Getting to the endgame in Ukraine: no self-fulfilling prophecies, please

As 2025 begins, and Ukraine soon will enter its fourth year of war against Russia, the general sentiment across the transatlantic community is that this will be an inflection year when, for better or for worse, the war will wind down.

Certainly, this is not because Kyiv is on the point of imminent collapse. Indeed, the Ukrainian army has shown plenty of fighting spirit of late. At the beginning of January, it launched a new offensive inside Russia in the Kursk Oblast north of Sudzha. This contradicted the widespread assumption that Russian forces, supported by North Korean troops, would rapidly regain full control of the Kursk Oblast, thereby denying President Zelensky a territorial bargaining chip to be used in peace negotiations with Moscow. Previously Russia had claimed to have retaken 40% of its territory captured by Ukraine last August. Kyiv shot down a Russian helicopter over the Black Sea using a sea drone, the first time this has ever been achieved. It blew up a Russian fuel tanker train near Zaporizhia, and has used US and UK supplied ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles to attack ammunition depots and oil and gas storage facilities deep inside Russia. It has even sent its attack drones as far as the Caspian Sea and Siberia. Moreover, Kyiv has carried out a number of daring assassinations, the most recent last December, when General Kirillov, the head of Russia’s chemical and biological weapons force, was killed outside a flat near the Kremlin, using a bomb planted inside an electric scooter.

Yet, although these tactical successes have boosted Ukrainian morale and shown Ukraine’s western backers that Kyiv still has stomach for the fight and can take the war to Russia directly, they cannot change the fundamental reality that Ukraine is slowly but surely losing the war. Russia is grinding out more and more territorial gains in eastern Ukraine. It has captured 4,000 square kilometres of territory during 2024, four times more than Ukraine seized in Russia’s Kursk Oblast. That takes its percentage of occupied Ukrainian territory from 17% to 20%. At the beginning of January, it is close to taking Pokrovsk, an important rail and road junction that will open up further advances by Moscow towards Dnipro and central Ukraine. Pokrovsk also has the last coking coal mine in Ukrainian hands, essential for steel production. Ukraine’s army is reporting up to 34 Russian assaults against Pokrovsk every day. Moscow now claims to have captured another strategic objective: the town of Kurakhove, 32km south of Pokrovsk. If this is confirmed, it will also facilitate Russia’s seizure of the whole of the Donbas region. Kyiv claims that these attacks are costing Russia on average1,500 killed and wounded every day, if the fighting in the Kursk Oblast is also taken into account. Casualties among the North Koreans are also running into the low thousands (Zelensky claims 3,700 North Korean dead and wounded so far, although US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, puts the figure more modestly at around 1,000) as Russia is giving them little artillery support and protection, and they fear being captured and so will not surrender. Overall western intelligence agencies believe around 1mn soldiers on both sides have now been killed or wounded since the war began in February 2022. Yet Putin shows no signs of giving up. At his end of the year news conference on 19 December, the Russian leader claimed that Russian forces were advancing across the entire 1,200 km front and that the dynamics of the conflict were now evolving in Moscow’s favour. He played down the impact of Kyiv’s strikes against Russia (where Russian commentators always claim to have shot down nearly all the Ukrainian missiles and drones and admit to only minor damage or casualties). Yet whereas Moscow and other Russian cities witnessed several patriotic rallies and military parades in the early months of the war and the Z symbol of the Russian army was plastered all over public buildings and military vehicles, now these have disappeared as Putin tries to create an impression of normalcy, keeping the war as far from the awareness of the average Russian as possible.

