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By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 8/22/25
Reuters reported on Thursday that Russia’s demands for a peace deal in Ukraine include Ukrainian forces withdrawing from the Donbas, a guarantee that Ukraine won’t join NATO, and for Ukraine to keep Western troops out of the country.
Russian sources told Reuters that Putin had compromised on his initial conditions, which included the Ukrainian withdrawal from the territory in the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. Under the current offer, Russia is willing to freeze the lines there and also return small amounts of territory it controls in Kharkiv, Sumy, and Dnipropetrovsk.
For his part, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has publicly rejected the idea of ceding the territory Ukrainian forces still control in the Donbas, and European leaders appear to be backing his position.
When it comes to NATO, the Reuters report said that Moscow is seeking a legally binding pledge from the alliance that it wouldn’t move further eastwards. A guarantee that Ukraine wouldn’t join NATO was one of Russia’s main demands to avoid the invasion, but the Biden administration refused to engage on the issue.
While the Trump administration has ruled out the idea of Ukraine joining NATO as part of a potential peace deal, the alliance’s leadership is still insisting on its “open door” policy. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said this week that Ukraine is on an “irreversible path” to NATO membership.
Russia’s other condition is related to the security guarantees for Ukraine that are being discussed by the US and its European allies, who are insisting on some sort of arrangement where European troops are deployed to Ukraine and backed by US air power. But Russia has made clear repeatedly that the idea is completely unacceptable, and the insistence on it could tank the peace process.
Sources speaking to Reuters floated the idea of some kind of three way deal between the US, Russia, and Ukraine on security guarantees or revisiting an idea from short-lived peace talks in 2022 that would have involved the five permanent members of the UN Security Council providing the guarantees, which was also brought up by Russian Foreign Minsiter Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday.
While Russia continues to engage in negotiations, it has also made clear that it’s willing to continue the war if its conditions aren’t met. “There are two choices: war or peace, and if there is no peace, then there is more war,” one of the sources told Reuters.
Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
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Hopes Fade on ‘Breakthrough’ in Ukraine Talks, Russia Keeps Gaining Land
Russia Matters, 8/22/25
Despite the past week’s initial hopes that Donald Trump’s subsequent meetings with Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders would advance talks on the Ukraine conflict toward a breakthrough, the negotiations on the subject remained riddled with contradictions and stalled outcomes as of Aug. 22. For instance, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff claimed Putin was amenable to “Article 5-like” guarantees for Kyiv, yet Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov insisted Moscow must hold veto power over any guarantees, suggesting that the P5 should provide them. Lavrov also discouraged Trump’s public hopes for quickly organizing a Zelenskyy-Putin summit, making clear Russia would presently agree to negotiate only at levels lower than heads of states. Meanwhile, European leaders flatly rejected giving Russia the veto on security guarantees, while Zelenskyy also ruled out China as a postwar security guarantor. It remains unclear whether and how these differences1 can be reconciled.
In the period of July 22–Aug. 19, Russian forces gained 237 square miles of Ukrainian territory, which marks a 2% decrease from the 241 square miles these forces gained in the period of July 15–Aug. 12, 2025, according to the latest issue of RM’s The Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. Comparing shorter periods, such as the past week to the preceding week, shows that in the period of Aug. 12–19, 2025, Russia gained 25 square miles of Ukrainian territory (roughly one Manhattan island), which marks a 67% decrease from the 76 square miles Russian forces gained in the period of Aug. 5–12, 2025. One of the reasons Russia has been able to make gains every week2 is that it has more personnel than Ukraine to employ in combat. “Today, Russia recruits about 1,000 soldiers a day,” which is “about twice as high as Ukraine’s” recruitment, according to The New York Times.*
A map that Trump showed to Zelenskyy during their Aug. 18 meeting indicates that Russian forces control 99% of the Luhansk region and 76% of the Donetsk region, which together constitute Donbass. U.S. intelligence estimates on whether and when Russia could take the rest of Donbass vary. “One assessment posits that Putin could seize all of Donetsk by October. Another predicts a far harder and inconclusive slog,“ according to Axios.
Russia has more than doubled the number of missiles and drones it has fired monthly into Ukraine since January, according to the Wall Street Journal. Most recently, the night of Aug. 20 to 21 saw Russia launch the third largest strike of the war, launching 574 drones and 40 missiles against 11 locations in Ukraine, according to ISW. The number of Russian long-distance strikes can be expected to increase further, and it is likely that more of them will reach targets in Ukraine as Russian drone and missile production increases (in fact, Russia may soon fire 2,000 drones a day), further attriting Ukraine’s already strained air defenses.3
India is under increasing pressure from the Trump administration over its continued purchases of Russian oil, with White House trade adviser Peter Navarro expecting punitive tariffs of 50% on imports from the South Asian nation to kick in next week. But is such pressure justified or are the Indian leaders right to complain about “double standards in Washington, which continues to buy Russian uranium hexafluoride, and in the EU, which remains a key buyer of Russian liquefied natural gas,” as the Wall Street Journal reported? Here are three facts which may help you decide if Indian leaders have a point: First, the U.S. continues to import enriched uranium from Russia. In fact, in 2024, the U.S. imported $624 million worth of Russian HEU, according to Comtrade’s international trade data. Second, the U.S. imported $1.3 billion of fertilizers from Russia, according to the New York Times. Third, Russia was the second largest source of gas imported by the European Union in 2024, with Russian supplies to the EU increasing by 18% that year. The EU also purchased $8.5 billion worth of LNG from Russia that year, according to CREA and The Economic Times.
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US Approves European-Funded Long-Range Cruise Missile Deal for Ukraine
By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 8/25/25
The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that the US has approved a deal that will arm Ukraine with thousands of Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) air-launched missiles, which have a significantly further range than other missiles that the US has sent into the proxy war.
Two US officials told the Journal that the ERAMs can hit targets up to 280 miles away, nearly 100 miles further than the range of the Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), munitions the US began providing Ukraine in 2023.
The deal will provide Ukraine with 3,350 ERAMs as part of an $850 million weapons package that will mostly be funded by European countries. This year, NATO began a new scheme to provide Ukraine with more US weapons in deals funded by other NATO allies, known as the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) initiative.
The ERAMs are expected to arrive in Ukraine within six weeks, and the US officials said that the Ukrainian military will need Pentagon approval to use them.
The Journal report said that the Trump administration had been quietly blocking ATACMS strikes on Russian territory, which the Biden administration first greenlit toward the end of 2024. At the time, the US-backed ATACMS strikes marked a significant escalation of the proxy war, and Moscow responded by altering its nuclear doctrine to lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.
The Journal report said that the Trump administration hasn’t allowed any Ukrainian ATACMS strikes on Russian territory since late spring, but the ERAMs deal signals that the US may be prepared to support missile attacks inside Russia once again. The news comes as there has been little progress toward a peace deal following the summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.