Ukrainian forces have stalled the Russian offensive in the eastern Donetsk region in recent months and have started to win back small patches of land, according to Ukrainian soldiers and military analysts.

Russia still holds the initiative, and conducts dozens of assaults across the eastern front every day, the soldiers and analysts say. But after more than 15 months on the offensive, Russian brigades have been depleted and Moscow is struggling to replace destroyed equipment, offering limited opportunities that Ukrainian forces are trying to exploit.

“The Russian offensive effort in Donetsk has stalled in recent months due to poor weather, exhaustion among Russian forces, and effective Ukrainian adaptation to the way Russian troops have been fighting,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

While it is too early to say the front has stabilized in Donetsk, he said, the situation has improved as Ukraine finds innovative ways to compensate for its shortage of troops.

Ukrainian soldiers cautioned that they expected the Russians to regroup and intensify offensive efforts to take advantage of the sudden suspension of American military assistance and intelligence sharing, which threatens to undermine the Ukrainian war effort.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, working to repair his strained relationship with the United States and secure a favorable deal to end his country’s war with Russia, was scheduled to meet on Monday with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.

The meeting between Mr. Zelensky and Prince Mohammed, the de facto Saudi leader, who has sought to take a central role on the world’s diplomatic stage, comes ahead of talks planned for Tuesday between Ukrainian and U.S. officials in the oil-rich Gulf state.

“Ukraine has been seeking peace since the very first second of the war, and we have always said that the only reason it continues is Russia,” Mr. Zelensky wrote Monday on social media before he landed in the seaside city of Jeddah.

Once shunned internationally because of accusations of human rights abuses that he has denied, the crown prince has positioned his country as a middleman in efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Last year, Saudi Arabia played a pivotal role in a complex U.S.-Russia prisoner swap, and President Trump has suggested it could be the site of a possible meeting between him and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Last month, Mr. Zelensky postponed a trip to Saudi Arabia after it hosted an extraordinary meeting of the U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, in which the two sides sought to reset their relationship and discussed the war in Ukraine, without Mr. Zelensky.

But on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky said on social media that he would visit Saudi Arabia, declaring that he was “determined to do everything to end this war with a just and lasting peace.”

“Realistic proposals are on the table. The key is to move quickly and effectively,” he wrote.

Mr. Zelensky added that he would not attend the talks with U.S. officials, saying that the Ukrainian delegation would include the country’s foreign and defense ministers, a top military official and his chief of staff.

The Ukrainian president is under intense pressure from the Trump administration to agree to a peace deal, and he has appeared to recalibrate his message after Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance angrily assailed him 10 days ago in the Oval Office over what they described as a lack of gratitude for U.S. support.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that Mr. Zelensky does not “have the cards” given Russia’s military strength, and has all but demanded that Ukraine accept diplomatic terms set by the United States for a resolution of the war. Still, there are signs that Ukraine’s position on the battlefield is improving: Ukrainian troops have in recent months stalled a Russian offensive and in some places won back small patches of land.

Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, has said that Mr. Zelensky’s deferential posture after the blowup in the White House has improved Ukraine’s standing with American officials. Nonetheless, the U.S. has paused military support for Ukraine.

Mr. Zelensky wrote on Saturday that he was “fully committed to constructive dialogue” and that he hoped to “discuss and agree on the necessary decisions and steps” during his visit to Saudi Arabia. Mr. Rubio will be in Jeddah for talks with Ukrainian officials from Monday through Wednesday, according to the U.S. State Department, and was expected to meet with Prince Mohammed after arriving on Monday evening.

Mr. Trump’s position on Russia and Ukraine has sometimes been hard to pin down. On Friday, he said on social media that he was considering significant sanctions on Russia to help force a peace deal on Ukraine. He demanded that the two countries “get to the table right now, before it is too late.”

Hours later, he told reporters at the White House that he felt talks with Russia were going well and that he was “finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine.”

For Prince Mohammed, acting as a mediator in the war is an opportunity to solidify his influence beyond the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has avoided taking sides in the conflict and in August 2023, the kingdom hosted a conference in Jeddah with representatives of more than 40 countries to discuss pathways to peace. Ukraine said those consultations were “fruitful,” but Russia, which had not been invited, was dismissive of the meeting.

