Many Ukrainians are expecting the new year 2025 to bring the beginning of peace negotiations and an end to the war by Kiev and NATO against Russia. Hopes have been stirred by the pre-election, populist pronouncements of the new US president. Months ago, Donald Trump made statements promising to 'end the war in one day' upon assuming office. But it remains entirely speculative as to whether he would act on that and how. Meanwhile, in the here and now, the outgoing administration of President Joseph Biden is flooding Ukraine with money and weapons so that the unelected regime in Kiev headed by Volodymyr Zelensky may continue a war that it is obviously losing. 

Tragically, the lives of many Ukrainian soldiers continue to be lost in a losing and immoral cause, perhaps as many as hundreds of lives on many days.

How to prolong a senseless war

After the beginning of Russia's special military operation (SMO) in Ukraine in February 2022, the only reason for Ukraine's existence has become its war with Russia, says Andrei Pinchuk in an interview for the Ukraine.ru news outlet on January 4. He is a reserve colonel and commander of the Russian BARS-13 battalion, a former Ukrainian military officer, and today First Minister of State Security of the Donetsk People's Republic (a constituent of the Russian Federation). 

Pinchuk says there is no longer an 'economy' in Ukraine, only warfare. "Negotiations are possible, no doubt about it, but I think they are impossible at the present time. After the start of the Special Military Operation in February 2022, the only reason for the existence of the state of Ukraine became waging war against Russia. As soon as the wheels stop turning on that Ukraine 'bicycle', everything will fall apart. Soldiers will leave the frontlines and travel to Kiev to demolish the government, and Western sponsors will stop giving money, which makes up half of the revenue of the budget of the Zelensky government."

In order to convince the West it is too early to write off the Kiev regime, the Ukraine Armed Forces launched a new attempt at a counteroffensive in Russia's Kursk region on December 5. This turned into a mass destruction of military equipment newly delivered by the United States. Ukrainian opposition blogger Anatoliy Shariy writes that this attempted offensive on Kursk could well enter the Guinness Book of Records as the largest destruction of Western military technology in one event. 

Russian military correspondent Alexander Sladkov says on Telegram that a new offensive by the Ukraine armed forces in the Kursk region was expected. "Our intelligence knew when, from where and with what forces the enemy would march on Kursk. Were we preparing? Of course we were preparing... Why did we let them clear the approach routes the day before? Because we wanted them to go there and get bogged down. Then we would continue to destroy enemy equipment and kill large numbers of soldiers," Sladkov said.

As in past attempts, Ukraine announced well ahead of time on media platforms at home and abroad its intentions in Kursk. Accordingly, the Russian army was waiting for them in exactly the right place and as a result, entire columns of Western tanks and armored vehicles were destroyed by Russian aviation, as though in a shooting gallery. 

The nearly three years of the war have shown to all concerned that the Ukrainian authorities can carefully hide their military losses and failures but are unable to conceal a planned military operation ahead of time. They just cannot stop their false bragging in the belief that this will please their Western sponsors. There is no one in the Office of the President of Ukraine who is actually interested in whatever military pronouncements are made; all they care about is the date of Donald Trump's inauguration and whether this will bring a continuation of the war.

According to the Ukrainian Telegram channel 'Rubicon', Zelensky's office will use two main means to continue its war-lobbying of American political circles and escalate the armed confrontation as much as possible. As for the lobbying (paid for by US taxpayers with US government aid funding), the change of the US administration may jeopardize the entire lobbying network that Zelensky has been building since 2021, the year when Kiev further escalated its war in Donbass, the key part of its wider threats against the Russian Federation as a whole.

"There is a distinct feeling that with totally new political circumstances in Washington, Ukraine is entering the unknown at the very time when the situation at the front is the most difficult," writes Rubicon. 

"Now all the rules are different and it’s going to be hard to learn them all over again," writes The Guardian newspaper in Britain on January 5, citing an official of the Zelensky regime. 

Forecasts for the AFU for 2025

Related News

The downward spiral of Ukraine in 2024 will only continue in 2025

After NATO’s Romanian coup, where next?

The main concerns of Ukrainian political and military experts at the outset of 2025 are those surrounding the future course of hostilities. All scenarios being voiced for the country range from bad to catastrophic. And as in 2022, 2023, and 2024, it is the British media that is scrambling to assure Ukrainians that Russia will soon collapse on its own; Ukrainians will only need to fight Russia for a short time longer, goes the tale. 

Analysts at Rubicon predict three possible military scenarios for 2025. The moderate scenario assumes that Russia will capture southern and central Donbass, including the city of Pokrovsk, but not the northern lands of the Donbass region. Russian troops will approach the city of Zaporozhye and occupy the eastern parts of Kharkiv and Dnepropetrovsk provinces while knocking the Ukrainian army out of the Kursk region. 

The larger scenario assumes that the Russian Federation will take the entire Donbass region (that is, everything east of the Dnieper River) and take all of Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions (historically populated in large numbers by ethnic Russians), and it will enter the Sumy province in Ukraine's northeast, considerably stretching further the frontlines of the Ukrainian army such that the movement of military reserves, when needed, will become ever-more difficult if not impossible. 

Then there is the third, so-called 'Syrian scenario', which, according to Ukrainian analysts, remains unlikely but cannot be ruled out. It assumes a rapid collapse of the Ukrainian army, similar to what happened in Syria in December 2024.

