Ukrainian elite units are rushing to halt the Russian assaults. But how much longer can they hold out?

A flat town, a crushed defense

Huliaipole is not Kupiansk. Kupiansk is surrounded by forests, bisected by a river—a city that defends itself naturally. Huliaipole? It’s a plain. The Zaporizhzhia steppe, as flat as a bingo table, where Russian tanks can unleash their full power. It’s a nightmare terrain for a Ukrainian defense increasingly reliant on drones. When there are no trees and no buildings, drones become useless. The Russian soldiers, meanwhile, see them coming. And they’re advancing. They’ve been advancing since September 2024. They’ve advanced 15 kilometers in two months. Fifteen kilometers that have sent thousands of refugees fleeing onto the roads.

The 102nd Territorial Brigade, based around Huliaipole, did not hold. Oleksandr Syrsky, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief, admitted on Ukrainian television that the brigade “could not withstand the enemy’s pressure.” They retreated. And as they retreated, they left a command post intact. The Russians found laptops there. Documents. Information. Video footage of Russian soldiers inspecting the remains of the command post circulated around the world. It was humiliating. It was proof that Ukraine’s territorial defense was no longer holding.

And this is the widening gap: between the elite units that receive everything, and the territorial brigades that get the scraps. Between those sent to prop up the president’s morale and those left to fight with drones and hope.

The Calculus of Despair: Sending the Best Too Late

By late November, Kyiv realized the situation was becoming critical. As a last resort, the 225th Regiment, an elite unit, was sent to Huliaipole. But it was too late. Too late, according to David Axe, an independent military analyst. “It was too little, too late,” he commented. An elite unit against the overwhelming might of the Russian army? It’s like sending a single scout up against a regiment. Brave. Ineffective. Depressing.

Today, Huliaipole is what’s known as a “gray zone.” Neither truly Ukrainian nor truly Russian. The Ukrainians control pockets of territory on the western side. The Russians hold the rest. And in between, it’s chaos. According to the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), Ukrainian troops may soon be confined to only the westernmost part of the city. After that, Huliaipole will effectively have fallen. Just like Pokrovsk before it. A ghost town. A humiliating defeat, where no one claims victory because everyone is ashamed.

That’s the real cost of the game: we save one city for the cameras, and we lose another because we had no more elite units to send in. Kyiv’s strategy works until it stops working.

Elite Units: A Finite Resource in an Endless War

Lee, a senior military analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, explains the system with chilling clarity. Ukrainian assault units receive the best armored vehicles. The fastest reinforcements. The best-trained soldiers. Those who understand modern warfare: infiltration, urban combat, improvisation under fire. But there aren’t thousands of them. There are a few hundred. Maybe a few thousand. No more than that.

And they don’t multiply like rabbits. Training a soldier takes time. It’s expensive. It’s risky. So when you have one who performs well, you keep him. You reuse him. You send him where it counts. In Kupiansk, it mattered. In Huliaipole, it mattered too. But you can’t be everywhere. And when you have to choose where to send your best assault unit, you have to accept that someone else will pay the price elsewhere.

Ukraine is playing a grim game. It has a limited pool of reliable, experienced, motivated soldiers. It sends them wherever the situation becomes critical. Kupiansk was critical. They go there. Huliaipole becomes critical. They go there. But when does Pokrovsk become critical? When does Sloviansk start to crumble? What happens then? The pool runs dry. And then there’s nothing left. No more firefighters. No more reserve units. Just a front line that’s slowly, inexorably collapsing.

And the real question—the one no one asks because it’s too depressing—is this: How many times can you deploy the same elite unit before it’s nothing more than a shadow of its former self? How many missions before they’re all dead or broken?

The Territorial Brigades: The Forgotten Ones on the Front Lines

Meanwhile, the territorial brigades are fighting in other sectors. These are the local units, hastily mobilized after the 2022 invasion. They lack equipment. They lack drones. They lack everything. They’ve even been neglected. When resources arrive, they don’t go to the territorial brigades. They go to the assault units—the ones we’re counting on to make a difference.

And that’s acceptable in military strategy. Focusing your best resources on your best soldiers makes sense—until it doesn’t. Until the territorial brigades are exhausted. Until they haven’t had a moment’s rest. Until they’ve held positions for months without relief. Until they’re literally out of breath. Huliaipole is a classic example. The 102nd Territorial Brigade had been holding that position for a long time—month after month. Russian troops kept pressing forward. And pressing forward. Casualties mounted. Equipment deteriorated. And then Ukraine realized too late that the system was breaking down.

