Putin's Dwindling 2024 Campaign
Though the sick old man in the Kremlin is throwing in all he has, the gains unlikely justify the cost. Moscow doesn't understand how brittle the fronts can become. And the drones keep coming.
Introduction
One of the key reasons why institutions fail is an inability to adapt. This is usually rooted in a structural defect that makes leaders fail to appreciate the magnitude of a crisis until it’s too late.
Centralization of power, whether wealth, prestige, or authority, tends to accelerate and worsen disasters when they inevitably arrive. Some central coordination is needed to avoid needless conflict, but too much ultimately generates an even worse outcome.
Human institutions tend to have a lot of inertia. Regimes can last for centuries as parasites, consuming the people of their country and any other they’re able to reach. Rome was like that, and its many spiritual successors in European history were ultimately the same.
Eventually a predator runs out of easy prey. Empires always do, because eventually victims learn how to effectively resist. Internally they paper over divisions using a portion of their ill-gotten gains, but once the flow is interrupted the predatory impulse turns inward. The longer the system has gone without real reform, the more vicious the end when it comes, desperation driving a large chunk of the population to treat life like a casino, risking everything in the hope of being one of the lucky winners.
This is the likely fate of Putin’s malignant regime. The collapse probably won’t happen quickly; visible impacts are unlikely to emerge until Ukraine has halted and reversed Putin’s latest - and probably last - major offensive. Moscow is repeating the mistakes of the summer of 2022, putting itself in a situation where it will be short on troops and facing a Ukraine invigorated by new firepower.
Ukraine’s Kursk campaign is probably only the first of a series Syrskyi has planned. It is forcing Moscow to strain its reserves, terminating offensive efforts on several minor fronts and likely a few more important ones in the near future. Desperate for a win, Putin is attempting to maintain a march on Pokrovsk that puts the divisions mounting the push in a vulnerable pocket.
Meanwhile, Ukraine keeps rolling out new weapons, using them to inflict major damage on airfields and oil depots. And not just once, but repeatedly: evidence its efforts to degrade and disperse ruscist air defenses has left critical sites vulnerable.
The Black Sea Fleet is all but defeated. The last ferries over the Kerch Strait are being hunted down. Moscow’s air defense system in Crimea has been battered to the point that Moscow can hit the russian side of the Kerch Strait with relative ease.
This isn’t getting better for Moscow. It would already be a whole lot worse if Ukraine had more modern gear.
Weekly Overview - Third Week Of August, 20241
It’s been a pretty intense week in the Ukraine War, with both sides trading substantial drone and missile attacks while slugging it out on the ground. Ukraine also celebrated its 33rd Independence Day, with the frontline city of Kharkiv finally protected enough that its residents could go out into the streets in large numbers.
It took over two full years, but Ukraine finally has enough air defense systems to partially cover Kharkiv and the license to strike orc launchers shooting S-300 missiles and long-range rockets from the other side of the international border - at least with HIMARS. Plus, Ukraine has not only re-tooled the Neptun cruise missile, used to sink Moskva, to strike land targets, but it also unveiled a jet powered drone that’s basically a miniature cruise missile. Though perhaps more visible to radars than the slower propeller driven drones, the increased payload, range, and speed appears to compensate.
In fact, I suspect that I now have my answer to what has been allowing Ukraine to blow up fuel depots at airfields it has been striking. Normally buried, getting one ought to take either a fairly large warhead or one featuring a shaped charge that directs the explosive blast into a jet ahead of the impact point.
Similarly, warehouses used to store glide bombs have been annihilated, when in theory a smaller drone should have had trouble penetrating through the roof to cause secondary fires. While there’s no confirmation that Ukraine used the new Palianytsia against the ruscist air bases which took bad hits in the past couple weeks, it’s as good a candidate as a Neptun. Maybe better, as it has a longer range.
The orcs lack enough SAM systems to cover every critical target. Drones can have the same range as fancier ballistic or cruise missiles, and jet powered models can be used in conjunction with propeller driven ones coming in several waves to overload defense systems.
