Euronews, 10/29/25

Three days after announcing a test of the nuclear-powered Burevestnik missile, Moscow said on Wednesday it also tested Poseidon, a nuclear-capable underwater drone. The second nuclear weapon test in just a week comes as the talks with the US stalled over Moscow’s reluctance to ceasefire in Ukraine.

Russia has conducted a successful test of a new nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable underwater drone, known as Poseidon, President Vladimir Putin announced on Wednesday.

Describing it as a new weapon “which cannot be intercepted,” Putin said the drone has already been dubbed a “doomsday machine”.

Speaking at a Moscow hospital where he met the soldiers wounded in Russia’s war against Ukraine, Putin said the Poseidon drone was tried while running on nuclear power for the first time on Tuesday. He also described it as having “unmatched in speed and depth”.

The Russian president said the nuclear reactor that powers the Poseidon is “100 times smaller” than those on submarines, and the power of its nuclear warhead is “significantly higher than that of our most advanced Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile.”

“For the first time, we managed not only to launch it with a launch engine from a carrier submarine, but also to launch the nuclear power unit on which this device passed a certain amount of time,” Putin said.

There was no independent confirmation that such a test took place.

What is Poseidon?

The Kremlin-affiliated media outlets claim that the Poseidon is designed to travel at up to 200 kilometres per hour.

Known in NATO as “Kanyon”, and formerly labelled “Status-6” by Moscow, the drone is 20 metres long, 1.8 metres in diameter and weighs 100 tonnes, according to Russian media outlets.

Moscow claims that with the nuclear power giving it an unlimited range, the drone’s speed and depth make it hard to locate.

Putin said the Poseidon’s power exceeded that of “even the most promising Sarmat intercontinental-range missile,” the so-called SS-X-29, or Satan II.

The Poseidon is one of six new arms — dubbed “super weapons” — the Russian president mentioned in his 2018 state-of-the-nation address.

Russian media reported that the Poseidon was designed to explode near coastlines and unleash a powerful radioactive tsunami.

Nuclear arms race instead of diplomatic talks

Since announcing the six, including the Poseidon and Burevestnik in 2018, Putin has described the super arsenal as a response to the US strategy to build a missile defence shield.

Last Sunday, Putin announced that Russia tested its “unique” Burevestnik nuclear-ready cruise missile, which the Kremlin described as part of efforts to “ensure the country’s national security”.

Together with Russia’s nuclear drills last week, the Burevestnik test over the past weekend and now the Poseidon test just a few days later, is widely seen as a further message to Washington, following Putin’s words last week, when he stated Moscow will not cave under US sanctions and pressure.

US President Donald Trump has called the Burevestnik test announcement “not appropriate”, noting also that Moscow is aware that the US has a nuclear submarine deployed “right off their shore”.

“(Putin) should get the war ended. A war that should have taken a week is now soon in its fourth year. That’s what he should do instead of testing missiles”, Trump said on Monday.

***

Russia Matters, 10/27/25

Vladimir Putin’s announcement of the successful tests of Russia’s nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable Burevestnik missile “constitutes his first serious nuclear saber rattling since Mr. Trump returned to office in January,” said Hanna Notte of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, according to The New York Times. Putin’s announcement Oct. 26 has not surprised analysts, but is still a cause for concern, NYT reports. According to Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at Middlebury College, Burevestnik is “a tiny flying Chernobyl… It is one more science fiction weapon that is going to be destabilizing and hard to address in arms control,” NYT reports. However, analysts do question the game-changing capability of the Burevestnik. “It’s not a terribly useful system,” said Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based analyst of Russian nuclear forces, according to NYT. Readers may recall that in 1957, the USSR launched a rudimentary satellite—the first manmade object in space—called Sputnik. Like Sputnik, Burevestnik’s real impact may be in stimulating a U.S. and allied arms race rather than actually shifting the balance of power between nuclear-capable rivals.*

RT, 10/14/25

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky would be defeated in a presidential vote by military intelligence chief Kirill Budanov as well as former armed forces commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny, a new poll has suggested.

