Ukraine’s battle against Russia in maps and charts: latest updates
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Russian forces are pressing ahead in several flashpoints along the eastern frontline in Ukraine as US-led peace efforts have faltered and Moscow is intensifying its drone and missile attacks on civilian areas and energy infrastructure.
Ukrainian troops are engaged in urban fighting in the eastern city of Kupyansk, which they had recaptured in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Further south, Moscow’s forces are encroaching on Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad and are nearing Kostyantinyvka. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in late October said the situation “remains difficult” in all those areas but insisted his forces were not pulling back.
The foothold on the western side of the Oskil river allows the Kremlin’s forces to move deeper into the Kharkiv region while further threatening the remaining part of the Donbas region that Russian leader Vladimir Putin demanded during his summit with Donald Trump in Alaska in August as a condition to restart peace talks.
Giving up those territories is unacceptable for Zelenskyy.
Putin restated his claim to the entire Donbas during a phone call with Trump earlier in October, after which the two leaders announced they would meet again in Budapest.
But that summit was scrapped after Russia’s foreign ministry sent a memo to Washington holding firm to Putin’s demands, followed by a tense call between the two countries’ top diplomats, said people familiar with the matter.
The decision to scrap the Budapest summit capped a remarkable turnaround in US policy less than a week after Trump appeared to have swung in Putin’s favour, including by abandoning the idea of arming Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles.
Minerals deal
The Trump administration earlier this year also struck a deal with Kyiv for US access to critical minerals and energy assets in Ukraine, after weeks of fraught negotiations contrasting with the more positive Russia talks.
The agreement signed at the US Treasury department will establish a “reconstruction investment fund” for Ukraine, though it does not include a previous Trump demand for retroactive compensation for more than $100bn in US military support.
While Washington has argued the deal is necessary for any continued US support, it does not include explicit security guarantees, and Ukraine will be beholden to it regardless of whether a peace deal is secured with Russia. However, any future US military assistance, such as contributions to Ukraine’s air defences, will be qualified as investment under the terms of the deal.
The eastern frontline
The Kremlin’s invasion has become a war of attrition, with both sides grinding it out from labyrinthine trenches and a frontline stretching more than 1,000km, from the southern Kherson region to Kharkiv in the north-east.
Ukraine has attempted to stabilise its defences and hold on to territory it had recaptured from Russia in 2022.
Kyiv had been hoping to slow Russia’s offensive and seize the initiative, but Ukrainian officials have admitted they are struggling to hold back Russia’s larger and better-equipped army amid manpower shortages.
Ukraine has plans to draft additional troops, though efforts to attract recruits are being hampered by military service being open-ended.
Russian forces gained thousands of square kilometres of the Donetsk region in 2024.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think-tank, said Russia captured roughly 4,200 sq km of Ukrainian territory last year, most of which was in the Donetsk area.
Drone war
Drones have played a vital role in the war, with both countries utilising unmanned aerial vehicles as part of their military strategies.
Ukraine has used drones to strike Russian soil, including hitting a Moscow suburb, with the aim of disrupting the Kremlin’s war effort and bringing the conflict home to ordinary Russians.
Ukraine has also used drones to attack military facilities, munitions factories and energy infrastructure in Russia and is estimated to have sunk one-fifth of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
Russian minefields and fortifications coupled with constant drone surveillance and artillery strikes proved insurmountable during the much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of 2023.
Kursk incursion
Ukraine seized parts of Russia’s Kursk region in a surprise incursion in August 2024. But after making steady gains in the region, Ukrainian troops began to lose territory and were largely pushed out of Russia this spring.
Kyiv’s forces one point to seized about 1,300 sq km of Russian territory, but the incursion came at the cost of territory in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
Russia mobilised a force of about 50,000 soldiers, including at least 10,000 from North Korea, to push the Ukrainians out of Kursk.
The Russian defence ministry on March 13 said it had taken Sudzha back, depriving Ukraine of a valuable bargaining chip in any talks with Russia.
Civilian and cultural impact
The number of Ukrainians fleeing the war has made it one of the largest refugee crises in modern history.
A Financial Times investigation found Ukrainian children who were abducted and taken to Russia in the early months of the Kremlin’s 2022 invasion have been put up for adoption by authorities, in one confirmed case under a false Russian identity.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine
On February 24 2022, the world awoke to news that Russian missiles had struck targets across Ukraine and used tanks to blast through the border.
The invasion came after months of rare public warnings from western intelligence agencies. It would soon escalate into the largest conflict in Europe since the second world war.
Ukrainians call the past 10 years “the great war” because of Russia’s first military invasion of their country in February 2014, when troops without insignia began their takeover of the Crimean Peninsula. Months later, they would spill into the Donbas region, fomenting a war under the guise of a separatist uprising.
March 2022: Russia fails to capture Kyiv
The Russian attempt to take Ukraine’s capital was thwarted by a combination of factors, including geography, the attackers’ blundering and modern arms, as well as Ukraine’s speedy, grassroots effort to mobilise and its ingenuity with smartphones and pieces of foam mat.
May 2023: Battle for Bakhmut
Putin hailed his first major victory after the early days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in May 2023, when his forces captured Bakhmut following a gruelling nine-month battle that reduced the city to ruins.
Many of the estimated 30,000 men killed were convicts recruited by the Wagner Group, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who a month later staged a mutiny against Moscow and then died in a plane crash in August 2023.
Additional cartography by Jana Tauschinski, Aditi Bhandari, Cleve Jones and Hirofumi Yamamoto
Development by Vanessa Brown, Martin Stabe, Alan Smith, Emma Lewis, Joanna S Kao, Sam Learner and Ændra Rininsland
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