YEARENDER: What does 2024 hold for Ukraine?

STORY: More than 21 months into the biggest conflict in Europe since World War Two, fierce fighting rages in Ukraine with no end in sight.Ukrainians hoped 2023 would be the year the country drove Russian forces out of swathes of occupied land. But the frontline has barely budged.Reuters Ukraine Chief Correspondent Thomas Balmforth:"The main takeaway of the year is probably there haven't been a great deal of advantages by either side during the war." The war in Ukraine has already killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed cities and villages, forced millions from their homes and placed hundreds of thousands more under the Russian occupation.Kyiv's much-anticipated counteroffensive has so far proved unable to punch through Russian defensive lines in the south and east."Russia controls about 17.5% of Ukrainian territory. Russian forces are back on the offensive in the east, and they've been mounting pressure on the town of Avdiivka. Many of the Ukrainian soldiers are exhausted and many of them will be fighting at the front for almost two years. Ukraine's own commander in chief has already described the war as a stalemate. President Zelenskiy has rejected that characterization, but it really does look very hard to imagine that either side could quickly forge a breakthrough and change things very quickly on the battlefield.”Ukrainians know they must secure Western military aid to carry on and that it will be harder with the war in Gaza distracting global attention."It's clear that there is increasing fatigue in the West on the matter of providing military and other support to Ukraine. The White House has asked Congress to approve a roughly $60 billion assistance program for Ukraine that would come through next year. At the moment it hasn't passed."Meanwhile in Europe, a four-year €20 billion EU military aid proposal has also run into resistance from some bloc members.Some Ukrainians believe Russian leader Vladimir Putin will use any let-up in fighting to build further defenses and regenerate the Russian army for a new assault."Russia is expected to hold an election in March that is widely expected to hand Vladimir Putin another six years in the Kremlin. Some observers think that he may feel his hands are more untied after that election to escalate his war effort. That could include, for instance, mobilizing more Russian men to fight in the army. He may also decide to invest even more effort into the defense industry in Russia.”The strain of the war is likely to weigh on everyday Ukrainians, for many of whom war fatigue has become a fact of life."I spoke to an internally displaced person from the Kherson region, Oleksii. He fled his hometown of Kherson in April 2022 when it was still under occupation. He's now currently living in Kiev and he has no plan to go back home to Kherson because he fears that it's still getting pounded by artillery and he thinks that it's too dangerous. So I think there's a lot of frustration, a lot of fatigue and also a sense that it's gonna be a long, long time until anything goes back to anything resembling normal." "Currently, if everything stays as it is, it doesn't look like Russian forces have any appetite for peace talks. The Ukrainians themselves, their official position is that they want all of their country back. Every single inch of occupied territory to be returned to Ukraine and their position is that peace talks cannot take place until Russia has left their territory. So it really it really does seem that neither side is ready for peace talks, and therefore it seems unlikely that you know the war are good to end anytime soon."Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces via Telegram / State Border Service of Ukraine / National Police of Ukraine / Reuters / Concord Press Service / 35th Separate Brigade of Marines via Facebook / Donetsk Region Police