As the World Pushes a Truce, Russia and Ukraine’s War – and Peace – Drag On

Fifty thousand Russian troops are amassed on Ukraine’s northeastern border, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

They are presumed to be a major part of a new summer offensive that Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to launch despite international efforts to seal a peace deal between the two, Reuters reported.  

Russia wants to show Ukraine and the world that it’s decisively winning the war, mainly because things are not going so well for it right now, analysts say.  

The offensive aims to eject the last remaining Ukrainian troops from the Kursk region of Russia and initiate a new Russian invasion of Ukraine, targeting the northeastern region of Sumy. Analysts are already expecting bloody fighting as well as humanitarian crises. “Current Russian troop movements and battlefield dynamics indicate that the coming summer offensive may be one of the largest and most ambitious of the entire war,” wrote the Atlantic Council. 

Even so, the fighting has already been heating up lately. Earlier this week, Ukraine launched an audacious drone attack against five strategic air bases deep inside Russian territory, including in Siberia, destroying 41 aircraft that carry cruise missiles and detect enemy planes. It was an attack, commentators said, that showed the resilience and ingenuity of the Ukrainians. 

That followed the collapse of two bridges causing two trains to derail in separate regions of Russia near the Ukrainian border Saturday, killing at least seven people. Russia blamed the collapse of the bridges on explosions caused by Ukraine, which has not commented on the incidents.  

Russia, meanwhile, has been pounding Ukraine with airstrikes across the country over the past few weeks, with some of the most brutal assaults since the war began.  

The escalation in the fighting comes as peace talks stumble on: On June 2, another round of talks took place in Turkey, but the negotiations ended in less than an hour with little progress, Reuters reported. Still, the two sides exchanged draft peace accords and agreed to another prisoner swap. 

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump is pushing for peace, Fox News noted, even as he is getting frustrated by the lack of progress on a ceasefire deal and also with Russian intransigence. European leaders, especially in Germany, have pledged more economic and military support for Ukraine, as the Wall Street Journal explained, and recently imposed new sanctions on Russia. 

Still, the West has yet to make game-changing moves like harsher sanctions proposed by some US officials that would cripple the Russian economy, Axios reported. As a result, some Ukrainians feel as if the US has abandoned them and that the Europeans are too weak to help on the scale they need, wrote the Financial Times. 

Yet the Ukrainians fight on. Their troops, while losing ground incrementally, continue to punish the Russian military with colossal losses. As of April, Russia has lost an estimated 800,000 troops to death, captivity, or debilitating injury since Putin launched the war in early 2022, according to US government estimates. Ukraine lost more than 400,000 soldiers, according to those same estimates. Neither side officially releases casualty figures. 

Some analysts say time appears to be on Putin’s side. The Russian president is willing to sustain these mammoth losses in return for creeping success and territorial gains, argued the Institute for the Study of War.  

Still, those Russian losses are one reason why the New York Times doesn’t foresee much success from this summer’s offensive, as Russia’s slow battlefield advances would almost certainly fail to achieve a decisive victory, the newspaper wrote. Instead, the war is likely to drag on into yet another winter unless diplomats can convince Putin and Zelenskyy to accept a peace deal.  

And for the first time in three years, some analysts now say that Russia is heading toward defeat, in spite of an adversary that is far smaller and weaker.  

“Russian President Vladimir Putin is skilled at escaping the optics of defeat…(and) with Ukraine, Putin can orchestrate scenes of success,” wrote Michael Kimmage of the Wilson Center in Foreign Policy. “In Ukraine, Russia’s military is stalled while deaths and casualties mount. Putin has no way out of the war – other than to admit a version of defeat… Slowly and not yet suddenly, Russia is starting to lose the war.”