Over the past year, Russian analysts have effectively become Trumpologists. Every statement from the US president, often several a day, is dissected and debated in real time. Since Donald Trump’s remarks frequently contradict one another, following his train of thought can feel like a virtual roller coaster ride – dizzying, unpredictable – yet impossible to ignore.
But one should not get carried away by the spectacle. Trump’s tactics are straightforward. He can be abrasive and threatening one moment, charming and conciliatory the next. At times he presents himself as “one of us,” at others as “one of them.” The real question is whether there is a coherent strategy behind this chaos. Nine months into his second term, there is enough evidence to draw some cautious conclusions.
First, Trump’s ultimate goal is personal glory. He wants to go down as the greatest president in US history – the man who restored America’s dominance and reshaped global politics. His strategic vision begins and ends with his own legacy.
Second, he is determined to suppress America’s economic rivals. In this, his policies are blunt but consistent: tariffs, trade wars, and the repatriation of production to US soil. For Trump, global competition is not about mutual gain but national survival.
Third, and most relevant for Russia, Trump wants to be seen as a global peacemaker. But in his vocabulary, “peace” really means truce. He is not interested in complex negotiations or long-term settlements. His aim is to get all sides into one room, stage a handshake, declare victory, and move on. Once the cameras are gone, the details, and the responsibility, are left to others. Should conflict resume, Trump can say he brought peace; it was others who spoiled it.
This formula does not work with Russia. Moscow has tried to explain to the US president the real origins of the Ukrainian crisis – and that Russia’s conditions for peace are not “maximalist” demands but the minimum basis for a lasting settlement. Trump, however, is uninterested in history or nuance. His focus is always the immediate result, the headline moment. After eight months of dialogue, progress remains intermittent at best.
There are also external limits to Trump’s freedom of action. For all his bluster, he is neither “the king of America” nor “the emperor of the West.” He cannot ignore Washington’s entrenched anti-Russian consensus, shared by Democrats and many in his own Republican Party. Nor can he completely disregard US allies in Europe, however little he may respect them. Despite his self-image as a political maverick, Trump is still constrained by the machinery of the American establishment.
Even so, the “special diplomatic operation” – Moscow’s direct dialogue with the Trump administration – has served its purpose. It has demonstrated to Russia’s partners that Moscow is genuinely committed to a fair and durable peace. It has shown Russia’s soldiers and citizens that their leadership continues to pursue the declared objectives of the Ukraine military operation. And it has clarified for the Kremlin the limits of Trump’s real power.
The talks may have slowed, but communication continues along two channels – Lavrov-Rubio and Dmitriev-Witkoff. Yet diplomacy, as ever, is not a substitute for strength. Its purpose is to consolidate what has been achieved on the battlefield. A diplomatic operation can assist, but it cannot replace, a military one.
This article was first published in Kommersant, and was translated and edited by the RT team:
(Full disclosure: I wrote some op-eds for RT in 2021. – Natylie)
Margarita Simonyan, the editor of RT
On June 7, 2005, Margarita Simonyan, an intelligent, articulate Russian journalist who had previously worked in the Kremlin press pool reporting for Rossiya, a leading Russian state television network, announced the creation of Russia Today. “It will be a perspective on the world from Russia,” she said. “Many foreigners are surprised to see that Russia is different from what they see in media reports. We will try to present a more balanced picture.”
Simonyan was 25 years old at the time.
RT went live on December 10, 2005, and the journalistic world has never been the same.
Russia Today, operating on a shoe-string budget of just $30 million (by way of comparison, CNN, a major American media outlet, had an operating budget of $2.5 billion in 2005) struggled to make a dent in the international news market.
Russia Today’s big break came in August 2008, during the short-lived Russian-Georgian War. Georgia and its Western allies painted the conflict as a flagrant example of modern-day Russian imperial ambition. Russia told a different story—that it was Georgia who was the aggressor, and that Russia was simply acting in accordance with its treaty obligations to defend South Ossetia from outside aggression.
Russia had brokered a ceasefire and negotiated an agreement in 1992 known as the “Sochi Agreement.” The agreement, which brought an end to fighting between Georgian and South Ossetian forces that had been raging since 1991, established a cease-fire between both the Georgian and South Ossetian forces, and defined a zone of conflict around the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali which would be monitored by a Joint Control Commission and a peacekeeping body, the Joint Peacekeeping Forces group (JPKF), which operated under Russian command.
The Georgian Army, on August 7, 2008, launched a military incursion into South Ossetia which occupied Tskhinvali and saw Georgia troops fire on the Russian peacekeeping force, killing and wounding scores of Russian soldiers.
The next day, on August 8, 2008, Russia responded with a massive military incursion of its own, driving the Georgian troops out of South Ossetia and subsequently advancing deep into Georgia, threatening the capital city of Tbilisi, before agreeing to a ceasefire brokered by the European Union.
