It is the defining paradox of the fifth year of Russia's full-scale war. Moscow has massed close to 700,000 personnel in and around Ukraine, according to Ukrainian estimates — more than triple the force it invaded with in February 2022. Yet the front line barely moves. Russian assault groups crawl forward metres at a time, take appalling losses, and are regularly thrown back, as Ukraine's recent gains near Lyman showed. Russia cannot win the war it started. But that does not mean the danger to the rest of Europe has passed. In some ways, the stalemate has made Moscow more dangerous, not less.
The drone kill zone froze the war
In 2022 Russia tried to win with columns of armour. Tank convoys rolling toward Kyiv and other cities were shredded by artillery, anti-tank teams and air strikes — the blitz failed within weeks. What replaced it is a war neither Soviet nor NATO doctrine prepared for. Small infiltration groups probe forward while fleets of first-person-view drones hunt everything that moves: infantry, vehicles, supply trucks, evacuation teams. Frontline analysts describe a kill zone tens of kilometres deep in which massing troops or armour is close to suicidal. Tanks, the symbol of Russian ground power, have largely vanished from summer offensives. Russia's great advantage — manpower and materiel — is being ground down against an enemy it can see but cannot reach, because every attempt to concentrate force is detected and destroyed before it can break through.
Ten years of concrete: the iron belt
Ukraine has also had something no other country on Russia's border possesses: time. Since 2014, through successive governments, Ukraine has built layered fortifications across the Donbas — trench systems, concrete strongpoints, minefields and pre-sighted artillery zones that analysts call the most formidable defensive belt in Europe. It is no accident that Moscow keeps demanding at the negotiating table what it cannot take on the battlefield: Ukrainian withdrawal from these fortified positions. Surrendering the iron belt would hand Russia the one thing four years of assaults could not buy. Kyiv has refused, and every month the defences hold, the price of a frontal breakthrough rises.
Why NATO faces a different kind of threat
None of this means the alliance can relax. Russia does not need to defeat NATO militarily to damage it — it only needs to break the political spell that holds the alliance together. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is widely misunderstood: it commits each ally to take "such action as it deems necessary," but it does not automatically oblige any member to send troops to fight. That ambiguity is the crack Moscow's strategists study. A limited land grab — a border town like Narva in Estonia, with its large Russian-speaking population, seized quickly and with minimal fighting — would force every NATO capital into an agonising choice: risk soldiers' lives for a patch of borderland, or let it go and watch the alliance's founding promise die on live television. Russian propaganda is already laying the groundwork, framing Ukrainian drone strikes such as the one that set the Ust-Luga oil terminal ablaze as evidence of a wider Western campaign against Russia. Meanwhile Moscow has reconstituted the Leningrad Military District and expanded military infrastructure along the Finnish and Baltic borders, while Western intelligence services openly warn of escalation — drone incursions, strikes on military sites, or a limited ground operation. And Europe's own divisions are the Kremlin's greatest asset: Russian fossil fuels and metals still flow west, and there are open disputes, including US pressure on Kyiv over its strikes on Russian refineries, about how far support for Ukraine should go.
Conclusion
Ukraine is holding because it built defences, mastered the drone war and refused to trade land for promises. But deterrence in Europe was never just about weapons — it is about political will. That is the one front where Russia, stuck in the Donbas mud, may still believe it can win. NATO's task is to prove it wrong before Moscow tests the theory.
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