For all of the Trump administration’s insistence that diplomacy is the key to ending Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine, the future of that country and the shape of an eventual settlement is being decided on the ground militarily. While independent analysts say the overall strategic picture remains favorable to Russia — a point which Moscow is eager to drive home in public messaging, as the United States mulls abandoning peace talks and withdrawing its support for Kyiv — the defender generally has the advantage in military operations. Ukraine has been staving off disaster in the field with creativity, innovation, and courage of arms, but the data paints a desultory picture of its prospects. Kyiv is struggling to assemble the number of frontline soldiers it needs for effective defense — let alone offensive operations, which require far more resources and carry much greater risks. Russia has an estimated 620,000 combatants in the field, according to Ukrainian military intelligence. Moscow says it is adding 40,000 new recruits per month — more than it needs to replace the 30,000 or more it loses on the battlefield each month. The Kremlin says it plans to increase its total military strength to 1.5 million in uniform. “The Russian military is reconstituting and growing at a faster rate than most analysts had anticipated,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, told a Senate committee in April. The Kremlin continues to unleash dozens of drones and missiles against Ukrainian cities nightly, and while the defenders are often able to shoot down a large portion of these, each one that gets through is costly. Russia is set to produce thousands of the most commonly used type of attack drone, the Geran, this year. Nevertheless, resistance continues. The key road-and-rail hub of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine has yet to fall to Russia. On that front — one of the centers of gravity for the war — Russia has advanced a mere 25 miles at a cost of tens of thousands of soldiers, after nearly a year of fighting. The city has been almost utterly destroyed, with one Ukrainian soldier who was deployed there recently telling Rolling Stone that “it feels more like a zombie apocalypse than real life.” About 2,000 civilians hang on in Pokrovsk, with parts of the city under near-constant attack from artillery, rockets, missiles and drones. When one of these diehard residents is slain, they are buried in the street by the survivors; emergency services no longer operate in the city, the soldier says. Any push by the Kremlin to make substantial gains in an offensive over the summer will likely be hampered by the Russian military’s original sins: an overreliance on human wave attacks, poor command-and-control, and logistics hamstrung by corruption and ossified bureaucracy. “Russia’s military has so far failed to develop effective tactics or concepts of operations that offset Ukraine’s capabilities. Throwing a higher volume of troops into the breach is unlikely to deliver significant returns,” George Barros — the Russia team lead at the Institute for the Study of War, a non-profit research organization based in Washington, D.C. — tells Rolling Stone. In the ground war, Ukraine and Russia both employ similar defensive tactics that have evolved over three years of war, relying on layers of minefields, obstacles and trenches to keep the enemy at bay, while drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs, bearing an array of sensors or munitions are used to hunt people and vehicles trying to approach the front. Moscow is losing upwards of 1,000 soldiers a day inching forward in slipshod assaults, hoping to simply overwhelm defenders. But even with hundreds of assaults per day, it’s having only marginal success. “The current nature of the positional warfare and Ukraine’s highly effective use of drones has given Ukraine a favorable attrition rate,” Barros says. For the most part, the soldiers Russia sends into the fray are minimally trained, poorly motivated draftees who must be forced to advance at the point of a bayonet. Most of Russia’s elite military personnel were slain in the first year of the war; the experienced and well-trained veterans who still survive have largely coalesced into favored units, allowing them to wait behind the lines managing the draftees sent forward as cannon fodder — and ready in reserve to exploit a breakthrough, if it comes. The fortunes of war can turn in a moment, but one U.S. military officer with expertise in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict doesn’t see much changing on the tactical side this summer: “I think the Ukrainian UAVs will hold the Russians. They’ll keep advancing, but no breakthroughs are likely.” An advantage that Russia does have, which Ukraine does not, is an ally putting boots on the ground. The Kremlin has now gone on the record about North Korean soldiers fighting for Moscow, something Russian officials had previously described as “fake news.” The presence of approximately 12,000 North Korean soldiers on the battlefield had been previously reported by multiple independent sources, and North Korean prisoners of war have even been produced by Kyiv. But last week, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s top military officer, confirmed that the North Koreans had helped Moscow eject the Ukrainians that had invaded Kursk beginning last summer, saying: “Soldiers and officers of the Korean People’s Army, carrying out combat missions shoulder to shoulder with Russian servicemen, displayed high professionalism, fortitude, courage and heroism in repulsing the Ukrainian invasion.” Two days later, the North Korean state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun carried a front page editorial lauding the North Korean intervention as “heroic.” The paper describes Ukraine’s forces as “the vanguard and shock brigade of the imperialist powers” who “made a vigorous attack on the Russian mainland by surprise with the involvement of tens of thousands of elite forces armed with ultra-modern weapons.” With an official commitment from Pyongyang under a mutual security treaty signed last year in hand, Moscow may eventually rotate as many as 150,000 North Koreans through the battlefront over the next year. According to South Korean intelligence, these are primarily special operations forces, as well as field artillery and other support units. North Korean officials have indicated that their forces will now be available for deployment in all the territories Moscow claims in Ukraine. Combat is unforgiving for novices, even relatively well-trained ones, and the North Koreans appear to have had some sharp lessons, with an estimated 4,700 casualties. Yet Pyongyang continues to cycle fresh troops into Ukraine, and appears committed to Russia’s war. Not so for Ukraine’s most important military partner, the United States. