On the night of December 31, 2025, Kyiv entered the New Year under an air raid alert, but the drones were shot down and the city’s power system held through the morning without outages. At the same time, strikes continued elsewhere: Odesa and Zaporizhzhia were attacked in waves, and on January 1, 2026, an airstrike hit an eco-park near Kharkiv. A female volunteer was wounded, lions and tigers were harmed, and nearly all parrots and pheasants died after a shell struck their enclosure.
The author writes that for people in the rear, war has become routine: in 2025 Kyiv repeatedly came under ballistic missile and drone attacks. She recalls in particular the strike on November 29, when one Shahed drone destroyed a three-story building inhabited mostly by pensioners, and a woman pulled from the rubble died in the ambulance before it could leave. Another drone hit a residential complex near a metro station.
Against that backdrop, moments of civic resilience stood out sharply. At Christmas, a large procession in traditional dress took place in Kyiv with the involvement of the Ivan Honchar Museum. After an air raid alert, people returned to Mykhailivska Square and continued the celebration; similar marches were held in Bucha, Odesa, Lviv, Vinnytsia, Poltava, and other cities.
Between Christmas and New Year, the author visited Hansen Town in Tarasivka near Kyiv. The project, supported by American philanthropist Dell Loy Hansen, has been building housing for evacuees from frontline regions since spring 2023. By December 2025, its fifth phase had opened: homes and infrastructure for about 4,000 people, including a school, hospital, sports complex, IT academy, and shelters.
In one of the shelters, psychologists from the state-run Center for Assistance to Rescued Persons met with women released from Russian captivity, as well as Ukrainians returned in exchanges from prisons in Belarus. Among them was Olena Zaitseva from Donetsk region, freed in October 2022 from the Izolyatsia prison; according to available information, her son was sentenced in Russia to 18 years in prison.
In closing, the author turns to Volodymyr Zelensky’s New Year address. In her assessment, about 90% of the speech focused on the guarantees of peace Ukraine expects after 1,407 days of full-scale war. Zelensky argued that concessions are not enough for Russia and that peace requires pressure and unity from Ukraine, the United States, and Europe.