At the time, both the Russian government and the European Union found that the Georgian military the fighting, a finding seconded by the Georgian government in April 2025, when Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze declared that “9former Georgian President Mikhail) Saakashvili started the war at the urging of external forces, on orders from the US State Department. The timeline of events is reflected, among other places, in a Council of Europe resolution and the Tagliavini Report, which state that on 7 August 2008, the regime at the time opened artillery fire on Tskhinvali, and the following day Russian troops entered Georgia.”
Julia Ioffe is a Russian-born émigré who moved to the United States at age seven in 1990, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History, specializing in Soviet History, from Princeton University in 2005, and later worked for two years in Russia as the as the Moscow correspondent for Foreign Policy and The New Yorker, where she developed a reputation as a “Putinologist”—someone who seeks to understand Russia today by deconstructing its leader and his policies. She has described the Russian-Georgia War as “Russia Today’s crucible” observing that, in the first days of the conflict, “when information was patchy and unreliable, RT became exactly what it set out to be: a source of information for the West about what the Russian position actually was.”
The numbers reflected this new reality: viewership of Russia Today topped out at just short of 15 million, and RT broadcasts on YouTube exceeded the one million mark (it should be noted that CNN had the same sort of “break” during the 1991 Gulf War, where the concept of a 24-hour news channel was shown to be attractive to a broader audience. CNN’s viewership during the Gulf War approached 10 million viewers.) According to Ioffe, the Russian-Georgian War was, from the perspective of RT, “the event that best showcased its abilities as a news organization, and that made it a recognizable brand in the West.”
For a “Putinologist” like Ioffe, Russia Today’s transition into the mainstream was baffling. “Russia Today,” she noted, “was conceived as a soft-power tool to improve Russia’s image abroad, to counter anti-Russian bias the Kremlin saw in the Western media.” But, Ioffe, lamented, “Often it seemed that Russia Today was just a way to stick it to the US from behind the façade of legitimate newsgathering.”
Ioffe cites the example of Alyona Minkovski, a Russian-born US citizen who hosted the “The Alyona Show”, a popular part of the RT line up from 2010-2012. When Fox News host Glenn Beck attacked RT for commenting on American political stories (in this case, a story about the New Black Panther Party), Minkovski fired back: “I get to ask all the questions the American people want answered about their own country because I care about this country and I don’t work for a corporate-owned media organization.”
The diminutive American RT host saved her best for last: “Fox…you hate Americans. Glenn Beck, you hate Americans. Because you lie to them, you try to warp their minds. You tell them that we’re becoming some socialist country…you’re not on the side of America. And the fact that my channel [RT] is more honest with the American people is something you should be ashamed of.”
Later, after he left Fox News, Beck himself admitted that his time at Fox News had been divisive for America. “I made an awful lot of mistakes,” he said in an interview with Megyn Kelly. “I think I played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart.”
Of course, neither Julia Ioffe or any of the other “Putinologists” could admit that Alyona Minkovski and RT had a point. But the reality is that the anti-Russian elite who dominated the American intellectual and media scene didn’t matter—the American public did. And, as Alyosha Minkovski told CSPAN’s Brian Lamb in a 2011 interview, RT was “on cable in almost every single or every major city in the US. I know that we’re on cable in New York, in D.C., in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and I believe maybe North or South Carolina. Something, like, 20 to 22 million households now within the US can access RT on cable. Around the world, we’re on satellite. You can always watch us online. The Alyona Show has its own You Tube channel. You can go to the RT.com website and we livestream everything.”
In many ways, RT’s success (Russia Today officially changed its name to RT in 2009 “so as not to scare the audience,” Simonyan quipped) was its undoing. In 2012, a junior CIA analyst named Michael van Landingham, while working at the Open-Source Center, or OSC, authored a study entitled “Kremlin’s TV Seeks to Influence Politics, Fuel Discontent in US.” The “Kremlin TV” referenced was none other than RT.
The OSC was created in 2005 when the Director of National Intelligence transferred the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) to the Office of the Director for National Intelligence, renaming it the Open-Source Center. The mission remained the same—to collect information available from the Internet, databases, press, radio, television, video, geospatial data, photos and commercial imagery, and to train intelligence analysts to make better use of this information.
In his report, Mr. van Landinghan observed that “RT America TV, a Kremlin-financed channel operated from within the United States, has substantially expanded its repertoire of programming that highlights criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties. The rapid expansion of RT’s operations and budget and recent candid statements by RT’s leadership point to the channel’s importance to the Kremlin as a messaging tool and indicate a Kremlin directed campaign to undermine faith in the US Government and fuel political protest. The Kremlin has committed significant resources to expanding the channel’s reach, particularly its social media footprint. A reliable UK report states that RT recently was the most-watched foreign news channel in the UK. RT America has positioned itself as a domestic US channel and has deliberately sought to obscure any legal ties to the Russian Government.”
