Fighting has raged in Ukraine since Russia launched a full-scale invasion more than three years ago. Over the past year, Russian forces have slowly expanded the amount of territory they control, mostly in the east of Ukraine, and have continued their recent barrage of air strikes on Kyiv and other cities.

Ukrainian and US officials have been meeting to try to refine a US-backed peace plan which had been viewed as favourable to Russia – Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said the discussions had been “constructive”.

With further talks now due to take place between Russia and the US, here’s a look at the situation on the ground in Ukraine.

In eastern Ukraine, Moscow’s war machine has been churning mile by mile through the wide open fields of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions – also known as the Donbas – surrounding and overwhelming villages and towns.

It has been trying to gain full control of the area along with two more regions to the west – Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Shortly after the invasion, Russia held referendums to try to annexe all these regions – in the same way it had annexed Crimea in 2014 – but it has never had them under full control.

Under the initial peace plan – drafted by US and Russian officials last month – Ukraine would cede control of all of Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea, along with the areas of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson that Russia currently occupies, to Moscow.

Ukrainian forces would have to withdraw from parts of Donetsk they still hold and this would become a demilitarised area under de facto Russian control. Russian forces would withdraw from the small areas of Ukraine they currently occupy outside those regions.

Zelensky has consistently said Ukraine will not hand over the Donbas in exchange for peace, saying such a concession could be used as a springboard for future attacks by Russia.

Following the most recent talks with US officials he said the “territorial issue is the most difficult” element of the peace deal.

A recent report by the US-based Institute for the Study of War, (ISW) describes a “fortress belt” running 50km (31 miles) through western Donetsk.

“Ukraine has spent the last 11 years pouring time, money, and effort into reinforcing the fortress belt and establishing significant defence industrial and defensive infrastructure,” it writes.

A Russian summer offensive near the eastern town of Pokrovsk did make rapid advances just north of the town and Russia has recently made advances in the south of the town itself and to the east of nearby Kostyantynivka.

Russian officials claim to have captured the key strategic town, known in Russian as Krasnoarmeysk, which could give Moscow a platform to drive north towards the two biggest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in the Donetsk region, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, but Ukraine denies this.

“Search and assault operations and the elimination of the enemy in urban areas continue in Pokrovsk,” Ukraine’s eastern military command said in a statement posted on social media on Tuesday morning.

Open-source intelligence projects monitoring the front lines of the war also suggest Pokrovsk has not yet been fully captured by the Russian army.

The ISW says it would take Russia “several years” to take the whole region.

However, it also notes that Russia’s casualty rates have fallen in recent months despite its more rapid advances and says this is likely to be the result of its increased use of unmanned aerial vehicles – drones.

Further north, Russia also claims to have taken the border town of Vovchansk – although Ukraine has not acknowledged this and open-source intelligence projects monitoring again suggest it has not yet been fully captured.

ISW analysts say Russia is trying to create a buffer zone inside Ukraine’s northern borders and get within artillery range of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest city.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says he wants this buffer zone to protect Russia, after Ukrainian forces captured a swathe of territory further north in Kursk in the summer of 2024. Russian forces eventually drove them out, with the help of North Korean troops.

As well as the counter-offensive in the Kursk region, Ukraine has struck air bases deep inside Russia. One of these attacks involved using 100 drones to target nuclear-capable long-range bombers.

The Russian Defence Ministry confirmed the attacks had occurred in five regions of Russia – Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan and Amur – but stated planes had been damaged only in Murmansk and Irkutsk, while in other locations the attacks had been repelled.

Kyiv claims the drone operation inflicted $7bn (£5.2bn) of damage to the Russian military. It hasn’t been possible to verify either country’s claims.

More recently Moscow blamed Ukrainian drones for a massive oil depot fire near Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi – the venue of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.

Since Trump took office at the start of 2025, the US has been pursuing an end to the war – now in its fourth year – through negotiations.

Trump had been seen as more sympathetic to Russia than his predecessor Joe Biden was, and strained relations with Zelensky came to a head on 28 February when he and Vice-President JD Vance berated the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office on live television.

Public relations with Zelensky have vastly improved in recent months and Ukraine remains critically dependent on deliveries of US-made advanced weaponry, including air defence systems to repel deadly Russian air assaults, as well as intelligence provided by Washington.

Zelensky warned that Kyiv risked losing US support over the latest peace plan – the draft, in addition to ceding territory, would have required Ukraine to significantly cut the size of its army and pledge not to join Nato.

Last week, Putin said he had seen a draft peace plan proposed by the US, and that it could become the “basis” for a future agreement to end the war.

However, Kremlin officials later cast doubt over whether it would accept the proposal after Kyiv and European allies said they had secured changes to it.

Russia’s full-scale invasion began with dozens of missile strikes on cities all over Ukraine before dawn on 24 February 2022.

Russian ground troops moved in quickly and within a few weeks were in control of large areas of Ukraine and had advanced to the suburbs of Kyiv.

Russian forces were bombarding Kharkiv, and had taken territory in the east and south as far as Kherson, and surrounded the port city of Mariupol.

But they hit very strong Ukrainian resistance almost everywhere and faced serious logistical problems with poorly-motivated Russian troops suffering shortages of food, water and ammunition.

Ukrainian forces were also quick to deploy Western supplied arms such as the Nlaw anti-tank system, which proved highly effective against the Russian advance.

By October 2022, the picture had changed dramatically and, having failed to take Kyiv, Russia withdrew completely from the north. The following month, Ukrainian forces recaptured the southern city of Kherson.

Since then, the battle has mostly been in the east of Ukraine with Russian forces slowly gaining ground over many months – military experts estimate between 165,000 and 235,000 Russian service personnel have been killed since the invasion.

Ukraine last updated its casualty figures in December 2024, when President Zelensky acknowledged 43,000 Ukrainian deaths among soldiers and officers. Western analysts believe this figure to be an under-estimate.

By Dominic Bailey, Mike Hills, Paul Sargeant, Chris Clayton, Kady Wardell, Camilla Costa, Mark Bryson, Sana Dionysiou, Gerry Fletcher, Kate Gaynor and Erwan Rivault