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This page features the weekly news and analysis digests compiled by Russia Matters. Explore them by clicking "Read More" below the current week's highlights and subscribe using the subscribe links throughout the site, like the one below, to receive our digests via email. Past digests are available in the News Archive, which is accessible via the link on this page.

4 Things to Know

  1. This week, Trump has confirmed earlier reports that he and Putin will meet in Saudi Arabia, while also revealing that the two leaders may then visit each other’s countries. “In fact, we expect that he'll come here, and I'll go there, and we're gonna meet also probably in Saudi Arabia the first time, we'll meet in Saudi Arabia, see if we can get something done,” Trump said, according to Politico. A date for the meeting “hasn't been set," but it will happen in the "not too distant future,” Trump said of the summit with the Russian leader, whom his predecessor refused to meet or directly negotiate with after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Last week saw senior Russian MP Leonid Slutsky reveal the meeting could take place sometime in February or March, while Russia’s Kommersant reported that Russia is reportedly considering Saudi Arabia as a potential location for the meeting. Meanwhile, Trump and Putin have already chosen officials that will negotiate on their behalf on ending the Russian-Ukrainian war, preserving strategic stability and other issues. “I have asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of the CIA John Ratcliffe, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Ambassador and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to lead the negotiations, which, I feel strongly, will be successful,” Trump said on Feb. 12, thus excluding his own envoy on the conflict, Keith Kellogg. In his turn, Putin is assembling what Bloomberg has described as “a heavyweight team with decades of experience in high-stakes negotiation.” They include Yuri Ushakov, the chief Kremlin foreign-policy adviser; his top spymaster, Sergei Naryshkin; and Kirill Dmitriev, a financier educated at Stanford and Harvard.
  2. The previously anemic process of key stakeholders in the Ukraine conflict slowly signaling their evolving negotiating positions has undergone a dramatic disruption by Trump and his team this past week. Trump personally launched the disruption by announcing on Feb. 12 an “immediate” start to negotiations to end the war after having a phone conversation with Putin. The Kremlin—which has previously been denying direct contacts between Putin and Trump—confirmed Trump’s claim this time, saying the Russian leader agreed with his U.S. counterpart to “work together” toward “a long-term settlement [that] could be reached through peaceful negotiations.” Speaking prior to the Feb. 12 phone call, Trump claimed to have developed a concrete plan to end the war. But even if he did have such a plan, Zelenskyy—whom Trump would refuse to grant the status of "an equal member" of the peace process and whom Trump didn’t warn of his call to Putin until after he’d made it—denied any knowledge of it on Feb. 14. Meanwhile, some of the statements made by Trump’ top aides also indicated that there is no firm plan yet. First, Hegseth announced on Feb. 11 that “we are not sending U.S. troops to Ukraine.” Then, JD Vance was quoted by WSJ as saying on Feb. 13 that the option of sending U.S. troops to Ukraine if Moscow failed to negotiate remained “on the table.”  In addition to pledging not to send troops to Ukraine, Hegseth called Ukraine’s desire for membership in NATO and a return to its pre-2014 borders unrealistic and illusionary this week. Hegseth’s remarks made some of America’s European allies publicly wonder why the U.S. would “concede” on these issues ahead of negotiations rather than try to use them as bargaining chips. But even with Hegseth sending conciliatory signals to Moscow on Ukraine’s borders and NATO, it won’t be easy for Trump and his team to convince their Russian counterparts to first agree to a ceasefire and then, possibly, conclude a peace deal. For one, Putin has showed no signs so far of abandoning the conditions he has set for Russia to agree to a ceasefire.1 Moreover, the Kremlin says it will agree to a ceasefire only if it is used to negotiate a legally-binding agreement, which would include guarantees of NATO’s non-expansion to the east. Whether such a commitment can be obtained from the alliance, which operates by consensus, is an open question. If Putin does agree to Trump’s proposal for the ceasefire, it could be secured by one of two significant upcoming dates, according to European and Ukrainian officials interviewed by FT: Easter on April 20 or May 9, when Russia celebrates the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. The key to successful peace talks could be having China join the U.S. in the peace efforts, according to Harvard’s Graham Allison. “I believe this terrible [Russian-Ukrainian] war will soon come to an end. In fact, I would bet that we will have a ceasefire within the next six months… with the help of a powerful partner: China,” Allison told Der Spiegel.
    1. Chinese officials in recent weeks have floated a proposal to the Trump team through intermediaries to hold a summit between Trump and Putin and to facilitate peacekeeping efforts after an eventual truce, people in Beijing and Washington familiar with the matter told WSJ. The Chinese offer, notably, envisions a U.S.-Russian summit without the involvement of Zelenskyy. Part of China’s proposal to assist a Russia-Ukraine peace deal involves Beijing acting as a “guarantor” by sending peacekeeping troops to the region, according to WSJ.
  3. Trump has proposed a three-way meeting with the Russian and Chinese leaders to discuss nuclear arms control, according to AFP. The chief motivation would be to find ways to save money, Trump said Feb. 13. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons, we already have so many,” Trump said. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.” In response to Trump’s statement, Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, depicted China as a much smaller player among nuclear powers, compared to the United States. “As countries with the largest nuclear arsenals, the United States and Russia should earnestly fulfill their special priority responsibilities for nuclear disarmament,” Guo said. Trump has called for a trilateral ‘denuclearization’ before and Putin responded to this call by stating readiness to discuss strategic stability. China has been, however, consistently rejecting trilateral reductions.
  4. In the past month, Russian forces made a net gain of 151 square miles of Ukraine’s territory (6 ½ Manhattan islands), according to the Feb. 12, 2025, issue of the Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. Meanwhile in Russia’s Kursk Oblast, Ukraine gained 2 square miles. According to the Ukrainian OSINT group DeepState, Russian military advances in eastern Ukraine have slowed significantly since November 2024. In November, DeepState reports Russian gains of 280 square miles, and these have declined every month since: 152 square miles in December 2024, and 126 square miles in January 2025.  
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4 Ideas to Explore

