Throughout 2025, even as peace talks have supposedly advanced, Russia has intensified, not reduced, its military aggression against Ukraine – and not just on the front lines. It has maintained relentless pressure on Ukrainian infrastructure, particularly energy facilities. The objective remains as before, not peace, but to make Ukrainian civilians suffer through another winter, break their will, and make resistance unbearable.
So, as President Volodymyr Zelensky sat across from US President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago last Sunday, claiming “95% progress” in peace negotiations, Russian missiles had just rained down on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. Diplomats spoke of breakthroughs while bodies were being counted. Headlines suggested optimism while cities burned.
The grim reality is that at the end of 2025, nearly four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the peace process remains stuck on the same impasse that has defined it from the start – territory and security. Whether might makes right in 21st century Europe, international law and the UN Charter have become awkward reminders of a defunct era.
Russia’s demand to keep Ukrainian land seized by force and to turn a blind eye to the war crimes this has entailed remains the obstacle that makes all other progress meaningless.
Trump and the 95% illusion
Trump has approached the entire peace process like a real estate deal.
Yes, the latest Trump-Zelensky meeting last weekend produced the kind of vague optimism that has become the currency of this endless diplomatic dance. A 20-point peace plan is supposedly “90% agreed upon.”
But that remaining 10% – or 5%, depending on which official one asks – contains the crucial element: Russia’s determination to formalize its control over occupied Ukrainian territory.
Trump has treated Ukrainian sovereignty as a negotiable commodity. He has approached the entire “peace process” like a real estate deal, except the “property” is someone else’s country.
Trump’s insistence that the US will not pay for any new assistance to protect Ukraine, and that European allies should fund American military aid to Ukraine, further exposes his priorities.
He wants the political credit for brokering peace without bearing any of the costs of ensuring Ukraine’s security. It’s a deal structure designed to benefit Trump, not Ukraine, nor Europe, while placating Putin.
Perhaps most revealing was the sequence of events before Sunday’s meeting.
Ukrainian leaders were reportedly “blindsided” when Trump spoke with Putin for over two hours immediately before Zelensky’s arrival at Mar-a-Lago. The US president coordinating with the aggressor before meeting with the victim, as if the two parties were somehow equivalent stakeholders in a business negotiation, rather than perpetrator and victim of an illegal war of conquest.
The Ukrainians understand this with the clarity that comes from having their cities reduced to rubble. Zelensky’s willingness to engage in these talks, to sit through meeting after meeting while his people die, reflects not naivety but desperate pragmatism. He knows that Ukraine cannot fight forever without Western support, and that Western support – particularly US support – is increasingly conditional, transactional, and diminishing.
Ukraine’s daunting task
Still, Ukraine’s military performance has defied expectations. Ukraine’s armed forces have learned to exploit Russian tactical weaknesses, integrated advanced Western systems into Soviet-era doctrine, and held critical positions even as they’ve been compelled to yield ground elsewhere.
Diplomatically, Zelensky has managed to maintain Western support far longer than Putin expected, keep Ukraine’s cause in the international spotlight, and navigate coalition management across Washington, Brussels, Berlin, Paris, and Warsaw while his soldiers die waiting for ammunition.
Zelensky’s willingness to discuss painful compromises – withdrawing from parts of the eastern Donbas region, accepting something less than full NATO membership, even entertaining referendums on territorial questions – has won appreciation not only in Europe, but also among those in Washington who disagree with Trump’s approach.
But pragmatism has its limits when dealing with Putin.
Putin’s cynical calculus
You don’t destroy a nation’s power grid to win over a few provinces. You do it to break the country entirely.
The current diplomatic focus on territorial compromise in the Donbas misunderstands Putin’s objectives. They were never simply about border adjustments or protecting Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.
Putin has consistently denied Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign state separate from Russia’s sphere of influence. The goal isn’t acquiring territory but ensuring Ukraine cannot function as a Western-aligned democracy and is viewed as Russian property.
Russia currently controls approximately 20% of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea and large swaths of the east. But Putin’s systematic attacks on civilian infrastructure extend across the entire country – not just frontline areas. Energy grids in Kyiv, water systems in Lviv, and hospitals hundreds of miles from any battlefield. You don’t destroy a nation’s power grid in winter if you’re negotiating over a few provinces. You do it if you want to break the country entirely.
Putin’s “denazification” rhetoric targeted Ukraine’s entire government and Western orientation, not specifically the Donbas. He has portrayed this as an existential struggle rather than a border dispute open to territorial concessions.
For Putin, Ukraine’s existence as an independent state aligned with the West is a threat to Russia that must be eliminated – or so he claims in order to bolster his despotism and desire to be seen as a modern Russian emperor or tsar intent on “Making Russia Great Again.”
That’s right. No exaggeration. What is so often overlooked is that Putin even refuses to view Ukrainians as a distinct nation with their own history, culture, and right to self-determination. He dreams of a return to the pre-decolonization age when under the tsars the constantly expanding Russian empire included not only Ukraine but part of Poland, the Baltic countries, Finland and Georgia.
Putin apparently thinks his version of victory is within reach. Russia has gained an average of 176 square miles per month throughout 2025 – not dramatic breakthroughs, but steady advances that add up. His refusal to accept even a temporary ceasefire shows he feels no urgency to stop because time appears to be on his side.
Putin’s own propaganda has boxed him in.
In his annual address earlier this month, Putin presented the Russian military as “prepared for a prolonged war” – no mention of casualties, no hint of seeking an exit. From his perspective, the strategic picture favors patience: Trump wants out, European unity remains fragile, and Ukraine is exhausted.
Yet Putin is also trapped. With at least 152,000 verified Russian military deaths and Western intelligence estimates of up to one million total casualties, he’s paid a price that makes compromise politically impossible. He’s mobilized Russian society for a proclaimed crusade against purported expansive Western liberalism and decadence. He’s told Russians their sons and husbands are dying to prevent Ukraine from becoming a dagger pointed at Russia’s heart.
But Putin has also finally been forced to implicitly acknowledge that Russia is paying a significant economic and financial price for its imperialistic belligerence. Western sanctions, loss of energy markets, and now Ukraine’s impressive growing capacity to strike strategic military and energy infrastructure targets deep within Russia are having an impact and creating embarrassing difficulties at home.
A settlement that leaves Ukraine sovereign, armed, and aligned with the West would be problematic to sell at home. Putin’s own propaganda has boxed him in. His recent reference to European leaders as “piglets” betrays a leader who must constantly project strength because any hint of weakness could prove fatal.
The human catastrophe
Behind every new optimistic statement about the attainability of peace, followed by more delays, lies a staggering human catastrophe.
In November, the United Nations in Ukraine verified over 53,000 civilian casualties since the invasion began, including 14,534 deaths, and the actual toll is certainly higher. Ukrainian civilian casualty rates in 2025 have been 27% higher than in 2024, a grim acceleration as the war grinds on.
Military casualties are harder to quantify but horrifying. Hundreds of thousands – Ukrainian and Russian – wounded or dead. An entire generation has been fed into the machinery of war for miles of scorched earth, plundered and destroyed towns and villages.
Trump himself keeps declaring that the war must be stopped to end this carnage. Yet he continues to procrastinate and prevaricate, thereby undermining the peace process and granting Putin even more time to keep pushing forward.
Every day negotiations drag on, more people die. Every percentage point of progress is purchased with blood.
The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.