Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he plans to increase the lethality of his armed forces as part of a strategy to disarm Moscow and turn around a deadlocked negotiating table.
“The task of Ukrainian units is to ensure a level of destruction of the occupier at which Russian losses exceed the number of reinforcements they can send to their forces each month,” he told military personnel on Monday.
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“We are talking about 50,000 Russian losses per month, this is the optimal level,” he said.
Video analysis, Zelenskyy recently said, showed 35,000 confirmed killings in December 2025, up from 30,000 in November and 26,000 in October. But on Monday he clarified that the 35,000 were “dead and seriously wounded occupiers” who would not return to the battlefield.
Its commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, conservatively estimated “more than 33,000” confirmed deaths in December.
Ukraine believes it has killed or maimed 1.2 million Russians since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies recently estimated that Russia had suffered 1.2 million casualties, including at least 325,000 deaths, and Ukraine as many as 600,000 casualties, with up to 140,000 deaths.
Al Jazeera cannot confirm casualty estimates from either side.
Currently, the war is at a standstill and Russia is struggling to make significant territorial gains.
Russia controlled just over a quarter of Ukraine a month into its full-scale war, in March 2022, according to geolocated images.
The following month, Ukraine pushed back Russian forces from a number of northern cities (kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy and Chernihiv), leaving Russia in possession of a fifth of the country.
In August and September 2022, then-ground forces commander Syrskii planned a campaign to push Russian forces east of the Oskil River in the northern Kharkiv region, and Russia itself retreated east of the Dnipro River in the southern Kherson region, leaving it with 17.8 percent of the country.
Over the past three years, Russia has increased that figure to 19.3 percent.
For nearly six months, Russia has struggled to seize two cities it has nearly surrounded with 150,000 troops in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region.
“In Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad, the Ukrainian Defense Forces continue to contain the enemy, which is trying to infiltrate the northern districts of both cities in small groups,” Syrskii said last week.
Russia claimed it had captured the northern city of Kupiansk last month, but Russian military journalists say Ukrainian forces retook control of the city and surrounded the Russian assault force inside it.
The engine of war
Zelenskyy's strategy involves increasing domestic drone production and honing the skills of drone operators, because drones now hit 80 percent of battlefield targets.
“In the last year alone, 819,737 targets were hit by drones. And we clearly recorded each of the impacts,” he said Monday.
The military has instituted a points system that rewards drone operators for the number and accuracy of their hits.
That reflects a system implemented in April 2024, which offers financial rewards to ground troops for destroying Russian battlefield equipment, culminating in $23,000 for capturing a battle tank.
Zelenskyy this month appointed Mykhailo Fedorov, who previously served as Minister of Digital Transformation and Deputy Prime Minister of Innovation, Education, Science and Technology, as Defense Minister.
Last week, Fedorov began naming his advisers. Among them is Serhiy Sternenko, who last year created Ukraine's largest non-state supplier of military drones, to increase drone production. Fedorov's former deputy at the Ministry of Digital Transformation, Valeriya Ionan, was put in charge of international collaborations, thanks to her experience with Silicon Valley giants such as Google and Cisco. Fedorov also appointed Serhiy Beskrestnov as technology advisor. Beskrestnov is an expert on Russian drone and electronic warfare innovation.
Russian attacks hit Ukraine
Zelenskyy's war goals arise in part from the fact that Russia refuses to abandon its campaign to seize more of Ukraine.
Despite US President Donald Trump's efforts to achieve a ceasefire, talks on the future of Donetsk remain stalled.
Russia's worst attack on Ukrainian cities and energy facilities last week came on Saturday, with 375 drones and 21 missiles, as Russian, American and Ukrainian delegations negotiated a ceasefire in Abu Dhabi.
The strike left 1.2 million homes without electricity across the country, including 6,000 in kyiv.
Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said 800,000 homes in kyiv remained without power after three strikes earlier this month. “Unfortunately, constant enemy attacks prevent the situation from stabilizing,” he wrote on social media.
Zelenskyy told Ukrainians in an afternoon video address that electricity supply problems were still widespread in kyiv, Kryvyi Rih, Dnipro and in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions.
“We are expanding assistance points and warming centers,” he said, adding that 174 [crews] They were working to repair the damage only in Kyiv. Shmyal said 710,000 people were still without power in Kyiv.
A Czech grassroots initiative raised $6 million to buy hundreds of electric generators for Ukrainian homes. On Friday, the European Commission said it would send 447 generators to Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Russian drones killed three people. Two of them were a young couple in kyiv who died when a drone hit their apartment building. The rescuers only found his four-year-old daughter alive.
“When I took her out, the girl started crying very loudly and then started shaking violently,” said Marian Kushnir, a journalist who was the couple's neighbor.
At least five more people were killed when a drone crashed into a passenger train in the northern Kharkiv region, and two children and a pregnant woman were injured when 50 drones fell on the southern port of Odessa.
The talks in Abu Dhabi ended without a ceasefire. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had said before the start that Russia was not willing to give in on any of its territorial demands.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the talks were focused on the heart of the disagreement between the two sides, which is Ukraine's refusal to hand over the remaining fifth of Donetsk that Moscow does not control.
Talks are scheduled to continue in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, the officials said.
Zelenskyy's unvarnished truth
In a scathing speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Zelenskyy accused his European allies of “hoping-hoping” that the Russian threat would go away after nearly four years of war in Ukraine.
“Europe is based solely on the belief that if danger comes, NATO will act. But no one has actually seen the Alliance in action. If Putin decides to take Lithuania or attack Poland, who will respond?” -Zelensky asked.
US President Donald Trump's threat to take Greenland by force on January 17, he said, revealed Europe's lack of preparedness as seven Nordic countries sent 40 troops to the island.
“If you send 30 or 40 soldiers to Greenland, what is it for? What message does it send? What is the message to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin? To China? And even more importantly, what message does it send to Denmark – the most important – its closest ally?”
In contrast, Zelenskyy said, Trump was willing to seize Russian tankers selling sanctioned oil and charge Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with drugs, while Putin, an accused war criminal, remained free. “No security guarantee works without the United States,” he said.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte echoed those sentiments in a speech to the European Parliament on Monday. [January 26].
“If anyone here thinks… that the European Union or Europe as a whole can defend itself without the United States, let them dream on,” he said. “You can't.”
