"Four years since Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia still occupies roughly 20 percent of the country after gaining almost five thousand square kilometers of territory in 2025." 

"Russia continues to bombard Ukrainian cities, while Ukraine maintains drone attacks on Russian oil infrastructure and military sites."

"Since January 2022, Ukraine has received about $188 billion in aid from the United States and $197 billion from the European Union."

"Fighting and air strikes have inflicted nearly 56,000 civilian casualties, while 3.7 million people are internally displaced, and 5.9 million are registered as refugees. 10.8 million people need humanitarian assistance."

Global Conflict Tracker 

 

"In many respects, this war in Ukraine is the one that most closely resembles World War I."

"[In both wars it was the intensity of firepower that forced armies to turn to trenches]: You bury yourself to protect yourself."
Michel Goya, former French colonel, historian 

People visit the graves of their relatives, who were killed during Russia's attack on Ukraine, as a large-scale light installation illuminates the Lychakiv cemetery in Lviv, Ukraine, on Feb. 23, 2026, marking the fourth anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion. (Roman Baluk/Reuters)

 

The heavy casualty counts and brutal infantry assaults of the ongoing war in Ukraine strikes some war historian as comparable to conflict conditions experienced during World War I. By June 11, the war in Ukraine -- Vladimir Putin's 'special military operation' -- saw a point in time where it has been prolonged for four years and three months, its duration outlasting World War I's epic conflict. 

 

Mr. Putin's expectation that his large operational full-on incursion of February 2022 would swiftly see Ukraine surrendering, his goal accomplished in a mere matter of months if not weeks. The Ukrainian counter offensive which saw Russia effectively opposed and the conflict became a war of attrition, it would have seemed inconceivable to any strategists, much less servicemen fighting for their lives on either side of the hostilities that the war would drag on for so many weeks, months and years. 

 

Yet the war has a life of its own, reflecting the level of determination on both sides; Moscow's to achieve its objective; Kyiv to sustain its sovereign rights and push its aggressor entirely out of its geography, including from Crimea and Donetsk, both of which fell to Russia in 2014. 

 

Ukrainian servicemen of the 33rd separate assault regiment participate in a training at an undisclosed location in Zaporizhzhia region on Jan. 30, 2026, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Tetiana Dzhafarova/AFP via Getty Images

 

Recent polls indicate that almost fifty percent of Ukrainians feel the war will not end before 2027. Among Ukrainians many are prepared to argue that the war's beginning in reality was 2014 when Russian troops with the assistance of Russian-Ukrainian rebels swept Crimea to seize it for Greater Russia, complementing Vladimir Putin's yearning for the days of firm control of eastern Europe during the Soviet Union, and he a modern-day Czar. 

 

According to Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, the conflict that Russia imposed upon Ukraine will rank in historical accounts as among the most consequential in modern European history. Alluding to both wars, having altered geopolitics in Europe through the reshaping of military alliances, driving a feverish defense buildup through NATO, unseen since the end of the Cold War. 

 

The war in Ukraine has now exceeded the first world war in duration. And while the comparison between these two conflicts is imperfect, it is becoming difficult to ignore.

 

 A century earlier, point out military analysts, it was the new technologies of warplanes and tanks that drove the fighting antagonists, while today advances in unmanned aerial war machines have taken centre stage in an increasingly brutal onslaught against humans more attuned to conventional warfare. As in 1914, so too in 2024, where a frozen front line maintains a status quo and where neither attacker nor defender can claim the upper hand. 

 

Historians see World War I trench warfare repeated in the trenches and bunkers that Ukrainian soldiers have been using where assaults with artillery barrages followed by storming enemy trenches by infantry squads were the elemental formulaic schemes brought to play in the early years of the current war, echoing what had been current a hundred years earlier. 

 

Once drones were brought into play, trench-like networks became outdated as unsafe, where drones monitored the battlefield, striking with precision greater than that of artillery shells. Survival now depends on smaller, more discreet and deeper trenches to outfox the drones; shelters now house a handful of soldiers in dugouts. As for the fearsome tanks of WWI, they have become targets for drones, and have been largely retired. 

 

According to Admiral Pierre Vandier, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation in NATO, the Ukrainian front has been lethalized by drones. And the strategy that Ukraine relies upon to use drones to strike deep into Russia to hit its oil assets, strikes at its very economy which funds Putin's special military operation. The battlefield has been flooded with small attack drones of Ukrainian design and forward technology. "This is World War I, but with drones", said historian Yaroslav Hrytsak.  

