The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | December 27th, 2025: Why This Year of War Rewrote the Ukraine Playbook & Asia’s Strategic Crossroads
27 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the PDB Situation Report. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage. Well, believe it or not, this is our final situation report of 2025. My, how the year flew by. So today we're doing something a little bit different. We're stepping back to take stock of two of the most consequential regions shaping the global security picture and looking ahead to what comes next.
We'll start in Ukraine, of course, where another brutal year of war has reshaped assumptions on both sides of the battlefield. Joining us to break it all down is George Barrows from the Institute for the Study of War. Then, later in the show, we'll shift our focus out to the Far East, where strategic competition continues to intensify. We'll be joined by Steve Yates from the Herrings Foundation.
But first... This coming February will mark the fourth year of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Imagine that. Fourth year. A war that many analysts once believed would be over in days. Do you remember that? There was once a time when we thought, oh, the Kremlin's going to roll right into Kiev in days, and it's going to all be over.
But here we are, and 2025 proved to be another grinding, consequential year in the conflict. Ukraine dramatically expanded its drone campaign deep into the heart of Russia, striking targets tied to Moscow's economic infrastructure and oil industry, bringing the war closer to home for the Kremlin than at any point so far. On the battlefield, however, the front lines told a familiar story.
Russia made incremental, slow, costly territorial gains, but, again, only at an extraordinarily high cost in manpower and equipment, underscoring the brutal, almost stalemate that continues to define this war. Joining us now is George Barrows. He's the U.S. team leader at the Institute for the Study of War and a very good friend of the show. George, thank you very much. Hey, Mike.
Good to see you once again. Thanks for having me. Oh, thank you too, man. I hope you're having a fantastic holiday season. It's hard to believe that the year has flown by the way that it has, right? It just... Maybe I'm just Groundhog Day. I think every year I say the same thing, which is, wow, it's really snuck up on me, meaning the end of the year. But look, we're about to walk into 2026.
And so what I was hoping to do is to get your thoughts on the year past and where you think
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Chapter 2: What significant changes occurred in the Ukraine conflict in 2025?
this is going? I mean, what are we looking at for 2026? So, let's start with that. What are your thoughts on the developments of 2025 in relation to the Ukraine conflict? What were the big surprises from your perspective? And where do you think this is going? I know that's a really, really big playing field.
Yeah, it's good. It's a good, broad place to start. So, look, let's start with the facts. The facts for 2025 is that the Russians seized not more than 1% of Ukraine's territory. They've actually seized less than 1% of Ukraine's territory.
I suppose the crowning operational achievement of the Russians on the battlefield in the theater for all of this year was the seizure of Poprovsk, or the near seizure of Poprovsk. There's still some tactical fighting happening on its outskirts. But this is not something that the Russians achieved in the last six months or nine months. They had been working on seizing Pokrovsk since April of 2024.
So this was, you know, the 20-month campaign to advance literally 20 miles to seize Pokrovsk. Ukraine's 74th most populous town, a town of formally of 60,000 people. And that was sort of the crowning Russian achievement.
And it was the basis of that seizure that the Russians tried to convince the White House and the whole world that the front lines are collapsing, that Ukraine is on the edge of military catastrophe. And because the Russians are advancing at this very slow rate, we have to cajole them to this sort of... the ceasefire and conflict termination agreement.
But beyond all of those... Well, it seems like, George, I mean, George, it seems like Putin was fairly successful in that effort, at least initially, right? Because the White House then turned around and produced a 28-point plan that kind of took all of that into account and turned around and looked at Zelensky and Keeve and said, well, here you go.
You better take this deal because otherwise, good luck.
And then there was attached to it the deadline for, hey, sign this Ukraine by Thanksgiving or you're screwed. We successfully evaded that. And now it's sort of a sign this by Christmas or sign this by New Year's or you're screwed sort of thing. So hopefully we can avoid that. But the good news is, is that
the Russians have been very clear that they're actually not really interested in negotiating. They're not interested in making any kinds of concessions. And Putin is actually, I think, insisting that he's going to seize all of this terrain. But look, as we look at a 2026, I'd like to see you try. Because the terrain that the Russians demand, it's the most heavily fortified and guarded terrain.
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Chapter 3: How has Ukraine's drone campaign evolved during the war?
The Russians just started importing Indian migrants from India to start offsetting the labor shortage. Putin gave a speech the other day saying, oh, Russia's labor unemployment rate is so great, it's 2% or 2 point something percent. That's actually a bad thing. When you have a labor pool that's that small and that stretched. So I'd like to see the Russians try to continue this.
And I think they're desperate to try to achieve through a negotiation these concessions that they're unlikely to seize on the battlefield anytime soon.