Zelensky has repeatedly ruled out holding elections in the country, citing martial law imposed due to the conflict with Russia.

According to a survey released on Monday, conducted by the Kiev-based pollster RATE1 among 1,200 respondents in early October, Zelensky’s political viability continues to wane.

In a scenario pitting Zelensky directly against Budanov, 33% of respondents favored the military intelligence chief as opposed to 32.5% for Zelensky.

In a head-to-head between Zelensky and Zaluzhny, 42.6% of voters said they would back the retired general, who is now serving as Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, while only 26.3% would support the incumbent leader. A direct race between Zaluzhny and Budanov would give the former a decisive lead, with 44.5% to 22%.

In a broader first-round scenario featuring multiple candidates, Zelensky would still lead among decided voters but with less than one-third of total support, the survey indicated.

Zelensky’s presidential term expired last year, but he remains in power under martial law. The Ukrainian Constitution mandates that presidential authority should transfer to the parliamentary speaker under such circumstances. Russia has said Zelensky is illegitimate.

Earlier this year, US President Donald Trump called the Ukrainian leader a “dictator without elections.” Speculation in the media suggests that Zelensky’s team is quietly preparing for a potential return to the polls, even though he has suggested he would not seek reelection once the conflict with Russia is over.

Neither Zaluzhny nor Budanov has officially declared political ambitions, maintaining that the conflict with Russia must first be resolved.

By Seymour Hersh, Substack, 10/23/25

The battered Russian troops call it the “Horseshoe,” a brutally reinforced area in the hilly northern corner of the Donbas region that blocks the army’s entry from the east to the vast central plains of Ukraine—a path that could lead the Russian army, if it were able to overcome an expected counterattack, deep into central Ukraine and even theoretically to the outskirts of Kiev.

The Horseshoe is bloodied high ground and fortified by trenches, bunkers, and concrete barriers that have kept the Russian army at bay, at great cost in lives and materials. A well-informed American official told me that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, continues to urge his generals to do an all-out assault and take the area and give Putin what he wants to end the war: total control of the Donbas, which consists of two provinces—Donetsk and Luhansk—that are rich in coal, iron ore, lithium, titanium, and rare earth metals. And Russian history. Russian speakers make up 70 per cent of the region. Russia’s generals, I was told by the official, have so far refused to make another attack on the Horseshoe, citing prior failures, heavy casualties to combat soldiers, and destruction of their tanks and other heavy weapons.

With winter approaching, Putin will not be able to mount a ground offensive until spring and again seek to take all of Donbas, whose Ukrainian-controlled areas have been under heavy Russian drone and missile assault since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. Press reports of the most recent non-summit have emphasized that Putin agreed to freeze all combat along the rest of the front if he is granted control of all of Donbas. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, despite pressure from the United States, insisted, as he has throughout the history of peace talks with Russia, that he would not alter, as the US official put it to me, “his long-standing position to keep up the empty hope and objective of ‘taking back all of the Ukraine.’”

The irony, or “reality,” as the official put it, is that “Russia has been trying unsuccessfully to capture this sliver of territory for a year and failed with great loss of life by his troops without success.” Zelensky’s gambit, he added wryly, “Might work. Might not.”

The full article (behind a paywall) is available here.

By Alexander Hill & Ted Snider, Antiwar.com, 10/14/25

Alexander Hill is Professor in Military History at the University of Calgary, and editor of the outledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies published in February 2025, as well as other books and articles on Soviet and Russian military affairs including The Red Army and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and  The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.

“Ukraine,” U.S. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social on September 23, “is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back.”

He came to this completely revised conclusion apparently having been briefed on battlefield and economic conditions by U.S. officials, including Special Envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellog and Mike Waltz, who served very briefly as Trump’s National Security Advisor and is now the U.S. Ambassador to the UN. Coming out of those briefings, Trump was now convinced that Russia is “in BIG Economic trouble” and that “Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win.” His advisors stressed that Russia had not made significant territorial gains despite large-scale summer offensives.