When asked by Brian Lamb about who owns RT, Alyona Minkovski answered without hesitation, “RT is publicly funded. So its funded by the Russian government.”
And RT has published its budget for the public to see ($400 million in 2014).
So much for obscurity.
Moreover, the idea that a state-funded media is anathema to a free press is somewhat mooted by the existence of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), an independent federal agency of the United States government that oversees civilian US international media (USIM), including the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia (RFA), and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. The BBG oversees 61 language services, 50 overseas news bureaus, 3,500 employees, and 1,500 stringers among the five media entities. In 2015, it had an annual budget of $751 million
According to the BBG, these networks are founded on the belief that it is in the interest of the United States to communicate directly with the people of the world and for the people of the world to have access to accurate information about local, regional, and global events, including in the United States. International audiences turn to VOA and the other BBG-supported media, the BBG asserts, because they count on their accuracy and reliability. If the BBG were to engage in propaganda, the BBG states, “our audiences would simply tune us out and we would not be able to accomplish our mission.”
In 2015 RT was the number one TV news network on YouTube, with nearly 3 billion views; more than half of that number belonging to the main RT YouTube channel. RT’s total monthly online audience reportedly exceeded 32 million unique users, and RT was the world leader among non-English speaking international TV news channels, and ahead Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle and Voice of America in terms of worldwide audience. RT also outperformed all other foreign broadcaster in the US market, with Nielsen research reporting that 2.8 million people in seven major US urban areas watch RT weekly, greater than the audience of Euronews, Deutsche Welle, NHK or France 24.
The world was listening and had apparently cast its vote: RT was a world leader in terms of viewership and influence.
RT’s success, however, wasn’t because the BBG had failed at its job, but rather because US mainstream media had failed at its job—informing the American public. There was a notable decline in the professionalism of American mainstream journalists which, when combined with a discernable reduction in media literacy and political polarization amongst the American people, led to a collective inability to understand the policy implications of the promises being made by politicians and their allies in the mainstream media. RT’s strength was exploiting the credibility gap created because of the collective incompetence of the US mainstream media and the American consumer at large, providing credible information that resonated with an audience that had grown increasingly skeptical and jaundiced.
Rather than admit that they were the problem, the American political class instead collaborated with their US mainstream media partners to shift the blame of an increasingly dysfunctional American society away from where it belongs—their own shoulders—and instead onto those of RT.
This issue came to a head in 2016, when the FBI and CIA, working hand in glove with the Democratic Party and the Obama administration, manufactured out of whole cloth allegations of Russian collusion with the campaign of Donald Trump during the 2016 election. The myths that sprang up about RT’s role in pushing for a Trump victory were as numerous as they were unfounded. But it didn’t matter—perception creates its own reality, and the repeated claims by respected senior members of the FBI and CIA made before the US Congress—and echoed by an unquestioning mainstream media—that Russian President Vladimir Putin had supported, aided and abetted the candidacy of Domald Trump became the gospel truth to those in search for a new Russian enemy.
James Comey, the former Director of the FBI, in testimony before the US Congress, noted that “[T]he Kremlin is waging an international disinformation campaign through the RT propaganda network which traffics in anti-American conspiracy theories that rivaled the extravagant untruths of Soviet era.”
But Comey’s assertion runs afoul of the conclusion reached by the CIA’s Peter Clement, who served as the Deputy Director of the Eurasia and Russian Mission Center during the period covered by the 2016 Presidential race, “A lot of our internal domestic problems are in fact of our own doing,” Clement declared, “I think the Russians have been very good at exploiting this. The polarization was already there. I don’t think this was generated by the Russians.”
“Exploiting”, however, has a multiplicity of meanings and definitions.
All RT was doing was reporting the truths about the 2016 national election.
The only “exploitation” taking place was filling the informational vacuum created by the failure of American mainstream journalism to do its job.
In January 2017 the Director of National Intelligence published what is known as an “Intelligence Community Assessment”, or ICA, about alleged Russian interference in the 1016 Presidential election. Appended to this declassified report was Michael van Landingham’s 2012 assessment of RT. Following the publication of that report, the Department of Justice determined that RT America comply with registration requirements under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).
While the Russian government maintained (accurately, as it turns out) that it played no role in influencing the 2016 US Presidential election, the fact is that RT was simply doing what any responsible media outlet would do—report the news. RT’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, decried the Department of Justice’s decision, but noted that it would comply with the demand in order to avoid further legal action by the US government.
“Between a criminal case and registration, we chose the latter. We congratulate American freedom of speech and all those who still believe in it,” Simonyan noted on her Twitter account.
