Posted on 08/14/2025 2:33:30 PM PDT by marcusmaximus
Face-to-face talks between President Trump and Vladimir Putin on Friday will give the Russian president a chance to pitch his conditions for peace, chief among them for Ukraine to hand over swaths of its territory.
Putin has long coveted the south and east of Ukraine, which his army has failed to fully occupy. Trump has said he would seek to negotiate a swap that would return some of the territory Russia occupies back to Ukraine, without offering further detail.
The Kremlin has declared five occupied regions to be part of Russia—Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Crimea. Of those, Russia fully occupies Crimea, almost all of Luhansk and much of the other three.
Here’s the lay of the land in the area that Putin is eyeing.
Putin in 2022 declared four Ukrainian regions to be part of Russia. Moscow had already seized Crimea in 2014. Ukraine recaptured the city of Kherson, the regional capital, in late 2022, and Russia has never come close to controlling Zaporizhzhia.
The eastern province of Donetsk is a top target for Putin, but his military has struggled to take control of several of its key cities. Russian infantry penetrated Ukraine’s first line of defense near the city of Dobropillya in recent days, but Ukrainian forces are counterattacking. Russian forces are currently besieging the cities of Kostyantynivka and Pokrovsk, which they have been unsuccessfully trying to seize for more than a year.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
The Putin calls these territories, Russia 🇷🇺
Why doesn’t Russia, as the successor state to the USSR, return the stolen Polish, Slovak, and Hungarian territories, taken without the consent of the involved states, in 1945?
That would be a start.
What Sapsan missiles doink?
Marcus, don’t know if you know about it but Free Republic is having a FReepathon now.
The Wall Streett Journal keeps pushing anti-Russian propaganda. There is no way Putin will give up any of this land.
Russia is doing so bad that Ukraine should obviously reject any ceasefire and continue to fight until Russia’s immminent surrender.
“Marcus, don’t know if you know about it but Free Republic is having a FReepathon now.”
FR ought to calculate how many CPU cycles wasted, bandwith consumed, and storage spaced used by its thousands of spam articles and send it the bill.
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