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Volodymyr Zelensky says there will almost certainly be no ceasefire in Ukraine before Christmas. This means the war is more than likely to stretch on into a fifth year to the dismay of everyone – barring, perhaps Vladimir Putin, for whom the war seems to be a means to a number of different ends.
Whatever the Russian president wants to gain immediately – prestige, territory, a pliant government in Kyiv, access to eastern Ukraine’s considerable resources – the war also appears to be fulfilling a number of Putin’s long-term foreign policy aims: it is driving a wedge between the US and Europe and exposing big divisions within Europe itself.
At present it looks as if we’re witnessing another of the diplomatic loops that have characterised much of the year as Donald Trump has tried to make good on his pledge to end the war. The latest deal is still being thrashed out between negotiators from the US, Ukraine and its European allies. But it’s far from clear that whatever the joint talks produce will receive buy-in from the US president, whose position – as we have seen all year – can change overnight depending on whom he talks to.
What’s more clear is that Putin will almost certainly reject the plan outright. How this will play in the White House is anyone’s guess. While the US president has shown that he is susceptible to the Russian leader’s blandishments, he has also displayed a short fuse when he thinks Putin isn’t taking him seriously enough.
Looking back on the year, it’s clear that – in the sphere of international relations – pretty much all roads lead back to Donald Trump. Most of the big international stories we’ve covered have featured the US president as a key player. So it makes sense to begin a review of the past year in international affairs with the return of Trump to the White House.
Donald Trump: a politician of consequence
After Trump was elected for a second term in November 2024, James Cooper of York St John University referred to the president as an “international disruptor”. Cooper predicted that Trump’s unconventional style might yield results via the “madman theory”, which holds that his unpredictability could prove to be an effective foreign policy approach. Quite how effective remains to be seen.
Read more: History will remember Donald Trump as a highly consequential president
Cooper also predicted that Ukraine and America’s Nato allies might find Trump’s foreign policy outlook a major concern. And so it has proved. The US has halted military aid to Ukraine, leaving Kyiv scrambling to secure reliable support from its European allies which – as we’ve seen, are struggling to secure the funds. And America’s Nato allies in Europe learned last month, when the US released its 2025 national security strategy, that they can no longer rely on the US for security in the way that they have in the eight decades since the end of the second world war.
The strategy makes for sobering reading if you live in Europe, writes Andrew Gawthorpe, a lecturer in history and international studies at Leiden University. The 33-page public document is harshly critical of what it sees as Europe’s weakness, saying the continent risks “civilizational erasure” thanks to migration.
Gawthorpe notes that Russia has welcomed the strategy as “largely consistent” and predicts that America’s allies in Asia and Europe may have to face the prospect that Trump may prefer to align the US in a “grand bargain” with Russia and China.
Read more: What the US national security strategy tells us about how Trump views the world
Ukraine conflict: no end in sight
Despite nearly ten months elapsing, it’s hard to forget the now-notorious White House meeting at which Trump and his vice-president, J.D. Vance, lambasted Zelensky for not being grateful for the help the US had given Ukraine. All diplomatic niceties abandoned, the Americans rounded on the Ukrainian president, accusing him of “gambling with world war three” and demanding: “You either make a deal or we are out.”
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The state of the conflict in Ukraine, December 16, 2025. Institute for the Study of War
Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko reported at the time that the real issue was Trump’s desire for US firms to exploit Ukraine’s considerable mineral reserves (many of Trump’s peace deals are also business deals, as we noted in a separate article last month).
Wolff, of the University of Birmingham, and Malyarenko, of the University of Odesa, have been contributing to our coverage of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and its geopolitical implications for more than a decade. For them, the US national security strategy was confirmation of something they have suspected for a while: that Europe will be left struggling to keep Ukraine in the fight as the continent re-arms itself in the face of the very real prospect that Putin doesn’t want to stop at Ukraine.
