What Is Actually Happening in Ukraine? The August 2026 Update

Russia's Summer Offensive Is Moving, but Slowly and at a High Cost.

Russia’s main goal is still to capture all of Donetsk and Luhansk while pushing further into eastern Ukraine.

Russia is still advancing in parts of Ukraine, but the speed and scale of those advances matter. Capturing individual villages or small stretches of territory represents a tactical success, but a true breakthrough would require Russian forces to penetrate Ukraine's defensive system and exploit that opening with larger formations. So far, Russia has struggled to consistently achieve this. Instead, Russian troops have often been drawn into repeated attacks against successive Ukrainian positions, producing incremental gains at significant cost. The question is therefore not simply “How much territory did Russia capture?” but “What did Russia have to spend to capture it, and did those gains actually weaken Ukraine's wider defence?”

Russia has been fighting for years to capture the rest of the Donbas, yet its own military leadership reportedly believes even another seven months may not be enough to achieve the objective.

These small advances have also come at a huge cost in Russian personnel. On August 1, reported cumulative Russian personnel losses stood at 1,447,620. By August 31, that figure had risen to 1,488,200, a difference of 40,580 personnel.

ISW calculated approximately 1,074 Russian casualties per square kilometre seized during the first 22 days of August.

Ukraine is turning the Russian Rear into a Battleground.

Ukraine is increasingly taking the fight far beyond the front line. Rather than focusing only on Russian troops and equipment directly involved in frontline combat, Ukrainian forces are targeting the infrastructure that allows Russia to sustain its war: oil refineries , fuel facilities, airfields , aircraft, air defence systems, ammunition factories, logistics hubs and other military infrastructure.

As Russia dealt with instability at home, Ukraine demonstrated that distance alone could no longer protect Russian military and industrial infrastructure.

Some Ukrainian strikes in August reached targets nearly 2,000 kilometres away - about the same distance as from Regina to Vancouver.

The effects of the war are also becoming increasingly visible inside Russia itself, reaching beyond the front line and affecting civilians and military personnel alike.

Russia Is Running Into a Manpower Problem.

The country is also facing the increasingly difficult task of replacing the personnel it is losing. Ukraine's General Staff estimated that Russia suffered roughly 40,000 personnel losses during August, bringing its reported cumulative personnel losses since the full-scale invasion to approximately 1.49 million. Ukraine's figures refer to personnel “combat losses” and should not be interpreted as a confirmed death toll.

Russia is instead relying heavily on financial incentives and regional recruitment campaigns - such as the $50,000 signing bonus for foreign recruits.

If recruitment continues to fall behind losses, Moscow could eventually face a choices between reducing the pace of its operations, increasing recruitment incentives, accepting higher casualties, or taking more politically difficult measures to generate manpower.

Russia has also sought recruits from groups including police officers, former military personnel, prisoners and foreign volunteers to compensate for battlefield losses.

Russia is continuing to gain territory while simultaneously weakening the force that is capturing it.

Imagine a hockey team constantly losing players and replacing them with people who have barely practiced together. The roster may remain full, but the team's effectiveness can still decline. Russia faces a similar challenge: recruiting enough people to replace casualties is one problem; replacing the experience, training and cohesion of those lost is another.

According to Ukrainian intelligence , Russia's traditional recruitment pools such as debtors, convicted criminals, migrants and other groups, had declined by 30–40% compared with 2025 in some Russian regions.

To compensate for declining recruitment, Russia has also recruited more than 8,500 troops from North Korea and increased incentives for foreigners to join its war effort.

Russia's problem is not only replacing the personnel it loses; it is also finding the money to sustain the war.

Russia's War Financing Model is Visibly Breaking Down

In July, Russia's Finance Ministry canceled government bond auctions indefinitely, saying it was not prepared to place debt at prevailing market rates. By August, the ministry had borrowed only about 8.8 billion rubles against a third-quarter target of 1.5 trillion, and the central bank acknowledged the 2026 budget deficit would run roughly double the original plan, at up to ₽8 trillion ($99.9 billion), compared with the original target of ₽3.8 trillion.

Even if Russia were able to solve its recruitment problems, financing the war on its current scale could become increasingly difficult. Weak demand for government bonds could leave Moscow increasingly dependent on state controlled banks to absorb its debt, potentially shifting more of the financial burden onto the domestic banking system.

