What happened in the war's first days of 2025?

What did the first days of the year look like along Ukraine's front lines and in its cities? By 9 January 2025, the reports of the preceding days pointed to a war running on several fronts at once: drones over a southern city, a strike in the east, and a Russian claim about Western-supplied missiles.

A bus in Kherson

On 6 January 2025, a Russian drone attacked a civilian passenger bus in Kherson. It reportedly killed at least one person and injured at least nine others. The city had been shelled many times throughout the Russian invasion, and those attacks intensified after Kherson was liberated.

A journalist killed in the east

Two days earlier, on 4 January 2025, a war correspondent for the Russian newspaper Izvestia was killed in a Ukrainian drone strike in Donetsk Oblast. Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv regions have been a theatre of operations since the war began in February 2022, and the strike belonged to that eastern campaign.

A claim about ATACMS

Also on 4 January 2025, the Russian Armed Forces said they had shot down eight American ATACMS missiles fired by Ukraine. They vowed retaliation. The claim was Russia's own, and the reports did not carry an independent account of the launches.

The picture on 9 January

Taken together, the reports show attacks on civilians in the south, drone warfare reaching a journalist in the east, and rhetoric about retaliation, all within a span of a few days. Each item was a separate thread, and none of the reports tied them into a single development. They show the pattern of the war at that point: strikes by drone and missile, and civilians and non-combatants among those hit.