By Big Serge, Substack, 3/28/25

The Russo-Ukrainian War is now three years old, and the third Z-Day, on February 24, 2025, was marked by a substantively different tone than prior iterations. On the battlefield, Russian forces stand significantly closer to victory than they have at any point since the opening weeks of the war. After reversals early in the war as Ukraine took advantage of Russian miscalculations and insufficient force generation, the Russian army surged in 2024, collapsing Ukraine’s front in southern Donetsk and pushing the front forward towards the remaining citadels of the Donbas.

At the same time, 2025’s Z-Day was the first under the new American administration, and hopes were high in some quarters that President Trump could bring about a negotiated settlement and end the war prematurely. The new tenor seemed to be made abundantly clear in an explosive February 28 Oval Office meeting between Trump, Vice President Vance, and Zelensky, which ended in the Ukrainian president being ignominiously shouted down and evicted from the White House. This followed an abrupt announcement that Ukraine was to be cut off from American ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) until Zelensky apologized for his conduct.

In an information sphere rife with rumors, inscrutable diplomatic maneuvering, and heavy handed posturing (clouded further by the distinctive style and personality of Trump himself), it is very hard to figure out what might actually matter. We’re left with a bizarre juxtaposition: based on the explosive vignettes of Trump and Zelensky, many might hope for an abrupt course change on the war, or at least a revision of the American position. On the ground, however, things continue much as they have, with the Russians grinding forward along a sprawling front. The infantryman entrenched near Pokrovsk, listening for the whirring of drones overhead, could be forgiven for not feeling that much has changed at all.

I have never made any bones about my belief that the war in Ukraine will be resolved militarily: that is, it will be fought to its conclusion and end in the defeat of Ukraine in the east, Russian control of vast swathes of the country, and the subordination of a rump Ukraine to Russian interests. Trump’s self conception is greatly tied up in his image as a “dealmaker”, and his view of foreign affairs as fundamentally transactional in nature. As the American president, he has the power to force this framing on Ukraine, but not on Russia. There remain intractable gulfs between Russia’s war aims and what Kiev is willing to discuss, and it is doubtful that Trump will be able to reconcile these differences. Russia, however, does not need to accept a partial victory simply in the name of goodwill and negotiation. Moscow has recourse to a more primal form of power. The sword predates and transcends the pen. Negotiation, as such, must bow to the reality of the battlefield, and no amount of sharp deal making can transcend the more ancient law of blood.

The Great Misadventure: Front Collapse in Kursk

When the history of this war is laid out retrospectively, no shortage of ink will be lavished on Ukraine’s eight month operation in Kursk. From the broader perspective of the wartime narrative, Ukraine’s initial incursion into Russia filled a variety of needs, with the AFU “taking the fight” to Russia and seizing the initiative, albeit on a limited front, after months of continuous Russian advances in the Donbas.

Notwithstanding the immense hyperbole that followed the launch of Ukraine’s Kursk Operation (which I facetiously nicknamed “Krepost”, in an homage to the 1943 German plan for its own Battle of Kursk), in the months that followed this was undoubtedly a sector of great significance, and not only because it brought the distinctive of Ukraine holding territory within the prewar Russian Federation. Based on a perusal of the Order of Battle, Kursk was clearly one of the two axes of primary effort for the AFU, along with the defense of Pokrovsk. Dozens of brigades were involved in the operation, including a significant portion of Ukraine’s premier assets (mechanized, air assault, and marine infantry brigades). Perhaps more importantly, Kursk is the only axis where Ukraine has made a serious effort to gain initiative and go on the offensive in the last year, and the first Ukrainian operational level offensive (as opposed to local counterattacks) since their assault on the Russian Zaporizhia line in 2023.

With all that being said, March brought about the culmination of a serious Ukrainian defeat, with Russian forces recapturing the town of Sudzha (which formed the central anchor of Ukraine’s position in Kursk) on March 13. Although Ukrainian forces still have a presence on the border, Russian forces have crossed the Kursk-Sumy border into Ukraine in other places. The AFU has been functionally ejected from Kursk, and all dreams of some breakout into Russia have faded. At this point, the Russians now hold more territory in Sumy than the Ukrainians do in Kursk.

