The question of where Ukraine’s borders with Russia should be drawn in any peace negotiations came into sharp focus this week after Pete Hegseth, the U.S. defense secretary, said that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to try to regain all of the territory Russia has seized since 2014.
Ukraine’s government has long said that its goal is to restore its borders to where they were before Russia launched its first invasion more than a decade ago.
Here is a look at Ukraine’s borders and Russia’s advances into its territory:
Independence borders
Ukraine’s borders were set when it gained independence in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed. It borders Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to the west; and Romania and Moldova to the south. It also borders its giant neighbor Russia to the east.
2014 invasion and Crimea annexation
Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2014, seizing Crimea, a peninsula extending from its southern coast. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia annexed the territory, a move that is not recognized internationally. Ukraine’s government has said that reclaiming Crimea, by force or diplomacy, is one of its most important goals in the war.
In 2018, Russia opened a bridge across the Kerch Strait linking its territory with Crimea. Ukraine has bombed the bridge on several occasions.
Military experts have long said that winning back Crimea by force is not a realistic option for Ukraine, given Russia’s military strength. Ukrainian forces have made little headway in opening a route toward Crimea.
In the 2014 invasion, Russian forces and proxy militias also seized territory in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, including the capitals of the two provinces it comprises, Donetsk and Luhansk. Moscow has held those cities and much of the surrounding areas ever since.
Full-scale invasion
The Kremlin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russian forces failed in their goal of seizing the capital, Kyiv, but they did capture more territory in Donetsk and Luhansk, including the cities of Mariupol and Bakhmut.
Russia also won ground in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in southern Ukraine, in effect gaining control of a land corridor along the northern coast of the Sea of Azov. That connected Russian forces in Crimea with territory they controlled in eastern Ukraine.
In the fall of 2022, Moscow illegally annexed Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk, just as it had done with Crimea, although it did not control the entirety of those provinces. Over the past year, the fiercest fighting in Ukraine has taken place in Donetsk, where Russian forces have gained control of several cities and towns.
Russia now controls around 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory, including areas in the south and east, Crimea and some ground north of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city.
