The slowest army: Russia's invasion of Ukraine

Thursday 26 February 2026

The social media claim that Russia’s advance in her full-scale invasion of Ukraine is ‘the slowest of any army in the past 100 years’ is the sort of line that lands because it feels emotionally true. It captures, in one sentence, the frustration of watching a purported great power grind forward village by village, month after month, without producing the kind of decisive manoeuvre that Soviet military mythology promised and Russian propaganda still advertises. But the claim is also too broad, too confident, and too careless with history to stand without qualification.

To test it, one first needs to decide what ‘slowest’ means. Is it kilometres per day along a main axis? Net territory gained per month? The ratio of territory gained to casualties? The time required to achieve a stated political objective? Each measure yields a different answer, and social media usually picks whichever suits the mood.

There is also a basic conceptual trap. ‘Slowest of any army’ implies a continuous offensive. Yet much of twentieth-century warfare was not continuous offensive movement at all. It was stalemate, attrition and positional fighting, punctuated by brief bursts of mobility. If one compares Russia’s day-to-day grind in Donbas with the great manoeuvre campaigns of 1940 or 1991, Russia looks astonishingly slow. If one compares her with the Western Front, the Korean stalemate or the Iran–Iraq War, the claim becomes very hard to sustain.

Consider first the wars that make the social media claim look plausible.

In the 1991 Gulf War, the coalition’s ground campaign lasted roughly one hundred hours and liberated Kuwait, advancing into Iraqi territory so quickly that the campaign became a byword for operational tempo. In 2003 a US-led coalition captured Baghdad on 9 April, twenty-two days after the invasion began on 20 March. In 1940 German forces overran the Netherlands and Belgium, captured Paris and forced France’s surrender in just over six weeks. 

Against that backdrop Russia’s war in Ukraine is visibly anomalous. Her initial attempt at a rapid decapitation campaign in February–March 2022 failed, and since then the war has increasingly resembled what military historians call an attritional contest—two sides trying to erode each other’s personnel and matériel faster than they themselves are eroded, while seeking incremental positional advantage. The evidence for slow net movement is not merely anecdotal. The Institute for the Study of War has published assessments suggesting that Russian territorial gains in 2025 amounted to well under 1 per cent of Ukraine’s territory—gains purchased at very high cost. Russia Matters, using ISW data, likewise estimated Russia captured about 0.93 per cent of Ukraine (including Crimea in the baseline) in 2025.  CSIS, looking at the post-2024 Russian initiative, described advances on some sectors of the front on the order of tens of metres per day—15 to 70 metres in their cited range—an image of movement so slight that it barely registers on most maps. 

At the strategic level, this sluggishness is even more striking. Russia began the full-scale invasion with the apparent aim of breaking Ukraine’s sovereignty and political independence. Four years into total war that aim remains unachieved, and the territorial picture has not transformed in the way one would expect if a major power were successfully imposing its will on a smaller neighbour. ISW assessed Russian control as rising to roughly 19.32 per cent by the end of 2025—an increase, but hardly the decisive conquest implied by Moscow’s maximalist rhetoric. 

So far the social media claim seems vindicated—until one remembers how many modern wars have featured years of near-static fronts.

The First World War remains the obvious counter-example. The Western Front became a symbol of positional warfare—trenches, wire, massed artillery and attacks measured in hundreds of metres. Even where breakthroughs occurred they were often temporary, followed by rapid re-stabilisation. A single spring offensive in 1918 could produce a dramatic lunge—around 100 kilometres in the deepest German advance—yet that only underlines the point: four years of fighting contained brief moments of mobility embedded within long periods of grinding stasis. If one is looking for ‘slowest advance’, the Western Front offers ample periods where advances were negligible for months at a time, at enormous human cost.

The Korean War provides a second corrective. After the early sweep north and the subsequent Chinese intervention the war settled, and by May 1951 the front line changed very little for the remainder of the conflict, with trench warfare and local assaults reminiscent of 1914–1918. In that late-war phase, it would be absurd to say any one army’s advance was the ‘slowest’ of the last century, because the salient fact was that advance, as a general phenomenon, largely ceased.

