Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Vladimir Putin keeps ordering his commanders to finish Donetsk – and the Russian forces keep missing the deadlines.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), in its September 6 assessment, found that Russian forces advanced an average of 2.36 square kilometers per day in Donetsk Oblast during August 2026.
Across the whole theater the figure was slightly higher, at 2.91 square kilometers per day.
The thing is that nineteen percent of Donetsk, which os one of the Oblasts making up the highly contested Donbas Region, remains outside Russian control, and at the August pace, ISW wrote, Russian forces would take until October 2, 2032, to seize the remaining 19 percent of Donetsk Oblast.
That is more than a year after Russia’s next scheduled State Duma elections in September 2031.
The 2032 date directly contradicts Putin’s latest public order: capture the whole of Donetsk by December 31, 2026.
A pattern of missed deadlines
That order is not the first. ISW counted “no fewer than 15 reported deadlines” set by Putin for the seizure of Donetsk Oblast since February 2022. Russian forces have missed every one.
Part of the gap between Kremlin ambition and battlefield reality, the assessment argued, is internal. Senior Russian commanders “routinely present exaggerated Russian advances” up the chain, ISW writes, as part of a “systematic cognitive warfare effort” that projects a picture of Ukrainian collapse.
Russian military bloggers have a name for the dishonest reporting culture: “beautiful reports.”
The consequence, ISW argued, is that Putin governs on numbers that do not match the ground. His “battlefield fiction remains divorced from the reality of Ukraine’s defensive abilities, Russia’s own degraded offensive capabilities, and the difficult and expansive terrain Russian forces must still fight through,” the assessment read.
Talks in Kyiv
The ISW findings landed the same day US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, a day after seeing Putin in Moscow.
Zelensky greeted the envoys with the words, “It is very important that the delegation has arrived to see us,” Al Jazeera reported. Kushner said the Trump administration’s focus is on “how do we create the right conditions and arrangements for a long-term, durable peace.”
In parallel discussions, Zelensky pressed for security and economic guarantees for Kyiv and “supplies of urgently needed air-defense missiles” before another wartime winter, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported.
Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov called the earlier Moscow session “constructive and useful,” according to KPBS. Russia continues to demand full Ukrainian withdrawal from Donetsk as a condition for any deal. That is the same territory ISW’s calculation says Moscow’s own army cannot take this decade.
