How the war in Ukraine may end in 2025

“It must be said that the situation is radically changing,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at his press conference at the end of the year in December. “There is movement all along the front line. Every day.”

In eastern Ukraine, Moscow’s military machine is gradually moving mile by mile across the vast fields of the Donbass, enveloping and capturing villages and towns.

Some civilians flee before the war reaches them. Others wait until the shells start exploding around them before packing what they can take with them and boarding trains and buses to travel further west.

Russia is gaining ground faster than at any time since it launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022, despite Kiev’s impressive record of highly publicized asymmetric attacks against its powerful neighbor.

As the invasion enters its third year, at an estimated cost of a million killed and wounded, Ukraine appears to be losing.

Meanwhile, in distant Washington, the White House is going to be occupied by the unpredictable Donald Trump, who is not known for his love for Ukraine or its leader.

It feels like an inflection point. But could 2025 really be the year this devastating European conflict finally ends – and if so, what might the endgame look like?

Trump’s promise to end the conflict within 24 hours of taking office is usually a grandiose boast, but it comes from a man clearly impatient with war and America’s costly involvement.

“The number of dead young soldiers lying in the fields everywhere is staggering,” he said. “It’s crazy what’s going on.”

But the new US administration faces a dual challenge, according to Michael Coffman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“First, they’re going to inherit a war on a very negative trajectory without a huge amount of time to stabilize the situation,” he said in December. “Secondly, they will inherit it without a clear theory of success.”

In recent interviews, the president-elect has given some clues about how he’s going to approach the war.

He told Time magazine that he “strongly” disagrees with the Biden administration’s decision in November to allow Ukraine to launch US-supplied long-range missiles at targets in Russia.

“We’re just escalating this war and making it worse,” he said.

On December 8, NBC News asked him whether Ukraine should prepare for less aid.

“Perhaps,” he replied. – Probably, of course.

But to those who fear, like many, that America’s new leader is inclined to leave Ukraine, he offered hints of reassurance. “You don’t negotiate if you refuse, in my opinion,” he said.

The truth is that Trump’s intentions are far from clear.

And for now, Ukrainian officials reject all talk of pressure or the assumption that Trump’s arrival necessarily means that peace talks are inevitable.

“There is a lot of talk about negotiations, but this is an illusion,” says Mikhail Padalyak, adviser to the head of President Zelensky’s office.

“No negotiation process can happen because Russia has not been made to pay a high enough price for this war.”

For all of Kiev’s misgivings about talks as Russian troops continue their relentless offensive in the east, it’s clear that President Zelensky is keen to position himself as someone Trump can do business with.

The Ukrainian leader was quick to congratulate Trump on his election victory and wasted no time sending high-ranking officials to meet with the president-elect’s team.

With the help of French President Emmanuel Macron, Zelenskiy also secured a meeting with Trump when they visited Paris for the restoration of Notre Dame.

“What we’re seeing now is a very smart strategy by President Zelensky,” his former foreign minister, Dmitry Kuleba, told the US Council on Foreign Relations in December.

Zelensky, according to him, “signals about constructiveness and readiness to interact with President Trump.”

With few obvious signs that the Kremlin is making similar gestures, the government in Kyiv is clearly trying to get ahead of the game.

“Since Trump has not fully explained how he will do it, the Ukrainians are trying to give him some ideas that he can present as his own,” says Orysia Lutsevich, head of the Ukrainian Forum at Chatham House.

“They know how to work that ego.”

Even before the US election, there were signs that Zelensky was looking for ways to make Ukraine more attractive as a future partner for a president-elect like Trump, who instinctively sticks to transactions and is reluctant to continue to guarantee broader European security.

As part of his “Victory Plan” released in October, Zelensky suggested that battle-hardened Ukrainian troops could replace US forces in Europe after the war with Russia ends. And he offered the prospect of joint investments in the development of Ukraine’s natural resources, including uranium, graphite and lithium.

Such strategic resources, Zelensky warned, “will either strengthen Russia or Ukraine and the democratic world.”

But other elements of the Ukrainian leader’s victory plan – NATO membership and a call for a “comprehensive package of non-nuclear strategic deterrence” – seem to have met with a cool reaction among Kiev’s allies.

