Frontline shifts, drone attacks and battlefield losses are forcing Russia to consider harder moves, sources say.
Every day, the Ukraine Battlefield update newsletter offers a clear look at how the war is unfolding on the ground, highlighting key developments along the frontline and the shifting dynamics of the conflict.. The war in Ukraine in spring 2026 was not developing in line with Vladimir Putin’s wishes.. What options does Russia have to reverse the course of the war?. None of them would be easy or cheap.. At least 352,000 Russian soldiers have
been killed in Ukraine, according to independent Russian media.. Map of the day: Russian forces advanced near Sloviansk.. Videos of the day: A report from drone operators explaining how they control drones via the internet; a Russian drone hits a Ukrainian soldier – a direct view.. It is no exaggeration to say that over the past few months the war against Ukraine has not been going the way Russian president Vladimir Putin envisaged.. Unlike last
spring, Russian forces at the front are moving only very slowly.. According to Ukraine, they are still losing up to 35,000 soldiers a month.. Increasingly, Ukrainian drones were causing them serious problems.. The smaller ones operated deep behind the front line and were hitting Russian logistics even around Mariupol.. The larger ones were striking Russian oil terminals and refineries as far as 1,000 km from the front.. The British magazine The Economist recently wrote that
after a harsh winter “Ukraine is turning the tide in its favour.” “In almost every respect, it is imposing ever greater costs on Russia,” it said.. However, there is no reason to succumb prematurely to excessive optimism.. Russia had already shown it could adapt to new developments and respond to Ukrainian technological innovations at the front.. In addition, Putin had several options for how to respond and try to reverse the course of the war..
None of them would be cheap or easy.. Ulyana Bezpalko, a journalist with the Ukrainian website RBC-Ukraine who heads its war desk, examined Russia’s options.. She spoke with several, including high-ranking, sources in the Ukrainian army.. As she wrote, once peace talks reach a deadlock, Putin can do three things to try to turn the war in his favour: The first is to change Russia’s targeting priorities when shelling Ukrainian cities, which is already happening..
The second is a possible mass mobilisation of Russians into the army.. The third is greater use of Belarus for the war against Ukraine.. We will go through all three points.. Changes in Russian targets.. In winter, Russia mainly attacked Ukraine’s energy system, aiming to break the country’s spirit with cold and darkness.. Despite major power outages and severe frosts in many Ukrainian apartment blocks, the Russians did not achieve this goal.. “After the winter,
the military leadership carried out an assessment.. They said Ukraine had increased the production and use of weapons, especially drones.. How could that have happened?. And then they realised: for several months in a row they had focused on energy facilities and had not attacked our defence industry,” one source said to RBC-Ukraine.. Russia is now changing this.. According to Ukraine, it has begun to prioritise strikes on Ukrainian arms factories, oil and gas facilities,
and filling stations close to the front.. Russia is still attacking the energy system, but Ukraine does not expect it to return, before autumn, to the kind of concentrated air raids on these targets seen last year.. In addition, there are two other changes: Russia has increasingly begun to use drones for attacks during the day.. And it appears to be husbanding its Iskander-M ballistic missiles, which it used extensively against Ukrainian cities in the
autumn and winter.. Recently, attacks with these missiles have been sporadic.. Previously, it was said that Russia produced 60 Iskander-M missiles a month, which, according to the website’s sources, has probably not changed.. Possible Russian mobilisation.. Ukraine claims that for several consecutive months it has been able to eliminate more Russian soldiers than the number of new troops Russia is recruiting into the army.. This cannot be independently verified, but at a minimum it appears
that the growth in the number of Russian soldiers in Ukraine has stopped.. There are several signals indicating that Russia is having growing difficulties recruiting new soldiers.. This is suggested, for example, by data from German economist Janis Kluge, who examined regional financial contributions for enlistment bonuses and found a 20-percent decline compared to the same period last year.. Reports have also emerged that Russia has started to court Russian university students for the army
more aggressively.. Recruitment in prisons is also continuing; according to RBC-Ukraine, they manage to persuade between one-quarter and one-fifth of inmates, and 10 to 12 percent of soldiers whose compulsory military service is ending.. Russia particularly wants to expand its unmanned systems from 101,000 to 165,000 by the end of the year.. This is precisely why Ukraine says that mobilisation is one of the options Putin might decide to pursue.. “This is one of the
scenarios they are considering if they decide to continue the war for another year or two,” Andrii Kovalenko, head of the Centre for Countering Disinformation, said to the website.. “Russia plans to carry out — if necessary — a more extensive mobilisation and is prepared for it.. This new mobilisation wave could, for example, involve drafting 300,000 people, as was the case in 2022,” one source said to RBC-Ukraine.. According to some analysts, the recent
