The two most dramatic changes are Russia’s mounting battlefield successes and the Ukrainian people turning against Zelensky and the war. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:
On August 6, U.S. President Donald Trump posted that special envoy Steve Witkoff had just returned from “a highly productive meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.” Trump said that “Great progress was made!”
During that meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin presented the Trump administration with a ceasefire proposal. When asked if it was true that Witkoff was “coming back with a ceasefire proposal,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio replied in a word, “Yes.” Two days later, Trump announced that he would meet with Putin in Alaska on August 15.
“What happened” in the Witkoff-Putin meeting “was good,” Rubio said, “because we have a sense now of what conditions the Russians would require in order to end the war.” But Putin’s message remains unchanged. He has been listing the same conditions since the Istanbul peace talks in the first weeks of the war, and most of those were unchanged since his proposed talks with the U.S. in the weeks before the war. So why are Trump and Putin meeting now? What’s different?
Five important things may have changed recently. The first may be an important concession by Putin. Putin has offered a complete ceasefire if Ukraine withdraws its troops from the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and the Russian annexation of those regions is recognized, including the small area that Russia does not yet control, as well as Crimea.
Trump then suggested that there would be “some swapping of territories to the betterment of both countries.” Russia would swap some territory it holds for some territory that Ukraine still holds. It remains unclear how much territory Russia would demand in return for the territory they would give back. According to some reports, the line would be frozen as it now stands with Ukraine ceding the remainder of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of the Donbas in exchange for Russia returning territory that it controls in Kharkiv and Sumy. According to other reports, Russia would return territory in exchange for the remainder of the Donbas and the remainder of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
