In his call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which lasted two-and-a-half hours on March 18, U.S. President Donald Trump failed to secure the Russian leader’s consent for a comprehensive 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine, with Putin agreeing instead to suspend attacks on energy infrastructure.¹ The U.S. and Russian readouts of the call revealed substantive differences between the two sides’ interpretations of the content and outcomes of the March 18 conversation. While the White House version claims that the leaders agreed that the movement to peace will begin with a 30-day energy and infrastructure ceasefire, the Kremlin version refers to an energy infrastructure ceasefire only. Likewise, the Kremlin readout includes items not mentioned in the White House readout, including a claim that the two leaders discussed “a complete cessation of providing Kyiv with foreign military aid.” The Kremlin's version, more than double the length of the White House readout, provides considerably more detail about the topics discussed, signaling Putin's greater interest in unfreezing the bilateral relationship now that the U.S. no longer treats him as a pariah, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict notwithstanding.² In a clear effort to encourage Trump to move with Putin toward further normalizing the U.S.-Russian relationship, the Kremlin's readout says the Russian leader praised his U.S. counterpart during the call for “striving to achieve the noble goal of ending the hostilities,” a panegyric not reciprocated in the White House readout.

Some divergence also appears regarding the description of future engagements between the two countries’ governments. For instance, the Kremlin version notes the formation of Russian and American expert task forces to continue bilateral efforts toward a Ukrainian settlement, which is absent from the White House summary. These and other points of divergence are summarized in the table below:

On the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, former Ukrainian foreign minister and senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs Dmytro Kuleba delivered the Center’s 2025 Lamont Lecture, “A View from Ukraine.” In conversation with Belfer Center director Meghan O’Sullivan, Kuleba outlined his views on Ukraine’s ongoing talks with the Trump administration, the potential for a ceasefire and the future of Ukraine itself. Arguing that the Trump administration’s aim for a ceasefire was inherently misguided, Kuleba criticized what he saw as the West’s continuous misreading of Russia’s intentions and the lack of a coherent strategy to deal with Russia’s expansionist tendencies. Kuleba called on European countries to unite behind support for Ukraine and touched on his country’s dogged resilience throughout its conflict with Russia.

Kuleba accused Western nations of consistently misinterpreting Russia’s actions toward Ukraine. He recalled the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine surrendered its remaining nuclear stocks for vaguely worded “security assurances” from Russia, the U.S. and U.K. In Kuleba’s eyes, Western countries misread Russian intentions. “While they saw the Budapest Memorandum as an act of denuclearization, Russia saw it entirely as an act of disarmament of Ukraine,” Kuleba said. “Russia always knew what it wanted to do to Ukraine,” he continued. “To achieve that, it first and foremost had to disarm it. Second, to shatter the unity of the Ukrainian nation. And third, to undermine the relationships Ukraine had with its neighbors.” An apparent victory for non-proliferation was instead the first act in Russia’s plan of neutralizing Ukraine. 

Introduction

Is Vladimir Putin a rational actor who weighs costs and benefits before making a momentous decision, such as whether to invade another country? Multiple scholars of Putin and his country think he is. If so, the third anniversary of his decision to order a full-scale invasion of Ukraine provides an appropriate opportunity to take stock of the costs and benefits of that invasion for Russia’s dictator and the country he rules. Before we do so, however, we must note that providing quantitative estimates of these costs and benefits is, predictably, very challenging, as it is difficult to find rigorous research that separates the impacts of the aggression on aspects such as, for instance, Russia’s economic output, from other factors that impact its GDP.¹ It is also difficult to estimate the duration of these costs, given Russian authorities’ efforts to reduce them through measures such as the evasion of sanctions. While trying to estimate the “pros” and “cons” of Russia’s invasion for Russia, we, of course, acknowledge the horrendous costs which have been endured by Ukraine and Ukrainians, including hundreds of thousands in military casualties and thousands of civilian fatalities.²

U.S.-European tensions and the future of Ukraine dominated the discussions at this year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC). An equally important aspect of Europe’s security equation, however, was the alignment of its adversaries: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. On Feb. 15, director of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs Meghan O’Sullivan convened an MSC panel to discuss “Adversarial Alignment” and its future ramifications for European and global security, delivering the opening remarks. O’Sullivan was joined in conversation by Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group and Belfer senior fellow; Fiona Hill, former Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on the National Security Council and member of Harvard University's Board of Overseers; Dmytro Kuleba, former Ukrainian foreign minister and Belfer senior fellow; and David Sanger, White House and National Security Correspondent for The New York Times and former Belfer senior fellow. The speakers concurred that the West’s adversaries were not monolithic: while China seeks to preserve global stability and multilateral institutions to displace the U.S. on the world stage, Russia, Iran and North Korea aim to destroy the status quo. In his drive to dismantle the U.S.’s international commitments, Kuleba and Bremmer concluded, U.S. President Donald Trump is giving Chinese President Xi Jinping exactly what he wants.

