Is Russia gearing up for a summer offensive? Or is what we see what they've got? I keep hearing that the Russian ground forces are now combat experienced. But I see an exhausted ground force.
The war goes on.
Russia's ground war has faltered:
Russian forces are performing poorly on the battlefield and failing to make operationally significant advances in their ongoing spring-summer 2026 campaign, as Ukrainian forces continue to counterattack and comprehensively strike Russian mid–range targets and deep in the Russian rear.
Russian war supporters wonder why Russia hits symbolic targets in their air war:
Russian milbloggers heavily criticized the May 24 strikes as expensive but not militarily useful and that the Oreshnik strike against Bila Tserkva did not have a clear militarily significant target. Milbloggers further criticized the strikes as expensive and as not contributing to the Russian war effort, while Russian forces are under-resourced and unable to advance on the frontline.
The appearance of success with missile strikes may now rely on aerial attacks in the absence of a ground war that provides that. You can only pretend to have taken a town from the Ukrainians so many times before people start to notice.
Recall that there were those who claimed the U.S. Army was "broken" by its campaign in Iraq after it suffered perhaps a thousand KIA per year there. I thought that was ridiculous:
Our Army is stressed. And we need to take actions to counter and eventually relieve that stress. So far, we seem to be doing that successfully. Don't confuse this, as Korb seems to do, with the other problem of being unbalanced--so focused on counter-insurgency that we are slighting conventional warfighting skills. But once Iraq deployments slow after victory, the problems of both stress and balance will be resolved. And we will retain the combat experienced troops for a generation.
Yet Russia with deaths in over four years of combat (nearly 500,000 according to Britain's GCHQ director) a couple orders of magnitude greater than America's 4,500 deaths in Iraq over about 6-1/2 years of combat missions is combat-hardened with hard-won experience against Ukraine? What survivors will make Russian ground forces better in the next war?
Call me skeptical about seeing bloodied and battered Russian ground force elements and thinking "none shall pass" that awesome array of experienced combat power!
Still, Russia's ground forces have power in the positional war of attrition they are optimized to fight now. Fighting that sort of war against Russia would not be ideal. As long as their troops are willing to die in large numbers, of course. Are we just seeing a pause in Russia's advance? Or has Russia lost the ability to attack. If the latter, can Ukraine exploit it before Russian ground forces can recover?
Ukraine has a six-month window in which to seize the battlefield initiative from Russia and strengthen its hand for peace talks, a senior commander told Reuters, predicting a “turning point” was imminent after more than four years of war.
Can Russian ground forces recover? Will a much-discussed Russian mobilization make or break the troops in the field?
NOTE: ISW updates continue here.
NOTE: Also, I put war-related links and commentary in the Weekend Data Dump on Substack. You may read my posts on Substack, at The Dignified Rant: Evolved.
