The three-day ceasefire, announced from May 9 to 11 and proposed by Vladimir Putin to Volodymyr Zelensky for the celebrations of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, will have offered only a short-term respite to Ukrainian civilians. Indeed, from the first hours of the truce, the two camps accused each other of violations, while strikes and fighting continued on several sectors of the front.
A conflict tracking tool that uses satellite systems to detect the location and intensity of war-related fires has shown no signs of The Economist, no significant slowdown in combat. Which proves that the probability of an imminent end to the war in Ukraine is very low. However, according to the British media, the course of the conflict seems to be reversing. The number of casualties on the Russian side remains extremely high, while the large-scale offensive planned for early spring in Ukraine appears to be at a standstill.
Russia continues to lose soldiers
According to our colleagues, for the first time since October 2023, Russia recorded modest but continuing territorial losses this year. They also estimate that as of May 12, 2026, between 280,000 and 518,000 Russian soldiers had been killed, for a total casualties (including wounded) of between 1.1 and 1.5 million. In other words, approximately 3% of the pre-war Russian male population of fighting age was killed or wounded.
To find these figures, The Economist relies on estimates from intelligence services, defense officials and independent researchers, as well as its conflict monitoring tool, which allows the daily number of deaths to be modeled based on the intensity of the fighting.
According to them, reliable estimates of Ukrainian losses remain too rare to allow comparable modeling. However, an estimate from CSIS, a think tank, puts it at nearly 600,000 casualties by December, including 100,000 to 140,000 deaths, a higher proportion of Ukraine’s pre-war population than Russia’s.
Russia struggles to advance on the battlefield
In addition to losing many men in combat, Russia made very little progress on the front. Indeed, Ukrainian drones track Russian troops well beyond the front line, complicating any deployment without immediate exposure to enemy fire. The tracking tool used by The Economistwhich uses battlefield maps provided by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), says Russian forces have conquered about 220 square kilometers this year, or just 0.04 percent of Ukraine’s territory.
At the same time, Ukraine began to regain ground, with a 30-day rolling average estimating about 189 square kilometers regained. Russia could, however, delay before a possible summer offensive, a scenario which could constitute a turning point in the conflict. The British media nevertheless specifies that mapping the battlefield became more and more difficult as it became dispersed.
