Started in February 2022, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is continuing unabated with daily fighting in Eastern Ukraine. As of late October 2025, there seems to be no prospects for a quick resolution of the conflict despite the expectations born from the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August 2025.
On the ground, the Russian and Ukrainian military are locked in a war of attrition. Only at the price of massive casualties can Russian forces slowly advance. According to Russian and Ukrainian military, significant stretches of the front line, especially in open terrain, have become a 20 km or wider “kill zone” where drones dominate. While Ukraine still has an advantage in this drone warfare, Russia has been catching up in 2025. The drone war also remains a technological competition where each side tries to out-innovate the other.
Longstanding characteristics of the war continue, meanwhile, to hold true. The smaller Ukraine has issues with recruiting soldiers and is unsure about the steadiness of the West’s support to compensate for its weapons’ shortages. Russia also struggles with replenishing its massive losses, although not as much as Ukraine, and sees Western sanctions and the war effort degrade its economy and social cohesion. In the mid-term, both sides seem unlikely to gain a decisive advantage without a fundamental shift in factors external to the conflict such as a significant drop in Western support to Ukraine or a political-economic crisis in Russia.
In this context, Kyiv hopes that its resolve to fight, helped by Western military support, and US pressure on Russia will bring Moscow to the negotiating table. Moscow, assessing that the US support to Ukraine has waned, has increased hybrid warfare against Western Europe in hope that it would undermine its willingness to back Ukraine. Both sides continue to believe that they can improve their positions militarily, seeing no reason to rush into negotiations that would necessarily force them to compromise on their war goals.
To advance a peace settlement, the United States, the world’s largest military and economic power and Ukraine’s main individual backer, is holding many of the cards. On 10 October, Putin confirmed that Russia and the United States still operated “as part of the agreements [reached] in Alaska”. One of his advisers elaborated that Russia “had made certain concessions” during the summit without likewise explaining what had been agreed. Whatever one makes of such comments, it is notable that the failure, so far, to organise another summit between Trump and Putin and the new sanctions adopted by the United States against Russia did not pause the US-Russian talks on Ukraine. Putin’s special representative travelled to the United States on 24 October where he praised Trump’s peace-making efforts.
To Moscow, it remains crucial to discuss a settlement in Ukraine directly with Washington because many of its war goals relate to the broader security architecture in Europe and the bilateral relation with the United States. Beyond this, Moscow continues to try to undermine US support to Kyiv and drive a wedge between the United States and Western Europe. However, the success of that strategy remains to be seen given the volatility of Trump’s policies and his apparent lassitude with Russia’s uncompromising stance on Ukraine.
This article was published in Globe #36, the Graduate Institute Review.