This would seem, then, to be a good time to conduct an autopsy on the Kursk Operation. Ukrainian forces achieved the basic prerequisite for success in August: they managed to stage a suitable mechanized package – notably, the forest canopy around Sumy allowed them to assemble assets in relative secrecy, in contrast to the open steppe in the south – and achieve tactical surprise, overrunning Russian border guards at the outset. Despite their tactical surprise and the early capture of Sudzha, the AFU was never able to parlay this into a meaningful penetration or exploitation in Kursk. Why?

The answer seems to be a nexus of operational and technical problems which became mutually reinforcing – in some respects these problems are general to this war and well understood, while in some ways they are unique to Kursk, or at least, Kursk provided a potent demonstration of them. More specifically, we can enumerate three problems that doomed the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk:

The failure of the AFU to widen their penetration adequately.

The road-poor connectivity of the Ukrainian hub in Sudzha to their bases of support around Sumy.

Persistent Russian ISR-strike overwatch on Ukrainian lines of communication and supply.

We can see, almost naturally, how these elements can feed into each other – the Ukrainians were unable to create a wide penetration into Russia (for the most part, the “opening” of their salient was less than 30 miles wide), which greatly reduced the number of roads available to them for supply and reinforcement. The narrow penetration and poor road access in turn allowed the Russians to concentrate strike systems on the few available lines of communication, to the effect that the Ukrainians struggled to either supply or reinforce the grouping based around Sudzha – this low logistical and reinforcement connectivity in turn made it impossible for the Ukrainians to stage additional forces to try and expand the salient. This created a positive feedback loop of confinement and isolation for the Ukrainian grouping which made their defeat more or less inevitable.

We can, however, go a little deeper in our postmortem and see how this happened. In the opening weeks of the operation, Ukraine’s prospects became severely untracked by two critical tactical failures which threatened from the outset to spiral into an operational catastrophe.

The first critical moment came in the days from August 10-13; after initial successes and tactical surprise, Ukrainian progress stalled as they attempted to advance up the highway from Sudzha to Korenevo. Several clashes took place throughout this period, but solid Russian blocking positions were held as reinforcements scrambled into the theater. Korenevo always promised to be a critical position, as the Russian breakwater on the main road leading northwest out of Sudzha: so long as the Russians held it, the Ukrainians would be unable to widen their penetration in this direction.

With the Russian defenses jamming up the Ukrainian columns at Korenevo, the Ukrainian position was already pregnant with a basic operational crisis: the penetration was narrow, and thus threatened to become a severe and untenable salient. At the risk of making a perilous historical analogy, the operational form was very similar to the famous 1944 Battle of the Bulge: taken by surprise by a German counteroffensive, Dwight Eisenhower prioritized limiting the width, rather than the depth of the German penetration, moving reinforcements to defend the “shoulders” of the salient.

Blocked at Korenevo, the Ukrainians shifted their approach and made a renewed effort to solidify the western shoulder of their position (their left flank). This attempt aimed to leverage the Seym River, which runs a winding course about twelve miles behind the state border. By striking bridges over the Seym and launching a ground attack towards the river, the Ukrainians hoped to isolate Russian forces on the south bank and either destroy them or force a withdrawal over the river. If they had succeeded, the Seym would have become an anchoring defensive feature protecting the western flank of the Ukrainian position….

The Art of the Deal

Any discussion of the diplomatic sphere and the prospects for a negotiation peace must begin by noting the guiding animus of the American stance: namely, that President Trump is a practitioner of personal politics, with a fundamentally transactional view of the world. By “personal politics”, we mean that he places great emphasis on his own interpersonal dynamics and his self-conception as a dealmaker who can maneuver people into agreement, provided he can just get them to the table.

Trump is hardly alone in this; to take one example, we could look at his long-dead predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. FDR, much like Trump, took great pride in the idea that he was exceptionally skilled at managing, soothing, and charming people. A guiding principle of American policy during the Second World War was FDR’s sense that he could “manage” Stalin in face to face interactions. In one infamous letter to Churchill, FDR told the British Prime Minister:

“I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”

Trump shares a similar sensibility, which postulates personality and transactional acumen as a driving force of world affairs. To be perfectly fair to President Trump, this has largely worked for him both in business and domestic politics, but it may not port over so well to foreign affairs. Nevertheless, this is how he thinks. He expressed it succinctly in his explosive February 28th meeting with Zelensky:

“Biden, they didn’t respect him. They didn’t respect Obama. They respect me… He might have broken deals with Obama and Bush, and he might have broken them with Biden. He did, maybe. Maybe he did. I don’t know what happened, but he didn’t break them with me. He wants to make a deal.”

