Who will win the war in Ukraine?

 Volodymyr Zelenskyy has indicated for the first time that he might be willing to negotiate with Russia to end the war that has raged in Ukraine for more than two years.

The Ukrainian president "struck an unusually subdued tone" as he addressed his nation last week, CNN reported, suggesting Moscow should send a delegation to the next peace summit that he hopes to hold in November. While he insisted any talks could only happen after a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine, this marks a small but significant change in tone and strategy from Kyiv.

Despite managing to slow the Russian advance thanks to an influx of US weaponry since the start of May, Kyiv is currently facing "the double whammy of a difficult frontline situation and political uncertainty over the level of future support from Ukraine's closest allies" – most notably the US and Germany – said the news network.

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 What is the latest from the frontline?

 The battlefield picture improved significantly for Ukraine with the arrival of US weapons in May, after Congress finally approved a $61 billion (£49 billion) aid package, following "months of dithering" in Congress, said The Economist. During that process, Russia renewed its offensive to devastating effect, taking the eastern city of Avdiivka and making slow but consistent gains in the Donetsk region since then.

Russian forces have in recent months turned their attention north to the Kharkiv Oblast region, home to Ukraine's second largest city. A combination of new weapons and permission from some Western allies to use these to strike targets inside Russia have helped Ukrainian forces slow their advance and averted a possible reoccupation of the Kharkiv region, but Kyiv is "still defending territory, rather than pushing forward to reclaim areas currently under Russian occupation", said CNN.

The recent gains have come at a steep cost for Russia, too, said The New York Times. Casualty estimates circulating among military analysts, pro-Russian bloggers and Ukrainian officials suggest that Moscow "lost more troops taking Avdiivka than it did in 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s". And the death tolls on both sides of the conflict are continuing to mount.

How many Russian and Ukrainian troops have died in the conflict?

True casualty figures are "notoriously difficult to pin down", said Newsweek, and "experts caution that both sides likely inflate the other's reported losses".

In May, an investigation by the BBC's Russian unit was able to identify 52,155 named Russian military personnel who have died in the conflict so far, but used statistical data on excess deaths to suggest that the true figure could be more than 100,000. Emmanuel Macron's foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, said that France was working with an estimate of 150,000 Russian military deaths. However, this falls well short of Kyiv's total tally of Russian troop losses which currently stands at 568,980 since the start of the war, according to Newsweek.

As for Ukraine, it is "extremely unusual" for the country's media to report on casualty figures, reported The Times. Zelenskyy said in February that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died since Russia invaded in February 2022 but US officials claimed last August that the Ukrainian death toll was more than twice that figure.

What does victory look like for each side?

Before Russia launched its invasion in February 2022, Putin outlined the objectives of what he called a "special military operation". His goal, he claimed, was to "denazify" and "demilitarise" Ukraine, and to defend Donetsk and Luhansk, the two eastern Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian proxy forces since 2014.

Another objective, although never explicitly stated, was to topple the Ukrainian government and remove the country's president, Zelenskyy. "The enemy has designated me as target number one; my family is target number two," said Zelenskyy shortly after the invasion. Russian troops made two attempts to storm the presidential compound.

Russia shifted its objectives, however, about a month into the invasion, after Russian forces were forced to retreat from Kyiv and Chernihiv. According to the Kremlin, its main goal became the "liberation of the Donbas", including the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – but Moscow has made little progress in achieving this aim.

Ukraine's main objective is the liberation of its occupied territories. That includes not just those held by Russia since the February 2022 invasion, but a return to its internationally recognised borders, including Crimea. 

Can Ukraine win the war?

As Ukraine battles to slow the advance of Russia further into its territory the outcome of the war looks increasingly likely to be decided by two key factors: supply of soldiers and maintaining international support.

Earlier this year, Zelenskyy lowered the age of military conscription in Ukraine to 25 in an attempt to boost troop numbers. But conscription remains a touchy topic in Ukraine, and officials have had to tread lightly amid dwindling enthusiasm for military service. "We don't only have a military crisis – we have a political one," one of the officers speaking to Politico warned.

Ukraine's "inherent weakness is that it depends on others for funding and arms", wrote the BBC's international editor, Jeremy Bowen, while Russia – in addition to an advantage in raw manpower – "makes most of its own weapons" and is "buying drones from Iran and ammunition from North Korea" with no limitations on how they are used.

If the "worst-case scenario" for Ukraine was to materialise, said CNN, namely if the US stopped providing aid, Europe did not step up its assistance and Ukraine was not able to access the $50 billion or so in frozen Russian assets promised to it by the G7, then Russia would "likely start to make much bigger gains".

Vladimir Putin is reported to be "ready to halt the war in Ukraine with a negotiated ceasefire that recognises the current battlefield lines", said Reuters, an arrangement which would "leave Russia in possession of substantial chunks of four Ukrainian regions".

Zelenskyy has repeatedly emphasised that any peace deal must include the withdrawal of Russian forces to behind pre-invasion borders, and while his tone "might have shifted this week, his position on what a peace deal should look like hasn't, or at least not publicly", said CNN.

"Right now, it is politically difficult, if not impossible, to state that a peace can be achieved without the full return of all Ukrainian territories. But that doesn't mean that over time, it couldn't become possible," former US Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst told the network.

He concluded Kyiv could "speak with some justification of Ukrainian victory in this war," even if Ukraine does not manage to get back all of its pre-war territory, as long as it reclaims enough to be an economically viable and secure state.