The opening of a front in Kursk or the recent murder of a military officer in Moscow, among the milestones of the year
Dec. 22 () –
The military invasion launched by Russia into Ukraine is now approaching its third anniversary without, on the ground, either side having managed to deliver the final blow. In the last twelve months, Ukrainian forces have resisted the onslaught in the east and have opened a new front within Russia, in the Kursk region, although now all actors seem to be waiting for the policies that Donald Trump may adopt. when he returns to the White House in January.
The conflict has intensified in recent months, after an apparent parenthesis in which the fronts barely moved. The organization Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) estimates that the monthly average of combats has increased by 63 percent compared to 2023 data and, on the ground, it is the Russian forces who apparently have the initiative.
The Russian Armed Forces managed to take control of Avdivka, a strategic town located in Donetsk, in February and have sought to gain ground in the direction of Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city. In the final stretch of the year, they advance steadily towards Pokrovsk, a key nucleus for the logistical supply of Ukrainian troops.
In between, Russia has also carried out large-scale attacks far from the occupied territories to mainly destroy critical infrastructure, delving into a series of practices that could be classified as war crimes. The sirens urging the population to take refuge have sounded in kyiv on a recurring basis.
Russian President Vladimir Putin stated this month that his troops had taken some 190 towns in Ukraine this year, although there is no independent data with which to contrast this or any other figure, nor in relation to possible casualties.
Moscow maintains that this year alone there have been more than half a million casualties – dead and wounded – in the Ukrainian ranks and the figure would already exceed one million if February 2022 is taken as a reference, while kyiv affirms that the Russian side has added up to November around 360,000. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has admitted that 43,000 of his soldiers have lost their lives since the beginning of the invasion.
THE KURSK FRONT
At the beginning of August, kyiv changed its military strategy and its forces broke into Russian territory for the first time in a solid way. They began a cross-border incursion into the Kursk region, a combat front that remains open to this day.
Zelensky justified these advances in the need to create a containment zone to at least distance Russian attack positions and boasted of filling “the exchange fund”, a euphemism for the capture of prisoners who could be exchanged ‘after the fact’. ‘. In fact, these prisoner exchanges are one of the few agreements signed by both parties in the middle of the conflict.
In addition, Ukraine has tried to expand its radius of action to other areas of Russia far from the border, mainly using unmanned aircraft that have threatened even Moscow. In the capital, on December 17, he carried out his most serious attack against a military officer, killing the head of the Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops of the Russian Armed Forces, Igor Kirillov, with a scooter bomb.
INTERNATIONAL ALLIES
The Kursk front has also demonstrated one of the great alliances woven this year by Putin, who in June signed a military agreement with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. As part of this relaunched cooperation, Pyongyang has sent thousands of soldiers to Russia to collaborate in the recovery of areas controlled by Ukrainian forces.
Putin, who has an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC), has continued to revolve in 2024 on the same orbit of alliances, with fundamental support such as that of China or Belarus. In the latter country, it even plans to deploy Oreshnik hypersonic missiles in 2025, which it already tested in 2024 in an attack on Ukraine.
Zelensky, for his part, has tried to put more pressure on his partners, with a view to accelerating Ukraine’s entry into the EU and NATO. In relation to the EU, accession talks are already underway, while the Atlantic Alliance resists formalizing the invitation to kyiv that the Ukrainian president demands in most of his contacts.
The president has managed to convince his partners in other areas such as political pressure on Moscow, which has resulted in successive rounds of sanctions – the EU agreed this month on number 15 – and in the sending of more military aid. Ukraine received the first F-16 fighters at the end of July and has obtained approval to use missiles such as the American ATACMS or the British Storm Shadow in bombing raids on Russia.
The United States has remained kyiv’s main supporter, but this unwavering support is now up in the air. Trump, who will return to the White House in January, has gone so far as to blame Zelensky for the outbreak of the conflict and has used the war as a political argument domestically, ensuring that with him in charge in the United States Putin would never have dared to invade the neighboring country.
Already as president-elect, he has proclaimed himself capable of stopping the conflict and has questioned policies of the outgoing president, Joe Biden, such as authorizing Ukraine to launch ATACMS over Russia. What is certain is that Trump and Putin will coincide in power in the coming years, since the Russian president was re-elected in March until 2030.
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