Why 2025 was the worst year for Russia in the war with Ukraine

The fourth triumphant Russian year was, in fact, a disaster in human and material terms. Moscow captured just over 3,000 square kilometers of Ukraine in 2024 and in 2025 it reached 4,300 square kilometers. They seem like huge numbers, but 4,300 square kilometers are equivalent to 0.7% of the country. It would take more than a century to conquer Ukraine.

That progress is a human meat grinder. Russian deaths last year exceeded 100,000 men, 23 men killed per square kilometer conquered. The Kremlin is recruiting between 30,000 and 35,000 men monthly, but 90% does not serve to increase the number of troops on the ground, but to cover the gap left by dead and wounded.

Putin seems not to be affected by the numbers. On December 27, dressed in camouflage, he said: “Judging by the pace we are seeing along the line of contact, our interest in a withdrawal of Ukrainian military formations from the territories they currently occupy is effectively reduced to zero. If the Kiev authorities do not want to resolve the matter peacefully, we will achieve all our objectives of the special military operation by armed means.”

Putin calls the war a “special military operation,” which isAccording to the Kremlin’s original plans, it was to last a few weeks with the taking of kyiv and the overthrow of Volodimir Zelensky’s government. But the truth is that the war is about to turn four years old.

The estimates that European diplomacy is considering ensure that the Russian advance is practically stopped. Those 4,300 square kilometers are not even a tenth of the 62,000 square kilometers that they conquered Ukraine in the 10 months that the war lasted in 2022. When the conquests are put on a map of the entire territory of Ukraine, the Russian advances of last year are residual.

Russia does not even control the territory it considers illegally its. In October 2022, the Kremlin approved a decree making four Ukrainian provinces of the Donbass Russian. Today it only almost completely controls Lugansk. The regions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia (with the largest nuclear power plant in Europe) and Donetsk remain divided.

Military strategy also leads to increased human carnage. Ukrainian drones are a constant threat to Russian tanks and other armored vehicles, so the tactics now are to try to pierce the Ukrainian lines with human groups without heavy military means. A BBC report claims that these tactics turned 2025 into the year with the most human casualties for Russia.

The material superiority of the Russians over the Ukrainians does not work in a war scenario dominated by drones when a long-distance Ukrainian attack drone costs less than $100,000 and destroys several million tanks.

Russia recognizes that war takes 5.1% of annual GDP and 80% of all spending related to security and defense. The country can barely sustain such spending. when its main income, from hydrocarbon exports, sank by 24% last year. According to Bloomberg data, it is due to the fall in the price of oil and a lower export of natural gas. These natural gas revenues depend heavily on European purchases, which will be definitively prohibited in January 2027.

The European Union extended its entire package of sanctions against Russia at the end of December, and is already preparing another package to approve in February. It is above all about hitting Russia’s technological and industrial capacity, restricting trade and financing, stopping buying hydrocarbons and not selling more dual-use goods. Europe removed Russian banking entities from Swift, complicating its operations with the rest of the world.

Europe strikes in the sectors that sustain the war: technology, machinery, electronics, dual-use goods, aviation. Closes international payment channels to Russian companies and institutions. Russia has not collapsed as predicted three years ago, but the economic damage is intense.