For the fourth consecutive Christmas since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Ukrainians are celebrating under air-raid sirens, rolling blackouts and empty chairs at family tables. President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose holiday messages once struck a cautiously optimistic tone, now mixes appeals for resilience and Western support with an openly personal wish: that Vladimir Putin and his regime face ruin for unleashing a war that has devastated his country.

Image Illustration. Photo by Xiang Qiu on Unsplash

As Ukraine enters a fourth winter of conflict, the contrast between the festive season and the brutality of daily life at the front underscores how deeply the war has reshaped Ukrainian society — and how central Zelensky’s hardened stance toward the Kremlin has become to the country’s political and emotional landscape.

Four Christmases Since Full-Scale Invasion

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, shattering a fragile post-2014 equilibrium and transforming a simmering conflict into Europe’s largest land war in generations. International monitors estimate that by late 2025, more than 53,000 Ukrainian civilians had been killed or injured since the invasion began, including over 14,500 deaths, as a result of missile strikes, artillery barrages and drone attacks targeting cities and frontline communities. United Nations human rights monitors report that civilian casualties in 2025 were significantly higher than the previous year, driven by renewed Russian strikes on urban centers and energy infrastructure.

The emotional weight of a fourth wartime Christmas is hard to overstate. In many Ukrainian cities, Christmas trees now share public squares with improvised memorials to fallen soldiers. Church services double as vigils for prisoners of war and the missing. And in nightly video addresses, Zelensky — once a television comedian, now a wartime president — has increasingly voiced anger at the Kremlin leadership, casting the struggle as both a national liberation fight and a moral confrontation with Russia’s president.

A President Hardened by Loss and Stalemate

Zelensky’s rhetoric has sharpened with each passing year of war. Early appeals framed Putin as an aggressor who could still be pressured into withdrawing. Now, after successive failed peace initiatives and mounting casualties, he increasingly speaks of the Russian leader in terms of inevitable downfall — whether through political isolation, economic attrition or the eventual reckoning of international justice.

On the ground, the context for this hardening tone is bleak. The front lines, stretching roughly 1,000 kilometers from the northeast to the Black Sea, have shifted only slowly despite costly offensives on both sides. United Nations reporting shows that monthly civilian casualties in 2025 remained consistently high, with several months seeing more than 200 civilians killed and over 900 injured in missile, drone and artillery attacks across Ukraine. These figures underscore why the war increasingly feels like a grinding war of attrition rather than a series of dramatic breakthroughs.

For Zelensky, each Christmas address now functions as both a morale exercise and a message to foreign capitals. In televised speeches, he routinely links the suffering of ordinary Ukrainians to the actions of the Russian president personally, framing Putin as the architect of a campaign that targets power grids, ports and apartment blocks as instruments of coercion. His public hope that the Kremlin leader’s rule ends in failure — or "ruin" — is inextricable from Kyiv’s push for continued sanctions, war-crimes investigations and long-term security guarantees from the West.

A Nation Displaced and Living in the Dark

Christmas in Ukraine today is marked by absence. Since 2022, Russia’s invasion has triggered one of the world’s largest displacement crises. The UN Refugee Agency estimates that by early 2025 some 10.6 million Ukrainians had been uprooted from their homes — about a quarter of the pre‑war population — with 3.7 to 3.8 million displaced inside Ukraine and around 6.9 million living as refugees abroad. Most of those who fled abroad remain in neighboring European countries, with Poland alone hosting roughly 1 million Ukrainian refugees.

Within Ukraine, millions more live with the consequences of repeated assaults on critical infrastructure. According to a joint assessment by the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Commission and the Ukrainian government, direct physical damage from the war reached an estimated $176 billion by the end of 2024. The same study puts overall reconstruction and recovery needs over the next decade at about $524 billion — nearly three times Ukraine’s projected 2024 economic output. Up to 13 percent of the country’s housing stock has been damaged or destroyed, affecting more than 2.5 million households.

