“Let 2025 be our year. » Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday evening that Ukraine should fight in 2025 on the “battlefield” but also at the “negotiation table” to end nearly three years of Russian invasion and a year 2024 marked by major Russian advances.
“Every day of the coming year, we will have to fight for a strong enough Ukraine. Because only such Ukraine will be respected and heard. Both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table,” he declared in his New Year’s address to the Nation.
The year 2024 will have been difficult for kyiv: the Russian army has advanced in Ukraine by nearly 4,000 km2 in 2024 facing Ukrainians in difficulty, or seven times more than in 2023, and the coming year will uncertain announcement for Ukraine, in particular due to questions about the sustainability of American support, the country's leading donor and arms supplier, since the election of Donald Trump in November. The unpredictable Republican, who speaks of an “immediate” ceasefire and promised to obtain a peace agreement, without ever detailing his plan, must take office on January 20.
“We will do everything to stop Russia”
For weeks, speculation has been rife about possible future peace talks, after nearly three years of a war which has left hundreds of thousands dead and injured on both camps. The Ukrainian president said he wanted “a just peace” in 2025, but his country is ending the year on the defensive, facing a Russian army which is advancing despite significant losses.
“Let 2025 be our year. The year of Ukraine. We know that peace will not be given to us as a gift, but we will do everything to stop Russia and end the war,” he added in his speech broadcast on social networks. As for Donald Trump, “I have no doubt that the new American president is willing and able to achieve peace and put an end to Putin's aggression,” said the Ukrainian president, who is still asking for his country security guarantees before any negotiation with Moscow.
For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed the progress of his troops in mid-December, ensuring he had “the initiative” at the end of a “pivotal” year. In his New Year's speech on Tuesday, he did not explicitly mention the war in Ukraine but praised Russian soldiers for their “courage and bravery”.
While Russia already occupies nearly 20% of Ukrainian territory, the Ukrainian forces, fewer in number and less armed, have been retreating at an accelerated pace since this fall, particularly in the East: November (725 km2) and October (610 km2 ) were the two months during which the Russian army took the most territory since March 2022 and the first weeks of the invasion, according to AFP analysis of data provided by the American Institute for the Study of the war (ISW), stopped on December 30.
2025 “will determine who wins”
Furthermore, the consequences for Ukrainians remain immense: millions of displaced people and refugees, and incessant Russian bombings, particularly those targeting energy infrastructure, regularly plunging civilians into darkness and cold. In this context, many unanswered questions remain. The coming year “will determine who wins,” the Ukrainian president warned in November.
VideoVolodymyr Zelensky confides in the readers of Le Parisien
In the meantime, the war continues in the country. During the night from Monday to Tuesday, Ukraine was again targeted by 21 missiles and around forty attack drones, of which seven and 16 respectively were able to be shot down. The Russian army claimed to have struck “a military airfield and an enterprise of the Ukrainian military-industrial complex”. On the Russian side, a Ukrainian drone attack caused a fuel fire in an oil depot in the Smolensk region, 500 km as the crow flies from kyiv, according to the regional governor.
