Ukraine in maps:
Tracking the war with Russia
The Visual Journalism team - BBC News
Thu, February 19, 2026
[BBC]
The war in Ukraine is about to enter its fifth year. Over the past year, Russian forces have slowly expanded the amount of territory they control, mostly in the east of Ukraine, and have continued their barrage of air strikes on Kyiv and other cities.
Some 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while the BBC has confirmed the names of almost 160,000 people killed fighting on Russia's side.
With the fourth anniversary of the Russia's full-scale invasion approaching, here's a look at the situation on the ground in Ukraine.
Russia grinds forward in the east
Analysts at the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), say Russia took about 4,700 sq km (1,800 sq miles) of territory in 2025 - an area about twice the size of the city of Moscow - although Russia claims to have taken 6,000 sq km.
In eastern Ukraine, Moscow's war machine has been churning mile by mile through the wide open fields of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions - also known as the Donbas - surrounding and overwhelming villages and towns.
It has been trying to gain full control of the area along with two more regions to the west - Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Shortly after the invasion, Russia held referendums to try to annexe all these regions - in the same way it had annexed Crimea in 2014 - but it has never had them under full control
Thu, February 19, 2026
[BBC]
The war in Ukraine is about to enter its fifth year. Over the past year, Russian forces have slowly expanded the amount of territory they control, mostly in the east of Ukraine, and have continued their barrage of air strikes on Kyiv and other cities.
Some 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while the BBC has confirmed the names of almost 160,000 people killed fighting on Russia's side.
With the fourth anniversary of the Russia's full-scale invasion approaching, here's a look at the situation on the ground in Ukraine.
Russia grinds forward in the east
Analysts at the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), say Russia took about 4,700 sq km (1,800 sq miles) of territory in 2025 - an area about twice the size of the city of Moscow - although Russia claims to have taken 6,000 sq km.
In eastern Ukraine, Moscow's war machine has been churning mile by mile through the wide open fields of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions - also known as the Donbas - surrounding and overwhelming villages and towns.
It has been trying to gain full control of the area along with two more regions to the west - Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Shortly after the invasion, Russia held referendums to try to annexe all these regions - in the same way it had annexed Crimea in 2014 - but it has never had them under full control
[BBC]
There is some evidence that Elon Musk's decision to deny Russian forces access to his Starlink satellite-based internet service at the start of February has given Ukraine an advantage.
In some areas of the long front line, especially east of the city of Zaporizhzhia, Russian forces appear to have been forced to retreat.
Ukraine requested the move as evidence grew that Starlink was enabling Russian forces to mount increasingly accurate attacks, including multiple instances of units being attached to drones, allowing operators to use real-time video links to guide drones on to targets.
Ukraine hopes that any territorial gains will strengthen the its position at the negotiating table.
It comes after a US-backed peace plan unveiled in November, suggested Ukraine could cede control of all of Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea, along with the areas of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson that Russia currently occupies, to Moscow.
Ukrainian forces would have had to withdraw from parts of Donetsk they still hold and this would become a demilitarised area under de facto Russian control. Russian forces would withdraw from the small areas of Ukraine they currently occupy outside those regions.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has consistently said Ukraine will not hand over the Donbas in exchange for peace, saying such a concession could be used as a springboard for future attacks by Russia.
Key towns targeted
A recent report by the ISW describes a "fortress belt" running 50km (31 miles) through western Donetsk.
"Ukraine has spent the last 11 years pouring time, money, and effort into reinforcing the fortress belt and establishing significant defence industrial and defensive infrastructure," it writes.
A Russian summer offensive near the eastern town of Pokrovsk did make rapid advances just north of the town and Russia has recently made advances in the town itself and to the east of nearby Kostyantynivka.
The town, once a key logistics hub for Ukraine's military, is already in ruins.
[BBC]
Russian officials previously claimed to have captured Pokrovsk, known in Russian as Krasnoarmeysk, which includes a major road and railway junction that used to connect the upper parts of the Donetsk region with key cities to the west, such as Dnipro.
But Ukraine says it still holds northern parts of the town, which could give Moscow a platform to drive north towards the two biggest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in the Donetsk region, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk.
Its fall would be Russia's biggest battlefield victory since it took the city of Avdiivka about 40km (25 miles) to the east in early 2024.
Ukraine is losing ground, but the ISW notes Russia has been trying to take Pokrovsk - a town of about 23 sq km - for nearly two years and that cities in the fortress belt are "significantly larger".
It suggests that it would take Russian forces another two years to seize the remainder of the Donetsk region "at great cost".
Why Donetsk 'fortress belt' matters so much for Ukraine's defences
Four key takeaways from Ukraine talks in Washington
Why did Putin's Russia invade Ukraine?
Russian incursion north of Kharkiv
Further north on the main front line, Russia has been trying to advance on the city of Kupyansk, which analysts suggest could allow it to encircle the northern Donetsk region.
It has also been trying to push Ukrainian forces back from the border with the Russian region of Belgorod.
[BBC]
ISW analysts say Russia is trying to create a buffer zone inside Ukraine's northern borders and get within artillery range of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-biggest city.
Russia's forces have recently gained limited control over a spear of land to the south of Vovchansk that would bring them closer to this target.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says he wants this buffer zone to protect Russia, after Ukrainian forces captured a swathe of territory further north in Kursk in the summer of 2024. Russian forces eventually drove them out, with the help of North Korean troops.
[BBC]
As well as the counter-offensive in the Kursk region, Ukraine has struck air bases deep inside Russia. One of these attacks involved using 100 drones to target nuclear-capable long-range bombers.
The Russian Defence Ministry confirmed the attacks had occurred in five regions of Russia - Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan and Amur - but stated planes had been damaged only in Murmansk and Irkutsk, while in other locations the attacks had been repelled.
More recently a massive attack by Ukrainian drones on Volzhsky, in the Volgograd region in Russia, was reported on 11 Febriuary.
Deep strikes are seen as a critical part of the war - Ukraine is trying to target Russia's war economy to slow the advances on the front line.
Russia has also been carrying out strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure - in particular its energy facilities such as electricity substations and power plants.
Several people have been killed in the attacks and tens of thousands of people across Ukraine have experienced severe power cuts or been left with no running water or heating during some of the coldest months of the winter.
Ceasefire talks
The attacks were paused for a week following a request from US President Donald Trump to Putin.
Trump has been leading efforts to end the war through negotiations, and Zelensky said this month that the US wanted the war to end by June.
However, the most recent round of talks between Russia, Ukraine and the US in Geneva, Switzerland, concluded without a breakthrough on 18 February.
Some progress was made on "military issues", including the location of the front line and ceasefire monitoring, according to a Ukrainian diplomatic source.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said later that "there was meaningful progress" made on both sides, and an agreement to "continue to work towards a peace deal together".
But an agreement on the issue of territory - without which no ceasefire can be envisaged - remains elusive, with Moscow and Kyiv's positions still far apart.
Three years of fighting
Russia's full-scale invasion began with dozens of missile strikes on cities all over Ukraine before dawn on 24 February 2022.
Russian ground troops moved in quickly and within a few weeks were in control of large areas of Ukraine and had advanced to the suburbs of Kyiv.
Russian forces were bombarding Kharkiv, and had taken territory in the east and south as far as Kherson, and surrounded the port city of Mariupol.
[BBC]
But they hit very strong Ukrainian resistance almost everywhere and faced serious logistical problems with poorly-motivated Russian troops suffering shortages of food, water and ammunition.
Ukrainian forces were also quick to deploy Western supplied arms such as the Nlaw anti-tank system, which proved highly effective against the Russian advance.