Anatoliy Kozel, an ex-commander of the 53rd brigade of the AFU, said at the beginning of the year that the situation on the front is critical. He says in the worst case, Ukraine will lose 100 square kilometers per day in the coming weeks compared to average daily losses of 20 square kilometers in the closing months of 2024. He says the Russian army will have enough resources to take Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporozhye, and Kherson, respectively the second, fourth, sixth, and thirteenth largest cities in Ukraine. "We had five million motivated soldiers at the beginning of this conflict in 2022, but these were largely exhausted in 2022-2023. Today, they are a demoralized horde, surrendering, running away or deserting," says the Ukrainian officer.

General Serhiy Kryvonos, the former deputy commander of the special operations forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, has written that Ukrainian soldiers are scattering and surrendering because they have nothing to fight for in the current Ukraine. "Look at the Ukrainian soldiers in Russian captivity, who they are and how they got there. We have actually swept the Ukrainian countryside of males aged 35-55 years; they worked for their masters [referring to waged farmworkers] and were not owners of the land. Where is their motivation to fight? To protect what? The lands their masters have taken from them by hook or by crook? In order to defend something, you have to have something worth defending," the Ukrainian general says, as reported by Politnavigator on January 5.

It is noteworthy that while Ukrainian media and military experts talk daily about mass desertions, military fatigue from fighting, and unwillingness to fight for foreign interests, Western (British and American) media constantly talk about dissatisfaction in the Ukrainian army with the 'failures of military conscription.' This amounts to demanding that conscription (legalized kidnappings) be continued and even intensified.

Andriy Biletsky, founder of the Azov neo-Nazi paramilitary regiment, said in early January that the Ukrainian military was afraid to enter their own cities in uniform because of the extremely negative attitude of people, specifically toward military recruitment officers. "I believe it is better to go into the cities without a uniform because of all this fear and hysteria associated with the military enlistment commissions. People are often wary of those in uniform," says the neo-Nazi group, stressing that even among the military, you will not find supporters of harsh conscription measures. 

Hopes for Western miracle weapons

The governing authorities and radical nationalists in Ukraine are still trying to assure Ukrainians that the West is about to hand Kiev some kind of miracle weapon that will turn the situation around. Nazi propaganda told something similar in the spring of 1945 when Soviet troops were already storming the outskirts of Berlin. Ukrainians recall the story by Konstantin Paustovsky, a popular author from Odessa at the beginning of the 20th century. He witnessed in Kiev the various stages of the civil war and foreign military interventions in and around Kiev following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. 

Paustovsky describes that on the eve of the storming of Kiev by units of the new, Red Army still-in-formation [1], the Ukrainian nationalists led by Simon Petliura [2], who was oriented to becoming sponsored by France, convinced the city's population that France would soon supply his forces with a miracle weapon - a violet ray that could destroy all threatening Red units! Civilians were asked not to leave their houses at night and not to look out of the windows so as not to be blinded by the 'violet ray'. It turned out that the pro-Western nationalists were using the night hours to escape from the city without a fight and, best of all, without witnesses. They took with them all the valuables they could carry. 

Ukrainian legislator and Zelensky's former party colleague Oleksandr Dubynskyy claimed in early January that this concept of the mythical violet ray was still working. "We have a new concept of the 'violet ray'... it's called weapons operated by robotic systems. Seriously. In a country where they can't convert a mine into something that can be shot out of a mortar barrel, they are betting on technological breakthroughs in the form of assaults waged by robots."

"Tomorrow, there will be another crazy idea, and this one, too, will fade into the background and be forgotten. Then another and another and another… until finally, the command headquarters will be reduced to the Lviv region [Western Ukraine, near the border with Poland]." 

Whatever the hopes of Ukrainians may be, they will be driven to die for the interests of Zelensky and NATO in the new year. As a military commissar in charge of catching Ukrainians to be sent to the front told a woman in a verbal confrontation captured on camera in early January, "Don't blame me. Your son would not have been taken away if you hadn't elected a clown president," referring to Zelensky's election in 2019 (his electoral mandate expired in April 2024). The video of that exchange has gone viral in Ukraine, though the officer and location have not been identified.

Responsibility for the unfolding tragedy of Ukraine also lies with pseudo-leftists, social democrats and liberals of in the Western countries. They have blindly listened to and followed Western media's explanation of the war in Ukraine. Today, this is a war being waged to preserve the imperialist world order regardless of the human and economic cost.

Explanatory notes:  

[1] In February 1919, the city of Kiev was taken without a battle by the newly formed Ukrainian Red Army, led by Mykola Schors (Wikipedia). Mykola Schors was killed in action later that year. A monument to him in Kiev was destroyed in 2023 by the far-right governing regime in Ukraine as part of its 'decommunization' and anti-Russia drive seeking to eradicate Russian language culture and the revolutionary history and traditions of Soviet Ukraine.

[2] Simon Petliura was a military commander who held power in part of Ukraine during the tumultuous several years following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the collapse of the German government and army one year later. Petliura was the dictatorial head of the short-lived, Ukrainian People's Republic in 1918/19. Prior to the collapse of the German government, the German army was occupying large parts of what would soon become Soviet Ukraine. Petliura chose to ally with Poland and the Western powers, particularly with France, against the unfolding revolutions in Ukraine and Russia. During his brief rule, he waged pogroms against Ukraine's Jewish population. He fled into exile in 1920 and was assassinated in Paris in 1926 by Jewish anarchist Sholem Schwarzbard, who had lost relatives in the pogroms.