Latest situation
US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are set to hold a call about the war in Ukraine on Tuesday, as Washington seeks to broker a ceasefire deal.
The US and its G7 partners said on Friday that they could expand sanctions and use frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine, a warning designed to win over Putin on the ceasefire proposal.
The talks come after Russia’s defence ministry said on Thursday that its forces had retaken control of Sudzha, the biggest town in its Kursk region held by Ukrainian forces for the past six months.
Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrsky acknowledged that Kyiv’s troops had pulled back from parts of the Kursk region and Russian forces had entered Sudzha, but said fighting was continuing on the outskirts of the town.
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Kursk incursion
Ukraine seized parts of Russia’s Kursk region in a surprise incursion in August. But after making steady gains in the region, Ukrainian troops began to lose territory in October.
Kyiv’s forces managed at one point to seize some 1,300 sq km of Russian territory, but the incursion came at the cost of territory in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
Russia mobilised a force of about 50,000 soldiers, including at least 10,000 from North Korea, to push the Ukrainians out of Kursk.
The Russian defence ministry claimed on March 13 that it had taken Sudzha back, depriving Ukraine of a valuable bargaining chip in any talks with Russia.
The eastern frontline
The Kremlin’s invasion has become a war of attrition, with both sides grinding it out from labyrinth trenches and a frontline stretching more than 1,000km, from southern Kherson region to Kharkiv in the north-east.
Ukraine has attempted to stabilise its defences and strengthen its eastern position ahead of any Trump-led negotiations with Putin.
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Ukraine had been hoping to slow Russia’s offensive and seize the initiative, but Ukrainian officials have admitted that they are struggling to hold back Russia’s larger and better equipped army amid manpower shortages.
Ukraine has plans to draft additional troops, though efforts to attract recruits are being hampered by military service being open-ended.
Russian forces gained thousands of square kilometres of the Donetsk region in 2024.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think-tank, said Russia captured approximately 4,200 sq km of Ukrainian territory last year, most of which was in the Donetsk area.
Drone war
Drones have played a key role in the war, with both Russia and Ukraine utilising unmanned aerial vehicles as part of their military strategies.
Ukraine has used drones to strike Russian soil, including hitting a Moscow suburb, with the aim of disrupting the Kremlin’s war effort and bringing the conflict home to ordinary Russians.
Ukraine has also used drones to attack military facilities, munitions factories and energy infrastructure in Russia and is estimated to have sunk one-fifth of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
Russian minefields and fortifications coupled with constant drone surveillance and artillery strikes proved insurmountable during the much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive of summer 2023.
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Civilian and cultural impact
The number of Ukrainians fleeing the war has made it one of the largest refugee crises in modern history.
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A Financial Times investigation found that Ukrainian children who were abducted and taken to Russia in the early months of the Kremlin’s 2022 invasion have been put up for adoption by authorities, in one confirmed case under a false Russian identity.
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Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine
On February 24 2022, the world awoke to news that Russian missiles had struck targets across Ukraine and used tanks to blast through the border.
The invasion came after months of rare public warnings from western intelligence agencies. It would soon escalate into the largest conflict in Europe since the second world war.
Ukrainians call the past 10 years “the great war” because of Russia’s first military invasion of their country in February 2014, when troops without insignia began their takeover of the Crimean Peninsula. Months later, they would spill into the Donbas region, fomenting a war under the guise of a separatist uprising.
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March 2022: Russia fails to capture Kyiv
The Russian attempt to take Ukraine’s capital was thwarted by a combination of factors, including geography, the attackers’ blundering and modern arms, as well as Ukraine’s speedy, grassroots effort to mobilise and its ingenuity with smartphones and pieces of foam mat.
May 2023: Battle for Bakhmut
Putin hailed his first major victory after the early days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in May 2023, after his forces captured Bakhmut following a gruelling nine-month battle that reduced the city to ruins.
Many of the estimated to 30,000 men killed were convicts recruited by the Wagner Group, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who a month later staged a mutiny against Moscow and then died in a plane crash in August 2023.
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Additional cartography by Aditi Bhandari, Cleve Jones and Hirofumi Yamamoto
Development by Martin Stabe, Alan Smith, Emma Lewis, Joanna S Kao, Sam Learner and Ændra Rininsland
