Is Ukraine losing the war against Russia?

livemint.com:

recently reported, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is still publicly claiming that Ukraine will recover all the territory the Russians conquered, even if he privately knows that this will not happen soon, if at all. His frustration with the lack of progress prompted him to reshuffle the leadership of the armed forces earlier in February. Our charts and maps below show where things stand two years into Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Roughly a month into the war, Russia controlled more than 22% of Ukrainian territory (including the land it occupied in 2014). Ukraine, helped by supplies of advanced weapons from the West, hit back with two stunning counter-offensives. By late January 2023 it had liberated more than half of the territory that Russia had seized since February 2022.

But progress on the territorial front has since stalled. A counter-offensive last summer did not amount to much. In fact, our analysis shows that Russia has gained ground in the past 12 months, albeit a tiny amount.

Including both gains and losses, Russia has increased its holdings of Ukrainian territory by 0.2 percentage points (see chart 1). The stalemate has caused consternation among Ukraine’s allies. Data published on February 16th by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think-tank, show that total aid allocated for near-term delivery from Europe is outpacing that sent by America, though it lags behind in sending military equipment (see charts 2 and 3).

Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign-policy chief, admitted that the bloc would only deliver around half of the 1m artillery shells it had promised to send to Ukraine by March. Russia is now producing more shells than Western countries are. It is also getting ammunition from