North Korea Is Becoming More Than an Ammunition Supplier

North Korea has supported Russia's war effort since 2024, when it began sending troops to Russia. North Korean troops were operating inside Russia. North Korean ballistic missiles were being used in Russia's strikes against Ukraine, and North Korean personnel were reportedly gaining experience with modern drone warfare.

The cooperation increasingly appeared to be evolving from a transactional supply relationship into a broader military partnership in which North Korea was supplying personnel and weapons while gaining battlefield experience and technical lessons from Russia's war. Ukrainian intelligence reported that approximately 8,500 additional North Korean troops were deployed to Russia, primarily in Kursk Oblast, including around 400 drone operators. The figure has been reported by multiple outlets and was assessed by South Korea's East Asia Institute as more credible than separate claims that Russia could receive an additional 30,000–50,000 North Korean troops. Such a deployment would provide additional relief to Russia as it faces heavy personnel losses and recruitment pressures.

Russia receives ammunition, missiles and additional manpower; North Korea receives money, technology, military cooperation and something it cannot easily obtain at home: real world experience from a major modern war.

The personnel are only one part of the relationship. North Korea has also become a major source of ammunition and missiles for the Russian military, helping Moscow maintain the intensity of its war despite its own growing production and manpower challenges.

Ukraine Is Running Short of Ways to Stop Russia's Missiles

Ukraine is facing another serious problem: there are simply not enough air-defence interceptors to stop every Russian missile. This became increasingly clear in August, as Russia continued launching large numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles while Ukraine's supply of Patriot interceptors remained critically limited.

In one major attack on August 1, Russia launched 27 ballistic missiles. Ukraine said it intercepted only one, attributing the low interception rate in part to a shortage of Patriot interceptors. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials said the country was receiving only a fraction of the air defence missiles it had received the previous year.

Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute estimated that the United States, Germany and Japan together can produce roughly 840 Patriot interceptors per year, while Russia is producing approximately 750 Iskander missiles annually and is looking to increase production. Russia has the ability to produce ballistic missiles at a scale that places enormous pressure on the limited global production capacity of the most effective interceptors.

This creates a difficult equation: Russia can continue producing missiles designed to overwhelm Ukrainian air defences, while Ukraine and its allies have a limited supply of the missiles needed to stop them. The same Patriot systems are used by the United States and several NATO countries, meaning every interceptor sent to Ukraine also reduces the pool available to replenish other countries' stockpiles. The war in Ukraine has therefore exposed a much larger weakness in Western defence planning: NATO countries have spent decades preparing to fight wars, but not necessarily wars where thousands of missiles and drones could be fired over months or years.

If a major conflict required Canada to defend itself or support NATO allies against large-scale missile attacks, Canada could be dependent on a limited pool of allied interceptors and defence systems that are already under enormous demand.

The War Is No Longer Confined to Ukraine

Russian drones and missiles are increasingly operating near NATO territory, and incidents involving NATO airspace are becoming harder to treat as isolated events.

Throughout August, Russian drones repeatedly came close to or entered the airspace of NATO members and neighbouring countries. On August 20 , Russian drones were reported to have crossed into Romanian airspace, while another Russian drone entered Moldovan airspace. A Russian naval drone was also reported near a Romanian gas platform in the Black Sea. These incidents did not result in a direct attack on NATO, but they demonstrate how easily the geography of the war can extend beyond Ukraine's borders.

The danger is not necessarily that Russia will suddenly decide to launch a conventional invasion of NATO. The more immediate concern is the growing number of opportunities for something to go wrong.

A drone can cross a border because of navigation errors, electronic interference, damage to its guidance system or deliberate action. A missile can miss its intended target. Air defence systems can misidentify an object. A Russian strike against infrastructure close to NATO territory could create an incident even if NATO was not the intended target.

NATO has to continue supplying Ukraine while ensuring its own members retain enough ammunition, air defence interceptors, weapons and trained personnel to respond to a crisis or an escalation involving Russia.

In late August, the CIA director flew to Moscow without announcing the trip in advance. The last time this happened was in late 2021, when the CIA director travelled to Moscow to warn Vladimir Putin that the United States knew Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine and urged him to reconsider. The visit was significant enough to attract attention, but at this point, any conclusions about its purpose beyond the reported details remain speculative.

NATO and the European Union are struggling to find a way to respond to Russian tactics without crossing the threshold into a full-blown war.