Okay, there's a lot of questions wrapped up in all of that. But one that pops into mind is you talk about the labor rate, and we've looked at the economy here on the PDB from the perspective of it's a war machine at this point, right? That's what drives their economy. Obviously, their only external revenue stream has been oil and gas for some time, and that's been shrinking to some degree.
But if, say, for whatever reason, the war stops tomorrow, what happens to the Russian economy? I mean, because there goes the military industrial base that it's been built on for the past few years.
Yeah, I think you have a massive problem because I don't think there's enough jobs in Russia to actually accommodate all the people that would be returning to civilian life. I mean, you'd have major upsets, major shocks. The Russians actually have a term for what happened in the aftermath of the Soviet-Afghan war in the late 80s when that conflict terminated.
And we had all of these men, thousands of men, much smaller scale what's happening in Ukraine right now, by the way.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Russia's territorial gains in Ukraine?
Right. Returned from the Soviet Union. And these were people that were traumatized. They had PTSD. They didn't call it that at the time, but they had PTSD. And they actually resorted to the lives of crime. They became the mafia bosses that sort of ruled unruly Russia in the 1990s. They call this the Afghan syndrome.
It's the syndrome of these violent, unruly men who are not afraid of the use of force, coming back to domestic civilian life, but there's no opportunities for them. And they became these sort of robber barons and mafiosos and the oligarchs and all that sort of thing.
And so I think Putin is very, he understands there's a big sociological problem here connected with ending the war, which is why he doesn't want to stop the war, which is why he's actually building up the forces and streaming us all along and wasting all of our time. Because actually, in many regards, ending the war causes more regimes to build the problems than muddling along and protracting it.
Right. Yeah. Because then what have you got? Now you've lost your outside, you know, bogeyman. And I would argue Putin's always been very good at that in times of potential instability from his perspective. He's always been very good at redirecting the population's attention to some external problem. Right. That that, you know, they can then potentially rally around. Right.
Something else that I wanted to ask you about, the recent discussions that have been taking place down in Miami. So, you had the US negotiating team, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, others, talking with the Ukrainians, Umarov and some other folks who, they've been trying to hammer out a revised framework, right?
They took this 28-point peace plan, which pretty much leaned very heavily in favor of Putin, and have revised it down to reportedly 20 points, but they've been still working on it. And then at the same time in Miami, they've been speaking, the US has been separately with Russian envoys.
So, Steve Witkoff came out of that and said something that I'd like to get your take on, which is that he believes Russia is fully committed to finding peace in Ukraine. I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but he did say Russia is fully committed to peace, essentially.
Yeah. Are we going to have to prevent? I'm going to have to professionally disagree with Mr. Wyckoff here. All the available evidence indicates that the Russians are not interested in negotiating anything other than the capitulation of Ukraine. Putin gave a phenomenal speech on December 19th where he enumerated that their demands are unchanged.
They want this additional territory that they've claimed to have annexed. They're not willing to support any of the key provisions of the 28-point peace plan. It's a very Russian-preferable agreement, but There are certain provisions in there that the Russians don't like.
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Chapter 5: What strategies are being employed in U.S.-China relations as tensions rise?
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Joining me once again is George Barros, Russia team leader at the Institute for the Study of War. We've been talking all things Ukraine. We've been looking at what's been happening over the course of this past year of 2025. And we're looking forward, because it's right around the corner, we're looking forward into 2026.
George, thank you, first of all, for staying put and being willing to stick around. Going into 2026, do you have confidence? I'm trying to think of how to phrase this in an objective way. Do you have confidence that the White House, the Trump administration, will continue to support Zelensky and Ukraine?
Or do you think in the relatively near future, they're going to lose interest or get frustrated to the point of saying, okay, that's it?
Yeah. This administration is material, man. I mean, we'll go from the Ukrainians are cut off with intelligence sharing to, you know, we think they can get back all Ukraine and then maybe some more in Russia. So it also is wildly. So I'm not I'm not confident in particular. But what what I am confident of is that. The Russians are not going to end this war anytime soon.
I'm confident that they're stringing us along. And I'm confident that in order to actually have a conflict termination, you have to have a negotiating position where they're close enough as we're on here. Look, the administration at this point really isn't giving freebies to Ukraine anymore. We don't send them military aid anymore.
It's all under the rubric of sales, financed by the Europeans primarily. So at this point, it's actually a money-making adventure for the Americans. So it's not charity. The real thing is, even if the Europeans don't pay for it, would we turn off intelligence sharing, intelligence that we're already collecting ourselves for European command with the Ukrainians, which would be very bad.
