Chapter 1
Russia has occupied part of Ukraine since 2014 and roughly a fifth of…
Russia has occupied part of Ukraine since 2014 and roughly a fifth of it since the full-scale invasion of February 2022 — about 45,000 square miles, including Crimea and the Donbas districts taken before the war, a total on which the two main open-source trackers agree to within about one percent. Everything else is contested. The front runs some 1,200 kilometres from the Russian border south of Kharkiv down to the Dnipro estuary, and for most of the past two years it has moved in metres and single square kilometres rather than in provinces. Ukraine's one seizure of Russian ground, the Kursk incursion of August 2024, took about 250 square kilometres and has since been reduced almost to nothing.
Chapter 2
Ground changes hands slowly now because both sides can see it
Ground changes hands slowly now because both sides can see it. Drone reconnaissance and strike coverage reaching tens of kilometres behind the contact line has made massed armour expensive and rare, and Russian gains come instead through infiltration: small groups of infantry working forward on foot or on motorcycles into gaps, then trying to consolidate what they reach. Against fortified towns the pattern has a second step — sustained glide-bomb strikes to destroy strongpoints and drone control stations before the infantry enters. That sequence preceded the seizures of Avdiivka in February 2024, Vuhledar in October 2024, Kurakhove in December 2024 and Toretsk in August 2025, and it is now being applied to the Fortress Belt, the chain of Donetsk cities running through Kostiantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk that has anchored Ukraine's defence of the region since 2014. Donbas is not the only direction, though it is the one Moscow talks about. Russia also fights to hold a buffer strip inside Sumy and Kharkiv oblasts, and in the south it has been working to join its Orikhiv and Hulyaipole axes into a single push on Zaporizhzhia City that would bypass Ukraine's south-facing defences — offensives too large and too costly to be mere fixing attacks, and unnecessary if Donetsk were really the whole aim.
Chapter 3
This makes the war unusually hard to measure
This makes the war unusually hard to measure, and the measurement has become part of the story. Infiltration produces presence without control, so the same ground can be counted as taken, as contested or as held depending on the definition applied — and the trackers apply different ones, at times disagreeing not only about how far the front moved in a month but about which way. Both governments publish claims the geolocated record does not support: Russia's defence ministry has announced settlements while the nearest Russian troops were still kilometres away — and by the summer of 2026 some of the flag-raising video offered as proof was being assessed as generated or altered by artificial intelligence — and aggregate territorial figures from both sides have repeatedly failed verification against the map. What is established is the shape of the trend rather than any month’s number. Through the first half of 2026 Russia advanced, slowly, against fuel shortages, lost armour and its own commanders’ inaccurate picture of where the line runs, all documented by Russian sources. Then the balance tipped. Ukraine cleared Russian forces from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in a six-month counteroffensive on the Oleksandrivka axis — by area its largest recapture since 2022 — and north of Lyman it ran Operation Vivaldi, a counteroffensive fought for months before it was disclosed, which collapsed the salient from which Russia meant to envelop the Fortress Belt from the north. By ISW’s count Russia seized less than Ukraine liberated in August, lost ground on net in September, and has lost ground on net since March. In October 2026 ISW concluded that Russia’s 2026 campaign to seize Donetsk had been defeated, while cautioning that this was no rout on the scale of Kharkiv in 2022 and that the southern arm of the plan, at Dobropillya, was still being pressed. The rate question has a published answer of sorts: at August’s pace in Donetsk, ISW calculated, Russia would not finish taking the oblast until 2032, and it now declines to forecast that Russia can take it by force at all. No Fortress Belt city has fallen. The open questions are whether Russia rebuilds the northern arm or abandons it, whether Ukraine’s gains hold through the winter, and what either side’s claimed totals would look like if they had to be geolocated.
And now
Russia’s leadership is claiming ground the evidence says it has lost.
At a command post on October 16, Valery Gerasimov told Putin that Russian forces had taken more than 1,800 square kilometres and 92 settlements since September 1; Putin said 6,500 this year and claimed Ukraine holds barely a tenth of Donetsk Oblast. ISW measures a net Russian loss of 122 square kilometres across the front since September 1, and finds Ukraine still holds 20.4 percent of Donetsk and 24.6 percent of Zaporizhzhia. Gerasimov’s five kilometres from Zaporizhzhia city is at least 21 on ISW’s count, and it found no evidence of the encirclement he announced in northern Kharkiv. Ukraine’s General Staff called the briefing lies.
The same briefing claimed Dobropillya and Kostiantynivka, the southern cities of the Fortress Belt. ISW does not see either taken, and puts Russian troops at least 9 kilometres from Kramatorsk. The real fighting is inside Kostiantynivka, where Russian infiltrators are working north of the city. North of Lyman, the Russian salient stays collapsed.
ISW recorded no confirmed Russian advance between October 15 and 17 at Kupyansk, Sumy, Hulyaipole or western Zaporizhzhia.
Where it stands today →