What the fourth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine revealed: neither side can win the war, and neither side can end it
On the surface, the fourth year of Russia’s war in Ukraine offered little new: the same slow advances through the Donbas, the same failed diplomacy, the same lack of a Ukrainian counteroffensive. But 2025 was a year of real, if quiet, transformation — in the technology of killing, in the logic of negotiation, and in both sides’ understanding of what winning actually looks like. Meduza examines what changed, what didn’t, and what the fifth year of the war is likely to bring. The short answer: the war has grown harder to end precisely because it has grown harder to win, and both Moscow and Kyiv appear to have drawn the same conclusion, pursuing not victory but the best available form of not losing.
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A year of talks with no breakthrough
It’s easy to dismiss the peace process as a failure. No deal has been reached, and the talks are deadlocked. Look more closely, though, and both sides’ positions have shifted considerably since late 2024.
Two years ago, Ukraine demanded the full restoration of sovereignty over all its territory, while Russia insisted on full control of the four regions it claims as its own. Today, both sides appear to acknowledge that the central sticking point has narrowed to one question: the fate of the Ukrainian-controlled portions of the Donetsk region, primarily the Kramatorsk-Sloviansk area and its immediate surroundings.
The framework attributed to the Trump administration — reportedly agreed upon in broad strokes with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage — calls for Ukraine to withdraw from the portions of the Donetsk region still under its control, along with three villages in the Luhansk region. In the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, the current front line would serve as a new boundary. Russia, in turn, would withdraw from occupied sections of Ukraine’s Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Sumy regions.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says both the Kremlin and the White House have told him the same thing: the war ends when Ukrainian forces leave the Donbas. Zelensky has refused, though his negotiators have floated workarounds: a demilitarized zone in the northern Donbas, or a referendum on territorial status held some months after a ceasefire. Ukraine’s stated position is that it will cede only territory that is already occupied — without formally recognizing Russian sovereignty and reserving the right to contest it in the future — in exchange for Western security guarantees, including allied troop deployments and a binding U.S. congressional commitment to defend Ukraine against future aggression.
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Competing theories on why the talks have stalled
Two schools of thought dominate the debate over why, despite converging positions, Russia and Ukraine have not reached a deal.
The first holds that one or both sides are using the negotiations as a performance to appease Trump, while actually planning to fight on, hoping the battlefield delivers a better hand before any final agreement. From this perspective, the territorial dispute is less an insurmountable obstacle than a convenient excuse. Most versions of this theory cast the Kremlin as the saboteur, though some pro-war Russian commentators reverse the argument and blame Zelensky.
The second camp, which embraces what might be called the “small victory” thesis, holds that both sides genuinely want to end the war, but only on terms they can present to their publics as a victory. Zelensky has argued that Putin’s fixation on the territorial question stems from a desire to fracture Ukrainian society through humiliating concessions. He has cited Georgia as a cautionary tale — a country that drifted back toward Russian influence after losing a brief war in 2008. The Kremlin doesn’t explicitly confirm this framing, but its insistence on linking any peace agreement to Ukrainian presidential elections suggests a similar calculation. For Moscow, a peace without the Donbas — the nominal justification for starting the war — carries its own risks of political instability at home.
Both sides appear to have accepted that their original war aims (Russia’s seizure or Finlandization of Ukraine, and Ukraine’s full territorial restoration) are unachievable. Neither has a credible path to breaking the military deadlock, and neither has shown the capacity to inflict economic damage severe enough to erode the other’s public support for the war. That shared recognition has not brought them closer to a deal — it has only clarified what each side is now fighting for: a symbolic foothold in the Donbas and the patience to outlast the other.
A military revolution that makes the war no easier to end
Since early 2024, both armies have undergone a genuine tactical transformation, driven primarily by the mass deployment of reconnaissance and strike drones, themselves a response to shell shortages that emerged during the war’s artillery-intensive early phases.
The effects have been profound. The battlefield along the front line has become, in effect, transparent: both sides can detect and strike any significant concentration of troops or equipment almost immediately. Both armies have adapted by breaking infantry down into assault teams of two to five soldiers and moving heavy equipment to the rear, using it only for supply runs or as a “one-way taxi” to deliver troops to forward positions. The result is something Russian military theorists had long written about but never actually assembled: a real-time targeting and strike network.
The tactical revolution, however, has not restored mobility to the battlefield. If anything, both sides are more entrenched than before, and neither has achieved a meaningful operational breakthrough. When Ukrainian forces crossed into the Kursk region in the summer of 2024, or when Russian forces briefly penetrated the Kharkiv region a few weeks earlier, neither advance was fast enough to encircle large enemy formations or disrupt command structures — the hallmarks of genuine maneuver warfare.
Despite the stalemate, Russian troops slowly but steadily gained ground throughout 2025. The most significant progress came along the Zaporizhzhia front and toward Pokrovsk. But as Russian forces have pushed deeper into Donetsk, the front line has shortened, allowing Ukraine to concentrate its forces. The Ukrainian military used that flexibility to slow Russian progress near Pokrovsk in the late summer of 2025 and, more recently, to push back Russian units in Zaporizhzhia.
The drone revolution has also created a new resource competition. Because AI-controlled drone swarms remain largely experimental, each drone still requires a dedicated human operator, and both armies now need tens of thousands of trained personnel to sustain their unmanned operations. Russia has responded by offering drone operators separate contracts with demobilization rights after one year — a benefit unavailable to infantry, tank crews, and artillerymen.
What the past year’s tactical transformation has produced, then, is not a more winnable war but a more punishing one — the front is more lethal, the stalemate is deeper, and decisive victory is more distant than ever. Both sides continue fighting for the same reason: the belief that the other will exhaust itself first. That calculus has sustained the war for four years. There is little reason to think the fifth will be different.