Russia

President Trump has moved rapidly to broker a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, casting an end to the war as the signature achievement that would define his presidency and cement his reputation as a peacemaker. To that end, he has escalated the diplomatic track quickly, engaging in direct talks with President Putin and exerting heavy pressure on Kyiv to agree to his timelines and parameters for a deal...Yet despite this pace, the parties are not anywhere closer to a substantive peace agreement, largely because Moscow has refused to offer meaningful concessions or dilute maximalist territorial demands that remain fundamentally unacceptable to Ukraine...Negotiators have made progress on the architecture of security guarantees for Ukraine, but the core obstacles, above all Russia’s insistence on recognition of its claims over the Donbas region and beyond, remain unresolved and are explicitly described by Kyiv as the ‘most difficult point’ in the talks...So far, the Trump administration has concentrated its leverage on pushing Kyiv to show flexibility, while applying little to no sustained pressure on Moscow to soften its position, which leaves the overall dynamics of the peace process essentially unchanged despite the flurry of high‑level diplomacy."

For most of the West, they feel that this continues a pattern which they don’t want to see, which is the erosion of [global] institutions,” said Urban Coningham, a Middle East security and geopolitics analyst at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London. “With this new Board of Peace, it’s very much Trump’s way or the highway.”

Apart from drone attacks, Russian forces struggle to execute complicated joint maneuvers of different types of forces because soldiers lack the training needed to understand their orders, said Jack Watling, a senior research fellow in land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London.