Ukraine is Having a Tough Summer – It Doesn’t Mean They’re Losing the War

Ukraine is simply caught in a gap between dwindling American reliability and the arrival of European and Ukrainian industrial capacity

AFU Official

Hey friends. I just read an article at The Atlantic that essentially said Ukraine was doomed.

So, I just want to slow our roll here a second before this spreads any further.

The article, by Missy Ryan and Simon Shuster, starts from a reasonable premise: Ukraine entered 2026 with momentum, then ran face first into a string of setbacks that made the picture look much darker.

Trump backed away from a previously promised license that would have helped Ukraine produce Patriot interceptors, while Elon Musk refused Kyiv’s request to extend Starlink coverage inside Russia; a move that could have helped Ukrainian forces target ballistic-missile launchers before they fired. Ryan and Shuster also point to political turmoil in Kyiv, including the dismissal of the defense minister amid street protests and the resignation of an ambassador who was later charged with corruption.

Sure, all that sounds bad. If you’re job is to get clicks for your publication, I suppose you might even claim that the tide has turned against Ukraine.

But that’s not what’s happening here…

Ukraine is simply caught in a gap between dwindling American reliability and the arrival of European and Ukrainian industrial capacity built over four years of war. And Russia’s best remaining chance to win is to break Ukraine before that capacity fully matures.

As of this week, the evidence says Russia isn’t managing to do that. Not yet.

Every American officer learns some version of this in a classroom before they ever learn it in the field: war happens on three levels at the same time.

The tactical level covers battles and engagements, the actual fighting, the trench taken, the vehicle destroyed, the village cleared.

The operational level covers campaigns and major operations, the connective tissue that links a series of tactical actions to an actual military objective.

The strategic level covers national objectives and the political end state, meaning what the war is actually for and whether you achieved your goals.

These are essentially three different questions, and a military can answer one brilliantly while failing the others. Stay with me here, because these three ideas help us put Ukraine’s current situation in context.

The tactical level: Cannae, and the most perfect battle nobody won anything with

On August 2, 216 BCE, near a small town in southern Italy, Hannibal Barca fought what is still studied at West Point as possibly the most flawless tactical victory in military history.

He was outnumbered, roughly 50,000 against about 86,000 Romans.

He deliberately built a weak center that bowed backward under Roman pressure, drawing the legions forward into what they thought was a collapsing line.

Then his heavy African infantry closed from both flanks while his cavalry, having smashed the Roman horse, wheeled around and sealed the rear. The Roman army was enveloped and systematically destroyed, packed so tightly its soldiers couldn’t raise their weapons.

Estimates of Roman dead run somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 men in a single afternoon, including a serving consul, dozens of senators, and most of Rome’s military leadership class.

By every tactical measure available, that is as complete a victory as a commander can achieve. Hannibal’s double envelopment is still the textbook illustration of the concept, and armies have been trying to replicate it for 2,200 years. But here’s what happened next: Rome didn’t negotiate. It didn’t collapse. It raised new legions, adopted the Fabian strategy of refusing decisive battle, kept its alliance network mostly intact, and eventually took the war to Carthage itself.

Hannibal spent another fifteen years wandering Italy winning engagements he couldn’t convert into anything, because he never had the siege capability to take Rome, never got the reinforcements Carthage kept declining to send, and never broke the Roman political will to keep fighting.

He won the battle so completely it became immortal, and it bought him precisely zilch at the level where wars are actually decided.

The operational level: Operation Michael, and the breakthrough that killed the breakthrough

Let’s jump forward about two thousand years to March 21, 1918. The German Army, freed from the Eastern Front by Russia’s collapse and racing to win before American troops arrived in strength, launched Operation Michael.

This was to be the opening blow of what Germans called the Kaiserschlacht.

This one worked at the operational level in a way almost nothing else on the Western Front had. German soldiers, using new infiltration tactics, punched clean through British Fifth Army.

