Season of the Weak Arrows: Spring 2026 Retrospective

Russia entered spring with three objectives and left it with none of them meaningfully advanced. The primary effort was always Kramatorsk. Zaporizhzhia was the secondary push. The northern border was supposed to become a formalized buffer zone. The Green offensive launched on schedule in May. The results, so far, are not worth the schedule.
Spring is over. Time to take stock.
In three months, Russia seized roughly 334 km² according to DeepState — a modest number under any interpretation, and May was particularly thin. What made it worse was the nature of the failure. This was not a case of one bad break or one stubborn defensive line. Russia collected nearly every problem available to collect: recruitment pressures, logistical strain, and the slow but consequential emergence of Ukrainian tactical small-air dominance at full occupation depth. Each problem fed the next, and the cumulative result was visible decay across multiple fronts simultaneously. That combination is harder to recover from than a single setback.

The Northern Buffer: Mission Accomplished, Then Not
March and April produced something that looked, briefly, like progress. Army Group North did what it was asked to do — raided the border zone, disrupt the defense, extended the front, painted the map. The buffer materialized. Then May arrived, the momentum evaporated, and Russian forces began losing portions of the very ground they had just taken. The control was always going to be symbolic out there. What nobody in Moscow planned for was losing even that.

Zaporizhzhia: Further Away Than Three Months Ago
This is the most straightforward summary of the Zaporizhzhia direction: Russia is further from its objective today than it was when spring began. That is not a neutral result. That is a step backward.
The 5th Combined Arms Army sits at the center of this axis and has kept pushing forward with the kind of persistence that looks like confidence from the outside and looks like something else entirely when you check the flanks. Both the 58th and 36th CAAs lost ground over the spring. The flanks of the entire direction are softer now than they were in February. The 5th CAA does not appear troubled by this. It pushes forward, trusts that things will work out, and leaves the geometry to someone else. The 35th CAA at Orikhiv has not helped — it underperformed on its axis throughout the season.
Ukraine threw significant resources at this direction and earned the result. The 5th CAA is the force worth watching going forward, for better or worse.

Donbas: Five Problems Dressed as One Campaign
The Kramatorsk axis is not one battle. It is five separate efforts that are supposed to add up to an encirclement and currently add up to something considerably less elegant.
At Pokrovsk, the 2nd and 41st CAAs are active, generating friction, and going essentially nowhere. Ukrainian forces have closed the western approach and are not moving. The 51st CAA at Dobropillia — meant to be the southern claw of the encirclement — has not broken through. The claw is not closing.
The 8th CAA is grinding through Kostiantynivka from the south at the pace you would expect from urban fighting in a well-defended town. It is making progress in the way that a siege makes progress: slowly, expensively, and with no guarantee of what comes after. Its eastern flank is a patchwork of units nominally under 3rd CAA command, which is itself conducting a frontal assault toward Sloviansk with minimal subtlety. The 3rd CAA is pushing because someone has to push, and because the 25th CAA — assigned to take Lyman — has failed to reduce the isolated position that is blocking the entire northern axis. The 25th is stuck. Which means the 3rd is stuck. Which means the northern arm of the Kramatorsk operation is not an arm at all right now — it is a complaint.