Inserts:

00:03 Report by / Myles Tweedie
01:55 Marco Rubio / US Secretary of State

Script:

00:01
+++ ATMO ((3 sec)) +++ 
Russia's military -- hammering away at Ukraine's so-called 'fortress belt' along the frontline in the Donetsk region.

Moscow's forces have made incremental gains here over the last year but they've come at a huge human cost. 

The area lies in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region and the fate of that territory is central to the conflict between Moscow and Kyiv.

00:30
Before to the war, the Donbas was best known as Ukraine's industrial and coal-mining heartland. 
But it is also a vast economic zone, rich with minerals and fertile argicultural lands.
Prior to 2014 it accounted for about 16 percent of Ukraine's total GDP.

While there are various definitions of how big the Donbas is -- at the centre of it...  

00:55
... are the eastern Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk. Currently Russia occupies almost all of the Luhansk region and some 85 percent of Donetsk. The areas still under Ukrainian control -- seen here in yellow --- are heavily fortified, protecting the nearby key cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Kyiv views the cities as vital to its defense of the rest of Ukraine. 

01:21
Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly rejected the notion of signing away the rest of the Donbas to secure peace with Moscow.

01:30
But President Vladimir Putin has doubled down on his claim to the entire region -- saying it is part of Russia's historical lands.

01:40
And Ukraine is coming under mounting pressure from the Trump administration to make concessions.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he believes that public speculation is making peace negotiations more difficult.

01:54
+++ SOT Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State +++
"It's easier for the parties engaged to find flexibility on some of these matters if they're not being deliberated in the public on a constant basis, because it creates political pressures internally on both sides, as you can imagine in Ukraine, you know, the notion that you would even consider a change in land after all that`s gone in the war is not it`s difficult. And in the case of Russia, they've been telling their people for two and a half years that they're winning this war overwhelmingly. So people are going to wonder, why are we giving up land if we're winning so strongly?"

02:22
But with the Donbas being so important -- culturally and economically -- any compromise would publically be a bitter pill to swallow for either side. 

END