“The situation is changing dramatically,” said its president of Russia, Vladimir Putinat the press conference he gave at the end of 2024 in December. “There is movement along the entire front line on a daily basis.”

In the east UkraineMoscow’s war machine is gradually advancing across the vast open fields of the Donbass, enclosing and overwhelming villages and towns, according to a BBC analysis.

Some civilians flee before the war reaches their homes. Others wait until the shells start exploding around them before packing up what they can carry and boarding trains and buses to escape 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 asymmetric attacks against its powerful neighbor.

As the invasion reaches the end of its third year, with an estimated cost of one million dead and wounded, Ukraine appears to be losing.

In faraway Washington, meanwhile, the unpredictable Donald Trumpnot known for his love for Ukraine or its leader, is set to take over the White House. It looks like a tipping point. But could 2025 actually be the year that this devastating European conflict finally comes to an end – and if so, how could that happen?

“Talk of negotiations is an illusion”

Trump’s promise to end the war within 24 hours of taking office is a typically grandiose stroke, but it comes from a man who has clearly lost patience with war and America’s costly involvement.

“The numbers of dead young soldiers lying in the fields everywhere are shocking,” he noted. “It’s crazy what’s going on.”

But the incoming US administration faces a double challenge, according to Michael Kofman, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “First, they will inherit a war on a very negative trajectory, without a huge amount of time to stabilize the situation,” he said in December. “Second, they will inherit him without a clear plan for succession.”

The president-elect has offered some clues during recent interviews about how he plans to approach the war. He told Time magazine that he disagreed “strongly” with the Biden administration’s decision in November to allow Ukraine to fire long-range US-supplied missiles at targets inside Russia. “We are just escalating this war and making it worse,” he had stressed.

On December 8, he was asked by NBC News whether Ukraine should prepare for less aid. “Possibly,” he replied. “Probably”.

But for those who fear, as many do, that America’s new leader is moving away from Ukraine, he offered signs of reassurance. “You can’t reach an agreement if you give up, in my opinion,” he stressed.

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

And for now, Ukrainian officials reject any talk of pressure or the suggestion that Trump’s arrival necessarily means peace talks are imminent. “There is a lot of talk about negotiations, but it is an illusion,” said Mykhailo Podoliak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. “No negotiation process can take place because Russia has not been forced to pay a high enough price for this war.”

Zelensky strategy

For all of Kiev’s misgivings about negotiations as Russian forces continue their advance in the east, it is clear that Zelensky is anxious to position himself as the kind of man Trump can work with.

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

With the help of French President Emmanuel Macron, Zelensky also secured a meeting with Trump when the two men visited Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral.

“What we are seeing now is a very smart strategy by President Zelensky,” his former foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, told the US Council on Foreign Relations in December. Zelensky, he said, “shows readiness to work with President Trump.”

With few corresponding gestures from the Kremlin, the government in Kiev is clearly trying to move with smart strategy.

“Because Trump hasn’t fully explained how he’s going to proceed, the Ukrainians are trying to give him some ideas that he can present as his own,” said Orysia Lucevic, head of the Ukraine Forum at Chatham House. “They know how to work with that ego.”

The winning plan: The possible developments

Even before the US election, there were signs that Zelensky was looking for ways to boost Ukraine’s attractiveness as a future partner for a president-elect like Trump, who is reluctant to continue to take on broader European security.

As part of his “Victory Plan”, unveiled 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 investment in the exploitation of Ukraine’s natural resources, including uranium, graphite and lithium. These strategic resources, Zelensky warned, “will either strengthen Russia or Ukraine and the democratic world.”

But other elements of the Ukrainian president’s victory plan – joining NATO and his call for a “comprehensive package of non-nuclear strategic deterrence” – appear to have failed to find a strong response among Kiev’s allies.

NATO membership in particular remains a sticking point, as it has been since long before Russia’s full-scale invasion. For Kiev, it is the only way to guarantee the country’s future survival against a voracious Russian enemy bent on subjugating 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 still not in favor of issuing an invitation to join in the alliance.

Zelensky has said that if the membership offer were extended to the entire country, within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, he would be willing to accept that it would apply, initially, only to territory under Kiev’s control. This, he told Sky News in November, could end the “hot stage” of the war, allowing a diplomatic process to deal with the issue of Ukraine’s final borders. But, he said, no such offer has yet been made.

The difficult position of Kiev

If not NATO membership, then what? With the possibility of Trump-led peace talks looming on the horizon and Ukraine losing ground on the battlefield, the international debate is about supporting Kiev’s predicament.

“It is crucial to have strong, legal and practical guarantees,” Andriy Yermak, head of Zelensky’s office, told Ukrainian public broadcaster December 12. Ukraine’s recent past, he said, had left a bitter legacy. “Unfortunately, in our experience, all the guarantees we had in the past did not lead to safety.”

Without concrete mechanisms akin to the kind of collective defense embodied in Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty, analysts fear there will be little to prevent another Russian attack.

“Zelensky understands that he can’t just have an empty ceasefire,” says Orisa Lucevic. “It has to be a ceasefire along with something else. It would be suicidal for Zelensky to simply accept a ceasefire and not have any answers on how to protect Ukraine,” he added.

In European policy forums, experts are considering ways in which Europe could shoulder this heavy responsibility.

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

But Kofman is wary. “Security guarantees that don’t have the US as one of the guarantors are like a donut with a huge piece missing.” It’s a view echoed in Kyiv.

“What alternative could there be? There are no alternatives today,” says Podoliak. Simple documents like the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (on Ukraine’s post-Soviet borders) or the 2014-15 Minsk accords (which sought to end the war in Donbass) are worthless, he argues, without the added threat of military prevention. “Russia must understand that once it starts aggression, it will receive a significant number of blows in response,” he added.

Britain, Biden and the role of the West

In the absence of agreement on Ukraine’s long-term future, its allies are doing everything they can to shore up its defenses.

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

With Ukraine still facing severe manpower shortages, UK Defense Secretary John Healy said the government could be willing to send British troops to Ukraine to help with training.

For its part, the outgoing Biden administration appears determined to deliver as much congressionally-authorized military aid to Ukraine as possible before it leaves the White House, though reports suggest it may not have time to send everything.

On December 21, it was reported that Trump will continue to provide military aid to Ukraine, but will require NATO members to dramatically increase their defense spending. Kiev’s allies have also continued to strengthen sanctions against Moscow, in the hope that the Russian war economy, which has proven stubbornly resilient, may finally “break”.

“There is deep frustration that the sanctions have not crushed the Russian economy beyond repair,” a US congressional source told the BBC on condition of anonymity.

After multiple rounds of sanctions (fifteen from the EU alone), government officials have become wary of predicting the impact they can have.

But recent indications are increasingly worrying for the Kremlin. With interest rates at 23%, inflation running above 9%, the ruble plunging and growth expected to slow dramatically in 2025, the pressures on the Russian economy have rarely been more acute.

Putin puts on a brave face. “Sanctions have an impact,” he said during a year-end press conference, “but they are not the bottom line.”

Along with Russia’s staggering losses on the battlefield – Western officials estimate that Moscow is losing an average of 1,500 men – dead and wounded – every day – the cost of this war could yet drive Putin to the table of negotiations.

But how much more territory will Ukraine have lost – and how many more people will have been killed – by the time that moment arrives?