From high-stakes U.S.-Russia talks to a potential cease-fire, the conversation around ending the war in Ukraine is rushing forward as U.S. President Donald Trump looks to make good on his campaign promise to quickly strike a deal to stop the fighting.
But despite recent diplomatic momentum, tensions flared in Washington on February 28, when a heated exchange between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy exposed deep divisions over how to achieve that goal. Analysts say that a concrete agreement -- let alone a lasting peace deal -- remains elusive, and the three-year, all-out war looks set to keep grinding on.
"There is a disconnect between the situation on the ground and the political discourse that we are hearing about cease-fires, peacekeepers, and even a settlement," Janis Kluge, a Russia expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, told RFE/RL. "All of those things are still a long way off."
On the ground, Russian and Ukrainian forces are still fighting a brutal war of attrition with few territorial gains and high casualties.
Biting winter weather has slowed the fighting lately as Russian forces have looked to replenish equipment and soldiers after months of crushing combat that's led to steady but incremental gains. The Ukrainian military, meanwhile, remains outflanked and is struggling with manpower shortages but has adapted by employing new tactics and technologies to blunt Russia's attacks.
According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank, Russian forces have made small advances on Ukrainian positions in Kursk, the small swath of Russian territory taken by Kyiv in August 2024, in recent days.
The Ukrainian military has also reported fresh Russian attacks in all directions along the front, such as near the city of Pokrovsk and the village of Nadiivka along the western edge of the Donetsk region. Nearby, Ukrainian forces said they recently regained control of the village of Kotlyne after launching a counterattack at the end of February.
"The fundamental situation on the battlefield has not changed and that is that Moscow is still in a relatively strong position," Kluge said. "Russia is advancing -- although very slowly and at a high cost.”
Where Do Things Stand On The Front Line?
The sweeping territorial gains by Ukrainian or Russian militaries in the early days of the war have mostly transitioned into high-casualty assaults with heavy artillery and drone attacks. Russian forces currently control around 20 percent of Ukrainian territory and claim to have annexed four regions -- Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson -- despite some parts of those areas remaining under Kyiv's control.
Ukrainian forces are currently holding more than 1,500 kilometers of front lines against Russian troops, as well as about 400 square kilometers in Kursk.
On the battlefield in Ukraine, Russian forces have maintained the upper-hand and largely controlled the tempo of fighting in the last year as they've looked to gain new advances thanks to the use of glide bombs and explosive-loaded drones that fly with the use of fiber-optic cables.
But those limited territorial gains have come at a great cost for Russia.
George Barros, who leads the team that monitors battlefield developments at ISW, says that Russia's operations on the ground have slowed considerably, especially since it captured the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiyivka in February 2024. That advance came after Ukraine had defended the city since the beginning of the invasion but withdrew as wave after wave of Russian assaults left its depleted forces nearly surrounded.
"Since taking Avdiyivka a little over a year ago, Russia has not managed to advance their front line by very much," he told RFE/RL. "That's come with staggering losses in terms of soldiers and equipment."
Russian forces gained 4,168 square kilometers of land in 2024, according to ISW, and that came with a high cost of life on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides.
Exact battlefield casualties are difficult to ascertain, but since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has lost 46,000 soldiers in combat and 380,000 have been wounded, Zelenskyy said during a recent speech, although many experts believe the total number to be higher.
Russian casualty estimates range from 600,000 to 750,000 killed or wounded soldiers since the beginning of the war and estimates compiled by ISW say that Moscow could be losing around 25,000 to 30,000 troops per month, or roughly 1,000 soldiers a day.
The sheer size of Russia's military has allowed it to absorb high losses -- as well as the addition of thousands of soldiers from North Korea in Kursk.
Estimates by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) say that Moscow also lost more than 1,400 tanks to Ukrainian attacks in 2024 but has still managed to sustain its war effort on Soviet-era stockpiles and ramped-up domestic manufacturing.
Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that while holding the upper hand on the battlefield, Moscow likely remains "disappointed" that it hasn't been able to achieve "an operationally significant breakthrough."
"Despite the fact that they retain a very significant advantage in terms of materiel and overall manpower, they've not been able to turn those advantages into big gains on the battlefield," he told an online panel to mark the war's third anniversary.
What Will 2025 Bring To The Battlefield?
Despite talk of winding the war down, the fighting continues. Reports from the open-source monitoring group DeepState show that Russian forces have been concentrating nearly half of their attacks so far in 2025 in the area around Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine.
"Neither side is able to conduct large operational maneuvers right now, but the Russians are burning through a lot more resources than the Ukrainians are," Barros said.
In the absence of a likely breakthrough of each other's front lines, experts say that the war has become less about taking large swaths of territory and instead about forcing the other side to suffer high losses in terms of equipment, ammunition, and casualties.
Ukraine's main weaknesses have been a shortage of soldiers to replace its losses and uncertain supplies of Western military aid, especially given the Trump administration's stated reluctance to keep supporting Kyiv on the battlefield as it has in the past.
That raises vital questions for Ukraine on the battlefield should the war continue to grind on while U.S. military assistance stops.
According to data from the German-based Kiel Institute for the World Economy, European governments -- including non-EU members Britain and Norway -- have contributed almost $64 billion in military aid to Ukraine up until the end of 2024 compared to $66 billion from the United States in the same span.
Zelenskyy, following his difficult trip to Washington, received a warmer welcome in London on March 1 as European leaders prepared to meet on March 2 to discuss Ukraine and European security.
But Julia Friedrich, a research fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin, says that European militaries will need time to ramp up production in order to adequately supply Ukraine, possibly even years.
"We are definitely looking at a gap between what the Ukrainians need and what the Europeans can supply," she told RFE/RL. "There is hope that investing in Ukrainian production will help, but more funds will need to be raised for that, which also takes time."
How quickly -- or if at all -- European governments will need to bridge that gap remains to be seen and will be affected by the success and speed of diplomatic talks to end the war. In the meantime, the war looks set to continue.
"Russian negotiators are experienced and will be aiming to get everything they can," said Friedrich. "Moscow has put everything into this war, so it's going to take a lot more than a friendly phone call and meeting to make Russia stop."
