Russian monthly territorial gains slip into negative for first time since 2023, DeepState reports

Ukraine has gained more territory than Russia occupied over the same period in May, pushing overall Russian advances into the negative for the first time since 2023, Ukrainian monitoring group DeepState reported on June 1.

This is despite the group's public map showing a Russian advance of 14 square kilometers (5.4 square miles) in May, due to the delay in publicly acknowledging advances by the Ukrainian military amid security concerns, according to DeepState.

"According to our map, in May the enemy occupied only 14 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory," DeepState posted on Telegram, adding that "for security reasons, we show the advance of the Defense Forces of Ukraine with a delay."

Due to this lag in updating their map, DeepState claimed that "this is the first month in recent years after the 'Counteroffensive 2023' when the increase in the occupied territory for the Russians became negative."

"Russia typically advances faster in the late spring-fall, but we aren't seeing an increase in the rate of advance," Rob Lee, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an expert on the Russian military, told the Kyiv Independent.

"It is important because the seasons have already changed and Russian advances have not increased."

DeepState said in the same Telegram post that the reverses Russia suffered came despite a significant increase in Russian assault actions, which jumped up by 37.5% in May.

Considering the majority of Russian assault troopers are killed or severely wounded during assaults, Russian casualties likely increased as well.

The first non-government report on the Russian advances underperforming Ukraine's battlefield gains in a month since 2023 comes as Kyiv slowly begins to create conditions to turn the tide in its favor, launching counterattacks over the past half a year and honing its deep-strike capabilities inside Russia.

Tracking battlefield gains, however, has become an immense challenge for both government and independent observers, with estimates of liberated and occupied territory varying across sources.

DeepState's report clashes with earlier claims made by Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, who claimed that Ukraine liberated more territories in February than Russia had occupied over the same period.

Syrskyi's claim came as Ukraine launched a surprise counterattack on the border of Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts in the southeast at the end of January. Ukrainian units fighting there told the Kyiv Independent that they were able to advance further in the first weeks in the high-stakes operation that caught the Russian military off guard, but making progress in later months has become much more difficult since Russia reinforced the area with more effective drone units.

With the "gray zone" — the contested forefront part of the battlefield that neither side controls — constantly expanding and shrinking, tracking advances and territorial losses has become more difficult than ever in the current drone-dominated phase of the war. Infiltrations from both sides are constant, obscuring front line boundaries.

Russia hasn't been able to gain "any real momentum" in its spring offensive and has failed to capture similar amounts of territory in recent months to what it occupied over the same period in previous years, retired Australian Army Major-General Mick Ryan said.

But he stressed that the second half of the year, particularly the fall months, would show how much Ukraine has improved its military effectiveness in 2026, as that period tends to see the fiercest fighting.

"I would say that there's a glimmer that a turning point might be coming because the most deadly parts of the year in the ground war are generally in the second half of the year, not in the first half," Ryan told the Kyiv Independent last month.

Russia's reverses in May come as Ukraine has launched a concerted effort to cut Russian supply lines. Ukraine's "Logistical Lockdown" campaign has seen hundreds of Russian supply trucks targeted and destroyed by units using Kyiv's growing arsenal of medium-range drones.

"Dynamics show that Ukraine has significantly slowed the enemy's advance and is gradually regaining the initiative," Ukraine's Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told journalists at a May closed-door briefing. ​​

"At the same time, we are increasing active operations and liberating territory."