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Top image credit: U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as U.S. Vice President JD Vance reacts at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 28, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
10 moments we won’t soon forget in 2025 Ukraine war politics
December 30, 2025
It has been a rollercoaster, but President Donald Trump vowed to end the war in Ukraine and spent 2025 putting his stamp on the process and shaking things up far beyond his predecessor Joe Biden. Here’s the Top 10.
Tears in Munich
We didn’t have to wait long after President Trump assumed office for one of the more bizarre moments of 2025. In closing the Munich Security Conference on February 16, outgoing Chairman, Christoph Heusgen burst into tears. Taking issue with Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech two days before, he lamented: “we have to fear that our common value base, is not that common any more.”
Vance hadn’t even mentioned Ukraine, had heaped praise on the city of Munich, and offered heartfelt prayers following the February 13 terrorist attack. His crime? Advancing the cause of democracy and free speech in Europe, which he argued was under attack, a theme explored in the new U.S. National Security Strategy. In my view, this little vignette characterizes Europe’s fragility more than its leaders’ efforts to maintain the war in Ukraine.
Dressed-down in the Oval Office
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had not previously taken criticism for his signature dress-down wartime style until asked by a reporter why he wasn’t wearing a suit in the Oval Office on February 28. The conversation sped down-hill from there with the now infamous dressing down by President Trump.
That was a pivotal moment in how this year has played out. Zelensky had previously been untouchable, calling the policy shots in D.C. and across Europe for ever increasing military and financial support for his beleaguered country. To quote from Vice President Vance’s Munich speech, it was the moment when President Trump made it clear that there was a “new sheriff in town.”
Starmer launches the coalition of the (not very) willing
Days later in London, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer hosted Zelensky and other European leaders to unveil the “coalition of the willing.” Starmer was trying to achieve the impossible: reposition himself as an interface between the U.S. and Europe after a history of his political party criticizing President Trump, and to maintain an unchanged European stance on the Ukraine War. He has failed. Starmer’s willingness to back a peace deal with British “boots on the ground and planes in the air” fell apart within weeks, when it became clear that Europe would struggle to muster 25,000 troops. The Europeans have continued to block any U.S.-led peace initiative to the point where they have increasingly been left out of the talks.
Meet me in Turkey, if you dare!
With President Trump piling on the pressure for peace talks, President Zelensky challenged President Vladimir Putin to meet him in Istanbul on 15 May for peace talks. This was pure performance, of the type we have become accustomed with Zelensky. Putin was never going to turn up for a summit with no prior talks having taken place.
True to form, he sent a negotiating team who waited around with no sign of the Ukrainians. President Erdogan pressured Zelensky to send a delegation for negotiations which finally took place on May 16. Little progress was made towards peace, beyond helpful steps for both sides to exchange dead bodies and prisoners. Further pressure would be needed from the U.S. administration to edge talks forward.
Zelensky starts to lose his luster
For the first time since the war started, July witnessed widespread protests to Zelensky’s rule after he made a failed bid to shackle independent anti-corruption bodies as they closed in on investigations of members of his inner circle. Zelensky backed down under pressure from the West, but his image has not recovered, and even the western mainstream media seems to have slowly cooled on him.
More shocking revelations of his administration's complicity in corruption would later be revealed by the New York Times. In parallel, growing concerns about manpower shortages in the Ukrainian military and the increasing use of forced conscription of young men into the army has built a sense that Zelensky is increasingly the problem, not the solution.
Who's the daddy?
Undaunted by President Trump’s increasing persistence to pursue a peace deal in Ukraine, European leaders pivoted to a new strategy: flattery. This reached peak weird on June 25 at the Hague NATO Summit, when NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte referred to the U.S. President as “daddy.”
While holding the line that Ukraine should receive unlimited financial assistance until Russia is defeated, the Europeans had hoped that by saying nice things to President Trump he might not notice that they were blocking his efforts. This then led to the moment in August in which European leaders and Zelensky, now in a sports jacket, presented themselves in the Oval Office before daddy, sour-faced and looking like "unruly schoolchildren.”
Trump brings President Putin in from the cold
The schoolchildren moment happened hot on the heels of President Trump bringing President Putin in from the cold, at the Alaska Summit for Peace on August 16. That event was pivotal in breaking the diplomatic isolation that the U.S. and European nations had imposed on Putin since the start of the war (and which, arguably, has been building since 2014).
However, it was also key in outlining the contours of the peace plan that we appear to be slowly edging towards. One in which NATO membership is finally taken off the table in return for security guarantees, where some concessions are made on territory in Ukraine.
