Russia ended 2025 with what Ukraine described as an information operation aimed at avoiding participation in peace talks and continuing the war, despite inflicting staggering casualties this year for small territorial gains.
On Monday, December 29, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Ukraine of attempting to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin at his residence on Lake Valdai, 140 kilometers (87 miles) northeast of Moscow.
“The Kiev regime launched a terrorist attack using 91 long-range unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) against the presidential palace of the Russian Federation in the Novgorod Oblast. All UAVs were destroyed by Russian military air defense systems,” Lavrov said in a statement.
He did not say whether Putin was there at the time.
Lavrov’s foreign minister, Ukrainian Andriy Sibikha, immediately dismissed the claims. “Almost a day has passed and Russia still has not provided any plausible evidence for Ukraine’s alleged attack on Putin’s residence. And they will not do so, because there is none. Such an attack did not occur,” Sibiha said.
Two days later, Russia produced photos of the drone’s wreckage lying in the snow, but the photos could not confirm the drone’s location, manufacturer, or time of shootdown.
“The attack on President Putin’s Valdai residence is probably a Kremlin fake,” opposition media outlet Sota wrote. “Residents in Valdai, home to President Putin’s ‘Dinner’ residence, told Sota that they could not hear any air defense activity last night, which would have shot down 91 drones.”
Sota also pointed out that the drones attacking Valdai “necessarily pass through specially protected airspace where there are strategic missile forces, East Kazakhstan region, military aircraft and objects of closed administrative units such as Solnechny and lakes.”
“Only a miracle would allow a drone that crosses the territory of these facilities to fly into Dinner’s residence,” Sota said.
Lavrov’s claim also appears to contradict an earlier statement by the Russian Ministry of Defense that only 41 drones were shot down in the Novgorod region on the night of December 28-29.
The Russian Ministry of Defense later issued an update, saying that 49 more drones were shot down over Bryansk, and one over Smolensk “while flying in the direction of the Novgorod region.”
Ukrainian observers noted that Bryansk and Smolensk are hundreds of kilometers from Valdai.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank, said the usual evidence for attacks on Ukraine, such as footage, heat signatures, statements from local officials and local media reports, did not accompany the alleged attack.
For example, the successful attack by Ukrainian forces on an oil depot in Rybinsk on December 31 was well documented on social media. So was the attack on Rostov’s Novoshakhtinsk refinery a week earlier, as well as many other attacks that week.
What really happened?
News of the alleged attack came a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy concluded a successful meeting with US President Donald Trump in Florida, securing a commitment for the US military to participate in Ukraine’s security under a peace agreement with Russia.
It is the first time the United States has agreed to such security arrangements, and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk appears to have grown optimistic that the Ukraine war could end in early 2026.
“Peace is just around the corner,” the prime minister said at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday.
“An important outcome of the last few days is that the United States has expressed its intention to participate in the security of Ukraine after the peace agreement, including, for example, the presence of American troops on the border and along the contact line between Ukraine and Russia,” Tusk said.
President Zelensky said Ukraine’s allies, known as the Coalition of the Willing, will meet in Kiev on January 3 and in France three days later.
Foreign Minister Lavrov’s statement that “Russia’s negotiating position will be reviewed” cast a cloud over this optimistic view. On the same day, President Putin ordered his forces in southern Ukraine to continue their efforts to occupy the remaining vacant areas in the Zaporizhzhya region of southern Ukraine. Moscow controls three-quarters of the region.
Zelenskyy said that following the successful meeting with President Trump, Russia was “looking for an excuse” to escalate hostilities and avoid participating in peace talks.
“Russia is at it again, using dangerous rhetoric to undermine all diplomatic efforts with President Trump’s team,” he said on social media.
Russia has repeatedly dashed President Trump’s hopes for peace, refusing to cede occupied territory or allow U.S. and European forces into Ukrainian territory.
But President Trump appears to believe Moscow’s claims.
“I don’t like it. It’s not good,” President Trump told reporters Monday. “It’s one thing to be aggressive and it’s another thing to attack his house. Now is not the right time to do something like that. And I learned about that from President Putin today. I was very angry about it.”
Other US officials were not convinced. Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, expressed skepticism in an interview Monday, saying, “We don’t know if that actually happened.” On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Ukraine did not target Putin’s residence.
The Russian government’s message appeared to be canceling a meeting between President Zelensky and President Trump that targeted the US president.
President Putin held a staged meeting with the General Staff on Saturday and Monday, December 27, immediately before and after the meeting between President Zelensky and President Trump, during which Commander-in-Chief Valery Gerasimov aired exaggerated claims of success.
He said Russian forces had occupied 6,640 square kilometers (2,564 square miles) of Ukrainian territory in 2025 and occupied 334 Ukrainian settlements. ISW said it observed evidence of a Russian presence in “4,952 square kilometers (1,912 square miles)” and 245 settlements.
Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Shirsky said the loss of territory was equivalent to 0.8 percent of Ukraine’s 603,550 square kilometers (233,032 square miles). Approximately 420,000 people were killed or injured.
The Ukrainian General Staff estimates that the total number of Russian casualties from the war is more than 1.2 million people, approximately 11,500 tanks and 24,000 armored fighting vehicles, more than 37,000 artillery systems, 781 aircraft, and well over 4,000 missiles.
By the end of 2025, Russian forces had not yet captured the eastern Ukrainian towns of Pokrovsk and Mirnohrad in the eastern Donetsk region, which they had been fighting to capture for five months. They held 55 percent of Hryaipol, in the southern Zaporozhye region, even though they claimed to have occupied it. Even Russian military reporters admitted that Russian troops were being driven out of Kupiansk, in the northern Kharkov region, even though they claimed to have captured it.
“Inaccurate reporting of the situation to higher authorities led to the redeployment of reserve forces to other regions that were not needed for the capture and clearing of Kupiansk,” one Kremlin-friendly news outlet wrote, citing “systematic exaggeration of successes.”
Questions remain as to whether Ukraine targeted Valdai, but Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities have been documented. In the last week of this year, Russia launched just over 1,000 drones and 33 missiles toward Ukrainian cities. The Ukrainian Air Force said it intercepted 86% of the drones and 30 missiles.
