Former Chinese diplomat in Kyiv on Russia–Ukraine battle trajectories
Ding Jianwei, who served in Kyiv during Russia’s 2022 attack, reviews how the war has evolved and why he expects a long war of attrition.
When Russian troops crossed into Ukraine in February 2022, Ding Jianwei was serving as a diplomat at China’s embassy in Kyiv. We have published his rare, first-hand account of those days on Pekingnology, our sister newsletter.
Four years later, the retired Chinese diplomat argues that the conflict is unlikely to end soon and will probably remain a prolonged war of attrition along largely fixed front lines. Its outcome, he says, will depend on which side can better develop counter-drone and long-range air-defence systems, hold its current lines, and secure a favourable security-guarantee framework.
Ding Jianwei served in Chinese missions in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Ukraine between 2005 and 2023, according to his own account. He was working in the Chinese embassy in Kyiv on 24 Feb, 2022, as Russia’s attack began.
Ding is now retired from diplomatic service. Publicly available records as recently as December 2025 identified him as a researcher at the Eurasian Social Development Institute under the Development Research Centre of China’s State Council.
Ding studied Russian literature at the PLA Nanjing Institute of Foreign Languages, now the College of International Studies at the National University of Defense Technology, before completing two years of military service in 1987. He also appears to hold a doctorate in law.
The following essay was published on the WeChat blog 永久的心路 on 7 May 2026.
—Yuxuan Jia
俄乌冲突四年复盘:战场格局演变及未来发展前瞻
The Russia–Ukraine Conflict Four Years On: Battlefield Evolution and Future Trajectories
More than four years have passed since Russia launched its special military operation in February 2022. This largest land conflict in Europe since the Second World War has completely overturned traditional modes of land warfare. It has displayed multiple features: the frustration of large-army blitzkrieg, the impairment of maritime dominance, the normalisation of precision strikes on bridges and interdiction operations, the rapid entrenchment of front lines, prolonged positional tug-of-war, the centrality of drones to battlefield operations, and the routine use of long-range strikes against targets in depth. The form of war and the structure of geopolitical contestation have been comprehensively reshaped.
At the beginning of the conflict, Russia sought a rapid victory through a combined airborne assault plus ground blitzkrieg. On the first day of the war, they sent elite airborne troops to rush Hostomel Airport near Kyiv, attempting to establish a strategic bridgehead that could support a direct advance on the Ukrainian capital. However, Ukrainian regular forces, National Guard units, and local militias coordinated their resistance. Relying on airport buildings and wooded field fortifications, they held out tenaciously and encircled the isolated Russian airborne troops. Russia’s plan for a quick victory in Kyiv collapsed almost as soon as it began.
In the first phase of the war, Russian forces used cruise missiles and tactical missiles to suppress Ukrainian airfields, ammunition depots, and command hubs in advance, while committing tank and mechanised groupings to multi-directional deep penetrations towards Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv. Because Russia gravely underestimated the Ukrainian people’s will for resistance, the rapid collapse it had anticipated did not materialise. Ukrainian forces relied on rivers, lakes, forests, villages, and towns to build layered defensive lines, and made precision bridge demolition and road destruction core means of obstruction. They blew up trunk-road bridges and key railway bridges, cutting off Russian armoured manoeuvre and logistical supply routes. Civilian territorial defence battalions cooperated in ambushes, interdiction operations, and urban combat, forming a three-dimensional pattern of regular defence plus nationwide resistance, which effectively slowed the tempo of Russia’s advance.
The naval theatre also saw a disruptive reversal. In April 2022, the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s flagship, the cruiser Moskva, was sunk by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles, marking Russia’s largest naval combat loss since the war began. This engagement dealt a severe blow to the Black Sea Fleet’s air-defence system, forcing Russia’s main warships away from the northwestern Black Sea. Its capabilities for near-sea blockade and fire support against shore targets declined sharply. Over the past four years, Ukrainian forces have continuously harassed Russian forces with drones, uncrewed surface vessels, and cruise missiles. Multiple Black Sea Fleet warships have been damaged, their overall combat power has been seriously degraded, and the strategic landscape in the Black Sea has been thoroughly rewritten.
Among these cases, the repeated attacks on the Crimean Bridge became emblematic. As Russia’s only land lifeline connecting it to Crimea, the bridge was attacked three times, in October 2022, July 2023, and 2025, by explosions, uncrewed surface vessels, and underwater demolition. Its road deck was damaged, rail transport was interrupted, and traffic capacity was sharply reduced. These attacks directly severed a key Russian supply line on the southern front, dealt a major blow to Russia’s sense of strategic security in the rear, and became a classic example of Ukraine using asymmetric means to constrain the battlefield.
On land, Russia’s northern offensive stalled after its advance was blocked and roads and bridges were destroyed. Its only major highlight was the capture of Kherson in March 2022. Ukraine, relying on Western air-defence equipment and intelligence support, wove a low-altitude air-defence fire network, repeatedly intercepting Russian missile attacks and inflicting heavy losses on Russian Aerospace Forces aircraft and helicopters, thereby depriving them of close air support capabilities. Just over a month after the outbreak of war, Russian forces, facing overstretched lines, repeated disruption of supplies caused by bridge demolitions, and persistently high casualties, were forced to withdraw across the board from northern and northeastern Ukraine and concentrate their forces in Donbas. Ukrainian troops relied on fortified defensive lines to resist step by step and continued destroying key transport bridges, restricting Russian mobility and redeployment. Russian forces could only slowly nibble forward village by village and trench by trench, never managing to open a strategic breakthrough.