 

Ukraine Teaching Russia Defense Techniques

"The same ultimatums they voiced back then -- now they just put them on paper."

"Honestly, this document looks like spam. It's spam meant to flood us and create the impression that they're doing something."

"[The 2025 talks in Istanbul carry] the same content and spirit [as the fruitless negotiations  held in the Turkish city in the early days of the war]."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Operation Spiderweb, Ukrainian Secret Service

 

To achieve 'peace' Vladimir Putin recommends a few little concessions from Ukraine that would do the trick. To begin with, the provinces that the Russian military managed to wrest from its Ukrainian defenders which Moscow swiftly declared to be part of the Russian Federation through the usual Russian penchant for expropriating Ukrainian geography, must be formally ceded by Kyiv to Moscow. Ukraine must put down its arms, return to what Russia for now allow it to consider sovereign, and agree to put a stop to its attempts to join NATO.

 

Ukraine must no longer demand reparations from Russia over the gross ruination of Ukraine's infrastructure, its destroyed towns and cities, realizing them to be unreasonable. Along the 1,000-kilometre front line, Ukraine must disassemble its protective blockades as it decamps. Ukraine must swiftly call a general election to put a new government in place. One that will be more amenable to the concerns of its neighbour. That's all, just a few simple recommendations if Ukraine wants peace.

 

And while President Zelenskyy dismissed Russia's ceasefire proposal as "an ultimatum", he is open to a frank, direct, person-to-person meeting with Vladimir Putin. A suggestion that has outraged the Russian president, as he raged over Ukraine's recent "terrorist acts" on Russian soil in the Kursk and Bryansk regions on the countries' border.

 

"How can any such [summit] meetings be conducted in such circumstances? What shall we talk about?" He went on to accuse Ukraine of seeking a truce in bad faith. To use such a hiatus in the 3-1/2-year conflict as an opportunity to replenish its western arms stockpiles, recruit additional servicemen, while preparing new attacks just like those carried out in Kursk and Bryansk. Ukraine's determination to defend itself from the vicious territorial predation that caused the Kremlin to plan a full-scale invasion in reaction to 'neo-Nazi' occupation of Kyiv's government, evidently represents an intolerable insult to Russia. 

 

Both Russia and Ukraine have their established red lines, beyond the U.S.-led international diplomatic enterprise to put a stop to the conflict. Both Kyiv and its allies in the West view the Kremlin's Istanbul proposal's demands as absurd non-starters. Continuing such talks have little value at the current level of delegations, in Mr. Zelenskyy's considered opinion. 

 

While Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov led the Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul, Vladimir Medinsky, a mere aide to Putin, headed the Russian negotiating team. As the talks took place, both sides have maintained offensive military actions along the front line, each carrying out deep strikes. Putin views Russia's strikes as legitimate moves of war, and Ukraine's successful attacks deep within Russian territory as illegitimate 'terrorism'. 

Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb. (Nizar al-Rifai/The Kyiv Independent)

 

The spectacular weekend drone strike carried out last weekend by Ukraine's Security Service which destroyed or damaged 41 Russian aircraft including strategic bombers, a case in point. Stunning Russia with the bold ingenuity of the Ukrainian team, able to plan and conduct a operation of that ambitious level without Russian defensive scrutiny to detect the incursion; failing entirely in its critical security and intelligence capabilities.

 

Seven destroyed bombers were shown by Satellite photos on the tarmac of a Russian airbase in eastern Siberia, one of the Ukrainian Secret Service targets struck, representing one of the moseet impressive covert operations of the war. Photos by Planet Labs PBC showed aircraft wreckage and scorched areas at the Belaya Air Base, a major installation for the Russian long-range bomber force. Three Tu-95 bombers and four Tu-22Ms were destroyed, according to the photos.

 

And then, mere days later the Ukrainian Secret Service struck again, this time setting off an undersea explosion beneath the Kerch Bridge the transport link between Russia and the annexed Crimea, to disrupt vital Russian supplies reaching the front lines.  

A map showing Russian control over Crimea and Ukrainian land on the Black Sea coast. (Nizar al-Rifai/The Kyiv Independent)