No withdrawal from Donbass, no imposed peace: this is how Ukrainian society feels today

In Ukraine, 2026 begins with a survey that reveals some telling data. Seventy-four per cent of Ukrainians are against any peace plan that involves the withdrawal of troops from areas of Donbas that are still under the control of President Zelensky's government.

In the last few hours, another Russian attack on Kyiv has left several people dead, while a Ukrainian attack has left Russians in Belgorod without power. Russia, for its part, bombed Ukrainian territory tonight with an Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile.

Maria, before we analyse these issues, there is one question that everyone is talking about: how does Ukraine think that the United States' intervention in Venezuela might affect them? Has there been a change of cards?

Ukraine has also followed with great interest this operation to remove Maduro and his wife and what might happen from now on with control of the country. We must bear in mind that Russia was very involved in Venezuela.

There was talk that Wagner forces, before Prigozhin fell, controlled Venezuela's gold mines, and there was also talk that there were factories in that country producing the Shahed drones that strike Ukrainian cities every night. Furthermore, there was evidence that through Venezuelan and other Latin American companies, Russia was circumventing the restrictions it faced in operating in the international market due to European sanctions, thereby obtaining funds and money to continue financing its war in Ukraine.

So, the first impressions in the country about this US operation in Venezuela are that it could benefit them because it could somehow cut off this funding that Russia was obtaining through these business structures and through the extraction of resources from Venezuela, money that it then used to finance the war in Ukraine.

These issues were explained to us by Commander José David Zaparro, who was the founder of the Bolívar battalion in Ukraine, a battalion of Venezuelans and other Spanish speakers fighting in the ranks of the Ukrainian army, which continues to receive people from these countries today. Two years ago, Commander José David Zaparro told us all about these peculiarities of how Russia is operating within Venezuela and the direct consequences for Ukraine.

We invite our readers to look up that interview because it shed a lot of light on this modus operandi, which is now likely to be affected or blocked by the US operation.

That's right, you can find it in Atalayar, and it contains many of the key points you have mentioned. María, let's move on to the survey conducted in Ukraine. The results seem clear: there is a rejection of withdrawal from the Donbass, which is still controlled by Ukrainian troops. And we repeat that this is not just about territory, but about the lives of many human beings.

Of the 5 million Ukrainians who are trapped in these occupied territories, 74% of the population surveyed is reluctant to accept any peace plan that also involves Ukraine withdrawing from the Donbass areas, which Russia has not even managed to control militarily, such as Kramatorsk, from where we usually connect, or Sloviansk. Furthermore, 69% of those surveyed say they would support a peace plan that would freeze the war, but with credible guarantees that Russia would not continue to advance.

And this brings us back to the question of the occupied territories, as long as Ukraine is not forced to officially recognise these temporarily occupied territories as part of Russia. This is according to a survey published by the International Institute of Sociology in Kiev on 2 January, which also reveals that despite Zelensky's statements about progress in the peace negotiations, Ukrainian citizens systematically reject Trump's impositions and his role as mediator.

Another interesting finding in this survey is that only 16% of Ukrainians believe that the war will end in the first half of this year, while 62% of those surveyed say they are willing to endure the war for as long as necessary.

This percentage, the 62% of Ukrainians who say they will resist, has remained stable in successive surveys conducted throughout 2025, despite it being a very difficult year in terms of bombings, power cuts and the difficulty of continuing with daily life in cities far from the front line.

Let's talk about drones now. Well, we have been talking about drones throughout the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but the Ukrainian Army has taken stock of 2025 and drones continue to play a leading role.

Drones are the big players and, in fact, in 2025, Ukraine's unmanned systems forces, separate forces within the Ukrainian Armed Forces, began to operate. They have taken stock of their work throughout the year and the figures are impressive. Ukraine has attacked 168,000 targets, 350 on Russian soil, with an estimated value of £14 billion. In other words, these unmanned systems forces have caused Russia losses valued at £14 billion with drones alone.

Notable operations include Operation Spiderweb, which took place last June, in which they attacked a military airfield using only FPV drones, very low-cost drones costing between £400 and £500 per unit, which managed to disable a large part of the Russian Army's combat air fleet. But these attacks are also causing a great deal of damage to refineries and infrastructure that supply Putin's combat aircraft, to the point that Russia has been forced to move most of its military airfields further inland so that Ukrainian drones cannot cause them any more damage.

This Ukrainian Armed Forces unmanned systems centre also carries out operations in Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine, and a few weeks ago it also managed to disable a highly valuable Russian radar and surveillance station in Crimea, which was being used to select targets for attack on Ukrainian soil.

The other side of the coin, it must also be said, is that throughout 2025, Russia launched more than 54,000 drones against Ukraine, 44,800 aerial bombs and some 2,000 ballistic missiles.

More than 80% of these Russian drones were neutralised by Ukrainian air defences, but those that did hit their targets caused great destruction, with a daily death toll that shows no sign of abating. Furthermore, there are indications that there is a growing trend towards the use of low-cost weapons, such as Shahed drones and other smaller types of drones, thanks to which Russia does not have to pay the enormous costs of missiles, such as hypersonic or ballistic missiles, which are also launched, and can therefore carry out this type of attack on a daily basis.

Furthermore, it should be noted that if you do not have an anti-drone system in place, neutralising drones can cost between €500 and €1,000, but a missile to shoot down a drone can cost €20,000 or €100,000, so in that sense, drones are, as we have said and you have explained well, changing many of the military doctrines that countries within NATO itself are now becoming accustomed to. You mentioned a trickle of deaths. We close with the new attacks in the last few hours, which I fear will not be the last. It seems that Russia's retaliation for the attempted attack on Putin's residence has been the use of an Oreshnik hypersonic missile.

That's right, Russia carried out its threats to bomb Ukraine heavily for the Ukrainians' alleged attempt to attack Putin's private residence. Although Zelensky's government denied the allegations, and even the US intelligence services, the CIA, presented reports refuting them, it was not enough for Putin, who used it as an excuse to launch one of the worst combined attacks in memory against Ukrainian cities last night.

The most affected areas were Kiev, where at least 30 explosions were recorded, leaving four dead and more than 30 wounded, and the city of Lviv, where Putin launched his nuclear-capable Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile. Fortunately, the warheads were not loaded with nuclear weapons. That would have been an escalation of the war that we would rather not contemplate, but even without nuclear weapons, the destructive capacity of this missile, which flies at 13,000 kilometres per hour, is enormous and there is currently no air defence system capable of stopping it.

Furthermore, it was launched against the city closest to Poland and, therefore, to the European Union, in what appeared to be a new veiled threat from Putin against the whole of Europe. This is the second time that the Russian president has used an Oreshnik. The first was launched in November 2024 against Dnipro, the city of Dnipro, in the centre of the country, causing panic, destruction and deaths.

Let us remind our audience that this missile breaks up into several projectiles before hitting up to eight targets, and there is no way to stop it. These are therefore extremely harsh attacks when launched against a city and civilian targets. This time, it has targeted the electrical infrastructure of the Lviv region, which will affect the systematic power cuts occurring throughout the country.

You said that it will not be the last. The Ukrainians have no doubt about that either. It is a very harsh way to start 2026, which Zelensky predicted a few months ago would probably be the harshest winter of their lives.