Ukraine now has the ability to slip through ruscist air defenses to launch not simple pinprick, but operationally devastating attacks on key air bases. This is already reportedly reducing the rate of glide bomb attacks overall, and though Moscow can and will disperse aircraft across dozens of old Soviet era airfields, their levels of protection will be even weaker. Drones will still get through.
On the other side of the coin, Ukraine’s use of F-16s has so far resulted in no known losses. While details about their operations aren’t available yet, conservative use can be expected. However, the recent loss of several MiG-29 and Su-27 jets flying close air support missions near Kursk implies a need for F-16 escorts carrying electronic jammers once enough Vipers are available.
As of a few months ago, the schedule for F-16 pilot training suggested that a second batch of pilots would be ready by the end of August, pushing numbers from 10-12 to at least 20. This should be sufficient to keep 2-4 F-16s in the air constantly, ensuring that one is airborne to respond to air threats while another can run electronic warfare support missions that might even go so far as to involve active suppression of enemy air defenses using HARM anti-radar missiles.
There’s some indication that even if Ukraine doesn’t get the most advanced AIM-120D model AMRAAM with a 180km maximum range, it might get access to the C-8, an extended range version of the older AMRAAM line that can hit targets out to 160km. It might have a smaller warhead to make room for the bigger booster, but that won’t matter - damage to an orc airframe is probably as good as a kill given limited production capabilities.
Unfortunately, there’s little prospect of Ukraine sending F-16s or any other jet deep into ruscist airspace to shoot down heavy bombers that fire big, long-range missiles into Ukraine. Even if it could, the Tu-95 bombers that just yesterday launched close to a hundred cruise missiles at Ukraine can do that over the Caspian Sea, much too far out for an F-16 to look for a fight.
The Bears (NATO designation) were part of a strike package of more than two hundred missiles and drones thrown at Ukraine in the first attack of this size in quite some time. Most were shot down, though some damage was registered to dam near Kyiv.
With Putin deliberately playing down his humiliation in Kursk, it looks like this attack was a revenge strike for Ukraine’s successful hits on targets across russia. One of these was on an oil depot in Rostov-on-Don that started a massive blaze. It’s still burning a full week later, the destruction enhanced by a second drone strike a few days later. Supposedly people across the entire district are being told to stay indoors because of the smoke - to any FSB minders who read this, that’s coming from social media posts, not my in-laws who live there now.
As Ukraine’s capabilities improve, facilities will burn. Unfortunately the ridiculously slow pace at which allied support arrives has given the orcs an opportunity to destroy about half of Ukraine’s electric power generating capacity. Aid is flowing in, but constructing a decentralized energy system on the fly by building hundreds of gas, biomass, solar, and wind plants is a challenge.
Ukraine has long been a net electricity exporter to the rest of Europe. That makes Moscow’s attacks a direct assault on the European Union as a whole, even more than the orc efforts to conduct sabotage and even assassination missions in the EU.
Ultimately, Ukraine may prove exactly how fast an energy system can be decarbonized. While I don’t write a lot about climate issues, I’ve got a stronger official background in global environmental policy than I do military affairs. The environmental movement on the whole, unfortunately, has entered another of its unserious episodes where a great deal of popular policy is in fact deeply counterproductive.
Ukraine is showing what happens when leaders feel true urgency and aren’t just faking to look good in public. This doesn’t mean they’ll make the right decisions, but at least they’ll move.
In military terms, of course, the immediate and obvious solution is to accept that there’s a fundamental difference between flying NATO missions over Ukraine to shoot down uncrewed objects and ones intended to hit ruscist jets. These no longer operate over Ukraine, meaning that it is flat-out idiotic that NATO pilots aren’t getting valuable experience sealing the airspace over Ukraine west of the Dnipro.
How NATO leaders treat Ukraine is a sign of how they’ll treat Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and probably even Poland or Romania if the orcs ever come. They’re lighting Article Five on fire every time an orc weapon could even theoretically enter NATO territory and isn’t shot down.
