For the first time in at least two years, Russian forces appear to have lost territory in Ukraine, according to battlefield experts and open-source researchers, as Ukrainian forces eke out small battlefield gains and push back Russian troops.
The findings, reported by DeepState, an open-source group with ties to the Ukrainian military, and Black Bird Group, a Finnish research organization, do not appear to signal a wholesale turning of the tides in the Ukraine war, now in its fifth year since Russia's full-scale invasion.
But they do highlight a growing consensus that Russia's war has ground to a near stalemate, with Moscow unable to decisively achieve its goals and Kyiv unable to push out Russia's invading forces.
Russia appears to still have a slight upper hand across most of the 1,100-kilometer front line. In Pokrovsk, for example, Russian forces have occupied the southern Donbas city almost entirely after a grueling, yearlong campaign. The most intense combat is currently concentrated on the city's northern edges. Ukraine has yet to acknowledge the loss of the city.
But the Russian gains have also been incremental: By some estimates, Russian forces are advancing at a pace measured in just meters, on par with the most grueling trench warfare during World War I.
For their part, Ukrainian forces are exhausted, outmanned, and in many places outgunned. Porous defenses in some parts of the front line have given Russian troops the opportunity to race past pockets of Ukrainian positions, using motorcycles or all-terrain vehicles -- often at great toll.
But Kyiv has still managed to both inflict near-debilitating casualties and now, even recapture territory -- a point that Ukraine's commander-in-chief, General Oleksandr Syrskiy, tried to emphasize on March 2.
"In February 2026, for the first time since the Kursk offensive operation, the Ukraine's Defense Forces restored control over more territory than the enemy could capture," he said in a Facebook post.
In Kupyansk, Ukrainian troops last year fully recaptured the Kharkiv region city in part by thwarting Russian troops using unused underground pipelines to sneak past Ukrainian defenses.
Ukrainian officials now say they are conducting "mopping-up" operations to wipe out the last pockets of Russian positions in the city.
In January and February, Ukrainian troops conducted a series of small, localized counteroffensives mainly in the southern parts of the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhya regions, where the pace of Russia's operations have been relatively slow.
Deep State, a Ukrainian volunteer organization whose maps are closely watched in and out of the country, including reportedly by Syrskiy, as well as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Russian troops occupied just 126 square kilometers last month. That's their lowest monthly gain since July 2024.
According to Black Bird Group, Russia has now lost a total of almost 37 square kilometers since January.
That would be the first net loss of territory by Russian forces since November 2023, at the tail end of a bigger Ukrainian counteroffensive that military and political leaders -- and their Western backers -- hoped would land a decisive blow against Russian troops. In the end, the Ukrainian counteroffensive failed.
The causes of the battlefield shifts appear to be varied, though many experts point to this winter's colder than usual temperatures, which have curtailed the ability of both sides to move fast or pull off bigger offensive operations.
Emil Kastehelmi, a Finnish analyst and co-founder of Black Bird Group, said the recent cutoff of Starlink satellite Internet transmissions had a noticeable effect on Russian forces.
Also, the recent Ukrainian counterattacks took place in a swathe of open territory near the town of Hulyaypole and the Haychur River, where forces were able to move easily and quickly.
"Relatively large areas can change hands easily," he told RFE/RL. "A few hundred kilometers doesn't really matter that much, like it would in other places, where it would be more significant."
"There's no one single variation that explains this," Kastehelmi said. "But this should probably be treated as an anomaly to the trend. It's likely the Russians will continue to advance into the spring and summer and unlikely that that Ukrainian forces will be able to continue these sorts of counterattacks on a large scale in other directions."
