Battlefield momentum shifts as Trump team pushes Ukraine peace plan

Battlefield shifts tighten Ukraine’s hand in talks

Russia’s war in Ukraine has entered a darker phase for Kyiv. On paper, the front lines have not dramatically snapped. There is no sudden collapse, no spectacular breakthrough. But bit by bit, Russian troops are pushing forward, and that slow grind is starting to show in both the battlefield map and the diplomacy swirling around it, the New York Times reported.

In the middle of all this, President Trump’s envoys are trying to sell a peace framework. The trouble for Ukraine is that the talks are happening at a moment when it has less and less room to manoeuvre.

Ahead of meetings with US officials in Moscow, Vladimir Putin claimed Russian forces had taken Pokrovsk, a key logistics city in the Donetsk region. Ukrainian commanders say the picture is more complicated, with pockets of resistance still holding out. But the broader story is hard to ignore: Russia is advancing, and the Kremlin wants everyone to see it.

Putin has ordered his military to be ready for hard winter fighting and has shown no public sign of softening his demands. At the same time, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff has been holding rounds of talks with the Ukrainian side, including follow-up conversations with President Volodymyr Zelensky and Jared Kushner. Both camps call the discussions “constructive”, but no one pretends the war is close to ending.

Meanwhile, Russia has been reminding Ukraine what “negotiating under fire” really means, launching a fresh wave of drones and missiles at cities and infrastructure even as statements about peace keep coming.

On the ground, Russian forces are probing and pushing in several directions at once. Around Pokrovsk and the neighbouring town of Myrnohrad, Ukrainian soldiers report near-daily assaults, backed by drones and artillery. Further north, Russian troops are edging closer to Kupiansk. To the east, they are testing defences near Siversk. In the south, in the Zaporizhzhia region, Moscow’s troops have moved faster than many expected, grabbing a chunk of territory around Huliaipole in a matter of weeks.

None of these gains is decisive on its own. Add them together, and the map starts to look different. Analysts tracking daily changes say Russia now takes more ground each month than it did through much of the summer. Putin’s ultimate goal of controlling all of Donetsk remains distant, but the direction of travel is clear.

Ukraine’s forces are still holding, but they are doing it under mounting strain. Commanders talk openly about exhaustion. Units that have been fighting almost nonstop for months are short on rest, fresh troops and, in some areas, ammunition.

The battle for Pokrovsk has become a test of will for both sides. For Ukraine, it is a symbol that eastern cities are not simply being abandoned. For Russia, it is a stepping stone toward the larger and heavily fortified cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.

Some military analysts wonder if Kyiv is paying too high a price to hang on. The more Ukraine concentrates forces in Pokrovsk, the more opportunities it gives Russia elsewhere along the front. But withdrawing carries its own risks. Losing the city would feed Moscow’s storyline that Russian victory is just a matter of time, especially as peace proposals are being discussed.

Soldiers in the area describe a bleak routine: heavy fog, the constant buzz of drones, streets littered with bodies that cannot be safely recovered, and a feeling that the front is not a neat line but a broad zone where any movement can be fatal.

Both armies are leaning hard on drones, which has changed how the front looks and feels. Large infantry assaults are rarer. Instead, small groups move cautiously under watch from above, and almost everything is observed, recorded or targeted. Often, the front is less a trench line than a wide “kill belt” where neither side really controls the space but both can hit it.

Russia’s advantage is numbers and a willingness to take losses. Ukrainian troops describe facing three, five or ten times as many Russian soldiers in local attacks. Kyiv can still inflict heavy casualties, but replacing its own dead and wounded is getting harder, especially with uncertainty over future Western support.

All of this feeds back into the political track. Ukraine says it will not accept a deal that rewards aggression or freezes Russian gains in place. But the worse the battlefield looks, the more pressure there will be — from Moscow and quietly from some foreign capitals — to consider painful compromises.

For now, Kyiv is trying to do three things at once: hold critical ground, slow the Russian advance, and keep the diplomatic channel open without signalling weakness. Whether that delicate balance can last through a full winter of bombardment and attrition is an open question. What is already clear is that any peace plan emerging from Trump’s envoys will be negotiated against a backdrop that is getting steadily harsher for Ukraine.