Moving on to ground ops, I’ve come to see it as useful to group the fronts according to their relative intensity. Kursk and Pokrovsk are the key focal points for each side’s offensive operations right now, though for very different reasons. The Toretsk, Chasiv Yar, and Vuhledar fronts are also pretty hot. Kharkiv, Kupiansk, and Siversk are all simmering, while Dnipro and the Azov areas have slowly gone quiet.
Raging Battles
Ukrainian forces in Kursk continue to engage ruscist reinforcements as they arrive in a kind of grand meeting engagement. This is an older concept from back when cavalry detachments would often rove in the space between armies and engage in unplanned clashes.
As such, observers are only getting a picture of what’s happening at a delay. With Ukrainians not keen on broadcast what they’re up to, tracking battles is a matter of interpreting the drone videos released by orc forces and sifting through blog and media reports. The former are typically more reliable than the latter.
Anyone who read my Friday update on Kursk will probably recall that last week Syrskyi released an operational map from when the fighting was about ten days old. This led to a shift in the area marked as under partial Ukrainian control on open source maps that looks like a reduction in territory, but masks that there’s a zone about 15km deep beyond Ukraine’s known positions where small groups operate.
Not much movement has been detected over the weekend, with both sides mounting local attacks and counterattacks. I get the distinct sense that after expanding the perimeter aggressively for the first two weeks Ukraine intends to destroy and degrade ruscist forces on the flanks for one or two more before moving to secure any larger chunks of territory, aside from the south bank of the Seim, not mostly isolated.
Ultimately an expansion west to Rylsk appears ideal, however this will depend on how strong the orc defense becomes on the western flank of Free Kursk. Ukraine’s best bet for developing the Kursk campaign beyond that is likely to establish a good defensive perimeter then begin expanding the buffer zone towards Kharkiv. The more Moscow is forced to commit troops to holding the border away from Donbas, the better.
In theory this allows Moscow to commit conscripts instead of contract soldiers, allowing it to effectively increase troop levels in the fight without having to mobilize. The performance of conscripts so far implies that this would be a grave mistake, as the contract pool almost certainly requires a steady supply of conscripts finishing their mandatory service period. Those without clear prospects can be pressured into signing a contract.
Start losing thousands of conscripts and, aside from what angry russian mothers might do, good luck sustaining six hundred thousand billets in occupied Ukraine and covering the border. Ukraine can always withdraw from Kursk and find a new weak spot.
On the surface, the situation in Kursk would seem to offer a stark contrast to what’s been happening in Pokrovsk. On this front, a group of Ukrainian brigades that have been fighting hard all year near Avdiivka have fallen back to the next natural defense line on the path to the town.
The latest critique of Ukraine’s Kursk campaign by the usual suspects in the expert community is fixating on the fact that Ukraine’s push into Kursk appears to be slowing while the orc advance to Pokrovsk continues. This claim overlooks geography: in Kursk Ukraine moved quickly to seize defensible areas around Sudzha without overstretching their supply lines. In Pokrovsk the terrain favors a stout defense along a ridge situated just a few kilometers to the east along a line of small towns.
Further, the Kursk incursion area isn’t big enough to draw away all of Moscow’s forces from Ukraine. Moscow has enough bodies to maintain at least some offensive efforts in Donbas provided that it curtails operations on other fronts. It would actually be worse for Ukraine if Putin ordered his troops to go on the defensive everywhere except Kursk, because the longer term strategic goal of invading Kursk is to thin orc lines in other parts of occupied Ukraine than the ones Putin has fixated on.
Over the past week Moscow’s push towards Pokrovsk has slowed; not only that, but orc generals appeared to believe that they could catch 68th Jager and 25th Airborne in a trap east of the Vovcha by pushing due south from Prohres. This failed, and though the brigades have pulled back, they did so in good order and took up newlines.
The going should get tougher for Moscow as time passes. Though they keep throwing in fresh formations, the orc generals advancing in Pokrovsk are losing a huge number of people and opening themselves up to a nasty counterattack. I still evaluate the Ukrainian plan as intending to pull the orcs close to Pokrovsk before smashing their outstretched arm - for the first time in a long while Moscow is risking the creation of an exposed salient where it previously carefully worked around the flanks of a target.
