How could the Ukraine war end in 2025?

“I must say that the situation is changing dramatically,” Russian President Vladimir Putin declared at his end-of-year press conference last December. “There is movement along the entire front line every day.”

In eastern Ukraine, the Russian war machine is gradually moving mile after mile across the vast open fields of Donbas, enveloping and submerging villages and towns.

Some civilians flee before the war reaches them. Others wait until shells begin to explode around them before packing what luggage they can and boarding trains and buses to safety in the west.

Russia is gaining ground more quickly than at any time since it launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, despite Kiev's impressive record of well-publicized asymmetric attacks against its powerful neighbour.

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

In faraway Washington, meanwhile, the unpredictable Donald Trump, not known for his love of Ukraine or its leader, is about to take over the White House.

It feels like an inflection point. But could 2025 really be the year in which this devastating European conflict finally comes to an end – 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 grand boast, but it comes from a man clearly impatient with war and costly American intervention.

“The numbers of dead young soldiers lying in fields everywhere are staggering,” he said. “It's crazy what's going on.”

But the next US administration faces dual challenges, according to Michael Kaufman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“First, they will inherit a war with a very negative trajectory, without a tremendous amount of time to stabilize the situation,” he said in December. “Second, they will inherit it without a clear theory of success.”

The president-elect has given some clues during recent interviews about how he intends to handle the war.

He told TIME magazine that he “strongly” disagreed with the Biden administration's decision, in November, to allow Ukraine to fire long-range missiles provided by the United States at targets inside Russia.

He added: “We are only escalating this war and making it worse.”

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

“Maybe,” he replied. “Maybe, sure.”

But for those who fear, as many do, that the new American leader is disengaged from Ukraine, he has offered hints of reassurance. “You can't reach an agreement if you give it up, in my opinion,” he said.

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

For now, Ukrainian officials reject all talk of pressure, or any suggestion that Trump's arrival necessarily means peace talks are imminent.

“There is a lot of talk about negotiations, but it is just an illusion,” says Mykhailo Podoliak, advisor to the chief of staff of President Zelensky.

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

For all Kiev's misgivings about negotiating as Russian forces continue their stubborn advance in the east, President Zelensky is clearly keen to present himself as the kind of man Trump can do business with.

The Ukrainian leader was quick to congratulate Trump on his election victory, and wasted little time in sending senior officials to meet the president-elect's team.

With the help of French President Emmanuel Macron, Zelensky was also able to secure a meeting with Trump when the two men visited Paris to reopen Notre Dame Cathedral.

“What we are seeing now is a very smart strategic exercise by President Zelensky,” his former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told the US Council on Foreign Relations in December.

He added that Zelensky was “indicating constructive action and readiness to deal with President Trump.”

With few clear signs that the Kremlin is making similar gestures, it is clear that the government in Kiev is trying to get ahead of the game.

“Because Trump hasn't fully explained how he's going to do this, the Ukrainians are trying to give him some ideas that he might present as his own,” says Orisiya Lutsevich, head of the Ukrainian Forum at Chatham House.

“They know how to work with that ego.”

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 instinctively deal-making and reluctant to continue ensuring European security more broadly.

As part of the “Victory Plan” he unveiled in October, Zelensky proposed that Ukrainian battle-hardened forces replace American forces in Europe after the war with Russia ends. He offered the possibility of joint investments to exploit Ukraine's natural resources, including uranium, graphite and lithium.

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

But other elements of the Ukrainian leader's victory plan – NATO membership and his call for a “comprehensive non-nuclear strategic deterrence package” – appear to have met with a lukewarm response among Kiev's allies.

NATO membership in particular remains a sticking point, as it was long before the large-scale Russian invasion.

For Kiev, this is the only way to ensure the country's future survival, against the greedy Russian enemy bent on subjugating Ukraine.

But despite declaring last July that Ukraine is on an “irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership,” the alliance is divided, with the United States and Germany so far neither backing an invitation.

President Zelensky has indicated that if the membership offer is expanded to include the entire country, within Ukraine's internationally recognized borders, he would be willing to accept that the offer would apply, initially, only to territory under Kiev's control.

He told Sky News in November that this could end the “hot phase” of the war, allowing a diplomatic process to address the question of Ukraine's final borders.

But he said no such offer has been made yet.

If not NATO, then what? With the prospect of Trump-led peace talks looming and Ukraine losing ground on the battlefield, the international discussion is about shoring up Kiev's shaky position.

“It is important that there are strong, legal and practical guarantees,” Andriy Yermak, President Zelensky’s chief of staff, told Ukrainian Public Broadcasting Corporation on December 12.

He said that Ukraine's recent past left a bitter legacy. He added, “Unfortunately, from our experience, all the guarantees we had before did not lead to security.”

Without concrete mechanisms similar to the concept of collective defense embodied in Article 5 of NATO's founding treaty, observers fear there will be nothing to prevent another Russian attack.

“Zelensky realizes that he cannot reach an outright ceasefire,” says Orisya Lutsevich.

“The ceasefire must be redundant. It would be suicidal for Zelensky to accept a ceasefire without having any answer on how to protect Ukraine.”

In European policy forums, experts have been examining ways Europe might help shoulder this heavy responsibility.

Ideas included deploying peacekeeping forces in Ukraine (a proposal first put forward by Macron last February), or the participation of the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which includes forces from eight Nordic and Baltic countries, in addition to the Netherlands.

But Kaufman is skeptical. “Security guarantees in which the United States does not participate as one of the guarantors are like a cake with a giant missing middle.”

It is a view echoed in Kyiv.

“What could be an alternative? There are no alternatives today,” Podolyak says.

He sees pieces of paper, such as the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (on Ukraine's post-Soviet borders) or the 2014-2015 Minsk Agreements (which sought to end the Donbas war) as worthless, without the added threat of military deterrence.

“Russia must understand that once it starts aggression, it will receive a large number of blows in response,” he says.

In the absence of agreement on Ukraine's long-term future, its allies are doing their best to bolster its defenses.

In December, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said “everything” was under consideration, including providing additional air defense systems, partly to protect the country’s damaged energy infrastructure from a renewed wave of coordinated Russian missile attacks. And drone attacks.

As Ukraine continues to face severe manpower shortages, British Defense Secretary John Healey said the government may be willing to send British troops to Ukraine to help with training.

For its part, the outgoing Biden administration appears intent on delivering as much congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine as possible before leaving office, although reports suggest time may be running out to send everything.

On December 21, it was reported that Trump would continue to provide military aid to Ukraine, but would demand that NATO members significantly increase their defense spending.

Kiev's allies also continued to tighten sanctions on Moscow, hoping that Russia's wartime economy, which had proven its stubborn resilience, would finally collapse.

A source in the US Congress, who requested anonymity, said: “There is deep frustration that the sanctions have not destroyed the Russian economy beyond repair.”

After several rounds of sanctions (fifteen from the European Union alone), government officials have become wary of predicting their successful impact.

But recent indicators are increasingly worrying the Kremlin. With interest rates at 23%, inflation above 9%, the ruble falling, and growth slowing significantly in 2025, the pressures on the Russian economy have rarely seemed more severe.

Putin put on a brave face. “Sanctions have an impact, but they are not of major importance,” he said during his year-end press conference.

Combined with Russia's staggering battlefield losses—Western officials estimate that Moscow loses an average of 1,500 men killed and wounded every day—the cost of this war may push Putin to the negotiating table.

But how much territory will Ukraine lose – and how many people will be killed – by the time it reaches that point?

Top image credit: Getty Images

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