Home › Opinion › What did 24 January 2025 show about the war?
What did 24 January 2025 show about the war?
Summary
A retrospective on a day when mobilisation reform, drone strikes, the return of fallen soldiers and protests in Slovakia pointed to pressures on Ukraine at home and abroad.
What did 24 January 2025 reveal about where the war stood? Taken together, the day's reports describe a conflict pressing on several fronts at once: manpower, long-range strikes, the human toll and the politics of Ukraine's neighbours.
Manpower and the cost of war
On that date Ukraine finalised military reforms aimed at recruiting 18- to 25-year-olds, penalising draft dodgers and lowering the minimum compulsory military service age to 25 from 27. The reforms addressed the need to bring more people into the armed forces.
The same day, Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War announced that, with help from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the bodies of 757 Ukrainian soldiers had been returned to Ukraine. The figure gives a sense of the human cost that the recruitment effort was meant to offset, though the reports do not link the two.
Strikes in both directions
A Ukrainian drone strike hit an oil refinery in Ryazan Oblast, Russia, in one of the largest Ukrainian drone attacks inside Russia of the conflict to that point. The Russian military said it shot down at least 121 drones over 13 regions overnight.
Russia's strikes continued too. A Russian drone hit a ten-storey apartment building in Fastiv, Kyiv Oblast, killing at least three people. Civilian housing remained exposed even as Ukraine extended its own reach into Russian territory.
Politics next door
Beyond Ukraine's borders, more than 60,000 people demonstrated across Slovakia against the policies of Prime Minister Robert Fico, described in the report as anti-Ukrainian, pro-Russian and Eurosceptic. The protests showed public opposition within a neighbouring country to that course.
What the day adds up to
No single event on 24 January 2025 changed the war's direction. But the reports show its main strands side by side: a state adjusting its recruitment rules, a returned toll of 757 fallen soldiers, drone warfare reaching deep into Russia and into Kyiv Oblast, and a neighbouring society divided over its government's stance towards Kyiv.
