Last June I witnessed a picturesque sunset over Lake Lucerne from the top of the Bürgenstock resort in central Switzerland.
The five-star hotel, normally frequented by the world’s rich, was the venue for a two-day ‘Summit on Peace’ to shore up international support for Ukraine’s peace plan.
But standing there on the top of that Swiss mountain as the last of the television crews wrapped up their cameras and lights, it felt like the road to a peace settlement in Ukraine was still a long way off.
With Russia absent, the summit was a confirmation of what we already knew: that the West and countries aligned with the West support Ukraine’s cause.
Officially, Switzerland did not invite Russia on the grounds that the Kremlin had said the talks were pointless.
Some progress was made though.
Most attending countries signed a joint declaration in support of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and condemned Russia’s war of aggression. They also backed Kyiv’s demands for the full exchange of prisoners of war and the return of illegally deported Ukrainian children, the latter being a cause championed by Ireland.
South Africa, India and Saudi Arabia – countries from the Global South – did not sign up to the joint declaration.
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president and the man who started this long and costly war, had chosen that same weekend in June to double down on his price for stopping the conflict: Ukraine’s agreement to officially cede occupied territory to Russia and to drop its application to join NATO.
Since then, Mr Putin hasn’t budged an inch on those demands and is unlikely to do so either.
Both demands – giving up territory and relinquishing its application for NATO membership – are unpalatable for Ukraine’s government and its military, and a large proportion of its citizens too.
My sense, and that of probably most other journalists and delegates, was that Russia’s absence meant the summit was always going to be limited in what it could achieve.
China’s absence too – Beijing had declined to attend because Russia was not there – meant that the event would not deliver a diplomatic breakthrough for peace.
As we enter 2025, some form of peace talks, involving Ukraine and Russia is becoming more likely.
2024 was a year of massive Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian cities and energy sites, killing civilians indiscriminately, and steady, but small gains by Russian forces at the front.
Russia’s missile attack in July on Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital, one of the largest paediatric hospitals in Ukraine, stands out as a particularly malicious attack.
Two people were killed and only for the quick reactions of staff, which moved the hospital’s 600 young patients to an underground shelter, there would have been mass casualties.
That same day, a Russian missile struck a maternity and children’s clinic in the capital, killing five medical staff and two patients. Like an automated response, Russia’s defence ministry blamed Ukraine’s air defences for the strikes.
Going into the third year of Russia’s invasion, the conversation around what a peace settlement would look like has shifted significantly since that summit in Switzerland.
Back in June, Mr Zelensky was still talking about the need for any peace deal to ensure that Ukraine reclaimed all of its territory, including Crimea.
Regaining its occupied territory from Russia still remains Ukraine’s long-term goal but it is looking increasingly likely that Kyiv will have to accept a peace deal that freezes the current frontlines.
That pressure has mounted since Donald Trump’s victory in November’s US presidential election.
Mr Zelensky has said, quite diplomatically, that he is looking forward to working with the new US president but the future of US military aid for Ukraine is now uncertain.
Unlike Mr Biden, Mr Trump is neither an Atlanticist nor does he view supporting Ukraine as a moral cause for the United States.
For the incoming president, ending the war will be purely transactional, a necessary thing to do in order to stop costing the US tens of billions of dollars in military aid each year.
Oleksandr Kraiev, a Ukrainian foreign policy expert, told RTÉ News that Mr Trump has not talked about achieving a “just peace”, as Ukraine demands. Rather, he has only spoken about stopping the war.
In that sense, Mr Trump might claim that by stopping the fighting, even through a long ceasefire, he has stopped the war.
The 47th US president will push for peace talks from his first week in office. Already, his nominee for Ukraine peace envoy, Keith Kellogg, a former US lieutenant-general, has spelled out a plan: freezing the frontlines, not allowing Ukraine into NATO (that would appease Russia) and threatening to stop military aid to Ukraine if it refuses to engage in peace talks.
Mr Kellogg has also suggested increasing military aid to Ukraine if Russia refuses to negotiate – it’s a carrot and stick approach from Washington that also treats Ukraine and Russia equally.
The US and Ukraine have already agreed an undisclosed date for Mr Kellogg’s first visit to Kyiv after Mr Trump’s inauguration.
The most immediate impact of Mr Trump’s presidency will be on Ukraine’s use of ATACMS, long-range US-made ballistic missiles that the Biden administration has allowed Ukraine to use against military targets within Russia since mid-November.
Mr Trump disagrees with that decision so we can likely expect him to reverse the Biden policy.
