February 24, 2026

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Taking Stock: Four Years Since Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

(AP Photo/Mykola Tys)

Today marks four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On February 24, 2022, most — including Russian President Vladimir Putin himself — believed Moscow’s invasion would last no more than a week or so, with Russian troops marching unimpeded through the streets of Kyiv by mid-March of that year. But Ukraine more than shattered expectations. Domestically, Ukrainians rallied around their shared national identity and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who quickly rose to the occasion as a wartime leader. Internationally, world leaders — especially in Europe and North America — balked at the brazen invasion of a neighboring sovereign nation, which many felt echoed a precedent not seen so clearly since Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939.

Now, four years later, the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine continues to grind on, with Russian forces inching forward in small but steady advances along the front line, a pattern that has become a cornerstone in Russia’s defining strategy of attrition. While Russia had initially hoped to conquer Kyiv in 2022 as swiftly as it took Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin has adjusted to Ukraine’s defensive abilities, and has relied on overwhelming small villages in the Donbas and across the front, one by one, burning through ammunition and manpower, and betting that time, fatigue and politics will erode Ukraine’s ability to stave off Russian advances. This has given Moscow the upper hand, but it has also prolonged a war with no clear end in sight, steadily draining Russia’s own resources. In parallel, Russia has also calculated that it can outlast Western support for its embattled neighbor, and has ramped up its hybrid tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to hedge that bet. That strategy has helped the Kremlin sustain the status quo for four years, and it may continue for years more, but it cannot hold indefinitely.

For Ukraine’s part, Kyiv understands that it is outgunned in many traditional categories of conventional warfare, and so, it has relied on unmanned aerial systems, or drones, to achieve parity on the battlefield. Ukrainian forces now deploy millions of maritime and aerial drones annually for reconnaissance, targeting, and precision strikes, allowing Kyiv to successfully impose outsized costs on Russian forces and blunt Moscow’s advantages in manpower and firepower. In an op-ed to the Sunday Times, former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wrote that 80 percent of Russian casualties inflicted by Ukraine during the war come from unmanned vehicles. Sunak also noted that Ukrainian drones enabled Kyiv to push back Russia’s Black Sea Fleet to restart grain exports, all without even having a navy. During May 2025 NATO wargame exercises, Kyiv demonstrated just how unprepared the rest of the world was for the type of modern warfare it has helped innovate, with Ukrainian drone teams mock-destroying dozens of NATO armored vehicles in a matter of hours.

However, Russia has also defied expectations in many ways. Many believed Russia’s fragile, energy-dependent economy would collapse under the weight of Western sanctions in 2022 and the years that followed. Yet, after an initial shock as Western businesses fled Moscow and sanctions were imposed on Russian oil and gas, Moscow was able to stabilize its economy, largely by shifting to a wartime footing. Due to the rapid rise in Russian military expenditures, the country ranked as the world’s ninth-largest economy in 2025, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, many economists warn that Russia is mortgaging long-term economic stability for short-term financial boons. As it diverts all resources and bandwidth to its military sector, it sacrifices all other economic sectors, leaving them to stagnate. CNN reports that military recruitment and industrial prioritization have created what Russian officials themselves describe as a “severe labor shortage” in essential civilian industries, including food processing.

Alexandra Prokopenko at the Economist noted that Russia’s defense sector now accounts for roughly 8 percent of its GDP and warned that its overall economy expanded by only 1 percent in 2025, with the forecast for 2026 looking much worse. For as long as journalists and economists have reported on the fragility of the Russian economy, many have assumed these pressures would eventually push Moscow toward concessions at the negotiating table. And yet, as of the most recent Geneva talks last week, little tangible progress was achieved. Prokopenko argues that Putin’s calculus is that Russia can tolerate economic strain longer than the West — where many countries are also facing economic headwinds, compounded by political instability and division — which, in turn, reinforces the Kremlin’s hardline approach to negotiations.

Following the onset of the war, it was incredibly difficult to get both Putin and Zelenskyy to appear at the same negotiations, with the Russian president refusing to meet his Ukrainian counterpart for quite some time. When U.S. President Donald Trump was elected in November 2024, he promised to end the war within 24 hours of his inauguration. This effort evidently proved unsuccessful, but he did succeed in restarting a more regular cadence of talks and diplomatic engagement — some of which both Putin and Zelenskyy attended. Since Trump entered office in January 2025, there have been numerous bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral talks concerning the war in Ukraine. Some involved both parties; some did not. But none made any substantial headway, as both parties have all but refused to budge on their hardline stances. Ukraine will not participate in any discussion of territorial concessions unless there are real, solid foundations for security guarantees. On the other hand, Russia will not budge on some of its most maximalist demands of annexing the Donbas (even territories it does not currently occupy) and will also not negotiate in good faith regarding security guarantees for Ukraine.

As the conflict grinds on, with little change on the battlefield and negotiations yielding little to show for it, Russia’s initial objectives in its 2022 invasion should increasingly be called into question. One of the Kremlin’s central justifications for the invasion was to halt NATO’s expansion and push Western military (and political) influence away from its borders. Instead, CNN reporter Mathew Chance notes that both Finland and Sweden joined NATO directly as a result of the invasion, doubling NATO’s land border with Russia. At the same time, Russia has sought to compensate for its battlefield meatgrinder by expanding its hybrid war beyond Ukraine, using cyber operations, political interference, and disinformation campaigns to sow division across Europe and the United States. And while Russia has been successful in sowing domestic and international misalignment between Western allies, this global restructuring has spurred European leaders to completely rethink their own defense industries. In the coming years, we will likely see a much stronger Europe, with increasingly independent military capabilities, which will certainly disadvantage Russia.

More fundamentally, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was part of a broader effort to reshape the global order itself. For decades, Moscow has long railed against a U.S.-dominated liberal world order, advocating instead for a return to multipolarity — a world in which power is distributed among those strong enough to take and defend it. And as the U.S. evolves its foreign policy, many believe we are entering this stage. But this shift may not benefit Russia as much as Putin assumes. Under the liberal order, Russia’s opponents were relatively predictable: they largely played by the rules, while Russia could exploit loopholes and leverage rules that served its interests and disregard those that did not. In a looser, more transactional world, Russia may find itself less powerful than it thinks. With a fragile post-war economic outlook and waning international influence, Moscow will have to contend more directly with stronger players like China — and growing regional powers like Türkiye, which has increasingly worked around Moscow in the Caucasus and Central Asia and expanded its footprint across the Middle East and Africa.