it needs, including mines. So if we’re looking at the tactical level and what’s being consumed the most at the front, Ukraine could probably sustain itself for quite some time, and we’d be seeing a steady degradation rather than any sort of sudden collapse. And even then, the jury’s out on how the fighting might unfold. But the impact would be visible over time, and I think one should not be too cavalier or hand-wave away the extent to which U.S. support and U.S. organization of military assistance writ large for Ukraine has been a significant contributor to Ukraine’s military efforts.
The other factor here is the possibility of some kind of ceasefire. Ukraine and Russia agreed to a limited one, on energy infrastructure, but that hasn’t been successful, and Russia keeps killing civilians across Ukraine. Plans for any kind of larger ceasefire have gone nowhere. And now Trump and Rubio seem annoyed that Putin might not be interested. Is what Trump wants and what Putin wants totally incompatible? What would a satisfactory ceasefire to Russia even look like?
I think the Russian view is that despite the fact that their military is woefully underperforming relative to their expectations and their overall matériel advantages, that if they’re going to agree to a ceasefire, it would have to be a heavily conditioned one. Russian leadership has sought Ukrainian capitulation, which they can’t achieve on the battlefield. So instead, they’re trying to attain Western capitulation, to an extent. And here, they feel they have a stronger chance of getting a lot of what they want.
Naturally, they are stalling to the extent they can. But most importantly, they are trying to position the Russian-Ukraine war as one issue, or one negotiation topic, among an entire package within which they would like diplomatic normalization, economic normalization, some restored role for Russian conversations about European security. And what they’re essentially doing over the course of this time period, if we look at the process, is they are maneuvering this war away from being the central organizing principle in U.S. foreign policy under the previous administration. That is, everything was linked to the fact that Russia had invaded Ukraine and was conducting this atrocious war in Europe. They’re trying to isolate and sideline the war as one problem set among a series in U.S.-Russia relations, and trying to decouple U.S.-Russia relations from the war.
What they want is a host of Western concessions, not just on the question of Ukraine, but on this other set of issues. The challenge that Moscow has is that Trump very much wanted the ceasefire by the first hundred days, and had issued this as a fairly hard deadline. Russia’s efforts to say “yes” in theory but “no” in practice have a limited shelf life, because I’m sure it’s clear now to folks in the White House that the Russians have no intention of agreeing to a ceasefire anytime soon. And that even if they were to agree to a ceasefire, the odds that it would last and prove durable from my point of view are exceedingly low, given the track record of ceasefires with Russia, especially in this war.
So what is Russia actually looking for in these negotiations?
I think what Moscow wants isn’t even a rescinding of sanctions, but rather, a pullback of U.S. enforcement, particularly of secondary sanctions. And that by itself will already give them the slack they need in order to sustain the war effort this year.
Naturally, their dream would be to have sanctions that are the most effective lifted as part of this process, perhaps get to a ceasefire, and then have the ceasefire collapse. But the other important part of this interaction, as best I can tell, is that both sides are trying to position the other as the party most responsible for the fact that there’s no ceasefire, come 100 days into the Trump administration. From my point of view, this is the game Moscow is trying to play. The question is, at the end of this month, who will the Trump administration blame? Or will they blame both Russia and Ukraine out of frustration as they’ve had a tendency to do? And what are the possible consequences for Ukraine?
I think the one thing that Ukraine certainly has going for it beyond its own resilience is that Moscow has a strong tendency to overplay his hand and to get overly ambitious in these types of negotiations with the U.S.. And while Russia retains the advantage in this war, its actual hand — if we look at Russian military performance relative to their maximalist demands and their political objectives — isn’t especially good. And they could very well come off in the coming days or weeks as the party that is the least realistic and the most recalcitrant and the most greedy in the negotiations given their actual position.
That could never just describe the Trump administration, of course.
The other important factor is, of course, Europeans. Europeans are not likely to go along, particularly the leading European nations.
Lifting Russian sanctions would depend on them, too, right? It’s not unilateral.
Yes. It actually depends on them in some respects, a lot more than it depends on us. They’re not likely to go along with a substantial lifting of sanctions. They’re also not likely to go along with any effort to revise Russia’s role in European security. And they will probably make a best effort in order to enable Ukraine, such that Ukraine doesn’t necessarily have to accept a bad deal. Because the reality on the ground is that the overall dynamic in the war hasn’t changed, and I wouldn’t spin it overly positively, the frontline is not about the collapse, and Ukraine is not in some dire position such that it desperately needs a ceasefire right now. That said, I wouldn’t make the other extreme version of this argument, suggesting that the entire dynamic has changed and that Ukraine has turned things around so dramatically that we can now have a completely different set of assumptions and expectations about the course of the war. That, too, is not true.
And it seems like there’s little hope of Ukraine gaining more territory, at least within Ukraine itself. They may be launching another limited operation in Russia, but it’s not like they’re going on the offensive elsewhere anytime soon.
