As part of the projects OutRush and Russia’s Antiwar Commons, sociologist Margarita Zavadskaya and colleagues have studied how the moods of new Russian emigrants, along with their political views and perceptions of their host countries, have changed over the course of the war. In this article, she recaps where emigrants are mentally as 2025 starts – for many, it is the fourth year away from home.

Journalist Tatiana Rybakova spoke with experts about the situation in the breakaway state of Transnistria, which has been left in the cold after Ukraine ended Russian gas transit. The local population blames the Moldovan leadership but believes that the crisis will be resolved shortly.

Yuri Danilov returns to the polemic surrounding the report “Dictator’s reliable rear: Russian economy at the time of war” (see Russia.Post about it here), whose authors Sergey Aleksashenko, Vladislav Inozemtsev and Dmitry Nekrasov draw conclusions about the stability of the Russian economy.

Mikhail Krutikhin writes that Ukraine’s closure of the Gazprom pipeline is the penultimate step towards the complete liberation of European countries from Gazprom, a supplier that has turned natural gas into an instrument of political pressure and blackmail.

Political scientist Nikolay Mitrokhin writes about how in 2024, Russia managed to turn the tide of war in the land theater in its favor and capture the largest amount of Ukrainian territory since 2022, and also considers possible scenarios for how events will unfold in the near future.