The phrase “quantity has a quality of its own” is often attributed (possibly incorrectly) to Joseph Stalin, and captures a persistent feature of Russian and Soviet warfare. Mass comes first, and everything else follows.
Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has pursued the same logic. Moscow has tried to overwhelm Ukraine with more soldiers, weapons and the advantages of a far larger population, economy and defense-industrial base. This imbalance has forced Kyiv to improvise and find ways to compensate.
It has partly done so through innovative forms of asymmetric warfare, and its expanding drone and long-range strike campaign has hit Russian refineries, fuel depots, ports, ships and logistics sites far behind the frontline every single day for weeks. These attacks have disrupted fuel supplies, forced Moscow to divert resources to air defense and demonstrated that Ukraine can impose serious costs.
There is clear pleasure among Ukraine’s supporters at seeing Russia struck with such frequency and to such effect.
But, there’s always a but. Kyiv’s Western allies shouldn’t get carried away. Ukraine’s successes coexist with a darker reflection where Russia continues to inflict grievous damage on its victim.
There are several aspects to this.
The Battlefield
While Russia has not achieved the rapid breakthrough it wanted on the battlefield, and its advances remain slow, costly and uneven, it is exerting serious pressure on the fortress belt in Donetsk, around Kostiantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
Small assault groups continuously probe Ukrainian positions while drones, artillery and glide bombs make roads, supply routes and nearby settlements difficult to hold. Russia is also maintaining pressure in the Sumy, Kharkiv, Lyman and Zaporizhzhia sectors, forcing Ukraine to distribute already limited manpower and air-defense resources across a 1,200 km (750 mile) front.
Air campaign
Moscow has also intensified its air campaign, launching repeated combinations of Shahed-type drones, decoys, cruise and ballistic missiles, glide bombs and shorter-range drones.
While Ukraine can tackle many threats (On August 2, it said it had intercepted more than 450,000 aerial targets since the all-out war started), ballistic missiles remain a serious vulnerability as Patriot interceptors are limited and cannot protect every city, industrial facility or strategic site. The difficult truth is that Ukraine lacks ballistic missile interceptors and is near-defenseless against them.
Filling stations and warehouses
Russia is also zeroing in on the civilian infrastructure that keeps a country functioning. More than 200 filling stations have been hit and Russia now regularly targets them in frontline and border regions. While this has not yet caused a nationwide fuel shortage, such attacks make local movement slower and more dangerous, reduce reliability and compromise emergency services, generators and military transport.
Warehouses, postal facilities and delivery centers play a similar role, enabling the movement of food, medicine, electronics, spare parts and generators to vulnerable regions. Russia’s strikes combine economic damage with pressure on potentially dual-use logistics, while the immediate costs fall on workers, businesses and civilians.
Ports and shipping
Ports are part of the same campaign, and Russian attacks have hit Odesa, Chornomorsk, Izmail and Mykolaiv, as well as port storage facilities and civilian vessels. Maersk suspended a service through Chornomorsk in July, rerouting cargo through Romania, while other shipowners have paused arrivals.
More than 90% of Ukraine’s agricultural exports are shipped through ports in the Odesa region, meaning even limited disruption raises insurance costs, frightens commercial operators and weakens the country’s principal export corridor.
Moscow claims some of these attacks as retaliation for Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries, distribution hubs and shipping, but Putin’s forces were targeting Ukrainian energy and infrastructure long before Kyiv developed its deep-strike capabilities.
Its broader military logic is that in a war of attrition, limited territorial gains and repeated damage gradually accumulate.
Russian advances often appear negligible in monthly assessments, with its forces gaining only a few kilometers while losing thousands of troops and large quantities of equipment, but Moscow does not need every offensive to produce an immediate breakthrough. It can continue applying pressure until individual positions, supply routes and cities become impossible for Ukraine to hold.
Mariupol fell after a devastating siege in 2022. Bakhmut, where Russia suffered tens of thousands of casualties, followed in 2023, and Avdiivka in February 2024. Each loss moved the battlefield further west, removed another defensive or logistical base, and allowed Russia to concentrate on the next.
If Crimea and the areas of Donbas seized before 2022 are included, Russia now occupies almost one-fifth of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. Its recent advances may look small in percentage terms, but Russia measures the war —which was initially supposed to last weeks — in years, not months.
Those advances also have a clear direction. Moscow claims all of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, while complete control of Donbas remains its clearest immediate territorial objective. The remaining Ukrainian-held cities in Donetsk are therefore central to Putin’s recently repeated goal of taking the whole region.
Russia can absorb heavy losses and draw on a larger mobilization pool and military manufacturers to replace personnel and equipment more easily than Ukraine. Only if Ukraine can kill and injure more Russians that the recruitment system can supply, as it did in June and July, will the Kremlin face a manpower crisis.
That may generate another Russian mobilization. Zelenskyy warned on July 27 that Ukrainian intelligence expects Russia to mobilize another 300,000 to 500,000 personnel after September’s State Duma elections.
Whether or not mobilization reaches that scale, Moscow still has the resources to sustain — and potentially expand — the war, drawing on a far larger population, a deeper pool of manpower and a greater capacity than Ukraine to replace personnel and equipment.
None of this means that Ukraine is losing, but it is a sobering reality check. Despite its successes, Ukraine is still fighting a much larger opponent.
At the same time, Ukraine still has many bottlenecks to address, from manpower and air defense to logistics and economic endurance.
It needs a more sustainable military manpower system, predictable supplies of ammunition and air-defense interceptors, stronger protection for logistics infrastructure, and Western support planned for years rather than delivered through repeated emergency packages.
The overall military situation appears better than it has for some time and there is much to cheer. Ukraine is far from beaten and a long way from being forced into a bad peace.
But the Kremlin is measuring this war in years, not months. Unless there is some sudden and unexpected collapse, Ukraine and its partners will need to do the same.
Sofia Slonovska is a CEPA Editorial Intern and a graduate of Bard College Berlin, where she studied politics, economics, and social thought. Ukrainian-born, her research interests include European security, Russia’s war against Ukraine, and transatlantic relations.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
