How Ukraine is finally turning the tide against Russia | Fareed's Take

Here's my take.Donald Trump faces plunging public approval at home and a messy war he initiated abroad.But he has an opportunity to change that narrative, not in the Middle East, but more than 1 ,000 miles away in Europe, where a bloody war rages on between Russia and Ukraine.In recent months, the tide has turned in that conflict in ways that make peace finally possible.Ukraine is now in the fifth year of a war against an adversary with roughly 12 times its economy and more than four times its population.Its mere survival has been one of the great military and national achievements of the modern era.

But now, Kiev is no longer simply surviving.It is changing the arithmetic of the war.For years, Russia's brutal advantage was not that it fought well.It was that it could fight badly and endure the cost.Putin's army used conscripts, convicts, ethnic minorities, poor men from remote regions, and anyone else the state could throw into the furnace.It lost staggering numbers of soldiers, but it could recruit more than it lost, often bringing in more than 30 ,000 men every month.

That equation has begun to break.Russia is taking losses at a rate that appears to exceed its ability to replace trained troops.Its advances, bought at enormous cost, have slowed to a crawl.Russian forces that once aspired to take all of Donbass are now moving in meters, not miles.In May, battlefield trackers suggest Russia barely gained territory at all, and may even have lost some ground.Russia's size, once its great advantage, has become a liability.

More logistics to protect, more targets to defend, more territoryvulnerable to attack.Ukraine, meanwhile, has substituted speed, intelligence, and ingenuity for mass.It has built a formidable drone industry, much of it homegrown.It plans to produce 7 million drones this year.By comparison, the United States is planning to produce around 300 ,000 by the end of 2027.

Ukraine is using mid -range strikes to disrupt Russian logistics and command posts behind the front.It is using long -range drones and missiles to hit refineries, oil depots, airfields, radar sites, and military factories inside Russia itself.Putin can no longer keep the war safely contained in Ukraine.Even Moscow's Victory Day celebration in Red Square last month was scaled down under the shadow of Ukrainian drones.None of this means Ukraine is close to an easy victory.Russia is still pounding Ukrainian cities with missiles and drones.

Kiev remains short of Patriot interceptors.It still has manpower problems, and its politics have been strained by corruption scandals and harsh conscription.But the momentum has shifted.One crucial reason for this change is Europe.Perhaps the most underappreciated success of the war this year has been Europe's ability to step in after America stepped back.European aid has now largely offset the collapse in American support for Kiev.

The EU's 90 billion euro loan package is beginning to move, freed from Viktor Orban's obstruction after his defeat in Hungary.Europeans have taken charge of this war.This is where Trump comes in.His diplomacy toward Ukraine has been so far a study in squandered leverage.He berated Zelensky publicly.treated Ukrainian concessions as the starting point of negotiations, and gave Putin reason to believe he could wait the West out.

But Trump still has tools no European leader possesses.He could threaten to restart major American military aid to Kiev, tighten sanctions on Russian oil and the Shadow Fleet, and speed up the sale of U .S.weapons to NATO countries for transfer to Ukraine.then he could offer Putin an exit ramp in the form of a peace deal.Remember, Russia has lost somewhere between 350 ,000 and half a million soldiers in a war that, according to a new independent survey, is now deeply unpopular at home.

Trump's pro -Russian bias, ironically, positions himself well to make such a deal.Putin knows Trump has long been skeptical of Kiev and indulgent towards Moscow.Of course, for the Ukrainians and Europeans to accept the deal, it would have to be serious.Ukraine should be willing to concede territory, but its new borders must be defensible.It needs real security guarantees that anchor Ukraine in the West.The war is not about Donbass.

It's about whether Ukraine will remain a sovereign country, free to choose its future.Putin's twin theories of victory were that Ukraine was weak and that the West would tire.Both have collapsed.This is Trump's opportunity.He could help end the worst war in Europe since World War II, secure Ukraine's place in the West, and deter a revanchist great power with an imperial project to defeat the West.This would be a real achievement, not a phony photo -op ceasefire like the ones in the Middle East that Trump has brandished.

It would be a deal that actually deserves to be called historic.

Let's join retired U .S.Army Major General Mark McCarley with his thoughts on this now.Thank you so much for joining us, Major General.Do you feel the tide is turning in this conflict?Because we keep hearing about Ukrainian triumphs when before we were just hearing about Ukrainian defeats.

Well, I think the best measurement is a measurement that is taken on the ground, because at the end of the day, war is fought ground up.What you've described in the last couple of minutes, of course, is what we call the standoff war, where both parties, Russia and Ukraine, shoot their arsenal, send that barrage of missiles, ballistic missiles and drones across borders.But when we assess what has taken place, the Russians have been unable to move that line of contact for any significant distance for the last six months.And that is significant.That registers as a great success on the part of the Ukrainian ground forces.That's why I think it's legitimate to say that the Ukrainians are performing much, much better in 2026 than they did last year.

Which is interesting because so much has been said about the development of drones in Ukraine and how effective they've been in developing that technology.But what you're saying is we should be looking at how successful they've been on the ground as well.

Absolutely.The ground will dictate the ultimate victor, or however this matter is ultimately negotiated.But drones are a weapon system.The ground forces useground forces, and the Russian counterparts use drone systems.Drones are the tool or the weapon of choice.

Close to the front line, you've got Ukrainian forces and the manner in which they engage the Russians is to launch multiple drones that have the capability, this has been developed over the last couple of years, to identify specifically a Russian grouping of personnel or Russian tanks and other weapons systems on the ground.The drones have been the ones developed by Ukraine have performed significantly and have contributed to a stabilisation, if not an improvement of the situation on the ground.

Still, the Russian military is far bigger than Ukraine's.Is there an opportunity?Do they have any sort of slack, do you think, to be able to really launch a major push, which they, in theory, could be capable of?

Oh, my gosh, that's perhaps the most important question.If we were in the in the Ukrainian office of the chief of its armed forces, that would be the same question put forward.Russia has significant resources, much more resources in Ukraine.But this war is fought, as we said, on the ground.It's also fought.And what we wanted to address today is this aerial barrage coming from west to east, that's Ukrainian, and from east to west from Russia.

And the purpose of those barrages, of course, is to destroy infrastructure, destroy manufacturing facilities, those factories, and military congregation, military resources to degrade somebody Ukrainian's ability to fight.But when you get down to reality, the significantexpression of what takes place with these aerial barrages is the fear and trepidation that those on the receiving end of those drones and ballistic missiles, how they are going to counter it.Will an attack by Russia, as the Russians have demonstrated the last couple of days in which they've sent swarms, as you've addressed, of Shaheed drones and ballistic missiles, how has that influenced the Ukrainian population, especially in Kyiv, which has been the focus of all that?Will the Kievans, will those in Ukraine continue to be resilient?Now, the Russian objective is to degrade that resilience and put political pressure on Zelensky to come to terms with Russian demands.

And the counterpart of that is that with the increasing sophistication and the manufacturing of greater numbers of Ukrainian drones and ballistic missiles, that same sort of psychological pressure is now being applied in Russia.And if you look at some of the open source materials, you're going to see beginning to see some significant portions of the Russian population, discreetly, of course, they can't stand up and condemn Putin, but they certainly are expressing concern about the fact that the war has taken so long, that Russia has sustained significant casualties, and that the Russian people want to be done with this war.So that's part of this psychological combat, which is exemplified by this cross pattern of drone attacks, east, west, west, east.