“before Russia loses its willingness to settle.”
You are assuming that Russia ever had a willingness to settle.
The Ukrainians are very unlikely to approve transfer of the heavily fortified Donetsk areas in exchange for what are worthless security guarantees from the US and Europe. Trump has destroyed any confidence Ukraine or the Europeans might have had in US security guarantees. While that may have secured a valuable US objective in forcing the Euroweenies to pick up their own defense, it has only encouraged Russia to prolong the conflict.
Russia will refuse any agreement with security guarantees & European troops anyway. Putin is riding the tiger, and as one German commentator noted, the last thing he needs is an apparent defeat and lots of disgruntled and unemployed former soldiers hanging around Russia, so even the current casualty rate suits him just fine.
His hope is that Trump will somehow canoodle a Ukrainian capitulation splitting the US and Europe entirely. However, the recent preposterous $12 trillion deal has not been picked up by the Trump administration, and Trump continues to strip Russia of its allies in Venezuela and maybe Cuba and Iran and has applied secondary sanctions and pursuit of some of Russia's shadow fleet to good effect. Those are not insubstantial actions that are clearly taken for US interests but which help Ukraine incidentally for which he gets zero credit, mainly because they violate the phantasmagorical "rules based international order" so beloved by Europe.
Both Ukraine and Russia have good reasons to prolong the current negotiations indefinitely, with both maneuvering with delays carefully calculated to avoid making an enemy of the Trump administration while resolving nothing.
Why would Russia lose its willingness to settle? After all, Ukraine is taking everything back! And the Russian economy is failing! Lol.
AFP reports.
Not that this is necessarily untrue but given their past record of inaccurate or fairytale reporting, I wouldn’t lay much stake in it.
1.) Russia is doing a slow roll because they have ZERO interest in taking the nationalist areas of Ukraine, this is a war of attrition, and they are avoiding high casualties. They pretty much took most of what they wanted (~85% or so). Would they like Kharkiv and Odessa, sure. But those will be horrible fights, at least now.
Russia keeps the pressure on and thereby prevents Ukraine from amassing a large reserve with which they can launch a true counter offensive which could practically seize terrain and hold it. For Ukraine, this is a war about trying to take and hold terrain - they are oriented on terrain. For Russia, this is a war where they are oriented on the enemy forces. It’s about keeping the Ukrainian forces depleted to the point where they can’t do much. This also puts Ukraine in an unfavorable position at the negotiating table since every month Ukraine is losing a little bit more real estate - the longer the war rages on, the worse Ukraine’s end state.
2.) In net, Ukraine is losing, losing, losing. They might gain a little back here or there, but then they will lose that again and then some, and in the net, every month, for the last 2+ YEARS, Ukraine is losing ground.
Ukraine is a very large country. People do not realize this. Ukraine was 233,100 square miles. In comparison, a state almost everyone is familiar with Florida is 65,000 square miles. Russia has gained an average of 176 square miles per month in 2025. Again, in comparison to what people are familiar with, NY city is about 305 square miles. Russia is seizing a little more than the landmass of NY city every two months. Another example, Ukraine is about 175% the landmass of Iraq, and about 150% the population. Think about the stress our military was under trying to deal with holding onto such a massive area and population.
484 football fields fit into one square mile. Russia is taking 176 X 484 every month. Our media belittles this.
We’re winning, we’re winning!!! At some point, the clowns screaming this look and sound like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/amUmQ-pTdiM
The war was essentially over (pending some act of God) after the failed counter offensive of 2023-2024. Since then, all the death and carnage was basically because you have failed politicians, many not even elected and supported by their population (Von der Leyen is a bureaucrat appointed, not elected in the EU) that have pinned their political future to the outcome of this war. Every Ukrainian AND Russian death post Ukrainian failed counter offensive was merely because politicians are playing games, but the physical reality of warfare, the cards people were dealt, how we play our hand, had all already been done. This is a poker game where each side knows the other sides hand, we lost and we know we lost, but instead of conceding loss, we are stalling by escalation (As done in 24, 25 and under Biden) or simply not agreeing to some agreement which eventually will be forced upon us if we play the attrition game until its bitter end when demographics end it.
The politicians opposing peace at this point are part of the problem and no tough guys with principals.
Would you really prefer the foreign policy that we had under Biden as an alternative, where there was an implicit promise of a blank check to Ukraine with no expiration date?
First Boris Johnson and then Biden embraced the view that if only NATO nations (primarily the US) gave Ukraine enough money and arms, the Ukrainians would eventually retake every square mile of lost territory, including Crimea. What that means in practice is a blank check and free munitions for perpetuity, since the likelihood of Ukraine recapturing Crimea is about on par with Germany getting Danzig back today.
Ukraine hurry up and accept peace terms before Russia loses its willingness to settle.
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Russia still maintains that the only settlement they will accept are the terms they put forth in 2022 - total capitulation.