By October 2022, the picture had changed dramatically and, having failed to take Kyiv, Russia withdrew completely from the north. The following month, Ukrainian forces recaptured the southern city of Kherson.
Since then, the battle has mostly been in the east of Ukraine with Russian forces slowly gaining ground over many months.
Both Kyiv and Moscow have regularly published estimates of the other side's losses but they have been reluctant to detail their own.
As of six months ago, Ukraine's interior ministry had recorded more than 70,000 people as officially missing - both soldiers and civilians - but the breakdown is never given and the true figure may be higher. However, Zelensky said at the start of February that 55,000 soldiers had been killed.
By Dominic Bailey, Mike Hills, Paul Sargeant, Chris Clayton, Kady Wardell, Camilla Costa, Mark Bryson, Sana Dionysiou, Gerry Fletcher, Kate Gaynor and Erwan Rivault
About these maps
To indicate which parts of Ukraine are under control by Russian troops we are using daily assessments published by the Institute for the Study of War with the American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project.
The situation in Ukraine is often fast moving and it is likely there will be times when there have been changes not reflected in the maps.
Life is harsh and dangerous in Russian-run parts of Ukraine, activists and former residents say
YURAS KARMANAU
Thu, February 19, 2026
Civilians gather to receive drinking water distributed by the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry in Mariupol on May 27, 2022, after the seaside city in eastern Ukraine fell to Moscow's troops. (AP Photo, File)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
A woman gets drinking water distributed by authorities in the city of Donetsk in the Russian-controlled part of eastern Ukraine, on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026. (AP Photo)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
A view inside Mariupol's Drama Theater on Monday, April 4, 2022, after the landmark was heavily damaged during fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces that led to Moscow's takeover of the seaside city. (AP Photo, File)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Even now, safely in her new home of Estonia, Inna Vnukova says she can’t purge the terrifying memory of living under Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine early in the war and her family’s harrowing escape.
They hid in a damp basement for days in their village of Kudriashivka after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. In the streets, soldiers waving machine guns bullied residents, set up checkpoints and looted homes. There was constant shelling.
“Everyone was very scared and afraid to go outside,” Vnukova told The Associated Press, with troops seeking out Ukrainian sympathizers and civil servants like her and her husband, Oleksii Vnukov.
In mid-March, she decided that she and her 16-year-old son, Zhenya, would flee the village with her brother's family, even though it meant leaving her husband behind temporarily. They took a risky trip by car to nearby Starobilsk, waving a white sheet amid mortar fire.
“We had already said our goodbyes to life, cursing this Russian world,” said Vnukova, 42. “I’ve been trying to forget this nightmare for four years, but I can’t.”
Many Ukrainians like Vnukova fled the invading forces. Those who stayed risked being detained — or worse — as Russian forces eventually took control of about 20% of the country and its estimated 3 million to 5 million people.
A new, Russian life in the seized regions
After four years of war, life in shattered cities like Mariupol and villages like Kudriashivka remains difficult, with residents facing problems with housing, water, power, heat and health care. Even President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged they have “many truly pressing, urgent problems."
In the illegally annexed regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Russian citizenship, language and culture is forced on residents, including in school lessons and textbooks. By spring 2025, some 3.5 million people in the four regions had been given Russian passports — a requirement to receive vital services like health care.
Some in the regions say they live in fear of being accused of sympathizing with Ukraine. Many have been imprisoned, beaten and killed, according to human rights activists.
Oleksii Vnukov, a court security officer, stayed behind in the village for nearly two weeks. Russian soldiers twice threatened to kill him, including an instance where he and a friend were dragged off the street by soldiers. But he survived and soon also escaped the village.
The family traveled through Russia before making it to Estonia, where Inna works in a printing house and Oleksii, 43, is an electrician.
“All life is leaving the occupied territories,” Vnukov said. “The people there aren’t living, they’re just surviving.”
Mykhailo Savva of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine said the Russian military's practice of wielding “systemic and total control” in the regions continues today.
“Even though a significant number of socially active people have already been detained, Russian special services continue to identify disloyal Ukrainians, extract confessions, and continue to detain people,” Savva said. “Residents face such practices as document checks, mass searches, and denunciations on a daily basis.”
Human rights groups say Russian authorities used “filtration camps” to identify potentially disloyal individuals, as well as anyone who worked for the government, helped the Ukrainian army or had relatives in the military, along with journalists, teachers, scientists and politicians.
Stanislav Shkuta, 25, who lived in occupied Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region, said he narrowly escaped arrest several times before reaching Ukrainian-controlled territory in 2023. He recalled being on a bus that was stopped by Russian soldiers.
“It was horrific. Men and women were asked to strip to the waist to see if they had Ukrainian tattoos,” said Shkuta, who now lives in Estonia. “I turned white with fear, wondering if I’d cleared everything on my phone.”
He said his friends who stayed in Nova Kakhovka say life has worsened, with suspected Ukrainian sympathizers stopped on the street or in surprise door-to-door inspections.
“Today, my friends complain that life there has become impossible,” he said.
Russia established a “vast network of secret and official detention centers where tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians” are held indefinitely without charge, said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties.
“Everyone knows that if you end up in the basement, your life is worth nothing,” she said.
Russian officials have refused to comment on past allegations by U.N. human rights officials that it tortures civilians and prisoners of war.
About 16,000 civilians have been detained illegally, but that number could be much higher because many are held incommunicado. said Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets.
A U.N. report released last summer said that between July 2024 and June 2025, it spoke to 57 civilians who were detained in the occupied regions, and that 52 of them told of severe beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, degradation and threats of violence.
One particularly famous case is that of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, 27, who disappeared in 2023 while reporting near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and died in Russian custody. When her body was handed over to Ukraine in 2025, it bore signs of torture, with some of her organs removed, a prosecutor said.
“Russia uses terror in the occupied territories to physically eliminate active people working in certain fields: teachers, children’s writers, musicians, mayors, journalists, environmentalists. It also intimidates the passive majority,” Matviichuk says.
Destruction in Mariupol
At the start of the war, Russian forces besieged Mariupol before the port city fell in May 2022. The Russian bombing of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater on March 16 of that year killed close to 600 people in and around the building, an AP investigation found, in the single deadliest known attack against civilians in the war.
Most of the city's population of about a half-million fled but many hid in basements, said a former actor who huddled for months with his parents, saying they were nearly killed by the Russian bombing.
The former actor, now in Estonia, spoke on condition of anonymity to not endanger his 76-year-old parents, still in Mariupol. They had to take Russian citizenship to get medical care, as well as a one-time payment equivalent to $1,300 per person as compensation for their destroyed home, he said.
As in other occupied cities, Russification is taking place in Mariupol, changing street names, teaching Moscow-approved curriculum in schools, using Russian phone and TV networks and putting the city in Moscow's time zone.
“But even today, the threat of death has not gone away. Only those who have Russian passports can survive,″ the former actor said, adding that his parents have asked him not to send postcards in Ukrainian because “it could be dangerous.”
Putin "openly states that there is no Ukrainian language, no Ukrainian culture, no Ukrainian nation. And in the occupied territories, these words are turning into terrible practice,” Matviichuk said.
But not everyone opposes the Russian takeover in Mariupol. The former actor says half of the members of his old troupe now support the Kremlin and believe Kyiv “provoked the war.”
Housing is a sore point in Mariupol, where the population is about half of what it was before 2022. New apartment blocks rose from the ruins, but rather than going to those who lost their homes, they are sold to Russian newcomers.
Some who lost their homes have made video appeals to Putin. “You said we ‘don’t abandon our own.’ Do we not count as your own?” said one resident at a mass rally.
At least 12,191 apartments in Mariupol were added to a list of purportedly “ownerless” and abandoned flats to be expropriated in the first half of 2025. Thousands more are being seized elsewhere.
