Kyiv, Ukraine – The harsh winter of the Russia-Ukraine war has brought constant pressure from Moscow on the front lines, and significant airstrikes have left millions of Ukrainians without power and heat.
For the first time in nearly three years, Kyiv is beginning to regain some territory, even as Russia pushes toward Ukrainian strongholds in the southeastern region of Donetsk and plans a spring-summer offensive.
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According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the gains are 460 square km (117.6 sq mi), or about 10 percent of what Kyiv lost to Moscow in 2025.
He said the main factor was Moscow’s inability to make up for its front line losses.
“Russia is losing a lot of people, up to 35,000 a month,” he told Italian daily Corriere della Sera on March 3.
He mentioned that due to the losses caused by Ukraine, the Russian army “stopped growing. The losses are equal to the number of newly mobilized soldiers. They are close to crisis.”
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US think tank, said the gains were more modest – 257 sq km (100 sq mi) – but admitted that a porous front line and multiple gray areas complicated a better calculation.
Ukraine says almost all of Dnipropetrovsk has been liberated
Ukrainian counterattacks were particularly successful in the region east of Dnipropetrovsk, where the Russian troop presence was negligible and now reduced to just three towns.
“Almost the entire area of Dnipropetrovsk has been liberated,” Ukraine’s chief strategist, Major General Oleksandr Komarenko, said in televised remarks.
In the neighboring Zaporizhia region, where Moscow occupies three-quarters of the total territory and is advancing on the titular administrative capital, Ukrainian forces have retaken nine towns since January.
“These counterattacks have tactical, operational and strategic consequences that could disrupt Russia’s spring-summer 2026 offensive campaign plan,” ISW said.
According to Lt. Gen. Ihor Romanko, former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Ukrainian military, the gains are “strategic but very meaningful.”
But he told Al Jazeera that while Ukraine had “raised some reserves” for advances in Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia, the Russians were pushing forward towards the towns of Sloviansk, Limon, Siversk and Kostiantynivka in key areas of Donetsk.
For Romanenko, low recruitment numbers across Russia are key to Moscow’s losses.
“For three months, they have nothing to create their reserves,” he said.
In 2025, Moscow’s recruiting offensive fueled by a campaign of persuasion and huge signing bonuses of tens of thousands of dollars replenished the losses, and the monthly number of newly mobilized troops sometimes reached 60,000, he said.
But this year, Russia’s recruitment frenzy appears to have been fueled by financial problems caused by Western sanctions, as the people needed to feed the front line are exhausted.
Putin’s dilemma
Russian President Vladimir Putin is wary of public outrage over full-scale mobilization.
“Putin is afraid of carrying out total mobilization. He is looking for other ways,” Romanko said.
One of them is the forced enlistment of university students, especially those with lower grades, as drone operators.
From St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city and Putin’s hometown, to Khabarovsk, near the Chinese border, several Russian universities force male students to undergo training to fly drones, the Movement of Conscientious Objectors, a Moscow-based rights organization, said this month.
Sometimes, universities offer payments of 100,000 rubles ($1,260) a month on top of Defense Ministry salaries for newly trained operators to join.
“They’re stepping up the process to build drone units. They’re pushing students to become drone operators,” Romenko said.
Kyiv’s advances have so far not turned the tables on the war, but they have certainly infuriated Moscow.
“The Kremlin is completely upset from a moral point of view because their concept, their confidence that they are pushing on the entire front line, is collapsing,” Kyiv-based analyst Igor Tishkevich told Al Jazeera.
Developments in the Black Sea
Meanwhile, Washington and Israel’s strikes on Iran have delayed the resumption of United States-brokered peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow.
Other observers are skeptical of the significance of Kyiv’s territorial gains.
“They can hardly be called remarkable considering the very modest successes of the Russian army,” Nikolai Mitrokhin of the University of Bremen in Germany told Al Jazeera.
By using reserves stockpiled at vulnerable frontline sites, Ukraine “in some cases manages to regain some territory,” he said.
He said the sites were mostly “politically sensitive” areas in the northern region of Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, annexed by Russia after a “referendum” in 2022.
The liberation of Dnipropetrovsk was part of a larger counteroffensive that also opened across the border in Zaporizhia, but it failed, he said.
Another less publicized development is taking place in the Black Sea.
In February, Mitrokhin said Ukraine began a “systematic withdrawal” of Russia’s Black Sea fleet from its main port, the southern port of Novorossiysk.
On March 1, drone strikes damaged five Russian warships, including those capable of launching Kalibr cruise missiles.
The fleet was moved to Novorossiysk from the annexed port of Sevastopol in Crimea in 2023 after Ukrainian aerial and naval drones and missiles destroyed its largest ships.
He said the attacks on Novorossiysk followed the destruction of Russian aircraft monitoring air defense systems and maritime drones in Crimea last year.
“Ukraine has a lot of drones, keeps producing new ones, while Russia has two-thirds of its warships in the Black Sea,” Mitrokhin said. “Most importantly, they have nothing to flee to.”
Small ships could be moved from the Volga-Don Canal not to the Caspian Sea, where Ukrainian drones could easily reach them, but to the upper Volga or Moskva rivers, where Moscow’s air defense systems could protect them.
He said the big warships in Novorossiysk “must only vouch for their air defense or the war is over faster than being sunk.”
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