What the first week of January 2025 showed

What did the opening days of the year say about the security picture in Ukraine as of 9 January 2025? The reports available from 4 to 6 January described a war moving along several lines at once: long-range missiles, drones over the front, and attacks on civilians in a southern city.

Missiles and a vow of retaliation

On 4 January, the Russian Armed Forces claimed to have shot down eight American ATACMS missiles fired by Ukraine, and vowed retaliation. The claim was Russia's own, and the reports did not describe any response by 9 January. The episode nonetheless placed the question of Western-supplied long-range weapons, and the threat of Russian retaliation, at the centre of the first week of the year.

Drones at the front and over Kherson

On the same day, 4 January, a war correspondent for the Russian newspaper Izvestia was killed in a Ukrainian drone strike in Donetsk Oblast. The region belongs to the eastern regions of Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv, which have been a theatre of operations since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war in February 2022.

Two days later, on 6 January, a Russian drone attacked a civilian passenger bus in Kherson. It reportedly killed at least one person and injured at least nine others. Kherson has been shelled repeatedly throughout the invasion, and those attacks intensified after the city was liberated.

What the pattern showed

These three reports do not amount to a single story, but together they show how varied the means of war had become: missiles aimed at distant targets, drones used in combat zones and against a public vehicle in a city, and journalists exposed to the danger. In Donetsk Oblast the casualty was a correspondent for a Russian outlet; in Kherson it was passengers on a bus.

The Russian pledge of retaliation left open how Moscow might respond. By 9 January no such response had been reported in these accounts, and any later developments lie beyond what this review covers.