After the revision in Trump’s assessment, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Trump now “clearly understands the situation and is well-informed about all aspects of this war.” But does he?

Trump now apparently thinks that Putin is vulnerable because Russia is in economic trouble, although it isn’t exactly clear what trouble Russia is in. The Russian government and central bank are certainly having to walk something of an economic tightrope, trying to lower inflation while not pushing the economy towards some sort of recession. Interest rates remain high, with the Russian Central Bank’s key rate at 17%, impacting consumer spending and investment. Inflation has, however, dropped to much more manageable levels than earlier in the war, and indeed than earlier this year.  Where inflation is now around 8%, it has been as high as just under 18% back in early 2022, still topping 10% earlier this year.

While Russian government plans to increase VAT to help fund the war may contribute to modest increases in inflation, the Russian Central Bank still expects inflation to be down to 6-7% by the end of the year. Lower inflation should allow for the cutting of interest rates. If all of this data was from a Western country it would be seen as positive, but there seems to be a determination on the part of some Western governments and observers to try to put a negative spin on any economic news out of Russia – regardless of what the news is.

Russia has weathered the harshest sanctions regime the West could muster. Russia has the fourth largest economy in the world when measured by purchasing-power parity, which is an assessment of the size of an economy adjusted for the cost of goods and services within it, and is a key measure used by the World Bank. Russia’s GDP growth continues to be more than respectable – currently still expected to be above 1% for 2025 even according to conservative figures. For the first time since the war began, the 2026 budget actually cuts military spending. Russia will officially spend 5.8% of GDP on defense spending. In comparison, Ukraine spends 34.48% of GDP on the military, the largest military burden in the world.

Russia may be facing some economic challenges, but Ukraine is undoubtedly in big trouble and is living hand to mouth. Ukraine has been, for some time, on the verge of economic collapse – and the IMF recently revealed that the situation is far worse than projected. Ukraine has received $145 billion in international aid since the war began, and they have a massive budget deficit they cannot pay. At this point the Ukrainian economy is essentially dependent on foreign assistance. While for the time being the EU currently seems content to carry on bailing Ukraine out, for how long that will last and whether it will be sufficient to keep Ukraine afloat remains to be seen.

The same negative trend for Ukraine is apparent not just for the money to fund the war, but for the troops to fight it. Even if Ukraine had all the money and weapons it needs to equip the war, it is running out of soldiers to fight it. By far the most serious shortage Ukraine is facing is manpower. Millions have left the country, hundreds of thousands have avoided the draft, and, worst of all, hundreds of thousands have been killed or seriously injured. Already by the end of 2023, a close aid to Zelensky had complained that, even if Ukraine had all the weapons they needed, they “don’t have the men to use them.” Two years later, the situation is very much worse.

By contrast, although Russian losses have also remained high, they have continued to be proportionally far lower than those of Ukraine given Russia’s much larger population. Last year, half a million Russians joined the military.  Although presented in a negative light in much of the Western press given that it represents a drop in recruitment, the Russian military continues to recruit significant numbers of new personnel: nearly 40,000 during the second quarter of 2025. Russian recruitment has certainly dropped, but there is limited evidence that Russia has been losing fewer troops during 2025 than 2024 while still maintaining pressure on Ukrainian forces.

And that raises another problem for Trump’s belief that Ukraine will “be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that!” Ukraine cannot win back all of its territory while it is on the defensive. Without going over to the offensive it will continue, bit by bit, to slowly lose more territory as it is now, while suffering losses that it can afford even less than Russia can. But with its manpower shortage, Ukraine is simply not likely to be capable of shifting to the offensive in any meaningful way. This war has taught both sides that to go on the offensive and push the other side back requires a significant local manpower advantage – something that shouldn’t have come as a surprise in a peer-peer war – and something that Ukraine is increasingly incapable of achieving.

