As Winter Comes to Ukraine's Frontlines, Zelensky is Betting on a Miracle

Ukraine’s current vulnerability is most visible in that Russia is finally inside of cities that it has been trying to take since mid-2024. Namely, Chasiv Yar which overlooks Kramatorsk, is under occupation. Pokrovsk is also about to fall, with Kupiansk to follow and very likely Kostyatynivka thereafter.

The major wins that Ukraine has racked up in 2025 have primarily consisted of attacks far beyond the front line. Deep strikes on oil have rattled the Russian economy and scuppered Putin’s trade surpluses. The life of the average Russian becomes steadily more miserable. Russia’s economy will likely take decades to recover its demographics, the better part of a century, given its pre-existing problems with birth rates.

While a weakened Russia is heartening news to many in the West, it does not negate the reality that Ukraine will face the same problems of money and people, plus the indignity of losing steadily growing slices of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhya, Donetsk and even Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts.

Other audacious maneuvers like Operation Spiderweb proved that Ukraine could still inflict real damage on Russia. But the Russian bomber planes that Ukrainian FPV drones, stowed away in unsuspecting Russian truck drivers’ cargo containers and piloted via cellular networks, destroyed on the runway were not in use in the war against Ukraine. Their destruction is eye-catching to the West but won’t save the war effort. An audacious and highly publicized helicopter insertion deep into Pokrovsk by Ukrainian military intelligence managed to carve out a land corridor to the city, but the defense remains tenuous and may cost a number of Ukraine’s best soldiers.

Similarly, the increasing Ukrainian deep strikes on Russian infrastructure including oil refineries and weapons depots are impressive. But while they are adding to Russia’s losses, they are not adding to Ukraine’s takeaways, whether they be a return of territory or reliable future security guarantees.

None of this is to neglect Ukraine’s underlying victory: survival in the face of invasion by a much larger enemy going on four years now. But time is not on Kyiv’s side. Ukraine is running out of resources with which to fight the war, ranging from manpower to explosive materials to air defense missiles.

The situation for soldiers at the front grows ever grimmer, with some rotations forcing them to stay in positions for up to 60 days. The units prepared to make assaults and potentially take back territory are all too often wasted in death missions to hold empty cities — in many ways the signature strategy of Commander-in-Chief Oleksander Syrsky. Other soldiers are stuck in defensive positions and often at the mercy of capricious commanders and defective supply lines.

The military has not criminalized going A.W.O.L. because there is a broad understanding that many soldiers were not getting sufficient food and water to physically stay alive in positions they were tasked to hold. This phenomenon went overlooked until Russians began streaming through hitherto unknown holes in the lines around Pokrovsk.

New funding and production models with European allies promise to bolster Ukraine’s weapons stockpiles, but they remain overwhelmingly prospective. Despite rosier local predictions, Ukraine’s federal budget is meanwhile facing a financing crunch of upwards of $60 billion USD, as estimated by the International Monetary Fund.

Ukraine’s government has similarly kicked the can down the road when it comes to expectation-setting as to any end to the war. Nations that have taken in the largest populations of Ukrainians fleeing the war — namely Poland and Germany — are increasingly talking about sending back at least the men.

Volodymyr Zelensky and his administration publicly treat the war as total, particularly when speaking to the West. The decisions they make, however, steadfastly avoid upsetting the delicate balance of relative security in Ukraine’s wealthier cities, especially Kyiv. Despite upwards of two years of warnings from at home and abroad of lack of manpower there have been no comprehensive changes to mobilization, nor real attempts to boost tax revenues — the kinds of policies that total war would intuitively suggest. Meanwhile, soldiers already in the military are effectively locked into increasingly untenable positions from which they are walking out in droves.

No explanation fits the overall strategy more aptly than an attempt to put the war on background mode. The actual initiatives that the administration has invested into over the past year have largely focused on hype-heavy elements of defense technology that will somehow come to save the day.

Khartiia, a brigade responsible for the defense of much of Kharkiv and the surrounding oblast, publicly touted a fully unmanned seizure of a Russian position last December. It was the first of its kind and drew enormous attention precisely because of the underlying promise that such operations could allow Ukraine to take back occupied territory without infantry assaults. A year on, that kind of operation has clearly not been replicated in any meaningful quantity.

The Ukrainian government has similarly touted new long-range strike drones and even a massive cruise missile on behalf of theoretically private company Fire Point. The firm initially claimed production of 100 FP-1 long-range drones and, by the end of November, eight "Flamingo" cruise missiles per day, figures that it subsequently backtracked. Only two believed usages of the Flamingo have ever been documented in Russian open sources, with none of them proving especially impressive.  But Fire Point has nonetheless become a marquee name in gathering money from the West, even while being under a corruption investigation.

These sorts of technologies get money, particularly European money, into the Ukrainian system, which has made up for some of US President Donald Trump’s pullbacks. But the actual technologies often prove themselves escapist facades covering over the real systemic ills hamstringing Ukraine’s defense. Among them is that resources are getting diverted away from the front.

From the broader perspective of politics many of the most striking and controversial initiatives of the past year have focused on weapons procurement, particularly centralizing them in the Office of the President. Those include cutting out Yuriy Myronenko, an ally of Digital Transformation Minister Mykhaylo Fedorov, from the main budget for drones last December, firing Maryna Bezrukova from the Defense Procurement Agency, and setting up new “co-production” deals for Ukrainian firms to move to the EU to build — and sell — their wares there.

Meanwhile, over the summer, the Zelensky administration tried to ram legislation through the Rada that would allow the president’s office to shut down investigations by the independent and Western-backed anticorruption authorities, NABU and SAPO.

In November, the NABU released details of one such investigation in which $150 million was siphoned away from contracts designed to protect energy infrastructure. Ukraine is, meanwhile, staring at what is likely to be the darkest and coldest winter of the war.

Following the failure of bringing NABU and SAPO to heel, Zelensky loyalists introduced a fleet of legislation called “Defense City,” patterned on a low-regulation regime for IT companies called “Diia City.” The initial Defense City legislation most infamously introduced a safe harbor for registered defense contractors against prosecution for corruption, though those provisions were scrapped.

Domestic internal politics largely went on ice at the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. But these unpopular and clumsy maneuvers have unfrozen internal political disputes — likely the most substantive movement of 2024. 

There are only two ways forward. One is to militarize Ukrainian society to a degree that Zelensky has never been comfortable with. That means pulling from the mass of fighting-age men still living civilian lives in Ukraine and abroad and sending them into the military, or at least to plants making anything from artillery to TNT. Such a mobilization would require a painstaking centralized review of bron, the exemptions from service that have become subject to increasingly intricate abuses. More comprehensive militarization would also mean pulling from the pool of many soldiers who are in the military but have managed to secure cushy jobs of no impact on the war.

That kind of militarization would send aftershocks through Ukrainian society, certainly jarring a tenuous political stability. But the only alternative is surrendering masses of territory to Russia. A good deal a year ago would have been de facto recognition of the then-current front line that avoided any de jure international recognition of Russian occupation. At the time, that was politically unacceptable. Today, that's already a pipe dream. Maintaining areas like the 30% of Donetsk Oblast that remains unoccupied is going to require not just damage to Russia's economy, but traditional defense manifested in momentum at the line. 

The sum total of 2025 has been a Ukrainian posture that staunchly refuses to make those tough choices. The Zelensky administration instead holds out hope for a miracle.

Image Credit: Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons