Key Judgments

Russia’s claim to have captured Kostiantynivka runs ahead of the facts on the ground. When Moscow announced the city had fallen on 3 July, independent analysts still put Russian control at little more than a third of it, and much of that was not firmly held.

The town is Russia’s biggest prize of the year, and a sign of how little that now buys. Kostiantynivka opens the southern door to Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, Ukraine’s last fortified stronghold in Donetsk. Russia is taking it a few dozen metres at a time, and paying heavily for each.

Russia is still attacking, but it has lost the initiative. Through the spring and into June it gave up more ground than it seized, its worst run since 2024, and outside analysts now say Moscow no longer sets the pace of the war.

Ukraine has taken the war to Russia’s rear. Its drones and missiles have knocked out a large share of Russian oil refining, between a quarter and a third by most counts, and forced President Putin to admit publicly to a fuel shortage.

The front is settling into something close to a freeze, but the war is far from over. Talks remain stuck on the Donbas, the very ground being fought over at Kostiantynivka, and both sides are stepping up long-range strikes rather than easing off.

1.What is happening at Kostiantynivka

Moscow declared victory on 3 July. The Defence Ministry, backed by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, said Russian troops had taken Kostiantynivka, a city of some 67,000 people before the war in the middle of Donetsk oblast. Kyiv flatly denied it. Ukraine’s General Staff said its own command and mapping systems still showed fighting inside the town, with Ukrainian troops holding contested ground. On the substance, the independent trackers sided with Kyiv. As of 1 July, the Institute for the Study of War reckoned Russian forces had pushed into only about a third of the city, and that most of that had come in June alone. Many of those footholds, it cautioned, were thin infiltrations rather than ground Russia actually controlled.

The gap between what Moscow says and what it holds has itself become part of the story. On 29 June, Putin claimed his troops held 96 percent of the city and stood a few kilometres from Kramatorsk. ISW’s mapping put the real share far lower and the distances far greater. The institute has also noted that some Russian “flag-raising” videos may be staged or AI-generated, and that senior commanders have overstated their gains in set-piece briefings all year, aiming as much at Western opinion as at their own public. For anyone trying to read the battle honestly, the messaging matters less than a plain fact: the advance is slow, contested and unfinished.

None of this makes the town unimportant. Kostiantynivka is the southern gateway to the Sloviansk–Kramatorsk urban area, the heart of what remains of Ukraine’s fortified belt in Donetsk. It stands in the same line as Avdiivka, which fell in early 2024, and Chasiv Yar, which fell in 2025. Russia switched its main summer effort here after its drive on Sloviansk lost momentum, pressing up from the south along the Donetsk–Kramatorsk highway. It has committed real weight to the fight, by ISW’s account a full combined-arms army and more. And still the advance crawls: CSIS clocked Russian progress around the town at roughly 50 metres a day.

2.What it means: attrition and a lost initiative

Step back from Kostiantynivka and the wider trend runs the other way. For all its effort, Russia gained barely 30 square kilometres across the entire front in June, about a kilometre a day. A year earlier it had taken sixteen times as much in the same month. Once you subtract the ground Ukraine clawed back through counter-attacks, the month tips into the red. Rochan Consulting logged a net Russian loss of around 40 square kilometres, and the Ukrainian monitoring group DeepState summed June up as “one step forward and one step back.”

This is what analysts mean when they say Russia has lost the initiative. CSIS found that Moscow surrendered more territory than it captured across the spring, its first sustained net losses since the summer of 2024. The reasons are consistent wherever you look. Ukrainian drones are thicker over the battlefield than ever. The defences behind the line are deeper. And Ukrainian units are striking Russian supply routes well before the front, wearing down assault groups before they can even form up.

The cost in lives sits underneath all of it. CSIS estimates the two armies together have now taken more than two million casualties since February 2022, with Russia carrying the heavier load, perhaps 1.4 million including on the order of 450,000 dead. Ukraine’s losses are grievous but smaller. What stands out is the exchange rate. Russia still fields far more men at the front, Zelensky has described being outnumbered eight to one around Pokrovsk, yet it is losing them at roughly that same ratio. Moscow has the manpower to keep pushing. It has less and less to show for it.

