War in Ukraine: better commanded, better equipped, the Ukrainian army is gradually regaining the advantage on the front

“Until then the Russians managed to nibble ground; today they are stalling”sums up a senior Western officer who knows the Russian and Ukrainian armies well and looks closely at the progress of each. Same impression of trampling among independent cartographers, those who, with the help of so-called “open” intelligence sources (geolocated videos of each other that we find in abundance on Telegram channels or the social network the retreats of the combatants. Whether it is the American think tank Institute for the Study of War, the Ukrainian site DeepState UA on Telegram or French independents like Clément Molin and “Poulet Volant” or even the Italian Playfra on all the fighting on the 1,200 km of front line.

Of course, not all cartographers produce equivalent maps, but in truth mapping the front line in Ukraine is all the more difficult as this line is no longer one. Or rather that its thickness has frankly deepened; we are no longer talking about a front line but about “gray zones” which can be up to 50 km thick. The fighters, for their part, speak of “kill zone“. Understand: a region of the front which is not really held by either of the two adversaries, and where the incessant overflight of attack and reconnaissance drones, both Russian and Ukrainian, prohibits any movement and any concentration of troops or armored vehicles: these would be immediately spotted and attacked. The French strategists of the Army Future Combat Command speak on this subject of a new “transparency of the battlefield”which prevents any large-scale maneuver, a maneuver which normally constitutes the ABC of infantry combat.

Throughout the year 2025, the Russian offensives were therefore made up not of columns of armored vehicles rushing towards a town, a position or a tree line in the open countryside, but of infiltrations of men in groups of four or five, on motorbikes, bicycles, electric scooters or even on horseback. In recent weeks, these infiltration attempts have most often been carried out on foot and increasingly by single men. The video of a Russian fighter taken by the Go Pro attached to his helmet and posted online at the beginning of June shows just one minute of a race towards a line of trees during which the soldier steps over or leaves aside around fifteen bodies: those of the soldiers who had tried similar infiltration before him.

Already in April the Russian “nibbling” of the ground (always by infiltration) had clearly slowed down. In May, it seems about to stop, although in certain areas it continues, such as around Kostiantynivka in Donbass where the situation of the Ukrainian armed forces begins to become particularly difficult. This is evidenced by a report from the General Staff of the Ukrainian army published online on June 3, 2026: “Combats here in the direction of KostiantynivkaÂ; à proximité de Kostyantynivka, Ivanopillya, Rusyn Yar et Illinivka.”

But on the scale of the front line, which crosses the entire country over 1,200 km from east to southwest, the “trampling” of the Russian army is real. It is all the more remarkable that, since April, these Russian attacks have increased: 37% more attacks in May, the Ukrainian general staff calculated. It was the now classic “spring offensive”, which the Russians carry out every year and which normally allows them their most important territorial gains. In 2026 there will have been a spring offensive, but without visible gain for the moment. And with considerable losses in men for the Moscow army.

Territory, won or lost, is not all that matters in this war. For a year and a half, Ukraine seems to have abandoned its strategies consisting of “not giving up anything” on the ground, of retaining as much of the country’s territory, towns and villages as possible, in favor of another strategy: inflicting maximum losses on Moscow’s army. When he returns to the front after a stay at the rear, Vadym Adamov, veteran of Ukrainian drone pilots, does not talk about returning to the front or going to defend this or that position. “I’m going back to kill Russians!”he blurted instead.

Russia’s main advantage in this confrontation is indeed mass: mass of arms and munitions, mass of personnel as well. It is estimated that Moscow’s army has 600,000 fighters in Ukraine compared to 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers. The Ukrainians worked to reduce this substantial numerical advantage. “When they go on an operation and are given three potential targets to deal with, the Ukrainians systematically choose the one that will do the most human damage”notes a European staff officer.