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Chapter 6: How is the U.S. responding to China's military pressure on Taiwan?
He was very paranoid during the pandemic, but certainly now, there's very few people that I think actually get into him and feel empowered to give him truth, which I guess is not atypical for despots or dictators or strong men at some point. So what about, and you mentioned this earlier in the first segment, briefly, you talked about the economy.
Some of it is hyperbole when we talk about the collapse of the Russian economy, but But what is, you know, in short order, I know we could take a lot of time to talk about it, but in short order, from your perspective, the state of the Russian economy right now and its ability to just continue this through 2036.
Yeah, so the Russian economy is overheating. We have inflation. We have a labor shortage. And we have regional budgets which are in deficit. And so this is significant because The Russians embraced a strategy of recruitment that is very resource-intensive economically.
I mean, the previous strategy for getting guys to the front line was paying them huge amounts of money, huge by Russian standards, three, four times the annual salary to go fight as a sign-up bonus. And it's very interesting. Putin, I think, is starting to change that because he's facing an economic problem.
Either he's running out of liquidity or the pool of people who are willing to sign up and take a fat paycheck to go risk their lives is drying up or both things are happening. Because in October of 25, the Russians passed a new law which actually lowers the legal threshold for mobilizing reservists.
It used to be the case that in Russian law, the Russians could only mobilize reservists to go fight in expeditionary wars during an officially declared war or a state emergency or that sort of thing. But this new amendment to the law actually lowers it and says, actually, no, we can actually mobilize reservists without declaring a state of war.
And yes, they can go fight expeditionary wars, including in Ukraine, including in the parts of Ukraine we have annexed and declared actually Russian territory anyway. And these reservists are actually starting to be mobilized now.
And that's what I should really mean because it's a violation of Putin's previous social contract, which is, I don't use the monopoly of violence of the state to force you to fight, I pay you to fight. And if you die or wounded that, you took the deal. But now the deal has changed.
It's like Darth Vader to Lando in Star Wars, the Empire Strikes Back, I've altered the deal, pray I don't alter it any further. Now it's actually, you signed up to be reservists, but now we can recruit you anyways and put you in its compulsory. And I don't think there's going to be a recognition of Russia or anything like that, but this is, I think, driven by the economic issues.
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Chapter 7: What economic challenges is Russia facing due to the ongoing war?
And I think it's something worth striving for. We've certainly not given it our all to try to actually strive for it in good faith. There's a lot more that we can do. And the President Trump still has the cards on the table to do that sort of thing. But stopping it would be a good place to be. I mean, it's difficult.
Look, the Russians are currently saying we're going to take all this stuff in Ukraine, even though that we're advancing at 10 meters or less than 10 meters a day. And it took us 20 months to move 20 miles. We're going to keep doing this slog. If you change that to you're going to spend 20 months to move 20 feet. I think that becomes a much more difficult proposition.
And actually, you have a much more compelling case for a theory of victory. By the way, the big problem with this is that Ukraine is entirely dependent on international backing. I mean, there isn't a stable equilibrium right now because Putin's whole theory is, I just got to wait out this fickle alliance of Western countries.
um and in korea and japan and as soon as they lose the political will to keep doing this and see this as a sunk cost fallacy and i trick them into thinking that my victory is inevitable then i get to steve or i get to have everything um and and i think it's important that we do you think he's right do you think he's right I think he is right. I think he is right.
Because the center of gravity for the war is the international coalition. I mean, Ukraine doesn't have a state budget. They will have weapons. They'll fight. I mean, they're not going to collapse overnight. But Ukraine is so reliant on everything that the international coalition provides them. And that's not normal. I mean, that's completely normal for states that are fighting an existential war.
The United States and the American Revolution wouldn't have won the Revolutionary War against Great Britain if it were not for France, right? So, South Korea wouldn't have existed, wouldn't exist today if it were not for the United States, right? So, this is normal. And if Putin can convince us to pull away and fall back, yeah, he will mop it up.
Well, George, on that note, people are going, really? Wait a second. Aren't you going to finish on an optimistic note? Give us something in a minute or less, George. Give us something optimistic about this whole situation as we head into the new year.
Yeah, this administration, I think, is getting frustrated with being toyed with and dragged on and having their time wasted. We've seen Donald Trump, I think, actually realize when he's having his time wasted and being taken for a fool. So, look, we have cards. It's possible, I would argue, to stop Russian advances.
The Ukrainians' counterattack in Kupinsk, I hope, is a foreshadow of things to come. There are actually ways to be able to counterattack. The war is still dynamic. It's not totally stalemated. There are opportunities to roll back the Russian gains. It's just a question of how do you resource it properly? How do you set the conditions for it?
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