Winter is coming: Putin orders one last big push

US President Donald Trump surprised the world this week with a dramatic reversal of opinion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin believes otherwise: “(We have) strategic initiative … there are reasons to believe that we can finish off Ukrainian forces”.

But he said that in March.

Russian forces launched a much hyped “summer offensive” soon after.

Seven months later, they’re still trying.

They have been advancing. Slowly.

But time is running out.

Winter is coming.

Now, Moscow appears to be preparing yet another “big push”. It still wants its tank armies to win the elusive “breakthrough” they have failed to generate since the opening days of the invasion.

Russia has restored its 90th Tank Division.

Remaining reserve stocks have been plundered. Chinese components are helping emergency war production to deliver new equipment. North Korea is supplying the ammunition. And raw recruits are being trucked to the front lines.

Analysts say the 90th is now some 25,000 troops strong. And it is equipped with Russia’s best surviving tanks, the T-90M.

Its target is the heavily defended Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, Donetsk.

The city’s defenders have been slowly pushed back. 

But Ukraine isn’t waiting for Russia’s Cold War-era mechanised assault to assemble, form up, position itself, and start rolling. After months of contending with motorcycle raids and infantry charges, the defenders are redirecting their drone, artillery and missile strikes towards the parked armoured columns. 

It’s shaping up to be an all-out effort from both exhausted forces.

Some estimates put Russia’s casualties so far at over 1 million (including 250,000 killed). 

Smaller Ukraine is believed to have suffered around 400,000 casualties (with about 100,000 dead). 

Both sides are struggling to find replacements.

Once more into the breach …

“We have a saying … where the foot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours,” Putin said during a St Petersburg address in July.

“I have said many times that I consider the Russian and Ukrainian peoples to be one people. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours.”

But he may not have enough boots to achieve this.

Moscow’s greatest success so far came in the opening weeks of the 2022 invasion. It was able to dig in after being repulsed from the capital, Kyiv, within Ukraine’s easternmost provinces.

In the subsequent three years, it has struggled to seize an additional 75,000 square kilometres (12 per cent of Ukraine’s territory).

“During the early months of 2025, there was much speculation that Russia’s coming summer offensive would prove the decisive campaign of the entire invasion,” analyst Peter Dickinson writes for the Atlantic Council think-tank.

“Many thought the Ukrainian army was already close to collapse, with Putin himself declaring in March that ‘there are reasons to believe we can finish off’ Ukrainian forces.”

But Putin’s summer offensive has failed.

“The Russian army has been unable to secure any frontline breakthroughs or capture a single major city, with overall Russian advances during the three summer months limited to an estimated 0.3 per cent of Ukrainian territory,” Dickinson adds.

Moscow has failed to advance in Ukraine’s northern Sumy and Kharkiv regions.

And the strategic eastern province city of Pokrovsk is hanging on.

Now Moscow is expecting that, this time, one of its repeatedly failed armour assaults will somehow succeed.

That job rests on the shoulders of the largely untrained and poorly equipped troops of the 90th Tank Division being loaded into the back of refurbished armoured personnel carriers.

Boots on the ground

“At this rate, Russia is losing 10 troops for every square mile gained,” writes Professor Natasha Lindstaedt of the University of Essex.

The expert on authoritarianism says President Putin has been focusing conscription efforts on Russia’s poorer and remote regions. Urban centres and their richer western provinces have generally been spared in an effort to avoid civil unrest.

“As Russia’s approach to military recruitment has always been quantity of troops over quality, it is struggling to keep up with the number of men needed to fight a conventional war in Ukraine,” Professor Lindstaedt argues.

“Since late 2024, Russia has been so desperate for manpower that it has even turned to foreign fighters, including soldiers from North Korea.”

But Moscow needs more.

Ukraine is taking troops from wherever it can. Conscription is targeting increasingly older men. And while anyone under 25 cannot be forced into service, they are being offered big cash bonuses.

And President Volodymyr Zelensky is showing the strain. He’s proposing harsh new desertion laws to combat growing discipline and morale issues among his troops. And many of his young men are considering fleeing the country to avoid the draft.

But Kyiv needs more.

Both governments have learned that hypersonic missiles don’t matter, nor do combat jets, tanks, or drones. 

Holding ground needs boots on the ground.

“The era of limited counterinsurgency operations and quick precision warfare is over,” argues military analyst Gil Barndollar. 

“As more than half a million soldiers face one another across a 1000-mile front, we have had to relearn an old principle of war: Mass matters. And ultimately, that mass still rests on manpower.”

It’s a relearning of an age-old lesson that has profound implications for NATO. And Australia.

“For all the singular fixation on spending targets, the best single metric for gauging a wealthy modern country’s dedication to its own defence may instead be the number of well-trained people in uniform,” Barndollar concludes.