The US State Department at the time stated that registration as a foreign agent was a mere formality that would not affect the broadcaster’s operation in the US. And yet immediately after the State Department made this statement, the US Congress stripped RT of its credentials, citing its FARA registration as the reason.
Once again it was left to RT to articulate the importance of free speech in America, and the danger of having the notion of a free press trampled on by the US government.
“To all the self-righteous defenders of ‘freedom of speech’”, Simonyan said after the Congressional decision was announced, “who oh-so-ardently proclaimed that FARA registration places no restrictions whatsoever on RT’s journalistic work in the US: Withdrawal of Congressional credentials speaks much louder than empty platitudes. And to borrow from Orwell, all ‘foreign agents’ are equal, but looks like only RT is denied congressional accreditation on the basis of FARA status, while the likes of NHK and China Daily carry-on business as usual, and US officials continue to claim that the forced FARA registration for RT America’s operating company isn’t at all discriminatory.”
In late 2019 I was contacted by an editor with RT’s online English language web service, RT.com, about writing content for their web page. At that time, I was already being published on a regular basis by The Washington Spectator, The Huffington Post, TruthDig, The American Conservative, and Consortium News. I would not be an employee of RT, but rather a contributor who would be compensated for each article. The agreed upon level of compensation was on par with the media outlets which already published me.
My very first article, “‘Russian aggression’ is just a pretext for US politicians to further bloat 2020 defense budget, while Moscow won’t even care”, was published on December 23, 2019. “By including provisions to stop Russian pipelines and target Russia’s actions in Syria,” I wrote, “the new US defense budget demonstrates Washington’s overreach, but likely does nothing to rein in Vladimir Putin.”
It turned out that my analysis here, and in my other articles published on RT, withstood the test of time.
I will note that the RT editorial “touch” was the lightest of any outlet I’ve ever been published it. I was the originator of most of my ideas, although on occasion RT would ask me to write about some breaking news (literally the conversation would go something like this: “Trump is speaking today on defense spending. Would you be able to write something about this?”).
The notion that I parted with any notion of journalistic or ethical integrity by having articles I wrote published in RT is absurd.
And yet, in September 2020 the Journal of Communications published an article, “Anything that causes chaos: The organizational behavior of Russia Today (RT)”, authored by Mona Elswah and Philip Howard. Ms. Elswah was a graduate of Oxford University’s Internet Institute, where she received her PhD. During that time, she served as a research associate of her PhD supervisor, Philip Howard. Howard specialized in what is known as “computational propaganda” and has made a career out of writing and researching about the nexus between democracy and technology on behalf of his underwriters, who include George Soros’ Open Society, the German Marshall Project, and the National Endowment for Democracy, who’s affiliated agency, the National Democratic Institute, awarded him the “Democracy Prize” in 2019 (former US Secretary of State Madaleine Albright made the presentation.)
Curiously, the Elswah-Howard paper opted from the start to avoid discussing the content presented by RT but rather zeroed in on RT’s “organizational behavior”, which was defined as “an applied behavioral science that investigates the impact individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within a certain organization.”
Elswah-Howard, in their paper, sought to “advance the theory about the organizational behavior within the newsroom and news production” to explain “why some sources of political news and information produce the content they do.”
After declaring that RT was founded on a legacy of Soviet-era media practices where central authority dictated journalistic outcomes, the authors note that the best description of RT is a “neo-Soviet” model called “neo-authoritarian” in which media outlets “have limited autonomy and where private ownership is, to some extent, tolerated.”
Are you confused? I am.
“Although it might be tempting to compare RT’s organizational behavior with other media outlets,” the authors wrote, “this study focusses only on RT.”
The author’s then decried RT’s practice of having its employees sign non-disclosure agreements, something every major US mainstream media organization does as standard practice.
But we’re just talking about RT here.
Don’t get distracted.
“RT’s organizational behavior,” the authors later conceded, “may share some practices with other news organizations.”
But RT was different. “Journalists at RT,” the authors observed, “continue to be subject to Soviet-style socialization and self-censoring.”
The main “tactic” used by RT in this regard was “socialization”.
“Socialization at RT,” the authors wrote, “depends largely or earning the loyalty of the journalists” by “”integrating the attitudes, habits and state of mind into the employees which should then lead them to reach decisions in favor of the organization.”
In short, RT treated its employees with respect and paid them well.
RT’s editorial control was exerted by publishing a “style guide” on “terms journalists should use to refer to regimes, countries and political groups.”
I regularly write for Energy Intelligence, a major on-line publication.
Energy Intelligence has a style guide that I must adhere to.
It doesn’t make them controlling—just professional.
