The Ukrainian army is surprisingly able to counter the Russian attacks. In the meantime even a victory seems possible. There are seven reasons for this.

Between single-family houses, Russian battle tanks drive through a northern Ukrainian settlement. Suddenly shells hit, smoke rises, vehicles burn. Ukrainian artillerymen fired on the enemy. As the Russians retreat, a Bayraktar TB2 combat drone attacks, destroying more tanks. This combined attack can be seen in a video that was distributed via Twitter . Other short films show how the drone pilots work together with artillerymen and engineers who have laid anti-tank mines against a Russian vehicle convoy. The Ukrainians always manage to coordinate complex attacks.

Although the Ukrainian troops are clearly inferior to the invaders in the number of weapons and the total number of soldiers, they have been able to defy the attackers for more than 40 days. Even fiercely contested cities like Mariupol hold them. How did they do it? Seven attempts to explain the Ukrainian success so far:

1. Tactics

The Ukrainians are purposefully defending important roads. Protecting forests, they constantly attack Russian units with rockets. At the beginning of the war they operated purely defensively. First, they delayed the Russian advance and set up defenses to hold major cities like Odessa and the western part of the country. For a week now they have been starting small counter-offensives from the secured areas. On April 3 and 4 they were successful in counterattacking in the Kherson area. They succeed in inflicting such heavy losses on the Russian armed forces that the opponents have to regroup and are even said to have withdrawn troops to Belarus to do so.

The Ukrainian army is also acting very differently from 2014. The Ukrainians are ambushing the supply lines of the Russian army very successfully: the more trucks with provisions and fuel transports they can destroy, the more the Russian attack falters. In the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, where Russian troops have been concentrating for the past few days, Vladimir Putin's soldiers have hardly been able to gain ground. There, too, the Ukrainians are inflicting heavy losses on their opponents with advances from defensive positions.

2. Perseverance

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the leadership of the armed forces demonstrate their unconditional will not to give up. Despite heavy Russian shelling and many casualties among the population, they did not evacuate a single city that had been attacked without a fight. They know very well that house-to-house fighting always results in extremely high losses for the attackers. Military experts say a ratio of at least eight to one is required to storm a city.

Mariupol shows how difficult it is for the Russians to gain control of the streets. The Ukrainians are tying up strong Russian forces there that cannot fight anywhere else. And the casualties of the attackers are high, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

The Ukrainians anticipated the Russian airstrikes and brought equipment to safety in good time. They have hidden part of their surface-to-air missile defense or housed it in bunkers. On the very first day of the war, Russia announced that it had eliminated Ukraine's air defenses. A deliberate deception. After that, the attackers lost many planes and helicopters to Ukrainian surface-to-air missiles.

7. Weapons from NATO countries

The US Department of Defense recently announced in early April that Ukraine would receive additional weapons for a good 270 million euros, including armored vehicles. Since 2021, the US alone has provided $2.3 billion in military aid to the government in Kyiv. The United States also provides the partners with intelligence information, which allows the Ukrainians to target attacks on key targets.

None of this means a guarantee of success for Ukraine. But it has allowed the defenders to keep the attackers at bay for 41 days. And more and more experts in the West believe it is possible that the Ukrainians will win the war. Hardly anyone would have guessed that before the Russian attack.