Donald Trump has claimed that Ukraine could win back all of the land captured by Russia since the beginning of its invasion in February 2022, in a major shift in his position on the war.
The US president said in a Truth Social post that Kyiv’s military could win “all of Ukraine back in its original form”, adding that Putin and Russia are in “BIG economic trouble”.
Military experts say Ukraine could push Russia back towards the border as it stood in 2022, and force Vladimir Putin to seek a peace deal – but only in the presence of a strict, and unlikely, set of conditions.
The Independent asked three experts with knowledge of Russia’s military, its economy, and the front line in Ukraine whether Trump’s claim could be realised.
What would it take for Ukraine to drive Russia out?
Experts say that in theory, Ukraine has always had the capacity to win back the 13 per cent of its territory seized by Russia since the beginning of the invasion. But in practice, it would require a specific set of conditions.
“Can they regain some of the territory that was lost since February 2022? I think, unquestionably,” says John Lough, head of foreign policy at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre. “We saw during the offensive in late 2022 that they took back a lot of territory at that point.”
Ukraine’s troops, Lough says, are “fighting extremely well” given the size of the country’s military compared to that of Russia. He highlights the repeated Ukrainian attacks on oil refineries as a strategy that has inflicted damage on the Russian economy.
But for Ukraine to overpower Russia militarily, he says, it would need “a great deal more assistance from its allies”, including an effective “sky shield” to protect it from nightly air attacks, and more long-range weapons.
It is “very difficult to see [Kyiv] getting the military capacity” to overwhelm Moscow’s forces, adds Lough. “It doesn’t really look realistic unless Russia can be crippled economically. Perhaps this is what Trump is thinking of.”
Military push by Ukraine would take ‘more than a year’
With a sustainable change in US policy to damage and pressurise the Russian economy, along with strong military support, Lough says Ukraine could take back large parts of its territory and force Putin to accept a peace deal. This cannot be done quickly, he cautions – it would take at least 12 to 18 months.
And while Trump’s attitude appears to have shifted, Lough says he remains sceptical about “whether that really is going to lead to a kind of sustainable change in US policy”.
Keir Giles, a Russian military expert and a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia programme, says there is “nothing to suggest that there’s going to be any deviation from the consistent policy of the Trump administration to hang Ukraine out to dry”.
He says it has “always been possible for Ukraine to defeat Russia”, but only “if the US were interested in this happening”. Under Trump and Joe Biden, he says, this has not been the case. “What would be required is support from the coalition of countries backing Ukraine, primarily the US, that is not conditional,” he adds.
Military success will require the ‘exhaustion of Russia’s economy’
Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst at Finnish OSINT specialists Black Bird Group, is also highly doubtful of Ukraine’s capacity to overpower Russia’s military to the extent required to push it back to the 2022 border.
“It may be able to counterattack locally; it has actually even done that during the summer and into the fall,” says Kastehelmi. “But Russia has also been advancing forward, and I do not find it possible, under the current circumstances, that Ukraine would be able to take all of its land back.”
A precondition for Russian forces to be pushed back and Putin to be forced into peace would be “the exhaustion of the Russian economy and society”, he adds. But a collapse of the Russian military, in a way that would force it to withdraw on a large scale, is “extremely unlikely”, says Kastehelmi.
Defeating the Russian military repeatedly while plotting continuous strategic military breakthroughs is an “immense task” that would only be possible if Western countries joined Ukraine’s resistance, he explains.
How significant is Ukraine’s Donetsk counteroffensive?
Zelensky insists that Ukraine is making major gains in the Donetsk region, where Russia has been edging forward for more than a year as it looks to seize the key strategic town of Pokrovsk.
“It was there that one of the most important directions of the Russian offensive was located, and they were unable to launch a fully fledged offensive there. Our military is destroying their forces,” he said in his nightly video address late last week. “The Russians have suffered significant losses, and the ‘exchange fund’ for our country has been significantly replenished – every day more Russian prisoners are being taken.”
But Kastehelmi says he doesn’t entirely understand “what Zelensky is actually talking about”. He says the Ukrainian forces have made some local counterattacks, taking back some villages and areas of land, but these locations have since changed hands “a couple of times”.
Kastehelmi is doubtful of Zelensky’s claim that Ukraine has made significant gains in Donetsk.
“The amount of land that he’s saying has been taken back seems to be over-exaggerated, and usually Zelensky is very vague while talking about these things, so it’s difficult to say what he actually means.
“I think that’s more like strategic messaging towards the West, and especially towards Trump, to actually bolster these claims a little bit over the actual situation.”
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