The gaps between Kyiv and Moscow remain too explicit, and their reasons for obstinacy too drenched in sacrifice, anxiety and blood.

On November 18, 2025, Ukraine carried out drone strikes on two major power plants, Zuivska and Starobesheve, in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region. These plants supplied electricity to civilians as well as Russian military units in the area.

Russia claimed on Thursday that its forces took control of another settlement in Ukraine’s Donetsk region amid its ongoing offensives in the over three-and-a-half-year war.

Russian forces have surrounded the embattled Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk and control 70 per cent of it, President Vladimir Putin claimed on Thursday, though Kyiv's top general insisted Ukrainian defenders were pushing back hard amid fierce fighting in the city centre.

"Nobody will make concessions on the territories, because it’s our land and we stand here," one soldier told NBC News about the proposal's call for Ukraine to cede land to Russia.

As Russia advances on the front line, its forces targeted Ukraine's capital and the region for two nights in a row ahead of the talks in the United States

The U.S. is reportedly prepared to formally acknowledge Russia's hold over Crimea and parts of eastern and southern Ukraine as part of a proposed agreement to end the war, a shift that would overturn longstanding U.

Vladimir Putin says Russia needs to discuss President Trump's Ukraine peace proposal seriously as U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff prepares to visit Moscow.

Russian forces advance in Pokrovsk and Siversk amid intensified conflict in Ukraine. While Moscow claims progress, Ukrainian military reports successful defense against numerous Russian assaults. The strategic capture of Pokrovsk could enable Moscow to target key Ukrainian-controlled cities.

From the front-line city of Pokrovsk in eastern Donetsk, to Zaporizhzhia in the south, there is little doubt that Russia is making advances. But, battlefield monitors suggest the picture is not quite so bleak for Ukraine as Trump and Putin suggest.

The Germans called it “Machtpolitik,” power politics, and it was that system the Western powers had fought to defeat. As President Harry S. Truman put it in 1945, “We must make certain that no nation will ever again be able to begin a war. We must substitute for the jungle of international anarchy a rule of law based on justice.”

Russia claims its biggest eastern advance in months, announcing the capture of Zvanovka, Petrovskoye, Ivanopolye, and Vasyukovka in Donetsk. Moscow says Kyiv’s forces suffered heavy losses across mechanised,