U.S. President Donald Trump has said he believes Ukraine will be "crushed very shortly," as it is up against Russia's "big war machine" that it cannot defeat.
"I think I'm saving that nation. I think I'm doing a great service to Ukraine. I believe that," he said in an interview with The Atlantic published April 28.
Trump's comments come as his administration's self-declared deadline of 100 days to end the war in Ukraine approaches this week, with the goal still a long way from completion.
In recent days, the White House has threatened to walk away from the peace negotiations altogether, with U.S. Vice President JD Vance on April 28 saying the U.S. is "making progress" in the negotiations, but a peace deal is not necessarily guaranteed.
Concerns have been raised by Ukraine and its European allies that Washington's unfavorable view of Ukraine's current position in the war means Kyiv could be forced into an unfavorable peace deal.
Whilst applying no real pressure on Moscow, the U.S. is trying to force Ukraine into a rushed peace to end the war at all costs, with Washington potentially recognizing Moscow's illegal annexation of Crimea among the hard-hitting concessions.
But the reality on the front lines is at odds with Trump's recent statement — military analysts and soldiers told the Kyiv Independent last week that Russia is waging small-scale assaults across the entire front, but Ukraine is light years away from being "crushed very shortly."
Since Ukraine announced the start of the Russian spring offensive in early April, Moscow has made "incremental gains" in multiple sectors of the front at a high cost, but achieving a breakthrough seems unlikely.
Though outmanned and outgunned, Ukraine has managed to stabilize the front, and according to experts, Kyiv can keep fighting.
"Ukraine's position is nowhere near bad enough that they would need to make such concessions, especially when Russia isn't making any actual concessions," said Jakub Janovsky, a Prague-based military analyst at the Oryx open-source project tracking Ukrainian and Russian equipment losses.
Alisa Yurchenko
While Russia wages costly assaults in Donetsk Oblast and across the southern front, its troops appear to be struggling to keep advancing, and Ukraine has gotten better at countering these attacks, including with the use of cheap first-person-view (FPV) drones and mines.
"Creeping one kilometer after another in a country as large as Ukraine isn't exactly a viable strategy," Janovsky told the Kyiv Independent.
Based on the open-source footage of Russian assaults thus far in the spring offensive, Janovsky assessed that the assaults that rely on mechanized and motorized units and "loads of infantry" are not going well.
The Russian assaults are, nevertheless, endless on the ground, varying in intensity from day to day.
Oleksandr Spytsin, commander of a drone unit in the National Guard's Omega special operations division, deployed near Pokrovsk, said that Russian troops have been creeping "non-stop." His unit's task is to locate and prevent them from reaching the Ukrainian infantry positions.
"We often observe this pattern: When they take a serious beating, the next day their activity drops, they quiet down a bit," Spytsin told the Kyiv Independent at a drone position about two kilometers from the "zero" line.
"Then maybe they don't operate for a day, or they focus on another direction, and then they're back here again, acting like nothing happened."
Janovsky predicted that Russia's potential gains in the future would depend on how many resources Moscow would be willing to allocate, especially given how the usable equipment from the mass Soviet-inherited storage is "shrinking significantly."
"Even if Ukraine has no 'cards,' it still cannot accept something which reinforces Putin for further actions."
Despite Russia's losses outnumbering its arms production capacity, Moscow would likely be able to keep replenishing its units this year, even if it means using less favorable options such as civilian vehicles instead of armored personnel carriers, according to Janovsky.
Former Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk, chairman of the Kyiv-based Center for Defense Strategies, argued that no matter the front-line situation, the de jure recognition of Crimea is "certainly unreasonable."
Zagorodnyuk said that the suggested peace formula circulating in the public domain has "nothing concrete about security guarantees," failing to prevent Russian President Vladimir Putin from breaching the ceasefire and restarting the war.
"You can only formally accept territorial losses once, you cannot get them back again. But Russia can breach ceasefires as many times as it likes," Zagorodnyuk told the Kyiv Independent, stressing that Ukraine needs firm security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe.
"Even if Ukraine has no 'cards,' it still cannot accept something which reinforces Putin for further actions."
Lawmaker Yehor Cherniev, deputy chairman at the National Security, Defense and Intelligence Committee and a chairman at Ukraine's permanent delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, said that "all our partners have long been informed about these red lines" despite the U.S. reportedly considering recognizing Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea.
"We have nowhere to retreat, we will not sign a surrender," Cherniev told the Kyiv Independent, saying that he hopes the European partners will remain on Kyiv's side.
John Hardie, deputy director of the Russia Program at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, agreed that the overall front-line situation is "not great, but not dire," and it's unlikely to collapse.
Even if the U.S. were to pull out its military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine again, Hardie believes that a front-line collapse is unlikely, although the effect in some areas — such as the air defense — may be felt quicker. Trump's team has threatened that the U.S. could ditch the peace talks efforts if there is no progress in the coming weeks.
While Russia's advances in its spring offensive may speed up with time despite its infantry currently being "very low quality," Ukraine's "really good ability" in its prepared defense and precision pose "a formidable challenge for the Russian attackers."
"I don't think Ukraine is in a position where it sort of has to accept whatever the U.S. says or Russia's demands in order to get a deal immediately," Hardie told the Kyiv Independent.
Asami Terajima