They’ve conducted fairly small-scale localized counterattacks in the last couple months, mostly to improve positions along the front line. The honest answer is I don’t know if Ukraine is planning another offensive operation, but looking at the overall trajectory in this war, I think Ukraine’s focus is and probably should be stabilizing the front, playing to some extent for time, and looking for ways to effectively exhaust Russian offensive potential while maximizing the cost to Russia, such that the Russian war effort in general reaches diminishing returns and the host of economic and other issues that Moscow has to deal with grow in significance, and affect the sustainability of the military effort if this war goes on through 2025.
And then negotiate some kind of ceasefire from that position of relative strength.
If not from a position of strength, certainly not from a position of desperation or weakness. There is a significant range of outcomes you could have between these extremes. But most importantly, you would not have to accept a deal that would be fundamentally unacceptable to Ukrainian society, and that would make much of the war not worth it in the first place. Any society that sacrificed this much in a war of this scale that’s gone on now for over three years, is always going to ask “What was the point of the sacrifice if this is the political outcome that the war achieved?”
What I think is often difficult for some colleagues in the West to understand is the reason why the Ukrainian leadership is reluctant to just accept the ceasefire is that if all a ceasefire does is lead to a rearmament period. If there’s nothing supporting the ceasefire, then what follows very likely could be much worse for Ukraine. People will leave, a large part of the army may have to be demobilized, and Russia will simply come back — maybe in a year, maybe in four years, but they’re not likely to invade again in the way that they conducted the full-scale invasion of 2022. And in the third iteration of the war, the consequence for Ukraine could be even more dire.
That is why I think many in Ukrainian society and in Ukrainian political leadership rightfully ask — what is the point of getting a piece of paper that just says the word ceasefire on it when ultimately, it doesn’t end the war, it doesn’t attain any security for Ukraine, and it doesn’t ensure the return of people or investment to Ukraine, but simply leaves Ukraine as a country and a society in a prolonged period of jeopardy and facing the likelihood of a renewed war at any point in the future?
While also possibly handing off natural resources to the United States in exchange for zero security guarantees.
In exchange for what looks like nothing.
It seemed like this minerals deal was about to happen, but it hasn’t yet. Why sign on those kinds of terms?
I can only give you my opinion, which is that I think the mineral deal was a scheme meant to explain here in America why the U.S. was still supporting Ukraine and what the return for the United States would be in a very transactional and, I think to some extent, cynical sort of way. But it’s also a gateway deal to a series of other deals that were meant to follow. If you look at all the earlier drafts, it had very strong neo-colonialist overtones and it looked decidedly predatory. That draft was visibly revised over time, but the latest iterations I’ve seen look just as predatory and extractionist as the earlier version. So I’m not sure where we are at this point.
Trump and JD Vance attempted to humiliate Zelensky in the Oval Office and that predictably led to a swell of support for Zelensky in Ukraine. Does it seem like Ukrainians people are perhaps more supportive of this war effort now because of what’s happened in the US than they were before? Because it seemed like a few months ago there was quite a bit of restiveness among the population with his approach, and now it seems like there’s a new sense of patriotism going on.
I think it’s important to disambiguate the two parts of your question. The first is the rally-around-the-flag effect that Zelensky experienced in publicly defending Ukraine and Ukrainian interests, first in the course of negotiations over the minerals deal, and then second during that disastrous White House meeting. The second aspect is Ukrainian public sentiment with respect to the war. Ukrainian society has of course grown increasingly tired of the ongoing conflict, and many would like the war to end. However, they’re not willing to make major concessions to Russia. And when we look at the domestic political leadership, they are heavily constrained by public attitudes and in my view, haven’t done much to shape them.
Plus, many are increasingly looking to future elections, which are likely to follow any ceasefire agreement. And there’s a tendency to get ahead of oneself, where elites begin positioning themselves for the parliamentary and presidential elections to come while having not actually figured out how this war ends. And this can lead to a degree of short-sightedness or a lack of serious thinking about the immediate while fixating on its political implications.
One of the biggest challenges that Ukraine has in making a deal — and it’s not a challenge, it’s frankly a feature — is the fact that Ukraine is ultimately a democracy, and the Ukrainian political leadership can’t just sign any deal the way Putin might. They will be looking over their shoulder over the course of the process, as you saw in the negotiation with the United States on the minerals deal, to see what the public reaction is. And they understand that they can make a deal, but the public may not accept this deal.
So I think there’s a degree of learning probably taking place once again here in the United States, that you can’t so easily force Ukraine or Ukrainian leadership into a deal. And that the amount of leverage that the United States has over Ukraine and over Russia, while probably more significant in the case of Ukraine, nonetheless is grossly insufficient if the question is “Can the United States force Russia and Ukraine into a ceasefire that they themselves do not want or do not want right now?”
So that leaves us with a muddle.
There’s a reason why wars like this tend to go on well beyond the decisive phase of the war and negotiations may take months or years, if we look at historical cases. It’s very difficult to get society and elites, if they represent their society, to compromise. It is also exceedingly difficult to get leaders to make an agreement with a party they don’t trust, and to get them to agree to something that they don’t think actually answers any of the big questions for their country or won’t yield a solution to the war — especially if you’re not willing to offer security guarantees or anything else to backstop that arrangement.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
