Russia and Ukraine’s war continued unabated through 2025, though this year, the United States began a new tactic of pursuing diplomatic negotiations with both sides instead of continuing to fully back Ukraine.
President Donald Trump, who was reelected with a campaign pledge to end the war within 24 hours, made a dramatic shift in the momentum of the war far from the battlefield. Despite several rounds of intense negotiations with both sides, the Trump administration has been unable to successfully figure out how to satisfy both sides.
Within Trump’s first 11 months back in office, he vacillated from attacking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, to hosting the two leaders individually on U.S. soil, all the while trying to broker a deal that Putin does not want to make unless it hands him the objectives his troops have not been able to accomplish on the battlefield.
“We also know that Trump’s policy of pressure has flipped back and forth several times since became president for a second time, and now we’re in the phase of pressing Ukraine,” Ambassador John Herbst, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2003-2006, told the Washington Examiner.
Over the course of the year, Trump has blamed Biden and Zelensky for the war, not Putin; has accused Zelensky, not Putin, of sidestepping democracy to stay in power; and has called Zelensky insufficiently grateful for the U.S.’s support his country has received.
In one of the rare moments when he criticized Putin, Trump said in September that he believed Ukraine could “win all of Ukraine back in its original form,” which marked a dramatic shift in his viewpoint, one he has since changed.
“His default position is to pressure the victim, Ukraine, the one with whom he feels he has the most leverage. And even when Putin acts horribly, or Melania tells him what’s going on with the children is wrong or Putin walks away from talks and immediately does a large scale air strike on civilian population, the president bends a little, but then he returns to the core position that his best avenue for ending this war is to pressure the victim into additional concessions,” retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, a senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Examiner.
On the front lines
Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were killed or injured fighting on the front lines that moved incrementally this year.
As has been apparent over the course of the nearly four-year-long war, Russian leaders are willing to lose thousands of soldiers every single week for insignificant gains on the battlefield in the name of trying to make this a war of attrition that it can win due to its larger military and bigger recruiting pool.
“The Russians have not made substantial gains on the battlefield. While, yes, they have hundreds of square kilometers, they have gained at extraordinary cost. So the Russians really have not gained that much on the battlefield,” Heather Conley, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner.
From Jan. 1 through Dec. 17, the Russian military has advanced roughly 1,900 square miles, less than 1% of Ukraine’s entire territory, the Institute for the Study of War told the Washington Examiner.
Their gains primarily come in the Donbas, the easternmost region of Ukraine, and a bit further south near Zaporizhzhia. After Russian forces were repelled in their early efforts to seize the capital of Kyiv, they changed their objective to fully overtake the Donetsk and Luhansk (which make up the Donbas), Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson — four areas where they held sham referenda to annex the areas earlier in the war.
Even with the refined objectives, the Russians have not been able to capture all of that territory.
It would take “at least two to three more years to seize the remainder of the Donetsk oblast, let alone the other three regions that the Russians also demand and have not militarily seized,” George Barros, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War, told the Washington Examiner.
In June, the British Defense Ministry announced that Russia’s military had surpassed more than 1 million troops killed or injured since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on Feb. 24, 2022. That tally has inevitably increased since, and over the last six months as well.
“If there’s one place where you can see the difference between the Ukrainian way of war and the Russian way of war, it’s in the attrition, the commitment to avoiding attrition warfare by the Ukrainians and embracing attrition warfare by the Russians,” Montgomery said.
The information space
Russian leaders want the world to believe their victory is inevitable so that the world will press Ukraine to surrender, but the situation is more nuanced.
In his end-of-the-year press conference, Putin said Russian forces were “advancing across the whole front line,” and that his forces were close to capturing multiple towns and villages, though many of those claims have been disputed.
“The Russians are extremely vested right now in pushing the White House into thinking that because the Ukrainians are going to lose all this land in eastern Ukraine anyway, and because the war in Ukraine is going to inevitably end with a Russian battlefield victory, why don’t we just skip ahead to act three of this, where we give the Russians what they’re going to get,” Barros said. “The problem with that line of argumentation is, however, it isn’t the case of Russian battlefield victory is inevitable.”
Even U.S. leaders have made the argument that Ukraine is losing the war and should be more open to making concessions, though they have swung back and forth.
Trump said in December Ukraine is ‘losing’ the war
Vice President JD Vance said in April, “If this doesn’t stop, the Ukrainians aren’t winning the war. I think there’s this weird idea among the mainstream media that if this thing goes on for just another few years, the Russians will collapse, the Ukrainians will take their territory back, and everything will go back to the way that it was before the war, that is not the reality that we live in.”
In September, he said, “The Russians have got to wake up and accept reality here.”
However, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said more recently that the intelligence community “assesses that Russia does not even have the capability to conquer and occupy Ukraine.”
Her comments, which she made in response to media reports that Putin still has the desire to conquer Ukraine and Europe, did not directly address whether Putin has or doesn’t have those ambitions; rather, she only addressed their current capabilities and not Putin’s long-term objectives.
The evolving U.S. sentiments regarding the outlook of the war, Herbst said, mean the assessments should be taken “not with a grain of salt, but a shaker of salt” because “we’ve seen from President Trump and the vice president and others claim that Russia is making inevitable gains on the battlefield. That is not true.”
