As war in Ukraine enters fifth year, peace remains elusive

Year Five of the war begins with Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in shambles, Russia’s economy in tatters, and Zelensky wondering if President Donald Trump truly has Ukraine’s best interests at heart.

Asked by CNN what he hoped to hear from Trump in his State of the Union speech, Zelensky — after an uncomfortably long pause — answered, “I want him to stay on our side.”

That’s not what he heard.

Trump let the day of the anniversary pass without comment — no praise for the brave Ukrainian defenders who against all odds have denied Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal of ending Ukraine’s sovereignty, no recognition of the suffering of Ukrainian civilians who have endured untold misery and sacrifice, no indication Trump wants to help Ukraine make any gains on the battlefield to improve its negotiation position.

The only mention of the war during Trump’s nearly two-hour address was of his desire to end the deaths of soldiers, which Russia is losing at twice the rate of Ukraine, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“We’re working very hard to end the … war, the killing and slaughter between Russia and Ukraine, where 25,000 soldiers are dying each and every month,” Trump said. “Think of that; 25,000 soldiers are dying a month.” 

Indeed, Trump and his negotiating team of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are working hard to end the war. It just seems to Zelensky and other Ukraine supporters that they are hell-bent on ending it on Putin’s terms.

Zelensky’s strategy for getting along with Trump is to accept every American proposal and then try to work to make it acceptable, while Russia simply rejects everything. But Trump continues to portray Ukraine as the obstacle to peace. 

“Russia wants to make a deal, and Zelensky’s going to have to get moving. Otherwise, he’s going to miss a great opportunity,” Trump told reporters during a visit to Georgia.

A few days later, Zelensky lamented to Axios that it was “not fair” for Trump to keep calling on Ukraine, not Russia, to make concessions.

“Trump said he would end the war in Ukraine on Day 1,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said in a post on X. “Instead, he’s sided with Putin at every turn, prolonging the war & throwing the Ukrainian people under the bus. Zelensky is right to stand up for his people & call out Trump’s double standard, which is making peace harder.”

Zelensky told CNN he has already made painful concessions, including agreeing to freeze the front lines, which would leave Russia in control of more than 18% of his country.

“We already said that we are ready for the compromise to freeze the points where we stay, the places. It’s a frozen contact line. We are ready for this,” Zelensky said.

But what Zelensky is not willing to do — what he says he can’t do because his people would never accept it — is hand over the part of the eastern Donbas region that Russia has been unable to capture after four years of trying.

At every turn, it seems to Zelensky, it’s two against one, he says. 

“Both the Americans and the Russians say that if you want the war to end tomorrow, get out of Donbas,” Zelensky told the French news agency AFP. 

“If we will give him all he wants, we will lose everything, just everything, our houses, our lives, our families, everything. Because all of us people will have to run away from the country or be Russians,” he told CNN. 

It would also mean giving up Ukraine’s “fortress belt,” the heavily fortified kill zone that has held Russian forces at bay, where Ukrainian drones pick off Russian troops at a staggering rate. 

The pressure on Zelensky comes as military experts argue that Putin’s position is much more tenuous than he lets on.

“Vladimir Putin is bluffing,” writes Christina Harward, a Russia team leader at the Institute for the Study of War, in an opinion piece in the New York Post. “His hand at the negotiating table is not remotely as strong as he wants the world to believe.”

“His country’s forces seized only 0.8% of Ukraine’s territory in all of 2025. And they’ve paid a staggering price for these marginal gains: 92 casualties for every square kilometer they seized,” Harward says. “Russia is now starting to suffer more casualties on the battlefield than it can recruit.”

A recent ISW assessment concludes that Ukraine, thanks in part to Elon Musk cutting off internet service to unregistered Russian Starlink receivers, has made some of the most significant battlefield gains since 2023.

“The fifth year of Russia’s invasion is not beginning well for Moscow,” the Feb. 24 assessment states. “Recent Ukrainian successes on the battlefield disprove Russian claims that things can only get worse for Ukraine the longer Kyiv delays surrendering to Russian demands.”

“[Putin] has resorted to feigning strength to try to push Ukraine and the United States to give in to his demands during peace talks because he cannot achieve them through force,” Harward concludes.

“It is apparent to me that at this point, Putin is not serious about ending the war,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a vocal supporter of Ukraine, posted on X. “I would urge President Trump to provide Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine to increase the military pressure on Putin’s forces. The Tomahawks would be able to go deeper into Russia and hit drone and missile factories that provide the armaments to Putin’s war machine.”

Trump considered sending Tomahawks to Ukraine late last year, but as Zelensky was flying to Washington to try to seal the deal, Putin called Trump and talked him out of it.

In an opinion essay in the Wall Street Journal, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said if Europe doesn’t want to see Ukraine lose, it needs to “put up or put a sock in it.”

“If we care about the suffering of these Ukrainians, as we say we do, then for God’s sake, let’s give them the means to take out the factories that make Russia’s drones. Why are the Germans still sitting on their arsenal of Taurus cruise missiles? Fears of ‘escalation’?” Johnson wrote. “The history of the war so far is that the only person who fears escalation is Mr. Putin himself.”

“If we wanted to show real strategic European autonomy, we would launch a concerted operation to impound the shadow fleet — the sanctions-busting oil tankers that are helping Mr. Putin to fund his war machine,” Johnson continued. 

Zelensky is seeking a way to end the war in a way that will ensure Russia won’t attack again once it’s had time to lick its wounds and rebuild its military.

The key for Zelensky is obtaining ironclad security guarantees in the form of a treaty with the U.S. ratified by the Senate.

“I want a very specific answer to what partners will be ready to do if Putin will come again. And I think this is what Ukrainians want to hear,” Zelensky told CNN. “We have mostly everything. I think everything in the paper. But it’s still not signed. It’s not signed by the United States.”

One reason the U.S. is not signing until there is a peace agreement is that, so far, Russia has rejected the proposed guarantees that would put Western troops on Ukrainian soil. 

Meanwhile, in his fourth anniversary video address, Zelensky acknowledged that many Ukrainians, lauded for their resilience, are nearing a breaking point, and he urged them to hang on.

“Less than a week until spring. We are getting through the hardest winter in history. This is a fact. And it is very difficult. Difficult for all of us,” Zelensky said. “Putin has not achieved his goals. He has not broken Ukrainians. He has not won this war. We have preserved Ukraine, and we will do everything to secure peace and justice.“

When CNN’s Clarissa Ward returned to Kyiv to interview Zelensky, she found a lot of bitterness toward the U.S.

“A lot of people here feel that effectively America has abandoned Ukraine,” she reported. “They’re still struggling to understand.”

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“I had one woman from Ukraine send me a message saying, I never want to hear the word resilient again,” Ward said. 

Another woman she interviewed, who lost her nail salon to the war, said many Ukrainians she knows are at the breaking point. “I mean, we are not super humans. We are not robots. We are not super people. We are human, and we are breakable, unfortunately.”

Jamie McIntyre (@jamiejmcintyre) is the Washington Examiner‘s senior writer on national security.