The speakers agreed that adversarial alignment between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea is based much more on quid pro quos related to the war in Ukraine than deep ideological convergence. Hill argued that Russia did not embark upon its invasion with intentions of forging closer relationships with China, Iran or North Korea. “A quid pro quo is emerging,” she said, as Russia needs resources to fuel its war effort: namely, North Korean Soviet-era arms and ammunition, Iranian drones and Chinese chips, energy markets, and capital reserves. Before the war, Russia opposed expanding North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programs. It now supports the expansion of these programs due to assistance it received from those countries during the conflict. According to Hill, “all the dynamics have changed.”

The past few months have seen a number of Russia watchers echo each other’s proclamations that the Russian economy is either already collapsing or close to crumbling. 

Will these predictions materialize?

Gloom and Doom: The Russian Economy as Seen From the West 

Mark Temnycky of the Atlantic Council contributed a Jan. 8, 2025 commentary to this U.S. think-tank, in which he asks “Is 2025 the year that Russia’s economy finally freezes up under sanctions?” and answers in the affirmative. Olga Chyzh of the University of Toronto also took a dim view of the Russian economy in her recent commentary for The Guardian, entitled “A string of assassinations, a faltering economy, a shortage of workers: the pressure on Putin is ratcheting up.” In this Dec. 19. 2024, commentary, Chyzh writes that Russia’s “economy is faltering under the combined strain of the war and Western sanctions.” “War-driven salary increases … have triggered a vicious cycle of inflation and subsequent interest-rate hikes. The country also has a chronic shortage of workers, thanks to its ageing population and the exodus of some 700,000 working-age individuals at the start of the war,” she writes.

More recently, FT commentator Martin Sandbu proclaimed in his Jan. 12, 2025, column that, due to ballooning corporate debt, "Russia’s war economy is a house of cards,” while Alexander Motyl of Rutgers University-Newark sees that house of cards crumbling in 2025. Writing in The Hill in October 2024, he predicts that a “Russian economic meltdown is coming next year.” “Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union should have taught Putin a lesson,” warns Motyl, who has repeatedly predicted Russia’s collapse. “The decrepit Soviet economy couldn’t support Brezhnev’s military expenditure. If Russia’s economy collapses, so too will the military and the war,” Motyl predicts.

Motyl is not the only Russia watcher who believes it is not just the Russian economy that is in deep trouble. The entire regime is crumbling, in the view of Roger Boyes of the Times of London. His Jan. 3, 2025, column, entitled "Putin's empire is crumbling: will 2025 prove to be his 1989?,” states that “the shift to a war economy has aggravated labor shortages and inflation, bankruptcies are on the increase.” “The pressing issue is: who is next on the redundancy list after Assad, and how quickly will Putin's protective layers be peeled away?” Boyes asks in his column. 

Post-Soviet Eurasia watchers based in Ukraine see the Russian economy, perhaps predictably, in an even bleaker state than their Western counterparts. Kyiv-based journalists Yelyzaveta Yefimenko, Mariana Lastovyria and Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova published a post on Dec. 5, 2024, entitled “The collapse of the Russian economy,” on American journalist Tim Mak’s Substack, “Counteroffensive.” The Kyiv-based Euromaidan Press outlet then published a commentary by Yurii Bohdanov on Jan. 17, 2025, in which he claims that “even ‘freezing’ the war in Ukraine will not solve Russia’s economic problems… and a freeze only delays the inevitable collapse.” 

The unique potential of the Arctic as a point of potential cooperation between the U.S. and Russia was the subject of an event, “2025 Russia-U.S. Relations: Can Arctic Science Diplomacy Mend Strategic Fences?”, hosted by the Arctic Initiative at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

Cooperation on the Arctic between Russia and the U.S. was one of the many casualties of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Arctic Initiative senior fellow Margaret Williams noted at the beginning of the discussion that Russia’s invasion and the nearly three years of war that have followed have had a profound impact on Ukraine’s natural heritage. “Ukrainian people have suffered so deeply, and Ukrainian natural areas, and the environment have suffered terribly as well,” Williams told the event, which took place on Dec. 5, 2024.

Moving on to the Arctic, Williams said some scientific studies indicate that the area is warming three to four times faster than the rest of the world, which in turn is causing a disastrous ripple effect, from disrupted weather patterns to vanishing permanent sea ice, thawing permafrost and rising sea levels. “These are critical problems, and Russia is key to solving them,” Williams said. Williams reminded the event’s audience that “Russia occupies half of the Arctic coastline, more than half of the northern hemisphere's permafrost occurs in Arctic in the Russian Arctic.” Russia is inextricably bound up in the critical problems facing the Arctic; however, Williams worries that the rift between Russia and the West will only grow. 

