As Ukraine has moved through its different phases of war, the theory of victory has changed.
Survival of the Russian blitzkrieg in February 2022 was victory in itself. The flow of Western equipment at a much greater scale and the provision of Western intelligence helped to stem the tide and stabilise the front during the rest of the year.
By September 2022, Ukraine was in a position to launch a counter-attack which led to it regaining around half of the territory which had been lost in February-March 2022. Russian territorial occupation went from 7% of Ukraine in January 2022 to a peak of 27% in March, and down again to 18% by the end of 2022.
“The period from the start of 2023 until the middle of that year was probably our most optimistic period since the war had started,” says Andrii Zahorodniuk, a petroleum sector entrepreneur turned politician, who is now focusing his energies on developing a jet-powered mid-range drone.
But by the end of the year, with the failed and yet much-hyped Ukrainian counter-offensive, the war began to take on its attritional character, even though there were breakthroughs in effectively destroying Russia’s Black Sea fleet despite Ukraine’s not having a conventional navy.
Zahorodniuk headed the Reform Project Office at the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine for two years from 2015, and was appointed as the Minister of Defence from August 2019 to March 2020.
At the same time, while not a theory of victory, Ukraine pursued a theory of prevalence, as Zahorodniuk describes it, with high profile (and costly) assaults in stemming the Russian advance around symbolically notable towns, just as Bakhmut had been in 2023. By the end of 2024, the war had become synonymous with the grinding, campaigns to capture Avdiivka, Chasiv Yar, Kupyansk, Pokrovsk, Robotyne, Kostiantynivka, Dobropillia, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
[Image: Mural in Ukraine. Greg Mills]
Russia’s theory of victory has remained constant.
Putin’s objective is to bring Ukraine back into Russia’s sphere of influence. This can be achieved, either directly by militarily conquering and annexing Ukraine, or indirectly by installing a Russian proxy in Kyiv. A secondary consideration is to prevent further NATO expansion eastward.
Putin has claimed
To do so, Putin has claimed – falsely – that Ukraine is not, and has never been, an independent country with a distinct culture, history, religion, or language, and that, in his words, there is “no historical basis for the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians”.
With regard to his military strategy, in his December 2025 talk at the National Defence Control Centre, Putin remarked: “Our troops are advancing with confidence and grinding down the hostile forces, defeating enemy units, its groups, forces and reserves, including so-called elite formations trained in Western centres and equipped with modern foreign weaponry.”.
The method by which the Russians grind forward is extraordinarily costly, with units inserting themselves in areas having suffered as much as 90% casualties but by surviving, essentially infiltrating areas within the kill-zone.
What Putin did not refer to was the pace of progress, which in parts of his advance is slower than the Somme in 1916, or less than 80 metres per day. Units in the region of Zaporizhzhia talk of less than 100 metres of advance per week, though all the time the grey-zone is expanding outwards in both directions given the prevalence and accuracy of drones.
By 2025, the conflict had become “a full-on drone war”, an attritional conflict which presumably Putin believes he can win because the traditional maths of war of people and conventional equipment are to Russia’s comparative advantage. But absent manoeuvre forces, it is very difficult to restore land.
Land is the medium of Russia, and the metrics of success appear to remain focused on capturing small bits of territory on the front whatever the cost and despite the loss of people and the strategic initiative in the rear areas.
Existential question
For Ukraine, the theory of victory remains an existential question.
“It’s not about NATO and the Donbas,” says Zahorodniuk, “but about Ukraine and its existence.”
Since you can’t kill every Russian, there needs to be a way to the peace table that is reasonable and fair. And here optics are important, the perception of who is winning, which places an emphasis on the impact of the deep-strike operations.
Until then, the aim of the war is to remove options from Putin, that he doesn’t have a path to victory any more than Ukraine has a way to lose. This has been accomplished, for instance, in the naval domain, and has been the effect of the war of attrition in place since 2024.
Behind this, notes Andrii Zahorodniuk, is a combination of an existential determination, Ukraine’s horizontal society and the eco-system which has been established, creating a critical mass.
“If you are in Houston,” he says, “every second person you meet in a bar is in the oil and gas business. Building drones now in Ukraine is like doing oil and gas in Houston.”
Dr Mills from Ukraine.
[Image: Greg Mills]
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