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appears to have made significant progress in currying favor with President Donald Trump and reversing the disastrous course of Ukraine-U.S. relations that were on display when Vice President J.D. Vance gave the foreign leader a tongue-lashing in the Oval Office. After a one-on-one meeting between Trump and Zelensky in the Vatican, there have been a handful of minor positive politico-military developments — such as the signing of an agreement to give the U.S. access to rare-earths minerals in Ukraine, and a deal to provide parts and maintenance for F-16 aircraft donated by third parties to Kyiv. None of this meaningfully changes the battlefield dynamics. If anything, it is a sign of how fraught Ukraine’s relationship with Washington has become under Trump that a $300 million aircraft maintenance deal is now regarded as a major triumph. In the meantime, Trump continues to treat Russian President Vladimir Putin with deference, and has taken no meaningful action against Russia. Mike Waltz, the recently ousted National Security Advisor who was hawkish on Russia prior to joining Team Trump, has been forced out, and Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg, who the Kremlin also views as a hardliner, has been sidelined. Putin has much to gain from successfully threading the needle in showing a willingness to cooperate with Washington amid the White House’s foreign policy realignment, while continuing to fight unrestricted in Ukraine. A long war saps resources, and Russia has thrown its entire economy into the fight. The degree to which Russia can continue to sustain the war amid a raft of international economic sanctions largely hinges on energy revenues. With crude oil prices falling, any easing of sanctions will be a windfall for Putin. Both Russia and Ukraine now have some of the most experienced military units in the world, in terms of fighting a peer-to-peer conflict. Technological innovation has been rapid for both sides. Over the weekend, Ukraine announced it had shot down two Russian Su-30 fighter jets using an unmanned naval drone — a first in the annals of modern warfare. Russia later confirmed the loss of at least one aircraft. This minor victory was achieved by creating the kind of “Frankenweapon” that Ukraine has become adept at producing; an amalgamation of NATO and former Warsaw Pact weaponry, coupled with new technologies produced locally. These kinds of weapons have become such a headache for Moscow that it appears to have enlisted its security services to kill Ukrainians involved in developing and funding them. On Thursday, Serhii Sternenko, a prominent social media influencer who regularly raises hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to purchase and develop drones, was the target of such an attack. He narrowly survived, with video showing his would-be assassin being tackled as she fired a pistol toward Sternenko at close range. Ultimately this also illustrates the degree to which Ukraine must rely on itself for defense. While friendly countries in Europe have finally begun to supply ammunition in meaningful quantities, there is little indication that Europe is realistically ready to do more than supply arms and money. It’s easy to find various European Union officials making pro-Ukrainian speeches. But when it comes to the particulars of military assistance, Henry Kissinger’s old question remains as true as ever: “Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?” A recent report in London’s The Times highlights the problem: European military capabilities can’t live up to the needs of the moment. Senior military officials question the ability of a European coalition to muster a peacekeeping force like the one outlined in a recent British cease-fire proposal. The assertion that Europe’s major military powers combined could not muster 25,000 combat-ready troops for a peacekeeping mission is a stunning admission of unpreparedness, at a time when one of modern history’s deadliest wars has been raging for three years inside Europe itself. These are the realities with which leaders in Ukraine and across Europe must contend. They are also what Moscow is counting on. Russia has begun to build up its forces along the border with Finland, and has been ramping up its rhetoric against the Baltic States. NATO has never looked as weak as it does at this moment, and an array of analysts believe Russia will test the alliance’s unity and resolve within the next two years, as Trump makes good on his promises to leave Europe to its own devices. While some may assume it would be madness for Putin to embark on further military adventurism, for Russia’s neighbors, the prospect cannot be discounted. That a great power has not achieved victory on the battlefield against its opponent has not, historically, prevented leaders from expanding a conflict to new fronts — witness the United States expanding the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos even as peace talks with North Vietnam were ongoing, or Nazi Germany’s invasion of Russia in 1941. For the 80th anniversary of Russia’s victory over those same Nazis, Putin floated the idea of a three-day cease-fire centered around “Victory Day,” when Russia celebrates the defeat of Germany in World War II on May 8. The celebrations have traditionally featured large military parades in Moscow, attended by dignitaries and foreign leaders. Zelensky rejected the temporary cease-fire proposal as a cynical ploy, intended to protect Putin’s reputation during the high-profile event, rather than to advance peace talks. He also said that Ukraine “could not guarantee the safety” of any foreign leaders who would attend. Ukrainians noted with glee that two European leaders friendly to Putin — Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić — soon thereafter began indicating they would be unable to make the trip due to illness, but both have since confirmed that they will go to Moscow. Despite Ukraine’s increasingly sophisticated long-range attack drone capabilities, Moscow’s Victory Day celebrations may indeed come off without a hitch. But it is likely too soon for anyone to start planning a victory parade when it comes to the war in Ukraine.