Yevhen Prasol, a ground drone operator from the Ukrainian Da Vinci Wolves brigade, confirms by giving an example: “The Russians have succeeded in setting up a tactical communications network to partially replace their ouster from the Starlink network [Ndlr : Sur demande insistante des Ukrainiens, Elon Musk a décidé en février dernier de couper toute communication via Starlink des terminaux n’étant pas régulièrement enregistrés, utilisés notamment par les Russes]. It’s another American system: Ubiquiti which works with two or three antennas which must be installed on high points and which play the role of server for dozens of terminals. It’s easy to spot these antennas and destroy them, but we prefer to try to spot and attack the installation and maintenance crews.”

“An antenna is easy to replace, but training a technician in signal processing takes a lot more time!”

Yevhen Prasol, Ukrainian ground drone operator

à franceinfo

The stated objective of the Russian army is to recruit (for a significant salary) around 30,000 men each month, to compensate for losses – which the Kremlin clearly does not care about – and to replenish the front lines. The Ukrainians’ objective is therefore to put more than 30,000 Russians out of action per month: 1,000 per day! average over 2025, the Ukrainian general staff estimates having put 23,000 Moscow soldiers out of action each month. Since 2026 the pace has accelerated. In April and May, the number of soldiers lost by Moscow (dead and seriously injured) exceeded 30,000. beyond what can be met by recruitment: kyiv’s objective has been achieved. More than the trampling on the ground, it is perhaps an important tipping point in the progress of this war.

Moscow’s army has also lost its strictly military quality, several observers note. First of all, new Russian recruits are most of the time little or not trained. Sometimes a soldier’s initial training does not exceed a week before finding himself on the threshold of the “gray zones” and being launched into these deadly infiltration attempts.

The quality of Russian military command is also at half mast. Military analyst Jack Watling of Royal United Services Institute British (RUSI) which carries out frequent missions on the front lines in Ukraine indicates, in a recent article published on the Foreign Affairs website what “lack of qualifications [militaire de l’armée russe] at lower levels led to deterioration in performance and an inability to implement plans of attack or even orders.”

“Many officers were promoted in the field, without having gone through extensive officer training, and their main task was to psychologically prepare their soldiers for attacks rather than to plan and organize these attacks competently.”

Jack Waitling, military analyst

à franceinfo

A senior French officer, an observer of the Ukrainian theater, specifies: “Today a young lieutenant in the Russian army is no longer even capable of conceiving or even executing a simple maneuver”. In fact, if the art of maneuver has been lost, it is also because these maneuvers are simply no longer possible in the era of the “transparent” battlefield.

Between insufficient or distorted tactical information which does not always reach the appropriate level, the poverty of the troop’s military training and the carelessness of its middle management, Moscow’s army is today struggling. “The Russian army regularly makes errors in the allocation of its artillery and drone resources and issues a whole series of orders, based on bad information, orders which are impossible to execute,” poursuit Jack Watling.

“Russian forces are increasingly unable to translate their battle plans into military operations, leading to a weakening of their attacks.”

Jack Watling, military analyst

à franceinfo

Opposite, in the ranks of the Ukrainian army, rather the opposite happened during the year 2025. A greater concern to preserve the lives of combatants, to organize a more frequent rotation of troops on the front, to repatriate and treat the wounded from the battlefield and initial training of soldiers by the officers who will command in combat, initial training which can last up to eight weeks, allowed the kyiv army to compensate for its lack of personnel.

As for the Ukrainian command, it proved capable of mounting increasingly complex operations, some far inside Russian territory such as the ‘spider web’ operation which saw the dispatch of nearly a hundred attack drones, hidden in anonymized roofed trucks. opening and which were liberated in the immediate vicinity of six air bases, in the four corners of the Russian Federation, with the result of the destruction or decommissioning of around thirty military devices: radar planes, strategic bombers, etc. On the front, operations. Ukrainians are clearly better prepared, better planned in the long term or, on the contrary, carried out in an extremely reactive manner and this is undoubtedly thanks to technological advances.

