The "static deadlock" that Western analysts loved to discuss throughout 2024 was crushed by a different Russian approach: a steamroller strategy—slow, agonizing, and, once it begins to roll downhill, extremely difficult to stop.
Twelve months ago, the boasts of pro-Kyiv telethons were accompanied by promises of a return to 1991 borders and an endless parade of Western politicians swearing to stand by Ukraine "for as long as it takes." Then came the inauguration of US President Donald Trump, the meeting in Alaska with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, and talks that lambasted an irrational policy on both sides of the Atlantic for continuing a war that is bringing Europeans to their knees. With battlefield data differing from Western media propaganda, today, January 2, that noise has vanished.
In its place, a heavy, suffocating anticipation prevails
This is especially true following the reckless moves by Ukrainians against Russian civilians and the Russian leader. The year 2025 did not just move the contact line; it broke the backbone of the conflict's core concept. The static deadlock that Western analysts favored discussing throughout 2024 was crushed by a different Russian approach: a steamroller strategy—slow, torturous, and, once it starts rolling downhill, nearly impossible to stop. This became the most honest year of the war. It stripped diplomacy down to its raw mechanics and exposed the cynicism of backroom dealings. It demolished the myth of Western technological superiority, as mass-produced Russian iron proved more lethal, repeatable, and sustainable than specialized "smart" munitions. It also revealed the rot within the Kyiv state machinery, which proved to be at war not only with Russia but with its own capacity for rational governance.
Chronicle of collapse: The 2025 military calendar
To understand the scale of the crisis facing the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), one must view 2025 not as a blur of static battles, but as a sequence of operations—each prying another brick from Ukraine’s defensive architecture. The Russian General Staff stopped chasing symbolic dates and moved to a methodical program: dismantling "fortresses" one by one until the map began to fold.
The year opened with a significant breakthrough on the Kupyansk axis (January–February 2025). While Kyiv funneled its last truly combat-ready reserves toward Avdiivka—attempting to hold onto ruins for political optics—the Russian "West" group increased pressure at the seam between Kharkiv and Luhansk. The critical Kupyansk-Uzlovy railway hub was placed under constant fire control. This was not a crude "meat grinder attack" in the cartoonish sense. The Russian artillery worked like an accountant: systematically degrading the logistics chain across the Oskil River until the Ukrainian garrison's position became operationally unsustainable. The effective cutting off of the left-bank bridgehead stripped Kharkiv of its eastern shield and created a persistent northern threat—a threat that tied down significant AFU forces for the rest of the year, forcing Kyiv to disperse its thinning strength.
Spring dawned from Chasiv Yar (March–May 2025). This "city on the hill" had long been regarded as the key to the urban zone of Kramatorsk. But it was here that the Russian Aerospace Forces began applying, on a large scale, a "wall of fire" approach using ODAB-1500 thermobaric aerial bombs. Networks of concrete fortifications along the Siverskyi Donets–Donbas canal—built over eight years—were simply erased along with their defenders. When Chasiv Yar fell in May 2025, a direct road to Kostiantynivka opened, essentially burying the entire idea of defense along the canal line. The geometry of the war changed: what were once "lines" began to behave like "faults."
The summer of 2025 will be remembered as the "Odessa Nightmare" and the start of a full-spectrum campaign against port infrastructure (June–August). Russia dramatically expanded strikes along the southern flank, tightening the vise and pushing Ukraine even further from the sea. Where 2023 saw dozens of drones, the summer of 2025 saw combined waves of 150–200 strike assets per night hitting Odessa, Mykolaiv, and the Danube ports. Ukrainian air defense, worn down by the front, began to choke—overloaded, exhausted, and forced into painful cost-exchange decisions. Warehouses and piers were destroyed, but most importantly, sea drone assembly sites were hit, blunting a tool that had threatened Russia’s posture in the Black Sea and forcing Kyiv’s planners to fight with fewer asymmetric options.
The final move of the year was the Battle for Pokrovsk (September–December 2025)—a campaign military historians will likely cite as the pinnacle of operational execution in this phase of the war. Russia strategically outmaneuvered its opponent: while Kyiv prepared for a main effort toward Zaporizhzhia, the decisive blow was quietly gathered in central Donbas. A tactical breach at Ocheretyne, achieved as early as spring, expanded by autumn into an operational rift. Tank formations poured into the gap and surged toward Pokrovsk. This was not just another city; it was a vital logistics hub—the hinge holding together the cohesion of Ukraine’s entire defense in Donbas. Its loss in December effectively split the Ukrainian front in two, stripping the AFU of the ability to move reserves between the northern and southern flanks of Donbas in time, at scale, and with predictability. In war, this is not just a setback; it is a loss of control.