Yermak is sacked and says he'll go to the front line (but doesn't)
The former Head of Zelensky’s Administration, Andriy Yermak, was called the second most powerful man in Ukraine. But he increasingly came to be seen as at the heart of a growing authoritarianism in Ukraine. Having resisted pressure to sack him after the July corruption protests, Zelensky was left with no choice when the corruption investigation reached Yermak’s door in November.
Having started life as a film producer, Yermak theatrically announced his plan to join the army and go to the frontline. He does not appear to have done so, but rather still holds 10 advisory and consultative positions linked to the Ukrainian leadership. His official position as Head of the Presidential Administration has yet to be filled, adding to a sense of Zelensky’s increasing domestic isolation.
Shootout in Brussels
It has been clear for some considerable time that Ukraine was bankrupt and would eventually run out of money to continue the war. Europe’s response, expropriate sovereign Russian assets and find a legally defensible way to give them to Ukraine. However, an immovable obstacle stood in the way of the European Commission’s cunning plan: Belgium. The lowlands country, led by Bart de Wever, was never going to agree to this, given the huge financial and legal risks involved. At a chaotic European Council meeting in Brussels on December 18, he stood firm under considerable pressure, forcing Europe to borrow Euro 90 billion to keep Ukraine’s finances afloat.
This now leaves European taxpayers on the hook to keep the war going (as I predicted).
Pokrovsk is slowly dying and Ukraine continues to lose territory
The Ukrainian army has fought valiantly for eighteen months to hold the heavily fortified military hub of Pokrovsk in Donetsk. The city now appears to be fully encircled, although fighting continues in the slow death of a city that Russia has prioritized capturing. The military strategic value of Pokrovsk is questioned, but its complete loss to Russia would be another political blow to the Zelensky regime that is finding it increasingly hard to shore up western support.
In any case, Ukraine continues to lose land at “one of the fastest rates since the war began.” The Russian Ambassador to London, Andrei Keilin, told me last week that Russia intends to take the whole of Donetsk by military means if Zelensky does not commit to a US-brokered peace plan. I have seen nothing to make me doubt that.
The passing of time will only make any deal that Ukraine strikes more unpalatable. As we roll into 2026, some of President Trump’s remarks to President Zelensky in the Oval office from February will jangle ever louder: “you’re not winning this.”
Others will increasingly become less likely: “you have a damn good chance of coming out okay because of us.”
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Top photo credit: Frank Schoonover illustration of Blackbeard the pirate (public domain)
Aargh! Letters of marque would unleash Blackbeard on the cartels
December 29, 2025
Just saying the words, “Letters of Marque” is to conjure the myth and romance of the pirate: Namely, that species of corsair also known as Blackbeard or Long John Silver, stalking the fabled Spanish Main, memorialized in glorious Technicolor by Robert Newton, hallooing the unwary with “Aye, me hearties!”
Perhaps it is no surprise that the legendary patois has been resurrected today in Congress. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has introduced the Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act on the Senate floor, thundering that it “will revive this historic practice to defend our shores and seize cartel assets.” If enacted into law, Congress, in accordance with Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, would license private American citizens “to employ all reasonably necessary means to seize outside the geographic boundaries of the United States and its territories the person and property of any cartel or conspirator of a cartel or cartel-linked organization."
Although still enshrined in Constitutional canon, the fact that American citizens can be empowered to make war in a wholly private capacity skirts centuries-long understanding over “the laws of war.” At best, a letter of marque is to be issued only in the circumstance of a legally issued state declaration of war. Hence, a licensed corsair or privateer is akin to a sheriff’s deputy, who even as a private armed person is sworn to abide by the order and laws of the state.
History, however, does not support this best case. The plain truth — again, over centuries — tells the story of private naval enterprise practically unfettered. These are no Old West deputies under direct command of a U.S. Marshal. These are licensed raiders, serving autonomously, as flag-waving freebooters.
A letter of marque, the King’s signature notwithstanding, is simply licensed predation at sea — and this is under the most favorable aegis, when said letter is actually granted to a private person when the nation is at war. Yet most often, for the last 700 years, a letter of marque is really no more or less legal piracy.
But why would states want to create such a legal justification for attacking rivals and competitors, pesky inconvenient minor states, or in this case, drug traffickers?
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn), who introduced his own bill in February, proudly confesses to the Washington Post that letters of marque would give “the president some constitutional power to go after the Bad Guys and not wait on Congress to give their permission.”
Here we come to our world reality — the exact same reality that has held for seven centuries — and that is this: States want to degrade their rivals, competitors, and their pesky minors without having to go to actual war. This is an ironclad rule of “international relations” that is also (forever cynically) unspoken. War continues as it has always, outside of any laws.