Something I consider highly suspicious is the lack of substantial reinforcements appearing in Pokrovsk to date. Ukraine almost certainly didn’t commit everything it has to the Kursk incursion.
I could always be wrong, but my sense is that phase two of Ukraine’s 2024 counteroffensive will catch the orcs off balance again. Regardless, actually taking Pokrovsk in 2024 is very likely beyond Moscow’s capabilities, and making the attempt should prime Putin’s forces for collapse.
Intense Grinds
The Toretsk offensive on the whole has been following the standard orc model. After launching an intensive and costly pincer strike, on one flank deliberately targeting a brigade that had recently rotated in and didn’t know the terrain, Moscow pushed into Niu-York, Pivniche, and Zalizhne. After slowly pushing Ukrainian forces back, advance elements are attempting to enter Toretsk itself, but are finding it slow going.
Ukraine can still send supplies into Toretsk with ease. Ukrainian troops hold plenty of good defensive positions and unlike the fight in Avdiivka aren’t yet threatened from the flanks. It looks like Moscow will have to dedicate a lot of time and firepower yet to create a true crisis on this front.
This situation is why I expected Moscow to move north from Avdiivka after Ukrainian troops were forced back across the Vovcha instead of west. Along with a successful strike through or south of Chasiv Yar, this would give Moscow a chance to encircle Toretsk and even the larger Kramatorsk. Instead, Moscow is spreading its efforts thin, and the glide bombs required to demolish fortifications are in high demand.
Speaking of Chasiv Yar, it looks to be the first victim of constrained resources as a result of Ukraine’s operations in Kursk. Moscow has maintained a steady rate of attacks over the canal, but hasn’t secured a bridgehead. With regular troops previously allocated to this front confirmed to be moving to Kursk, Moscow’s entire effort to push west from Bakhmut seems to be stalled.
If this situation holds, a couple Ukrainian brigades can hopefully shift from here to Toretsk or Pokrovsk. Or there might be some potential for a local counteroffensive north of Bakhmut.
However, Moscow could also be getting ready for one last lunge in conjunction with the attempt to storm Toretsk. This could force Ukraine to fight for Kostiantynivka early next year, if Moscow’s resource burn isn’t as bad as it seems or Putin pulls the trigger on a broader mobilization. Not much of a victory in strategic terms.
Down along the Vuhledar-Hiorhiivka line Moscow is still creeping west one field at a time. I’d almost call this one of the slow burn fronts except for the long term importance of the area as a staging ground for the liberation of Mariupol. This is probably why Ukraine keeps several top notch brigades here.
Assuming that component battalions frequently rotate into the reserve, there are advantages to keeping brigades in one place for months or years at a time. Command staff and personnel alike become intimately familiar with the terrain, for one. If Moscow pulls reserves to Kursk and Ukraine manages another surprise, a collapse of ruscist forces between Vuhledar and Velyka Novosilka is possible. If the Kursk incursion were repeated here, Moscow’s rail logistics network west of Mariupol would be crippled.
Slow Burns
Speaking of unexpected Ukrainian counterattacks, Third Assault broke cover this past week to reveal that it had punched a couple kilometers into enemy lines between Kupiansk and Lyman. This is on the southern flank of the ruscist push towards Kupiansk, north of the thwarted effort to reach Torske and Terny near Lyman that has been stalled all year.
In this operation they saw a local weakness and took advantage, alleviating pressure on the brigades holding Third Assault’s flanks. It’s a testament to the confidence and competence of the unit. Now imagine them with Leopard 2A6 tanks, CV-90 IFVs, and Stryker APCs. Moscow has been attacking towards the rail line heading south from Kupiansk along the Oskil, but just as the effort was starting to make a bit of progress near Pischane reserves were sent to Kursk. Third Assault may have more punches to throw.