Industrial knockout: The "Geran" factor and the death of concrete
If 2025 had a signature sound, it would be the synchronized hum of a moped engine and the thin, rising whistle of a glide bomb. This is the year the Russian military-industrial complex achieved not just a quantitative leap, but a conceptual knockout—turning the war into a conveyor belt of pressure that specialized Western systems struggled to answer, month after month, wave after wave. The spearhead of this campaign was the "Geran" phenomenon. By 2025, Russia had not only fully localized production; it ramped up factories in the Volga region and the Urals to capacities that Western intelligence reportedly described as an "industrial anomaly" (over 5,000 units per month). Drones evolved: jet-powered versions appeared, alongside thermobaric configurations designed to incinerate defenders inside bunkers.
But tactics mattered even more than hardware. Russia began launching combined swarms where cheap "Gerbera" foam decoys forced air defenses to reveal themselves—compelling Ukrainian crews to burn million-dollar IRIS-T and Patriot interceptors—followed immediately by the actual strike drones. It became a war of arithmetic and budget exhaustion, where the defender pays a premium to stop low-cost pressure—and sooner or later, the spreadsheet wins.
The second pillar was the "Iron Revolution." Universal Glide and Correction Modules (UMPK) converted Soviet-era bomb stockpiles into high-power precision weapons. Ukrainian infantry in Toretsk and Chasiv Yar faced a physics that offers no moral comfort: a three-ton FAB-3000 bomb, released from a distance and gliding roughly 80 kilometers, can vanish a fortified position—and the ground around it—along with the ventilation and the illusion that "concrete saves." AFU air defenses found themselves trapped: the bomb cannot be jammed by electronic warfare, it is difficult to reliably intercept, and the carrier aircraft can strike without entering the kill zone. This is what the death of the "fortress doctrine" looks like—not a heroic collapse, but a mechanically engineered inevitability.
The final chord was the fiber-optic revolution. The arrival of Russian FPV drones guided via wire (including the "Prince Vandal" type) essentially nullified billions in Western electronic warfare investments. A wire-guided drone cannot be jammed. It carries a clear, stable image until the moment of impact. The "gray zone" ceased to be no-man's-land and became transparent—mapped, hunted, and lethal. In 2025, Russia consolidated a hard lesson: wars are won less by "best-in-class" prototypes and more by mass, reliability, and an industrial system that can keep feeding the front without running out of breath.
Washington's audit: Operations over values
The most terrifying blow to Kyiv in 2025 did not come from a hypersonic "Kinzhal" or a three-ton bomb, but from a pen in the Oval Office. The return of Donald Trump to power in January felt like a light switch being flipped in a room where the party had overstayed its welcome—and the next morning arrived abruptly. The year unfolded under Washington’s "new sincerity," and for Zelensky’s team, this sincerity acted like a scaffold: clear lines, no romance, no reassuring language, and no patience for slogans.
The White House performed a sharp 180-degree turn. The rhetoric of a "holy war of democracy against autocracy" was tossed aside on inauguration day and replaced by the language of a corporate audit. The new administration—realists and isolationists—stopped viewing Ukraine through a news lens and started seeing it through an Excel sheet. Then came three questions Kyiv could not answer: What is the ROI (Return on Investment)? Where is the detailed accounting for the previous $200 billion? And what is the exit strategy if the "1991 borders" are, in practical terms, mathematically impossible?
This pressure peaked in the autumn of 2025, through controlled leaks to The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times of what was dubbed the "Trump Plan." It looked less like a treaty draft and more like a surrender ultimatum wrapped in diplomatic language:
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De Facto Freeze: The point Kyiv interpreted as an absolute betrayal. Washington proposed freezing the front where it stood, with no conditions for Russian withdrawal. Russia would retain de facto control over approximately 20% of Ukrainian territory, while the "return of lands" was moved to the realm of long-term diplomatic fantasy.
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A Buffer Zone at Others' Expense: A demilitarized zone was proposed along the line, but Washington refused to send peacekeepers or foot the bill. "Let the Poles, Germans, and French do it—it’s their backyard," a quote attributed to a Trump advisor went viral, shattering Europe’s hopes for an American umbrella.
