Russia Matters, 5/23/25

1. In the week preceding May 20, 2025, Russian forces gained 55 square miles of Ukrainian territory (just over 2 Manhattan islands), a notable gain over its 33-square mile advance over each of the previous two weeks, according to the May 21, 2025, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s armed forces lost 1 square mile of their control in Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions, leaving them with a total of 9 square miles, according to the card, which analyzes ISW data. In the past month (April 22–May 20, 2025), Russia gained 135 square miles, according to that data. According to RM’s analysis of data posted by Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT group, the total amount of Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia increased by 0.9% so far this year. See Table 1 for more estimates.*
2. Donald Trump’s May 19 call with Vladimir Putin yielded no breakthrough on the Russia-Ukraine war, with Putin rejecting an unconditional full ceasefire again and Trump asserting that, going forward, Moscow and Kyiv will need to negotiate conditions directly, perhaps in the Vatican, in what Financial Times reporters interpreted as a signal that Washington is “stepping back from a role as a mediator.” While the White House did not explicitly confirm Trump’s disengagement publicly, the U.S. leader did observe after the call with Putin: “This isn’t my war.” When briefing European leaders by phone on the outcome of his conversation with Putin, Trump said that Putin isn’t ready to end the war in Ukraine because he thinks he is winning, according to the Wall Street Journal.¹ Since the call, Russia has a rejected the Vatican as a venue for further talks while advancing to “final stages” the “memorandum” on its terms for a future peace treaty, which Putin promised to come up with during his call with Trump and which his diplomats intend to discuss with their Ukrainian counterparts in Istanbul.
3. Ukrainians should not bet on some kind of “white swan” event that would “bring peace to Ukraine in the borders of 1991 or 2022,” ex-commander of Ukraine’s armed forces Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi said at a recent public forum in Ukraine. Ukraine needs to transform the nature of the current war from that of attrition to one that minimizes the expenditure of Ukraine’s human and economic resources, he said. Given the “huge deficit of human resources and a catastrophic economic situation,” “we can only talk about a high-tech war for survival, where a minimum of human resources, a minimum of economic means are used to achieve maximum benefit,” according to Zaluzhnyi.²