re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict.

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Gimpongrinder is projecting, just let him continue to make a fool out of himself. Its good comedy relief.

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Question: Regarding the Ukraine/Russian war. How much more of Ukraine's land does Russia control today compared to what it controlled on July 11th of 2022?

Answer: Counterintuitive answer: Russia controls slightly **less** Ukrainian territory today than it did on July 11, 2022.

**Today (July 2026):** DeepState puts total Russian-controlled Ukrainian territory at 45,155 square miles (~19% of Ukraine); ISW-based figures put it at 45,652 square miles (~20%) — roughly 117,000–118,000 km², including Crimea and pre-2022 Donbas holdings.

**July 2022:** Russia was at its post-Kyiv-withdrawal high-water mark, having just completed the capture of Luhansk Oblast (Lysychansk fell July 3). Zelensky's June 2022 figure was ~125,000 km² (~20%), and most trackers put the mid-summer 2022 footprint at roughly 20–22% of Ukraine — call it 125,000–133,000 km².

**Net change: roughly -7,000 to -15,000 km², or about 1–2 percentage points less.** The reason is sequencing. Ukraine's September 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive recaptured ~12,000 km², and the November 2022 Kherson operation liberated the right bank, reducing Russian control to about 19% by late November 2022. Everything Russia has ground out since — roughly 0.8% of Ukraine's territory in all of 2025 per Syrskii, plus 2024's Avdiivka-axis gains — still hasn't restored the July 2022 line. Over the past 12 months (July 2025–July 2026), Russia netted about 1,170–1,180 square miles — roughly 0.5% of Ukraine, and 2026's pace has collapsed further: 622 km² seized or infiltrated in H1 2026 vs. 2,190 km² in H1 2025.

Caveat on precision: the 2022 baseline varies by tracker and methodology (ISW vs. Ukrainian government figures), so I'd frame it as "roughly flat to modestly negative" rather than a hard number. But the directional conclusion holds across sources: four years of fighting since July 2022, over a million Russian casualties by most Western estimates, and Russia's net territorial position in Ukraine is no better than where it stood the week Lysychansk fell.

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You sad little clown you.

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Question: What territory change occurred in the last 2 years?

Answer: Using Russia Matters' ISW-based series (same methodology across all three dates):

July 2024: +25,000 square miles gained since Feb. 24, 2022 (11% of Ukraine); ~41,000 sq mi total including pre-war holdings (17.5%) Russia Matters
July 2025: +27,856 square miles Russia Matters
July 2026: +29,027 square miles; ~45,652 sq mi total (~20%) Russia Matters

Net two-year change: roughly +4,000 square miles (~10,400 km²), about 1.7% of Ukraine's total territory. Slightly less than the land area of Connecticut, taken over 24 months.
The year-over-year split is the more telling part:

Year 1 (Jul 2024–Jul 2025): ~2,860 sq mi. This was Russia's best sustained stretch of the war after 2022 — the Pokrovsk axis grind, the fall of Vuhledar, Kurakhove, and eventually Pokrovsk itself, plus expansion into Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.
Year 2 (Jul 2025–Jul 2026): ~1,170 sq mi. Both DeepState and ISW put the past 12 months at roughly 1,170–1,180 square miles — about 0.5% of Ukraine, so the rate of advance fell by roughly 60% year-over-year. And 2026 has decelerated further within that: 622 km² in H1 2026 vs. 2,190 km² in H1 2025, with June 2026 casualties running around 1,298 per square kilometer taken versus 68 a year earlier. Russia MattersCritical Threats

Two caveats. The July 2024 figure was rounded to the nearest thousand in RM's older format, so treat the 4,000 sq mi total as ±100–200. And ISW warns that year-over-year comparisons are muddied by Russia's shift to infiltration tactics — forces exert significantly less control over infiltrated areas than seized ones, meaning the recent figures, small as they are, likely overstate consolidated control. Russia Matters
The pattern: Russia's cost-per-square-mile has gone vertical while its rate of gain has collapsed. Whether that's sustainable through 2027 is the question hanging over the Abu Dhabi/Geneva talks.