Read more: New US national security strategy adds to Ukraine's woes and exacerbates Europe's dilemmas
Our coverage of the Ukraine conflict has also been informed by Frank Ledwidge, formerly of UK military intelligence, now an expert in military strategy at the University of Portsmouth. Ledwidge is a regular visitor to Ukraine and in August contributed this vivid piece of reportage from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s “unbreakable” eastern capital.
Read more: Kharkiv: what I saw in Ukraine's 'unbreakable' eastern capital
The tragedy of Palestine
This was the year that many western countries came off the sidelines and formally declared their recognition of Palestinian statehood. These declarations, by the UK, France, Australia and Canada, were largely symbolic. As things stand the prospect of a two-state solution remains as remote as ever. The (very tenuous) ceasefire in Gaza has not progressed further than a cessation of the wholesale killing of Palestinian civilians in the enclave.
And as Leonie Fleischmann, an expert in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at City St Georges, University of London, reports, illegal Israeli settlements have multiplied to such an extent that they threaten to cut the West Bank in two, which – as Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich noted – “buries the idea of a Palestinian state”.
Read more: Israel's plan for massive new West Bank settlement would make a Palestinian state impossible
In Gaza meanwhile, and despite the ceasefire, the violence continues – albeit on a smaller scale, at present. Within days of the ceasefire being signed, and notwithstanding a stipulation that Hamas must disarm and disband, the militant Palestinian group was already regrouping.
Winter descends on the refugees seeking shelter in a camp in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Decmber 15. About 90% of the population of the Gaza Strip has been displaced by the comlfict. EPA/Haitham Imad
Tahani Mustafa, formerly a Palestine analyst for the international crisis group and now a lecturer in international relations at King’s College London, used her considerably range of contacts on the ground in Gaza to bring us this report.
Read more: Hamas turns to executions as it tries to establish a monopoly on force in Gaza
What 2026 may hold for the people of Gaza remains uncertain. There’s been little or no progress on establishing a framework for governance in the enclave and at present Israel’s strategy seems to be to encourage as many Gaza residents as possible to leave via the Rafah crossing into Egypt.
Whether we will see the beginnings of the realisation of the Trump blueprint for the redevelopment of much of Gaza into commercial and tourism property, sometimes called the “Trump riviera”, may become clearer next year.
Read more: Donald Trump's vision for Gaza's future: what a leaked plan tells us about US regional strategy
What is clear, though, is that whatever Israeli and its allies plan to do in Gaza, it will be critical to secure the support and cooperation of the Gulf states, without which any plan for the future of the region will be a non-starter.
Scott Lucas, a Middle East expert at the Clinton Institute, University College Dublin, has been contributing to our coverage of the region for more than a decade. As the Gaza ceasefire was announced in October, he answered our questions and underlined the vital role played by other powers in the Middle East.
Read more: Israel and Hamas agree ceasefire deal – what we know so far: expert Q&A
Civil war in Sudan
The bitter conflict in Sudan has often been eclipsed this year by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and it’s significant that it is not among the wars the US president claims to have solved in his eleven months in power. But the regular reports of wholesale slaughter of civilians, mass rape and other war crimes have been no less terrible for that.
Refugees fleeing the violence in Darfur, western Sudan. seek shelter form the sun, April 2025. EPA/Marwan Mohamed
The conflict is often reported as an ethnic clash: Arab militias from the country’s northern provinces fighting against African groups from Sudan’s west and south. But Justin Willis of Durham University and Willow Berridge of Newcastle University – both experts in the history of the Sudan conflict – believe it’s more complicated than that and has much to do with international meddling.
Read more: Why has Sudan descended into mass slaughter? The answer goes far beyond simple ethnic conflict
But when you strip away the geopolitics, as ever, it is innocent civilians who are left to bear the lion’s share of the suffering, as is clear from this harrowing report based on interviews with refugees flooding south to escape the violence.
Read more: ‘I have to talk about it so that the world can know what happened to women and girls in Sudan’ – rape and terror sparks mass migration
We’re going to take a two week break over the holiday season. The next world affairs update will be on January 8 2026. Many thanks for your support over the year.
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