In the summer and autumn of 2022, Ukraine seized the opportunity created by the dispersion of Russian forces and launched counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson, retaking key towns such as Izium and Kupiansk, as well as the urban area of Kherson. Russian forces retreated to the left bank of the Dnipro River. The entire front line stretching along rivers, strongholds, and the Russia–Ukraine border had basically taken shape by the end of 2022 and has seen no fundamental change in the four years since.
The Battle of Bakhmut, which began in late 2022, marked the conflict’s formal shift from mobile warfare and manoeuvre warfare into brutal trench attrition. Tens of thousands of elite troops from both sides fought street by street and building by building. The city was reduced to ruins. Trenches and minefields covered the battlefield. Both sides sank into a prolonged and meaningless positional war of attrition. In June 2023, Ukrainian forces massed Western-supplied heavy equipment and launched their summer counteroffensive. But shortages of ammunition, Russia’s layered defences, and vast minefields prevented it from tearing open the main defensive line. The deadlock remained.
After traditional ground operations reached a bottleneck, drones rose forcefully and rewrote the rules of modern warfare. Ukrainian forces, on the one hand, normalised deep strikes into Russia’s interior, precisely targeting energy facilities such as oil refineries, oil storage tanks, and oil and gas hubs, severely damaging Russia’s energy production and export chains. On the other hand, they relied on drones to conduct long-range sabotage and interdiction operations, precision bridge strikes, and sustained pressure on rear supply lines.
Operation Spiderweb, planned by the Security Service of Ukraine in June 2025, became a benchmark case in long-range unmanned operations. After long-term covert preparation, Ukrainian forces secretly delivered more than 100 FPV drones deep into Russian territory and carried out synchronised raids on five major strategic air bases, severely damaging high-value targets including Tu-160 and Tu-95 strategic bombers and airborne early-warning aircraft. The operation shattered the myth of absolute security in Russia’s interior and pioneered a new mode of operations featuring long-range drone swarms concealed in depth and synchronised multi-point strikes.
In 2023, Ukraine established specialised drone units. In 2024, it created an independent Unmanned Systems Forces branch, incorporating frontline operations, long-range strikes on energy facilities, and sabotage-and-interdiction operations against transport hubs such as the Crimean Bridge into a normalised system. Russia, meanwhile, mass-produced drones such as Lancet and Geran and formed counter-drone units. At present, more than 70 per cent of personnel casualties and armoured losses on the battlefield are directly caused by drone operations.
The deep integration of drones with satellite intelligence and the Starlink system has rendered traditional large-scale formation assaults completely ineffective. Both sides have instead turned to small elite teams of three to five soldiers for covert infiltration, night operations to seize strongpoints, and gradual positional attrition. Rain, snow, and heavy fog can reduce drone effectiveness and allow traditional infantry tactics to play a role once again. Russia’s local breakthrough in the Pokrovsk direction in autumn 2025 was achieved precisely by exploiting such a weather window.
Overall, the four-year battlefield has settled into a steady state of fixed front lines and localised tug-of-war. Russian forces have only made slow tactical gains in places such as Avdiivka, Marinka, and Zaporizhzhia, and have been unable to change the overall situation. Ukraine’s cross-border operation into Kursk, continued destruction of bridges and supply lines, strikes on Russian energy facilities, Operation Spiderweb, and attrition of the Black Sea Fleet are all tactical containment and asymmetric sabotage-and-interdiction operations. They are unlikely to fundamentally reverse the strategic balance.
The conflict has now entered a phase of fighting while negotiating, with military attrition and geopolitical contestation unfolding in parallel. A comprehensive ceasefire is unlikely in the short term. Territorial status and security guarantees have become the two central deadlocks. Russia insists on retaining the territories currently under its effective control and demands that Ukraine remain permanently neutral and refrain from joining NATO. Ukraine insists on restoring its 1991 borders, rejects territorial concessions, seeks long-term Western security guarantees, and aims to join NATO and the European Union. The two sides’ bottom lines are fundamentally opposed, and the conditions for political compromise are not yet in place.
In the future, the most likely scenario is a frozen front line and a prolonged low-intensity tug-of-war. Militarily, the conflict will continue to centre on long-range drone strikes, precision bridge destruction and supply-line disruption, harassment by uncrewed surface vessels, and the slow attrition of fortified positions. Diplomatically, mediation efforts by multiple parties will continue, with prolonged bargaining over territorial demarcation, neutrality, security guarantees, and related issues. Whichever side first succeeds in improving its counter-drone and long-range air-defence systems, stabilising its line of effective control, and securing a favourable security-guarantee framework will gain the initiative and determine the endgame of the Russia–Ukraine conflict and the future security order of Eastern Europe.
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