The weapon most widely used in the Ukrainian theater is of course the drone: several thousand devices fly over the battlefield every day. Observation drones, communications relay drones, kamikaze attack drones, bomb-dropping drones, drone-hunting drones (with rifle mounted on top or even net), ultra-fast interceptor drones, drone jamming devices, drones guided by optical fiber that are impossible to jam… The two parties have competed over the last two years of inventiveness to find the weapon or the solution. As soon as a new system appeared, barely more than a fortnight passed before the adversary found a solution or countermeasure, an eternal game of exchange between the sword and the shield.

But in this game, the Ukrainians seem to have taken a serious lead in recent months. Russian military bloggers, certified chroniclers in Russia of the Moscow offensive and who, obviously, support it, complain that the Ukrainian adversary is now capable of launching on a single sector of the front line more than 200 attack drones at the same time, piloted in swarms by two or three people: impossible to counter them all, especially since they are often of different, while Russian drones only arrive at the front in scattered order and often late, deplore these same bloggers. The centralization of the Russian military apparatus and the obvious corruption of its middle-level executives do not help.

Another “weapon” that the Russians only occasionally have at the level of combat units: an efficient tactical management and command support system (Battle Management System). The Ukrainians have developed DELTA from 2023; all brigades are now equipped with them. This tactical management system allows the fusion in real time of all the image data collected in particular by swarms of drones but also by other sensors (in particular audio), to organize them, to “comb” them in a few seconds thanks to artificial intelligence and thus to identify obvious weaknesses in the enemy device. It then only takes a few minutes for the equipment to propose solutions for “processing” potential targets, depending on the resources available to the Ukrainian army (attack drones but also long-range artillery or even aerial bombardments), for which the system has also been “fed”. In other words, it involves partly automating the work of a staff, which must normally study the physical terrain, collect tactical intelligence data, evaluate it, identify the adversary’s weak points and, on this basis, decide on a possible maneuver before ordering its implementation: a process which can take hours. A small staff, equipped with DELTA, can operate in the same way in a few minutes.

This technological advantage and this experience of integrated command have enabled Ukraine to mount in recent months a major campaign targeting the logistics of all Russian troops in the south and southeast of the country. It all started with a classic SEAD campaign (Suppression of enemy air defenses) or suppression of the enemy’s air defenses: anything that resembled a Russian anti-aircraft battery or surveillance radar and which could have been spotted in Crimea or the occupied regions of Donbass and the oblasts of Zaporijja and Kherson were been attacked.

Air-to-ground missiles or hovering bombs fired by the F16, MIG 29 or Mirage 2000 available to the Ukrainian armed forces, as well as long-distance attack drones, have thus “treated” several dozen targets: at least fifty radars and more than a hundred Russian anti-aircraft batteries have been reduced to ashes. based on open source images that can be found here and there. The Ukrainian army announces 174 anti-aircraft defense systems affected since the start of the year. The idea being to provide air superiority over certain sectors of the terrain. “A SEAD campaign, even if partially carried out, allows you to create radar “holes” where you will be able to operate your own aircraft in relative safety”explains a staff officer.

And that’s exactly what happened: since the beginning of May, an armada of attack drones of a new type, of intermediate range (50 to 200 km) and difficult to jam have hit everything that could resemble a tanker, an equipment transport truck and of course to a military vehicle, in the depths of the territory occupied by the Russians in Ukraine: on the main axis linking Crimea to Russia, up to 160 km behind the front line, but also, further north, all around Donetsk the first and main town of the Ukrainian Donbass, occupied since 2014, and which serves as a logistical “hub” for Russian troops setting out to attack southeastern Ukraine. Trains – the main logistical weapon of the Moscow army – have also been attacked: at least thirty rail convoys targeted over the last fortnight.

The desired objective, in the long term, is of course to deprive the Russian assault troops of their material resources but also to push back even further from the front line all the stores, the command centers, the weapons depots which fuel the battle on the Russian side and which are now within the range of the drones Ukrainians. We are not there yet: if gasoline is now rationed in Crimea and in part of Donbass for civilians, the Russian military units have not shown any retreat: the assaults continue, even if it is at a standstill and with heavy human losses. The battle is still ongoing, but Ukraine has taken the advantage.