Four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the fighting has become a grueling war of attrition with mounting casualties on both sides. The stalemate on the battlefield is matched by a failure to find a diplomatic end to the conflict.

Mr. Trump has shifted U.S. policy toward a “peace through mediation” strategy since returning to the White House in January 2025. U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff says plans are in place for a summit with Mr. Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “Hopefully, you’ll be hearing some good news in the coming weeks,” Mr. Witkoff said during an appearance on Fox News over the weekend.

Retired Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says Russian forces are “gaining tenths of a percentage of Ukrainian territory a year at tremendous costs to Russia’s future.” Russian casualties in Ukraine have reached levels that are unprecedented for any conflict since World War II. Reports from Western intelligence indicate that Moscow has sustained more than 1.2 million casualties, killed and wounded, since the start of the war.

The power vacuum created inside Nemesio Ruben Oseguera Cervantes’ Jalisco New Generation Cartel could lead to even more instability as competing factions battle for control of the highly profitable outfit, which the U.S. says is responsible for much of the fentanyl and other narcotics flowing into the country.

Reuters reports that a new U.S.-military-led task force specializing in intelligence collection on drug cartels played a role in the Mexican military raid on Sunday that killed the Mexican drug lord known as “El Mencho.” U.S. officials told the news agency the Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel was launched last month to map networks of cartel members on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The cartel has at least 15,000 members and moves drugs all over the world, including to the U.S. and Canada, as well as Europe, Asia and Africa, according to a U.S. intelligence fact sheet.

The initial wave of violence after the cartel leader’s death left more than 70 people dead across Mexico. Mexican officials said at least 25 national guard members were killed, along with at least 30 suspected criminals, a prison guard and an agent from the state prosecutor’s office.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps carried out a fresh round of drills in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday, a week after similar drills resulted in a partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

The drills have alarmed regional experts, who note the potential damage to global oil markets if Iran attempts to close the strait in response to a potential U.S. attack. The strait is the only waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean, making it a strategic choke point through which as much as one-fifth of the world’s crude oil and petroleum passes annually.

The ramp-up in military drills comes as U.S. and Iranian negotiators prepare for talks Thursday in Geneva. U.S. officials have demanded that Iran abandon its nuclear ambitions and severely limit its ballistic missile program. The Pentagon has moved dozens of warships, fighter jets, missile defense batteries and two aircraft carriers to the region over the past month.

Bosnian-Herzegovinian Ambassador to the United States Sven Alkalaj takes issue with two recent columns published by The Washington Times, writing that they amounted to “synchronized xenophobic attacks on Bosnian-Herzegovinian society, which not so long ago suffered mass murders, expulsions, mass rapes and imprisonment in concentration camps.

“On Feb. 9, your media published a piece, ‘Republika Srpska deserves independence,’ based on an interview with Milorad Dodik, and on Feb. 10, you published Max Primorac’s commentary, ‘An Islamist state on NATO’s border?’” Mr. Alkalaj writes in an op-ed of his own for The Times. “These pieces contained claims portraying Bosnia-Herzegovina as increasingly extremist and unstable.

“The malicious and inflammatory messages spread by Messrs. Dodik and Primorac are identical to the messages of Slobodan Milosevic, aka ‘The Butcher of the Balkans,’ who orchestrated aggression against Bosnia-Herzegovina,” the ambassador writes. “Three decades ago, this resulted in more than 2 million refugees and more than 100,000 killed and culminated in the genocide committed by Serbs. Therefore, it is essential that such public statements be examined with historical accuracy and moral clarity.”

For more than four decades, Western policy toward Iran has “oscillated between pressure and negotiation,” writes Sepideh Bahrami, a water researcher and engineer. “Sanctions are imposed, talks resume and policymakers attempt to contain the Islamic republic’s destabilizing behavior.

“Today, Western policy often measures success by the degree to which the Islamic republic is weakened. Economic strain is interpreted as progress. Diplomatic isolation is viewed as containment,” Ms. Bahrami writes in an op-ed for The Times. “Yet weakening a regime does not change its ideological foundation. Iran remains structurally committed to strategic confrontation, asymmetric leverage and regional disruption. Containment limits capability; it does not create it.

“The strategic question facing Washington is no longer whether to pressure or negotiate,” she writes. “It is whether U.S. policy aligns with the political transformation already unfolding inside Iran.”

• Feb. 24-25 — Warfare Symposium, Air & Space Forces Association

• Feb. 24-25 — National Summit on Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles, American Conference Institute

• Feb. 24— Assessing the Scope and Impacts of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Military Purges, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• Feb. 25 — The International Relations of the Two-State Solution, Middle East Institute

• March 3 — North Korea’s Ninth Party Congress: Domestic and Global Implications, Stimson Center

• March 4 — Surveying Foreign Influence in Artificial Intelligence Tools, Foundation for Defense of Democracies