Despite having caught Russian forces off guard in 2022 and having achieved local numerical superiority late that year, since then, when Ukraine has amassed resources to go over to the offensive, those offensive operations have ended badly.  The much-vaunted counteroffensive of the summer of 2023 squandered much equipment and many lives for little gain. The so-called ‘Kursk’ offensive of 2024 looked impressive for a while on a map, but the territory occupied by Ukrainian forces was of little military or economic value and soaked up better quality military units just to hold it. When it was finally recaptured by Russian forces, Ukraine lost many men and much equipment in an offensive operation that ultimately gained it little or nothing other than fleeting Western headlines. Zelensky’s potential rival and former head of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, may have been point scoring when he recently suggested that the costs for Ukraine of the ‘Kursk’ offensive had been ‘too high’, but they were certainly losses in both men and materiel that Ukraine could ill afford.

Though Russian forces have not made decisive advances on the battlefield, recently they have been making gains more quickly than at any point in the war since early 2022. The increasingly thinly stretched Ukrainian frontline is becoming more porous and vulnerable with the danger of collapse still looming in the background. For the first time in years, the Russian armed forces recently broke through key defensive positions, and logistical hubs critical for the Ukrainian armed forces to supply their troops in the east have been partially infiltrated and all but surrounded, challenging the Ukrainian armed force’s ability to supply their troops on key sectors of the front. The briefings being given to Trump seem to omit the existential attrition of Ukrainian troops and weapons and the increasing pressure it is putting on their front lines.

There remains a naïve belief in much of the Western press and some government circles that the West can make up for Ukrainian weaknesses in terms of manpower with more weapons. However, currently cut off from the flow of American weapons, Ukraine is dependent on what it can produce for itself and what an economically troubled Europe can provide. That has left it depleted of weapons to prosecute the war and even more depleted of air defenses to defend it.

Russia, on the other hand, is, for the first time, producing more weapons than it needs to fight the war in Ukraine. It has doubled its production of artillery, drones, armored vehicles and tanks. No longer producing just what it needs, Russia is poised to restart arms exports in a meaningful way, with there being reports that Algeria may become the first foreign operator of the SU-57 aircraft by 2026, receiving 14 such aircraft during 2026-7.

And Russia is not just producing more weapons, it is producing improved weapons. Russia is passing Ukraine in the race for more sophisticated drones and more sophisticated ways of defending against drones. It is also using them in increasingly sophisticated ways that better co-ordinate with other arms. It has also upgraded its ballistic missiles to evade the best air defenses Ukraine has, including American made Patriot systems. Russian ballistic missiles now seem capable of performing last minute changes of course and dives that confuse Patriot interceptors. Ukraine air force data suggests that the Ukrainian armed forces now have a missile interception rate of only 6%. Russian missiles are eluding Ukraine’s air defenses and are hitting their targets. A report produced by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency concludes that the Ukrainian armed forces are now “struggle[ing] to consistently use Patriot air defence systems to protect against Moscow’s ballistic missiles because of recent Russian tactical improvements.”

And there does not seem to be any magic bullet to reverse the trend. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked Trump for Tomahawk missiles. Trump is reportedly considering it. Tomahawk missiles have a range of 1,500 miles, putting targets deep within Russia, including the Kremlin, within range according to Zelensky.

There are a number of problems with Zelensky’s plan. The first is that the U.S. doesn’t have all that many such missiles itself – and recent use of its own missiles against Iran and Yemen highlights that they are a resource that the U.S. also needs. Pentagon budget data suggests that the US plans to buy only 57 such missiles in 2026.

The second problem is that Ukraine currently lacks any of the platforms capable of launching Tomahawk missiles. While some sort of jerry-rigged solution is not beyond the realms of possibility in the mid-longer term, the U.S. also has the Typhon missile system capable of firing Tomahawks, but the first U.S. systems are only just being deployed.

