Russia has stepped up its territorial gains in Ukraine ahead of the highly anticipated peace talks with US President Donald Trump on Friday.
Battlefield reports claim Russian sabotage and reconnaisance teams have breached weak points in eastern Ukraine, advancing up to six miles past the front line in two days, in what may prove to be a “breakthrough” for Vladimir Putin.
It comes just days before the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, which European leaders fear could end in peace terms imposed on an unlawfully shrunken Ukraine.
In one of the most extensive incursions so far this year, Russian troops advanced near the coal-mining town of Dobropillia, part of Putin's campaign to take full control of Ukraine's Donetsk region.
Ukraine's military dispatched reserve troops, saying they were in difficult combat against Russian soldiers.
The site holds key strategic value. A Russian foothold there could cut off Kramatorsk, one of Kyiv’s last major strongholds in the Donbas. Losing the city would bring Putin close to full control of the region and boost his leverage in talks with Trump’s administration over Ukraine’s future.
"This breakthrough is like a gift to Putin and Trump during the negotiations," said Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser.
Ukraine's military meanwhile said it had retaken two villages in the eastern region of Sumy on Monday, part of a small reversal in more than a year of slow, attritional Russian gains in the southeast.
Russia, which launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, has mounted a new offensive this year in Sumy after Putin demanded a "buffer zone" there.
Ukraine and its European allies fear that Trump, keen to claim credit for making peace and seal new business deals with Russia's government, will end up rewarding Putin for his 11 years spent in efforts to seize Ukrainian territory, the last three in open warfare.
Trump has said any peace deal would involve "some swapping of territories to the betterment of both" Russia and Ukraine, which has up to now depended on the US as its main arms supplier.
But because all the areas being contested lie within Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his European Union allies fear that he will face pressure to give up far more than Russia does.
Trump's administration tempered expectations on Tuesday for major progress toward a ceasefire, calling his meeting on Friday with Putin in Alaska a "listening exercise."
Zelenskiy and most of his European counterparts have said a lasting peace cannot be secured without Ukraine at the negotiating table, and a deal must comply with international law, Ukraine's sovereignty and its territorial integrity.
They will hold a virtual meeting with Trump on Wednesday to underscore those concerns before the Putin summit, the first U.S.-Russia summit since 2021.
"An imitated rather than genuine peace will not hold for long and will only encourage Russia to seize even more territory," Zelenskiy said in a statement on Tuesday.
Zelenskiy said Russia must agree to a ceasefire before territorial issues are discussed. He would reject any Russian proposal that Ukraine pull its troops from the eastern Donbas region and cede its defensive lines.
Asked why Zelenskiy was not joining the US and Russian leaders at the Alaska summit, a White House spokeswoman said on Tuesday that the bilateral meeting had been proposed by Putin, and that Trump accepted to get a "better understanding" of how to end the war.
"Only one party that's involved in this war is going to be present, and so this is for the president to go and to get a more firm and better understanding of how we can hopefully bring this war to an end," press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. "You need both countries to agree to a deal."
Trump is open to a trilateral meeting with Putin and Zelenskiy later, Leavitt said.
