What to know about Ukraine in 2025

Sergey Radchenko, an expert on Russia and Eastern Europe, weighs in as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine nears the end of its third year

February marks the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia now occupies roughly one-fifth of Ukraine and troops have advanced on the eastern Donetsk region recently. With U.S. support expected to dwindle with a change in presidential administrations, Ukraine will face significant difficulties in its efforts to drive Russia out.

“It has become a war of attrition in many ways, but even wars of attrition can end in breakthrough,” Sergey Radchenko, a Cold War scholar and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said in late December. “There are different possibilities that have unfolded recently.”

Here, Radchenko provides an overview of the war’s current state and what may lie ahead in 2025.

Can you give us a sense of what the situation in Ukraine is now and how it compares to a year ago?

The situation in practical terms, or I suppose in visual terms, has not changed all that much. Russia controls about as much territory, a little bit more than it controlled about a year ago. It has been making slow, steady gains in parts of Donbas that do not necessarily indicate a breakthrough but could potentially build up toward a breakthrough on the front line.

We’re used to thinking about this war now, three years since it started, as a static war, a war of attrition. It has become a war of attrition in many way, but even wars of attrition can end in breakthrough. There are different possibilities that have unfolded recently.

Now, if you’re looking at what is happening in terms of manpower, both sides have sustained heavy casualties on the front lines in terms of both the dead and the wounded. Although they don’t officially release figures on either side and make vastly exaggerated claims about the other side. It seems that—more or less—they have sustained similar rates of casualties on the front lines, now numbering the hundreds of thousands. This is disadvantageous for Ukraine because it has a smaller population compared to Russia.

Ukraine has been facing a manpower problem. They’re having difficulty recruiting and mobilizing people for the front lines. That said, there’s a particular bracket of the population they have not even touched, which is 18- to 25-year-olds. They’re not touching them because they’re worried about killing too many of these young people and effectively destroying the nation.

Now the Russians are also facing a human power problem. Theirs is different because they do not have forced mobilization. At one moment they did. Putin ordered it in September 2022 and that did not go over so well inside the country, although it was partial, not full mobilization. But people fled the country in the hundreds of thousands. Many of them later came back.

Russia has been relying on paying people to serve at the front. And because the salaries are quite good, a lot of people have been going, but still Russia has been facing difficulties of replenishing its manpower on the front lines. That’s one of the reasons that they have North Korean soldiers fighting, although not very visibly despite all the talk about their deployment when this first came about.

Then we have the continued Russian effort to destroy Ukrainian energy infrastructure. We’ve had strikes against energy targets inside Ukraine. The idea is basically to leave the Ukrainian people desperate and push them toward a negotiated solution with Russia, where Russia would dictate the outcome.

You mentioned different possibilities for the future. What are they?

One possibility is a Russian breakthrough, which is what the Russians have been hoping to achieve by making those marginal gains in the Donbas.

The second possibility is that things will remain pretty much the same because the Ukrainians have reinforced their lines. They’re holding strongly but they’re facing difficulties.

The third possibility is the Ukrainians actually going on the offensive and recapturing some of the territories from Russia, like they did in the fall of 2022, which was a big success for Ukraine. Now, that last possibility is quite unlikely at the moment. Our main two options are that things basically remain the same and the war is more or less static, or the Russians are able to achieve a breakthrough.

How does President Trump’s election affect the war in Ukraine?

Putin is waiting to see what Donald Trump will do once he arrives in office because Trump is keen to force this conflict toward a negotiated solution. But Putin has his own priorities. It’s not clear that he will want to negotiate on the terms offered by Trump.

There’s this sense that Russians have, that the American and European publics are tired with this war. They want to bring this war to an end and that is not something that is dependent on Trump’s election or not. We already saw where American support for Ukraine was headed during the last time that Congress had to prove supplemental aid for Ukraine. It was a drawn out, painful process. Finally, the funding was approved but it was clear at the time that this would be a last time a significant amount of funding was being spent or committed to the Ukraine by the United States. I think that still remains the case.

In that sense, Trump’s election has not changed all that much in Putin’s mind because he thinks there’s basically a decline in interest in Ukraine on the part of the American public and politicians. He’s not necessarily wrong in this calculation.

The uncertain part is what Trump might introduce into this. There are two different ways of looking at Trump’s early actions in office. First, Trump might cut Ukraine loose altogether, strike a bargain with Putin and say, “if Ukrainians don’t want to negotiate on Putin’s terms, to hell with them.” Then the United States is done with Ukraine. If the Europeans want to sort it out, it’s up to them.

The other possibility is that Trump will try to get Putin to negotiate on his preferred terms. It would entail certain concessions to Russia, but also Russia effectively stopping the war and abandoning some of Putin’s long-term goals.

If this sort of negotiation does not work, then Trump could potentially do something more to support Ukraine—providing weapons or other direct American support—in order to force Putin to yield before American demands.

How it will play out depends on a variety of factors, not least Trump himself. Trump is very unpredictable, and that’s what’s different about the situation now. With Biden, we could see where things were going. They were not going great for Ukraine, but at least certain things were predictable. Trump is unpredictable and that is both an opportunity and a challenge for Ukraine.