Moscow is encouraging Russian citizens to move to the occupied regions, offering a range of benefits. Teachers, doctors and cultural workers are promised salary supplements if they commit to living there for five years.
Crumbling infrastructure and a shortage of doctors
Years of war and neglect have saddled many occupied cities in eastern Ukraine with serious problems in supplying heat, electricity and water.
The northeastern city of Sievierodonetsk suffered significant destruction before falling to Russia in June 2022. Once home to 140,000 people, only 45,000 remain, mostly elderly or disabled.
Only one ambulance crew serves the whole city, and doctors and other health workers rotate in from Russian regions like Perm to work at its hospital, said a 67-year-old former engineer who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
But she still supports “the great work Putin is doing,” because she was born and raised in the former Soviet Union.
In Alchevsk, a city in the Luhansk region, over half the homes have been without heat for two bitterly cold months. Five warming stations have been set up and utility companies said over 60% of municipal heating networks are in poor shape, without funds for repairs.
Even a pro-Moscow politician, Oleg Tsaryov, has accused authorities of freezing “an entire city.” When the heating system failed in 2006, he noted on social media that Ukrainian authorities "and the entire country stepped in to help and completely replaced the faulty equipment.” But after the Russian takeover, officials had “contrived to repeat this Armageddon scenario all over again,” he added.
In the Donetsk region, water trucks fill barrels outside apartment blocks — but they freeze solid in winter, said a resident who spoke on condition of anonymity because she feared repercussions.
“There's constant squabbling over water,” she said, adding that lines to get the precious resource are “insane,” and people who are away at work often miss the trucks' arrival.
Donetsk residents wrote an appeal for Putin to intervene in what has become "a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe.”
Putin last year acknowledged the plight in the four regions.
“I know how difficult it is now for the residents of the liberated cities and towns. There are many truly pressing, urgent problems," he said, marking the third anniversary of incorporating those areas into Russia. He cited the need for reliable water supplies and access to health care, among other issues, and said he has launched a "large-scale socioeconomic development program” for the regions.
Meanwhile, Inna Vnukova is building a new life in Estonia: She and Oleksii now have a 1-year-old daughter, Alisa. Their son is now 20.
Only about 150 people — including the couple's parents — remain in the village that once was home to 800, Vnukova said, adding that she would like to show her daughter the family's native Luhansk region someday.
“We’ve been dreaming of returning for four years, but we increasingly wonder — what will we see there?” she asked.
Thu, February 19, 2026
Civilians gather to receive drinking water distributed by the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry in Mariupol on May 27, 2022, after the seaside city in eastern Ukraine fell to Moscow's troops. (AP Photo, File)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
A woman gets drinking water distributed by authorities in the city of Donetsk in the Russian-controlled part of eastern Ukraine, on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026. (AP Photo)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
A view inside Mariupol's Drama Theater on Monday, April 4, 2022, after the landmark was heavily damaged during fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces that led to Moscow's takeover of the seaside city. (AP Photo, File)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Even now, safely in her new home of Estonia, Inna Vnukova says she can’t purge the terrifying memory of living under Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine early in the war and her family’s harrowing escape.
They hid in a damp basement for days in their village of Kudriashivka after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. In the streets, soldiers waving machine guns bullied residents, set up checkpoints and looted homes. There was constant shelling.
“Everyone was very scared and afraid to go outside,” Vnukova told The Associated Press, with troops seeking out Ukrainian sympathizers and civil servants like her and her husband, Oleksii Vnukov.
In mid-March, she decided that she and her 16-year-old son, Zhenya, would flee the village with her brother's family, even though it meant leaving her husband behind temporarily. They took a risky trip by car to nearby Starobilsk, waving a white sheet amid mortar fire.
“We had already said our goodbyes to life, cursing this Russian world,” said Vnukova, 42. “I’ve been trying to forget this nightmare for four years, but I can’t.”
Many Ukrainians like Vnukova fled the invading forces. Those who stayed risked being detained — or worse — as Russian forces eventually took control of about 20% of the country and its estimated 3 million to 5 million people.
A new, Russian life in the seized regions
After four years of war, life in shattered cities like Mariupol and villages like Kudriashivka remains difficult, with residents facing problems with housing, water, power, heat and health care. Even President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged they have “many truly pressing, urgent problems."
In the illegally annexed regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Russian citizenship, language and culture is forced on residents, including in school lessons and textbooks. By spring 2025, some 3.5 million people in the four regions had been given Russian passports — a requirement to receive vital services like health care.
Some in the regions say they live in fear of being accused of sympathizing with Ukraine. Many have been imprisoned, beaten and killed, according to human rights activists.
Oleksii Vnukov, a court security officer, stayed behind in the village for nearly two weeks. Russian soldiers twice threatened to kill him, including an instance where he and a friend were dragged off the street by soldiers. But he survived and soon also escaped the village.
The family traveled through Russia before making it to Estonia, where Inna works in a printing house and Oleksii, 43, is an electrician.
“All life is leaving the occupied territories,” Vnukov said. “The people there aren’t living, they’re just surviving.”
Mykhailo Savva of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine said the Russian military's practice of wielding “systemic and total control” in the regions continues today.
“Even though a significant number of socially active people have already been detained, Russian special services continue to identify disloyal Ukrainians, extract confessions, and continue to detain people,” Savva said. “Residents face such practices as document checks, mass searches, and denunciations on a daily basis.”
Human rights groups say Russian authorities used “filtration camps” to identify potentially disloyal individuals, as well as anyone who worked for the government, helped the Ukrainian army or had relatives in the military, along with journalists, teachers, scientists and politicians.
Stanislav Shkuta, 25, who lived in occupied Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region, said he narrowly escaped arrest several times before reaching Ukrainian-controlled territory in 2023. He recalled being on a bus that was stopped by Russian soldiers.
“It was horrific. Men and women were asked to strip to the waist to see if they had Ukrainian tattoos,” said Shkuta, who now lives in Estonia. “I turned white with fear, wondering if I’d cleared everything on my phone.”
He said his friends who stayed in Nova Kakhovka say life has worsened, with suspected Ukrainian sympathizers stopped on the street or in surprise door-to-door inspections.
“Today, my friends complain that life there has become impossible,” he said.
Russia established a “vast network of secret and official detention centers where tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians” are held indefinitely without charge, said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties.
“Everyone knows that if you end up in the basement, your life is worth nothing,” she said.
Russian officials have refused to comment on past allegations by U.N. human rights officials that it tortures civilians and prisoners of war.
About 16,000 civilians have been detained illegally, but that number could be much higher because many are held incommunicado. said Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets.
A U.N. report released last summer said that between July 2024 and June 2025, it spoke to 57 civilians who were detained in the occupied regions, and that 52 of them told of severe beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, degradation and threats of violence.
One particularly famous case is that of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, 27, who disappeared in 2023 while reporting near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and died in Russian custody. When her body was handed over to Ukraine in 2025, it bore signs of torture, with some of her organs removed, a prosecutor said.
“Russia uses terror in the occupied territories to physically eliminate active people working in certain fields: teachers, children’s writers, musicians, mayors, journalists, environmentalists. It also intimidates the passive majority,” Matviichuk says.
Destruction in Mariupol
At the start of the war, Russian forces besieged Mariupol before the port city fell in May 2022. The Russian bombing of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater on March 16 of that year killed close to 600 people in and around the building, an AP investigation found, in the single deadliest known attack against civilians in the war.
Most of the city's population of about a half-million fled but many hid in basements, said a former actor who huddled for months with his parents, saying they were nearly killed by the Russian bombing.