  1. “If Putin does not get his way in negotiations, he appears confident that Russia can keep fighting for at least another year and get what it wants via the battlefield,” Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center writes in his commentary for The Economist, entitled "Putin Thinks Time Is on His Side. Sadly He May Be Right.” “Ukraine, [Putin] calculates, lacks the time or resources to hold out indefinitely. Proving Mr. Putin wrong is possible, but it will take more Ukrainian blood and Western weaponry—and, perhaps more importantly than anything, more time than Mr. Trump’s impatience for a deal would seem to allow,” Gabuev writes.
  2. Russian forces “have been sufficiently reconstituted and adapted to sustain offensive operations for at least another year,” despite suffering “staggering” losses of personnel and equipment, according to Yurri Clavilier and Michael Gjerstad of IISS. Meanwhile, for Ukraine, the current main challenge is “manpower, specifically regarding management and allocation,” according to the two researchers. “Ukraine’s military has only ad hoc command formations above the brigade level, making inter-brigade communications and cooperation uneven and difficult,” they write. “The situation is not as dire for Ukraine as it was in early 2024, but it will still rely on Western support and improving its manpower-management to avoid further setbacks on the battlefield,” according to the two IISS researchers. AFU’s plans to transition to a corps-based command system may be one consequence of dissatisfaction with the existing command and control structure.*
  3. Why did Russia abstain from using nuclear weapons against Ukraine in the fall of 2022? “A correlation between taboo, the multilateral diplomacy initiated by the Biden administration in the fall of 2022 and Moscow’s receding nuclear rhetoric toward the end of that year may come closest to a causal link explaining non-use against Ukraine,” concludes Ulrich Kühn of the University of Hamburg in his analysis of the period when the CIA estimated the likelihood of Russia using nuclear weapons at 50% or higher as Russian forces were in retreat in Ukraine. 
  4. “The industrial requirements for producing fissile material and fitting a warhead to delivery systems exceed Ukraine’s current capacity,” IISS’ Alexander Bollfrass writes in an article, entitled “Are nuclear weapons an option for Ukraine?” Rather than pursue nuclear-weapons acquisition or NATO membership, Ukraine should adopt “the ‘Israel model’ [which] involves a heavily armed state under bilateral protection by the United States,” Bollfrass argues in IISS. According to a Nov. 2024 estimate by Harvard’s Mariana Budjeryn, however, if Ukraine could somehow marshal the expertise and the engineering needed… it could get to a ‘Fat Man’ kind of bomb in several months.”

NB: The next Russia Analytical Report will appear on Tuesday, Feb. 18, instead of Monday, Feb. 17, because of the U.S. Presidents' Day holiday.

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