With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, 2025 saw a year of geopolitical shifts. Russia’s war in Ukraine marked its third year, and despite a series of attempts by the Trump administration to help the warring sides reach a ceasefire, at the time of this writing a peace deal has not yet been agreed on, although it does appear closer. 

From exploring the resilience of Russia’s economy to its demographic decline, to examinations of whether and when Moscow may enter into an armed conflict with NATO, RM’s top 10 most read articles and blog posts in 2025 provide insight and analysis on the geopolitical implications of a world in flux. 

After briefly seeing more Russians express positive views of the U.S. than negative ones in August 2025 for the 1st time since 2021, Levada Center pollsters found a return to the old trend, with a majority of Russians expressing a dim view of America, its allies and Ukraine in Levada’s October 2025 survey.¹ The share of those with good attitudes toward America decreased from 48% in August to 34% in October, while the share of those with bad attitudes toward America increased from 30% to 45% during the same period (Figures 1 and 2). As usual, there must have been multiple drivers of this change, but, perhaps, the expectations for the then-pending August summit of U.S. and Russian leaders in Alaska could explain the surge in good attitudes toward the U.S. among Russians. Then, the failure of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to achieve any substantive peace agreement at the summit coupled with tangible sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies could, perhaps, explain why those with good views of America are again in the minority. 

The leaked 28-point peace proposal—reportedly drafted by U.S. and Russian negotiators before being presented to Kyiv—triggered an immediate wave of sharply divergent reactions from top officials across Washington, Moscow, Kyiv and Europe. In the United States, Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the moment as one demanding “difficult but necessary concessions,” even as other senior figures rejected that logic. In her turn, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted the initiative did not require Ukraine to relinquish major territory or gut its armed forces.

Moscow’s response was restrained. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed there was “nothing new,” and Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova emphasized that any genuine U.S. overture should arrive through official diplomatic channels. In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office said the U.S. believed the draft plan could "help reinvigorate diplomacy" and added that Ukraine had "agreed to work on the plan's provisions in a way that would bring about a just end to the war." In contrast, Zelensky’s adviser Mykhailo Podolyak condemned the terms as “unconditional capitulation,” a sentiment echoed by Ukrainian journalists and former leaders. European leaders, apparently excluded from the proposal’s drafting, warned that “peace cannot be capitulation” and demanded full Ukrainian and European involvement in any negotiation framework. See below what the plan calls for, according to the press, and what reactions it has elicited.

On leave from the Kyiv School of Economics, where he has been helping to establish a new national security studies program, Brig. Gen. (ret.) Kevin Ryan sat down with the Belfer Center’s Russia Matters and the Harvard community at an event on Oct. 8 to share his reflections on the war in Ukraine and map possible endgames. In conversation with Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard, and Simon Saradzhyan, the founding director of Russia Matters, Ryan offered his candid views on life in wartime Ukraine, the war’s trajectory and the steps he believes are needed to bring the conflict to a negotiated settlement.

Ryan has had a long and illustrious career as a U.S. military officer, who served in air and missile defense, intelligence and political-military policy areas. He served in Russia, East and West Germany and in policy-making assignments at the Pentagon. From 1995 to 1996, he was head of the Moscow office of the POW/MIA Commission, and then served as senior regional director for Slavic states in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 1998 to 2000, and then from 2001 to 2003, as defense attaché to Russia. He also served as chief of staff for the Army's Space and Missile Defense Command, and in his last duty assignment was responsible for army strategic war plans, policy and international affairs and coordinated U.S. Army policy in the domestic interagency area and with foreign allies. After military service, he was a senior fellow and executive director for Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, where he was also the founder and director of the Center's defense and intelligence projects. 

Resilience of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people

Ryan painted a portrait of a country at war yet profoundly alive. In Kyiv, he noted, life continues amid danger: cars and trains run, restaurants and even the opera remain open, although only until the 10:00pm nightly curfew, when drone and missile strikes begin. These are often led by Iranian-designed drones, referred to as “mopeds” in reference to their whining engines. This “bifurcated world” of daily normalcy and nightly warfare has made Ukrainians remarkably self-reliant, according to Ryan. Around 60% of munitions and nearly all drones Ukrainians use in the war are now domestically produced, often through small, innovative units such as Ukraine’s 14^th UAV Regiment, which coordinates deep strikes into Russia and partners with Ukrainian universities for training in management and entrepreneurship training, he said. However, both Ukrainian and Russian drones are heavily reliant on Chinese-made parts, Ryan said, noting that replacing a Chinese camera with a Western-made one on a Ukrainian drone triples the cost of producing that same drone.

The share of Russians who favor peace talks on resolving the Russian-Ukrainian war over continuing the hostilities has crept up to a record level: 65.9%, according to the Levada Center’s August poll. But while many of the August poll’s respondents favor peace talks over war, 78% of them also support the actions of the Russian army, which has been gaining some 170 square miles in Ukraine per month this year. Such a high level of approval for Russia’s military action in the neighboring state, combined with Vladimir Putin’s high approval rating (87%), may be indicating that common Russians won’t support an end to the war unless the country’s military-political leadership publicly does so. 

Another interesting outcome of Levada’s August poll is that as many as 30% of its respondents revealed that they have a relative, friend or acquaintance that has been killed in the war. In addition, 28% of the poll’s respondents revealed that their relatives, friends, acquaintances or the respondents themselves are fighting in the war, in which 125,681 Russian servicemen have been identified as killed.¹ These significant percentages (26%) and (28%) signal how wide and tangible the impact of the conflict on the Russian public has become, despite the Kremlin’s effort to limit the impact of what its propagandists at least initially insisted was not a war, but a “special operation,” threatening those who called a spade a spade with prosecution. 