The third, and very dangerous, problem is that Ukraine is incapable of using Tomahawk missiles without U.S. assistance. The US has clearly been providing Ukraine with targeting information in the war to date, so providing such information wouldn’t be anything new. However, the amount of U.S. assistance that would be required to get Ukraine firing Tomahawk missiles into the depths of Russia would be considerable – and there couldn’t be any hiding it. Vladimir Putin has reportedly said recently that a decision to supply Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine “will ruin our relations [with the United States] or at least the emerging positive trend in these relations”.

Russia has faced increased Ukrainian capabilities in this regard before and has adapted. What makes the Tomahawk missile somewhat different than previous U.S. and European missile-related escalations in assistance to Ukraine is the fact that, although the U.S. doesn’t currently deploy nuclear Tomahawk missiles, the reintroduction of such a missile remains a possibility.

Rhetoric about Ukraine being in a position to take all of its land back and win the war will not change the reality on the battlefield: nor would a few Tomahawk missiles. They would, however, constitute yet another escalation in a war that sooner or later may run out of escalations. So far, as one of the authors of this piece predicted back in late 2022, those escalations have not led to an overwhelming advantage for either side in circumstances in which morale on both sides remains sustainable for the foreseeable future. If time is on either side, however, it is leaning more and more towards Russia for reasons that were to some extent foreseeable earlier in the war.

Western ‘hawks’ are now trying to hype up the need for another wave of escalation of Western assistance to Ukraine, ignoring the fact that, at some point, an escalation may be an escalation too far. They also often conveniently ignore the fact that not only Russians but also Ukrainians are still dying in their droves, but are still apparently willing to fight to the ‘last Ukrainian’ rather than accept realities and move towards the sort of peace that is viable.

By Stephen Bryen, Asia Times, 10/14/25

US President Donald Trump, in the midst of his triumph ending the Gaza war and gaining the return of the Israeli hostages, is jacking up the pressure on Russia. The major threat, but not the only one, is the threat to deliver Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine that would be used to target assets inside Russia.

Russia has not won the war on the ground in Ukraine. Even without the Tomahawk, Russia will experience heavy losses to Ukrainian drones aimed at Russia’s energy infrastructure and military industries. Ukrainian raids on Russia happen nearly every night, just as Russian raids on Ukraine appear fairly persistent.

Russia has limited financial ability to replace its losses, and shutdowns of power and equipment losses do not play well with the public.

In effect, Ukraine has retaliated fairly effectively for heavy Russian raids on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, and so far at least Ukraine has been able to manage such losses or at least persist through them.

Nonetheless there are limits to everything. How long can Ukraine sustain mounting losses, and how much reverse punishment can Russia take in pursuit of its goals in Ukraine? There are no answers to these questions, or to the question of how long the war itself will continue.

The modern battlefield has changed significantly. Drones and precision weapons, along with aerial-dropped mines, have made armored assaults nearly a thing of the past. Some say that the life of a main battle tank is a mere 72 hours, meaning that hardware will be rapidly destroyed and experienced crews are few and far between.

Observers say that Russia is now outproducing Ukraine in drone manufacturing and deployment, but not enough yet to change the battlefield significantly in Russia’s favor.

Meanwhile new types of smart drones with artificial intelligence features are starting to appear, making drone lethality independent of their operators. Surprisingly, these drones, important ones fielded by Russia, are stuffed with US electronics including from the AI-leader, Nvidia.

Whatever sanctions and export controls the US imposes, the system is like swiss cheese, full of holes and roundabouts, making the supply chain, as far as Russia is concerned, fairly secure.

Russia’s two main problems in the war come in two distinct directions.

A key problem is the conservative and risk-averse Russian military leaders. They are under great pressure to produce results and minimize casualties, largely contradictory objectives. With some 700,000 troops in the battle zone, Russia has not been able to mount a singular campaign against a Ukrainian strategic target.

