Molin’s map is useful precisely because it strips away the Kremlin’s narrative and shows what the Donbas campaign actually is: a slow, ruinous grind.
The Real Nature of the Donbas Campaign
Russia trades thousands of lives for mining towns it then cannot rebuild. Since May 2022 this has been the declared main effort. Thirteen years if you count from 2014. The result is a strategic breakthrough: a demographic and industrial graveyard.
The part worth stressing is the admission that the 2024 Pokrovsk rupture did not unlock the rest of the region. Russia still has to fight for every settlement. Every slag heap. Every fortified line.
A Pattern of Attrition, Not Momentum
A year in Toretsk. A year around Pokrovsk. Now the same pattern repeats toward Kostiantynivka, Druzhkivka, Sloviansk. Momentum is something else entirely.
That is institutionalized attrition dressed up as operational progress.
The remaining Donbas holds only strategic and geopolitical stakes for Ukraine. A shield in front of Dnipropetrovsk oblast. That region is the dense and economically critical center of the country. Every kilometer Russia grinds through fortified terrain costs it combat power it cannot regenerate at the same quality.
The Quiet Strategic Tell
The mobilized replacements are older and worse trained. They get thrown into the same kill zones that have been chewing up Russian assault units for three years. And the water point Molin raises is the quiet strategic tell. To make the captured Donbas economically functional, Russia would need the Dnipro.
That means the war cannot end at the administrative border of Donetsk oblast. The logic of the campaign pushes toward central Ukraine. This regional issue deserves more than a permanent label of being stalled. Start treating it as a rolling threat to European security.
Sixteen Deadlines and Counting
Russia has now burned through sixteen deadlines for taking Donetsk oblast. Sixteen. The current one expires December 31. It will fail too.
Not because Moscow lacks cruelty, but because Ukraine has turned the region into a defensive ecosystem. Russian advances are measured in meters and paid for in brigades. The map shows colored patches. The reality behind them is a Russian army consuming itself for territory it cannot hold, cannot govern, and cannot rebuild.