Whether or not this is true, it is an important bedrock in the framing of the situation to remember that this is how Trump sees himself and the world: politics is a transactional domain mediated by personalities. With that in mind, there are two different issues to consider, namely the mineral deal between Ukraine and the United States, and the prospects for a negotiated ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.

The mineral deal is somewhat easier to parse, and the central motif that emerges is just how badly Zelensky bungled his meetings with Trump. It’s helpful first to examine the actual contents of the mineral deal – notwithstanding the enormous $500 billion price tag, it is actually a very scant agreement. The agreement, as it currently stands, seems to essentially give American companies the right of first refusal on the exploitation of Ukrainian mineral resources, with 50% of the proceeds from state owned resources going to an “investment fund” for the reconstruction of Ukraine under joint US-Ukrainian management.

The mineral deal ought to be understood as a manifestation of Trump’s immense aversion to acting at economic disadvantage. He is a fundamentally transactional man who complained at great length about the costs of American support for Kiev, and mineral rights are the easiest way for him to extract promises of “repayment” from a Ukrainian government that cannot actually afford to repay anything in the near term.

For Ukraine, entangling America in Ukrainian mineral wealth might seem like an opportunity to ensure ongoing American support, as it would potentially create direct stakes for American companies. It’s important to note, however, that the mineral deal does not contain any security guarantees for Ukraine, and is in fact explicitly tied to *past* support, rather than future aid. In other words, Trump wants to present the mineral deal as a way for Ukraine to repay the last three years of American assistance, and not as a deal guaranteeing American support in the future.

Given this, it ought to be obvious that Zelensky badly fumbled his encounter with Trump. The optimal strategy for Ukraine was to draw as close to the Trump administration as possible – sign the mineral deal, say thank you, wear a suit, and commend Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war. Trump’s negotiations were guaranteed to run into a wall once the Russians themselves were brought into the discussion, but in this scenario (one where Zelensky came across as supportive and compliant towards Trump), Trump’s personal ire would be directed at Moscow, rather than Kiev. This might have enabled Zelensky to play Trump and Putin off of each other, parlaying the situation into more American support once Trump became frustrated at Russia’s unwillingness to quickly negotiate a ceasefire.

The operating principle is that Trump is a mercurial, personal politician who places primacy on the deal. Inability to solidify the deal breeds irritation, and Zelensky’s best play was to do everything possible to ensure that it was Russia that became the irritant in Trump’s attempted deal making. Unfortunately for Ukraine, a valuable opportunity was wasted by Zelensky’s inability to read the room. Instead, Ukraine was put in an ISR timeout and Zelensky had to come crawling back with an apology to sign the mineral deal.

This parlayed directly into tenuous diplomatic feelers, including a long phone conversation between Trump and Putin and a diplomatic roundtable in Riyadh attended by American, Russian, and Ukrainian delegations.

Thus far, the only outcome from these discussions has been the sketch for a climbdown in the Black Sea, which in its essence would end attacks on commercial shipping (presumably including Russian attacks on Ukrainian port infrastructure in Odessa) in exchange for American moves to rehabilitate Russian agricultural exports by reconnecting Russia to shipping insurance, foreign ports, and payment systems.

For those that have been following along, this is more or less a revival of the defunct Turkish-negotiated grain deal, which collapsed in 2023. There are still sticking points here: Ukraine is bristling at the promise to loosen sanctions on Russian agricultural exports, and Russia will want a robust inspection regime to ensure that the Black Sea ceasefire does not provide cover for weapons to be shipped into Odessa, but things appear on the whole to be returning roughly to the lines of the 2022 grain deal. Whether the rerun will last remains to be seen.

All of this is preliminary and perhaps even irrelevant to the main question, which is whether it is possible to negotiate a meaningful peace in Ukraine at this time, or even a temporary ceasefire. This, however, is a much larger hurdle to climb. As I see it, there are four structural obstacles to a negotiated peace which Trump has little or leverage to overcome:

1. Russian disillusionment with negotiation and the credibility of western promises

2. Climbing Russian confidence that they are on track to win a decisive victory on the battlefield

3. Mutual unwillingness between Moscow and the extant Kiev regime to engage in direct negotiations with each other

4. The status of Russian-claimed territories in the Donbas which are still under Ukrainian control

Many of these issues dovetail, and are ultimately linked to the trajectory of the battlefield where the Russian Army continues to advance. So long as Russian leadership believes they are on pace to capture the entirety of the Donbas (and beyond), Putin’s team is highly unlikely to accept a truncated victory at the negotiating table – the only way out would be for Kiev to cede objectives like Kramatorsk and Slovyansk. In many ways, Ukraine’s current possession of these cities are its best cards in any negotiation, but for cards to be useful they must be played, and it’s difficult to imagine Zelensky’s regime simply giving up cities that it has fought for years to defend.

