How long would it take Russia to occupy all Ukraine?

At Russia’s present rate of advance, the notion of seizing Kyiv and then the whole of Ukraine is less a realistic military plan than a brutal arithmetic exercise in attrition. If one treats the current rate of progress as a constant and simply projects it forward, the timelines involved stretch far beyond any rational political horizon, and very likely beyond Russia’s own capacity to sustain the war.

What follows is therefore an exercise in counter-factual analysis. It is not a prediction of Russian victory but an exploration of what the present numbers imply if nothing fundamental changes in Ukrainian resistance, Western support or Russian military performance.

By late 2025 Russia controls roughly 19.2 per cent of Ukraine’s internationally recognised territory, including Crimea, most of Luhansk, over eighty per cent of Donetsk, and large parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. The front line runs for some 1,200 kilometres and remains highly active.

Several independent datasets converge on a similar picture of Russian progress in 2024–25:

• In 2025 Russia captured about 4,562 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory, compared with 3,734 square kilometres in 2024.

  
  

• One recent synthesis of Institute for the Study of War (ISW) data calculates that Russia has seized less than 1 per cent of Ukraine’s total area in 2025, around 0.77 per cent.

  
  

• Over the four weeks from 21 October to 18 November 2025, Russian forces gained about 169 square miles (roughly 438 square kilometres) of territory, an uptick on the previous month but still small in absolute terms.

Operationally, this corresponds to what ISW calls an advance measured at “a footpace”, even in sectors where Russia is heavily attacking, such as northern Kharkiv oblast, and to assessments that a Russian effort merely to clear the “Fortress Belt” of eastern Donetsk would likely take several years at current rates.

The Pokrovsk campaign illustrates this dynamic. Russia has spent roughly twenty months edging forward, losing immense quantities of armour and infantry to move about 25 miles through heavily fortified terrain. This is not a Blitzkrieg. It is a slow, grinding accretion of ruined villages.

Ukraine’s territory is about 603,700 square kilometres. Of this, Russia currently controls roughly 116,000 square kilometres. That leaves around 488,000 square kilometres outside Russian control.

If one simply divides the remaining territory by the 2025 rate of conquest, on the order of 4,500 to 4,600 square kilometres per year, one obtains a figure of roughly 100 to 110 years to occupy the rest of the country. If one were generous to Russia and assumed that her rate of advance could somehow be permanently increased by about half, to say 6,500 square kilometres per year, the result would still be in the region of three quarters of a century.

This sort of linear extrapolation is methodologically crude. War is non-linear. Ukraine adapts. Russia adapts. Western support waxes and wanes. Internal political shocks may transform the strategic picture overnight. Yet as a first approximation, the arithmetic is sobering. It suggests that, at the present cost in casualties and materiel, simply “finishing the job” militarily is not something Russia can plausibly do within a single leadership generation.

It is striking that a number of Western analysts looking at slightly older data reached very similar conclusions. Earlier in 2025, one widely cited estimate concluded that at then current rates it would take Russia “centuries” and “tens of millions of casualties” to conquer all of Ukraine. The precise numbers may be debated, but the qualitative conclusion is consistent with the more recent figures: the speed of conquest is extraordinarily slow compared with the size of the target.

Kyiv as an operational objective

Seizing Kyiv is a more specific problem than seizing “the whole of Ukraine”. To reach the capital, Russia would have to solve several discrete operational challenges.

1. Clear the Fortress Belt in Donbas.

   
   

   Key Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk, including the line of fortified cities built since 2014, remain in Ukrainian hands. Analysts assess that at current rates, simply taking the remainder of Donetsk oblast, including the Fortress Belt, could take several further years of intense fighting.

   
   

2. Advance through central Ukraine.

   
   

   Any serious march on Kyiv from the east or south would require seizing or neutralising major hubs such as Dnipro, Poltava and possibly Cherkasy. Each is a city larger than any Russia has taken since 2022, with extensive urban areas and multiple prepared defensive belts. Ukrainian experience at Bakhmut, Avdiivka and now Pokrovsk shows that such battles can consume many months or years for modest gains.

   
   

3. Cross major rivers and maintain logistics.

   
   

   Ukraine’s geography favours the defender. The Dnipro is a formidable obstacle, and the road and rail networks leading towards Kyiv are vulnerable to Ukrainian long-range fires and drones. Russia’s struggle to maintain bridges and crossings near Kherson in 2022, and her continuing difficulties in supplying troops under Ukrainian fire, suggest that sustaining deep penetrations into central Ukraine would be extremely challenging without air superiority and vastly expanded engineering resources.

   
   

4. Approach and encircle the capital.

   
   

   Even if Russian forces reached the outskirts of Kyiv, they would face a city of pre-war population around 3 million, now heavily militarised and ringed with fortifications informed by the lessons of 2022. Urban combat on this scale would be orders of magnitude more demanding than the battles for Mariupol or Bakhmut.

If one mapped the twenty-month, 25-mile Pokrovsk campaign onto a notional hundred-plus mile advance from current positions to a viable assault line against Kyiv, one would again arrive at a timeline measured in many years, not months. In other words, even under highly favourable assumptions for Russia the seizure of Kyiv by the same methods presently employed would be a long-term project with enormous costs and no guarantee of success.

Structural constraints on Russian expansion

Several structural factors make it even less likely that Russia can extend her current rate of advance indefinitely.

