The Russian military is increasingly moving away from large-scale infantry assaults toward more secretive tactics to overcome Ukrainian defenses.
According to a report by The Telegraph, the previous strategy of sending waves of soldiers into heavy fire – relying on numerical superiority – resulted in massive losses with minimal territorial gains.
Advancements in technology, particularly constant drone surveillance and electronic warfare, have made large troop concentrations easy to detect and disrupt. In response, Russian units are now forming into much smaller groups of two to four people.
These teams move on foot, often at night, with minimal radio communication to avoid detection. Their objective is to find vulnerabilities in the Ukrainian front line and quietly infiltrate the rear, where they wait for additional small groups to accumulate enough force to strike from the flanks or behind.
Keir Giles, a senior fellow at Chatham House, describes this as an evolution necessitated by the “transparent battlefield,” where threats are identified almost instantly. While these small groups are harder to target, experts note that this method does not facilitate rapid breakthroughs.
Anton Zemlianyi, an analyst at the Ukrainian Strategic Security and Cooperation Center, emphasized that it is impossible to break through a full defense with such small teams; rather, it leads to slow, localized advancement at a high cost of personnel per square kilometer.
To counter these evolving threats and sustain the defensive effort, the Ukrainian General Staff has introduced a mandatory rotation policy. Under a new order from the commander-in-chief, infantry soldiers are to spend no more than two months on the forward edge of the battlefield to prevent exhaustion.
This initiative aims to prioritize the lives of defenders while maintaining the “Ukrainian quality” in warfare that Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky credited for recent territorial gains of nearly 50 square kilometers in March.