Ukraine's 2025 Strategic Endeavours
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Battle of Kursk
19 min read
The article discusses Ukraine's Kursk offensive and Russia's response. Understanding the original 1943 Battle of Kursk—the largest tank battle in history and a turning point on the Eastern Front—provides crucial historical context for why this region holds such strategic and symbolic significance in modern conflict.
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Attrition warfare
10 min read
The article's core analysis revolves around casualty ratios, territorial gains versus manpower costs, and Russia's 382,000 killed and wounded in 2025. Understanding the theory and historical examples of attrition warfare illuminates why these metrics matter strategically and how wars of exhaustion unfold.
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Minsk agreements
11 min read
The article discusses current peace negotiations and the risk of a short-term ceasefire that fails to secure lasting sovereignty. The Minsk agreements (2014-2015) represent the most relevant historical precedent for failed diplomatic attempts to resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict, offering lessons on why previous ceasefires collapsed.
In January this year, I wrote a two-part article that looked forward into 2025 and assessed what the main strategic endeavours for Ukraine would be over the course of the year. These articles, which you can read here and here, proposed seven key Ukrainian strategic undertakings that would have the most impact on its goal to defend against Russia’s ground, air, economic, diplomatic and information attacks and remain a sovereign nation.
Despite the early hopes that a new Trump administration in the White House would be able to broker a ceasefire or some kind of war termination agreement this year, this process has suffered a series of false starts and false hopes since February 2025.
A new round of talks is currently underway, although many in the Trump administration are heavily biased towards either a business deal with Russia, or have sympathies for Putin’s objectives in Ukraine and Europe. It is hardly a formula for a peace deal that secures enduring sovereignty and security for the people of Ukraine. More likely, if the current negotiations continue in their current form, they are likely to provide the foundation for only a short-term ceasefire in fighting, but also the continuation of Putin’s genocide against Ukrainians in occupied Ukraine, his sabotage and subversion in Europe, and another Russian war against Ukraine in the coming years.
Putin seized the strategic momentum in early 2024. With the short-term exception of the Kursk operation last year, Russian has retained that momentum through 2025. Putin has also retained his maximalist objectives for the war against Ukraine. Throughout 2025 and up to the current peace negotiations, Putin continues to imagine that the conditions of the war are favourable for Russia. As he noted in his press conference last week:
The positive dynamics persist in all directions. Moreover, our troops’ advance in each of these directions continues to pick up the pace, and quite noticeably.
For Ukraine, 2025 has been another extraordinarily tough year. It featured a significant increase in Russian aerial attacks and a decline in power generation for the coming winter, the Russian advance upon and envelopment of Pokrovsk, a cutoff of U.S. military intelligence for a short period in March, a cutoff of American-funded military aid, a re-shuffle of Zelenskyy’s government including a new Prime Minister and new defence minister, two major corruption scandals, the loss of Zelenskyy’s closest advisor and the
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