The display of force that Russia rained on Ukraine early Tuesday, with hundreds of drones and missiles, cannot mask the increasing signs of Moscow’s weakness in the four-year war.
Russia’s advance in Ukraine has slowed almost to a halt. It has stepped up coerced mobilization in occupied eastern Ukraine as its domestic recruitment efforts fall short. Domestic discontent is growing, and Europe is providing new support to Ukraine. Peace talks brokered by the United States have all but ended.
The war has not been going the Kremlin’s way, with battleground losses and mounting casualties. With fiercer strikes, Moscow hopes to gain a better position for negotiations.
“Ukraine’s position is much, much more formidable now than just a year ago,” Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Ukraine’s battlefield gains have turned the tide in the war, wrote Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London, this week.
“In Kyiv, there is a growing optimism that Ukraine can fight Russia to a cease-fire,” Mr. Watling wrote in an analysis for Foreign Affairs. He said that while “drone strikes and shelling remain constant, Russian combat performance is waning.”
In Moscow on Tuesday, Mr. Putin’s chief spokesman said the war could end as soon as Ukraine withdraws from the Donbas region, where Russia has claimed territory.
That is a stark turnabout from last summer, when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was so confident of victory that he flew to Alaska for a meeting of minds with President Trump on how to end the war. These days, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is the one pushing for a quick end to the hostilities.
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Zelensky called the latest assault “a large-scale attack and a completely transparent statement from Russia: If Ukraine is not protected from ballistic and other missile strikes, these attacks will continue.”
Ukraine’s battlefield position has improved with additional military aid from Europe, including an arms package worth about $149 million from Finland and 16 Gripen fighter jets from Sweden, both announced this past week.
At the same time, analysts with DeepState UA, a Ukrainian open-source intelligence tracker, reported this week that the Russian military appeared to have lost more territory in May than it had gained, its first month with such a loss since Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive.
That was despite a 37.5 percent increase in the number of Russian attacks. Analysts said Russian battlefield forces had likely degraded to the point that, at times, attacks were left to only one or two soldiers to launch.
Recent estimates from Western officials suggest that Russia is suffering staggering battlefield casualties. Last week, the British spy chief Anne Keast-Butler said nearly 500,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the war began in February 2022.
“As we remain steadfast in our support for Ukraine, Putin is going backwards on the battlefield,” Ms. Keast-Butler said in a speech in London.
In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Russia was losing 15,000 to 20,000 soldiers every month. “Not injured — dead,” Mr. Rubio said on Fox News. “It’s a bad war.”