The Kharkiv front encompassing Lyptsi and Vovchansk has likewise been far from quiet, but the intensity of the fighting has lessened somewhat with first Ukrainian and then ruscist reserves moving to Kursk. After doing an excellent job of giving the impression that 80th Air Assault was spearheading the push into Kursk for the first week to ten days, 82nd Air Assault Brigade began publishing footage confirming that it has been in the vanguard the entire time. Equipped with Challenger 2 tanks, Marder IFVs, and Stryker APCs, it’s notable how few of these have been lost - one Challenger (out of 13), several Marders (of 30+) and a few Strykers (out of up to 90) is all that has been confirmed - and the orcs love to brag about killing NATO gear. The 82nd appears to have contributed a quarter of the battalions fighting Kursk, not counting separate attached battalions.
Its presence is notable not only because it’s one of Ukraine’s premier units but because it had been one of the first to respond to the assault on Kharkiv. It looks an awful lot like Kharkiv was a trap all along. Not certain how hard Moscow would try to hit, Ukraine made sure that there were elements of four brigades in reserve and ready to respond. Once it was clear that Moscow wasn’t planning a grand flanking maneuver between Kharkiv and Sumy, only aiming to reclaim what it lost in the fall of 2022, Ukraine was free to hit Kursk after pretending to be setting up for a counterattack in Kharkiv.
What happens next in Kharkiv is unclear; Ukraine still has at least four to six brigades covering the sector, and they might launch a counterattack soon. Some efforts towards this end appear to be underway near Lyptsi, with mixed results. The entire front could even go quiet until the Kursk situation is resolved.
The third slow grind, Siversk, features a steady trickle of orc attacks against Ukrainian positions in a long arc. Neither side is committing much combat power here, particularly not Ukraine.
For a while Moscow was justifiably concerned about a Ukrainian flanking attack from the north against Bakhmut, but this never materialized. With substantial fortifications built as a hedge against this, the front here looks unlikely to shift quickly.
Going Quiet
The Dnipro front hasn’t been very active after a slow decline in ruscist attacks on the Ukrainian footholds on the south bank of the river. A couple weeks ago, at the same time the Kursk operation was getting underway, Ukraine’s intelligence directorate under Budanov released a glitzy video showing footage from a raid on the Tendra Spit, which just out into the Black Sea beyond the mouth of the Dnipro.
Some sources indicate the op ran into trouble and suffered losses, others say it destroyed a bunch of equipment and troops. Both are likely true. Whatever the case, the raid looks more like a distraction from Kursk than a prelude to a major crossing of the Dnipro. In fact, most of the front from Kherson all the way to Vuhledar, what I tend to refer to as the Azov front despite it being split into a number of distinct sections, seems to be going mostly dormant. For now.
Ukraine Waxes As Moscow Wanes2
Muscovite efforts over the past year have been intensive but lacking strategic coherence. For a while I thought this was a sign of a desire to stretch Ukrainian forces out as much as possible. Now, my view has slightly changed.
After spending most of the first year of his failed super-coup personally micromanaging military affairs down to the company level, Putin seems to have stepped back after losing Kharkiv. Making Surovikin head of the war effort was his smartest move to date, the general relying on Moscow’s traditional competence with military engineering to construct fortifications right where Ukraine most wanted to strike.
He lost his job because there was no choice but to abandon the bridgehead on the north bank of the Dnipro in Kherson, but Putin hated losing the single district capital his orcs had seized. This save his war in 2023, shortening a front line that Moscow lacked the troops to staff even when mobilization finally got into gear. But after Wagner’s brief rebellion, which Surovikin became associated with, he was out of favor.
Putin did not return to personally managing operations, however, apparently aware of how dangerous this was for his reputation. He quite clearly had also lost faith in the professional army, and naturally wary of allowing any general from gaining a following, he effectively franchised the war out to a collective.
Instead of a single strategic paradigm governing all orc operations, instead each major military command does it’s own thing. They all go to Putin’s regime, hat in hand, begging for resources to achieve objectives in their area. Instead of their efforts being additive, they wind up competing, and everyone lies about what they can accomplish. This only makes the already chronic issue with everyone hoarding information worse.
