Russia Is Showing Signs of Weakness in Ukraine. So It Hits Harder.

The war has not been going the Kremlin’s way, with battleground losses and mounting casualties. With fiercer strikes, Moscow hopes to gain a better position for negotiations style/ Black smoke and flames rise from a foreground fire. A hazy city with many buildings and a tall tower extends to the horizon. Smoke rising from buildings in Kyiv on Tuesday, after a Russian missile and drone attack.Credit...Roman Pilipey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images/ By Lara Jakes/ Lara Jakes covers European defense and diplomacy./ The New York Times, June 2, 2026/ Updated 11:37 a.m. ET/ The display of force that Russia rained on Ukraine early Tuesday, with hundreds of drones and missiles, cannot mask the increasing signs of Moscow’s weakness in the four-year war./ Russia’s advance in Ukraine has slowed almost to a halt. It has stepped up coerced mobilization in occupied eastern Ukraine as its domestic recruitment efforts fall short. Domestic discontent is growing, and Europe is providing new support to Ukraine. Peace talks brokered by the United States have all but ended./ All this adds up to a loss of momentum by Russia, analysts say./ “Ukraine’s position is much, much more formidable now than just a year ago,” Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst, said in an interview on Tuesday./ Some analysts say they believe that Russia’s fiercer recent strikes are an attempt to reclaim an advantage in potential peace talks and to engage the Trump administration, which has become more focused on the war in Iran than the one in Ukraine/ Nonetheless, Ukraine’s battlefield gains have turned the tide in the war, wrote Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London, this week./ “In Kyiv, there is a growing optimism that Ukraine can fight Russia to a cease-fire,” Mr. Watling wrote in an analysis for Foreign Affairs. He said that while “drone strikes and shelling remain constant, Russian combat performance is waning.”/ That is a stark turnabout from last summer, when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was so confident of victory that he flew to Alaska for a meeting of minds with President Trump on how to end the war. These days, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is the one pushing for a quick end to the hostilities./ In Moscow on Tuesday, Mr. Putin’s chief spokesman said the war could end as soon as Ukraine withdraws from the Donbas region, where Russia has claimed territory./ “We remain open to peace negotiations,” said the spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, even as he conceded that talks were at a standstill./ He also said Russia was unlikely to seize full control of the Donbas by the end of 2026, as it has sought to do before returning to cease-fire negotiations./ Image Volodymyr Zelensky and Ulf Kristersson stand at lecterns in a hangar with a fighter jet and the flags of Sweden and Ukraine behind them. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, left, and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson of Sweden in Uppsala, Sweden, last month. The Scandinavian country has agreed to give 16 fighter jets to Ukraine.Credit...Christine Olsson/TT News Agency, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images/ Ukraine’s battlefield position has improved with additional military aid from Europe, including an arms package worth about $149 million from Finland and 16 Gripen fighter jets from Sweden, both announced this past week./ At the same time, analysts with DeepState UA, a Ukrainian open-source intelligence tracker, reported this week that the Russian military appeared to have lost more territory in May than it had gained, its first month with such a loss since Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive./ That was despite a 37.5 percent increase in the number of Russian attacks. Analysts said Russian battlefield forces had likely degraded to the point that, at times, attacks were left to only one or two soldiers to launch./ “The war is entering a new phase, and it’s important for the Ukrainian state not to lose the initiative,” the DeepState analysts concluded./ Recent estimates from Western officials suggest that Russia is suffering staggering battlefield casualties. Last week, the British spy chief Anne Keast-Butler said nearly 500,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the war began in February 2022./ “As we remain steadfast in our support for Ukraine, Putin is going backwards on the battlefield,” Ms. Keast-Butler said in a speech in London./ In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Russia was losing 15,000 to 20,000 soldiers every month. “Not injured — dead,” Mr. Rubio said on Fox News. “It’s a bad war.”/ That is why Moscow is trying to get more soldiers from eastern Ukraine./ Students in the occupied Luhansk and Donetsk regions have seen their mobilization deferrals canceled, and the Russian occupation authorities have resorted to mandatory registration, raids and threats of legal punishment to force Ukrainians into the Russian Army, according to Maksym Beznosiuk at the Jamestown Foundation, a policy group in Washington./ “The Kremlin’s mobilization strategy in the occupied territories aims to fill the personnel gap caused by catastrophic Russian military losses and reshape the demographic balance by removing some Ukrainian residents,” Mr. Beznosiuk, an expert on Russia’s military and E.U.-Ukraine relations, wrote in an analysis this week./ Image/ In the rain, a person in a pink hoodie smiles widely, holding an orange cup, as they walk under an umbrella with another person. Behind them, a billboard displays a person in military fatigues. A poster in Moscow last month promoting military service. Recent estimates from Western officials suggest that Russia is suffering staggering battlefield casualties.Credit...Alexander Nemenov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images/ On Tuesday morning, Mr. Zelensky called the latest assault “a large-scale attack and a completely transparent statement from Russia: If Ukraine is not protected from ballistic and other missile strikes, these attacks will continue.”/ In his interview on Fox News, Mr. Rubio acknowledged that American efforts to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine “lost some momentum over the last few months, for a variety of reasons.”/ “Hopefully, we’ll reach a point here soon where both parties re-engage,” Mr. Rubio said. “And we’re prepared to play the role to mediate and to bring that to a conclusion.”/ He also said Russia might have recently felt “a little bit optimistic” because profits from the high costs of oil caused by the closed Strait of Hormuz had given the Kremlin an economic lifeline to continue supporting the military effort./ Even so, Mr. Rubio said, “the Ukrainians feel increasingly confident about their battlefield position.”/ Lara Jakes, a Times reporter based in Rome, reports on conflict and diplomacy, with a focus on weapons and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. 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