Mapping Russian assaults and territorial features throughout Ukraine | Russia-Ukraine warfare News | USAEMALL.com

In the early hours of February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared on Russian state television to announce a “special military operation” against Ukraine.

A full-scale invasion of Ukraine came days after the Russian president recognised the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states.

“I deem it necessary to make a decision that should have been made a long time ago – to immediately recognise the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic,” Putin said on February 21, 2022.

An operation that was only supposed to last a few months is now entering its fifth year.

On the fourth anniversary of Europe’s largest war since 1945, Al Jazeera maps the ground lost and reclaimed, the drone revolution shaping the conflict and the debilitating attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure by Russian forces.

Russia controls 20 percent of Ukraine

Russia launched its military operation along multiple axes, from the north towards the capital, Kyiv, from the east across the eastern Donbas region, and from the south out of Crimea Peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014. At its furthest advance in March 2022, Moscow’s forces occupied roughly 27 percent of Ukrainian territory. That early momentum, however, proved unsustainable.

In the second half of 2022, Ukraine mounted sweeping counteroffensives that unravelled Russian positions in Kharkiv oblast and forced a withdrawal from Kherson city. By late November, the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington, DC, estimated Ukraine had reclaimed approximately 74,000sq km (28,600sq miles), reducing Russian control to about 19 percent of the country.

From 2023, the conflict became one of attrition centred on the mineral-rich Donbas region. Russian forces took Soledar and Bakhmut after months of brutal combat, and, in 2024, Avdiivka – gains that were secured at extraordinary human and material cost. That same year, Ukraine mounted a surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, underscoring that the front line into Russia’s west was not impenetrable.

By 2025, despite heavy reported losses, Russia had only gained a further 0.8 percent of Ukraine’s territory, according to Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii. These advances mainly occurred in Donetsk, particularly in the town of Pokrovsk, which saw only 70 metres (77 yards) of Russian advances a day in 2025, according to the Reuters news agency. Pokrovsk was finally captured by Russia in early December.

According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), an independent conflict monitor, the capture of Pokrovsk paved the way for operations in Dnipropetrovsk, resulting in a tripling of violence in the region compared with the year before.

Moscow’s forces concentrated fighting around the logistical hub of Kostiantynivka, which they entered in December, in a bid to gain control of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk – the last major cities under Ukrainian control in Donetsk. In December, the ISW estimated Russian advances had claimed no more than 5 percent of Kostiantynivka.

In the north, Ukraine managed to hold off Russia’s yearlong campaign for Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region with a surprise counteroffensive in December.

The map below shows four years of territorial changes on the ground, highlighting Russia’s gains and Ukraine’s efforts to regain territory.

Air and drone attacks have increased threefold

Russia has accelerated its drone production and has integrated drones more systematically into its campaign against Ukraine. According to ACLED, in 2025, drone-led targeting of civilians became the leading form of attack, dwarfing other media.

Shelling, artillery and missile attacks initially dominated the conflict, with more than 101,200 events recorded since the war began. While these types of events have decreased as the war has gone on, there has been a rise in air/drone attacks and armed clashes.

Air and drone attacks rose from 6,000 in 2023 to almost 16,000 in 2024 and more than 29,000 in 2025. The jump reflects Russia’s expanding drone programme.

Russia is mainly using Shahed-type drones in their attacks. At the start of the war, these low-cost weapons were primarily supplied by Iran. Now, similar drones are produced in Russia, costing between $20,000-50,000 in production. For example, Geran-2, which are Russian analogues of the Iranian missiles, can reach a range up to 2,000km (1,243 miles) depending on the type. According to the ISW, Russia is producing these drones in Tatarstan, a republic about 800km (500 miles) east of Moscow.

In January, Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskii, said: “At the moment, the enemy produces daily 404 ‘Shaheds’ (Iranian-designed drones) of different kinds. And the plans are to increase that. The enemy plans to boost production significantly, up to 1,000 drones a day.”

Ukraine has employed several tactics and weapons to take down or disable drones, including modern air defence systems, mobile fire teams and electronic warfare.

However, Russia escalated its use of coordinated mass strikes with waves of drone attacks, missiles and decoys used to overwhelm air defences in Ukraine.

Particularly devastating drone attacks on civilians have landed in densely populated cities, including Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa.

More than 1,900 attacks on energy infrastructure

Last month, 16-year-old Taira Sluisarenko’s apartment building in eastern Kyiv was hit by a Russian drone, blowing out windows and buckling walls in the apartments above hers.

“I was sitting on the toilet floor and right away felt [the explosion] shake us more than usual,” she told Al Jazeera.

A second drone struck the same location and killed Serhiy Smolyak, a 56-year-old emergency medic, and wounded his colleagues. Russia deployed 278 missiles and drones that night, which killed four and injured dozens.

Days later, with temperatures plunging to -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit), President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared a nationwide state of emergency for the energy sector, stating that Ukraine’s energy system was meeting only 60 percent of the country’s electricity needs.

Across Ukraine, similar strikes have played out with grim regularity since 2022, falling hardest in winter, when they strip millions of heat, water and power as temperatures plunge double-digits below freezing.

According to data from ACLED, since the conflict began, Russia has carried out more than 1,900 attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which, before the war, was one of Europe’s most robust. The majority of attacks have occurred along the front line.

On January 16, Defence Minister Denys Shmyhal said: “There is not a single power plant left in Ukraine that the enemy has not attacked.”

Depending on the facility and scale of damage, the time it takes to repair Ukraine’s energy infrastructure ranges from hours or weeks to months or years.

In September last year, Russia launched yet another campaign of targeted attacks against energy infrastructure in Ukraine in the lead-up to the coldest months. October saw the highest number of attacks with 175 strikes, followed by January with 138 attacks.

Across the country, generation plants and distribution networks have buckled under the recent assaults, and rolling blackouts have returned.

The failure of peace talks

In the past four years, there have been more than a dozen rounds of peace talks and summits, other than sporadic direct negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv.

The most intensive period of negotiations came in the first two months of the war, with five rounds of talks held in Belarus and Turkiye between late February and late March 2022. The most significant were held on March 29, 2022, in Istanbul, where Ukraine presented a detailed 10-point proposal, including neutrality. The talks collapsed in April following the discovery of mass civilian killings in Bucha, 25km (16 miles) west of Kyiv.

From mid-2022 until early 2025, diplomatic efforts were dominated by multilateral summits, which excluded Russia. Without Moscow’s participation, none of these summits yielded breakthroughs.

Direct negotiations resumed in May 2025, when Turkiye successfully brought both sides to Istanbul for two rounds of talks, which resulted in a prisoner exchange.

The most recent developments have been the Trump administration’s engagement starting in late January 2026, with envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner facilitating trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi and Geneva. They are the first sustained direct negotiations since Turkiye’s first efforts in 2022. As of yet, there have no breakthroughs on a peace agreement.

Talks so far have not yielded results, as Russia has demanded it wants control of all of the Donbas region and the denial of NATO membership to Ukraine. But Ukraine has ruled out ceding control of its territory. Kyiv also wants security guarantees as part of any deal.