For Ukrainians on the other hand, the reality of war has become all too oppressive and inescapable. Almost daily Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy grid and generators have put 80% of the network out of action leading to daily power cuts. Cities like Kyiv and Lviv, which were spared for a while, have once again been regularly targeted in Russian attacks. The Russian advances in the Donbas have caused thousands of more civilians to flee their homes, adding to the humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian army has become more tired and demoralised as it counts the high cost of its dead and wounded and is forced to retreat due to lack of ammunition and shells in what has become an artillery war. Arguments have broken out among commanders on military strategy with some criticising the incursion into the Kursk Oblast because it took large numbers of the best Ukrainian troops away from the defence of Donetsk for no appreciable impact on the Russian offensive. The desertion rate has risen sharply and has been estimated at between 10-20% by certain experts. Le Monde reports that 1,700 members of the Anne of Kyiv brigade, recently trained by France in Alsace, have deserted. Meanwhile, Kyiv is struggling to recruit new soldiers and train them quickly to get into the field. Although the military conscription age has been lowered from 27 to 25 years of age, Zelensky has so far resisted the admonitions of Pentagon and NATO officials to draft Ukrainian men from the age of 18. Opinion polls among Ukrainians show an increasing war weariness and the resignation to make territorial concessions to Russia in exchange for an end to the war. Even Zelensky is now openly contemplating the prospects (and the inevitability) of peace talks in 2025, mindful of the fact that his country can no longer sustain the level of battlefield losses and economic and infrastructure damage. He also knows that a surge in Western support sufficient to enable him to turn the situation around is unlikely to be forthcoming.

The imminent arrival of Donald Trump in the White House confirms this sense of an inflexion point. As expected, Trump has not succeeded in ending the war in 24 hours, nor before he formally takes office. During the campaign, he repeatedly refused to say that he was in favour of a Ukrainian victory, nor would he criticise Putin. When he speaks about Ukraine, it is always in terms of the battlefield carnage. He says it is “crazy what is taking place” in Ukraine, and suggests that ending the war quickly is the objective rather than defining the geopolitical conditions that should govern a peace settlement. Trump has continued to hint that supporting Ukraine is costing the US too much and that assistance needs to be reduced. But he has not said that it should be cut off entirely. However, he has criticised the decision of the Biden administration to allow Ukraine to use long range ATACMS missiles, claiming that this is only escalating the conflict. But Trump, as ever, is unpredictable and sends mixed messages. He told Zelensky when they met in New York last September that he would not abandon Ukraine. Trump’s intent vis-à-vis Ukraine is not clear and, as Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment has pointed out, he faces two major obstacles. First, the war is on a downward trajectory for Kyiv which does not put Trump in a strong negotiating position vis-à-vis Putin. Second, Trump has thus far not come up with a definition of success in Ukraine and consequently not produced a detailed plan for how to get there. Many pro-Republican think tanks in Washington have come up with peace plans of various stripes, but Trump will most probably look to General Keith Kellogg, who he has appointed as his special envoy on Ukraine, to define the administration’s approach. Kellogg has suggested in the past that the US should continue supplying weapons to Kyiv provided that Zelensky enters serious peace negotiations with Moscow. But whatever the plan on paper, Trump will probably be pragmatic, calibrating his position (and assistance) to whomever he thinks is the biggest obstacle to peace at any one time.