Ismaeel Naar contributed reporting.

Under President Trump’s plan, the United States would govern Gaza and expel its residents. Under the Arab plan, Gaza would be run by Palestinian technocrats within a wider Palestinian state. By one Israeli proposal, Israel would cede some control to Palestinians but block Palestinian statehood. By another, Israel would occupy the entire territory.

Since the opening weeks of the war in Gaza, politicians, diplomats and analysts have made scores of proposals for how it might end, and who should subsequently govern the territory. Those proposals grew in number and relevance after the sealing of a cease-fire in January, increasing the need for clear postwar plans. And when Mr. Trump proposed to forcibly transfer the population later that month, it fueled a push across the Middle East to find an alternative.

The problem? Each plan contains something unacceptable to either Israel or Hamas, or to the Arab countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia who some hope will fund and partially oversee Gaza’s future.

“The devil is in the details, and none of the details in these plans make any sense,” said Thomas R. Nides, a former United States ambassador to Israel. “Israel and Hamas have fundamentally opposed positions, while parts of the Arab plan are unacceptable to Israel, and vice versa. I’m all for people suggesting new ideas, but it is very hard for anyone to find common ground unless the dynamics change significantly.”

The central challenge is that Israel wants a Hamas-free Gaza whereas the group still seeks to retain its military wing, which led the October 2023 attack on Israel that ignited the war.

Mr. Trump’s plan would satisfy many Israelis, but it is unacceptable both to Hamas and to the Arab partners of the United States, who want to avoid a process that international lawyers say would amount to a war crime.

The Arab alternative — which was announced last week in Egypt — would allow Palestinians to stay in Gaza, while transferring power to a technocratic Palestinian government. But it was hazy about how exactly Hamas would be removed from power, and it was conditional on the creation of a Palestinian state, which a majority of Israelis oppose.

The upshot is that, despite the flurry of proposals since January, Israelis and Palestinians are no closer to an agreement about Gaza’s future than they were at the start of the year.

In turn, that raises the risks of renewed war.

The cease-fire agreed to in January was technically meant to last just six weeks, a period that elapsed at the start of March. For now, both sides are maintaining an informal truce while they continue negotiations — mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the United States — for a formal extension.

But that goal seems distant because Hamas wants Israel to accept a postwar plan before releasing more hostages, whereas Israel wants more hostages released without an agreement over Gaza’s future. While some Israelis could accept any deal that secures the return of 59 hostages still held in Gaza, of which 24 are said to be alive, key members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government would not.

For now, all sides are projecting a sense of momentum.

A Hamas delegation visited Egypt over the weekend to discuss Gaza’s future. An Israeli delegation was set to arrive in Qatar on Monday for further mediation. And on Sunday night, Israeli networks broadcast interviews with Adam Boehler, an American envoy, in which he reported “some progress” from a “baby-steps perspective.”

Mr. Boehler, who has broken with years of U.S. policy to negotiate directly with Hamas, said some of the group’s demands were “relatively reasonable” and that he had “some hope about where this could go.” Mr. Boehler also conceded that any breakthrough was still weeks away.

A senior Hamas official, Mousa Abu Marzouq, said in a recent interview with The New York Times that he was personally open to negotiations about Hamas’s disarmament, a move that would increase the chances of a compromise. But the Hamas movement quickly distanced itself from his remarks and said they had been taken out of context.

The longer the impasse lasts without any hostages being released, the likelier it is that Israel will return to battle, according to Israeli analysts.

Absent a breakthrough, Israel would either have to accept Hamas’s long-term presence — an outcome that is unacceptable to many ministers in the Israeli government — or return to war to force Hamas’s hand, said Ofer Shelah, a former lawmaker and a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, a research group in Tel Aviv.

“Given the current situation, we are on a path leading to an Israeli occupation of Gaza, making Israel responsible for the fate of two million people,” Mr. Shelah said. That would have lasting consequences not only for the Palestinians in Gaza, he said, but also for Israel itself, which would probably get bogged down in a costly war of attrition in order to maintain its control of the territory.

Lia Lapidot contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.