The pressure building on Ukraine is not just diplomatic.
While President Donald Trump pushes for a quick resolution, the churning mud of the battlefield has produced only slow and painstaking gains for the Kremlin during the four years since its full-scale invasion.
From the front-line city of Pokrovsk in eastern Donetsk to Zaporizhzhia in the south and the northern region of Kharkiv, there is little doubt that Russia is making advances.
President Vladimir Putin has urged Ukraine to surrender key territory at the negotiating table — as Washington has suggested — or face Moscow's military taking it by force anyway. Trump has echoed this sentiment, warning that Ukraine "will lose in a short period of time" if it does not agree to the deal he has backed.
But battlefield monitors suggest the picture is not quite so bleak for Ukraine as Trump and Putin suggest.
Russia's gains are slow and incremental, won at a heavy cost against Kyiv’s overstretched army, according to these mostly Western observers, who see Moscow as overstating its position for diplomatic gain in negotiations with Washington.
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Pokrovsk, a transit hub that has been the center of the fighting for months, could soon hand the Kremlin its first major capture in two years.
Yet, Russia would not be able to take the rest of Donetsk "without significant casualties, probably in the hundreds of thousands," Chris Parry, a former NATO commander and rear admiral in the British Royal Navy, told NBC News in an interview. If Ukraine gives that up in a deal, it "will leave the rest of the country vulnerable to a strike anytime that Putin wants to come back," he said.
Indeed, since Aug. 15, Russia has has been advancing at "foot pace,” gaining just 3½ square miles a day, according to an analysis Sunday by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.
In all, Russia has occupied only an additional 1% of territory since November 2022, war-watchers agree. Most of the 20% of Ukraine that Russia controls is made up of land seized by Russian-backed fighters after 2014, and the illegally annexed Crimean Peninsula.
Assuming it can keep up even this crawl, Russia would not capture the rest of Donetsk until at least August 2027 “and likely even longer,” the Institute for the Study of War said. And Putin is pressuring Ukraine to hand over this territory, not because it truly is a fait accompli, but merely “to save Russia significant amounts of time, effort, manpower, and resources," it said.
On the flip side, not even Ukraine's most ardent supporters could claim that its position is easy. Could it survive the Russian advance if it wasn’t coming under U.S. pressure to capitulate?
“That’s the million-dollar question,” said Michael A. Horowitz, a Jerusalem-based geopolitical consultant. “We’re in a battle of attrition, and both sides are paying a very high cost to defend or capture smaller and smaller areas.”
Pokrovsk is “on the verge of falling into Russian hands,” said Horowitz, who follows the conflict in minutiae.
That would allow Russian troops to turn their attention north to the “fortress belt” of Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk, Slovyansk and Kostyantynivka, a defensive line of cities that Kyiv has spent years reinforcing.
Giving Donetsk to Russia would hand over these cities anyway.
Ultimately, few Ukrainians believe this would be the end of the Kremlin’s aggression. Rather, it would give Russia a potent foothold in the heart of the country, from which it might be able to add to its history of broken ceasefires and diplomatic promises.
Ukrainian troops have for more than a year defended Pokrovsk. Now, most are pinned down in their positions, unable to move because of loitering Russian drones, and only resupplied by robotic tracked vehicles controlled remotely.
Further northeast up the Donetsk front line, Russia claimed its forces had captured a string of villages, including Yampil.
Meanwhile, in Zaporizhzhia, Russia has likely captured 15 villages since September, the Black Bird Group, a Finnish open-source intelligence agency, told The Kyiv Independent on Sunday.
Last week, both sides traded familiar claims and denials of Russian victory in Kupiansk, in the eastern Kharkiv region, which Russian commander Sergei Kuzovlev told Putin was a “key cog in Ukraine’s defenses.”
As of last Thursday, the general staff of the Ukrainian military said it was still under its control, deriding Russian "propaganda" that was “solely aimed at concealing the critical losses of the Russian army."
NBC News could not independently verify the battlefield accounts from either side.
Putin has used these claims of victory to threaten Ukraine and Europe.
He warned in a speech Friday that if Ukraine rejects Trump’s peace efforts, “then both they and the European warmongers should understand that” the Kremlin’s recent victories will “inevitably be repeated in other key parts of the front.”
“It may not happen as quickly as we would like, but inevitably it will happen,” he said.