So far, Zelensky has played a skilful game. Rather than confront Trump and risk alienating him further, he has chosen to embrace him, flatter him and express his hope that Trump’s mixture of “strength and unpredictability” will force Putin to the negotiating table and avoid a disastrous peace of capitulation for his country. Zelensky has invited Trump to visit Kyiv soon into his term. He has suggested that the new President fly directly into Kyiv on Air Force One, a direct flight to the Ukrainian capital that no other western leader (including Biden) has dared to undertake since Russia’s invasion. He has, as noted, also met Trump in New York and given a positive interpretation of their meeting in order to get out in front of more negative, anti-Zelensky comments from Vice President elect JD Vance and Trump’s son, Eric. Also helped by President Macron, he had another meeting with Trump in Paris during the ceremony of the reopening of Notre Dame cathedral. He expects to receive an official invitation to visit Washington soon after Trump’s inauguration, or even be invited to attend the inauguration itself. But in engaging Trump and sending his principal aides, like National Security Adviser, Andrey Yermak, to meet with Kellogg and other Trump aides, Zelensky is also requesting US security guarantees to undergird any peace agreement. What he wants above all to avoid is a repeat of the purely declaratory security promises contained in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 or the vague undertakings and empty implementation promises that vitiated the Minsk Agreements in 2014/15. This was an important element in Zelensky’s Victory Plan which he unveiled last October: the assurance that if Russia invades again, it will meet with a robust military response. Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations last December, former foreign minister, Kuleba, stressed the need for “legal and practical security guarantees” for Ukraine. Kyiv rejects the idea of a purely European security guarantee or European peacekeepers without Americans. To quote Kofman again, this would be a doughnut; something with a big hole in the middle. Zelensky is also rejecting major territorial concessions or simply a ceasefire which returns Ukraine to the pre-2022 situation of a frozen conflict. He does not think that Russia is serious about peace negotiations while it believes that it is winning, and is trying to convince Trump that he has to be willing and able to put Moscow under much greater military and economic pressure to forge an acceptable peace. At the same time, knowing that Trump is transactional, and always putting the American economic or business interest first, Zelensky has been trying to lure him into a more pro-Ukraine stance by offering to substitute Ukrainian troops for US troops in Europe following a peace agreement, or giving US companies a leading role in Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction. Zelensky has also suggested that the US could have privileged access to Ukraine’s important deposits of lithium, graphite and uranium.

Ultimately the only real security guarantee, as Kyiv well knows, is NATO membership, but this is unlikely to be forthcoming under a Trump presidency given the major new military commitment that the US would need to assume. Zelensky has said that he would insist that NATO membership be extended in principle to all of Ukraine’s territory, even the parts of it that might have to be conceded to Russia. To do otherwise would be to recognise Russia’s sovereignty over the four occupied provinces of eastern Ukraine and this is something that Kyiv (and many western countries) are unwilling and unlikely to do. But in practice the NATO guarantee would only apply to those portions of Ukraine effectively under Kyiv’s control, similar to the situation in Berlin during the Cold War. Zelensky has also made clear that he is seeking a non-nuclear deterrence package for Ukraine from NATO as he is well aware of the fierce opposition of Putin to a nuclear Ukraine or the presence of NATO nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory (although Russia has deployed tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus). Yet these stipulations might prove problematic for the Alliance. NATO is a nuclear alliance and the US nuclear umbrella covers all member states. This is the bedrock of NATO’s deterrence, indivisibility of security and counter-escalation strategy. So the nuclear shield would need to be extended to Ukraine upon membership to avoid the fragmentation of the Alliance into different zones of security. Moreover, the Alliance would find it difficult to enlarge to a country partially occupied by Russian forces on a more or less permanent basis, embroiled in a territorial dispute and not in control of its sovereign territory. This was already the problem in addressing the issue of Georgia’s NATO membership in the past, given the Russian occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and before the contested re-election of the pro-Moscow Georgia Dream party took the issue off the table (at least for the foreseeable future). But NATO membership for Ukraine does not seem likely as part of a peace deal, notwithstanding the oft-repeated promises by NATO that “Ukraine is on an irreversible path to NATO membership”, last repeated at the NATO Summit in Washington last July. Putin has made it clear that his price for a peace deal is that NATO cancels its invitation to Ukraine, dating back to the Bucharest Summit in 2008, or that Kyiv renounces it unilaterally and returns to its pre-2014 status of neutrality. But allies are also still far from a consensus on the how and when of NATO membership for Ukraine, even if today there is more agreement on the why. The election of pro-Russian populist leaders in central and eastern Europe means that opposition is today not confined principally to the US and Germany. Upcoming elections in Germany, Czechia and Romania, and the just-completed presidential elections in Croatia could further complicate the issue.