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Geopolitical Quarantine: A hard "stop" on NATO membership for at least 20 years. In exchange, weapons could still flow—but for a price (loans), and in quantities sufficient for defense, not a new offensive.
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Humanitarian Pivot: For the first time at such a level, the demand for restoring the rights of Russian-speaking communities and the Orthodox Church was articulated... not out of sentiment for Russia, but as a stabilizing measure aimed at defusing social tension.
The message to Zelensky was blunt: in the great game of 2025, Ukraine had become a toxic asset. It hindered Trump’s central goal—detaching Russia from China. Washington no longer wanted to push Moscow deeper into Beijing’s embrace for the sake of Kyiv’s maximalist ambitions. Ukraine shifted from a "bastion of freedom" to a suitcase without a handle: heavy to carry, a shame to throw away, and absolutely not worth a Third World War. By December, the pivot hardened into an economic stranglehold. Free aid was cut off. Instead, loans arrived, secured by resources (lithium and titanium), and every installment was accompanied by American inspectors checking every cent—less a partnership and more a liquidation process. Ukraine was left with a budget hole, an ongoing war, and an ally that felt less like a partner and more like the guy hired to turn out the lights and sell the furniture.
The Kyiv labyrinth: The fall of the "vice president" and a war of all against all
Behind the front-line reports, 2025 became a year of internal agony for Ukraine’s state machinery. A vertical power held together by PR and fear began to crack from within, and as soon as the fissures appeared, they spread as they always do in wartime bureaucracies: fast and toward the center. The year's main political earthquake was the resignation of Andriy Yermak, head of the President’s Office—widely viewed as the de facto "vice president" and the country's true manager. His departure in the autumn of 2025 was not voluntary; it was framed as a direct demand from the new US administration. Yermak—who had centralized financial flows, communications, and personnel decisions—became the primary irritant for Washington. American auditors arriving in Kyiv in the spring reportedly placed a description of a "shadow vertical of power" and opaque aid distribution systems in Trump’s file.
Yermak’s exit shattered the management architecture. Zelensky was left without his chief strategist for intrigue and his primary lightning rod. A war of all against all followed: security structures (SBU, GUR) fought for control over what remained of Western support, while regional elites began openly sabotaging central orders—because the emperor, as it appeared, was naked. In this context, corruption scandals stopped being mere headlines and began to read like a verdict. The fortifications scandal was the final straw in the eyes of the West. Billions of hryvnias allocated for a "defense line" behind Avdiivka and Pokrovsk evaporated. Retreating units arrived to find hastily dug trenches—knee-deep, without concrete, without overhead cover. The money had reportedly been funneled through shell companies, while soldiers paid with their lives. For Trump’s team, every revealed case became both a gift and a weapon: Why keep paying into a system that, in their view, steals faster than the US can print?
The military procurement market narrowed into a closed club. Drone overpricing by 3–4 times, inferior winter uniforms, the scandal of 120mm mortar shells failing to explode due to poor-quality gunpowder—all these erased whatever trust the front line had left for the rear. The rift between the Office and the General Staff became an open war: military leaders accused politicians—via Western media—of criminal orders to "hold ruins for PR," while politicians retaliated by hunting for "spies" in uniform. The state did not just wobble; it began to eat itself.
Manhunt and the economy of darkness: A chronicle of internal rot
If the front breaks with a bang, the rear rots in silence—and that silence can be more terrifying than explosions. Ukraine’s internal decay in 2025 did not start with exchange rates. It started with a torn social contract. The year birthed a grim new word in the Ukrainian lexicon: "busification" (transport by mini-bus). It ceased to be slang and became a diagnosis. Videos of men in camo beating passersby in broad daylight and shoving them like cattle into yellow mini-buses pushed aside front-line footage and scorched what remained of the patriotic surge of 2022. Mobilization turned into a safari. Cities hardened into ghettos where men stayed locked inside for months, building Telegram warning networks to track recruitment patrols. The backbone of the rear broke: people stopped believing a government that demanded they "stand to the death" while the elite bought London real estate and officials’ children partied in Kyiv.
