'Russia's not losing... but they're also not winning'

Ahead of tomorrow’s third anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Sam Kiley speaks to frontline soldiers, some of whom question the timing of peace talks

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“We’re fed up with fighting but there will have been no point if we give in to Putin now, as Trump wants us to. So, we’ll fight on whatever anyone tells us to do,” a senior officer in Ukraine says.

As the third anniversary of the war fast approaches, soldiers on the front line are outraged by the assumption made by their country’s allies that their war against Russia is lost and that now is the time to sue for peace.

“Russia is not winning in Ukraine. They’re not losing but they’re just not winning,” says Kallas, a senior officer in a specialist brigade that deploys across much of the 1,300km front line. “The enemy are making very small gains for an enormous cost in men and equipment. They’re not having any operational successes of any significance and they’re definitely not able to use anything like the amounts of artillery and armour that we saw a few months ago.”

Ukraine is staying ahead of Russia in the drone war and in the Kursk salient, a lozenge of Russian land captured last year by Kyiv’s forces, Zelensky’s forces are managing to use Nato-style manoeuvre tactics which free its forces to attack rather than defend trench lines.

Kyiv has relied on about $232bn in military and financial aid from the US and Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022. The US has contributed about half of that, plus around $62bn in security assistance.

However, that aid is now in doubt as Donald Trump embarks on “peace talks” with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine but excluding Kyiv from the process.