The former actor, now in Estonia, spoke on condition of anonymity to not endanger his 76-year-old parents, still in Mariupol. They had to take Russian citizenship to get medical care, as well as a one-time payment equivalent to $1,300 per person as compensation for their destroyed home, he said.
As in other occupied cities, Russification is taking place in Mariupol, changing street names, teaching Moscow-approved curriculum in schools, using Russian phone and TV networks and putting the city in Moscow's time zone.
“But even today, the threat of death has not gone away. Only those who have Russian passports can survive,″ the former actor said, adding that his parents have asked him not to send postcards in Ukrainian because “it could be dangerous.”
Putin "openly states that there is no Ukrainian language, no Ukrainian culture, no Ukrainian nation. And in the occupied territories, these words are turning into terrible practice,” Matviichuk said.
But not everyone opposes the Russian takeover in Mariupol. The former actor says half of the members of his old troupe now support the Kremlin and believe Kyiv “provoked the war.”
Housing is a sore point in Mariupol, where the population is about half of what it was before 2022. New apartment blocks rose from the ruins, but rather than going to those who lost their homes, they are sold to Russian newcomers.
Some who lost their homes have made video appeals to Putin. “You said we ‘don’t abandon our own.’ Do we not count as your own?” said one resident at a mass rally.
At least 12,191 apartments in Mariupol were added to a list of purportedly “ownerless” and abandoned flats to be expropriated in the first half of 2025. Thousands more are being seized elsewhere.
Moscow is encouraging Russian citizens to move to the occupied regions, offering a range of benefits. Teachers, doctors and cultural workers are promised salary supplements if they commit to living there for five years.
Crumbling infrastructure and a shortage of doctors
Years of war and neglect have saddled many occupied cities in eastern Ukraine with serious problems in supplying heat, electricity and water.
The northeastern city of Sievierodonetsk suffered significant destruction before falling to Russia in June 2022. Once home to 140,000 people, only 45,000 remain, mostly elderly or disabled.
Only one ambulance crew serves the whole city, and doctors and other health workers rotate in from Russian regions like Perm to work at its hospital, said a 67-year-old former engineer who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
But she still supports “the great work Putin is doing,” because she was born and raised in the former Soviet Union.
In Alchevsk, a city in the Luhansk region, over half the homes have been without heat for two bitterly cold months. Five warming stations have been set up and utility companies said over 60% of municipal heating networks are in poor shape, without funds for repairs.
Even a pro-Moscow politician, Oleg Tsaryov, has accused authorities of freezing “an entire city.” When the heating system failed in 2006, he noted on social media that Ukrainian authorities "and the entire country stepped in to help and completely replaced the faulty equipment.” But after the Russian takeover, officials had “contrived to repeat this Armageddon scenario all over again,” he added.
In the Donetsk region, water trucks fill barrels outside apartment blocks — but they freeze solid in winter, said a resident who spoke on condition of anonymity because she feared repercussions.
“There's constant squabbling over water,” she said, adding that lines to get the precious resource are “insane,” and people who are away at work often miss the trucks' arrival.
Donetsk residents wrote an appeal for Putin to intervene in what has become "a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe.”
Putin last year acknowledged the plight in the four regions.
“I know how difficult it is now for the residents of the liberated cities and towns. There are many truly pressing, urgent problems," he said, marking the third anniversary of incorporating those areas into Russia. He cited the need for reliable water supplies and access to health care, among other issues, and said he has launched a "large-scale socioeconomic development program” for the regions.
Meanwhile, Inna Vnukova is building a new life in Estonia: She and Oleksii now have a 1-year-old daughter, Alisa. Their son is now 20.
Only about 150 people — including the couple's parents — remain in the village that once was home to 800, Vnukova said, adding that she would like to show her daughter the family's native Luhansk region someday.
“We’ve been dreaming of returning for four years, but we increasingly wonder — what will we see there?” she asked.
Opinion - Under pressure from Putin and Trump, Zelensky is not giving up
Jonathan Sweet and Mark Toth, opinion contributor
Thu, February 19, 2026
Jonathan Sweet and Mark Toth, opinion contributor
Thu, February 19, 2026
THE HILL
“Nuts!” was the now-famous response delivered at Bastogne in December 1944, by the acting 101st Airborne Division Commander, Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe. “Nuts!” was his answer to an ultimatum from the German forces surrounding him: Surrender or be annihilated.
Seven roads intersected in Bastogne deep in the Ardennes Forest. It became key and decisive terrain during the German counteroffensive codenamed Operation Autumn Mist.
The Germans’ goal was to drive a wedge between the American and British armies in France and recapture the port of Antwerp, denying Allied Forces use of its port facilities to sustain combat operations in Europe. German mechanized forces were tasked to seize the roadways in eastern Belgium to facilitate the operation, and they all converged in Bastogne.
And so an outmanned and outgunned army, had to defend a key piece to terrain. Had Bastogne been lost, the Germans could have advanced rapidly toward their objective amid one of the coldest winters in recent memory.
Fast forward 81 year. Today’s Bastogne is Ukraine’s Fortress Belt in the Donetsk Oblast. All roads lead to the capital city of Kyiv the port of Odesa, and potentially the rest of Eastern Europe.
Control of the Donbas is one of the remaining sticking points in the trilateral negotiations between the U.S., Ukraine and Russia. It is the most contentious. Others include a ceasefire, security guarantees, governance and status of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, like McAuliffe, is faced with a similar decision to consider Russia’s maximalist demands and avoid annihilation.
He faces pressure not only from Russian President Vladimir Putin, but also from President Trump, who recently told reporters, “Well, Zelensky is going to have to get moving. Russia wants to make a deal, and Zelensky is going to have to get moving otherwise, he’s going to miss a great opportunity. He has to move.”
Zelensky claims that U.S. officials assured him that the war will end “quickly” if Ukraine cedes the Donbas. As Trump put it Monday, “Ukraine better come to the table fast.”
But Zelensky has pushed back. It is “not fair,” he says for Trump to keep “publicly calling on Ukraine, not Russia, to make concessions for peace.” He added that “While it might be easier for Trump to pressure Ukraine than the much larger Russia, the way to create a lasting peace is not to give victory” to Russia.
Zelensky had hoped the Geneva talks would prove “serious, substantive … but honestly sometimes it feels like the sides are talking about completely different things.”
He is right. Ukraine seeks a lasting peace; Russia is just seeking a pathway to defeat Ukraine. Putin needs time and friction between Trump and Zelensky. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s negotiators, are giving him both.
Putin adviser and noted hardliner Vladimir Medinsky, who was recently reappointed to the role of chief negotiator, promptly halted talks on day one. U.S. officials claimed that peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine got “stuck,” implying that the sticking point on Tuesday was the Donbas.
Yesterday, talks between Ukraine and Russia ended after just two hours. Zelensky characterized the negotiations as “difficult” and accused Russia of “trying to drag out negotiations.”
For Medinsky it was mission accomplished. No deal, plus additional time to avoid U.S. secondary sanctions.
Medinsky effectively tapped Trump out, while promising that another meeting would take place “soon.”
Meanwhile, Kirill Dmitriev’s $12 trillion economic deal — a would-be bribe, really — hangs in the balance.
Witkoff and Kushner need Zelensky to hand over the Donbas, but he is not going to do that. What part of ‘no’ does Team Trump not understand?
Zelensky has said that any deal concerning the Donbas would have to be voted upon by the Ukrainian people in a referendum — one he believes would be rejected. He is right. A poll conducted in December revealed that 75 percent of Ukrainians oppose a unilateral Ukrainian withdrawal.
