Reflecting on 2025, I recall a remark from a security conference in Germany: Ukraine must cease to be seen as a security problem for Europe and instead be recognized as a solution to Europe’s defense challenge. I believe this transformation has already begun, but it remains incomplete and fragile.

To a Western observer, Ukraine’s recent moves — renaming streets, dismantling monuments, and removing names like Tchaikovsky from music academies — might look like an excess of “cancel culture” or nationalist fervor. But from inside Kyiv, it doesn’t feel like canceling. It feels like finally cleaning out the attic.

Trostianets is a small town in the Sumy region, but its story during the first month of the full-scale Russian invasion is large: it is a lesson in how organised military power may be turned into organised abuse. Its victims deserve justice, and its perpetrators — whether low-level foot soldiers or the commanders who ordered, facilitated, or ignored the crimes — must be held accountable.

This note starts from an uncomfortable but necessary premise: Ukraine may lose this war, not necessarily through total military defeat, but through an imposed and unfair settlement. Territorial concessions, frozen occupation, or a political agreement forced under pressure would still amount to failure. The reasons for that failure would not be purely Ukrainian.

Russia’s fossil fuel exports fell in November to their lowest level since the full-scale invasion, further extending the downward trend in earnings.

In Ukraine, “busification” has become more than street slang for forceful draft detentions. It is now a quiet calculation many people make each day — which streets to avoid, when to take out their phone, and whether an encounter with the state will follow the law or test its limits.