shutdowns of mobile internet in Russia, as well as the planned blocking of Telegram, were a test of how the country would react in such a situation.. When partial mobilisation took place in 2022, 1 million Russians left the country, although many later returned.. However, Russia needs not only soldiers but also workers.. Mobilisation would remove these people from the labour market, harming the Russian economy, which is already in a difficult situation.. This scenario
is therefore likely only if developments on the battlefield become very unfavourable.. The third thing Russia could do, according to the website, is to involve Belarus more heavily in the war.. Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has resisted having his army officially join the war.. He is helping Russia in other ways, however.. For example, Russian forces are currently using Belarusian territory to relay signals for Russian drones that cannot be reached from Russian soil.. According
to Ukrainian officials quoted by the website, the latest development is the use of balloons sent from Belarus into Ukrainian territory, which serve as signal repeaters for Russian drones.. As the website writes, in early May specific activity was detected in certain sectors of the border between Ukraine and Belarus – the extension of logistics routes, new training camps and bases.. This does not necessarily have to mean anything, and it should be added that
at present the Russian army has no units on Belarusian territory.. “However, we cannot rule out that Belarus might intervene, not necessarily through a large-scale invasion, but through attempts to destabilise the situation or provocations on the border.. We must remain vigilant in all directions,” Andrii Demchenko, spokesperson for Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service, said.. Bringing Belarus into the war would create problems for Ukraine, either by adding tens of thousands of troops or by
widening the front.. So far, however, Lukashenko has resisted this.. One reason may be that he fears it could endanger his regime at home, something Putin does not want either.. At least 352,000 Russians have been killed in Ukraine.. This figure was reported last week by the independent Russian websites Mediazona and Meduza.. They have long sought to track the number of Russians killed in the war.. Together with the Russian service of the BBC,
for example, they verify names via social networks and obituaries.. Using this methodology, they know the names of 218,000 dead Russians.. In addition, they also map records from official Russian inheritance proceedings.. For the first time this year, they updated the death toll using these statistics and concluded that from the start of the war until 2025 at least 352,000 Russians had been killed.. That is more than 1 percent of the population of Russian
men of working age (18 to 60) before the war.. As they note, for the very first time the tally also includes people declared dead or missing without their body having been found.. These account for roughly 90,000 men out of the total.. However, these figures cover the period only up to mid-2025 at the latest.. It is therefore possible that the current number of dead Russians already exceeds 400,000.. Foreign mercenaries, and probably also
soldiers of the former Donetsk and Luhansk “republics”, are not included in this figure either.. At the end of April, the Dutch intelligence service also published its report.. It stated that Russia had permanently lost about 1.2 million soldiers, of whom around half a million were dead.. On the other hand, according to the report, Ukraine had permanently lost half a million soldiers.. “In 2025 a worrying trend can be observed in which the ratio
of daily casualties is converging, due to the rising number of Ukraine’s permanent losses.. This ratio is unfavourable for Ukraine because, unlike Russia, it is not, or is hardly, able to replace these losses,” the Dutch intelligence service wrote.. In recent months, however, Ukrainian soldiers have increasingly begun deploying ground robots at the front, which in some cases replace troops.. In April, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said that the deployment of robots had saved 22,000
Ukrainian soldiers’ lives.. Map of the day The Ukrainian account DeepState UA updated the map in the Sloviansk sector on Monday.. It reported that Russia had seized parts of the villages of Kalenyky and Riznykivka, and had also advanced south of the latter village.. Source : DeepState UA The Ukrainian account Petrenko wrote that Russia had established a strongpoint along the Siverskyi Donets–Donbas canal between Malynivka and the village of Pryvillia.. “It is highly likely
that this will be followed by Russian attacks aimed at straightening the front line along the canal.. West of the canal, fighting for Markove continues.. Russian units managed to enter the village but came under attack from unmanned aircraft,” Petrenko wrote.. Video of the day Julian Röpcke, a journalist with the German newspaper Bild, visited Ukrainian drone operators from the 7th Rapid Reaction Corps.. They explained to him that they are now able to control
FPV drones via the internet from virtually anywhere, even from Berlin.. They have solved the issues preventing signal lag, so they can truly see, even from a great distance, exactly what is happening on the front at any given moment.. Be warned, this video shows a Ukrainian soldier being wounded and therefore may not be suitable for everyone.. Nonetheless, it is quite an exceptional piece of footage.. The soldier tried to stop the attacking drone
with a firearm.. Interestingly, the drone was flying under an anti-drone net, and it is unclear how it got inside.. The soldier failed to stop the drone and it hit him.. The footage shows, in almost brutal realism, how hard it is to fight face-to-face against a drone hurtling towards you at high speed.. According to the description, the soldier survived the attack but lost a leg.
Ukraine battlefield update, Vladimir Putin options, Russian mobilisation, drone warfare, Belarus involvement, Iskander-M missiles