In days they advanced roughly 40 miles, the deepest movement anyone had achieved on that front since 1914, capturing more ground in a week than the Allies had taken in months of Somme fighting.

They shattered formations, disrupted the entire British logistics structure, and forced the Allies into an emergency unified command under Foch. They penetrated the defensive system and created maneuver space in the enemy’s rear, which is exactly what the operational level is supposed to accomplish.

And it destroyed Germany.

The advance outran its own supply lines. The stormtroopers, Germany’s irreplaceable elite infantry, were expended taking ground that had essentially no strategic value. Ludendorff had famously said he would “punch a hole and let the rest follow,” which gives us a glimpse into his mindset: he had no clear objective beyond breaking through.

German troops, starving under blockade, stopped to loot captured British supply dumps. The salient they created was longer, harder to defend, and packed with exhausted men.

By August, the Allied counterattack at Amiens shattered a German army that had spent its last offensive capital.

The armistice came in November.

Operational brilliance without strategic purpose is a great way to arrive somewhere you can’t hold.

The strategic level: Vietnam, and winning every battle on the way to defeat

In Vietnam, American forces won virtually every conventional engagement they fought.

The Tet Offensive in January 1968 is the textbook case. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched coordinated attacks on more than 100 cities and towns, and it was a military disaster for them.

The Viet Cong were effectively destroyed as a fighting organization, losing tens of thousands of men, and every major objective was retaken by the Americans.

By the tactical scorecard, it was an American and South Vietnamese victory.

But Tet demolished American public confidence that the war was being won, drove Johnson from the presidential race, and began the political unwinding that ended with American withdrawal in 1973 and Saigon falling in 1975.

Colonel Harry Summers famously captured this in an exchange with a North Vietnamese colonel in Hanoi in 1975, telling him the Americans had never been defeated on the battlefield.

The reply: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”

Now look at what’s actually happening in Ukraine

Okay, let’s look at the current battlefield data, and specifically at what Russia is and isn’t achieving.

From a tactical standpoint, Russia is achieving successes to varying degrees along the front line, especially around Kostyantynivka and Pokrovsk where Russian forces are slowly advancing. The Ukrainian forces may get dislodged and lose hold on the locations they had been controlling for a while. Each such incident is tagged as a tactical accomplishment for Russia, and they are accompanied by photographs and appropriate GPS coordinates, which explains why there is so much coverage of tactical progress.

But operationally, Russia is failing. Ukraine’s DeepState monitoring project tracked Russian territorial gains falling from 445 square kilometers in December 2025 to 27 square kilometers in July 2026.

ISW’s separate and more conservative methodology found Russia seized or infiltrated 622.60 square kilometers between January and June this year, against 2,189.87 square kilometers in the same period of 2025, meaning Russia is capturing roughly 28 percent of what it managed a year ago.

ISW also calculated that Russian casualties per kilometer of ground taken increased more than nineteen-fold between June 2025 and June 2026, and a Radio Svoboda analysis published this week put the casualty-per-square-kilometer increase at 3.5-fold just since January.

AFU Official

So, Russia is taking positions, yes. Russia is not penetrating Ukraine’s defensive system deeply enough to disrupt formations, logistics, or reserves in a way that opens maneuver.

There is no Russian Operation Michael happening. There’s no breakthrough, no exploitation, no envelopment, no encirclement of a Ukrainian field army. There’s a grinding, meter-by-meter creep purchased at a casualty rate that’s climbing faster than the ground gained.

Strategically, Russia has already failed at the thing it actually went to war for. Putin’s February 2022 objective wasn’t a few thousand square kilometers of Donetsk. It was Kyiv in days, a replaced Ukrainian government, a collapsed Ukrainian military, and Ukraine returned permanently to Moscow’s sphere as a buffer.

