Ukraine’s army chief says 600 square kilometers, about 232 square miles, have come back under Kyiv’s control this year. Gen. Oleksandr Syrski gave the figure this week without saying where the gains were. He did say the fiercest fighting was in the southeast, around Oleksandrivka and Huliaipole.
Several retired U.S. generals and a former head of a U.S. intelligence agency told CBS News that Ukraine now has the upper hand.
“I would assess operationally Ukraine is winning in the context they are defeating enemy operational objectives, creating conditions for follow-on operations and preserving freedom of action,” retired Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in an email. Two other generals agreed with his reading and stressed that Ukraine was outmaneuvering Russia on the front lines.
The shift is in the drones
Military experts point to one change above the rest: mid-range strike drones. Ukraine built up short-range first-person-view drones from 2023, and according to its president they now cause more than 90% of Russian casualties. From 2024 it added long-range drones and cruise missiles, which most recently hit military bases in St. Petersburg, more than 600 miles from Ukraine’s borders.
The gap sat in between. Hitting targets reliably at 30 to 60 miles stayed out of reach until recently, and a front-line research unit of the elite Khartiia Brigade called pushing its drones past 30 miles its “top priority.”
Rob Lee, a Ukraine-based analyst and former U.S. Marine infantry officer, says units have largely solved it. “Ukraine just lacked this capacity last year, the ability to hit targets at 50 to 100 kilometers (30 to 60 miles) past the front line,” he told CBS News. “They’re doing that very often, basically every day now. And the quantities of these drones they’re using is only going to increase.”
The targets are the things that keep an offensive running. “Command posts are getting targeted, warehouses with ammunition, vehicles,” Lee said. “And so over time, it’s going to degrade what gets to the front line.”
No one is calling it over
Both Lee and Ashley warned against reading operational wins as a sure strategic victory. “All of this is reversible and fragile at best depending on how much Putin wants to escalate,” Ashley said. Lee put it this way: “The situation has gotten better for Ukraine, but I don’t think we’re going to see a breakthrough.”
Retired Gen. Joseph Ralston, a former supreme allied commander in Europe, disagreed that anyone is winning. In his view “Russia is not strong enough to take all the territory they want without using nukes and Ukraine is not strong enough to take back the territory they have lost.”
Ashley still sees the trend running Ukraine’s way. “Both sides still see victory, which means no one will entertain a ceasefire anytime soon,” he said. “But time is not necessarily on Putin’s side.”
