Experts Predict Big Russian Spring-Summer Offensive Attempt in Ukraine

The Russian Federation is concentrating troops and military materiel for a massive offensive with the objective of defeating Ukraine and dictating peace terms to Kyiv by summer’s end, Ukrainian and international military observers say.

Moscow has been accumulating strategic reserves for a large-scale assault to be launched in late spring in Ukraine’s eastern and later southern sectors, said Roman Pohorily, co-founder of the military research group Deep State UA, at a Kyiv security conference on Friday, Feb. 9.

The main axis of the offensive will be toward the major Donetsk region cities Sloviansk and Kramatorsk in the east of Ukraine, with the overall objective of bringing most of the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s (AFU) ground units into general battle and destroying them, he said.

A supporting attack to be launched later, in early summer, will hit in Ukraine’s southern territories and aim toward the major cities of Zaporizhzhia and Orikhiv, with the objectives of diverting Ukrainian forces from the main battle area in the east, he said.

Total Russian forces concentrated for the main effort of the operation could number more than 100,000 men, said DeepState co-presenter Ruslan Mykula.

The US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in a Friday analysis made similar predictions, reporting that Russian military command intends to deploy strategic reserves, which it has been forming since mid-2025, for a major spring offensive in Ukraine’s east. The ongoing Russian planning for a major offensive, according to ISW was confirmed based on observable troop movements and recruiting patterns, and clearly contradicts Kremlin official statements that Russia wants peace with Ukraine and does not wish take more territory from Ukraine, that report said.

The ISW analysis said that the Kremlin intent to defeat Ukraine in a war-winning offensive is likely unrealistic because of the strength of Ukraine’s drone-based defense networks, and falling recruiting numbers inside Russia.

A DeepState Saturday analysis of the likelihood of the Russian offensive’s achieving its aims said that Ukrainian combat performance has demonstrated Kyiv’s forces are capable of stopping the Russians cold and are likely to do so again, and called on Ukraine’s Western allies to differentiate between Russian fighting capability as advertised in Russian state-controlled media, and what the Russian forces actually are capable of on Ukraine’s battlefields.

“We [Ukraine] have already turned the ‘second-most-powerful army of the world’ into an army that suffers colossal human losses, conducts assaults using motorcycles and civilian automobiles, and employs donkeys, camels and horses for logistics. Moscow knows only the language of force and that force must be demonstrated through joint efforts, combining our experience with the armament of our partners,” the DeepState statement said in part.

Gen. David Petraeus, former supreme commander of allied forces in Afghanistan and ex-CIA Director, in comment to Kyiv Post said that Russian attacks towards the first objective, Pokrovsk, are already in progress and that the AFU has held in that sector for months.

Asked whether those Ukrainian defenses might be able to resist against a more massive, spring-summer offensive, Petraeus said: “They’ll stop the Russians. They’ll hold. The Ukrainian people are behind them.”

Ukrainian military journalist Andriy Tsaplienko, on Feb. 8 on Telegram commented:

“Russia is accumulating forces and readying a new large-scale offensive in the south and east of Ukraine in the summer…(and) is preparing for escalation, and not for diplomacy… They will be stopped.”

Starting in early 2024, AFU units have increasingly turned to drone swarms to underpin defenses, inflicting heavy casualties and within a year, forcing Russian forces to abandon almost all use of armored vehicles like tanks and armored personnel carriers, because those vehicles are highly vulnerable to drone attacks.

The Russian counter-tactic, first employed in early 2025 – infiltration attacks by small groups of harder-to-spot foot soldiers – has allowed Kremlin forces to continue to score small, incremental advances at the price of heavy and sometimes crushing casualties. In the worst failed attacks, entire units have been wiped out by first-person view (FPV) drone swarms and artillery and mortar strikes.

DeepState on Monday reported Russian infantry teams were still pushing ahead in the Pokrovsk sector, taking advantage of cold temperatures, which reduced drone battery capacity and flight times, to launch a new wave of infiltrations in the northern part of Pokrovsk city proper, and into the adjacent town Myrnohrod, where dozens of Russian soldiers were allegedly hiding in the city church.

A Russian follow-up armored column sent to reinforce the foot soldiers was wiped out, with more than 300 soldiers killed or wounded that report said. Kyiv Post could not confirm those kill claims independently.

Russian troops operating in the Pokrovsk/Mrynohrad sectors and elsewhere on the Donetsk region front are avoiding direct assaults against Ukrainian defensive positions, preferring instead to set up ambushes along roads used by AFU units for supply and ambushing Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) that are moving men and materiel to and from forward positions, a Feb. 5 RBC-Ukraine report on Russian attack tactics said.

Kyryll Sazonov, an officer and unit blogger in the AFU’s 41st Mechanized Infantry Brigade, said that predictions of a major Russian offensive are credible and that Russian claims of peaceful intentions should not be believed.

“Yes, it’s true. Russia is not preparing to sign a peace treaty; we see efforts to increase pressure, including on the front lines…” Sazonov said in a Monday analysis published on his personal Telegram channel.

“The question is capabilities…right now, Russia doesn’t have a couple of hundred thousand soldiers with armored vehicles in the rear who could be thrown against Ukraine at the right moment. Those who could have been thrown in have already been thrown in. Assault units are being recruited literally on the fly. Recruited, trained a little [or not], brought in, and off they go [to die],” Sazonov continued.

“It’s obvious that with the warming weather, they’ll throw everything fresh that they have in reserve… [But] we will see the same result. It’s familiar to us.

“We will see minimal advances with maximum losses. This is the way fighting them has been since 2022. And their economy is really falling apart. It’s a crisis now. And by summer, it will go downhill sharply. Like a jackhammer,” Sazonov predicted.