Ukraine Project

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stated on June 10 that the United States intends to reduce its budget for the purchase of weapons for Ukraine in 2026.

Ukrainian officials warned that the People's Republic of China (PRC) is increasingly enabling Russia to improve and grow its drone production. Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service (SZRU) Spokesperson Oleh Aleksandrov told Politico in an interview published on June 5 that Chinese manufacturers are providing Russian developers with hardware, electronics, navigation, optical, and telemetry systems, engines, microcircuits, processor modules, antenna field systems, and control boards.

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be switching between rhetoric focused on Russian ethnic nationalism and Russian multinationalism, but remains committed to promoting anti-Western sentiment and the militarization of Russia's youth. Putin held a meeting with the Security Council on June 10 that largely focused on the unification of the peoples of Russia and the use of military-patriotic youth programs and Russian government initiatives to promote Russian patriotism.

Russian forces recently advanced to the Dnipropetrovsk-Donetsk administrative border as Kremlin officials continued to demonstrate that Russia has wider territorial ambitions in Ukraine beyond Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts and Crimea.

Kremlin-appointed Russian Commissioner on Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova tacitly acknowledged that Russia has illegally deported Ukrainian children. Lvova-Belova claimed on June 4 that Russian Presidential Aide Vladimir Medinsky gave her “the list” and that her office has “started working on it,” in reference to the list of hundreds of kidnapped Ukrainian children which Ukrainian officials handed over to Russian officials during negotiations in Istanbul on June 2.

The Sino-Russian relationship is closer and more interconnected in 2025 than it has ever been. The cooperation between Beijing and Moscow is a nexus—their relationship is a flexible and strategic knot of interconnections across the military, technological, economic, and political domains, and is not bounded by the structural rigidity of a formal defensive alliance. This Sino-Russian nexus has solidified against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. Moscow and Beijing have both exploited the circumstances of the war to deepen their strategic entanglement, and it has therefore become strategically impossible to separate them at this time.

Kremlin officials and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced on June 8 that Russian forces reached the Donetsk-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border and are conducting offensive operations into Dnipropetrovsk Oblast — an oblast that Russia has not illegally declared as annexed.

Russia baselessly accused Ukraine of failing to conduct a prisoner of war (POW) exchange and to repatriate the bodies of killed in action (KIA) soldiers on June 6 — part of Kremlin efforts to undermine mutually agreed upon confidence building measures with Ukraine. Russian Presidential Aide Vladimir Medinsky, Russian First Deputy Chief of Information of the General Staff's Main Directorate (GRU) Alexander Zorin, and Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin claimed on June 7 that Russia was prepared to exchange severely wounded and sick POWs, POWs under the age of 25, and 6,000 bodies of KIA soldiers on June 6 as Russia and Ukraine agreed to during the most recent bilateral talks in Istanbul on June 2.

A senior Ukrainian official reported that the Russian military intends to seize half of Ukraine by the end of 2026. Russian forces are highly unlikely to be able to make such large advances in such a narrow time frame, given Russia’s current offensive capabilities and assuming that the flow of Western aid to Ukraine continues.

Russian forces are reportedly sustaining an average of 1,140 casualties per day and suffering disproportionately high personnel casualties for marginal, grinding territorial gains. Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (MoD) news agency ArmyInform reported on June 5 that an unnamed NATO official stated that Russian forces are sustaining an average casualty rate of 1,140 personnel per day, of whom nearly 975 are killed in action (KIA) – a much higher number of killed than the standard one-to-three KIA-to-wounded-in-action (WIA) ratio.