It appears that Putin is trying to sell the view that he’s about get the WHOLE of Kursk back….
It also appears THAT isn’t the case….
Western countries are trying to pressure Putin to take the ‘Trump’ Deal….
Zelensky says Putin’s stalling for time to get more of Kursk back…
Putin is also trying to keep ALL the territory HIS troops have taken IN the Ulkraine though…
The Daily Kos grunt report linked below revealed the horrible treatment Russian troops are under FROM their OWN….
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Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he sees a “good chance to end this war quickly and secure peace” after Kyiv accepted a US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire but Moscow said it would agree only if certain conditions were met. The Ukrainian president also urged the US and other allies to apply pressure on Moscow, reiterating his belief that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, will delay reaching a ceasefire for as long as possible. “If there is a strong response from the United States, they will not let them play around,” Zelenskyy told reporters. “And if there are steps that Russia is not afraid of, they will delay the process.” He said separately that Putin “will try to drag everyone into endless discussions … while his guns continue to kill people”.
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Vladimir Putin called for beleaguered Ukrainian troops in the Russian region of Kursk to “surrender”, saying they would be treated with dignity. Donald Trump urged Putin to spare the lives of the troops while he said his envoy had held “very good and productive” talks with the Russian leader on the proposed 30-day ceasefire. Moscow’s rapid counteroffensive in Kursk over the past week has recaptured much of the territory that Ukraine seized last August in the western Russian border region and hoped to use as a bargaining chip in peace talks. “We are sympathetic to President Trump’s call,” Putin said in remarks broadcast on Russian television on Friday. “If they lay down their arms and surrender, they will be guaranteed life and dignified treatment.” Trump said “thousands” of Ukrainian troops were “completely surrounded by the Russian military and in a very bad and vulnerable position”. Putin, meanwhile, praised Trump for “doing everything” to improve relations between Moscow and Washington.
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Ukraine’s military leadership denied the battlefield claims. “There is no threat of our units being encircled,” Ukraine’s general staff posted on social media. Zelenskyy also gave a more sober assessment, saying: “The situation in the Kursk region is obviously very difficult.” He insisted the campaign still had value. Sources in Ukraine and military analysts also said Trump’s claims of a mass encirclement in Kursk were not accurate.
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Keir Starmer will urge about 25 world leaders on Saturday to make concrete commitments to support Ukraine and increase pressure on Vladimir Putin to accept the ceasefire. The British prime minister hopes Saturday’s video call will see the so-called “coalition of the willing” come up with firm commitments of help for Ukraine in the run-up to any peace agreement and, after that, to ensure the nation’s security. The meeting will be choreographed to show wide support for Ukraine from western nations, including Europe, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Starmer will be seeking offers of logistical, financial or military support for Kyiv to put it in a strong position for talks. “If Russia finally comes to the table, then we must be ready to monitor a ceasefire to ensure it is a serious and enduring peace,” he said in a statement before the video meeting. “If they don’t, then we need to strain every sinew to ramp up economic pressure on Russia to secure an end to this war.”
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G7 foreign ministers warned Russia of new sanctions unless it accepted the ceasefire “on equal terms”, saying sanctions could include “caps on oil prices, as well as additional support for Ukraine, and other means”. France and Germany accused Russia of seeking to block the truce, while Starmer said Moscow has shown “complete disregard” for Trump’s proposal.
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A Russian missile struck a residential area in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih on Friday, injuring 11 people including two children, the regional governor said. Serhiy Lysak posted photos on Telegram showing damage to high-rise apartment buildings, private homes and a building that appeared to house a number of businesses. Oleksandr Vilkul, head of the military administration in the city – Zelenskyy’s home town – said two areas took direct hits. One of the sites hit was a night club, he said. In the southern region of Kherson, Russian guided bombs struck a series of targets including a residential area in Kherson city, killing one person, the regional governor said on Telegram. Near the Black Sea city of Odesa, Russian drones attacked the nearby port of Chornomorsk, cutting power to its residents, the regional governor said.
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Ukrainian air defences destroyed 130 out of 178 drones launched by Russia during its latest overnight strike, Kyiv’s air force said on Saturday.
It added that another 38 drones had been “locationally lost”, typically a reference to electronic jamming, and that Russian forces had also fired two ballistic missiles. -
Russian deputy foreign minister Andrei Rudenko is visiting North Korea, the country’s KCNA state media said on Saturday. Thousands of North Korean troops have been deployed to Ukraine to support Russian forces, according to Ukrainian, US and South Korean officials.
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EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas would propose that the 27-country bloc supply up to €40bn ($44bn) in new military aid to Ukraine,diplomatic sources have said. Senior EU diplomats, meanwhile, agreed on Friday to a six-month extension of sanctions against about 2,000 Russians including Putin and many senior politicians and businesspeople….
Trump people talking about Ukraine giving up Kursk AND Being Alright with Russia keeping Donbas territory?
National security adviser Mike Waltz said Ukraine likely would have to cede some of its Donbas region to Russia if it wants a long-term peace deal.
The comments, during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday night, come as the Trump administration pressures Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine.
Trump officials have previously signaled Ukraine should not expect to return to its pre-2014 borders as part of the peace talks, which effectively takes the Crimean peninsula out of negotiations.