• Manpower and casualties

  
  

  Russian forces are already sustaining extremely high casualties merely to move the front line by a few hundred square kilometres per month. Open source analyses suggest that in 2025 alone Russia has lost tens of thousands of troops, and that since 2022 perhaps 1 to 1.35 million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded, roughly 1 per cent of Russia’s pre-war male fighting-age population. Maintaining the present speed of advance across decades would imply a demographic catastrophe.

  
  

• Equipment and industrial strain

  
  

  Even in the relatively modest Pokrovsk sector, Russia is reported to have lost over a thousand armoured vehicles and several hundred tanks over the course of the campaign. Russia’s industry can produce and refurbish a great deal, particularly with sanctions leakage, but the replacement cycle for modern equipment, electronics and precision munitions is much longer than the rate at which they are expended.

  
  

• Logistics over distance

  
  

  The deeper Russian forces advance into Ukraine, the longer their supply lines become and the more exposed they are to Ukrainian deep-strike capabilities, including drones and Western-supplied long-range weapons. This is already visible in the Russian effort to hold occupied parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, where supply routes must run close to the front and within range of Ukrainian fires.

  
  

• Domestic and political limits

  
  

  A war that offers slow, costly gains and no clear decisive victory risks eroding domestic support over time. So far the Kremlin has managed dissent, but sustaining a campaign on the scale required to conquer Kyiv and the rest of Ukraine would probably require further waves of mobilisation and ever greater repression.

  
  

Ukrainian adaptation and Western support

Any extrapolation that treats the Ukrainian side as static is inherently misleading. Ukraine has shown a consistent capacity to adapt her force structure and tactics, particularly in the fields of drones, electronic warfare and precision artillery. Western assistance, although uneven and politicised, has repeatedly introduced new capabilities at moments of crisis.

Several points are relevant here:

• As Russia pushes forward, she must assault successively deeper layers of Ukrainian defences that have had years to prepare. Donetsk’s Fortress Belt is the most obvious example of this.

  
  

• Ukrainian forces are increasingly adept at striking Russian logistics in depth, both within occupied Ukraine and across the border into Russia. This complicates any attempt at rapid, large-scale manoeuvre towards Kyiv.

  
  

• External support is, to a degree, counter-cyclical. Clear Russian advances tend to galvanise Western capitals into new aid packages, whether in artillery, air defence systems or long-range missiles. Conversely a visible collapse of Ukrainian defences around the capital would likely trigger a surge of assistance designed specifically to prevent the fall of Kyiv.

The net effect is that any attempt by Russia to accelerate her present glacial advance in the direction of Kyiv might well provoke new defensive layers, new weapons and new doctrines that would slow her again.

Under what conditions could Kyiv realistically be threatened?

If one accepts that, at the current rate, the conquest of Kyiv and the rest of Ukraine would take several generations, the more interesting question becomes: what would have to change for the threat to become serious within a decade?

Roughly speaking, three broad conditions might bring Russia closer to such an objective:

1. A collapse or radical curtailment of Western support to Ukraine

   
   

   Without ammunition, air defences and financial aid from Europe and North America, Ukraine’s capacity to hold a thousand-kilometre front would degrade. This is why Russian strategy places such emphasis upon energy pressure, disinformation and diplomacy intended to fracture Western unity.

   
   

2. Qualitative transformation in Russian military capabilities

   
   

   If Russia were able to achieve something approaching air superiority, field a new generation of stand-off weapons in very large quantities, or produce and coordinate uncrewed systems at a scale that overwhelms Ukrainian defences, the current balance might change. There is no sign of such a revolution in Russian capabilities at present, although both sides are experimenting with new technologies.

   
   

3. Major political or social disruption within Ukraine

   
   

   A coup, a collapse of governmental legitimacy or a sharp fracturing of Ukrainian society could weaken the will or capacity to fight. So far the opposite has occurred; under the shock of invasion, Ukrainian political identity has hardened and consolidated.

Absent some combination of these developments, the current pattern of slow, attritional Russian advances against a resilient Ukrainian defence is more likely to persist or to freeze into a negotiated or de facto ceasefire than to morph into a successful march on Kyiv.

The tyranny of distance and time

If one applies simple arithmetic to Russia’s current rate of territorial expansion, the answer is stark. At present, Russia is annexing less than one per cent of Ukraine per year, at the cost of enormous casualties and equipment losses. To conquer the remaining four fifths would, under present conditions, take on the order of a century. To reach, encircle and seize Kyiv would require successful assaults across multiple fortress belts, major river crossings and large urban centres, each of which has historically absorbed months or years of fighting.

In practice, wars are not fought on spreadsheets. Political shocks, changes of government, technological leaps, external intervention or internal collapse can all transform the landscape. Yet the numbers themselves reveal something important. They tell us that, on current trends, the military road to Kyiv and the total conquest of Ukraine is not just long. It is so long that it collides with the likely limits of Russia’s own endurance.

The more realistic risk is not of a sudden Russian march on Kyiv in the next few years, but of a drawn-out conflict in which Russia continues to claw forward slowly, seeks to fix gains diplomatically, and prepares the conditions for later aggression from whatever new lines she can establish. For Ukraine and her partners, the strategic task is therefore threefold: to ensure that even this slow progress becomes unsustainable for Russia, to prevent any political settlement from gifting Moscow, by negotiation, what she manifestly cannot seize by force; and to wait for Moscow to collapse.