Ukraine Project

US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff referred on February 23 to the draft Istanbul Protocol crafted in 2022 as a "guidepost" for future negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. Russia's demands in the draft agreement were made in the first and second months of the war when Russian troops were advancing on Kyiv City and throughout northeastern, eastern, and southern Ukraine and before Ukrainian forces conducted successful counteroffensives that liberated significant swaths of territory in Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts.  The draft agreement does not reflect the situation today in which Ukraine has liberated 50 percent of the territory Russian forces have seized since 2022 and largely forced a year-long Russian offensive to a standstill.  The Istanbul draft agreement surrenders Ukraine's sovereignty and prohibits any efforts by Ukraine or any other state to maintain Ukrainian armed forces adequate to deter or defend against, a future Russian attack.  It also explicitly ruled out many actions Trump Administration officials have identified as parts of a peace agreement acceptable to the US.

Russia has achieved relatively faster gains in 2024 than throughout most of the war after the initial invasion and developed a blueprint for conducting slow, tactical envelopments to achieve these advances, but Russian forces have failed to restore the operational maneuver necessary to achieve operationally significant gains rapidly.

US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff referred to the early 2022 Istanbul protocols as offering "guideposts" for negotiations between Russia and Ukraine on February 23. An agreement based on those protocols would be a capitulation document.

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a coordinated campaign in late 2022 and early 2023 to prevent the emergence of an independent veterans-based civil society in Russia, likely out of fear that veteran groups could threaten the stability of his regime upon their return from Ukraine.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov claimed on February 22 that US and Russian officials are planning to meet within the next two weeks in an unspecified third country about bilateral relations. Ryabkov claimed that the United States and Russia are undertaking two "parallel" but "politically interconnected" negotiation tracks that will discuss the war in Ukraine and US-Russian bilateral relations.

Russian state media and Kremlin officials appear to be leveraging select statements from US officials alongside long-standing Russian narratives to create tension between the United States and Ukraine and undermine faith in America's commitment to Ukraine.

Russian forces currently occupy around 20 percent of Ukraine, leaving the remaining 80 percent of the country under Ukraine's sovereign control. At the current rate of advance, it would take Russian forces over 83 years to capture the remaining 80 percent of Ukraine, assuming that they can sustain massive personnel losses indefinitely.

The Financial Times (FT) published an investigation on February 20 supporting ISW's long-held assessment that Russian military commanders are either complicit in or directly enabling subordinates to execute Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) in clear violation of international law. The FT investigation provided additional details and analysis following a significant increase in the number of credible reports of Russian forces executing Ukrainian POWs in 2024 compared to the first two years of the war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly trying to optimize the Russian negotiations delegation to be most effective with the specific individuals whom the United States chooses for its negotiation delegation, likely in an effort to extract maximum concessions from the United States.

The United States can use the enormous challenges Russia will face in 2025 as leverage to secure critical concessions in ongoing negotiations to end the war by continuing and even expanding military support to Ukraine. Russia will likely face a number of materiel, manpower, and economic issues in 12 to 18 months if Ukrainian forces continue to inflict damage on Russian forces on the battlefield at the current rate.