Furthermore, Putin has made it extremely clear that he does not consider Zelensky to be either a legitimate or credible figure at all, arguing that because Zelensky has suspended elections under the pretext of martial law, there is in fact no legitimate government in Kiev. This is obfuscation by the Kremlin, of course: Zelensky is the President of Ukraine, and within the parameters of Ukraine’s laws, conditions of martial law do allow him to stay in office. But this is rather beside the point: what matters is that the Kremlin has more or less categorically ruled out negotiating with the current government in Kiev, and has even suggested an internationally supervised provisional government as a replacement.

A generous assessment is that, for there to be reasonable prospects for a negotiated settlement from the Russian perspective, at least four conditions have to be satisfied:

1. Regime change in Kiev to bring in a government more acquiescent to Russian interests.

2. Russian control of all annexed territories (either through the actions of the Russian Army on the ground or by Kiev withdrawing from them)

3. Broad sanctions relief for Russia

4. Credible pledges that western troops will not be stationed in Ukraine as “peacekeepers” – since, after all, one critical strategic objective for Russia was to prevent the consolidation of NATO on its flank, they will hardly accept a peace that features the deployment of NATO troops into Ukraine.

So long as Russia continues to advance on the battlefield, they have no incentive to (as they would see it) rob themselves of a full victory by accepting a truncated and premature settlement. Putin expressed this view very cogently and explicitly on March 27:

“We are gradually, not as quickly as some would like, but nevertheless persistently and confidently moving towards achieving all the goals declared at the beginning of this operation. Along the entire line of combat contact, our troops have the strategic initiative. I said just recently: We will finish them off. There is reason to believe that we will finish them off.”

Fair enough. Ultimately, Trumps’ transactional view of politics runs into the more grounded reality of what negotiations actually mean, in wartime. The battlefield has a reality of its own that is existentially prior to negotiations. Diplomacy in this context does not serve to transact a “fair” or “balanced” peace, but rather to codify the reality of the military calculus. If Russia believes it is on a trajectory to achieve the total defeat of Ukraine, than the only acceptable sort of peace would be one that expresses such a defeat through the fall of the Ukrainian government and a Ukrainian withdrawal from the east. Russia’s blood is up, and Putin seems to be in no mood to accept a partial victory when the full measure is within reach.

The problem for Ukraine, if history is any guide, is that it is not actually very easy to surrender. In the First World War, Germany surrendered while its army was still in the field, fighting in good order far from the German heartland. This was an anticipatory surrender, born of a realistic assessment of the battlefield which indicated that German defeat was an inevitability. Berlin therefore opted to bow out prematurely, saving the lives of its young men once the struggle had become hopeless. This decision, of course, was poorly received, and was widely denounced as betrayal and cowardice. It became a politically scarring watershed moment that shaped German sensibilities and revanchist drives for decades to come.

So long as Zelensky’s government continues to receive western support and the AFU remains in the field – even if it is being steadily rolled back and chewed up all along the front – it is difficult to imagine Kiev acceding to an anticipatory surrender. Ukraine must choose between doing this the easy way and the hard way, as the parlance goes, but this is not really a choice at all, particularly given the Kremlin’s insistence that a change of government in Kiev is a prerequisite to peace as such. Any successful path to a negotiated piece runs through the ruins of Zelensky’s government, and is therefore largely precluded at the moment.

Russian forces today stand significantly closer to victory in the Donbas than they did one year ago, and the AFU has been decisively defeated in Kursk. They are poised to make further progress towards the limits of the Donbas in 2025, with an increasingly threadbare AFU straining to stay in the field. This is what Ukraine asked for, when they willingly eschewed the opportunity to negotiate in 2022. So for all the diplomatic cinema, the brute reality of the battlefield remains the same. The battlefield is the first principle, and the ultimate repository of political power. The diplomat is a servant of the warrior, and Russia takes recourse to the fist and the boot and the bullet.