The situation 1249 – August 17, 2025

• US officials acknowledged that Putin has yet to demonstrate a willingness to offer the concessions necessary to reach a peace agreement.
• Russia will be unable to seize the remainder of Donetsk Oblast rapidly through force, as Russian forces have failed to do for over a decade. Russia could only rapidly seize all of Donetsk Oblast if Ukraine concedes to Putin's demand and withdraws from the remainder of the oblast.
• Russian forces have historically thrown themselves into costly campaigns to seize fortified or urban areas in eastern Ukraine, a reality far from Putin's claims of rapid advances.
• Recent Russian advances northeast of Pokrovsk do not indicate that Russia can rapidly seize fortified or urban areas.
• Russia continues to deny Ukraine's sovereignty and to demand the right to dictate Ukrainian domestic affairs.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin's insistence that any peace agreement must address Russia's perceived "root causes" of the war will make it difficult to reach a peace agreement as rapidly as Trump desires, given the complexity of the "root causes."
• Russia's "root causes" extend beyond Ukraine, and eliminating them would require substantial negotiations with NATO.
• Putin's offer of a Russian law forbidding a future invasion of Ukraine is not credible because Russia has already twice broken previous binding international commitments not to invade and because Putin has shown that he can freely change Russian law as he desires.
• The details about Ukrainian security guarantees to which Putin may have agreed remain unclear at this time, but the Kremlin may be attempting to resurrect its demands about security guarantors from April 2022 that would have neutered such guarantees.
• Ukrainian forces recently advanced in northern Sumy Oblast and near Toretsk. Russian forces recently advanced near Pokrovsk.

The full update of the Russian offensive 1249 is available on UNDERSTANDING WAR