Ukraine: military manoeuvres winter 2025/26

Russia’s winter theory of victory has not changed: she will try to break Ukraine’s electrical grid and urban morale while pressing multiple land axes with attritional, artillery-centric tactics covered by electronic warfare and glide-bomb standoff fires. The renewed rhythm of massed strikes on power and gas infrastructure in October 2025 fits the pattern: large salvos of missiles blended with swarms of one-way attack drones to saturate defences cause regional blackouts and water cuts, and force Ukraine to spend scarce interceptors ahead of the coldest months. Recent reporting describes widespread power losses across several regions after such barrages and notes Kyiv’s renewed appeals for additional Patriot-class systems. This is the opening movement of a winter campaign designed as much to exhaust as to destroy. 

Expect Russia to intensify these long-range strikes through December and January, with a heavier emphasis on gas transmission nodes, underground storage facilities, compressor stations and high-voltage substations. Moscow has already signalled the target set by striking gas infrastructure during late summer and early autumn, and by launching its largest-of-the-war energy attack in early October. The purpose is simple: degrade heating and industrial resilience, stretch repair crews, and impose rolling load-shedding that complicates rail mobility and depot operations. In parallel, Russia will continue information operations blaming urban hardship on Western delay and Ukrainian policy choices, seeking to erode support at home and abroad. 

On the front line, Russian forces are likely to keep pressing along the Donetsk axis—particularly towards Pokrovsk—and maintain grinding pressure on Kupiansk–Lyman and northern Kharkiv approaches, where logistics are shorter and artillery can be massed. The aim is to accumulate tactically useful bites—hamlets, tree-lines, spoil heaps—without incurring prohibitive losses in set-piece armoured thrusts. Russian practice since mid-2025 has featured fewer tank-led assaults and more small-unit infantry pushes under the umbrella of cheap glide bombs fitted with UMPK kits (that convert Soviet-era unguided bombs of which Russia has many, into guided munitions at a cost of around US$25,000). Recent assessments also point to experimentation with a jet-assisted glide-bomb variant that extends release ranges, further insulating aircraft from Ukrainian ground-based air defence. Through winter, that standoff aviation plus dense electronic warfare is likely to suppress Ukrainian manoeuvre, even if Russian ground advances remain incremental. 

The maritime flank of Russia’s calculus is defensive. After two years of cumulative Ukrainian strikes—missiles and uncrewed surface vessels—Russia has repositioned much of the Black Sea Fleet away from Sevastopol to mainland ports, and Ukraine continues to extend the reach and capability of her naval drones. Through winter, Russia will try to harden Novorossiysk and Tuapse, improve boom barriers, sonar nets and coastal air defence, and hunt Ukrainian launch sites with reconnaissance-strike complexes. Even so, the Black Sea will remain a zone of episodic Ukrainian raids which constrain Russian patrol patterns and complicate missile launch cycles from surface combatants. The net effect is to keep Russian naval power on the back foot while Ukraine sustains her grain corridor economics—no small strategic dividend in a long war. 

A final Russian line of effort will be counter-drone and counter-strike defence in depth across the Russian Western Military District and the southern energy belt. Since August, Moscow has claimed to down very large numbers of Ukrainian long-range drones nightly; even if claims are inflated, the observable response—more radar pickets, mobile EW detachments, and modular barriers around refineries and fuel depots—suggests a winter of continuous adaptation. Expect Russia to disperse high-value refining processes, vary shifts to avoid predictable patterns, and add point-defence guns around compressor yards and pumping stations. That will not eliminate Ukrainian deep strikes, but it will raise the cost per successful hit. 

Ukraine, for her part, has settled upon a winter playbook with three interacting pillars: protect the grid; punish Russian depth; and preserve combat power for selective counter-attacks rather than broad offensives. On protection, expect tighter integration of Western and domestic air-defence layers over the largest cities, with mobile short-range systems pushed to defend key nodes and repair crews pre-positioned to cut restoration times. Kyiv will prioritise missile interceptors for ballistic and cruise threats while increasingly using cheaper guns and jammers against the nightly wave of Shahed-type drones. The winter objective is not perfect protection but survivable degradation: keeping hospitals heated, water flowing, and rail schedules workable even under sustained pressure. 

The second pillar—punishing Russian depth—will continue to define Ukraine’s strategic tempo. Through autumn, Kyiv has prosecuted an intensive campaign against oil refineries, fuel depots, ports and pipeline nodes across Russia’s south and Volga regions, while also striking Black Sea naval infrastructure. Through the winter months, that effort will likely expand in cadence and geography, calibrated to weather windows and sensor coverage. The logic is to force Russia to spend high-end air-defence munitions at home, complicate logistics to the theatre, and reduce the stock of refined products that feed Russia’s war machine and domestic stability. Ukrainian commanders openly describe this cat-and-mouse race—new guidance packages and routing to outfox improving Russian interception—and claim dozens of successful hits since August. Even with winter headwinds and better Russian counters, a steady drumbeat of deep strikes is probable. 

