Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington on Monday alongside a large cohort of European leaders. This comes after Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday as part of an ongoing push for a deal to end the war in Ukraine.
After the Alaska summit, Trump has been accused of aligning with Putin by abandoning previous calls for a cease-fire. Trump over the weekend said that instead of pursuing a “mere ceasefire,” the warring parties should “go directly” to a peace agreement.
In Alaska, Putin also reportedly demanded that Ukraine cede Donetsk and Luhansk, the two territories that constitute the industrial eastern Donbas region, as a condition to end the war—and offered to freeze the conflict along the rest of the front line.
Trump is apparently supportive of this proposal and is raising pressure on Zelensky. In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump said Zelensky could end the war “almost immediately, if he wants to” and suggested that doing so will require Zelensky to accept that Ukraine will never regain Crimea (which Russia illegally seized in 2014) or join NATO. Zelensky has repeatedly stated that he will not give up territory as part of a peace agreement. But as Ukrainian forces continue to face myriad challenges along the roughly 600-mile front line, Zelensky is in a tough position.
To get a clearer picture of what’s being asked of Kyiv, here’s a quick breakdown of where things currently stand on the battlefield in Ukraine.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Western intelligence assessments suggested that Kyiv would fall in 72 hours. That didn’t happen. Ukrainian forces put up a far tougher fight than expected and thwarted the Russian invaders. But the conflict raged on and morphed into a brutal war of attrition.
Moscow illegally annexed four Ukrainian territories in September 2022—Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson—despite not fully occupying the regions.
Today, Russia controls roughly one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea—approximately 44,600 square miles. It occupies all but a sliver of Luhansk, and roughly 70 percent of Donetsk. Overall, Russia controls around 88 percent of the Donbas region.
Russia has been vying for control of the Donbas for over a decade, and it’s been one of Putin’s primary goals in the war. Moscow laid the foundations for its full-scale invasion in 2022 by backing pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas in a conflict against Ukraine that began in 2014. Roughly one-third of the Donbas was already under the control of Moscow-backed forces when Russia invaded in 2022.
Russia continues to focus much of its energy on Donetsk. But Russian forces have struggled to make more than incremental gains. Ukraine still controls around 25 percent of Donetsk. Putin’s reported proposal to end the war would have Ukraine voluntarily give up the entire territory, including the land not currently occupied by Russia, in a region that Ukrainian forces have fought and died over for years.
Despite recent advances near the eastern city of Pokrovsk, Russian forces are not capable of quickly seizing the rest of Donetsk by force, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which closely tracks the front line in Ukraine. “Russia could only rapidly seize all of Donetsk Oblast if Ukraine concedes to Putin’s demand and withdraws from the remainder of the oblast,” ISW said in a recent report.
Fighting is also ongoing in other regions, and Russia has continued to pummel Ukrainian cities far from the front line—including Kyiv—with drone, air, and missile strikes. Russian attacks killed at least 10, including children, in the cities of Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia on Monday. These types of deadly attacks are among the many reasons why Kyiv and its European allies contend a cease-fire is desperately needed.
Meanwhile, Russia is shifting troops from the Sumy region in the north to the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region—home to the largest nuclear power plant in Europe—as part of a new push there, according to recent comments from Ukraine’s commander in chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi.
Syrskyi also said that Russian forces are conducting active operations near important bridges in the Kherson region but that recent transfers of troops away from the area suggest there won’t be “significant offensive operations there in the near future.” Russia is estimated to control around three-fourths of both Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Small portions of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk regions are also occupied by Russia.
In spite of the manpower and equipment advantages it has over Ukraine, the war has been extremely costly for Russia, and its forces are estimated to have suffered around 1 million casualties since the 2022 invasion. The British Ministry of Defense also recently said that it would take Russia roughly 4.4 years to fully conquer the remainder of the four Ukrainian territories Moscow illegally annexed three years ago.
Still, it’s also widely agreed that Ukraine is not capable of regaining control of territory that it’s lost. Ukrainian forces have also largely been pushed out of Russia’s Kursk region after seizing around 500 square miles of territory there in a surprise offensive last August.
In spite of the difficulties confronting Kyiv, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker told Foreign Policy that “the battlefield situation and the relative power situation is not as dire as people make it out to be against Ukraine.”
“Ukraine is doing very well at imposing lots and lots of Russian casualties and really not losing much of any territory,” Volker said.
Volker added that Russia’s economy is “in very bad shape and getting worse,” emphasizing that Moscow has the “clock ticking with how much financial reserves they have.” He also underscored that Ukraine is disrupting Moscow’s military logistics as it increasingly demonstrates an ability to strike targets deep inside Russia.
“This is actually not going well for Putin,” Volker said. “He doesn’t ever want to admit that, but I think he knows it. And we should not be rushing this on the assumption that Ukraine’s going to be defeated.”
Rishi Iyengar contributed reporting.
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