Russia Is Losing Its War, and Congress Should Help Finish the Job

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 05, 2025

 

George Barros, one of the Institute for the Study of War’s leading analysts of Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine, believes that the long-running conflict in Europe has reached a tipping point.

 

Moscow’s advances, most of which have been limited by Ukrainian drone warfare to platoon-level incursions, have “steadily decreased since January” of this year, he said recently. “Ukraine’s lines are holding and will likely continue to hold,” Barros continued. The “fortress belt” in the Donbas continues to repel Russian forces. “Ukraine has spent the last 11 years pouring time, money, effort, and resources into reinforcing the Belt, establishing significant defensive infrastructure in and around” the cities in the free areas of Donetsk Oblast.

 

This explains why the Kremlin has leaned so hard on the Trump administration to force Kyiv to surrender that region to Moscow “without a fight.”

 

But since mid-May, Barros, his colleague Kateryna Stepanenko, and the rest of the team at ISW have seen evidence that Russia is experiencing battlefield setbacks unlike any it has endured since the earliest days of Vladimir Putin’s expansionist war. “ISW is no longer prepared to forecast whether Russia is even capable of seizing the territory at all,” Barros warned.

 

He directed his audience to a May 13 ISW analysis, which concludes that Moscow’s “exaggerated territorial ambitions and aggressive territorial demands run completely counter to battlefield reality.”

 

Ukrainian forces are “stabilizing the line” and innovating new methods of “mechanized maneuver warfare” even under the drone-glutted skies of Eastern Ukraine. “And we anticipate that Ukrainian performance will likely to continue to stabilize throughout the rest of 2026,” Barros observed.

 

If the ISW is right, the West has a limited window of opportunity available to it to attempt to persuade the Kremlin that victory in Ukraine, as Vladimir Putin defines it, is unattainable. At least 18 House Republicans have heeded the call. This week, they joined House Democrats in voting to provide Ukraine with $8 billion in loans and another $1.8 billion in military aid.

 

The legislation faces a steep climb in the Senate, though. “And even if it were to clear both chambers, it would likely be vetoed by the president,” the New York Times asserted.

 

Perhaps. But the president may be persuadable. Given the intractability of his war against Russia’s allies in the Islamic Republic and the extent to which Moscow has provided vital assistance to Iran throughout the conflict, it’s possible that Trump could be convinced that his war and Ukraine’s are extensions of the same war against the emerging anti-American axis (because it is).

 

Congress’s intervention here is timely. The president’s allies in the Senate should support the House’s initiative, whether Trump backs it or not.