Since November, the temperature of the war has increased, with Ukraine firing ATACMS and British Storm Shadow missiles, and Russia threatening to strike “decision-making centres” in Kyiv with its new hypersonic Oreshnik missiles, a weapon capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
But for all the fire and brimstone from Mr Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, we have seen more of the same tactics from Russia: continued large-scale drone and missile assaults on Ukraine’s energy facilities to make winter more uncomfortable for Ukrainians.
Mr Putin said in his end-of-year news conference in mid-December that he is open to negotiations and compromise with Ukraine, while at the same time he said that Russia won’t give up occupied Ukrainian territory.
It was a classic case of double-speak from the Russian president, who has now ruled his country for a quarter of a century.
Keeping sanctions against Russia and ensuring that Ukraine still gets NATO and EU membership at some point “might preclude Russia from future aggression”, said Marianna Fakhurdinova, a Fulbright Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington DC.
A ceasefire along the current frontlines in 2025 will suit Mr Putin, who will spin the agreement to say he has achieved the aims of his “special military operation”, and enable Moscow to further integrate occupied Ukrainian territory into Russia’s state apparatus.
Kyiv, however, will refuse to officially cede part of its country and will continue to regard any occupied territory as part of Ukraine, as will most of the international community.
And so, the situation could remain frozen until there is a change of leadership in the Kremlin, which could take years, or until Mr Putin’s death.
The other main factor pressurising Ukraine into a peace deal, or, at the very least, a ceasefire, has been Russia’s slow but incremental gains along the front in 2024.
Russian ground forces and heavy artillery have continued to chip away at Ukraine’s defences and are now capturing a couple of destroyed settlements each week in eastern Ukraine.
Those gains are coming at great cost though. Western military analysts generally agree that Russia is incurring up to 30,000 casualties each month. It’s an attrition rate that exceeds the number of new soldiers the Russian military can recruit each month.
According to Mr Zelensky, 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began.
Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region last August showed ingenuity from its military high command. They used topography to their advantage, launching their line of attack along two key rivers in the Kursk region that provided Ukraine with a natural line of defence.
But overall, Ukraine’s Kursk offensive did not dissuade Mr Putin from trying to grab more land in eastern Ukraine, which remains his goal.
There is also an inescapable fact: Russia’s larger population means it will always have an advantage when it comes to enlisting new soldiers.
Writing in Foreign Affairs this month, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Michael Kofman, noted that Mr Putin’s reluctance to divert troops to Kursk immediately following Ukraine’s incursion demonstrated that he is “more committed than ever to the war with Ukraine and his broader confrontation with the West”.
“Although the conflict is first and foremost an imperial pursuit to end Ukraine’s independence, Putin’s ultimate objectives are to relitigate the post–Cold War order in Europe, weaken the United States, and usher in a new international system that affords Russia the status and influence Putin believes it deserves,” wrote Ms Kendall-Taylor and Mr Kofman.
Mykhailo Samus, a senior Ukrainian defence analyst, said that he doesn’t believe there will even be any “direct negotiations” between Ukraine and Russia.
Mr Trump’s negotiators, in his view, will act as mediators between Moscow and Kyiv and push for a ceasefire but leave the job of maintaining a ceasefire to Europe.
The idea of deploying European peacekeepers to a frozen frontline in Ukraine has been mooted by some European leaders in recent weeks but without a peace deal in place, it is hard to know whether this is a realistic proposal at this stage.
Policing a 1,300km frontline would be a huge task (and perhaps the border with Russia’s client-state Belarus too). But having European troops in the area would make Russia think twice about re-starting the war.
Ukraine’s application to join NATO, or even a commitment on when it could join in future, is likely to be delayed because Russia will only join talks if it gets a guarantee that Ukrainian membership of the alliance is off the table.
But, in return, Ukraine needs security guarantees from its Western partners.
“Ukraine will do everything possible to get into NATO or to get any kind of security guarantees as fast as possible,” said Mr Kraiev.
He thinks that an acceptable deal for Ukraine would include peacekeepers, continued military aid and a security guarantee from individual NATO members that is similar to Article 4 of the NATO Treaty – that member states will consult if Ukraine’s territorial integrity is threatened again.
But is Russia really ready to talk peace in 2025?
The low value of the rouble relative to the US dollar and the fact that the Russian army’s monthly casualty toll exceeds its number of new recruits each month might give Mr Putin more pressing reasons to negotiate.
Ukrainians have endured three long years of war. But, like their president, they will need firm assurances that any peace deal won’t jeopardise their country’s sovereignty in the future.
A security guarantee from one or more of the big NATO members, continued military aid and not officially ceding any occupied Ukrainian territory to Russia would seem the very least that Ukraine and its citizens would accept as terms for peace.