“Emotionally, people will never forgive this,” he said of a hypothetical surrender of the Donbas region. “They will not forgive … me, they will not forgive [the U.S.] … Ukrainians can’t understand why they would be asked to give up additional land. This is part of our country, all these citizens, the flag, the land.”
Unlike McAuliffe in 1944, Zelensky may not have a Gen. George Patton coming to his rescue — not from the U.S., NATO, the EU or the “coalition of the willing.” But he understands what is at stake in the Donbas, which is why he has given his own “Nuts!” answer to Putin and Trump.
Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer and led the US European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014.
“Nuts!” was the now-famous response delivered at Bastogne in December 1944, by the acting 101st Airborne Division Commander, Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe. “Nuts!” was his answer to an ultimatum from the German forces surrounding him: Surrender or be annihilated.
Seven roads intersected in Bastogne deep in the Ardennes Forest. It became key and decisive terrain during the German counteroffensive codenamed Operation Autumn Mist.
The Germans’ goal was to drive a wedge between the American and British armies in France and recapture the port of Antwerp, denying Allied Forces use of its port facilities to sustain combat operations in Europe. German mechanized forces were tasked to seize the roadways in eastern Belgium to facilitate the operation, and they all converged in Bastogne.
And so an outmanned and outgunned army, had to defend a key piece to terrain. Had Bastogne been lost, the Germans could have advanced rapidly toward their objective amid one of the coldest winters in recent memory.
Fast forward 81 year. Today’s Bastogne is Ukraine’s Fortress Belt in the Donetsk Oblast. All roads lead to the capital city of Kyiv the port of Odesa, and potentially the rest of Eastern Europe.
Control of the Donbas is one of the remaining sticking points in the trilateral negotiations between the U.S., Ukraine and Russia. It is the most contentious. Others include a ceasefire, security guarantees, governance and status of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, like McAuliffe, is faced with a similar decision to consider Russia’s maximalist demands and avoid annihilation.
He faces pressure not only from Russian President Vladimir Putin, but also from President Trump, who recently told reporters, “Well, Zelensky is going to have to get moving. Russia wants to make a deal, and Zelensky is going to have to get moving otherwise, he’s going to miss a great opportunity. He has to move.”
Zelensky claims that U.S. officials assured him that the war will end “quickly” if Ukraine cedes the Donbas. As Trump put it Monday, “Ukraine better come to the table fast.”
But Zelensky has pushed back. It is “not fair,” he says for Trump to keep “publicly calling on Ukraine, not Russia, to make concessions for peace.” He added that “While it might be easier for Trump to pressure Ukraine than the much larger Russia, the way to create a lasting peace is not to give victory” to Russia.
Zelensky had hoped the Geneva talks would prove “serious, substantive … but honestly sometimes it feels like the sides are talking about completely different things.”
He is right. Ukraine seeks a lasting peace; Russia is just seeking a pathway to defeat Ukraine. Putin needs time and friction between Trump and Zelensky. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s negotiators, are giving him both.
Putin adviser and noted hardliner Vladimir Medinsky, who was recently reappointed to the role of chief negotiator, promptly halted talks on day one. U.S. officials claimed that peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine got “stuck,” implying that the sticking point on Tuesday was the Donbas.
Yesterday, talks between Ukraine and Russia ended after just two hours. Zelensky characterized the negotiations as “difficult” and accused Russia of “trying to drag out negotiations.”
For Medinsky it was mission accomplished. No deal, plus additional time to avoid U.S. secondary sanctions.
Medinsky effectively tapped Trump out, while promising that another meeting would take place “soon.”
Meanwhile, Kirill Dmitriev’s $12 trillion economic deal — a would-be bribe, really — hangs in the balance.
Witkoff and Kushner need Zelensky to hand over the Donbas, but he is not going to do that. What part of ‘no’ does Team Trump not understand?
Zelensky has said that any deal concerning the Donbas would have to be voted upon by the Ukrainian people in a referendum — one he believes would be rejected. He is right. A poll conducted in December revealed that 75 percent of Ukrainians oppose a unilateral Ukrainian withdrawal.
“Emotionally, people will never forgive this,” he said of a hypothetical surrender of the Donbas region. “They will not forgive … me, they will not forgive [the U.S.] … Ukrainians can’t understand why they would be asked to give up additional land. This is part of our country, all these citizens, the flag, the land.”
Unlike McAuliffe in 1944, Zelensky may not have a Gen. George Patton coming to his rescue — not from the U.S., NATO, the EU or the “coalition of the willing.” But he understands what is at stake in the Donbas, which is why he has given his own “Nuts!” answer to Putin and Trump.
Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer and led the US European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014.
Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. They are the co-founders of INTREP360 and the INTREP360 Intelligence Report on Substack.
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
Ukraine war briefing: Trump sees conflict as ‘very unfair’ for war dead and US taxpayers, says White House
Guardian staff and agencies
Wed, February 18, 2026
Donald Trump sees the Ukraine situation as unfair ‘not just for Russians and Ukrainians who have lost their lives’, says the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Guardian staff and agencies
Wed, February 18, 2026
Donald Trump sees the Ukraine situation as unfair ‘not just for Russians and Ukrainians who have lost their lives’, says the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Photograph: Andrew Thomas/CNP/
Donald Trump views the Ukraine war as very unfair on not only those killed but also on US taxpayers, the White House has said. Speaking in Washington after two days of trilateral peace talks in Geneva ended without a breakthrough, the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said there had been “meaningful progress made” with pledges “to continue to work towards a peace deal together”. But she also said Trump viewed the situation – nearly four years into the war – as “very unfair, not just for Russians and Ukrainians who have lost their lives, but also for the American people and the American taxpayer who were footing the bill for this war effort before President Trump put a stop to it”. In March last year the Trump administration suspended delivery of all US military aid to Ukraine, blocking billions of dollars’ worth of crucial shipments, as the White House piled pressure on Kyiv to reach a peace deal with Russia. The US and its allies later developed a mechanism where Ukraine is supplied with weapons from US stocks bought with funds from Nato countries.
After the two days of US-brokered talks in Geneva between Ukraine and Russia ended on Wednesday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was dissatisfied with the outcome. Officials from Kyiv and Moscow both said the discussions were difficult. At the conclusion the delegations said they would meet again, without providing a date, while Zelenskyy and the White House suggested discussions could occur soon. As fighting continued in the war, Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address: “As of today, we cannot say that the result is sufficient. The military discussed certain issues seriously and substantively. Sensitive political matters, possible compromises and the necessary meeting of leaders have not yet been sufficiently addressed.”
Zelenskyy wrote on X as the two sides met in the US-mediated talks that Russia was “trying to drag out negotiations that could already have reached the final stage”. Moments after his statement, the delegations broke off the talks after just two hours. Pjotr Sauer reports that Zelenskyy said after the talks that “some groundwork” had been done, “but for now the positions differ, because the negotiations were not easy”. The Ukrainian president said the status of Russian-occupied territories in eastern Ukraine and the future of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which remains under Moscow’s control, were among the most contentious unresolved issues.
Russian crude shipments in January made up the smallest portion of India’s oil imports since late 2022, according to data from industry sources. India, the world’s third-biggest oil importer and consumer, ramped up purchases of discounted Russian oil after Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with volumes topping 2m barrels per day in some months. However, western sanctions over the war and pressure to clinch a trade deal with the US have forced India to scale back Russian oil purchases, the data showed. China has, since November, replaced India as Russia’s top buyer of seaborne crude.
Ukraine imposed sanctions against the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, on Wednesday, vowing to “increase countermeasures” against Minsk for wartime assistance to close ally Russia. “We will significantly intensify countermeasures against all forms of [Lukashenko’s] assistance in the killing of Ukrainians,” Zelenskyy said on social media. The Belarusian presidency’s press service did not immediately respond to a request for comment. With Lukashenko already under US and European sanctions, the move is largely symbolic.