The proof is easy to illustrate: Pokrovsk, a key city and objective for Russia, remains mostly in Ukraine’s hands. The Russians were able to insert small squads into the south of the city, but the attempts to cut off supply lines, mainly in the north, were countered fairly effectively by Ukraine. Pokrovsk has been nothing much more than a squeeze play where Russia has not been able to squeeze hard enough.

Sooner or later Russia’s military will need to decide whether it can force a major advance. If they can’t, they cannot win the war.

The second problem is Russia’s lack of credible allies. North Korea is not a credible ally. However many North Korean troops died in Kursk, on Russian territory, the evidently high numbers of those casualties suggests that North Korea will not use its forces on Ukrainian territory. In any case, the heavy losses were a big blow to Kim Jong-Un’s credibility, and his tearful performance at funerals in Pyongyang was not much more than a cover-up for failure.

Similarly Russia’s near neighbor, Belarus, wants to avoid engaging in the conflict, and has made it clear to Poland and others that Belarus is not a threat (even though Poland put a lot of troops and hardware on Belarus’s border).

Iran, a Russian ally, is all but worthless. Iran has been effectively neutered by the US and Israel, its nuclear program trashed and much of its air defense system ruined. The Russians were smart to move production of Iranian drones to Russian territory.

Likewise China, despite backdoor help to Russia in the form of supply chain support, deliberately has not been a player when it comes to Ukraine. China is always balancing its trade situation and geostrategic priorities, but Russia and Ukraine hardly matter, other than symbolic exercises and military parades.

This leaves Moscow isolated, and if Moscow cannot soon achieve a military victory, it will need to end the war in Ukraine. The part that is less certain is how long Ukraine can hang in against a powerful and persistent adversary.

President Trump instinctively knows this, and is playing the game of leverage on Russia. The risk, for Trump, is to go too far and lead Putin and Russia to desperate measures. Putin’s future, unlike Trump’s, is tied up in the Ukraine outcome. Thus the risk of a bigger war, or the introduction of new classes of weapons, is lurking on the near-horizon.

It would seem Trump has to cook up a deal that Russia might find attractive. There are formulas that can end the war, and which give Russia half a loaf. The answers can be found in mitigating the Russian territorial annexations, except perhaps Crimea, and backing NATO away from Russia’s territory, a key Russian objective. Large buffer zones and reductions in military supplies are promising and need to be explored.

A word about territorial mitigation. Russia has outright annexed a number of territories, Donbas (Luhansk and Donetsk), Zaporizhia, Kherson and Crimea. But with the exception of Luhansk and Crimea, Russia only holds around 75% of these territories. There is room for deals that could result in a framework for a deal for two countries, Russia and Ukraine, in peace, not war. For example:

-mixed territorial administration,

-recognition of Russian rights,

-withdrawal of forces,

-mutually agreeable economic cooperation.

No one has proposed, let alone discussed, solutions that can lead to a long term reconciliation between the major actors.

Trump also understands that Russia faces an economic crisis. Aside from petroleum exports, specialty metals including enriched uranium and titanium, and grain, Russia lacks a commercially viable domestic industrial base that can compete internationally. It is particularly deficient in electronics. The impending crisis is easy to visualize: the massive amounts of the Russian budget going into armaments production will no longer serve much purpose if the war ends. This means Russia could quickly transition from full employment, which is the case now, to pockets of serious unemployment. With troops returning home, and less conscription, jobs will be at a premium and the industrial base is not ready to absorb them. On the other hand, keeping the war going also is not sustainable -the costs are too high and government income too low to keep them running.

Bringing US investment to Russia could be very significant, but Russia needs to clean up its legal system that often plays havoc with foreign investors. This is no trifling matter where Russian government officials and industry leaders behave like predators instead of partners.

But Russia will need a bailout to make a deal. This is a Trump specialty. It needs to be matched with better ideas on an overall deal ending the war, as suggested above. The case of only a ceasefire does not square the circle.

Zelensky has said he will resign when the war ends. Trump needs to hold him to that decision, perhaps asking him to go sooner rather than later.

Trump has some options to do for Ukraine what he did for Israel and Gaza.