The Close of Ukraine’s Summer Fighting Season, 2025: Net Gains, Losses, and Lessons

As the autumn rains set in across the Donbas steppe and southern Ukraine, the summer 2025 fighting season comes to its natural pause. Both Ukrainian and Russian armies have spent the warmer months locked in an exhausting contest of attrition. This year, as in 2022, 2023 and 2024, the seasonal rhythm of war has shaped events: roads hardened by heat permitted large-scale movements of men and machinery, drones and artillery dominated daily exchanges, and the search for breakthrough or collapse defined military strategy. What remains, however, is a campaign that offers few unequivocal territorial shifts but reveals much about the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing forces.

Territorial Outcomes: A Stalemated Summer

The most striking feature of the summer’s fighting is the near-absence of decisive territorial change. Russian forces pressed relentlessly in the Donbas, particularly around Pokrovsk, Dobropillia and Toretsk, while maintaining pressure on the flanks near Kupiansk and Avdiivka. Incremental advances – measured in kilometres rather than tens of kilometres – came at staggering cost in manpower and equipment. Russian units secured some tactically useful ground, edging closer to logistics hubs that Ukraine must now strain to defend, but none of these gains amounted to the strategic breakthrough the Kremlin sought.

On the Ukrainian side, counter-offensive activity was more restrained than in 2023. Limited spoiling operations around Kherson and Zaporizhzhia demonstrated Kyiv’s ability to threaten Russian positions but lacked the weight to alter the broader geometry of the front. Ukraine focused instead on holding ground, integrating newly arrived Western air defence and artillery systems, and conducting deep strikes against Russian infrastructure across the border. The net result was that Ukraine preserved her defensive lines at enormous cost, but with limited recapture of lost terrain.

Russia’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Russia entered the summer with momentum, having stabilised her economy despite sanctions and committed vast manpower resources through continued mobilisation. The Russian army demonstrated an ability to mass artillery, drones and infantry in grinding offensives that slowly erode Ukrainian positions. She also proved capable of sustaining high casualty rates – testimony both to the depth of her manpower pool and to the Kremlin’s willingness to expend it.

Yet Russia’s weaknesses remain glaring. Her reliance on massed infantry assaults exposes the limits of tactical flexibility. Equipment losses, while replenished by domestic industry and imports from Iran and North Korea, often involved older or improvised systems, undermining operational sophistication. The Russian air force again failed to achieve decisive air superiority, its drones increasingly contested by Ukrainian electronic warfare. Moreover every small territorial gain came at the cost of enormous bloodshed, a balance that over time may prove politically and socially corrosive.

Ukraine’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Ukraine’s summer performance underscored her defensive resilience. Despite shortages of shells and manpower, her forces proved capable of holding fortified lines against larger Russian numbers. Western-supplied long-range strike systems enabled Kyiv to target Russian logistics far behind the front, disrupting supply chains and sowing uncertainty in Moscow’s rear areas. Equally important, Ukraine’s ability to innovate in drone warfare – with cheap, mass-produced first-person-view drones – continued to offset Russian numerical advantages.

Nonetheless, Ukraine’s vulnerabilities are increasingly clear. Her defensive capacity is dependent on sustained Western resupply, which has been slowed at times by political debates in Washington and European capitals. Manpower shortages have become acute, with mobilisation politically sensitive and battlefield rotations stretched thin. The inability to mount a counter-offensive of strategic scale this summer highlights both the exhaustion of Ukrainian forces and the difficulty of breaking entrenched Russian lines without overwhelming superiority in artillery, armour and air power.

Lessons from the Campaign

The net gains and losses of summer 2025 were minimal in territorial terms, but the broader lessons are profound:

• Russia retains the capacity for offensive action but lacks the operational finesse to translate attritional advances into strategic victories. Her strengths lie in endurance and mass; her weaknesses in flexibility and sustainability.

  
  

• Ukraine retains the capacity for defence and innovation but lacks the resources for large-scale offensive manoeuvre. Her strengths lie in technological ingenuity, precision strikes, and moral resolve; her weaknesses in manpower and dependency upon external aid.

  
  

• The war remains one of exhaustion, not manoeuvre. Neither side has demonstrated the ability to achieve decisive results under current conditions. Instead, incremental attrition defines the struggle, with each side gambling that time favours its endurance.

A War Without Breakthrough

The summer of 2025 will be remembered less for dramatic breakthroughs than for the grim continuation of attrition. Russia gained some ground but at unsustainable cost. Ukraine held firm but struggled to reverse Russian advances. Both armies revealed their core strengths and weaknesses in sharp relief: Russia’s mass versus Ukraine’s innovation, Russia’s willingness to sacrifice men versus Ukraine’s reliance upon the West. As autumn mud and winter frost set in, the battlefield is frozen not only in terrain but in strategic stalemate. The lessons of this summer are sobering: without a radical shift in resources, tactics, or external intervention, neither side possesses the means to bring this war to an end on her own terms.