Can Europe take over from where the US leaves off in the future? There has been much talk of this in the latter months of 2024 on the Brussels conference circuit. On paper at least, Europe could do more; but more money doesn’t mean more weapons for Kyiv in the immediate term as it will take time to produce these; European stocks are low. Moreover, Germany is still unwilling to send its Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine. The NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, has been calling for more air defence systems for Ukraine in view of the continuing massive Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy sector. But NATO’s defence planners are currently apportioning new Capabilities Targets for the 32 individual allies and many of these (as in the case of the UK) call for more investment in national air and missile defence in light of the increased threat from Russia but also Iran, North Korea and the Houthis to commercial shipping in the Red Sea. So finding a way to avoid “robbing Peter to pay Paul” will be increasingly difficult for the Alliance. Zelensky frequently complains that in 2024, North Korea alone sent 3.5mn shells and missiles to Russia, whereas the number supplied to Kyiv by the West overall was less than 1mn. Macron has proposed to send European troops as trainers to Ukraine to help with the raising of new battalions for the army and the UK Defence Minister, John Healey, has spoken in a similar vein. There have been suggestions too that the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which includes the Scandinavians and the Netherlands, could also be sent to help with training. But these ideas have been in circulation for some time already with little follow-up so far. The truth is probably that if the US significantly reduces its military aid to Kyiv (and also withdraws from initiatives like the G7 loan of $50bn using Russian Central Bank assets as collateral), many European countries will conclude that the game is up, and that it makes little sense to squander their resources on a war which seems lost in any case. The US also controls the approval process for many weapons transfers where the specific weapons contain US-made components or technologies and could withhold these approvals as well.

A further question which both Trump and the Europeans will need to consider quickly (hopefully together) after the inauguration is: how to put Russia under pressure to come to the negotiating table without signalling a willingness to meet all of Moscow’s terms and conditions? The EU has already imposed 15 packages of sanctions since the Russian invasion. What more can it do? In reality there are plenty of key areas that remain untouched. Even in late 2024, three years into the war, the Biden administration was still discovering big Russian banks (such as Gazprombank) to sanction, in its dying days in office has just announced new sanctions against  Russia’s fleet of “ghost ships”, tankers in poor condition and with little or no insurance that transport Russian oil to international markets. Two have recently sunk (one off the coast of Spain, the other near Crimea) causing environmental pollution. Piped gas, liquified natural gas, nuclear fuels, fertilisers and precious metals and diamonds are other areas that could be restricted, although Gazprom is set to lose €8bn this year from Ukraine’s decision to close its gas transit pipeline from Russia to Slovakia from 1 January. Clamping down on the sanctions busters, and on implementation and monitoring was also a priority declared by Secretary of State, Blinken, this time last year; but as he leaves office, it is unclear how far this effort has come. There is no sign of shortages in the Moscow supermarkets, but inflation is now running at 9% and interest rates at 23%. The rouble has taken a plunge on financial markets and Moscow is now embracing cryptocurrencies as a way to circumvent the effects of sanctions and currency devaluation but with what impact is too early to say. Russian economic growth is stagnant. The habitually upbeat Putin has acknowledged that the sanctions are indeed now having an impact on the Russian economy, but he insists that the impact is minor and that his government is finding workarounds. So it looks likely that a compromise peace will need to be found in Ukraine before the West has the negotiating advantage of sanctions that are really hurting Russia. More likely these would produce their full effect in the 2025-26 timeframe.

Meanwhile the policy that the Biden administration and its European allies are pursuing is business as usual: trying to support Kyiv as much as they can in the fast disappearing days before Trump is inaugurated by shipping as much material as possible to Ukraine. This week, the US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, in one of his final acts in office, will be in Europe for a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group at Ramstein on Thursday together with 50 other defence ministers from countries supporting Ukraine. The Biden Administration has been doing its best to use up as much as possible of the $8bn in Congressional authorisation that was allocated to assisting Ukraine in the supplemental bill passed last spring. Virtually every week since the election, NSC or Pentagon spokespersons have announced new packages of support (mainly shells, ammunition, vehicles and spare parts) although only about 50% of these supplies come from existing stockpiles under Presidential Drawdown Authority and the remainder must come from new industrial production, which Trump could easily cancel. The speed and determination that the Biden team have displayed in these final months makes one wonder why they could not have shown the same sense of urgency earlier. Whether Trump will want to continue the Ramstein group or allow the Pentagon to lead and coordinate it is unclear. Yet, at least just before Christmas and nearly four months behind schedule, NATO announced that it was activating its NSATU (NATO Support and Training-Ukraine) coordination centre in Wiesbaden, which will now be the focal point for matching Ukraine’s needs with available supply. Zelensky has already made clear that he would like air defence to be the top agenda item for the meeting. Yet we are now in something of a “chicken and egg” situation in which Zelensky is calling for more weapons before he conscripts more soldiers into the Ukrainian army and the NATO allies want to see the evidence of a robust Ukrainian recruitment process before they deliver the new weapons.

