The last year of war in Ukraine, a conflict about to enter its fourth year, has been marked by billions in aid, Ukraine seizing Russian territory and Moscow using a new hypersonic missile. US President Donald Trump sidelined Kyiv and its European backers when he called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on 12 February to talk about starting discussions to end the conflict. Meanwhile, the future of US military support for Ukraine remains uncertain, as Kyiv fears being forced into an unfavourable agreement. Washington has called Ukraine's ambition to join NATO and to return to its pre-2014 borders unrealistic. Three years on from the Russian invasion in February 2022, where does Ukraine stand?
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00:005 people were killed and up to 50 people were injured.
00:10The enemy hit the center of the city, the administrative building, in the middle of the day.
00:17This middle window flies out, my computer falls, and I understand perfectly well that this is an explosion.
00:25I feel sorry for the people. These are the last creatures.
00:37They won't go to Dnipropetrovsk. They need Luhansk and Donetsk regions.
00:42Why? What are their plans?
00:45They'll make a mess there, then they'll go to another city and make a mess there, and then there.
00:51Three years into the war, Russian troops are now making steady territorial gains in eastern Ukraine.
00:56Russia has captured seven times more territory in 2024 than it did in 2023.
01:02At the moment, the enemy is on active offensive. We are in defense and counterattacking.
01:09The situation is very difficult due to the fact that the enemy is defeating us in large numbers in artillery, infantry, AT-BT vehicles.
01:23Our ongoing support for Ukraine.
01:25The United States authorized Kiev to use long-range weapons against targets in Russian territory in 2024,
01:31which it used for the first time in November to target a military facility in the Bryansk region, southwest of Moscow.
01:38In a surprising incursion, Ukraine captured swaths of territory in Russia's border region of Kursk last August.
01:44It still controls several hundred square kilometers in the region.
01:48But its grip has slipped, with Kiev saying it now holds barely a third of the area it captured last year.
01:55Ukraine is also facing issues with filling its ranks.
01:58Ukraine has had considerable challenges.
02:00Our estimate is that at the front line, it's probably short of between 50,000 and 100,000 troops.
02:07More and more soldiers are abandoning the front line.
02:10Figures published by the Ukrainian General Prosecutor's Office show that more than 90,000 cases have been opened
02:16into instances of soldiers going absent without leave or deserting since Russia invaded in 2022.
02:22Even just being under siege, you gradually get, how should I put it, nervous.
02:31You're always nervous, you're constantly changing.
02:35You start to get very nervous.
02:41Ukraine is struggling against better-equipped Russian troops, now thought to be reinforced by North Korean soldiers.
02:47Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Pyongyang of deploying 11,000 soldiers to help Moscow.
03:09Away from the front, signs of war fatigue are spreading amongst the population.
03:14Moscow's bombing campaigns against Ukrainian energy infrastructure regularly plunge civilians into cold and darkness.
03:39Donald Trump's return to the White House has shaken up the war.
03:42Vladimir Putin has agreed to negotiations with the U.S. president, but so far has refused to do so with Zelenskyy.
04:02Over the past three years, the U.S. and its allies have insisted that no decisions on the war can take place without Ukraine.
04:10But Trump has announced plans to hold peace talks with Putin in Saudi Arabia.
04:14We had a great call and it lasted for a long time, over an hour this morning.
04:21I also had with President Zelenskyy a very good call after that.
04:26And I think we're on the way to getting peace.
04:29I think President Putin wants peace and President Zelenskyy wants peace, and I want peace.
04:35I just want to see people stop getting killed.
04:37Concerns are now mounting in Kiev and amongst European allies that the war will be settled without them.
04:43We shouldn't take anything off the table before the negotiations have even started, because it plays to Russia's court.
04:50And it is what they want. Why are we giving them everything that they want even before the negotiations have even started?
04:58It's appeasement. It has never worked.
05:00Putin appears completely unwilling to compromise on his war aims, and let's be quite clear what his war aims are.
05:07Regime change in Ukraine, Ukraine largely disarmed, Ukraine politically unable to move towards the EU, NATO or the Western world, effectively a satellite state of Russia.
05:20It also means Russia controlling the Crimea and those four eastern and southern oblasts.
05:30On the ground, soldiers also remain sceptical.
05:37They will stay where they are at the moment.
05:40There will be some kind of demarcation line, but in time, forces and missiles will regroup and strike again.
05:51They won't leave their plan.
05:53They have a task to destroy Ukraine and the Ukrainian nation.
06:07For more UN videos visit www.un.org