Russia Matters, 5/2/25

1. In the week of April 22–29, Russia gained 14 square miles (the equivalent of just over half of Manhattan island)—a major slow-down as compared to the previous week’s 40 square miles gained, according to the April 30, 2025, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. As for Ukrainian forces, they controlled only 3 square miles of Russia’s Kursk region as of April 28, according to ISW’s data, compared to 482 square miles they claimed to have captured last August. Moreover, chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov claimed in his report to Vladimir Putin earlier this week that Russian forces had completed pushing the Ukrainian forces out of the Kursk region¹ even though Ukrainian officials denied this claim.
2. Inferring lessons from the Russian-Ukrainian war, the U.S. Army is “embarking on its largest overhaul since the end of the Cold War, with plans to equip each of its combat divisions with around 1,000 drones and to shed outmoded weapons and other equipment,” according to Wall Street Journal’s April 30 report. One day after that disclosure by Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg reported that Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth wants the U.S. Army to increase its use of drones as part of a broad overhaul of the military’s largest service.
3. Confusion continued to reign this week with regard to whether Russia and Ukraine can be brought together to agree on a durable ceasefire,² to say nothing of a full-fledged peace deal, as the U.S. signaled a possible end to its mediation. On April 25, Trump wrote after Putin had hosted his envoy Steve Witkoff for talks that “they are very close to a deal, and the two sides should now meet, at very high levels, to ‘finish it off.’” On April 26, however, Trump appeared to have changed his tack, writing that maybe Putin “doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along.” To hear Trump’s deputy, JD Vance, tell Fox TV on May 1, there is a “very large gap” between the positions of Ukraine and Russia regarding the end of the war. Marco Rubio—who on May 9 may become the first U.S. government minister to pay a public visit Moscow in years—concurred with Vance’s assessment, acknowledging in an interview on the same day that “they’re still far apart.” It also remained unclear in what capacity the U.S. may continue to pursue peace. On May 1, the State Department’s Tammy Bruce told reporters that the U.S. “will not be the mediators” going forward.
4. On April 30, the Trump administration finally secured an agreement with Ukraine, giving the U.S. preferential access to the country’s contested natural resources—such as aluminum, graphite, oil and natural gas.³ The agreement establishes the “United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund” that Washington and Kyiv will pay into to fund development, infrastructure and natural resource extraction projects in Ukraine, according to ISW. The text of the agreement made no mention of the security guarantees that Kyiv had long sought, though part of the fund’s income will go to reimbursing the U.S. for future military assistance to Ukraine,⁴ according to Bloomberg. Neither does the deal cover Ukraine’s nuclear power producer Energoatom, which will remain in Ukrainian state ownership, Bloomberg reported.⁵ Accessing Ukraine’s minerals won’t be easy, according to experts interviewed by the U.S. press. For one, maps showing trillions of dollars of mineral deposits scattered across Ukraine are based largely on outdated studies, and proper surveys could take several years to complete, according to experts interviewed by Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Also, somewhere between 20% and 40% of Ukraine’s deposits are critical minerals located in areas of the country currently under Russian occupation, George Ingall of Benchmark Minerals Intelligence told Wall Street Journal.