This is the dilemma of any army: you can’t be excellent everywhere. You can’t have elite units in every trench. So you sacrifice one part to save the other. And you hope the calculation is correct. In Huliaipole, the calculation was wrong.

The Overwhelming Number of Battles and Unbearable Attrition

The numbers are significant, even if they’re horrifying. Russia is sending entire motorized brigades against Ukrainian platoons. Hundreds of Russian soldiers against a few dozen Ukrainians. The Ukrainians harass them with drones. They kill a few. They wound others. But the Russian troops keep coming. It’s the steamroller tactic. Send in cannon fodder until they break through. Accept the losses. Military analysts say Russia accepts 10 casualties for every unit of territory gained. It’s a massive waste. But if you have a population of 150 million and you mobilize on a massive scale, you have the capacity to sustain that waste.

Ukraine doesn’t have that capacity. It has a population of 40 million. Many of whom have fled. Many of whom have become refugees. Many of whom can’t fight because they’re caring for children or the elderly. Its pool of available fighters is much smaller. And it also has to defend its cities. Feed its population. Maintain some semblance of an economy. Russia can afford to suffer massive losses. Ukraine cannot. That’s why elite units become so valuable. They kill more. They lose fewer. They maximize their effectiveness. But they can’t be everywhere.

The figures reported by sources show 219 military skirmishes in a single day along the front line. 219 places where the Ukrainians must hold their ground. 219 positions to defend. Imagine the resources that requires. Imagine the exhaustion. And then understand why elite units are rushed in as a matter of urgency—always too late, always for one sector, never for the entire front.

And here’s the nightmarish scenario: the further the Russians advance, the more Ukraine is forced to stretch its resources. The more it stretches them, the more it cracks in other places. It’s a downward spiral. And we don’t know where it will end.

Fatigue that kills more than bullets

A 26-year-old staff sergeant from the 13th “Khartiia” Brigade recounted the Kupiansk operation to the Financial Times with the detachment of someone who has seen too much. “Systematic and conducted with discretion,” he described it. That tone, that detachment, is the mark of a man who has grasped the essence of war: no victory is final. No success erases defeats elsewhere. You save a city; you lose ground elsewhere. That’s the game. And you have to accept it, or you’ll go mad.

But accepting this logic over several months is another matter entirely. It’s exhaustion. Not physical exhaustion, though that certainly exists. No. It’s mental exhaustion. It’s the moment when you realize you can win every day and still lose the war. When every success seems suspect because it comes at a cost elsewhere. When you can no longer celebrate because somewhere, a comrade is dying so that you can enjoy that success.

The Ukrainian troops defending Huliaipole had been holding out for a long time. They hadn’t had any rest. They were fighting nonstop. When the Russian army finally broke through, it wasn’t because the Ukrainians were weak. It was because they were exhausted. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s a huge one. Weakness can be fixed with training. Exhaustion, on the other hand, requires rest. But in wartime, rest is a scarcer resource than ammunition.

And so elite units are sent in to rescue exhausted brigades. But that doesn’t solve the problem. It just shifts it elsewhere. And in the end, everyone is exhausted. Everyone stares at the ceiling and wonders how much longer this will last.

The Viability of Attrition When You Don’t Have the Numbers

Atlantic Council analyst Peter Dickinson wrote something surprisingly candid in December: Russia is advancing, but “at a glacial pace while suffering catastrophic losses.” That’s the key to everything. Russia is advancing, slowly. But it is advancing. And it accepts the cost. Yes, it is losing thousands of men. But it has others who can take their place.

Ukraine does not have that luxury. Zelenskyy said in February 2025 that more than 46,000 Ukrainians had been killed and 380,000 wounded. That’s since 2022. That means about 16,000 deaths per year. That means an entire generation of young Ukrainian men is missing. That means widows. That means orphans. And that means Ukraine simply cannot keep up this pace.

Russia, according to military reports, has lost around 1.2 million troops since February 2022. Yes, you read that right: one million two hundred thousand. It’s a bloodbath. It’s a hemorrhage. It’s unsustainable. But for Moscow, it’s acceptable because it’s not a billion people it has to replace. It’s a little more than 1 percent of its population. For a nation willing to sacrifice its young people like this, it’s sustainable.

For Ukraine, it’s fatal. Every death counts triple. Every serious injury means a family destroyed. Every veteran who can no longer fight is a permanent loss.

And so when you realize you can’t win a war of attrition against someone who has more young people to send to their deaths, you have to change your strategy. But what strategy? Elite units aren’t enough. They delay the inevitable. They create images for the press. But they don’t win the war.