At sea, Ukraine will lean further into asymmetric pressure. The unveiling of longer-ranged, heavier-payload maritime drones is not mere theatre; it signals a winter in which Russian harbour sanctuaries remain porous. Expect Ukraine to attempt multi-vector maritime raids synchronised with aerial decoys and cyber probing of port systems, aiming for opportunistic damage to repair ships, oil terminals and air-defence radars along the Black Sea coast. Successful attacks have cumulative effects out of all proportion to the number of drones involved, because they force Russia into costly defensive investments and keep high-value units away from Crimea’s western littoral, which in turn eases Ukrainian coastal movement and sustains the maritime export corridor despite episodic Russian strikes. 

On land, Ukraine’s winter manoeuvre culture will likely be elastic defence with local counter-attacks, not deep exploitation. Expect a continued emphasis on night operations, small-unit infiltration with first-person-view drones as organic fires, and strict artillery economy. Where Russian assaults create over-extended salients, Ukrainian forces will counter-punch to restore more defensible lines rather than pursue ambitious breakthroughs in poor ground and short daylight. The constraint remains massed air defence and long-range fires. While F-16 programmes are advancing, credible open sources indicate that meaningful operational numbers are likelier to appear in 2026 rather than during the heart of this winter; Kyiv will therefore continue to rely on ground-based systems, camouflage and deception to blunt Russian aviation. 

A critical Ukrainian winter task is logistical husbandry. She must rotate exhausted brigades, repair armour under cover from glide-bomb arcs, and ration scarce 155mm stocks while domestic production and European lines climb. Expect more improvisation: repurposed munitions for longer-range drones, field fabrication of glide-munitions for legacy aircraft, and aggressive battlefield EW to claw back spectrum locally for hours at a time. The Ukrainian state will also strive to insulate society: targeted black-out schedules, district heating triage, and contingency rail time-tables to keep grain moving. The Danube and open-sea corridors will remain vital; both have proven resilient after Russia’s 2023-2024 attempts to strangle exports. The more predictable and safer these routes appear, the more macroeconomic oxygen Ukraine keeps through winter, and the more freedom she has to prioritise military spending without social collapse. 

What, then, of the balance between the two winter strategies? Russia holds the initiative in massed long-range strikes and in glide-bomb-enabled local offensives. Her limits are the same as last winter: munitions throughput, aircraft attrition risk if she creeps closer to the line, and the diminishing strategic returns of blackouts once societies adapt to load-shedding rhythms. Ukraine holds the initiative at sea and in the long-range drone duel. Her limits are the availability of interceptors for the grid war, the tempo at which she can produce and field accurate long-range drones, and the challenge of matching Russia’s glide-bomb effects without comparable freedom to use fast jets near the front. The result is likely to be a winter of hard positional fighting, punctuated by sudden Ukrainian deep-strike shocks and occasional Russian local gains of tactical ground.

There are two tipping points to watch. The first is the pace and efficacy of Russian jet-assisted glide bombs. If the new variant proves reliable at truly extended ranges, it could push Ukrainian armour and artillery further back, compressing the defenders’ room to manoeuvre. Conversely if Ukrainian air defence and EW degrade the weapon or impose unacceptable aircraft losses in winter conditions, Russia’s standoff advantage shrinks. The second is the sustainability of Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign. If Kyiv can keep inflicting meaningful downtime on refineries and port logistics despite thicker Russian point defences, she will gnaw at the sinews of the Russian war economy and force the Kremlin into awkward trade-offs between front and rear. 

Human factors remain decisive. Cold punishes the attacker’s small units more than the defender’s, particularly where rotations are thin and junior leadership is brittle. Yet cold also penalises the grid defender and the urban populace. Moscow is betting that hardship in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Chernihiv saps resolve faster than attrition at Pokrovsk saps hers. Kyiv is betting that cities can endure, that the Black Sea will stay permissive enough to keep exports alive, and that each month of adaptation narrows Russia’s coercive leverage. The likeliest outcome by March 2026 is a blood-and-ice stalemate with lines shifted only modestly—unless a systems shock intervenes: a catastrophic strike on a major energy node; a naval raid that disables high-value combatants; or a sudden influx of air-defence and strike capacity that changes the cost-exchange ratio in the skies.

Until then, expect the winter to feel familiar but sharper at the edges: louder in the power stations, darker in the cities after the biggest salvos, more standoff-heavy along the front, and more robotic on the sea lanes. Each side will claim progress; neither is likely to find a decisive manoeuvre before the thaw. The real campaign is attritional time: preserving national stamina while shaping the battlespace for 2026. On that measure, the side that best protects her civilians and logistics through the cold will have done more than survive the winter; she will have set the conditions to fight on terms of her choosing when the ground hardens again.