“Ukraine’s Quiet Push — The Success Ukraine Doesn’t Want to Talk About,” a DW News video report featuring an extended on-the-record interview with DW’s longtime Kyiv correspondent Nick Connolly, provides an assessment of several underreported Ukrainian operational successes in early 2025. Ukrainian forces have conducted an escalating campaign of long-range drone strikes against Russian oil refineries and Baltic port infrastructure, deploying larger warheads that have amplified economic disruption and complicated Russia’s ability to monetize elevated global oil prices—though Ukrainian commanders now face Western political pressure to curtail those attacks.
Ukrainian forces have also “quietly” recaptured hundreds of square kilometers in the Zaporizhzhia sector, surpassing the territorial gains of the much-publicized 2023 counteroffensive, but have deliberately suppressed public messaging about these advances to avoid the credibility damage from overpromising two years prior. SpaceX’s February 2025 decision to terminate unauthorized Russian access to Starlink degraded Russian drone operations and command-and-control links, opening tactical windows that Ukrainian units exploited along the southern front before Russia began fielding improvised antenna alternatives. Russia’s spring offensive has produced negligible territorial returns at extraordinary human cost, with combined killed and wounded estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and Connolly assesses that, absent a collapse in Western financial support, a withdrawal of intelligence sharing, or an unexpected internal rupture within Russia itself, no near-term end to the conflict is plausible.
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