The authors of the study on RT’s organizational behavior state that they “were able to obtain a copy of the guide that is being handed to newly hired journalists to help them understand the production process. This document,” the authors concede, “does not provide any political editorial directives but, rather, provides a professional guide for journalists who are just starting their career at RT.”
The authors, unable to document their theories about RT’s controlling practices, then cite unnamed sources who speculate that journalists at RT “were being told about the editorial policies of the channel through internal talks with the editors, rather than through a formal, written style guide. The journalistic socialization at RT”, the authors conclude, “is mostly pursued during casual day-to-day directives.”
Back to the conclusions reached by the author’s regarding RT’s “socialization” of its journalist. “RT’s social controls do not focus upon coercion and fear,” they concluded, “but rather the benefits of working for RT,” noting that “non-Russian journalists often joined and stayed with RT for career progression.”
The goal of the paper was to denigrate RT, and the author’s spent a great deal of time trying to do just that. But at the end of the day, the only fact-based assertions they could make was that RT operated as a legitimate journalistic organization, and that it was a great place to work.
This reality escaped the United States Department of Justice, however. The theory that RT was an organ of Russian state propaganda or, worse, an active participant in a broader campaign designed to sow chaos and confusion amongst an American audience in order to manipulate it to achieve electoral outcomes preferred by the Russian government, underpinned every judgement made by the Department of Justice.
In 2024, the Department of Justice weaponized this theory, launching a frontal assault on RT and people affiliated with RT. My home was raided by the FBI, as was the home of an RT producer who used to book my appearances on RT news programs. RT was declared a “foreign mission”, which precluded any operations on US soil.
I’ve written about my experiences in this regard, and how I view them as a frontal assault on free speech and a free press in the United States.
I have previously wrote about by extensive experience working as a journalist with CNN, NBC News, and Fox News. When it came to issues of national security importance, the news rooms of all three organizations, I wrote,” were literally subordinated to the US government, taking their talking points directly from either the White House, the State Department, or the Pentagon.
In short, these news organizations did not produce news, but rather American propaganda which was designed to deceive the broader American audience about critical issues of war and peace.
The news organizations I observed firsthand were more representative of a state-controlled media than a free press.
I also noted that, “if called upon to compare and contrast, based upon my own personal experiences, the level of journalistic integrity between these US media outlets and RT, RT wins hands-down.”
I stand by this assessment.
When I received the invitation to attend RT’s 20th Anniversary celebration, every fiber of my body screamed at me to turn it down.
I had just had my passport returned to me this past summer, and had already made a visit to Russia that proceeded with no interference from the US government (my passport had been seized on June 3, 2024, as I was preparing to board a flight to Saint Petersburg, where I was scheduled to appear of two panels hosted by RT.)
The FBI had just begun returning to me items they had seized during their raid on my home in August 2024.
The safe choice would have been to simply decline the invitation without comment.
But RT is a legitimate media organization whose voice provides essential information and perspective to an American audience being denied just that by US mainstream media outlets.
Free speech and a free press go hand in hand.
And for America to truly be a land where free speech and a free press exist in more than just theory, the RT must be able to practice its particular brand of journalism free from restriction or stigma.
As President Trump and President Putin navigate the troubled waters of current US-Russian relations toward a destination marked by normalcy and mutual respect, one can only hope that the restoration of RT as a news organization untainted by the unjust and inaccurate label of “foreign mission” or “foreign agent” will be part of whatever arrangements are made in this regard.
But perceptions create their own reality, and as long as people act as if RT is somehow leprous when it comes to the practice of journalism, then change will be slow, if at all.
If I turned down RT’s invitation, then I would be reinforcing the impression that RT was somehow tainted and not worthy of being treated as the legitimate journalistic organization that it, in fact, is.
In this regard, I had no choice but to accept as a matter of principle.
But allow me to conclude with something even more important.
Forget politics.
Let’s talk about people.
The producers, editors and journalists at RT with whom I have had the pleasure of working with over the course of the past six years have been some of the most decent human beings imaginable—genuinely good people who care deeply about others not from any professional mandate, but rather because they are, in their hearts, fundamentally decent human beings.
It is an honor and privilege to know them and count them as friends and colleagues.
And I will be proudly standing side by side with these amazing people later today as we collectively celebrate the anniversary of an organization that has, literally, changed the world we live in.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has lowered its forecast for Russia’s economic growth in 2025 to just 0.6%, marking the second-steepest downgrade among major economies, even as it raised its global outlook, the organisation reported on October 14.
At the same time, the IMF left its growth projections for Ukraine unchanged, despite escalating Russian attacks on energy infrastructure and a widening budget shortfall.
The revised Russian projection represents a 0.3 percentage-point cut from the IMF’s July estimate of 0.9%, and a significant drop from the 1.5% growth forecast published in April. The downgrade follows a period of stronger-than-expected growth in 2024, when Russia’s economy expanded by 4.3%, fuelled largely by elevated wartime spending.