3.Ukraine’s strikes into Russia

As the front has slowed, Ukraine has shifted its weight to Russia’s rear. It ran more than 300 longer-range strikes in June, well up on May, and the campaign against refineries and defence plants has grown sharply through the year. By Meduza’s count, Ukrainian drones and missiles have now hit almost every major Russian refinery, from Moscow and St Petersburg out to the Urals and the Black Sea coast, leaving only a couple of large plants untouched. Recent targets have included a refinery more than 1,000 kilometres inside Russia, an arms plant at Volgograd, a Lukoil refinery on the Volga, and military sites at Penza.

The damage is now impossible for Moscow to hide. Estimates of how much refining capacity has been knocked out vary, from under a third in most Western reporting to the 42 percent Ukraine claims, but the effect on the ground is the same. Petrol output is down sharply, more than half of Russia’s regions have rationed fuel sales, and Putin has admitted to a “fuel supply squeeze” while floating a ban on diesel exports. He also turned down a Ukrainian offer for both sides to stop the deep strikes, which says something about how each capital reads the leverage. By one Bloomberg assessment, air-raid alerts have now sounded across regions holding more than 70 percent of Russia’s population.

These strikes do not take ground, and they are not a war-winning weapon on their own. Russia has answered them by hitting back harder, not by backing down. Its missile and drone barrage on Kyiv over the night of 1–2 July, among the heaviest of the war, killed around twenty civilians and was cast in Moscow as payback for the refinery attacks. So the two campaigns feed each other. But the more lasting effect is behind the lines. By draining fuel, ammunition and command links, Ukraine is thinning the very supply base that offensives like Kostiantynivka depend on, and it is making ordinary Russians feel a war that, until recently, most of them did not.

4.Trajectory: a freezing front, an unfrozen war

Put it together and you have a front that is hardening in place. Gains on both sides are measured in metres. Russia’s net advance has turned negative. Ukrainian counter-attacks near Lyman and in the south have steadied lines that looked shaky a year ago. But a frozen front is not the same as a finished war. As CSIS points out, Russia keeps fighting because Putin has chosen to, and he has given no sign of stopping. Ukraine, for its part, shows no sign of breaking. The likeliest near future is more of this same grind, rather than either a Russian breakthrough or an agreement to halt.

More and more, the fighting exists to strengthen a hand at the negotiating table. The diplomacy under the Trump administration has produced plenty of meetings and no settlement: talks in Geneva in February, an earlier round in Abu Dhabi that went nowhere, a three-day ceasefire in May that did not hold. Kyiv suggested late last year that most of a framework was agreed, but the hard part never moved, and the hard part is territory. Russia wants the whole of the Donbas. That is precisely what Kostiantynivka and the fortified belt behind it are about. Whoever holds Sloviansk and Kramatorsk holds the rest of Donetsk, and with it the core of any land-for-peace bargain. The town is a bargaining chip as much as a military objective.

Two things could break the pattern. The first is Russian expectation-setting drifting ever further from reality. Zelensky notes that Moscow has now moved its own deadline for taking the Donbas fifteen times, and currently points to the end of 2026, which reads less like a plan than like a country settling in for a long war. The second is the north. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, has warned that Russia may open a new line of attack there, most likely a push from Bryansk toward Chernihiv meant to stretch Ukrainian forces thin. Against both, Western support keeps arriving: a large EU financing package, new fighter jets from Sweden, and a NATO cell now handling the bulk of arms deliveries.

5.Outlook

For the coming months, the base case is continuity. Russia probably finishes taking Kostiantynivka but cannot turn it into a real breakthrough toward Kramatorsk and Sloviansk this year. The ground behind the town is open, mined and watched by drones, which favours whoever is defending it. Expect steady Russian pressure at Kostiantynivka, Pokrovsk and Lyman, matched by Ukrainian counter-attacks that keep the overall map close to still.

Three things are worth watching for a genuine shift. First, whether Russia can mount a second major effort after Kostiantynivka, or whether this summer’s win, as one prominent battlefield mapper put it, leads nowhere else this year. Second, whether the fuel crisis actually changes Moscow’s calculations on talks, or merely prompts it to repair refineries and dig in. Third, whether the strike-and-counterstrike cycle keeps climbing, especially as Ukraine reaches for longer-range missiles and Russia hammers Ukrainian cities and power grids heading into winter.

Kostiantynivka, in the end, is both Russia’s biggest success of the year and a clear illustration of why that success no longer adds up to much. The front is drifting toward a stalemate that neither side wants to put its name to, even as the war climbs into the air through long-range strikes. For now, the fighting is less about breaking through than about deciding who walks into an eventual negotiation over the Donbas with the stronger hand, a negotiation that, for all the diplomatic motion, remains unresolved.