Finally, Europeans are nervous about being excluded from a negotiation led by Trump and his aides, talking bilaterally to Kyiv and Moscow above the heads of the leading European powers and showing little transparency. France, Germany and Poland have all impressed on the incoming administration the need to give Europe a consultative role in the talks. Particularly if Trump will then turn round and demand that Europe sends peacekeepers to Ukraine to implement a peace deal or pays the lion’s share of the reconstruction costs and for the return of refugees and displaced persons. “No taxation without representation” is very much the view in EU capitals. Some European diplomats have suggested a revival of the 2+4 mechanism which handled German unification at the beginning of the 1990s. In this formula, a steering group of major powers (for instance the US, France, Germany and Poland- with perhaps the UK participating as well) would oversee direct negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow, but tilting the balance from time to time to ensure an outcome that preserves Ukraine as a functioning state and economy. But we do not yet know Trump intends to kick start the negotiations. Would there be a US-Russia Summit first to get Moscow onboard and to outline a negotiation framework and timetable? What incentives (positive and negative) would Trump deploy; for instance the threat to arm Kyiv with more powerful US weapons if Putin refuses to show any flexibility? Or to tighten US sanctions further or confiscate Russian Central Bank assets (although most of these are held in Europe)? On the other hand, will Trump try the carrot approach of offering Putin relief from sanctions, and in response for real actions or just declarations of intent? How willing will Trump be to push Putin hard given his previous desire to maintain a cordial relationship with him? And with so many other issues on Trump’s agenda, and campaign promises to keep (from curbing migration to protecting US workers against inflation and foreign competition), it is unclear how committed Trump will be to peace in Ukraine, particularly if there is no immediate breakthrough and the going gets tough. He may well then hand the task over to the Europeans or to Turkey, which tried to mediate between Kyiv and Moscow at the beginning of the war.

Thus, in conclusion, Europeans sense that something will change in Ukraine in 2025, but they are far from clear as to the what and how. The interregnum between Trump being elected in November and taking office in January has produced a frenzy of diplomatic activity and numerous efforts to make contact with the incoming Trump team in an attempt to influence their thinking. But whereas well known campaign slogans have been oft-repeated, we are no closer to knowing what they mean in detailed policy terms. The Trump envoy to Ukraine, General Kellogg, was due to visit Kyiv and the major European capitals at the beginning of January but he has postponed the visit until after Trump’s inauguration. This suggests that the new administration does not have a coherent plan yet for how to deal with Ukraine, or is no longer making the war the top priority that it had during the election campaign. So there continue to be more questions than answers. Will negotiations produce a peace agreement in 2025? Will it be more than a temporary ceasefire? Will Kyiv receive the security guarantees that it needs and what form will they take? Who will provide them and how? And with Russia acquiring more Ukrainian territory and key economic assets with every passing week, how can the military situation be turned around quickly to give Kyiv some real leverage in the talks? Above all, how can Trump’s unorthodox style and unpredictability be converted into a true negotiation asset while Europe and America construct an organised diplomatic and negotiating framework to take the talks forward to a satisfactory conclusion? Not the just peace that western diplomats were calling for at the beginning of the war, free of territorial conquest, but one which at least preserves Ukraine as a viable state, able to recover its sovereignty in more benign circumstances in the future. Let’s see (and hope) that in 2025, something less than catastrophe can be rescued from all the wreckage.