Despite the downward revision, the IMF maintained its longer-term forecasts for Russia, projecting GDP growth of 1% in 2026 and 1.1% by 2030. These figures suggest a prolonged period of subdued expansion, in stark contrast to official Russian estimates.
Russia’s Economic Development Ministry has projected GDP growth of 1% in 2025 and 1.3% in 2026, anticipating a gradual acceleration to between 2.5% and 2.8% later in the decade. Meanwhile, the Central Bank of Russia forecasts economic growth of 1–2% in 2025 and as much as 2.5% by 2028.
Alongside the growth downgrade, the IMF also warned of rising inflationary pressures. It now expects Russia’s inflation rate to reach 9% in 2025 — more than double the global average forecast of 4.2% — before moderating to 5.2% in 2026. Inflation in Russia stood at 8.2% as of early September, according to the Central Bank.
Globally, the IMF raised its 2025 growth forecast to 3.2%, up from 3% in its July update. The 2026 global outlook remains unchanged at 3.1%.
The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook highlights a widening gap between Russia’s near-term prospects and those of the broader global economy, as structural constraints and high inflation weigh on the country’s post-war recovery.
Ukraine growth flat in 2025
The IMF forecast Ukraine’s GDP growth of 2% in 2025 and 4.5% in 2026, unchanged from its April 2025 projections. The figures signal a pause in downward revisions, though they remain lower than the Fund’s October 2024 forecasts of 2.5% and 5.3%, respectively.
Ukraine is currently negotiating a new four-year loan programme with the IMF and seeking additional international support to fill an estimated $65bn budget gap for the 2026–2029 period. The country continues to rely almost entirely on external financing for non-defence spending, with domestic revenues directed primarily toward the war effort, which accounts for roughly half of the national budget.
While Ukraine’s economy has shown signs of resilience — rebounding by 5.5% in 2023 and 2.9% in 2024 following a severe wartime contraction — output remains more than 20% below 2021 levels, according to data from the Kyiv-based Centre for Economic Strategy.
The contraction in 2022, when GDP fell 28.8%, reflected the initial shock of Russia’s full-scale invasion, which led to the occupation of around one-fifth of Ukrainian territory and triggered the displacement of nearly 6mn people.
The IMF’s unchanged forecasts come as Ukraine faces growing uncertainty over the pace and reliability of international funding. Russian strikes on critical infrastructure have intensified in recent months, raising further concerns over energy security and the continuity of industrial activity during the winter heating season.
Ukraine’s longer-term recovery remains dependent on sustained financial assistance and the stabilisation of security conditions, both of which are subject to increasing geopolitical risk.
Reports are coming in that the situation in Pokrovsk is critical. Some 250 members of the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) have broken into the city and there are running street battles. The supply routes to this key logistical hub that supports the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) Donbas operations are under heavy attack and the manpower shortage is acute. If Pokrovsk falls, as Avdiivka and Bakhmut fell before it, there is a danger that the entire eastern defence could suddenly collapse and the war will be over bar the shouting.
It’s hard to be sure what is actually going on as we are limited to one-sided Ukrainian reporting as little is coming out of the Russian side. Moreover, even Bankova has drastically restricted access to its frontlines in order to control the media message. Milbloggers on both sides – which are in touch with individual soldiers – are the best source of information and on the whole a few have emerged as pretty reliable.
The bottomline is that the fighting has clearly gone up a notch and even established western military analysts like Rob Lee and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) say the situation is “critical.”
The western reporting on this story is afraid to go negative, but that is slowly starting to change and tone is starting to get more negative. But the Western politicians are still talking up their “irreversible” support for Ukraine, but the truth is that the campaign is in crisis and in my opinion that is starting to gather momentum.
The main points are:
• The US has withdrawn and will not supply any more arms or money;
• The EU has been left to carry the can, but has run out of money to fund the government ;
• The EU’s stockpile of weapons is also depleted so there is little military help either and the investments to make more are only now getting underway;
• The AFU is suffering from a “catastrophic” shortage of manpower and kilometre-long holes have opened up in the frontline, which is what allowed AFR troops to enter Pokrovsk; and
• the manpower shortages are being worse by rising desertion rates in the AFU, with reports recently of up to 250,000 men AWOL (impossible to check).
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is putting on a brave face and has denied that Pokrovsk is surrounded, but admits the fighting is intense. He is also pushing ahead with his attacks on Russian refineries with some effect. US President Donald Trump also imposed his first and very harsh oil sanctions last week.
But it’s all too little, too late, if you ask me. If you listen to the rhetoric, then it’s all still about “all we need to do is increase/tighten the sanctions a bit more…” to make a difference. And it’s just not happening.