The irony of Putin’s position is that for all his apparent power he is largely in fetters. A truly secure, effective tsar of the caliber of Catherine, Peter, or even Stalin would have long ago halted major operations and proclaimed victory, as Stalin did against Finland. But Putin is in his late seventies running a country where most men die in their sixties. Only by dangling hope of victory in front of leading regime members can he put off a reckoning.
Putin is the head of a militarized bureaucracy organized for the purpose of extracting wealth from russians lower on ladder. Switched on, all it can do is fulfill its machine purpose: send soldiers to die and empty Soviet warehouses while insisting that it can somehow wave a wand and undo all the damage.
Senior officers in this franchise know their business is not victory, but utilizing resources in such a way that their bosses are compelled to supply more. Eventually the music stops and a few squabble over chairs to stay in the game, but everyone can live day to day hoping their turn in the pit won’t come for a while.
This franchise model explains why ruscist operations at a large scale are so robotic and disconnected. Individual franchises can become quite effective in their own way, but lessons are rarely ported over to their peers. That’s how Moscow can seem to execute an effective offensive towards Pokrovsk while utterly failing the same in Chasiv Yar.
Syrskyi having trained in the Soviet system is probably a major advantage for Ukraine. Someone who is intimately familiar with the weaknesses in a construct is often ideally placed to tear it apart. There’s a reason that people with PhDs generally receive my work in one of two ways: broad appreciation or overt hostility.
Overall, Ukraine under Syrskyi appears to be effecting a rough if somewhat ruthless balance of centralized command and decentralized execution that doesn’t degenerate into franchise fratricide. What’s very telling to me is that he began an offensive in August of 2024, a full month before even I was suggesting that Ukraine would make a move and most everyone else was saying nothing could happen before 2025.
This represents just about the earliest possible date, given a highly abbreviated two month training cycle, that Ukrainians mobilized in late May could begin to enter front line units. The reason is not that they were needed in Kursk, but the deployment of Ukraine’s standing operational reserve to this fight demanded that another set of brigades move up the deployment roster.
In thinking about how much combat power Ukraine actually has and what it might do with it, keep in mind that Ukraine can’t afford to go without both operational and strategic reserves. In addition to every front having its own reserve, a brigade or two only sent to fight in a crisis, Ukraine will maintain a broader operational reserve consisting of brigades that are ready for action or very close to it.
Most of Ukraine’s brigades are deployed along the contact line for more than a year straight. They can only manage this by conducting their own internal rotation that keeps a quarter to a third of their strength held back from the front line, well out of range of regular shelling. After a few months of fighting, elements of frontline battalions that have been exhausted rotate back to this reserve to recuperate before heading out again. This doesn’t always happen, unfortunately, just as some units appear to be receiving new soldiers who aren’t adequately prepared for frontline combat.
When carefully managed, Ukraine has been able to keep brigades working like this for upwards of two years in some sectors. 47th Mechanized has been fighting constantly since June of 2023 when it was blooded on the Orihiv front, moving to Avdiivka after only a brief break.
But no brigade can sustain this indefinitely without becoming an administrative shell for managing independent battalions. So at some point they’ve got to be pulled from the line and put into a recovery state where they aren’t available for use at any level.
This forms a strategic reserve - a group of forces preparing to fight and that could theoretically go to battle in an emergency if given enough fresh trainees to handle the brunt of the fighting. It was strategic reserves along with Ukrainian Territorial Guard fighters that saved Kyiv an Odesa in 2022 while the bulk of the armed forces were holding the line in Donbas.
After a few months in the strategic reserve a formation is ready to move into the operational reserve - a status where it can be quickly committed with full confidence in its fighting strength. After taking on new recruits, time and care has been taken to integrate them into a team. You’re fostering base level individual connections that enable squad, platoon, and company sized elements to play their part in an operation while understanding enough about what must be achieved to adapt to altered circumstances.