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Now you just turned to desperate hackery. July 11 2022 is when Russia's control had no fortifications, no trench support, thinned out logistics and substantial manpower disadvantage to Ukraine. Actually Ukraine enjoyed a massive manpower advantage before 2023.

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“Hit the nerve” should be “hit a nerve.”

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You still haven't responded as to why Ukraine constantly gets 1000s of their bodies back and returns 30 bodies to Russia.

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Question: Tell me about KIA swaps between Ukraine and Russia. Does any disparity exist in the number of bodies returned by each side?

Answer: Yes — the disparity is large and well documented, and it's grown in 2026.

**The numbers**

In 2025 there were 14 exchanges, with 14,480 bodies returned to Ukraine and 391 returned to Russia — roughly 37:1. The 2026 exchanges have followed the same pattern: 1,000 Ukrainian bodies for 38 Russian in January, 1,000 for 35 in February, 1,000 for 41 on April 9, roughly 1,000 for 41 on April 17, and 522 for 33 on June 18. Cumulative war-total tallies (~24,000–25,500 to Ukraine vs. ~1,800–3,500 to Russia) circulate mainly through pro-Kremlin outlets like SouthFront, so treat the exact totals cautiously — but the direction and rough magnitude are corroborated by both sides' official announcements of each exchange. The framework traces to the June 2025 Istanbul talks, where the sides agreed to repatriate 6,000 fallen each; Ukraine took back over 6,000 in the following weeks while Russia, by its own account, received only dozens.

**What the disparity does and doesn't mean**

Pro-Russian sources present the ratio as a casualty proxy — proof Ukraine is losing 7-20x more men. That inference doesn't survive contact with the mechanics of body recovery, and it contradicts essentially every Western, and even some Russian-adjacent, casualty estimate (roughly 1.1–1.4M Russian casualties vs. 500–600K Ukrainian per the estimates in the report cards we discussed). Several factors drive the asymmetry:

1. **Who holds the ground.** Russia has been on the offensive for most of the war, so its troops have captured more Ukrainian remains — bodies of Ukrainian soldiers are often difficult for front-line units to retrieve due to Russian advances. The retreating side leaves its dead; the advancing side collects both its own and the enemy's. Ukraine's major territorial recoveries were in 2022, before the exchange mechanism scaled up.

2. **Russian incentives to not reclaim their dead.** A soldier confirmed KIA triggers substantial death payments to the family (payouts have run into the equivalent of $80K+) and adds to official loss figures. A soldier listed as missing does neither. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly claimed Russia declines to accept large numbers of its own dead, and there have been documented cases — Zelensky raised this publicly in 2025 — of Russian soldiers' bodies being mixed into the transfers *to* Ukraine, whether through negligence or intent.

3. **Counting ambiguity.** What's transferred is often fragmentary remains, not intact bodies. Ukraine's Interior Minister says full identification of repatriated remains takes around 14 months, largely because of the condition the bodies arrive in. One "body" in the count may be commingled remains of several people, or partial remains of one — which cuts both ways on the arithmetic.

4. **Asymmetric political incentives.** Ukraine actively wants its dead back — identification, burial, family closure, and resolving MIA cases are politically important in Kyiv. Russia's negotiators have shown little urgency requesting theirs, consistent with a general pattern of opacity around losses.

My read: the exchange ratio is real but is primarily a measurement of *who controls the ground where men died* and *who wants their dead back*, not relative attrition. The honest caveat in the other direction — Ukraine's losses are genuinely severe, and the 1,000-body monthly cadence is itself a grim indicator of the war's scale for Kyiv. But anyone citing the swap ratio as a casualty ratio is either innumerate about recovery mechanics or arguing in bad faith. Notably, even SouthFront's own writeup concedes the front-line control explanation before waving it away.

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