The owner of Ukrainian football club Shakhtar Donetsk has donated more than $200,000 to the skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych. The athlete was disqualified from the Winter Olympics before competing over the use of a helmet depicting Ukrainian athletes killed in the war with Russia, the club said on Tuesday.
A delegation of Democratic US senators was returning Wednesday from a trip to Ukraine, hoping to spur action in Congress for a series of sanctions meant to economically cripple Moscow and pressure President Vladimir Putin to make key concessions in peace talks. It was the first time US senators have visited Odesa, an economically crucial Ukrainian Black Sea port city that has been particularly targeted by Russia in the war. “One of the things we heard wherever we stopped today was that the people of Ukraine want a peace deal, but they want a peace deal that preserves their sovereignty, that recognises the importance of the integrity of Ukraine,” said the senator Jeanne Shaheen.
Hungary is suspending its shipments of diesel to neighbouring Ukraine until interruptions to Russian oil supplies via a pipeline that crosses Ukrainian territory are resolved, Hungary’s foreign minister said. Amid accusations from Hungary and Slovakia that Kyiv has deliberately held up supplies, Péter Szijjártó said in a video posted on social media that the interruption to oil deliveries was “a political decision made by the Ukrainian president himself”. Ukraine has denied such accusations.
Donald Trump views the Ukraine war as very unfair on not only those killed but also on US taxpayers, the White House has said. Speaking in Washington after two days of trilateral peace talks in Geneva ended without a breakthrough, the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said there had been “meaningful progress made” with pledges “to continue to work towards a peace deal together”. But she also said Trump viewed the situation – nearly four years into the war – as “very unfair, not just for Russians and Ukrainians who have lost their lives, but also for the American people and the American taxpayer who were footing the bill for this war effort before President Trump put a stop to it”. In March last year the Trump administration suspended delivery of all US military aid to Ukraine, blocking billions of dollars’ worth of crucial shipments, as the White House piled pressure on Kyiv to reach a peace deal with Russia. The US and its allies later developed a mechanism where Ukraine is supplied with weapons from US stocks bought with funds from Nato countries.
After the two days of US-brokered talks in Geneva between Ukraine and Russia ended on Wednesday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was dissatisfied with the outcome. Officials from Kyiv and Moscow both said the discussions were difficult. At the conclusion the delegations said they would meet again, without providing a date, while Zelenskyy and the White House suggested discussions could occur soon. As fighting continued in the war, Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address: “As of today, we cannot say that the result is sufficient. The military discussed certain issues seriously and substantively. Sensitive political matters, possible compromises and the necessary meeting of leaders have not yet been sufficiently addressed.”
Zelenskyy wrote on X as the two sides met in the US-mediated talks that Russia was “trying to drag out negotiations that could already have reached the final stage”. Moments after his statement, the delegations broke off the talks after just two hours. Pjotr Sauer reports that Zelenskyy said after the talks that “some groundwork” had been done, “but for now the positions differ, because the negotiations were not easy”. The Ukrainian president said the status of Russian-occupied territories in eastern Ukraine and the future of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which remains under Moscow’s control, were among the most contentious unresolved issues.
Russian crude shipments in January made up the smallest portion of India’s oil imports since late 2022, according to data from industry sources. India, the world’s third-biggest oil importer and consumer, ramped up purchases of discounted Russian oil after Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with volumes topping 2m barrels per day in some months. However, western sanctions over the war and pressure to clinch a trade deal with the US have forced India to scale back Russian oil purchases, the data showed. China has, since November, replaced India as Russia’s top buyer of seaborne crude.
Ukraine imposed sanctions against the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, on Wednesday, vowing to “increase countermeasures” against Minsk for wartime assistance to close ally Russia. “We will significantly intensify countermeasures against all forms of [Lukashenko’s] assistance in the killing of Ukrainians,” Zelenskyy said on social media. The Belarusian presidency’s press service did not immediately respond to a request for comment. With Lukashenko already under US and European sanctions, the move is largely symbolic.
The owner of Ukrainian football club Shakhtar Donetsk has donated more than $200,000 to the skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych. The athlete was disqualified from the Winter Olympics before competing over the use of a helmet depicting Ukrainian athletes killed in the war with Russia, the club said on Tuesday.
A delegation of Democratic US senators was returning Wednesday from a trip to Ukraine, hoping to spur action in Congress for a series of sanctions meant to economically cripple Moscow and pressure President Vladimir Putin to make key concessions in peace talks. It was the first time US senators have visited Odesa, an economically crucial Ukrainian Black Sea port city that has been particularly targeted by Russia in the war. “One of the things we heard wherever we stopped today was that the people of Ukraine want a peace deal, but they want a peace deal that preserves their sovereignty, that recognises the importance of the integrity of Ukraine,” said the senator Jeanne Shaheen.
Hungary is suspending its shipments of diesel to neighbouring Ukraine until interruptions to Russian oil supplies via a pipeline that crosses Ukrainian territory are resolved, Hungary’s foreign minister said. Amid accusations from Hungary and Slovakia that Kyiv has deliberately held up supplies, Péter Szijjártó said in a video posted on social media that the interruption to oil deliveries was “a political decision made by the Ukrainian president himself”. Ukraine has denied such accusations.
Four Years In, Putin’s Ukraine Conquest Is Still Stalled – But He’s Still Got Trump On His Side
S.V. Date
Thu, February 19, 2026
“Ukraine better come to the table fast, is all I’m telling you,” Trump told reporters Monday night on the flight back from his South Florida country club, Mar-a-Lago. It was a repeat of the warning he gave Zelenskyy Friday as he left for his three-day golf weekend: “Well, Zelenskyy is going to have to get moving. Russia wants to make a deal, and Zelenskyy is going to have to get moving, otherwise he’s going to miss a great opportunity. He has to move.”
In reality, Zelenskyy has repeatedly accepted U.S. calls for a ceasefire while negotiators work out a final peace agreement, while Putin has rejected that concept as he continues to kill and maim Ukrainian civilians with missiles and drones.
Those attacks and deaths have surged dramatically in the year since Trump took office last January. In Biden’s final year in the White House, there were 13,897 missiles and drones launched at Ukraine by Russia, or 38 on an average day, according to figures compiled by the Institute for the Study of War. In Trump’s first year back in office, there were 57,333 missiles and drones, or 157 per day – a 300% increase. The escalation coincided with the cutoff of new U.S. military aid to Ukraine under Trump.
To experts and analysts, Trump’s choice to pressure Zelenskyy rather than Putin is simple: He sees Ukraine as weaker and therefore easier to coerce.
“Trump wants any kind of deal he can get that results in a ceasefire, hoping this will be evidence for his Nobel Peace Prize campaign,” said John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers during his first term and now a target of Trump’s Justice Department. “He doesn’t care about the substance of an agreement, just getting one.”
Jim Townsend, who has worked at both the Pentagon and NATO and is now an analyst with the Center for a New American Security, said Putin knows Trump will never truly pressure him.
“Putin will keep stalling until he gets his way, either by Trump forcing Zelenskyy to the table or by some battlefield victory, which doesn’t look likely either,” Townsend said. “So he will always demand his maximalist position, knowing Zelenskyy will never agree and that irritates Trump, who squeezes Zelenskyy even more.”
To Russia With Love
Trump White House aides did not respond to HuffPost queries. At a news briefing on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, asked about Zelenskyy’s comment that it was unfair to demand concessions of Ukraine but not Russia, repeated Trump’s frequent lie that the U.S. was bankrolling Ukraine’s defense under Biden
“The president views this entire situation as very unfair, not just for Russians and Ukrainians who have lost their lives, but also for the American people and the American taxpayer who were footing the bill for this war effort before President Trump put a stop to it,” she said.