Based on comments made this year by Ukrainian authorities and a review of Project Owl OSINT’s Ukraine Control map, which helpfully tracks confirmed brigade locations as far as their presence on a given front, I suspect that Ukraine has 6-8 brigades in the strategic and operational reserves at any given time. When Ukraine committed a force of approximately this size to Kharkiv and then Kursk, that represented it committing one operational reserve and establishing another.
A few months ago Zelensky stated that fourteen brigades were waiting on gear. Recent reporting in the US suggests that Ukraine went from mobilizing 10,000 personnel a month to 30,000 in June and July. With a brigade having 5-6,000 staff in total, portion of these being veterans, Ukraine should have the ability to maintain the brigades it presently has and field four to five additional ones each month through September, the bulk-up completing in November.
This, Syrskyi’s aggressiveness, the logic of moving early in general, and the steady drain on Moscow’s resources all point to the Kursk Campaign being the first operation in a series. The strategic goal is to overwhelm Moscow’s capacity to replenish its frontline forces, causing a cascade failure along the line as it struggles to plug gaps small and large.
I expect that the second blow will fall by the middle of September. One of Ukraine’s tougher brigades, 21st Mechanized, was at last known to be active near Terny, south of where Third Assault is now, way back in April. While it’s possible the brigade could have been split up or just not posting footage, its combat record certainly doesn’t make that look probable.
Further, none of the CV-90s it was known to use has been confirmed as destroyed by Oryx in many months - in fact, of all the IFV models Ukraine has received, it’s suffered the fewest known losses. Though this brigade chopped a company of allotted Leopard 2A6 tanks to the 47th during the fighting on the Orihiv front in 2023, where a large number were damaged or destroyed, overall only a quarter of the most modern Leopard variants given to Ukraine have been destroyed, many or most of the other dozen that suffered damage likely repaired.
The surviving 2A6 Leopards were supposedly given back to the 21st. None of these or the Swedish versions of the 2A5 confirmed in action with the 21st have been reported lost in some time, just like the CV-90s. I suspect that this brigade is in the operational reserve right now, ready to fight, because 82nd Air Assault did the same thing before appearing near Kharkiv last May: went mostly off the radar for months, then came roaring into battle.
Having left the Krynky bridgehead, leaving one Marine Brigade to actively contest other positions across the Dnipro while another moved first to Kharkiv and then Kursk, near Glushkovo, another pair of Marine Brigades should be prepping for a new deployment. Often taking on the same role as Air Assault brigades, take a pair of Marine formations, add in a veteran Mechanized outfit like the 21st and a newer one with Leopard 1A5s like the 44th, and you have the core of another operational reserve.
My expectation is that all fourteen of the brigades Zelensky said were waiting on equipment are new: there are at least eight to ten brigades that have been formed but lack open source data on equipment or deployments. Sometimes details get lost in translation, so I wouldn’t be surprised if fourteen is the planned end state for this wave, counting everyone that Ukraine hopes to draft and train this summer and fall. I expect to see these brigades slowly appear on the front line to replace brigades worn out and needing to move into the strategic reserve.
I expect that over the coming months we’ll see progressive pulses of activity as each new operational reserve forms and is committed to a front. What Ukraine ultimately sent into Kursk was what was deployed to handle Kharkiv, and a new echelon of brigades should be set to pick a fight with the orcs in mid September.
In early November the process will repeat, weather permitting - but it was a dry spring, so if fall is the same the mud may not be crippling until December, especially farther south. By then Ukraine will probably stop growing its force and turn to sustaining what it has, having gained the ability to keep a solid 20% of its fighting strength in the reserves. Proper rotations can begin, and Ukraine might even consider demobilizing the weariest soldiers three years after the start of the all-out phase of the war.
Syrkyi’s offensive was remarkably conventional, a textbook case in how to make combined arms work. This is going to happen again, and again. Just as Moscow can’t stop Ukraine’s drone raids, it also won’t be able to prevent the destruction of several brigades at a time in limited thrusts coming one after another, forcing Moscow to shuffle reserves until there simply aren’t any.
