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US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that Washington and Moscow will begin negotiations “immediately” on ending the war in Ukraine after speaking with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
The call between Trump and Putin was the first time Washington and Moscow have spoken at the highest level since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Trump spoke to Putin before calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a sign that the US may not want to work with Kyiv or the EU on a common strategy to bring Russia to the negotiating table.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth also dashed Ukraine’s hopes of securing a pledge to join Nato and restoring its borders to their position before Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
Russia has taken a hardline position ahead of talks, demanding Nato roll back most of its post-cold war deployments in eastern Europe and insisting Ukraine recognise its annexation of four south-eastern regions.
Western long-range missiles
Ukraine struck Russia using US-made long-range Atacms missiles for the first time in November, with the Russian ministry of defence confirming an attack on its soil had taken place over the Bryansk region.
The depot was north of the Kursk region, where Russia’s forces were trying to push out Ukrainian troops who occupy about 600 sq km of Russian territory.
The strikes came a day after former US president Joe Biden authorised Ukraine to use Atacms missiles in Russia in a major policy shift.
Ukraine was in desperate need of new weaponry as its frontline buckles and Russian forces make gains on the battlefield at a faster rate than at any point since 2022.
Kursk incursion
Ukraine seized parts of Russia’s Kursk region in a surprise incursion in August. But after making steady gains in the region, Ukrainian troops began to lose territory there in October. The incursion has come at the cost of territory in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
Russia has mobilised a force of about 50,000 soldiers, including at least 10,000 from North Korea, in a fresh attempt to push the Ukrainians out of Kursk, according to Zelenskyy and Ukrainian and western intelligence officials.
Losing Kursk would deprive Zelenskyy of a valuable bargaining chip in any talks with Russia.
The eastern frontline
The Kremlin’s invasion has become a war of attrition, with both sides grinding it out from labyrinth trenches and a frontline stretching more than 1,000km, from southern Kherson region to Kharkiv in the north-east.
Ukraine has attempted to stabilise its defences and strengthen its eastern position ahead of any Trump-led negotiations with Putin.
Ukraine had been hoping to slow Russia’s offensive and seize the initiative, but Ukrainian officials have admitted that they are struggling to hold back Russia’s larger and better equipped army amid manpower shortages. Ukraine plans to draft additional troops, though efforts to attract recruits are being hampered by military service being open-ended.
Russian forces gained thousands of square kilometres of the Donetsk region in 2024. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think-tank, said Russia captured approximately 4,200 sq km of Ukrainian territory last year, most of which was in the Donetsk area.
Drone war
Drones have played a key role in the war, with both Russia and Ukraine utilising unmanned aerial vehicles as part of their military strategies.
Ukraine has used drones to strike Russian soil this year, including hitting a Moscow suburb, with the aim of disrupting the Kremlin’s war effort and bringing the conflict home to ordinary Russians.
Ukraine has also used drones to attack military facilities, munitions factories and energy infrastructure in Russia and is estimated to have sunk one-fifth of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
Russian minefields and fortifications coupled with constant drone surveillance and artillery strikes proved insurmountable during the much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive of summer 2023.
Civilian and cultural impact
The number of Ukrainians fleeing the war has made it one of the largest refugee crises in modern history.
A Financial Times investigation found that Ukrainian children who were abducted and taken to Russia in the early months of the Kremlin’s 2022 invasion have been put up for adoption by authorities, in one confirmed case under a false Russian identity.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine
On February 24 2022, the world awoke to news that Russian missiles had struck targets across Ukraine and used tanks to blast through the border.
The invasion came after months of rare public warnings from western intelligence agencies. It would soon escalate into the largest conflict in Europe since the second world war.
Ukrainians call the past 10 years “the great war” because of Russia’s first military invasion of their country in February 2014, when troops without insignia began their takeover of the Crimean Peninsula. Months later, they would spill into the Donbas region, fomenting a war under the guise of a separatist uprising.
March 2022: Russia fails to capture Kyiv
The Russian attempt to take Ukraine’s capital was thwarted by a combination of factors, including geography, the attackers’ blundering and modern arms, as well as Ukraine’s speedy, grassroots effort to mobilise and its ingenuity with smartphones and pieces of foam mat.
May 2023: Battle for Bakhmut
Putin hailed his first major victory after the early days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in May 2023, after his forces captured Bakhmut following a gruelling nine-month battle that reduced the city to ruins.
Many of the estimated to 30,000 men killed were convicts recruited by the Wagner Group, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who a month later staged a mutiny against Moscow and then died in a plane crash in August 2023.
Additional cartography by Cleve Jones and Hirofumi Yamamoto
Development by Martin Stabe, Alan Smith, Emma Lewis, Joanna S Kao, Sam Learner and Ændra Rininsland