In fact, America’s allies in Western Europe have provided more in both military and financial assistance to Ukraine since the invasion started four years ago.
Trump’s statement Monday night was in keeping with numerous other remarks Trump has made since returning to office. During the infamous visit by Zelenskyy to the Oval Office a year ago, Trump essentially blamed Ukraine for getting invaded and chided Zelenskyy for starting a war against a larger and more powerful neighbor.
Last June, in response to a Ukrainian attack on a Russian airfield, Trump again sided with Russia.
“They gave Putin a reason to go in and bomb the hell out of them last night,” he told reporters.
Trump, who at the time of the invasion called Putin a “genius” and “savvy” and later claimed while campaigning for office that his great relationship with Putin would let him end the fighting on his first day back in the White House, has instead failed to convince the dictator to make any concessions.
Heading into an August meeting with Putin in Alaska, Trump claimed there would be “consequences” for Putin if he did not agree to a ceasefire. Trump literally rolled out a red carpet for Putin and honored him with a flyover of military jets. Putin did not agree to a ceasefire and suffered no consequences.
And last month, Trump boasted that Putin had agreed to his request not to attack Ukrainian cities and towns for a week because of the extreme cold weather. Putin continued the attacks throughout the entire period, after which Trump claimed Putin had honored his pledge.
Trump, nevertheless, continues to boast of his “relationship” with the murderous dictator whose actions in 2023 led to war crime charges by the International Criminal Court. In late August, he showed off a photo of himself and Putin that Putin had sent him. More recently, he has hung a large photo of the two of them in the West Wing.
“Trump looks more and more impotent,” said Fiona Hill, a Russia expert who served on the White House National Security Council in Trump’s first term. “Which is more why he wants Zelenskyy to give it up, to capitulate.”
The de facto tilt away from Ukraine and toward Russia was tacitly acknowledged by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to the Munich Security Conference last weekend, where he skipped a meeting to discuss Ukraine with traditional U.S. allies. His visit there was highlighted by a speech in which he emphasized a “blood and soil” Christian nationalist message regarding the bonds between the United States and Europe, rather than the one of shared values of individualism and freedom that sprang from the European Enlightenment that American leaders have historically praised.
That new approach was then punctuated by visits to Hungary and Slovakia, which are currently led by the most pro-Russia leaders in Europe. Rubio, who seven years ago warned about Hungarian leader Viktor Orban’s turn toward autocracy, on Monday gave him the endorsement of the U.S. government in his coming election.
His remarks and his itinerary worried Europeans and their leaders, who see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine not as a faraway problem, but a potential preview of what might happen to their own countries.
In response to a query, State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott insulted HuffPost but did not address why Rubio had visited only pro-Russia leaders after his Munich visit and why he had endorsed Orban.
“S.V. Date is a low IQ, anti-Trump clown masquerading as a blogger,” Pigott wrote in a statement. “The secretary met with dozens of leaders from all across the world last weekend in Munich, including Volodymyr Zelenskyy. To claim they were all pro-Russian is an idiotic and bizarre claim. In addition to his historic speech at the Munich Security Conference, Secretary Rubio visited European allies in the region.”
It was not immediately clear what made Rubio’s speech “historic.”
Putin’s Four-Year-Old Quagmire
Ironically, Trump’s continued insistence that Ukraine give away its territory to get a ceasefire comes as its army has increased the lethality of its strikes against Russian troops in Ukraine. According to both Zelenskyy and outside analysts, Ukraine’s military is now killing and injuring more invading soldiers each month than the 35,000 or so that Putin is able to conscript to replace them.
“Increased losses on the battlefield and declining, expensive recruitment likely contributed to the loss rate finally exceeding recruitment rate,” said Kateryna Stepanenko, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of War.
In a report last month, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that Russia, since the invasion began in 2022, has suffered 1.2 million military casualties, including as many as 325,000 deaths. In contrast, the United States lost 47,434 service members over a decade in Vietnam and 6,897 over two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As a result, Putin has implemented an involuntary draft in some areas of Russia as well as increased his reliance on mercenaries from Central Asia, Cambodia, Pakistan and Africa, among other places.
“There are all kinds of people who are getting press-ganged into going to the front,” Hill said.
Leaders of several African nations, in fact, have publicly called for Putin to stop recruiting young men — who are frequently getting killed quickly after deployment — from their countries.
Last week, Kenya’s Foreign Minister Musalia Mudavadi, who called the recruitment of Kenyan nationals “unacceptable and clandestine,” announced a trip to Moscow to discuss the matter.
Experts also doubt that Putin’s decision to increase his attacks on civilians in their homes and workplaces will have the intended effect of wearing down their will.
“This is like the blitz bombing campaign… he wants to punish them and pummel them,” Hill said. “What it does do is make the people under bombardment more willing to resist.”
“His offensives don’t take much ground and the price is high for what he does take,” Townsend said of Putin. “So hitting Ukrainian civilians and the energy grid is his weapon to hit Zelenskyy domestically, hoping to get the people riled up and moving against Zelenskyy. That tactic didn’t work for Hitler against the Brits and I don’t think it will work with Ukraine either.”
Trump’s affinity for Putin, now manifesting itself in his war of conquest, is decades old. Trump publicly tried to befriend the dictator in 2013 and spent years, including the period when he ran for president in 2016, trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
In that election, Trump willingly accepted and used Russian assistance as he campaigned against Democrat Hillary Clinton, even though he knew it was coming from Russia. He later stood beside Putin at a news conference in Helsinki and said he believed Putin’s denials of interfering in the election over his own intelligence agencies’ analysis.
To this day, Trump continues to call the investigation into that election interference a “hoax” that has also unfairly impugned Putin’s good name.
S.V. Date
Thu, February 19, 2026
HUFFPOST
In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin talk on the tarmac upon their arrival for a U.S.-Russia summit on Ukraine at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15, 2025. Sergey Bobylev / Pool / AFP via Getty ImagesM
WASHINGTON – Four years after launching an invasion to seize neighboring Ukraine in a matter of days, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin can no longer replenish the tens of thousands of soldiers he is losing per month, has watched his ground offensive grind to a halt and has escalated a war-crime campaign to instead kill civilians. None of it has convinced President Donald Trump to drop his tacit approval of the invasion.
Rather than resume defensive weapons shipments to Ukraine that had existed under predecessor Joe Biden or further pressure Putin economically to end the biggest and deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, Trump is instead still leaning on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to give up the territory that Putin wants.
In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin talk on the tarmac upon their arrival for a U.S.-Russia summit on Ukraine at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15, 2025. Sergey Bobylev / Pool / AFP via Getty ImagesM
WASHINGTON – Four years after launching an invasion to seize neighboring Ukraine in a matter of days, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin can no longer replenish the tens of thousands of soldiers he is losing per month, has watched his ground offensive grind to a halt and has escalated a war-crime campaign to instead kill civilians. None of it has convinced President Donald Trump to drop his tacit approval of the invasion.
Rather than resume defensive weapons shipments to Ukraine that had existed under predecessor Joe Biden or further pressure Putin economically to end the biggest and deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, Trump is instead still leaning on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to give up the territory that Putin wants.
“Ukraine better come to the table fast, is all I’m telling you,” Trump told reporters Monday night on the flight back from his South Florida country club, Mar-a-Lago. It was a repeat of the warning he gave Zelenskyy Friday as he left for his three-day golf weekend: “Well, Zelenskyy is going to have to get moving. Russia wants to make a deal, and Zelenskyy is going to have to get moving, otherwise he’s going to miss a great opportunity. He has to move.”