The Iran–Iraq War is another warning against confident rankings. From 1980 to 1988 the war lasted almost eight years, with brutal attritional fighting, repeated offensives and counter-offensives and long stretches where front lines moved little. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s summary captures the basic shape—an invasion, then years of bloody fighting until a ceasefire—without suggesting any swift decisive movement. It is precisely the sort of war that makes ‘slowest in 100 years’ a risky claim.

One can multiply examples. The Franco-German stalemate of late 1914 to early 1918, the late Korean War, the Iran–Iraq War, even certain phases of the Second World War on the Italian front—all warn us that ‘speed’ is often episodic and front-dependent. The modern era is full of ‘slow’ campaigns—sometimes because both sides are exhausted, sometimes because technology favours defence, sometimes because political objectives are limited, sometimes because commanders are cautious and civilians are watching.

This brings us to a more defensible conclusion.

The proposition cannot be maintained as a literal historical ranking. There have been prolonged periods in the past century when armies advanced more slowly than Russia has in Ukraine—or did not advance at all. In that strict sense, the social media claim is more slogan than scholarship.

Yet it would be equally misleading to dismiss the intuition behind it. Russia’s pace is, in a different and more important sense, extraordinary.

What is extraordinary is not that fronts can be static—history is full of static fronts—but that Russia has turned a war she chose, on terrain adjacent to her own borders, against a neighbour she long treated as a subordinate, into a multi-year struggle characterised by modest territorial gains and high expenditure of men and matériel. The contrast is not with 1916 in Flanders; it is with the expectations of contemporary Russian power, and with the operational promises implicit in Russia’s pre-war posture.

A sober appraisal therefore needs two simultaneous thoughts.

First—Russia’s progress, measured against her proclaimed objectives and presumed advantages, has been remarkably small. Even in 2025, when some analyses record increased daily rates of advance in area terms, these still translate in many sectors into incremental movement. Net changes in territorial control over a year can look statistically minor when expressed as a proportion of Ukraine’s total area. 

Second—this is not simply a story of Russian incompetence. It is also a story about what modern battlefields do to attackers.

Ukraine has built, with Western support and with her own innovations, a defensive system that punishes movement. Minefields, layered field fortifications, artillery guided by drones, electronic warfare, precision strikes and a dense battlefield surveillance environment mean that concentration—necessary for rapid manoeuvre—invites destruction. The old recipe for swift advance—mass armour, punch a hole, exploit into the rear—becomes harder when every armoured column is visible, targetable and vulnerable. In such conditions armies revert reluctantly to methods that look like 1917: reconnaissance, probing, local assaults, slow consolidation, then repetition.

That modern defensive advantage also helps explain why comparisons with 1991 are so seductive but so misleading. Desert Storm was fought against an Iraqi army that was strategically outmatched, deprived of air control and facing a coalition that enjoyed overwhelming technological superiority, excellent logistics and a political willingness to accept rapid operational risk. Ukraine is not Iraq in 1991, and Russia is not the coalition. Ukraine is a determined, adaptive defender, fighting for national survival. Russia is an attacker facing a peer-like battlefield problem without the peer-like competence and combined-arms integration that would be required to solve it.

So where does that leave the social media claim?

If one insists on literal accuracy, it collapses. The twentieth century contains long wars where advance was slower, episodic or absent—by design, by exhaustion, or by defensive strength. 

But if one treats the claim as a provocation—a way of forcing attention to how little Russia has achieved relative to the scale of violence, mobilisation and expenditure she has chosen—then it points to something real. In four years of total war, Russia has not produced the decisive political outcome that would normally define victory. She has instead demonstrated that a state can inflict enormous harm, absorb vast casualties and still find herself advancing in measures that on some days are counted in metres. 

That is the sobering truth beneath the exaggeration. Not that Russia is uniquely slow in the abstract sweep of military history—but that she is painfully slow in the only comparison that ultimately matters: the comparison between the power she claimed to be, and the results she has been able to impose upon a smaller neighbour who refused to yield.