Energy facilities are a particular target. In late 2024 and 2025, Russian forces stepped up coordinated attacks on power plants, transmission lines and district heating systems, causing long blackouts and leaving many communities without reliable heat or water as temperatures dropped. UNHCR estimates that more than 2 million homes — roughly 10 percent of the national housing stock — have sustained some form of damage from strikes, compounding the humanitarian toll of winter without stable energy supplies.

Global Support and the Politics of Endurance

Zelensky’s increasingly uncompromising language toward Putin is also aimed at foreign audiences whose funding and arms supplies remain decisive for Ukraine’s military prospects. European governments and the United States have committed tens of billions of dollars in military and financial support since 2022, positioning the conflict as a test of the international order’s ability to resist territorial conquest.

At the same time, Western leaders are grappling with domestic fatigue over the costs of long-term assistance and concerns about escalation with Moscow. In this climate, Zelensky’s holiday speeches are carefully calibrated. On one hand, they offer gratitude for previous aid and a narrative of shared democratic values. On the other, by personalizing the war around Putin and portraying him as a destabilizing force far beyond Ukraine’s borders, they argue that a Russian defeat — or at least a clear failure of Putin’s war aims — is in the security interest of Europe and the broader international community.

International institutions have increasingly framed the war in similar terms. The UN human rights office has accused Russian forces of repeated violations of international humanitarian law, including indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas and infrastructure. The International Criminal Court has already issued arrest warrants related to the deportation of Ukrainian children, and Ukrainian officials continue to lobby for a special tribunal focused on the crime of aggression — steps that, in Kyiv’s view, should leave Putin increasingly isolated and legally vulnerable even if he remains in power in the short term.

Christmas at the Front: Faith, Fatigue and Defiance

For soldiers dug into trenches near Avdiivka, Kupiansk or the lower Dnipro, Zelensky’s words about Putin’s eventual downfall compete with more immediate concerns: drones overhead, ammunition shortages, and whether they will make it home alive. Chaplains organize small improvised services in bunkers and dugouts; care packages from families and diaspora communities arrive bearing sweets, socks and handmade ornaments.

Among civilians, too, Christmas rituals have adapted to wartime. In cities hit by frequent power outages, many residents gather in shelters or metro stations for communal meals. Volunteers deliver hot food and gifts to hospitals and temporary accommodation centers for the displaced. Social media fills with images of candlelit liturgies juxtaposed with shattered apartment blocks and anti‑aircraft tracers in the night sky.

Against this backdrop, the president’s hope that Putin’s rule will end in ruin resonates less as a call for vengeance and more as a shorthand for a broader desire: that this fourth Christmas in war will be one of the last, and that the architect of the invasion will ultimately bear the consequences — political, legal or historical — for the suffering unleashed.

An Uncertain Path to Peace

Yet even as Zelensky speaks of Putin’s eventual downfall, the path to a just and durable peace remains unclear. Russian forces still occupy large swaths of Ukrainian territory. Missile and drone attacks continue to kill civilians monthly in cities far from the front lines. International efforts to seize or tax frozen Russian assets for Ukraine’s reconstruction are moving slowly, even as Kyiv faces an estimated half-trillion‑dollar rebuilding bill.

What is clear is that the war has already defined a generation of Ukrainians, and that Christmas, once a simple family holiday, has become a marker of endurance. Each year since 2022 has brought new losses, new waves of displacement and new scars on the landscape. Each has also brought renewed assertions of Ukrainian identity — from liturgical reforms breaking with Moscow-linked churches to intensifying efforts to document war crimes and preserve cultural heritage under fire.

As Ukraine marks a fourth Christmas in the shadow of conflict, Zelensky’s hope that Putin’s project ends in failure mirrors a wider sentiment among Ukrainians: that however long the war lasts, they intend to outlast it — and to see those who unleashed it held to account. Whether that wish is fulfilled in courtrooms, in the court of public opinion or through political change in Russia itself remains uncertain. But for many, the belief that the war’s architects will one day face a reckoning has become part of what it means to celebrate Christmas in wartime Ukraine.