Next Tuesday marks four years since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine across land, sea and air, reports RTE.
Moscow’s assault triggered a vast humanitarian emergency, forcing millions of Ukrainians, largely women and children, to head west in search of safety, reports RTE.
Russia’s effort to swiftly topple the Ukrainian government did not succeed, yet its strategic objective remains unchanged — to fashion a weakened Ukrainian state that Moscow can dominate and block from closer integration with the West.
This winter has proven the harshest of the conflict so far for Ukrainians, as the country’s energy infrastructure has come under relentless Russian drone and missile strikes, reports RTE.
The ensuing blackouts and loss of heating have left millions of Ukrainians enduring sub-zero temperatures inside their homes.
A US-led peace initiative, launched by President Donald Trump a year ago this month, continues to develop, but tangible progress has been limited, reports RTE.
It is difficult to describe it as a genuine two-sided peace effort while Russia refuses the prospect of a ceasefire and maintains its nightly aerial bombardment of Ukraine.
Negotiations shifted to a trilateral format in Abu Dhabi at the end of January and earlier this month, with US officials mediating between Russian and Ukrainian representatives in the same room for the first time, reports RTE.
A third round of those discussions was held this week in Geneva.
However, the reappointment of Kremlin adviser and historian Vladimir Medinsky as head of the Russian delegation indicates a tougher stance from Moscow in the negotiations, reports RTE.
Mr Medinsky headed the Russian team during three rounds of talks last year in Istanbul and reportedly spent much of those short meetings lecturing the Ukrainian side on the Kremlin’s interpretation of history.
His previous writings cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state, reports RTE.
Yet the trilateral framework, facilitated by the US — and by the Swiss last week in Geneva — has resulted in longer meetings than the brief exchanges seen last year in Istanbul, suggesting that more substantive discussions are now taking place.
The opening day of talks this week lasted six hours, while the second concluded after two hours, reports RTE.
A fourth round of trilateral negotiations is anticipated in early March.
Even so, the two sides remain deeply divided over the central issue of territory — specifically Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demand that Ukrainian forces withdraw completely from the 30% of Donbas not currently occupied by Russia, reports RTE.
A pullback from eastern Donbas is unacceptable to Ukraine’s leadership and to much of the Ukrainian public.
Mr Trump’s administration has taken a hard line with Ukraine, cutting US military assistance to nearly zero compared with the Biden administration’s average spending during the first three years of the war, according to Germany’s Kiel Institute, reports RTE.
In response, European nations have over the past year become Ukraine’s primary suppliers of military aid.
Mr Trump has exerted significantly greater pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to a peace deal, while seldom applying the same pressure on Vladimir Putin, reports RTE.
US security guarantees for Ukraine also appear weak, despite assurances from US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff that they are “the best anyone has ever seen”, There just doesn’t seem to be any meat on the bone yet, reports RTE.
Europe was also present in Geneva this week, though only on the margins of the talks, as has largely been the case over the past year. This is despite European governments now playing a leading role in financing Ukraine’s current and future defence requirements. It appears to be a highly uneven arrangement, reports RTE.
For the Kremlin, securing control of the remainder of Donbas without fighting for every 50 metres would be far preferable to spending another four years attempting to seize the entire region — the length of time the British Ministry of Defence estimates it would take Russian forces to capture the rest of Donbas at their current pace.
The war has proved disastrous for Russia, reports RTE.
After occupying roughly a quarter of Ukrainian territory in the early weeks of the invasion and attempting to take Kyiv, Russian forces were driven back in the north by determined Ukrainian resistance.
A successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of 2022 forced Russian troops out of nearly all of Kharkiv in the north-east, a significant portion of the Kherson region and parts of the Zaporizhian region in the south, reports RTE.
What began as a tank-dominated conflict in 2022 has evolved into a drone-led war, backed by heavy artillery and infantry units along the frontlines.
A war of attrition took hold around early 2023, and the accuracy of today’s drones patrolling the 1,000km frontline has made advances by large infantry formations almost impossible, reports RTE.
Russian troops made gradual gains in Donbas last year, capturing less than one percentage point of Ukrainian territory throughout 2025.
Various assessments by Ukrainian and Western defence analysts estimate Russian personnel losses at a staggering 7,000 to 8,000 troops per week, reports RTE.
By contrast, the Soviet Union’s combat losses totalled 15,000 dead during its decade-long invasion of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.
A study by the Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, released last month, estimated that 1.2 million Russian and 600,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed, wounded or remain missing since Moscow’s full-scale invasion began. The frontline is a brutal kill zone from which few emerge unscathed, reports RTE.
Inside Russia, authorities have suppressed criticism of the war so effectively that little reporting surfaces about the heavy Russian losses on the battlefield.
The small, silent demonstrations by soldiers’ wives that appeared two years into the war have since vanished — a spokesperson for one such group was designated a “foreign agent” by the authorities, reports RTE.
As the conflict moves into its fifth year, the Kremlin seems determined to continue with the same strategy: press on with the invasion while insisting that Ukraine surrender the rest of Donbas during negotiations.
Ask Ukrainians whether they believe a ceasefire will happen soon and very few are likely to give an optimistic reply, reports RTE.
Since December, the Trump administration has promoted the idea of establishing a free economic zone in unoccupied Donbas as a way to address the territorial dispute.
However, that proposal raises questions about how such a buffer area would be monitored and by whom, reports RTE.
Russia opposes the deployment of European troops from NATO countries and without a credible stabilisation force, then a buffer zone would be vulnerable to another Russian invasion.
And without firm US security guarantees clearly outlined in a peace agreement, handing over Donbas in exchange for a free economic zone will not work for Ukraine, reports RTE.
Ukrainians will be hoping this is the year the war finally comes to an end, but not at any price.
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