Russia has Failed to Break Ukraine
By Grace Mappes
February 24, 2025
Executive Summary:
Russia dedicated staggering amounts of manpower and equipment to several major offensive efforts in Ukraine in 2024, intending to degrade Ukrainian defenses and seize the remainder of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. These Russian efforts included major operations in the Kharkiv-Luhansk Oblast area, Avdiivka, Chasiv Yar, northern Kharkiv Oblast, Toretsk, Marinka-Kurakhove, Pokrovsk, and Vuhledar-Velyka Novosilka. Russia has achieved relatively faster gains in 2024 than throughout most of the war after the initial invasion and developed a blueprint for conducting slow, tactical envelopments to achieve these advances, but Russian forces have failed to restore the operational maneuver necessary to achieve operationally significant gains rapidly. Russia has thus paid an exorbitant price in manpower and equipment losses that Russia cannot sustain in the medium term for very limited gains.
Russian losses in massive efforts that have failed to break Ukrainian lines or even drive them back very far are exacerbating challenges that Russia will face in sustaining the war effort through 2025 and 2026, as ISW's Christina Harward has recently reported.[1] Russia likely cannot sustain continued efforts along these lines indefinitely without a major mobilization effort that Russian President Vladimir Putin has so far refused to order. Ukraine, on the other hand, has shown its ability to fight off massive and determined Russian offensive efforts even during periods of restricted Western aid. The effective failure of these major and costly Russian offensive operations highlights the opportunities Ukraine has to inflict more serious battlefield defeats on Russia that could compel Putin to rethink his approach to the war and to negotiations if the United States and the West continue to provide essential support.
Russia's 2024 Military Campaigns
Russian forces seized the theater-wide initiative following the culmination of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in late 2023 and held it throughout 2024. Russian forces began several offensive operations with the intent of breaking Ukraine: a renewed offensive on the Kharkiv-Luhansk axis in Winter 2023-2024 and September 2024, several efforts in eastern Ukraine, and an offensive across the international border in northern Kharkiv Oblast in May 2024. Russian forces have been conducting these operations in an effort to achieve the Kremlin's long-held operational goal of seizing the remainder of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts by the end of 2024 and to exhaust Ukraine's defensive capabilities.[2] Russian forces significantly increased their rate of advance, particularly in Fall-Winter 2024 when Russian forces advanced at least 1,103 square kilometers between September 1 and November 14 compared to seizing 387 square kilometers in the entirety of 2023 due to Ukrainian counteroffensives.[3] Russian forces utilized astounding numbers of personnel and equipment to achieve these gains but still failed to make operationally significant gains proportionate to the costs in combat power, resources, time, and casualties. Russian forces' main achievements in 2024 were the seizures of Avdiivka, Selydove, Vuhledar, and Kurakhove, but no amount of Kremlin rhetoric attempting to paint these as significant victories will change the fact that these are mid-size settlements, the largest of which had a pre-war population of just over 31,000 people.[4]
The Russian military proved that it was and remains willing to sustain horrific battlefield losses for disproportionately small gains. The Kremlin sacrificed weapon systems, soldiers, and economic resources at scale to sustain its war effort in Ukraine. Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Oleksandr Syrskyi reported that Russian forces suffered more than 434,000 casualties in 2024, including 150,000 killed in action, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that Russian forces suffered 300,000 to 350,000 killed and 600,000 to 700,000 wounded in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.[5] These Ukrainian numbers suggest that Russian forces suffered 41 to 48 percent of all their battlefield casualties since the start of the war in 2024 alone. ISW assessed that Russian forces advanced roughly 4,168 square kilometers in 2024, and Syrskyi's statement indicates that Russian forces suffered approximately 104 casualties per square kilometer of advance in 2024.[6] Russian forces conducted multiple mechanized pushes in the latter half of 2024 to enable their gains but ultimately failed to restore operational maneuver to the battlefield in Ukraine. Russian forces ended 2024 and began 2025 by conducting grinding, infantry-heavy assaults in multiple areas of the battlefield in tactical envelopments and taking heavy personnel losses in the process.
Kharkiv-Luhansk axis
Russian forces attempted a multi-axis offensive operation on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line in Winter 2023-2024, but this large effort quickly fizzled out into occasional offensive pushes. Russian forces intended this effort to be a cohesive operation across four distinct axes of advance: northeast of Kupyansk near Synkivka, southeast of Kupyansk towards Kruhlyakivka, southwest of Svatove towards Borova, and west and southwest of Kreminna towards Lyman – all to advance the Kremlin's objective of seizing all of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.[7] This was the first cohesive Russian offensive effort across multiple axes since the initial invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and elements of the Moscow and Leningrad military districts (MMD and LMD, both formerly Western Military District [WMD]) were responsible for all four efforts on this line.[8] Russian forces failed to make significant gains along this line in the initial months of 2024, however, likely because Russian forces were unable to conduct the significant mechanized maneuver necessary to make such gains.[9] Russian forces occasionally conducted intensified offensive pushes in individual directions along the Kharkiv-Luhansk axis starting in Summer 2024 but could not simultaneously maintain multiple efforts.[10]
Russian forces revived their efforts to advance towards the Oskil River in the Borova direction in September 2024 likely to set conditions for the future envelopment of Ukrainian positions on the east (left) bank of the river.[11] Russia made a tactical breakthrough towards Kruhlyakivka in late August 2024 and eventually expanded their salient and reached the east (left) bank of the Oskil River in November 2024, bisecting the Ukrainian presence on the east bank.[12] Russian forces likely hoped that cutting the ground lines of communication (GLOCs) between Ukrainian forces operating in the area east of Kupyansk and those further south on the Svatove-Kreminna line in combination with striking Ukrainian crossings over the river would allow them to advance and envelop Ukrainian forces on the east bank more quickly.
Russian forces struggled to make significant gains anywhere along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line after reaching the Oskil River southeast of Kupyansk, however. Russian forces gradually widened the Kruhlyakivka salient but failed to make more than marginal gains elsewhere on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line in the following months. The Russian military command was and likely remains willing to accept gradual advances across the theater in Ukraine, however, and will likely continue pursuing its goals of pushing Ukrainian forces from the east bank of the Oskil River and seizing the remainder of Luhansk Oblast's administrative boundaries along this axis.[13] Russian forces have recently made tactically significant advances during intensified offensive operations northeast of Kupyansk on the west (right) bank of the Oskil River near Dvorichna in January and February 2025.[14] Russian forces thus far have been conducting tactical envelopments of Ukrainian forces northeast of Dvorichna and likely hope to envelop Kupyansk from the north before attempting to advance further northwest towards Velykyi Burluk and unite the Kupyansk effort with their effort in northern Kharkiv Oblast.[15]
Avdiivka
Russian forces completed their two-year effort to seize Avdiivka in February 2024 following an arduous and costly campaign. Russian forces intensified their offensive operations in the Avdiivka area in October 2023 to increase their tempo of offensive operations across the theater after Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast slowed throughout September and October 2023.[16] Russian forces had conducted relatively little offensive activity around Avdiivka in Summer 2023, and ISW has previously assessed that the Russian military command likely chose to increase offensive operations around Avdiivka in Fall 2023 because Russian forces had set favorable conditio...
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