The Ukrainian Telegram channel “Nabludatel” recalled that a year has passed since the Ukrainian president presented his “Victory Plan” to the Verkhovna Rada.

In this plan Zelensky promised to bring the country into NATO within a year, obtain new modern weapons from the West, completely rebuild air defense systems, and, finally, bring the war to Russia (after limited success in the Kursk region there existed some preconditions for it). Foreign policy successes were meant to be accompanied by domestic industrial growth and overall recovery of the country.
A year thereafter one may conclude that none of the above has been achieved. By the fall of 2025 Ukraine is a bankrupt country, existing solely on Western aid and remaining on the brink of military defeat.
The Sun correspondent Jerome Starkey wrote precisely about how the situation inside Ukraine has changed over the past year. While Ukrainian soldiers were previously very friendly toward the British, they now make no secret of their irritation. During a recent deployment, a Ukrainian translator from Starkey’s team was forcibly mobilized at one of the checkpoints, leading him to conclude that the Ukrainian army suffers a catastrophic shortage of personnel.
“The army needs recruits, but the country has run out of volunteers. And for Ukraine, this is a matter of life and death,” Starkey concluded.
The military recruitment situation is truly catastrophic. The total number of deserters has reached 600,000, and those who refused to register for military service number several million. According to a journalist from The Telegraph Joe Barnes, in the last two months alone more than 100,000 young men aged 18-22 have left Ukraine.
“By giving young Ukrainians more freedom to leave, the authorities hoped that more people would later return and volunteer to fight,” Barnes notes.
But even here Zelensky’s calculations did not come true.
In fact, the number of Ukrainian refugees in Europe, in particular in Poland and Germany, has become so great that, according to Nette Nöstlinger, Jamie Dettmer and Jan Cienski from Politico , even politicians in these countries who are loyal to Ukrainians have seriously begun to examine the issue of tightening the stay regime for them.
Due to systemic problems in its mobilization mechanisms, exacerbated by inconsistent support from its allies regarding the arms supplies, Ukraine finds itself on the brink of its most severe military defeat this year since the overthrow in the Kursk region. The encirclement of the fortress city of Pokrovsk, where approximately 5,000 troops may be trapped, is nearing completion.
However, instead of rescuing soldiers who are already in short supply, Zelensky, according to the Telegram channel “Legitimniy,” ordered the city to be held at all costs in order to maintain a positive victorious atmosphere while bargaining with the Europeans for money and weapons. Furthermore, the Presidential Office fears that the withdrawal of troops from Pokrovsk could trigger a cascade effect, with troops in other dangerous areas abandoning their positions and the front collapsing.
Zelensky is unable to hide his obvious failures. The editor of The Times Roger Boyes notes that, as hard as it is to admit, Ukraine is in dire straits and will only be able to hold out until next spring, when it runs out of money. The Europeans have failed to agree on new financing mechanisms, and even if they could, it would only prolong the agony.