In a recent editorial by The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board, entitled “Russian Drone Parts, Made in China,” the editors make the point that “Trump hasn’t been able to stop Xi Jinping’s support for Putin.” The Sept. 1 editorial accuses Trump of not doing enough to limit Chinese purchases of Russian fossil fuels and chides him for failing to take action against “Chinese suppliers [who] provide components and machinery that let Russia produce its own arms.”¹ Even pro-Kremlin Russian media acknowledges that Chinese drones, operated by Russian personnel, have been zipping around the battlefield, snooping on Ukrainian soldiers and dropping bombs on them.² But what the WSJ editorial doesn’t ask is whose war machines are also powered by Chinese drones and components? Who supplies Ukraine’s drones? And, for that matter, who provides the components for America’s own drones? 

If you answered “China” to each of the previous questions, you would be correct. Although Western partners have certainly sent their fair share of domestically produced drones to Ukraine, (Shield AI, AeroVironment and Anduril systems, to name a few), they make up only a sliver of the millions of drones used by Ukraine each year. But while Ukraine’s drone assembly lines may be buzzing, the industry is hardly self-reliant. With only 5% of Ukrainian defense firms reporting they do not use Chinese components in their systems, the vast majority of drones that fill the sky are likely either made in China or contain a number of key components made in China. A more accurate way to describe these so-called “domestically produced” Ukrainian drones, therefore, would be “made in China, assembled in Ukraine.” 

The gap between Russians who describe the relationship between their country and the U.S. in negative terms and those who describe it in positive terms has been narrowing, according to data Russia Matters obtained earlier this week from the Levada Center on the pollster’s multi-question survey on U.S.-Russian relations.

According to the August 2025 poll’s results, the gap between those who assessed the relationship as friendly, good, neighborly, normal or calm and those who assessed it as cool, tense or hostile, decreased from 76 percentage points as of May 1, 2021, to 32 percentage points as of Feb. 1, 2025, to 13 percentage points as of Aug. 1, 2025 (Graph 1). Some 42% of respondents of the August poll assessed current Russian-U.S. relations in a positive light, while the share of those who assessed relations negatively in that poll was 55%. 

Levada also posed a related question to respondents of its August poll: “What is your current attitude as a whole toward the U.S.?” The answers to that question indicate that in August 2025, the share of Russians who have a good attitude toward the U.S. (48%) exceeded the share of those with a bad attitude (30%) for the first time since Nov. 1, 2021 (Graph 2). 

More than three years into the war, Ukrainians’ support for continuing the fight against Russia until victory is “collapsing,” according to Gallup’s interpretation of its latest poll on the subject. Indeed, the share of those who think Ukraine should continue fighting until it wins plummeted from 73% in 2022 to 24% in 2025, which represents a decline of more than 67%, according to this international pollster. In the meantime, the share of Ukrainians who think Ukraine should seek to negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible went from 22% to 69%, exceeding that of Russians (63%) who would like to see a negotiated end to the fighting.¹

When recently asked by the Levada Center to name “the most outstanding individuals of all time and peoples,” the top three named by Russian respondents were Josef Stalin (42%), Vladimir Putin (31%) and Vladimir Lenin (28%). In fact, of the top 10, only three are not military-political leaders: poet Alexander Pushkin (4th), cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (6th) and chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (10th), according to the results of Levada’s poll, which was conducted in April and published in June. Levada is yet to take its analytical take on the dominance of authoritarian leaders in the Top 10. Meanwhile, one can guess that it might have something to do for a strong preference for a strong state led by a strong leader among many Russians, which should not be surprising, given the long history of authoritarian rule in Russia.

It should be noted that of the top 10, figures, as many as five came to prominence in Soviet times: Stalin, Lenin, Gagarin, Georgy Zhukov and Leonid Brezhnev, while four lived in pre-Soviet Russia: Pushkin, Mendeleev, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. Opposition-minded Russians may find Vladimir Putin not so great, especially when compared to Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, but he is the only person in Levada’s April 2025 top 10 to have come to prominence in post-Soviet times. 

Having taken a pause in his comments on Iran after the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, Russian President Vladimir Putin weighed in on June 23 to describe the strikes as a “completely unprovoked act of aggression against Iran” that is “without foundation or justification” during the public part of his meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi that day. In his public remarks during that meeting, Putin also told Araghchi that “we are committed to supporting the Iranian people through our continued efforts,” but chose not to elaborate on what that support could be and how it might be rendered. 

When asked that same day whether Tehran had requested military support from Moscow, Putin’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov offered no direct answer. “We are working with Iran in various areas, and it would be irresponsible to disclose some details of this cooperation,” he told Interfax. Ryabkov’s ministry was actually the first Russian government agency to criticize the June 22 strikes by the U.S., which Western commentators described as a “gamble” within hours, stating that "Russia strongly condemns” them. Some other Russian officials who offered their hot takes on the strikes warned of increased risks of a World War III (e.g. Leonid Slutsky of the State Duma) and of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (e.g. Konstantin Kosachev of the Russian Senate). Others (e.g. Dmitry Medvedev) welcomed the diversion of Washington’s attention from the Ukraine crisis to the Iran crisis and claimed Iran’s nuclear program will rebound and continue. Like Putin and Ryabkov, most non-governmental Russian commentators, whose opinions I came across when scanning Runet for hot takes on June 22-23, refrained from calling for assistance to Tehran. These commentators (one exception was conservative oligarch Konstantin Malofeev) refrained from doing so even though Putin and his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian¹ described their countries as allies last year,² and the two signed a bilateral strategic partnership treaty. That January 2025 accord has no mutual military aid clause and does not describe the two countries as allies, but it does refer to “military” and “military-technical” cooperation³ between Moscow and Tehran.