The map that obsesses Putin: how he seeks to unblock the Russian army's situation

MoscowVladimir Putin is convinced he can fully occupy the Ukrainian territories he annexed under the Constitution and which, three years later, he still only partially controls. At least, this is his public position. Privately, his generals assure him that the Ukrainian lines are about to collapse, but the Russian army is advancing very slowly and at a very high human cost. The front is stalled. Drones have turned the front into a deadly gray zone where soldiers are struggling to consolidate their gains. The Kremlin still has one more trump card to try to grab and win the game, but it doesn't seem willing to take it.

In early August, the General Staff promised Putin that they could break through Ukraine's defenses within two to three months, but November is approaching and Russian troops have made no significant progress. Now, sources in the Russian presidential administration tell the independent daily Viorstka that military commanders have guaranteed the Kremlin that they will soon occupy two key towns: Pokrovsk (in Donetsk, in the east) and Kupiansk (in Kharkiv, in the north). Until then, they say, They don't want to discuss the front line, as Donald Trump asks.

The maps show that Russian soldiers are inside these towns. In Pokrovsk, a key supply center for the Eastern Front and under siege for months, Putin's troops have penetrated from the south in just a few days and control approximately half of the municipality. However, since the Russians infiltrate in small groups, it is difficult to assess whether they effectively control a position.

In Kupiansk, a logistical center near the Oskil River, which acts as a natural border, Russian troops bypassed the waterway by entering the city through the interior of the gas pipelines and are now also present in the center of the town. According to Ukrainian military analysts at DeepState, "the coming weeks will be decisive for the fate of Kupiansk." Experts confirm that Kiev's troops have recently lost momentum in urban areas, as the Russian army has also managed to enter southern Vovchansk, an enclave from which artillery can threaten Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city.

The eternal battle for Donetsk

Be that as it may, Putin's big battle horse is Donetsk. With Luhansk almost 100% controlledThis territory is resisting the Russian president's attempt to complete the occupation of Donbas. Russian soldiers are advancing from north and south with the aim of reaching the last two major Ukrainian strongholds in the region: Kramatorsk, where some 150,000 people lived before the war, and Sloviansk, with a population of about 105,000. However, progress is minimal. It took sixteen months to capture Chasiv Yar, the last of the towns on the way to Kramatorsk that Russia has occupied,

In the southern regions of Zaporizhia and Kherson, Russian troops have an even tougher time because the Dnieper River is a difficult obstacle to overcome, keeping both capitals in Ukrainian hands. However, in Zaporizhia, analysts warn that the Russian General Staff is intensifying attacks to divert attention from other fronts and improve its reach on the main city. Meanwhile, in Kherson, they don't believe the Kremlin has the capacity to launch a new offensive, even though it's ramping up the momentum. At this point, the front has been virtually immobile since the fall of 2022. The exit to the Black Sea allows Moscow to reach Odessa, the wet dream of Russian nationalism., which aims to cut off Ukraine's access to the sea, even though it has never set foot in this city.

Drones have changed warfare

The major problem for both armies is that they cannot currently advance in large battalions. According to military analyst Andrei Morotxko, a former colonel in the Luhansk separatist forces, soldiers can currently only move in groups of two or three. to prevent them from being hunted by dronesTanks have also ceased to be useful for clearing a path for infantry, as they are too easy a target. "Before, the use of heavy armored vehicles was axiomatic; it was written into the combat regulations. Now, it's no longer true at all," he says.

This results in the front line blurring into a forest of used and abandoned fiber optic cables used to guide aircraft, rearguard villages becoming the target of unmanned vehicles, and roads supplying the front becoming death traps. In June, for the first time, a Ukrainian robot packed with explosives single-handedly recaptured a Russian position and forced the soldiers to surrender.

So how do you win a war in this dystopian scenario? The Kremlin has opted for the infiltration of these small groups of individuals behind Ukrainian lines., who try to hide and hold out until reinforcements arrive. This is the tactic used, for example, in Kupiansk and Pokrovsk. However, most analysts consider it to be an unsuccessful strategy: it results in huge casualties and makes shoring up positions, what they call "operational breakthroughs," extremely difficult.

A bloody plan with no end in sight

For now, however, Putin seems content with the results of this bloody plan. Russia has occupied almost twice as much territory during the first nine months of 2025 as it did in the same period in 2024, and while Russians continue to enlist, attracted by the juicy salaries, neither the president nor his commanders will have any trouble supplying the steamroller of men that they have turned their roadmap into in Ukraine.

Thus, if numerical superiority is the only factor that can tip the balance, Putin may be tempted to resort to partial mobilization again, as he did in September 2022. Many experts believe that the Kremlin could end up controlling Donetsk within a year or two without resorting to partial mobilization.

Now, the other question is what would happen once Russia managed, after five or six years of war and hundreds of thousands of deaths, to occupy all of Donetsk. Independent Russian analysts from the Conflict Intelligence Team believe that "nothing would fundamentally change" and that they would then unsuccessfully attempt to cross the Dnieper at Zaporizhia. Furthermore, they point out, these territories will not bring any of Putin's stated goals closer: Ukraine's neutrality or the removal of Volodymyr Zelensky. The only reasonable explanation, then, is that the Kremlin hopes to wear Kiev down as much as possible so that he will eventually surrender.