A year ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky articulated a strategy of “bringing the war back to Russia.” “The war was brought from Russia, and it is to Russia that the war must be pushed back. They must be the ones forced into peace. They are the ones who must be pressured to ensure security,” Zelensky said in March 2025.

Since then, and ever more intensely this year, Ukraine has been pursuing a “strategic neutralization” of assets in Russia. This means scaling back the hard-fought, casualty-intensive thrusts to claw back occupied territory that have cost Ukraine so much in terms of blood and treasure, and instead embracing long-range, asymmetric warfare to degrade Russia’s economy, rupture its military manufacturing, and deflate civilian morale. This spring, there’s every sign that this strategy is bearing fruit—and perhaps even shifting the battlefield calculus in the war’s fifth, grinding year.

A year ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky articulated a strategy of “bringing the war back to Russia.” “The war was brought from Russia, and it is to Russia that the war must be pushed back. They must be the ones forced into peace. They are the ones who must be pressured to ensure security,” Zelensky said in March 2025.

Since then, and ever more intensely this year, Ukraine has been pursuing a “strategic neutralization” of assets in Russia. This means scaling back the hard-fought, casualty-intensive thrusts to claw back occupied territory that have cost Ukraine so much in terms of blood and treasure, and instead embracing long-range, asymmetric warfare to degrade Russia’s economy, rupture its military manufacturing, and deflate civilian morale. This spring, there’s every sign that this strategy is bearing fruit—and perhaps even shifting the battlefield calculus in the war’s fifth, grinding year.

Almost daily, Ukraine’s new weaponry capabilities, in particular its own long-range missiles and high-precision drones, are wreaking havoc where they hit energy infrastructure, arms and explosives factories, and military command and logistics centers. On the home front, Ukraine is playing defense, killing or wounding about 35,000 Russians a month, according to Ukrainian sources, bringing some estimates of the war’s total death toll to 352,000 Russian service members.

According to Ulf Brunnbauer, a historian at the University of Regensburg, Ukraine’s object is to show its Western supporters that “they have not only staying power but can really harm Russia, thus helping their case for continuous support. This puts Kyiv in a better position for eventual peace talks by increasing the incentives for Russia to settle for a compromise.”

The battered oil refineries smoldering across Russia underscore Ukraine’s success in choking Russia’s economic lifeline. In April and thus this month, the Ukrainian armed forces have hit 20 oil refineries and export terminals. The dramatic images of Ukrainian drone strikes on the Tuapse oil refinery on Russia’s Black Sea coast on April 28 displayed a Russia at war and reeling: For weeks, thick black smoke spewed out of the site and blanketed more than 300 kilometers of southern Russia, including three cities.

The strikes, some hitting as far as 1,750 km from Ukraine—that’s 2.5 times farther than the range possible four years ago—have rendered Russia unable to fully capitalize on the high petroleum prices caused by the Iran war.

According to Al Jazeera, Ukraine has deterred Russia from reaping the gigantic windfall profits that it was counting on from oil exports, some of which the United States made possible by lifting individual sanctions in the context of the Iran war and energy crisis. Ukraine’s long-range strike campaign against Russian port and energy infrastructure in “a calculated bid to prevent Russia from offloading oil onto tankers,” Al Jazeera reports. In other words: Ukraine found a way to check the effects of a U.S. policy that had originally looked devastating for Ukraine. In March, Russia’s seaborne oil shipments dropped by roughly 300,000 barrels per day, partly as a result of Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries. According to Bloomberg, average output at Russian oil refineries fell to 4.69 million barrels per day in April, a record low since December 2009.

And the strikes on military installations such as air defense systems, airfields, and armament plants appear to be thrwarting Russia’s ground war in Ukraine, too—Kyiv’s most immediate priority. Russia’s forward momentum on the battlefield in Ukraine has ground to a virtual halt. Its armed forces even suffered a net loss of territory in April, for the first time since August 2024, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S.-based think tank. Russia’s anticipated spring offensive is thus far a washout.

