Who is winning the war in Ukraine?

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.

"Just one month" after Donald Trump's return to the White House, the US president has "thrown whatever hopes Kyiv had for future American support into chaos", said The Independent. Ukraine is now "fighting a war on two fronts": the "grind against the Russian invaders to the east", and "the battle to keep Mr Trump on side to the west".

President Trump has declared that, under his watch, there will be a "quick deal" deal to end the war. And his "aggressive rhetoric" – calling Zelenskyy a "dictator without elections" and suggesting Ukraine started the war or "shouldn't have let them attack" – has led to speculation that Trump may force Ukraine to cede to Russian demands, said Sky News.

Trump's special envoy for Kyiv and Moscow has, however, insisted that Washington is "with" Ukraine, and any deal to end the fighting with Russia should ensure there is no "next war".

Can Ukraine win the war?

The latest twists come after Ukraine battled to slow the advance of Russia further into its territory, and the outcome of the war began to look increasingly likely to be decided by two key factors: supply of soldiers and maintaining international support.

Zelenskyy has already lowered the age of military conscription in Ukraine to 25 in an attempt to boost troop numbers. But conscription remains a touchy topic in Ukraine, and officials have had to tread lightly amid dwindling enthusiasm for military service. In October, Al Jazeera reported that "feared patrols" are hunting for potential conscripts, as officials searching for recruits "stalk nightclubs, concerts and subway stations". There are accusations that some are employing "dubious measures", including that they "round people up randomly".

Ukraine's "inherent weakness is that it depends on others for funding and arms", wrote the BBC's international editor, Jeremy Bowen. On the other hand Russia – in addition to an advantage in raw manpower – "makes most of its own weapons" and is "buying drones from Iran and ammunition from North Korea" with no limitations on how they are used.

The return of Trump has focused minds on both sides. In the immediate aftermath of his father's election win, Donald Trump Jr. warned Zelenskyy he was 38 days from losing his "allowance".

Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, the former deputy head of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, told Al Jazeera that the armed forces are already bracing for the worst but cautioned it was still hard to predict what the famously unpredictable president would do.

If the "worst-case scenario" for Ukraine materialises, said CNN, namely if the US stopped providing aid, Europe did not step up its assistance and Ukraine was not able to access the $50 billion (￡40 billion) or so in frozen Russian assets promised to it by the G7, then Russia would "likely start to make much bigger gains" which could force Kyiv to the negotiating table.

This matters, said The Independent, because "each inch of territory lost or gained could prove vital in future negotiations."

What does victory look like for each side?

Before Russia launched its invasion in February 2022, Putin outlined the objectives of what he called a "special military operation". His goal, he claimed, was to "denazify" and "demilitarise" Ukraine, and to defend Donetsk and Luhansk, the two eastern Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian proxy forces since 2014.

Another objective, although never explicitly stated, was to topple the Ukrainian government and remove the country's president, Zelenskyy. "The enemy has designated me as target number one; my family is target number two," said Zelenskyy shortly after the invasion. Russian troops made two attempts to storm the presidential compound.

Russia shifted its objectives, however, about a month into the invasion, after Russian forces were forced to retreat from Kyiv and Chernihiv. According to the Kremlin, its main goal became the "liberation of the Donbas", including the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – but Moscow has made little progress in achieving this aim.

Russia has since scaled back its objectives. The Economist said the Kremlin's "minimum requirement" appears to be "occupying the entirety of the Donbas region (comprising the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk), regaining control of Russia's own Kursk region, which Ukraine has partly occupied, and holding on to the 'land bridge' it seized in the early stages of the war connecting Crimea to Russia".

Ukraine's main objective remains the liberation of its occupied territories. That includes not just those held by Russia since the February 2022 invasion, but a return to its internationally recognised borders, including Crimea.

How many Russian and Ukrainian troops have died in the conflict?

True casualty figures are "notoriously difficult to pin down", said Newsweek, and "experts caution that both sides likely inflate the other's reported losses".

More than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and 380,000 injured on the battlefield, Zelenskyy said in an interview with NBC earlier this month, with "tens of thousands" missing or in Russian captivity. However, this month, UALosses, a web project that records Ukrainian casualty data from open sources, lists more than 70,400 names.

Russian casualties are also high. A BBC Russia and Mediazona collaboration in January, again using open-source data, established the names of over 90,000 Russian soldiers killed since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Ukraine's General Staff estimates that Russia has lost a total of 859,920 troops, a figure believed to include "dead, wounded, missing and captured" soldiers, said The Kyiv Independent.