Ukraine ridiculed the claim that the entire Lugansk region was now under Russian control: “The front line has barely moved in the last six months. It looks like an April 1 departure.”
This week, for the third time since the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia announced that it has completely occupied the Ukrainian region of Lugansk.
The Russian army has controlled almost the entire Lugansk region – one of four eastern regions that Moscow seeks to illegally annex – since the first year of the conflict.
It is unclear why Russia felt the need to announce – again – that its forces “completed the liberation of the entire territory of the Luhansk People’s Republic”, as it calls the region.
According to analysts interviewed by CNN, the Russian Ministry of Defense has a habit of exaggerating advances when the front lines practically do not change.
Russian advances in Ukraine have slowed in the first three months of this year to about five kilometers per day, compared with 11 kilometers in the first quarter of 2025, based in Washington. And in some parts of the battlefield, the Ukrainians made gains.
Ukraine ridiculed the claim that the entire Lugansk region was now under Russian control.
“The front line has barely moved in the last six months. It looks like an April 1 match,” said Ukrainian military spokesman Victor Tregubov.
Russian soldiers photographed before being sent to the Lugansk region, in November 2024. Arkadii Budnitskii/Anadolu/Getty Images
Ukraine’s Third Army Corps, in charge of defending Luhansk, said the Russians unsuccessfully launched 144 attempted attacks on two villages in their attempts to complete the capture of the region.
On the same day as the Defense Ministry’s statement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should have already ordered the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the entire Donbass region, claiming that the withdrawal was necessary to put an end to the “hot phase” of the war.
The Donbass region includes Lugansk and Donetsk – about 20% of which, according to the Ukrainian military, are still under Ukrainian control.
“The Kremlin’s allegations about taking [Lugansk] in 2025 and 2026 are exaggerating the minimal changes on the battlefront in order to create the false impression that Russian forces are advancing rapidly in various sectors of the battlefield,” the Institute for the Study of War said following Russia’s latest statement.
“The Kremlin’s claims that Russian forces are advancing rapidly across several sectors of the battlefield in 2025 and 2026 are exaggerating the minimal changes at the battlefront to create the false impression that Russian forces are advancing rapidly across various sectors of the battlefield,” the institute added, following the latest Russian statement.
“Russia’s announcement aimed to portray Ukrainian defenses as being on the brink of collapse, forcing the United States and other Ukraine partners to unnecessarily cede territory that Russian forces are unlikely to be able to conquer militarily in the medium term, if at all,” the institute concluded.
The “liberation” of Lugansk had already been claimed in 2022 and again last June, when the Kremlin-appointed governor of Lugansk, Leonid Pasechnik, stated that “100%” of the region was under the control of Russian forces.
Ukrainian drones this week attacked Russian fuel tanks and ammunition depots 100 kilometers from the front line. Yan Dorbronosov/Reuters
In October, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Russia had just 0.13% of the region to capture.
Last week, Ukrainian drones attacked Russian fuel tanks and ammunition depots about 100 kilometers from the front lines in Lugansk, as well as a Russian air defense system more than 130 kilometers from the region’s border, according to geolocated videos.
In a broader picture, Ukrainian forces made their most significant gains during the winter since the incursion into the Russian region of Kursk in 2024. Their greatest progress occurred in the south, where they conquered around 400 square kilometers in Zaporizhzhia – another region claimed by Russia.
Ukrainian forces also recaptured at least 180 square kilometers in and around Kupiansk in the north in December and largely held on to the conquered areas, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, said last week that Ukrainian forces are prioritizing counterattacks in areas where Russian forces are most vulnerable.
“The enemy is playing by our rules. It is forced to adjust and focus its efforts where we are moving forward,” Syrskyi said.
The aim is to force the Russian military to redeploy troops in different areas to respond to attacks, just as the Russians have attempted to destabilize Ukrainian defenses.
Late last month, Yuri Podolyaka, a well-known pro-Kremlin military blogger with nearly three million followers on Telegram, expressed doubts about the ability of Russian forces to reverse an unfavorable situation on the battlefield in the coming months and complained about Ukrainian counterattacks, which have been “quite successful.”
Soldiers from the 154th Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine participate in a military exercise on April 4th. Serhii Korovainyi/Reuters
According to Yuri Podolyaka, Ukrainian forces were “outperforming” Russian forces in their ability to adapt, and the military leadership in Moscow was unable to adapt to the more advanced Ukrainian interceptor drones.
Ukraine is also trying to take advantage of the scale of Russian losses.
“Russian losses this March have reached their highest level since the start of the war,” Zelensky said on Friday.
“Our drone strikes alone resulted in 33,988 Russian military personnel killed or seriously injured, while artillery and other strikes eliminated another 1,363 Russian occupiers.”
“This means more than 35,000 Russian casualties in just one month,” Zelensky stressed.
“Russian advances have slowed significantly as Russian forces continue to suffer personnel losses and increasingly rely on poorly trained and poorly equipped infantry to make gains,” the Institute for the Study of War noted last week.
However, Ukraine also faces a severe shortage of personnel in many parts of the front line, and Zelensky has expressed concern that the war in the Middle East could lead to reduced availability of American weaponry, especially air defense missiles – hundreds of which have been sent to defend the Gulf countries.
