In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, escalating the conflict that began in 2014. Russia claims the invasion (a "special military operation") was necessary for its security and to "de-Nazify" Ukraine. Ukraine, backed extensively by NATO and Western allies, maintains it is fighting for its sovereign right to exist and reclaim occupied territories.

As the war evolved into a grinding war of attrition, Ukraine's initial reliance on Western stockpiles exposed critical vulnerabilities in allied defense industrial bases. In response, Ukraine launched unprecedented initiatives like the "Weapons of Victory" program and decentralized procurement, allowing frontline brigades to directly purchase domestically produced drones.

Domestic production capacity has climbed to roughly $10 billion in state-funded orders, yet funding and supply-chain bottlenecks remain severe across weapons platforms. The daily burn rates of 155mm artillery shells and interceptor missiles continue to outpace allied delivery schedules, forcing Ukrainian commanders into difficult tactical rationing on the eastern front.

By 2026 the front line has largely frozen into a war of attrition, and the conflict has become a contest of long-range fires and industrial endurance. ISW recorded no confirmed advance by either side anywhere on the front on four consecutive days, July 24 to 27. Ukraine's deep-strike campaign, by contrast, keeps widening: a refinery near Tyumen struck on July 25 at roughly 1,980 kilometres from the front — acknowledged by the region's own governor — oil facilities in Yaroslavl and Udmurtia two nights later, nine or more Wildberries warehouses burned in a week, and Kazakhstan's daily oil output more than halved after strikes closed its main Black Sea export terminal, a cost now falling on a country that is not party to the war. Russia's own strikes have widened too: the UN recorded June 2026 as the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since April 2022, foreign-flagged merchant ships in the Black Sea corridor are now targets, jet-powered drones are being used against city centres, and on July 24 a ballistic missile hit a defence-industry gathering outside Kyiv, killing at least 10. Diplomacy has if anything moved backward. The Kremlin has hardened its terms to the maximalist demands of June 2024; after Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Manila on July 23 the two governments published flatly incompatible accounts of the same meeting; and when Kazakhstan's president used a bilateral forum on Russian soil to ask Putin, publicly, to freeze the front and return to an "Istanbul formula 2.0", the Kremlin refused within a day — Putin, his spokesman said, had told him freezing the conflict was "impossible, given Kyiv's position". Rubio, at the same Manila briefing, put Russian losses at "upwards of five to six thousand soldiers a week", and Zelensky says Russia is now losing more troops than it recruits and is preparing a fresh mobilisation wave for the autumn.