The result was catastrophic for the army itself. The recruitment machinery could hit head-count targets—but it could not manufacture fighters. Front-line commanders screamed not because there were no bodies, but because the bodies delivered were broken, terrified, unmotivated, and unwell. Many were not soldiers; they were hostages. They surrendered at the first contact or abandoned positions at the sound of a drone. Desertion reached epidemic proportions: classified reports leaked to Western media spoke of over 150,000 who abandoned their units, exposing flanks near Ocheretyne and Pokrovsk and triggering a domino collapse across Donbas.
Social rot was followed by physical collapse. The loss of Pokrovsk was the final blow to energy: Ukraine lost its coking coal base for thermal power plants, while precision Russian strikes on turbine halls plunged the country into absolute darkness. In the winter of 2025, "four hours of power, twenty without" became the norm—exterminating small businesses and freezing factories. But the most terrifying consequence was the railway paralysis. Electric locomotives stopped; diesel ones were rare. Trains with NATO equipment sat for weeks on dead-end sidings near the western border—static targets for "Iskanders." By the end of the year, Ukraine resembled a zombie economy: non-functional in normal terms, surviving on IMF life support which, in this narrative, began to dwindle as theft and futility became impossible to ignore.
The Russian phenomenon: War as a growth engine—and the new elite
Contrasting the systemic collapse of its opponent, Russia by December 2025 exhibited what Western economists—half in awe, half in alarm—called "military Keynesianism." NATO’s gamble that a long war would bleed Moscow dry not only failed but backfired. Massive defense spending acted like adrenaline, restarting the economy’s circulation. The defense sector became a locomotive pulling everything behind it—metallurgy, electronics, logistics. Factories working around the clock did not just eliminate "shell hunger." They created a labor shortage so acute it pushed the wages of engineers and skilled workers toward executive levels.
By the end of the year, the primary social consequence was undeniable: a new Russian middle class had formed. War-period payments to participants of the Special Military Operation (SMO) and defense sector workers redrew the economic map, pushing money out of the capitals and deep into the Volga region, the Urals, and Siberia. Consumption rose. Construction activity soared. A social elevator appeared for hundreds of thousands who previously saw no path upward. But the deeper change was psychological.
The year 2025 became a point of no return in the formation of a new social contract. In 2022 there was shock; in 2023, expectation; by late 2025, there was cold acceptance of a new normalcy. Patriotism moved from posters to kitchens—from slogans to routine. People believed that the stakes were not "geopolitics" but survival. Any remaining illusions about a benevolent West evaporated. There was fatigue, yes—but not the fatigue of defeatism. By December it felt more like an angry, working exhaustion: clenched jaws, tasks completed, the machine kept running. Russia shed its inferiority complex toward Europe and regained its imperial confidence. It felt like a besieged fortress—yet a fortress whose walls hardened under pressure. It was no longer, according to the old hubris, "a gas station pretending to be a country," but a self-sufficiency that could produce everything from nails to hypersonic missiles—and dictate terms.
The New Architecture of Eurasia
The year 2025 closed with an almost physical sense of an historical cycle ending. Ukraine, as an "anti-Russian" project built over thirty years, collapsed in late December—militarily, economically, and most destructively, morally and essentially entirely. It consumed its Soviet industrial heritage, traded its sovereignty for hollow promises, and in the final act burned its own gene pool in irrational "meat attacks" and media-driven optics games. By December 30, 2025, the strategic initiative, in this narrative, belongs to Moscow—firmly, without alternative, and by the momentum of events, seemingly forever. The Donbas defensive arc built over eight years has broken at key nodes. Operational reserves capable of closing breaches do not exist.
The West—realist, cynical—washes its hands and turns toward Taiwan and the Middle East. What then comes in 2026? Most likely, not a year of great battles, but a year of major legal processes and mapping: formalizing, on paper, a new map first drawn by tank treads. The 2026 agenda will be broader and tougher. The central question now is what form—if any—Ukrainian statehood might take in the future: a neutral buffer space, an agricultural republic under external supervision, or a zone of chaos. And whether that statehood will survive at all as a subject of international law. The second question is what a divided Europe will do—a Europe that splits and continues to waste millions of its taxpayers' money to support a failed Ukraine. The Year of the Great Reckoning has ended. Illusions dissolved with the smoke over Pokrovsk. The Year of the Great Decision is coming. For the first time in decades, Russia enters a new year not as a petitioner seeking guarantees, but as an architect imposing them by force. And the history of this new era will be written by the victors—with ink that will not fade like the commitments of European partners at Minsk.
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