• Two graphs show that Ukrainians are currently attacking at least as much as Russians. They are also advancing just as often.
• The map, meanwhile, illustrates the territory Russians have captured in Donbas this year. It is smaller than in previous years.
• New tanks and other equipment have begun appearing in Russian storage facilities. Russia is preserving them, possibly for another war.
• Videos of the day: a Russian quad bike accident at the front; a Russian worker climbing an anti-drone net; Ukrainian children playing with a Russian drone.

Part of the population still believes that Russia is winning the war. It does not matter that it has failed to subjugate Kyiv for more than four and a half years, or to capture Donbas even after 12 years. It still has 20 percent of Donetsk oblast left to occupy — not 10 percent, as Russian president Vladimir Putin claims.

Of course, victory in war can be measured in different ways, and the movement of the front is not always decisive. But when it comes to activity at the front itself, the battlefield is essentially frozen. And Russian momentum is far weaker than it was at this time a year ago.

In today’s Ukraine Battlefield update, we present two graphs and one map showing that Russia is not currently winning the war on the battlefield.

The first graph suggests that Ukrainians are now launching attacks more frequently than Russians. It was published by the Ukrainian account Oko Hora.

It calculated the ratio of attacks on the basis of data from the Ukrainian general staff. The staff reports the number of engagements and the number of Russian attacks, meaning that the difference between them indicates Ukrainian attacks.

This methodology may not be precise, but other battlefield reports also suggest far greater Ukrainian activity than a few months ago or last year.

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This year, in France, a small book was published with major implications for the future of Europe: Notre déni de guerre [Our Denial of War] written by a military historian, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau.

Audoin-Rouzeau specialises in a subject that was long regarded a niche field: the First World War.

He delves into facts, developments, and societal, political and social undercurrents that are long past and therefore seem of little concern to most people.

But according to him, these matters are more relevant to modern Europeans than ever before. The more time passes, the more parallels he sees between the period around the First World War and the times we now live in.

With one very significant parallel: the denial that war is drawing nearer.

His argument is that Europeans have enjoyed peace for so long that they no longer know what war is. They don’t recognise it, cannot see it coming and therefore don’t know how to avert it.

Many have come to believe that if they don’t attack anyone or declare war on anyone, no one will attack them in return – the typical logic of people who have only known peacetime.

Europe’s problem, in his view, is that not everyone in the world lives in peacetime, and that others therefore operate according to a different logic – the logic of wartime.

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