Just this weekend, Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities reached deep into the Russian heartland, hammering its military tech industry in locations previously considered untouchable due to their closeness to the capital. Long-range attack drones struck Angstrem Microelectronics in Zelenograd, a main cog in Russia’s semiconductor industry. And drones also damaged MKB Raduga, the nerve center for Russia’s cruise missile program, in Dubna, just 80 miles north of Moscow.

“This strategy is all about the battlefield in Ukraine. It’s about stopping Russia from taking the Donbas and forcing it into negotiations that Ukraine can control,” said ISW analyst George Barros. “That should be the basis for a settlement.”

Until now, Barros argued, Russian President Vladimir Putin has operated “as if it doesn’t matter how high costs run as long as Russia keeps making gains and the West’s will dwindles. The idea was that Russia will simply outlast them and win in long run.” But Russia is obviously now wavering in a way that it hasn’t before, Barros said.

There are signs everywhere that Russia is panicking but perhaps none greater than Putin’s call for a cease-fire on May 9, Russia’s Victory Day national holiday, when it commemorates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, usually with plenty of pomp and bluster. Putin pleaded with Ukraine not to disrupt the celebrations, and the usually uber-martial parade burnished no military hardware at all this year—a stinging admission that Ukraine has the capability of striking a top-tier public event in the middle of Moscow in the middle of the day.

According to the Moscow Times, an independent Russian media outlet, the Kremlin is rethinking its war goals and the narrative that it tells Russians about the “special military operation,” as it calls the war, downplaying its significance. Russian officials are apparently preparing to frame a peace deal with Ukraine as a “victory.” The Kremlin wants to shift public messaging away from its previous goal of capturing all of Ukraine, and in particular Kyiv, and toward holding what Russia already has—occupied territories in eastern and southern Ukraine—firmly in its hand.

And there’s even evidence of discontent among Russian political strategists regarding the war’s high cost. High-ranking officials have begun to question aloud the war’s continuation, according to the Moscow Times. Reportedly, they believe that taking the entire Donbas requires a full-fledged wartime economy and countrywide mass mobilization. This, they warned, would dangerously exhaust Russia’s resources, break the economy, and accelerate already dire population decline.

These setbacks for Russia are increasingly reflected in public opinion, which has largely supported the war until now. Although Russian polling shows that 73 percent of Russians approve of Putin’s performance—a robust number, were this applied to Western politicos—it is the lowest figure recorded since February 2022, according to the Public Opinion Foundation.

Most Russia experts doubt that Ukraine pins any hope on Russians rising up to overthrow Putin. The authoritarian state’s controls are too muscular, and just to make sure that this occurs to no one, Putin has clamped down on social media, such as the widely used Telegram channels, which are a widely accessed media source for many Russians.

“Public opinion,” said Barros of ISW, “is important to the Kremlin today in a way it wasn’t during the Cold War. Our team has been astonished about the extent to which Putin has made militarily questionable decisions in order to maximize regime stability and minimize discontent at home.”

And the deep-strike capabilities aren’t the “only cards that Ukraine has now,” said Fedir Serdiuk, a Ukrainian Defense Ministry advisor, in reference to U.S. President Donald Trump’s contention that Ukraine “doesn’t have the cards” to win the war.

“Ukraine relies on state-of-the-art unmanned surface vehicles and sensors to navigate and control the Black Sea,” Serdiuk said. “Millions of first-person-view drones, surveillance platforms, and much improved intelligence tech has helped sustain defense on the ground.” Serdiuk also pointed to ever more effective special operations such as Operation Spiderweb, a covert drone attack deep inside Russia in June 2025 that took out a significant portion of Russia’s strategic aviation capabilities, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M bombers.

Brunnbauer, the historian, doubted that Ukraine believes that it can push the Russians back, at least in the short or medium term. “But what they are showing to the world, to themselves, and to the Russians who care to know” he said, “is that time is not necessarily on Russia’s side—and that they can survive without much American help.”