Ukraine takes back more than 230 square miles from Russia in first months of 2026, military chief says

Ukraine’s army has recaptured more than 230 square miles of territory so far this year, Kyiv’s military chief confirmed Monday as momentum continues to shift against Russia’s more than four-year-old invasion.Oleksandr Syrskyi said his forces have retaken several strips of land across the 800-mile front in the first five months of 2026, with more than one-fifth of the territorial gains resulting from last month’s offensive.May’s total gain of more than 38 square miles also marked Russia’s first net retreat since a major counter-offensive by Kyiv in 2023, according to DeepState, an independent ​Ukraine-based battlefield analyst group.In total, Ukrainian forces struck more than 88,000 Russian military targets in May, killing more than 30,000 soldiers and causing more than $1 billion in damage to Moscow’s military-industrial complex, Syrskyi added.Syrskyi added that the fighting remains most intense in the eastern Donetsk region, where Russia has struggled to make significant advances for nearly two years.The military chief also singled out the village of Oleksandrivka in the Kherson region and the city of Huliaipole ​in the Zaporizhzhia region as areas along the front line where the heaviest fighting was taking place.Meanwhile, Syrskyi said that despite expert consensus that the city of Pokrovsk fell last year to Russia following an intense campaign lasting nearly two years, Kyiv’s soldiers are still fighting inside the logistical hub.While the real-time state of the battlefield remains difficult to track due to the intensity of the war, Ukraine’s reported victories line up with analysis from the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which found that Kyiv was “actively challenging the positional character of the war” as of the end of May.The think tank specifically cited Ukraine’s ability to deploy drones to disrupt Russia’s supply chain and troop movement along the front as some of the keys to hindering Moscow’s advan...