Underpinning even the most modest advance by Russian forces in Ukraine is an implied willingness to sacrifice thousands of combatants to make gains as small as a single square kilometer, Puusepp noted.

 A big part of the picture is the fact that Ukrainian forces have become more effective at halting Russian advances, too.

"If we compare this with the same period a year ago, when the Russians managed to capture about 460 square kilometers last August and lost about 30,000 men in the process, then this August, according to Ukrainian statistics, the Russians have lost 42,000 men in taking significantly less territory. This shows that the Ukrainians' ability to repel and annihilate them effectively has been boosted over the past year, and at the same time the Russians have failed to come up with any effective method for accelerating their advance," Puusepp told "Ukraina stuudio."

When more than 40,000 men are lost in a month while the replenishment rate to the battlefield is around 30,000 over the same period, this represents a fairly substantial deficit and is one of the reasons why the advances have slowed, he went on.

"In fact, we cannot say there has been any successful offensive as such this summer, which had generally been expected, with the Russians anticipated to launch some kind of larger offensive. Instead, it has all been more like local skirmishes, and they have not been able to achieve any significant operational success," Puusepp said.

Another round of conscription or general mobilization, whose likelihood has been dismissed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin, may according to the Ukrainian shave to wait until after the Russian Duma elections later this month. While not a popular vote winner, such a move could translate to around half a million more personnel for Russia's forces. At the same time, it can be scraping the barrel more in terms of willingness to fight or to serve in the military whatsoever, making them something of a band‑aid solution at best.

Puusepp said conscripts can be provided "with minimal personal equipment and weapons. But whether they can effectively form them into specific units is somewhat doubtful. Presumably, they will simply be used to plug gaps wherever things are falling apart the most."

These kinds of personnel tend to be fed into a meat grinder anyway. "As can be observed from the publicly available information, recruits are not trained for very long. In the more extreme cases, they basically go from the recruitment center to the front in a couple of days without any training whatsoever, and that's that," Puusepp added.

Of the overall situation on the front, this remains stable, with only minor movements back and forth, Puusepp said.

"The war is now in its 236th week, and the Ukrainians are holding on. The level of activity is basically the same as last week, at around 265 combat engagements per day. The hotspots also remain the same: Kostiantynivka, Pokrovsk and Lyman in Donetsk oblast, and Huliaipole in Zaporizhzhia oblast. As for Putin's bragging, we have to understand that this is primarily aimed at a domestic audience, to show that all those thousands who have been killed did not die for nothing; that some kind of success has been achieved," he concluded.

Russia has launched summer offensives in some years, while Ukraine has mounted counter‑offensives at different points in the calendar too, including in the autumn of 2022. The "Rasputitsa" mud in spring and autumn often slows large‑scale operations, but both sides have sometimes continued making gains even in those conditions.

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