It's been a rough year for the Ukrainian army. Even if Russian tanks are no longer at Kyiv's gates as they were in the first weeks of the invasion in 2022, "the intensity of the fighting is very high" on the eastern front and "the situation is very tense along the 1,130 kilometers of the front line," the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, admitted in an interview with Le Monde. The general agreed to give a military assessment of the past year.

Sitting in a Kharkiv basement on Friday, December 13, just as Russia had launched its umpteenth attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure at dawn, General Syrskyi recalled that he was appointed head of the army on February 8, replacing General Valery Zaluzhny. This was during a pivotal moment for the town of Avdiivka, which fell to the Russians a week later. A first test, foreboding a year of Russian advances in the Donbas.

Since he took command, it has been, "a year of intense fighting, in ten operational sectors, against an enemy who is using significant forces to break down Ukrainian defenses." An enemy that also wants, through missile and drone strikes against cities and infrastructure, to "ruin the country."

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