The conversation between Eric Schmidt and Graham Allison, which Harvard Kennedy School’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum recently hosted, centered on Schmidt’s recently released book “Genesis.”¹ The book, which Schmidt co-authored with Henry Kissinger and Craig Mundie, explores the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on humanity, governance and global competition. In his remarks at Forum event on Nov. 18, 2024, Schmidt highlighted AI’s revolutionary potential in fields such as healthcare, education and climate change, while cautioning against significant risks, including centralization of power, misuse and cyber vulnerabilities. 

During their discussion, Schmidt and Allison emphasized the intensifying geopolitical AI race between the U.S. and China, underscoring the importance of cooperative frameworks inspired by Cold War-era nuclear agreements for regulating AI. The recommendations on AI regulations Schmidt voiced at the Nov. 18 event drew heavily from the Cold War experiences of Kissinger, who passed away one year ago at the age of 100.

Both speakers pointed to the war in Ukraine as a key example of how AI and autonomous systems are reshaping modern warfare. Ukraine’s innovative use of drones has disrupted Russia’s Black Sea operations and enabled grain shipping, demonstrating how low-cost, unmanned systems can effectively challenge larger, traditional militaries. This highlights the urgent need for nations to re-engineer their defense architectures around autonomous technologies to reduce collateral damage, protect soldiers and enhance lethality. 

As widely expected, the Kremlin has unveiled the new edition of Russia’s official nuclear doctrine, “Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence.” The document, which Russian President Vladimir Putin signed off on Nov. 18 as Ukraine tested his red line by striking the Bryansk region with U.S.-made longer-range missiles,¹ ushers in an expansion of conditions under which Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons, but contains few surprises for those who have followed the Russian leadership’s nuclear rhetoric since the re-invasion of Ukraine in 2022, including, most importantly, Putin’s Sept. 25 preview of changes that would be introduced into the 2020 edition of the document.

The content of the new edition’s opening section on “General Provisions” is largely, but not entirely, identical to the previous edition. There is one important change in this introductory section. The 2020 edition stated that “the Russian Federation considers nuclear weapons exclusively as a means of deterrence, their use being an extreme and compelled measure, and takes all necessary efforts to reduce nuclear threat and prevent aggravation of interstate relations, which could trigger military conflicts, including nuclear ones.” The word “exclusively” is absent from the 2024 edition.

After a significant wait, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Nov. 7 congratulated Donald Trump on his victory in the U.S. presidential election, stating he’s ready to hold discussions with the president-elect on stabilizing U.S.-Russian relations, including the issues of Ukraine and strategic stability. “It seems to me, it deserves attention what was said about the desire to restore relations with Russia, to help end the Ukrainian crisis,” Putin said in his first comments on Trump’s re-election, which he made during the third hour of his remarks at the Valdai conference on Nov. 7. Earlier, Putin’s deputy at the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev expressed hope that Trump will reduce U.S. support for Ukraine, although Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized that the Kremlin will wait for Trump's actions before drawing conclusions. Meanwhile, some high-ranking Russian officials, such as Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova struggled to contain outbursts of schadenfreude over Kamala Harris’ loss. On the other side of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, a Ukrainian soldier described the outcome of the Nov. 5 poll as a loss of hope for her country, even as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy put on a brave face, heaping praise on Trump. Interestingly, some Russian and Ukrainian commentators are skeptical that a President Trump will be able to keep his recent promise to quickly attain a Russian-Ukrainian peace deal (e.g. Moscow’s Dmitry Suslov and Kyiv’s Tymofiy Mylovanov). 

As Russian President Vladimir Putin hosts the first summit of BRICS+ in Tatarstan’s capital Kazan on Oct. 22–24, it has motivated me to update my comparison of this group of countries with the G-7 in terms of components of national power as of early 2024. This comparison has reaffirmed my earlier findings that BRICS has overtaken the G-7—which some in the former want to position as a rival to the latter—in key components such as economy and demography. But can BRICS put that advantage to use?

Single-Variable Measurements Show BRICS Overtaking G-7...

I began the renewed comparison of BRICS and the G-7 with conducting three waves of measurements focused on their economic and demographic performance: 

1. In 2001, when Goldman Sachs’ Jim O’Neil proposed grouping what he saw as the world’s key emerging economies; 
2. In 2024, the current year; and 
3. In 2029, which is the furthest year for which the April 2024 edition of IMF’s World Economic Outlook offers forecasts for most of the world’s countries.¹

My measurements of economic performance indicate that the BRICS’s share in world GDP has already overtaken that of the G-7 (see Figure 1 and Table 1), if calculated in terms of purchasing power parity (which is how the IMF measures these shares at country-level). The BRICS have also significantly outperformed the G-7 in terms of population, largely thanks to including the two most populous countries in the world: China and India. In fact, the combined population of the BRICS+ will exceed that of G-7 by a factor of four this year, according to U.N. data. However, U.N. data also suggests that the BRICS+ share of the world population is set to decline over the next five years. Also, when exploring how the BRICS have outperformed the G-7 economically and demographically, one should factor in that some (but not all) of that growth came from the addition of new members to the original group consisting of Brazil, Russia, India and China. (These non-original members include South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.²)