Hello and welcome to the final downstream of the year.

It's been a pretty intense year, starting with Donald Trump's inauguration,

culminating in high summer with Spurs winning their first trophy for 17 years,

which means I got so battered. I can't remember anything that happened. Six months either side of it, but luckily I'm joined by Aaron Bustani, whose recollection is a lot sharper than mine. I hope, I hope so, maybe not regarding Tottenham, because I wasn't, you know, that emphatic about it being a good thing. But the trophy before that was Juan de Ramos, right? League up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so. Pretty sure. That was a long time ago. It was a long time ago. So you can see why I got so battered. I mean, I was smashed, and I remember turning to my friend and, like, grabbing their face and being like, this is the best day of my life. And they were like, what about your wedding day? I was, I didn't weigh 17 years for that. It was, you can do that one again. Don't worry. You can do that one again. So I've broken up the year into themes because I thought that that would be a bit more interesting than plodding through month by month. I've not been able to do absolutely everything, but I hope that you'll agree that this is a pretty comprehensive

look at the political stories and big historical shifts that defined 2025. And so where I want to

start is war and peace. We're recording this on the 17th of December. Things can change by the time

this comes out. And at the moment, there is a ceasefire negotiation between Ukraine and Russia being

brokered by the United States. In your view, what has the biggest roadblock to a ceasefire deal been?

Has it been the security guarantees that Ukraine wants,

or wants a sort of NATO-style security guarantee?

Has it been land forfeiture?

Or is it something else?

Is it that Russia simply has no reason to agree to a ceasefire

on anything other than highly favourable terms because they've got the upper hand? Yeah, I think it's all

those things, right? I mean, Russia has a history of being embroiled in frozen conflicts and

frozen conflicts that it wants. Those range from being incredibly violent, like in Georgia, where there was a frozen

conflict as a result of a firefight in 2008.

Or you look at the exclaves it has in places like Moldova, Transnistria.

So I think this kind of ambiguous grey zone between war and peace is clearly not alien to sort of Russia's

modus operandi in terms of how it conducts foreign policy. It's also doing very well. It's winning.

Its economy hasn't really suffered. There was that initial hit. But in the last 12 to 18 months,

having a war economy hasn't really hurt it. It's not proven unpopular with Vladimir Putin.

...