DEAR READER,

This weekend's election in Armenia delivered a decisive outcome. Nikol Pashinyan's pro-European Civil Contract party achieved a parliamentary majority, albeit a slim one, overcoming a pro-Russian opposition. The nation is clearly pivoting towards the West, despite the challenges ahead.

In other developments, Tabib Huseynov's Expert Opinion this week highlights the crumbling of Russia's battlefield strategy in Ukraine due to its own attrition, suggesting that a cornered Putin is more likely to escalate than retreat. Don't miss this analysis and other top stories from Albania to Latvia.

Enjoy reading this week’s “brief”!

— Giorgi Beroshvili, Editor

Since the Avdiivka offensive in late 2023, Russia’s battlefield strategy in Ukraine has relied on sustaining relentless pressure across the frontline, regardless of the human cost. The Kremlin wagered that steady and incremental territorial gains would compound over time into a broader strategic shift in a protracted war of attrition.

By 2026, however, that logic of attrition appears to be turning against Moscow. If current trends hold, this year is poised to become the deadliest since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For six consecutive months, Russian battlefield casualties have reportedly averaged above 1,000 per day, exceeding recruitment rates. The number of Russian casualties incurred per square kilometer captured has risen sharply, from an estimated 96 troops in 2025 to an average of 210 in the first four months of 2026, according to Ukrainian officials. Recent estimates suggest this ratio may have reached as high as 1,688 in May due Ukrainian tactical gains. What makes these figures staggering is that most of these losses are irreversible. Due to the saturation of the battlefield with FPV drones it is estimated that Russia now sustains nearly two fatalities for every wounded serviceman – a ratio unseen in modern warfare. With Ukraine still controlling nearly 19% (around 5,000 sq km) of Donetsk Oblast, current trends imply that Russia would need to sacrifice over a million servicemen to seize just one region it claims as its own.

Russia’s setbacks in the frontline were partly due to the loss of Starlink access in February. The disruption sharply reduced the effectiveness of its drone operations across the frontline and degraded its battlefield communications, leaving Russian troops with “radios, cables and pigeons,” as one soldier complained. Ukraine moved quickly to exploit this weakness by intensifying drone strikes against Russian logistics in the rear. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s defense minister, has described this new strategy as a “logistics lockdown,” aimed at denying Russia the capacity to sustain offensive operations. Ukraine has also expanded long-range strikes deep inside Russia, disabling nearly a quarter of its refining capacity in May and forcing Moscow to ban gasoline and jet fuel exports and introduce fuel rationing in the occupied territories.

Ukraine is thus gaining the upper hand in the drone-led warfare both on the frontline and in the intermediate-range strike campaign extending up to 200 km behind Russian lines. It is also approaching parity in long-range strikes against targets inside Russia. These trends, if sustained, will make it increasingly difficult for Moscow to sustain its war of attrition for much longer.

The most consequential implication of Russia’s deteriorating battlefield position is that the Kremlin is likely to seek to regain leverage through escalation.

In one of his early interviews, shortly after being elected, Vladimir Putin reflected on a formative lesson from his childhood. He once spotted a rat and pursued it until driving it into a corner. The trapped animal suddenly lashed around and chased him away. “There, on that stair landing, I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word cornered,” Putin recalled. Popularized after the invasion of Ukraine, the anecdote has since been widely interpreted as revealing a core logic in Putin’s approach to power politics: as long as he believes he still has cards to play, he is more likely to raise the stakes than to back down.

Now, as Russia’s conventional attrition campaign in Ukraine is running its course, Putin is more likely to resort to more destabilizing methods to restore leverage. Unable to break Ukraine’s army, Moscow has increasingly targeted the systems that sustain Ukrainian society, including electricity, water, sewage, heating, transportation, and other critical infrastructure. This pattern was evident in repeated strikes on energy infrastructure last winter, which plunged parts of the capital into blackout and forced hundreds of thousands of residents to evacuate temporarily. The massive missile and drone attacks on Kyiv in May, which killed dozens of civilians and wounded more than a hundred, are indicative of what Russia may be aiming to achieve on a continuous basis. The most immediate risk for Ukraine in 2026 is therefore not a Russian breakthrough on the front lines but an intensified campaign to terrorize civilians and cripple the life-support systems of major population centers.

Ukraine is far from being helpless in the face of such attacks, and it will respond – not by mirroring Russia’s attacks on civilians but by further expanding long-range strikes against critical industrial infrastructure in Russian cities, including targets in major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg. As Ukrainian publicist Mykhailo Dubynianskyi recently observed, the war will increasingly take on the character of a “war of the cities”, echoing the gruesome experience of the Iran-Iraq War.

Russia is mistaken if it believes that terrorizing Ukrainian cities will intimidate Ukraine into restraint and submission. On the contrary, the record of the war suggests that attacks on Ukrainian cities have strengthened rather than weakened Ukrainian resolve while exposing Russia’s own urban centers and economic assets to growing vulnerability. In this regard, it is worth recalling that the moral of Putin’s “cornered rat” parable is not that the trapped animal lashed out, but that Putin retreated when confronted by a determined adversary.

— Tabib Huseynov, policy analyst and researcher based in Baku

Hungarian Institute of International Affairs (HIIA) — Future Leaders Program 2026 — A three-month fellowship for young professionals and recent graduates interested in international affairs, geopolitics, diplomacy, and public policy. Participants join HIIA’s research community in Budapest, working alongside policy experts on independent and collaborative research projects while contributing to strategic analyses and attending professional seminars. Research areas include the Western Balkans, Eastern Europe, transatlantic relations, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, security policy, the European Union, energy, multipolarity, connectivity, and cultural diplomacy. Fellows receive mentorship, leadership and public speaking training, media skills development, and access to high-level policy discussions and professional networks. Open to applicants under 30 with backgrounds in international relations, political science, diplomacy, history, philosophy, or related fields. International applicants are encouraged to apply, with travel support, accommodation assistance, and visa support available. Programme runs from 1 September to 30 November 2026 in Budapest. Application deadline: 30 June 2026.