“Private” legions have often made private war, often at the behest of state authority, down the centuries. Think: William Walker’s Nicaraguan filibuster, the Jameson Raid on the Transvaal, the Freikorps rampaging in the Baltics, the Czech Legion’s battle across Siberia, Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, Mike Hoare’s Congo Commandos. When they do state bidding, we call such fighting bands “proxies” — whether or not they operate with an official letter. The United States has been an eager — if not a standout — puppetmaster of privateers.
Like all privateers, however, the very autonomy of these armed groups leads them into gray areas outside of state sanction, into freebooting piracy. When they leave, or are let go by their state employers, they can easily go over to the dark side. Such was the fate of many most fabled pirate captains.
Yet many others, from Elizabethan Sea Dogs to Ottoman corsairs to Dutch vrijbuiter, worked their way back into the good graces of royal court — and the law — to great honor and even greater riches.
The dirty jobs that need doing
Two takeaways for today: First, the so-called laws of war are infinitely fungible, according to the desires of the state. Second, privateers — and pirates — are only meeting the compulsive need of legal authority to find someone who will go over to the dark side of the law for its own purposes.
After the grueling Napoleonic Wars, European powers tried to more decorously regulate the laws of war. In 1856, the Declaration of Paris, in the aftermath of the Crimean War, outlawed privateering altogether. The U.S., however, refused to sign. The U.S. Navy did, however, abolish prize money for naval crews in 1899, ostensibly to discourage piratical excesses at sea.
Yet, when there are dirty jobs that need doing, and the state seeks to avoid embarrassment through plausible deniability, it will always, unfailingly, turn to a willing proxy. Although the letter of marque, resurrected, lies at present merely in the realm of “sometimes a great notion,” the assets of both Washington Imperial and Crown covert agencies are even now attacking international shipping in the Black Sea, working from the media cover that these are Ukrainian strikes.
So why go to the trouble of reviving a troublesome and long-buried marque of state piracy from bygone days? Perhaps administration boosters want to widen the scope and means of U.S. seapower in decline. Perhaps they want to “spread the wealth” when it comes to making war, so that it is not so pointedly a government-only enterprise. Maybe some believe they can clothe a dirty war in flamboyant raiment, by invoking the romance of another age.
Judging from social and old-style media alike, there are legions of vocal patriots champing and clamoring to prime the frizzen and grab a cutlass. “Unleash the Privateers!” cries one highly respected military analyst. Robert Newton fans are almost ecstatically onboard.
Perhaps this rogue gang in Congress is truly channeling the Trumpian battlecry: Make War Aargh! Again
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Top photo credit: Palestinian Mohammed Abu Halima, 43, sits in front of his tent with his children in a camp for displaced Palestinians in Gaza City, Gaza, on December 11, 2025. Matrix Images / Mohammed Qita
Four major dynamics in Gaza War that will impact 2026
December 29, 2025
Just ahead of the New Year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to visit President Donald Trump in Florida today, no doubt with a wish list for 2026. Already there have been reports that he will ask Trump to help attack Iran’s nuclear program, again.
Meanwhile, despite the media narrative, the war in Gaza is not over, and more specifically, it has not ended in a clear victory for Netanyahu’s IDF forces. Nor has the New Year brought solace to the Palestinians — at least 71,000 have been killed since October 2023. But there have been a number of important dynamics and developments in 2025 that will affect not only Netanyahu’s “asks” but the future of security in Israel and the region.
Here are four major takeaways from 2025 which will no doubt impact all sides of the conflict, including the U.S., in 2026.
Israel’s war on Gaza is continuing in all but name
Following the announcement of Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza in October, which included a ceasefire and hostage/prisoner release, the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. Israel’s apocalyptic assault on Gaza has killed at least 71,000 Palestinians, including some 20,000 children, displaced nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants, and wiped out most of its infrastructure, including more than 90 percent of its housing stock—a war that a UN Commission of Inquiry, along with a growing chorus of human rights groups and scholars, describe as a genocide.
Since the ceasefire officially went into effect on October 10, however, Israel has continued to carry out deadly airstrikes and other military operations killing more than 400 Palestinians in that time. Despite the ceasefire agreement, Israel continues to restrict humanitarian aid, including shelter materials and other essential items, so children are freezing to death. Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip has been effectively partitioned between an Israeli-controlled eastern zone and a narrow — and ever-shrinking — coastal strip where Hamas still operates and where the vast majority of Gaza’s 2 million residents are concentrated in what is now less than 40% of its territory.
Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure has also continued, including the demolition of 1,500 buildings since the start of the ceasefire. In addition to prolonging the suffering of people in Gaza, Israel’s continued attacks and ceasefire violations in Gaza threaten a wider explosion and the eventual collapse of the ceasefire itself. Netanyahu, who only reluctantly signed onto the ceasefire deal, may be trying to bait Hamas into a military response as a pretext for relaunching full-scale war on Gaza. Israel’s assassination of senior Hamas commander Raad Saad on December 13 has further shaken the already precarious truce and raised alarm bells within the administration, with Trump privately worrying that Netanyahu was derailing his peace plan.
The Trump plan risks turning the U.S. into a co-occupier of Gaza
The plan calls for the creation of an international Board of Peace (BoP) to run Gaza’s internal affairs, including future governance and reconstruction, and to be chaired by President Trump, as well as an International Stabilization Force (ISF) to oversee security in the Gaza Strip.
Palestinians, who were not consulted in the plan’s development, are afforded a more limited role in governing Gaza via a technocratic committee that reports directly to the BoP. Meanwhile, the United States and Israel have established a joint civil military coordination center (CMCC), located in southern Israel near the Gaza border, to oversee aid distribution and implementation of the ceasefire in the interim.
In addition, Trump has announced plans to appoint a two-star general to lead the ISF in Gaza. Despite Trump’s pledge not to put boots on the ground, with Americans in control of both the administrative and security arrangements in Gaza, there is a real risk of the U.S. becoming a co-occupier of Gaza alongside Israel. Such a scenario would further erode America’s international standing and could potentially subject U.S. personnel and assets to direct attacks in the region and beyond.The price for supporting Palestine went up in 2025
To be clear, Americans that publicly expressed support for Palestinians’ human rights often paid a price under Biden, from losing jobs to facing physical violence. Yet under Trump, that price rose significantly.
Mahmoud Khalil was one of several activists targeted for deportation solely due to their advocacy for Palestine. Although some have been released, Leqaa Kordia, Ya’akub Vijandre, and others remain in detention. Similar to Biden, the Trump administration has sought to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, but has intensified the resulting legal repercussions: the administration launched an Antisemitism Task Force, froze funding to universities, and carried out politically motivated “civil rights” investigations based on flimsy evidence.
A report produced by the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association on the weaponization of civil rights law to repress campus speech stated that “Palestine is less an exception to academic freedom than it is a pretext for erasing the norm altogether.” Yet free speech is more than a norm, it is a Constitutional right enshrined in the First Amendment.
Unfortunately, the administration may soon undermine other fundamental freedoms: following the decisions by Texas and Florida governors to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a terrorist group — it is a domestic U.S. Muslim civil rights organization — many fear the administration may follow suit, fundamentally attacking the freedom of association. While such efforts have begun by targeting advocates for the rights of Palestinians and Muslims, they are unlikely to end there, with implications for Americans’ most basic liberties.
And yet support for Israel continues to fall
Despite the intensified repression of pro-Palestine speech, combined with concerted efforts by Israel’s supporters to suppress information about the daily horrors inflicted on Gaza, Israel continued to hemorrhage popular support in the U.S. A majority of Americans (53%) held a negative view of Israel as of April.
A poll in August found that 60% of voters disapproved of sending additional military aid to Israel. This shift is especially dramatic on the left, where 7 in 10 Democrats said that Israel has “gone too far” in its military operations in Gaza, yet even a majority of Republicans under age 45 say they would prefer a 2028 presidential candidate who would reduce U.S. security assistance to Israel.
Notably, 39% of American Jews describe Israel’s actions as “genocide.”
Meanwhile, candidates for the 2026 midterms running for both parties have refused to take money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This reflects a split in Trump’s coalition, where many are increasingly questioning how his administration can claim the mantle of “America First” when Israel’s preferences clearly dictate U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East.
Despite their best efforts, Israel and its supporters have lost control of the narrative: soon after October 7, American billionaires coordinated with the Netanyahu government to spread pro-Israel messaging. As the carnage in Gaza continued unabated, Israel targeted journalists in an effort to staunch the flow of information. Yet even liberal darlings like Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz acknowledged that when she tries to advocate on behalf of Israel, she is “talking through a wall of dead babies.”
Efforts by billionaires like Larry Ellison to purchase TikTok and by Meta to censor information about Palestine have been unsuccessful, so far, in turning the tide of public opinion.
It seems unlikely that the shattered myth of American and Israeli interests as indistinguishable will re-emerge, at least in full, in 2026.
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