Happy New Year (Ukraine daily update) 31 December 2025

Happy New Year 💥💥💥

We made it through Christmas warm, full, and satisfied – peace and calm are good for the Christmas joy.

The best thing about Christmas food is the leftovers the day after, more specifically the thick slices of Christmas ham on specially purchased crispbread with mustard that no one eats on Christmas Eve because it burns your nose like wasabi. This is better than the Christmas buffet, and when the family thinks I’m sacrificing myself to eat up the leftovers, it’s actually an elaborate setup to be able to sit there in the days between Christmas and New Year’s and indulge in mustard ham on crispbread and feel the Christmas peace wash over me.

As we sit here on New Year’s Eve at Johan No.1 and reflect on everything, I think we hit quite a lot in the category of “best possible outcome” in the second half of the year.

The worst fears did not come true at all, which made my Christmas much better – at some point, Ukraine decided to ignore the USA, and half of Europe’s countries have joined forces in a violent alliance to keep the damn Russians at bay. This is the first time this has happened in just under four years – like that lottery win in the commercial where the employee goes and pulls the boss by the tie and pours a cup of coffee over them.

My biggest mistake was to think that Trump in August 2025 had realized his mistake and started supporting Ukraine and Europe, but it was a malicious deception. The charm of deceit is that you succeed only once, and now a tidal wave of instant karma is sweeping over him in the form of the Epstein documents, which I fervently pray he won’t escape from in my Christmas prayers.

One thing I don’t understand why hasn’t happened yet is Russia’s operation to turn off the lights in Europe. Right now, they are purposefully targeting energy supply and distribution in Ukraine in order to darken as much as they can, and Ukraine is doing the same to Russia.

The amount of direct Russian sabotage in Europe has been absolutely enormous in 2025 – for example, all the forest fires this summer, various thwarted bomb attacks, not least a Russian job ordered by Hamas that was ambitious. They scout highway bridges, fly sharp strategic drones over Europe, violate airspace with over 1000 drone incidents in Germany alone in 2025.

According to those in the know, such as Johan No.1, the drones were allegedly used to test the navigation of drones through our mobile phone network – a beta test.

But our electricity supply is completely secure unlike in 2022 – 2023 when half of the nuclear power was offline in Europe, the gas disappeared (possibly due to Ukraine…) and other fun stuff.

The fact that Russia would target our electricity supply to make it look like a huge mess of technical failures on the 2025/2026 diagram is something I had guaranteed because it’s below everything else they’ve been up to this year.

For example, fighting Turkish ships in the Black Sea with drones and robots.

So far, we have only listed “hard” sabotage and not the extremely escalated subversive activities trying to lock the EU and overthrow the governments in Europe they find most troublesome.

I don’t have a good answer as to why an attack on the power infrastructure hasn’t happened – I want to believe the reason is that Europe stood up now before Christmas and Putin is starting to get nervous about a Europe ready for war, what do you think?

As you may have read, ceasefires and peace plans are behind me in my free fantasies now, but I may have jumped ahead a bit – there is a certain risk that we are heading towards a ceasefire here IF Putin starts to feel cornered.

Trump did a rehearsal – Putin called before the meeting and lied, Russia is claiming major victories that don’t exist because right now it’s actually the opposite, Ukraine is advancing and Trump came up with lousy excuses for why Ukraine should give up.

The difference was that he didn’t put any pressure on Ukraine at all compared to previous times.

I sympathize with the five million American readers of Johan No.1 who have to endure this – to have a president who sells himself to the highest bidder like a better-paid escort is downright embarrassing.

Perhaps Putin has also promised him to crush D so that the Trump clan can become long-standing dictators – he seems to like power, doesn’t he?

So far, Putin’s peace efforts actually seem to have had the hidden purpose of making the USA and Trump look weak – quite smart, and quite poorly played by the USA/Trump.

A bit of self-destructive behavior that may go back to the fact that it might be Trump’s hidden agenda, I think we now have evidence that Trump is playing on the red team after a couple of letters from Epstein that have been made public, so that guess may not have been entirely wrong, perhaps?

Anyway – a ceasefire is the worst possible outcome, and I sincerely hope that Europe supports Ukraine in this so they don’t agree to it because then we would give Putin something he doesn’t deserve AND he could escalate against us.

This time, Russia torpedoed it again after Trump obediently went through his talking points given by the GRU.

Europe stood up as one last fall, but then half of it sat back down quickly except for Germany, France, the UK, and northern Europe.

Those of us who stood up can always fall back and abandon Ukraine, but I don’t think the countries that matter in Europe will do that – we have taken a decisive step forward and are ready to go to war for Ukraine because we understand that they stand between us and something even worse than going to war now – I want to believe that, that our leaders have finally read Johan No.1 and understood that we’ve been nagging about this since 2022, it’s just that they hadn’t found the page earlier.

A “merz-marder” now has a paid subscription to my substack, and a “brigitte.mac” as well, so I think they follow the page and absorb the knowledge flowing freely so that the world will become a better place to live, I have a feeling that Brigitte has been a bit softer towards Emanuel in the past month.

Trump has burned his bridges, and now the Epstein scandal will haunt him until he is removed from office, so we should reasonably have a break from the USA’s attempts to destabilize us, right?

As I said, these are the most crucial months of the war, and the war is, in my opinion, won, but now it must also be secured, and Europe must balance on a very fine line so that we don’t do too little and not too much.