As we have reported, the Trump oil sanctions are unlikely to make a difference. They are the same sanctions that were imposed by the Biden administration in January on Surgutneftegas and Gazprom Neft, the third and fourth largest oil companies, in January. Those did reduce oil exports by about 15% for a few months, but they recovered again very quickly.
The same thing will happen again this time with sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil (numbers 1 & 2), as the flaw in these sanctions – which no one is mentioning – is that the sanctions are specifically on naming Rosneft and Lukoil, not the oil they export. That means there are no sanctions on trading companies or shell companies if they switch to those to continue their exports – which of course, they probably already did the very next day.
As for the EU raising money for Ukraine, the Reparation Loans idea has failed as it undermines Europe’s financial system, will hurt trust in the euro, and exposes Belgium to huge legal and liabilities risks. Hungary and Slovakia are going to veto any proposal anyway. The talk has now shifted to issuing Eurobonds to come up with the €140bn loan, but that is an even less appealing idea than the Reparation Loan.
Given Ukraine’s drone production and its strong defensive line in Donbas, I guess that the AFU can hold out and fight on for a while, but if Pokrovsk falls the war could be over suddenly. And that will unleash a political crisis on the first order that could see Zelenskiy quickly ousted. Then all hell will break loose. Indeed, one of the theories to explain why Zelenskiy suddenly proposed a law to neuter National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) last month is that he is anticipating a political attack and has been drawing more raw power into his own hands in order to weather a coming storm. He has already badly stained his war hero reputation with western partners.
Another sign of trouble on the way is a string of stories looking at the Flamingo cruise missile, claiming that they are fake, which are circulating in the local press. The anticorruption watchdog, NABU, was investigating it for corruption, which both the NYT and The Kyiv Independent have reported, when Zelenskiy pushed through his law at the weekend in the middle of the summer recess.
I have had some big questions since the Flamingo story broke. How did a bunch of Zelenskiy friends from the TV business, with no engineering or weapons experience, developed a sophisticated cruise missile from a standing start in only nine months? And now have a $1bn contract with the state to make them.
Both Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missile and America’s Tomahawk took a decade to develop by worldclass teams of engineers with multiple decades of experience working at some of the biggest defence industry firms in the world. The lady that runs Fire Point, Iryna Terekh, the maker of the Flamingo, made her money from designing attractive flowerpots made out of concrete. She apparently moved into an empty warehouse and set up the firm, paying for the initial development from her own pocket until the government contracts started to come in.
Even the story about why the missiles are pink smacks of that scene in “Wag the dog” where Dustin Hoffman goes out at night and throws old shoes into the trees outside the White House to create a social media meme with the right connotations. The pink missile story has certainly got a lot of attention.
However, I have been watching closely for reports of Flamingos being used. The initial article in AP claimed that Fire Point was making seven a day, yet I have yet to see a single report of them being fired. They are supposed to be a gamechanger and as good (actually better) than Tomahawks.
So far this is starting to look like Werner von Braun’s wunderwaffen that Hitler was pushing at the end of WWII, the V2 rocket, that was going to win the war overnight. At least Werner von Braun was a real rocket scientist that went on to work at NASA. And let’s face it, Terekh is no von Braun.
I won’t go into detail here, but I filled the rest of the list today with our Asian team’s reporting on global leaders gathering in Gyeongju in South Korea to shape APEC cooperation as that summit gets underway. As we have been reporting, while Europe distracts itself with the slowly imploding Ukraine war story, the rest of the world is getting on with the business of doing business. This is part of building what we have dubbed the Global Emerging Markets Institutions (GEMIs) to counter the West’s dominance of global geopolitics.
The main take out is that there seems to be a pause in the Sino-US showdown after Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Both sides have agreed to put off their retaliatory actions for a year and to meet in April when presumably a trade deal can be done. Trump has threatened 100% tariffs, but Capital Economics released a note saying the actual adjusted tariffs are currently 30%. Trump has agreed to ease restrictions on the export of top end microchips while Xi has agreed to delay rare earth metals (REMs) export restrictions for a year.
The final thing I will say is that watching this whole row develop, what has struck me is that at every step Xi has been reasonable and called for partnership, not confrontation. He did this in conversations with former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and former US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who both met him in Beijing and were frankly rude and aggressive. He just used the same rhetoric with Trump. So there does seem to be some real common ground to do a real deal.
