What did the last days of 2025 bring to Kyiv?
A look back at reports from late December 2025: a strike on the capital, a reported death later contradicted, and an intercept over the Baltic.
What did the final days of 2025 look like for Ukraine? On 30 December 2025, the most recent reports described a country still under attack and a war that reached well beyond the front line.
On 27 December, a Russian missile and drone strike on Kyiv killed two people and injured 32. Damage to critical infrastructure left 40% of the residential areas of Kyiv and its surrounding districts without heating, in the depth of winter.
The same day, Denis Kapustin, leader of the Ukraine-aligned Russian Volunteer Corps, was reported to have been killed in a Russian drone strike in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. It was later revealed that Kapustin had faked his death to thwart an assassination attempt, so the initial report did not hold.
Further afield, on 25 December the Polish Air Force intercepted and escorted a Russian aerial reconnaissance aircraft over international waters in the Baltic Sea. The aircraft stayed away from nearby Polish airspace.
Taken together, the reports from those days show the pressure on civilian infrastructure in the capital, the uncertainty of early battlefield claims, and continued military activity near NATO's borders.