NATO membership, in particular, remains a stumbling block, as it was long before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

For Kiev, this is the only way to guarantee the future survival of the country against the predatory Russian enemy, which seeks to subjugate Ukraine.

But despite declaring last July that Ukraine was on an “irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership”, the alliance is divided, with the US and Germany not yet in favor of an invitation.

President Zelensky noted that if the membership proposal were to be extended to the entire country within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, he would be willing to accept that it would initially apply only to the territory under Kyiv’s control.

This, he told Sky News in November, could end the “hot stage” of the war, allowing the diplomatic process to resolve the question of Ukraine’s final borders.

But, according to him, there was no such offer yet.

If not NATO, then what? With Trump-led peace talks approaching and Ukraine losing ground on the battlefield, the international debate is only about strengthening Kiev’s shaky position.

“It is critical to have strong legal and practical guarantees,” Andrey Yermak, head of President Zelensky’s office, told the Ukrainian Public Broadcaster.

According to him, Ukraine’s recent past has left a bitter legacy. “Unfortunately, in our experience, all the safeguards we had before did not lead to safety.”

Observers fear that without concrete mechanisms, similar to the concept of collective defense, which is embodied in Article 5 of the founding treaty of NATO, nothing will be able to prevent the next Russian attack.

“Zielensky understands that there cannot be an open ceasefire,” says Orysya Lutsevich.

“It should be a ceasefire plus. It would be suicide for Zelensky to simply agree to a ceasefire and not have an answer as to how Ukraine is protected.”

At European policy forums, experts considered ways in which Europe could help shoulder this heavy responsibility.

Ideas included the deployment of peacekeepers in Ukraine (a proposal first floated last February by Macron) or the participation of the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which brings together forces from eight Nordic and Baltic countries, as well as the Netherlands.

But Coffman is skeptical. “Security guarantees that do not involve the United States, because one of the guarantees is like a donut with a giant middle missing.”

This opinion was repeated in Kiev.

“What could be the alternative? There is no alternative today,” says Mr. Padalyak.

Pieces of paper like the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (on Ukraine’s post-Soviet borders) or the 2014-15 Minsk agreements (which sought to end the war in Donbass) are worthless, he argues, without the added threat of military deterrence.

“Russia should understand that as soon as they start aggression, they will receive a significant number of blows in return,” he says.

In the absence of an agreement on the long-term future of Ukraine, its allies are doing everything possible to strengthen its defense.

In December, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said “everything” was being considered, including the delivery of additional air defense systems, in part to protect the country’s damaged energy infrastructure from a new wave of coordinated Russian missile and drone attacks.

As Ukraine continues to face serious manpower shortages, British Defense Secretary John Healy said the government may want to send British troops to Ukraine to help with training.

For its part, the outgoing Biden administration appears determined to deliver as much congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine as possible before leaving office, though reports say it may be running out of time to send it all.

On December 21, it was reported that Trump will continue to provide military aid to Ukraine, but will demand a sharp increase in defense spending from NATO members.

Kiev’s allies also continue to tighten sanctions against Moscow in the hope that Russia’s wartime economy, which has proven its stubborn resilience, may finally break.

“There was deep disappointment that the sanctions didn’t just destroy the Russian economy beyond recovery,” a source in the US Congress said on condition of anonymity.

After many rounds of sanctions (fifteen from the EU alone), government officials stopped predicting their successful consequences.

But the latest indicators cause increasing alarm in the Kremlin. With interest rates at 23%, inflation in excess of 9%, a falling ruble and an expected sharp slowdown in growth in 2025, the strain on the Russian economy has rarely seemed more acute.

Putin makes a brave face. “Sanctions are having an effect,” he said during a press conference at the end of the year, “but they are not the key.”

Along with Russia’s staggering losses on the battlefield – Western officials estimate that Moscow is losing an average of 1,500 people killed and wounded every day – the cost of this war may yet force Putin to the negotiating table.

But how much more territory will Ukraine lose – and how many more people will be killed – before that point is reached?

Main photo credit: Getty Images

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