In reality, Zelenskyy has repeatedly accepted U.S. calls for a ceasefire while negotiators work out a final peace agreement, while Putin has rejected that concept as he continues to kill and maim Ukrainian civilians with missiles and drones.
Those attacks and deaths have surged dramatically in the year since Trump took office last January. In Biden’s final year in the White House, there were 13,897 missiles and drones launched at Ukraine by Russia, or 38 on an average day, according to figures compiled by the Institute for the Study of War. In Trump’s first year back in office, there were 57,333 missiles and drones, or 157 per day – a 300% increase. The escalation coincided with the cutoff of new U.S. military aid to Ukraine under Trump.
To experts and analysts, Trump’s choice to pressure Zelenskyy rather than Putin is simple: He sees Ukraine as weaker and therefore easier to coerce.
“Trump wants any kind of deal he can get that results in a ceasefire, hoping this will be evidence for his Nobel Peace Prize campaign,” said John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers during his first term and now a target of Trump’s Justice Department. “He doesn’t care about the substance of an agreement, just getting one.”
Jim Townsend, who has worked at both the Pentagon and NATO and is now an analyst with the Center for a New American Security, said Putin knows Trump will never truly pressure him.
“Putin will keep stalling until he gets his way, either by Trump forcing Zelenskyy to the table or by some battlefield victory, which doesn’t look likely either,” Townsend said. “So he will always demand his maximalist position, knowing Zelenskyy will never agree and that irritates Trump, who squeezes Zelenskyy even more.”
To Russia With Love
Trump White House aides did not respond to HuffPost queries. At a news briefing on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, asked about Zelenskyy’s comment that it was unfair to demand concessions of Ukraine but not Russia, repeated Trump’s frequent lie that the U.S. was bankrolling Ukraine’s defense under Biden
“The president views this entire situation as very unfair, not just for Russians and Ukrainians who have lost their lives, but also for the American people and the American taxpayer who were footing the bill for this war effort before President Trump put a stop to it,” she said.
In fact, America’s allies in Western Europe have provided more in both military and financial assistance to Ukraine since the invasion started four years ago.
Trump’s statement Monday night was in keeping with numerous other remarks Trump has made since returning to office. During the infamous visit by Zelenskyy to the Oval Office a year ago, Trump essentially blamed Ukraine for getting invaded and chided Zelenskyy for starting a war against a larger and more powerful neighbor.
Last June, in response to a Ukrainian attack on a Russian airfield, Trump again sided with Russia.
“They gave Putin a reason to go in and bomb the hell out of them last night,” he told reporters.
Trump, who at the time of the invasion called Putin a “genius” and “savvy” and later claimed while campaigning for office that his great relationship with Putin would let him end the fighting on his first day back in the White House, has instead failed to convince the dictator to make any concessions.
Heading into an August meeting with Putin in Alaska, Trump claimed there would be “consequences” for Putin if he did not agree to a ceasefire. Trump literally rolled out a red carpet for Putin and honored him with a flyover of military jets. Putin did not agree to a ceasefire and suffered no consequences.
And last month, Trump boasted that Putin had agreed to his request not to attack Ukrainian cities and towns for a week because of the extreme cold weather. Putin continued the attacks throughout the entire period, after which Trump claimed Putin had honored his pledge.
Trump, nevertheless, continues to boast of his “relationship” with the murderous dictator whose actions in 2023 led to war crime charges by the International Criminal Court. In late August, he showed off a photo of himself and Putin that Putin had sent him. More recently, he has hung a large photo of the two of them in the West Wing.
“Trump looks more and more impotent,” said Fiona Hill, a Russia expert who served on the White House National Security Council in Trump’s first term. “Which is more why he wants Zelenskyy to give it up, to capitulate.”
The de facto tilt away from Ukraine and toward Russia was tacitly acknowledged by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to the Munich Security Conference last weekend, where he skipped a meeting to discuss Ukraine with traditional U.S. allies. His visit there was highlighted by a speech in which he emphasized a “blood and soil” Christian nationalist message regarding the bonds between the United States and Europe, rather than the one of shared values of individualism and freedom that sprang from the European Enlightenment that American leaders have historically praised.
That new approach was then punctuated by visits to Hungary and Slovakia, which are currently led by the most pro-Russia leaders in Europe. Rubio, who seven years ago warned about Hungarian leader Viktor Orban’s turn toward autocracy, on Monday gave him the endorsement of the U.S. government in his coming election.
His remarks and his itinerary worried Europeans and their leaders, who see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine not as a faraway problem, but a potential preview of what might happen to their own countries.
In response to a query, State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott insulted HuffPost but did not address why Rubio had visited only pro-Russia leaders after his Munich visit and why he had endorsed Orban.
“S.V. Date is a low IQ, anti-Trump clown masquerading as a blogger,” Pigott wrote in a statement. “The secretary met with dozens of leaders from all across the world last weekend in Munich, including Volodymyr Zelenskyy. To claim they were all pro-Russian is an idiotic and bizarre claim. In addition to his historic speech at the Munich Security Conference, Secretary Rubio visited European allies in the region.”
It was not immediately clear what made Rubio’s speech “historic.”
Putin’s Four-Year-Old Quagmire
Ironically, Trump’s continued insistence that Ukraine give away its territory to get a ceasefire comes as its army has increased the lethality of its strikes against Russian troops in Ukraine. According to both Zelenskyy and outside analysts, Ukraine’s military is now killing and injuring more invading soldiers each month than the 35,000 or so that Putin is able to conscript to replace them.
“Increased losses on the battlefield and declining, expensive recruitment likely contributed to the loss rate finally exceeding recruitment rate,” said Kateryna Stepanenko, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of War.
In a report last month, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that Russia, since the invasion began in 2022, has suffered 1.2 million military casualties, including as many as 325,000 deaths. In contrast, the United States lost 47,434 service members over a decade in Vietnam and 6,897 over two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As a result, Putin has implemented an involuntary draft in some areas of Russia as well as increased his reliance on mercenaries from Central Asia, Cambodia, Pakistan and Africa, among other places.
“There are all kinds of people who are getting press-ganged into going to the front,” Hill said.
Leaders of several African nations, in fact, have publicly called for Putin to stop recruiting young men — who are frequently getting killed quickly after deployment — from their countries.
Last week, Kenya’s Foreign Minister Musalia Mudavadi, who called the recruitment of Kenyan nationals “unacceptable and clandestine,” announced a trip to Moscow to discuss the matter.
Experts also doubt that Putin’s decision to increase his attacks on civilians in their homes and workplaces will have the intended effect of wearing down their will.
“This is like the blitz bombing campaign… he wants to punish them and pummel them,” Hill said. “What it does do is make the people under bombardment more willing to resist.”
“His offensives don’t take much ground and the price is high for what he does take,” Townsend said of Putin. “So hitting Ukrainian civilians and the energy grid is his weapon to hit Zelenskyy domestically, hoping to get the people riled up and moving against Zelenskyy. That tactic didn’t work for Hitler against the Brits and I don’t think it will work with Ukraine either.”
Trump’s affinity for Putin, now manifesting itself in his war of conquest, is decades old. Trump publicly tried to befriend the dictator in 2013 and spent years, including the period when he ran for president in 2016, trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
In that election, Trump willingly accepted and used Russian assistance as he campaigned against Democrat Hillary Clinton, even though he knew it was coming from Russia. He later stood beside Putin at a news conference in Helsinki and said he believed Putin’s denials of interfering in the election over his own intelligence agencies’ analysis.
To this day, Trump continues to call the investigation into that election interference a “hoax” that has also unfairly impugned Putin’s good name.
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