For the first time in the war, it feels like the wind is blowing in the right direction, and the Ukrainian strategic offensive reserve has managed to find its form in the drone environment of 2025, it’s almost wizard-level.

There is no other defense force in the world that can handle it – RU has shown that they can’t.

Johan No.1 is very concerned that the bottle-bottom-glasses multitasking Chinese with his digital battlefield might be one step ahead, but he’s starting to get a bit tired and can be tricked.

In a worst-case scenario, I feared that Ukraine would start launching counteroffensives similar to those in the spring of 2023, then it would have been a disaster because Europe has no plans to get heavily involved in Ukraine.

Everything depends on a few hundred soldiers in the mud in eastern Ukraine getting up from their soaking wet sleeping bags and fighting for another day – and they do, despite four years of us in the West being the unreliable friends and the odds being terrible.

We have two minutes to the church in the middle of the village so we went there both on the 24th, which is a service for those who are alone, and then for the early Christmas service – it always strikes me how valuable it is not only to pass on the tradition to younger generations but how many value it enough to get up very early on the 25th and not fall asleep during the service.

This doesn’t happen by magic (even though God knows everything and Jesus turned water into wine 🙏) but through voluntary efforts – with the choir, there are probably 15 people involved, maintenance for the church, electricity bills, budget, etc.

I think it’s very important and something to cherish, it’s starting to become a bit “every other week” with the church services and quite empty when it’s not holidays, but it’s a vital part of our traditions and heritage.

The community also has a lot of activities throughout the year and the local area usually comes together reasonably well – there is an understanding that a vibrant community comes from enough people keeping it alive.

The cohesive bond is important in the country, society, and family – we try to follow the family traditions as best we can even though I have made some modifications to fit 2025, but the backbone of our family traditions is what my parents got from their parents who got it from theirs, so it has been around for a few years.

I think the church could start preaching a bit of fervent anti-Russian sentiment and “men (women and all other gender identities) do your duty” – I believe that European countries will need to adapt to some kind of war against Russia and it’s good if the citizens don’t resist so much that it leads to a vote of no confidence and immediate government downfall.

It should be a status and prestige to be a soldier because it’s hard to see anything more ungrateful than a population not caring about those who defend them against the red threat.

It may come, but right now it’s mostly messages of peace, which are also important, but when there is a need to kill in self-defense, it’s probably good to be prepared for it.

It looks like Ukraine is still fighting for Pokrovsk – they liberated Rodynske.

Kupiansk is reportedly completely liberated – a total humiliation for RU.

Lyman also looks better even though RU has launched offensive operations and we are full speed ahead in Huilapole.

And the persistent rumor about a UA offensive refuses to die down.

Ukraine is in CONTROL – this is VERY IMPORTANT.

Then a recent puzzle piece – for the first time, RU’s numbers in Ukraine have STARTED TO DECREASE, they are not replenishing enough.

It could have looked like this several times during the war, but the USA and then Trump adjusted the parameters and put pressure on Ukraine so things wouldn’t go too well, and Europe didn’t dare to object.

Now at the end of 2025, Europe chose the right path and Ukraine has thrown off the yoke, no one is listening to Trump.

Then it can only go one way – from darkness to light.

The free world fights back.

There are many analogies that fit into this, and now that I’ve been to church for two services, everything feels bittersweet, and that Ukraine has God on its side in the battle of light against darkness.

God is not on the side of the Russians, we know that, but we must also not forget that the absolute worst hand anyone has been dealt in this war is those who have been deceived into mobilizing in “storm units” in the Russian armed forces – they treat their own almost worse than the enemy.

Even today, I can’t understand why the Russian army doesn’t desert and march towards Moscow, but it hasn’t happened in four years now.

In 2023, I saw some Twitter videos of Russian naval infantry, at least a battalion, psyching themselves up for an attack on Vuhledar, 810th or 40th, and then we received videos from Ukraine the week before when the entire brigade burned and bled in front of Vuhledar as the defenders in the 72nd fought back excellently.

The contrast was strong because everyone in the videos was dead.

The New Year’s wish might as well be that we hope the Russian army has had enough by 2026 and chooses 1917 2.0 instead of continuing to die in a senseless war.

If that doesn’t happen, we must hope that the elite in Russia gets tired of Putin, despite Trump probably propping him up quite well so far, which is unfortunate – a president supported by the USA is not easy to push out of a window, unfortunately.

Right now, Russian information channels are outright lying about the situation at the fronts – Ukraine has carried out a series of offensives during November/December that have increased in strength during December and have been extremely successful.

Presumably, the UA command feels they have found something that works, and the Russian command is sitting there googling how to seek asylum in Dubai.

2026 will be very dark for Putin and Russia – you can be absolutely sure of that because I have written it, and UA also reads the posts and adjusts their strategy.

If you, like Johan No.1, are fervent supporters of UA, then you are now best off completely ignoring Trump’s nonsense and RU disinformation and reading Johan No.1 for the accurate situation reports. For some unfathomable reason, Russian disinformation still manages to seep into the information channels we consider legitimate after four years, which is almost a record.

Happy New Year and spare a thought for the defenders of light in Ukraine before the New Year’s buffet, and don’t forget johanno1.se and MXT’s continuous volunteer work to keep the site running and Johan No.1’s Substack for a subscription when you have the chance.