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.