This week has seen Russian forces advance in two pincer movements from the center of Pokrovsk and villages to the northeast with only a few miles separating the military advances, according to DeepState’s maps analyzed by NYT. DeepState, a reputable Ukrainian OSINT group, reported a “massive infiltration” of this Donetsk region city, which Russian command claims to have encircled along with Kupyansk, warning on Oct. 29 that “the situation in Pokrovsk is on the verge of [being] critical.” In a follow-up Oct. 31 assessment DeepState reported that Russian forces advanced in Pokrovsk while Ukraine’s Korrespondent.net reported on the same day that “a fierce battle is ongoing for the city of Pokrovsk.” If captured, Pokrovsk would be the largest city to be taken by Russian forces since Bakhmut in May 2023, according to The Washington Post. Its fall will be a serious setback, as the city is a junction for road and railway lines and would bring Russian forces closer to the Donetsk region cities of Kramatorsk and Kostiantynivka, according to the Post. In the past four weeks (Sept. 30–Oct. 28, 2025), Russian forces gained 154 square miles of Ukrainian territory, an increase over the 146 square miles these forces gained during the previous four-week period (Sept. 2–30, 2025), according to the Oct. 29 issue of The Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. In the week of Oct. 21–28, 2025, Russia has gained 39 square miles of Ukraine’s territory, up slightly from the previous week’s gain of 33 square miles, according to the card.
Tilman Ruff is the Honorary Principal Fellow, School of Population and Global Health, at The University of Melbourne.
US President Donald Trump has instructed the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing immediately, “on an equal basis” with other countries’ testing programs.
If Trump is referring to the resumption of explosive nuclear testing, this would be an extremely unfortunate, regrettable step by the United States.
It would almost inevitably be followed by tit-for-tat reciprocal announcements by other nuclear-armed states, particularly Russia and China, and cement an accelerating arms race that puts us all in great jeopardy.
It would also create profound risks of radioactive fallout globally. Even if such nuclear tests are conducted underground, this poses a risk in terms of the possible release and venting of radioactive materials, as well as the potential leakage into groundwater.
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty has been signed by 187 states – it’s one of the most widely supported disarmament treaties in the world.
The US signed the treaty decades ago, but has yet to ratify it. Nonetheless, it is actually legally bound not to violate the spirit and purpose of the treaty while it’s a signatory.
What testing is used for, and why it stopped
In earlier years, the purpose of testing was to understand the effects of nuclear weapons – for example, the blast damage at different distances, which provides confidence around destroying a given military target.
Understanding the consequences of nuclear weapons helps militaries plan their use, and to some extent, protect their own military equipment and people from the possible use of nuclear weapons by adversaries.
But since the end of the second world war, states have mostly used testing as part of the development of new weapons designs. There have been a very large number of tests, more than 2,000, mostly seeking to understand how these new weapons work.
The huge environmental and health problems caused by nuclear testing prompted nations to agree a moratorium on atmospheric testing for a couple of years in the early 1960s. In 1963, the Partial Test Ban Treaty banned nuclear tests in all environments except underground.
Since then, nuclear-armed states have stopped explosively testing at different times. The US stopped in 1992, while France stopped in 1996. China and Russia also aren’t known to have conducted any tests since the 1990s. North Korea is the only state to have openly tested a nuclear weapon this century, most recently in 2017.
These stoppages came in the 1990s for a reason: by that time, it became possible to test new nuclear weapon designs reliably through technical and computer developments, without having to actually explode them.
So, essentially, the nuclear states, particularly the more advanced ones, stopped when they no longer needed to explosively test new weapon designs to keep modernising their stocks, as they’re still doing.
With the exception of this significant development, however, everything else has been going badly.
All nine nuclear-armed states (the US, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel) are investing unprecedented sums in developing more accurate, stealthier, longer-range, faster, more concealable nuclear weapons.
This potentially lowers the threshold for their use. And it certainly gives no indication these powers are serious about fulfilling their legally binding obligations to disarm under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Moreover, multiple nuclear-armed states have been involved in recent conflicts in which nuclear threats have been made, most notably Russia and Israel.
This includes those in military stockpiles, those that have been deployed (linked to delivery systems such as missiles), and those on high alert, which are the ones most prone to accidental use because they can be launched within minutes of a decision to do so. All of these categories are on the increase.
Nearly all of the hard-won treaties that constrained nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War have been abrogated.
There’s now just one remaining treaty constraining 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, which are in the hands of the US and Russia. This is the New START Treaty, which is set to expire in February next year.
Putin offered to extend that treaty informally for another year, and Trump has said this is a good idea. But its official end is just four months away, and no actual negotiations on a successor treaty have begun.
The US has also said China needs to be involved in the successor treaty, which would make it enormously more complicated. China has not expressed a willingness to be part of the process.
Whether anything will be negotiated to maintain these restraints beyond February is unclear. None of the nuclear-armed states are negotiating any other new treaties, either.
All of this means the Doomsday Clock – one of the most authoritative and best-known assessments of the existential threats facing the world – has moved forward this year further than it has ever done before.
It’s really an extraordinarily dangerous time in history.
