Russia demands Donbas at table. DeepState says taking it would cost two years of fighting and colossal losses

DeepState assesses that Russia would need about two years to seize the entire Donetsk Oblast. OSINT project’s co-founder Roman Pohorilyi estimates that Russian forces would suffer “a colossal number of losses” to achieve it at the current pace of advance, in a comment to LIGA.net. 

The assessment quantifies the gap between Russia’s diplomatic demands and its military capacity. Moscow has used US-mediated talks to push for territorial concessions it cannot win on the battlefield, while Pohorilyi’s two-year estimate roughly aligns with NATO’s February 2026 view that Ukraine’s Donbas front would not collapse for at least 18 months.

“At the current pace, we estimate that capturing the Kramatorsk-Sloviansk agglomeration and the rest of Donetsk Oblast would take Russia approximately two years, with a colossal number of losses,” Pohorilyi believes. 

Russia demands what it cannot militarily take

Russia regularly demands that Ukraine cede Donbas as part of negotiations to end the Russo-Ukrainian war. The DeepState assessment puts the actual military cost of fulfilling that demand at roughly two more years of attritional warfare.

The figure is itself “an answer to the question of whether we should give up our territory just like that,” Pohorilyi said. 

The Institute for the Study of War concluded in May 2026 that Russia’s “exaggerated territorial ambitions and aggressive territorial demands run completely counter to battlefield reality,” and that the experts could no longer forecast when Russia might seize the rest of Donetsk Oblast, or whether it can at all.

Russian forces first infiltrated Kostiantynivka, the southernmost city of Ukraine’s Fortress Belt, in October 2025 and produced no meaningful battlefield progress in the six months that followed.

NATO and DeepState assessments converge

A NATO official told LIGA.net in February 2026 that the alliance does not expect a collapse of the Ukrainian Donbas front for at least the following 18 months. 

Pohorilyi told LIGA.net he agrees that “Russians won’t have it so easily,” adding that the timeline may take perhaps a bit more time than NATO said. 

ISW assessed on 10 June 2026 that Russian forces remain unlikely to seize Ukraine’s Fortress Belt, the 50-kilometer chain of fortified cities from Sloviansk through Kramatorsk to Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka, reinforced since 2014 — in 2026, though they will likely make tactical gains at high cost.