Ukraine's commander-in-chief has warned that a turning point in the war against Russia is "still a long way off", directly contradicting the optimistic narrative being pushed by Western leaders at this week's Nato summit in Ankara. In a stark Telegram post, Oleksandr Syrskyi, who took command in February 2024, said that while his troops had slowed Russia's advance and were inflicting increasing casualties, it was critical not to "underestimate the enemy".
"The aggressor has not abandoned its plans for the complete occupation of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions," he wrote. "They are seeking to expand their offensive operations in the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions, as well as to establish and expand a buffer zone in the northern regions of Ukraine." He added that the "intensity" of Russian missile and drone strikes had also increased.
“Ukraine's commander-in-chief warns turning point in war is 'still a long way off' despite Western victory narrative.”
Syrskyi's warning comes just days after Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, declared on social media that "the tide is turning" — a phrase echoed verbatim by politicians and commentators across the transatlantic ecosystem in what analysts describe as a coordinated narrative push. The West has a history of such claims: in 2023, journalists and agenda-setters spent months hyping Ukraine's counteroffensive, which turned out to be a catastrophic failure, producing mass casualties and negligible territorial gains.
The latest supposed game-changer is Ukraine's drone-strike campaign inside Russia, reaching as far as Saint Petersburg and Moscow, targeting logistics, fuel depots and refineries. On Monday, Moscow suffered the largest drone attack so far. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has announced a 40-day operation to "influence the aggressor state in order to press for an end to the war". Over the last six months, Syrskyi said, Ukraine had hit 697 targets inside Russia. The strikes have sparked a fuel crisis across Russia and Russian-occupied territories, with long queues at petrol stations and rising prices forcing Moscow to ban diesel exports.
In response, the United States has granted Kyiv permission to produce its own Patriot air defence missiles, fulfilling a long-standing request from Zelenskyy. At the Ankara summit, Trump signed a G7 statement committing to increase air defence deliveries and strengthen sanctions on Russia's oil and gas sectors. But the pro-war push is also a response to mounting war fatigue in the West: the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary refused to finance the EU's €90bn loan to Ukraine, and a new Bulgarian government has prohibited arms supplies.
Casualty figures remain staggering. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Ukraine has suffered between 525,000 and 625,000 casualties and between 125,000 and 150,000 fatalities from February 2022 to June 2026. Russia has seen 1.4 million casualties and up to 450,000 deaths over the same period. Zelenskyy told the Nato summit that nearly 28,000 Russian soldiers were "eliminated" in June alone, the vast majority by drones. Yet Syrskyi's assessment makes clear that Ukrainian victory is not imminent. As he put it: "When Russians feel pinned against the wall, they harden."
