After over one month of the war in Ukraine between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Ukraine, the war continues. Russian forces have been unable to capture any Ukrainian major city after about a month of campaigning through Ukraine, with their forces being currently nearly stalled on all fronts in Ukraine. Their offensive into Ukraine in February was stalled in mid-March with logistical problems and heavy losses, with Russian armor and air assets suffering at the hand of Ukrainian resistance. Russian troops were able to encircle the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol on all sides, and have engaged in a weeks-long siege in the city. The Ukrainian far-right Azov battalion, which has been headquartered in Mariupol since the city was retaken in 2014 from the Donetsk People’s Republic, has stalled Russian forces attempting to push into the city, and has attempted to hold on to Mariupol and resist Russian advances. Russian Forces also seemed to recently be running out of heavy munitions, with older and lower quality ammunition types for both rocket and missile launchers being used in place of supposedly present modern and newly invented missile types shown off at public demonstrations. 

Image of a Destroyed Mariupol on Sunday (The Guardian)

Russian ground forces were also found to be made up mostly of untrained, new teenage recruits or desperate men who enlisted in the Russian Armed Forces, thinking this was a training exercise. Other notable issues for Russian forces include their inability to destroy Ukrainian communications and electrical power stations on the first day of their invasion, resulting in the majority of the country still having power and being able to communicate over their mobile devices, which allowed them to relay Russian convoy positions to their armed forces. Russian convoys have been forced to take major highway routes as a result, leaving them exposed to concentrated drone and artillery strikes which have disabled several major convoys and left some Russian soldiers without food or fuel to continue moving across the country. Ukrainian forces also launched a recent counter offensive into Russian-Taken territory of Ukraine, with the support of Turkish Bayraktar TB2 Drones, which have thus far been a major factor in the success of Ukraine in their war with Russia. They have been able to reclaim several villages north of Kyiv and near the Crimean Peninsula and Kherson, which means Russia has started to retreat back from their lines of control in the country as Ukrainian forces go on the offensive.