During the early months of 2025, there was much speculation that Russia’s coming summer offensive would prove the decisive campaign of the entire invasion. Many thought the Ukrainian army was already close to collapse, with Putin himself declaring in March that “there are reasons to believe we can finish off” Ukrainian forces. The stage seemed set for Russia to finally break Ukraine’s dogged resistance and win the war.
As August gives way to September, it is now abundantly clear that Putin’s big summer offensive has failed. The Russian army has been unable to secure any front line breakthroughs or capture a single major city, with overall Russian advances during the three summer months limited to an estimated 0.3 percent of Ukrainian territory. Crucially, key strategic objectives like Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine remain in Ukrainian hands.
The Kremlin’s ambitious plans to expand the war into northern Ukraine’s Sumy and Kharkiv regions have also fallen flat. During the initial weeks of the summer offensive in June, a swaggering Putin confidently declared that “all Ukraine is ours” and threatened to seize regional capital Sumy as part of efforts to establish a so-called “security buffer zone” stretching deep inside Ukraine. With the summer season now over, his invading troops find themselves pinned down in a handful of border villages, having been forced to retreat after a series of battlefield reverses.
Russia’s extremely modest recent gains have come at a terrible price. While the Kremlin does not release information about its war dead, conservative estimates of Russian casualties based on open source data suggest catastrophic losses during the summer months numbering tens of thousands. As German journalist and BILD correspondent Julian Röpcke has noted, any sober assessment of Russia’s summer offensive must conclude that it has been a “debacle.”
Voice of Ukraine 