The humiliating negotiations that follow every victory

Zelensky filmed this video in Kupiansk just as the United States was preparing to negotiate with Russia. That’s political timing. That’s calculation. It’s saying: Look, we’re not running out of steam. Look, we can still achieve successes. Negotiate with us from a position of strength. It’s smart. But it’s also depressing.

Because it means we’re not fighting the war to win it. We’re winning small victories to secure a better negotiating position to end the war. We’re abandoning the idea of winning and just fighting not to lose too much. That’s the political strategy. It’s to sell the idea that we haven’t been defeated. But what it really says is that Ukraine knows it can’t win militarily. So it’s negotiating to keep what it can.

And that’s the real bitterness: elite units are fighting, dying, and holding their positions so that diplomats can say, “Look, we can hold out.” Not to win. Just to hold out. It’s an infinitely lesser goal. It’s a war reduced to its simplest form: survival.

Three months? Six months? Who knows?

The Ukrainian military isn’t saying how long they can hold out. U.S. officials say Ukraine can hold out “at least until 2026.” Maybe longer. But these empty phrases say everything about how little certainty there really is.

The real timeline is dictated by reserves. Elite units can only be deployed as long as there are reserves available. And the more they’re deployed, the faster they wear down. Not because they’re getting worse. No. Because they’re suffering casualties. And in an elite unit, casualties change everything. It’s like a soccer team where you have to replace your best players. You can keep playing. But it’s not the same anymore.

At some point, Ukraine will run out of elite units. Maybe in three months. Maybe in six. At that point, only the territorial brigades will remain. Brigades that are already exhausted. Brigades that haven’t received any attention. And then, the front line will collapse quickly. Not slowly. Quickly. Because there will be nothing left to stabilize the situation.

And that may be Russia’s real plan: to wait for the reservoir to run dry. Not to win crushing victories. Just to advance slowly, steadily, accepting losses, until the moment when Ukraine has no options left. It’s sadistic. It may also be as effective as any other tactic.

The specter of conscription: when the solutions become worse than the problem

Ukraine has been conscripting on a massive scale since 2022. It has drafted young people. It has enlisted the elderly. It has mobilized the poor. It has promised generous pay to attract volunteers. And it’s still chasing numbers. Always short on soldiers. Always forced to send people to the front who aren’t ready for it.

At some point, you can no longer carry out mass conscription. At that point, you must choose: continue the war with the people you have, or accept a peace agreement that leaves you alive but defeated. It’s a terrible choice. But it’s the choice that will come.

And elite units can’t change that equation. They can win battles. They can’t solve the demographic problem. They can’t create young people who will be born and ready to fight in three years. All they can do is delay. And hold the line. And hope.

And so when you watch the Ukrainian elite units rushing from one end of the front line to the other, what you’re really seeing is a hospital’s medical staff running from one emergency to the next. Effective—for now. But less and less so. Until the moment it all falls apart.

The Victory That Hides the Defeat

Elite units saved Kupiansk. Zelensky filmed himself. The world applauded. But in Huliaipole, 250 kilometers away, defeat was quietly taking hold. And in the coming months, other cities will fall. Not because the Ukrainians are weak. But because there aren’t enough elite units to save everyone.

That’s the fate of the reserve strategy. It works until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, everything collapses very quickly. It’s not a slow decline. It’s a collapse. That’s what happens when you bet everything on a handful of exceptional soldiers.

The Russian mothers waiting for calls from their sons won’t be coming anymore. They stopped waiting a long time ago. They know. But the Ukrainian mothers will keep waiting. Because waiting is all they have left. And while they wait, their sons are fighting. Their sons are dying. And the elite units are still on the move, from city to city, trying to save everything. And failing. Inevitably.

And that is the true ending of this story: not a triumphant conclusion. Not a clear defeat. Just a slow, inexorable exhaustion, where each victory costs more than the last. And where one day, there will be no more firefighters. Just burning ruins.

I am not a journalist, but a columnist. I am an analyst, an observer of the geopolitical and military dynamics that shape our world. My job is to dissect military strategies, understand movements on the battlefield, and anticipate the shifts in command. I do not claim to possess the cold objectivity of traditional journalism. I strive for clarity, sincere analysis, and a deep understanding of the issues that concern us all.

This text respects the fundamental distinction between verified facts and interpretive commentary. The factual information presented in this article comes from official and verifiable sources, including Ukrainian military communications, reports from the Financial Times, data from the Institute for the Study of War, analyses from the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and testimonies from recognized independent military analysts. The analyses and interpretations presented represent a critical synthesis based on the available information. Any subsequent developments could alter the perspectives presented here.