But Ukraine still has a functioning government, a larger and vastly more experienced military than it had in 2022, a domestic defense industry the Ukrainian government values around $50 billion annually, drone production capacity above 8 million units a year, deep-strike weapons reaching 2,700 kilometers into Siberia, and deeper integration with Europe than it had before the invasion.

Meanwhile NATO gained Finland and Sweden, adding roughly 1,300 kilometers of new NATO-Russia border, which is the precise opposite of Putin’s stated reason for starting this.

That war, the one Putin actually launched, is already lost. What’s happening now is a different war.

Why the confusion keeps happening

Ukraine can clearly still reach deep into Russia. The problem Musk’s refusal actually creates is more specific: finding and killing fast-moving mobile targets (the ballistic missile launchers) before they relocate. That’s a serious limitation but it’s not the same thing as losing strategic strike capability.

Plus, even after Trump’s public cooling on the Patriot license, Reuters reported this week that US officials were still quietly negotiating industrial cooperation with Ukraine, including an option where components could be manufactured in Ukraine itself and finished in Germany, alongside a separate possibility involving Ukrainian participation in Lockheed’s cheaper PAC-3 ACE variant.

Then there’s Freyja. Ukraine’s Fire Point is now working with more than a dozen European defense firms including Eurosam, Leonardo, Thales, Saab, and Kongsberg, with Diehl contributing guidance technology. The goal is an early 2027 launch. That’s just over four months away.

As far as Fedorov is concerned, there are over 160 Ukrainian companies with the total production ability to make more than 8 million FPV drones every year. In 2025, Ukraine produced 100,000 interceptor drones, and there are currently more than 20 companies working specifically in this interceptor niche. That is why Fedorov’s removal, even if it is painful, won’t shake the entire system as it might have in 2022.

These issues are tactical or, at best, operational challenges.

So why does the tactical level dominate the online conversation?

Tactical events are visible, photographable, and fast. A drone video of a Russian flag going up in a ruined village produces immediate, emotionally legible content.

Operational reality is territorial change over months. Strategic reality is a comparison between a country’s stated war aims and its actual position four years later, which requires remembering what those aims were in the first place.

So, coverage naturally over-weights the level that generates footage and under-weights the levels that decide outcomes. That’s just how news works.

Ukrainian F-16. AFU Official

But it means a reader interested in Ukraine coverage is being fed a continuous stream of the least decisive information available, and the effect compounds. Enough tactical bad news in a row starts to feel like strategic collapse even when the operational and strategic data are moving the other direction entirely.

This actually works in reverse also. Enough tactical wins for Ukraine and people get downright euphoric that Ukraine is on the verge of winning and Putin is about to be overthrown.

Hannibal’s contemporaries had the same problem.

After Cannae, plenty of people in the ancient Medeteranian assumed Rome was finished. The Roman Senate had better information about its own manpower reserves, its alliance structure, and its willingness to absorb losses than any observer watching from outside. It knew what it could survive.

What would operational failure actually look like?

Well, I would be worried if I saw rapid acceleration in Russian movement. Not two kilometers after a week of infantry assaults. I’m talking tens of kilometers as defending units lose contact and retreat faster than prepared positions can be occupied.

Watch for large Ukrainian formations becoming isolated or destroyed. Also, Russian forces gaining persistent freedom of movement behind the front would be a problem.

If Russian mechanized forces can again move large formations through a breach and attack logistics, headquarters, bridges, artillery, and reserves, the nature of the war has changed.

Finally, Ukraine losing its ability to restore the line. Reserves are the emergency room of operational warfare. As long as a defender can move formations into threatened sectors, establish new positions, and stop exploitation, tactical losses remain containable.

If I start seeing those things simultaneously, I’ll tell you Ukraine is facing an operational collapse.

Losing a frontline village doesn’t get us there…

Ukraine’s job now is to survive the gap and deny Russia any wins that would rise to the level of an operational victory.

As of now, Putin is winning at the only level that doesn’t decide anything, (tactical), and he’s running out of time to convert it into the levels that do.

Слава Україні!