Is Russia winning the war in Ukraine?

Moscow’s forces have spent roughly two years pushing the frontline through the Ukrainian countryside toward Kyiv at a glacial pace. In the past few days, Russian forces have inched forward in the Donetsk and Sumy regions despite Ukrainian resistance extracting heavy losses.

Russia is clawing for every inch of ground to improve its position in peace talks. So far, Russian negotiators have demanded massive concessions from Ukraine. Those include limits on the size of the Ukrainian military and the surrender of massive swaths of Ukrainian territory to Russia. But the battlefield stalemate is undercutting those demands.

Despite sporting a mightier military, Russia has failed to assert its dominance. Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, have demonstrated that they can hold their own against the Kremlin’s war machine.

Nonetheless, the Kremlin has managed to convince many in the West that Ukraine is on the verge of collapse, and propping it up means wasting valuable resources. Experts say Ukraine’s ability to remain a free and independent country largely depends on Washington’s willingness to bet on the facts on the ground and ignore Russian spin.

“The fight is in the information space, and it's in the hearts and minds of Americans right now,” Glenn Corn, professor at the Institute for World Politics, told WORLD. “And the Russians have been very aggressive in waging that fight using their disinformation capabilities.”

And they’ve made much more progress in the information space than they have on the frontlines, he added.

Since the initial, failed Russian attempt to take Kyiv, the frontline has largely remained static. Russian forces have gained some ground, but at a slow pace and incredible loss of life and equipment. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces have punctuated the front line with sporadic reconquests of Russian-controlled territory, Corn said.

Roughly a quarter of a million Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine, according to a recently published report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). That’s 15 times the number of Russian troops who died in the Kremlin’s 10-year conflict in Afghanistan, the CSIS report said. And it’s 10 times the number who died in Moscow’s 13-year war in Chechnya.

The total number of Russian casualties in Ukraine verges on 1 million.

The Kremlin has also lost roughly 6,400 tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces during the war in Ukraine. That’s between two and five times as many vehicles as the Ukrainian military has lost during the conflict.

Meanwhile, Russian forces have advanced an average of only 50 meters a day through the Ukrainian countryside. British and French forces at the Battle of the Somme—one of World War I’s slowest and most bitterly contested battles—gained roughly 80 meters of ground per day on average.

The one exception to the battlefield stalemate: Operation Spiderweb. Ukraine used cheap drones smuggled into Russian territory over 18 months to destroy much of the Kremlin’s bomber fleet, far from the battlefield. That shows two things about the war, according to Riley McCabe, who co-authored the CSIS report.

“The first is that at the broadest level, when it comes to Ukrainian morale and kind of how we think about the war, that Ukraine is very much still in this fight,” McCabe told WORLD.

Secondly, it shows that Ukraine isn’t bound to lose just because Russia has more military might on paper. Operation Spiderweb demonstrates that Ukraine is capable of clever innovation that enables it to counter Russia’s strength.

“That kind of innovation is also something we've seen on the front lines. And it's something that is kind of dictating the day-to-day, back and forth between Ukrainian troops and Russian troops fighting for just meters of ground every day,” McCabe said.

One example of that innovation, McCabe said, takes the form of hourly software upgrades just to keep Ukrainian drones operating as Russian forces try to electronically shut them down.

“Some of the reporting we're hearing from the front lines is that these software updates are being pushed as many as three times a day just to keep the drones flying through an electronically denied environment,” McCabe explained.

But while Russia has suffered heavy losses on the battlefield, it has been much more successful in the information space, Corn said. “The Russians have promoted the narrative that the Ukrainians are guilty for starting this war—which they're not. They didn't start the war. They didn't invade Russia. They didn't attack the Russians. But some people in the West sometimes believe that.”

When the war first started, the Ukrainians did a great job controlling the narrative that reached the West about the nature of the conflict, Corn explained. “But they've lost a lot of that steam, probably because they don't have the resources the Russians have, and the years of expertise that the Russians have,” he said.

The Kremlin uses its state media outlets—entities such as Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik—and proxy outlets it owns or heavily influences across the globe to spread its narrative, according to a report written last year by U.S. Army Col. (Res.) Michael J. Kelley. Often, those proxy outlets don’t brand themselves as Russian state media, but still spread the information that Kremlin-run outlets publish.