But it’s less clear how much of the eastern Donbas region Ukraine will need to cede, with Russia claiming more land than it currently occupies. Hannity outlined vague contours of a peace plan during his interview with Waltz on Friday.
“I would imagine that Ukraine being a part of NATO is not going to happen, and I would imagine parts — maybe the Donbas region in particular or areas that are heavily populated by people from Russia, that would go to Putin in any negotiated settlement. Am I wrong in my conjecture here?” Hannity asked….
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Zelenskyy said on Saturday that Russia wanted to achieve a “stronger position” militarily before committing to any ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. “They want a stronger position before the ceasefire,” Zelenskyy said at a press conference in Kyiv. At the same event, Zelenskyy said the question of territory in Ukraine’s war with Russia was “complicated” and should be discussed in detail at a later date.
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The Ukrainian president also accused Putin of “lying to everyone”. In a post on X on Saturday, Zelenskyy said Putin was lying “about the situation on the ground, especially about what’s happening in the Kursk region, where our Ukrainian forces continue their operations” and “about how a ceasefire is supposedly too complicated”.
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Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey urged Starmer to seize frozen Russian assets to fund more support for Ukraine. Responding to Saturday morning’s meeting of the “coalition of the willing”, Davey said: “Putin could end this war today if he wanted peace, but it’s clear he’s only interested in destroying Ukraine’s sovereignty and turning it into a vassal state of Russia.” Asked about whether he had discussed seizing Russian assets with his counterparts, Starmer said it had been discussed, but added it was “a complicated question”.
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Mikhail Kasyanov, Vladimir Putin’s first prime minister and now an opponent of the Russian president, said Moscow was only interested in a conditional ceasefire. Kasyanov told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “He rejected this proposal for an unconditional ceasefire, he wants conditional, he wants a ceasefire on his terms.”
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A retired US general charged with helping sell the Trump administration’s Ukraine peace plan wrote a string of op-eds and reports for a rightwing thinktank in which he repeatedly questioned whether Ukraine had a legitimate part to play in peace negotiations. Keith Kellogg also blamed the war on the machinations of a US “military-industrial complex” and “[Joe] Biden’s national security incompetence” rather than Russia’s 2022 invasion, which has been condemned across the globe and resulted in a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
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Zelenskyy said on Saturday that Kyiv’s forces were still fighting in Russia’s Kursk region and that they were not facing an encirclement. In a statement on social media, he added that the situation near the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk had stabilised but that Russian forces were accumulating across the border from Ukraine’s north-eastern Sumy region. Earlier on Saturday, the Russian defence ministry said that its troops had recaptured the villages of Rubanshchina and Zaoleshenka in its western Kursk region.
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Ukraine said on Saturday it had downed 130 Russian-launched drones across the country at night. Kyiv’s air force said the Iranian-made Shahed drones were downed over 14 regions and that Moscow had also attacked with two ballistic missiles.
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Kyiv also said that the number injured in a Russian strike a day earlier on Zelenskyy’s home town Kryvy Rig rose to 14. On Friday, officials said Russia attacked a residential area of the central Ukrainian city. “Fourteen people were wounded, among them two children,” the head of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Sergiy Lysak, said on Telegram.
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Russia deployed almost 200 firefighters to help put out a fire at an oil depot caused by a Ukraine drone strike in the southern Krasnodar region, authorities said. The governor of the Krasnodar region Veniamin Kondratyev said in the early hours of Saturday that a petrol reserve station in the Black Sea city of Tuapse was “attacked by the Kyiv regime”. The government of the Krasnodar region said 188 people were involved in putting out the fire.
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Akif Çağatay Kılıç, a foreign policy adviser to Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said that one of the main obstacles to a peace settlement between Ukraine and Russia is a “loss of trust” between the two sides. He referred cryptically to a group of politicians, no longer in power, who he claimed scuppered the initial February 2022 talks in Istanbul, noting that the conditions under which Ukraine is able to negotiate now have changed.
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Ukraine’s largest private energy provider said on Saturday that overnight Russian airstrikes had damaged its energy facilities in the Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa regions. In a statement, DTEK said “damages are significant” and that some consumers in both regions were left without power….
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ISW….Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 15, 2025
- Russian milbloggers and Ukrainian officials continue to deny Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unsubstantiated claim that Russian forces have encircled a significant number of Ukrainian troops in Kursk Oblast.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations in Kursk Oblast but have not completely pushed Ukrainian forces out of the area as of this publication.
- Ukrainian officials expressed concern about Russian ground operations in northern Sumy Oblast but doubt Russia’s ability to conduct an effective concerted offensive operation against Sumy City.
- The Kremlin is likely preparing to intensify a narrative that accuses Ukrainian forces of war crimes in Kursk Oblast in an attempt to discredit the Ukrainian military, erode Western support for Ukraine, and spoil or delay straightforward discussions about the 30-day ceasefire that US President Donald Trump proposed to Putin.
- Russian forces conducted drone and missile strikes against Ukraine on the night of March 14 to 15, including conducting their third double-tap strike against Ukraine in the past week.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appointed the official Ukrainian delegation to “engage with Ukraine’s international partners” in the negotiation process to end the war on March 15.
- Ukrainian forces recently advanced near Toretsk and Russian forces recently advanced in Sumy Oblast and near Chasiv Yar and Pokrovsk….
Daily Kos grunt Report for Today…..
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