Russian disinformation campaigns often follow a three-step pattern of planting, layering, and integration, according to Darren Linvill, who analyzes Russian disinformation at Clemson University. The Russian government, through one of its state media outlets or a social media post from one of its false-flag accounts, will float a story, accusation, or piece of false information somewhere online. That’s the “planting” part of the process. Russia then uses other social media accounts or other media outlets to start reposting or echoing the claim. That’s the “layering” part of the process. Eventually, the claim makes its way into the larger discourse about a certain subject. That’s “integration.”

As an example, Linvill showed me a video of two men wearing camouflage fatigues and face masks. They held assault-style rifles and stood several yards from a mannequin propped up in front of a plain, grassy hill. The mannequin wore a red baseball cap and a “Trump/Vance 2024” T-shirt. The soldier closest to the camera wore a Ukrainian trident on his right sleeve, which remained visible as he opened fire on the mannequin. Once the soldiers finished firing, one of the men lit a trail of gasoline that stretched toward it like a fiery snake. The mannequin began to burn and then toppled over face-first into the dirt in a pile of fire before the video cut off.

“So that video looks sort of sophomoric, and simple, and it looks like something that I would have made in my backyard when I was in middle school,” Linvill said. “But it is actually, I think, an absolutely brilliant video for a couple of reasons. It's simple. It tells a very simple narrative that you know almost immediately. You don't have to watch the whole video. You don't have to get much past the thumbnail to understand the narrative that Ukraine hates Trump. Ukraine hates MAGA.”

The day after the Nov. 5 election, the video went viral.

Linvill said that was the start of the Russian lobbying campaign to encourage the new Trump administration to stop supporting Ukraine.

Following Russia’s disinformation campaign pattern, the video first showed up on the internet platform Discord two weeks before the election. It then moved to a Telegram channel claiming to belong to the Ukrainian 79th Airborne Assault Brigade. Both Russian and Ukrainian units do have social media accounts, but this one was fake. The video then skipped across Telegram like a stone on a pond to other channels before landing with Russian state media. It then skipped across English-speaking portions of the internet.

“And from there it becomes organic and it becomes integrated—that third step—into the general discourse the day after the election,” Linvill said. Various versions of the video had millions or hundreds of thousands of views, he added.

The U.S. Department of Justice, in recent years, has indicted dozens of individuals for creating false social media personalities and using those accounts to spread alleged Russian disinformation. The department also seized the domain names of websites and social media accounts that Russia was using in a similar manner.

Even though authorities have cracked down on alleged Russian disinformation, it still infects the U.S. media landscape. Every time Russia runs a campaign like the shot and burned Trump mannequin, roughly 10% of the online discussion on X—and on Google as a whole—about that topic involves spreading the campaign’s message in some way.

“That's astounding,” Linvill said. “That is a huge percentage, if you think about the fact that most people saying ‘Zelenskyy’ on X are just, you know, reposting a New York Times or CNN article that happens to have the word ‘Zelenskyy’ in the title. 10% of the total conversation is outrageous.”

Other voices also support Russia’s narrative about the war. Tucker Carlson, whom Linvill considers an independent voice, is one. He’s not a fixture of the Kremlin’s disinformation apparatus, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t assisted Russia’s interests. The popular conservative media personality has publicly stated that he’s more sympathetic to Russia than to Ukraine. Early last year, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell credited Carlson with being one of the individuals most responsible for convincing members of the Republican Party that the United States should not support Ukraine.

Other conservatives have argued that, even if Russia is in the wrong and Ukraine is in the right, the United States still shouldn’t be involved. Rather, it should focus on matters at home.

President Donald Trump, in recent months, has gone from criticizing Ukraine to berating Putin for his unwillingness to participate in peace talks. Glenn Corn applauded the president’s desire to end the conflict. He added that he hopes the president will recognize the fact that Putin isn’t seriously considering peace and then double down on American support for Ukraine until Russia begins to approach the negotiation table with more sincerity.

“I think there's a chance of that happening,” Corn said. “But of course, there's also a chance that the U.S. may just say, ‘You know, some people are saying we should wash our hands of all this,’ and walk away. That's a possibility. Personally, I don't want to see that happen. I don't think it would be the right thing for the United States.”