The process will be a whole lot smoother if brigades actually get the modern gear they need. The Biden Administration is stubbornly pretending that it’s doing all it can for Ukraine, though. And I don’t see that changing, because the USA has its own idiot bureaucracy, just like Putin’s russia.
Geostrategic Developments3
Hezbollah’s retaliation for Israel killing a senior commander and several civilians in Beirut a few weeks ago finally came, and it was mercifully symbolic. Even better, Iran didn’t join in. Now another US carrier group is in the region, giving Iran a perfect excuse to be deterred from an overt strike that might let Netanyahu drag the USA into a war with Iran. Iran just needs to pump out a few nukes in case Trump is president again, and Tehran is good to go.
The horrible geopolitical dance in this region has never been so ridiculous as it is today. Innocent people in Palestine and Israel are bones caught in the middle of a pack of feral dogs fighting to demonstrate they aren’t to be trifled with. Every regime, including America’s, outright lies to their population about the nature of the conflicts that roil the cursed region.
All of them are pretending to protect their people against scary bloodthirsty enemies who will stop at nothing to do evil, terrible things. This claim appears justified whenever a psycho does something awful, leading to years of violence without purpose save demonstrating the ability to inflict more of the same. Yet each and every regime is actively colluding with all the others to maintain a delicate balance of terror where everyone is constantly at war on some level but never willing to fight to the end.
Middle East conflicts have nothing to do with religious belief. It’s a neo-feudal post-colonial system that exists to perpetrate a cozy relationship between rich people in developed countries and oil sheiks that keeps energy prices - and thus the world economy - relatively stable. The world is addicted to oil, even if the good stuff is running out. That gives those with an ability to influence the price great power.
Every country does what it can to keep the bomb that is the Middle East from exploding. Avowed freedom-loving democracies like the USA intervened in countless ways to subvert the democratic Arab Spring uprisings a decade ago because leaders feared the consequences of a pan-Islamic political movement. Israel is terrified of the regimes that claim to hate it falling apart because if a united hostile entity ever formed, Tel Aviv would be unable to treat the Palestinians as it does.
Hamas transformed Gaza into a gigantic suicide bomb because Hamas was hitting a dead end, not structured to efficiently govern anything. Now it will persist forever as a resistance group thanks to Israel’s campaign of collective punishment against the people of Gaza. The terrible game can carry on until the next tragic explosion.
Naturally, no one in power seems to care about the Palestinians enduring pretty much exactly what the Jewish ghettos of Poland did under Nazi rule. While the world looks on and America’s Democratic Party mumbles about the need for an immediate ceasefire while shaming protestors into silence, Never Again has never proven so meaningless. So it will remain, until an independent international security force exists. Want to fund that, Melinda Gates? I’ve got plans.
Despite the grand spectacle of the Democratic National Convention, there is little worthy of note in the past week of American politics. Ukraine will receive no reliable promises - neither campaign even much wants or needs to talk about policy, because that’s now implicit in the partisan framework.
Biden naturally attempted to claim credit for Ukraine still existing even though he absolutely abandoned it the way he also did every American ally in Kabul. Trump has no idea how to stop the war or desire to; he isn’t even tough or decisive enough to dump that fake-patriot loser Vance and make Haley his VP even though that would completely upend the Democrats’ entire narrative.
The best evidence puts Harris behind where Biden and Clinton were at this point in 2020 and 2016. This is bad for her, because a Democrat’s peak polls usually coincide with their convention. Now, polling outfits might have finally corrected the bias that threw off their predictions about how close it would be, though some recent work I’ve read suggests otherwise. But at the national level the polls were never as far off as the critical state level ones anyway, the latter being trickier to do right.
Applying the handicaps that would have corrected the 2016 and 2020 polls, right now Harris-Walz stands to narrowly lose. If the standard slippage in presidential elections as November approaches holds, they’re in deep trouble. And even if the polls are dead on, they’re only drawing even.
Which is why the party’s messaging approach so far is dangerous. They’re attempting to appeal to literally everyone they possibly can, but with a catch: behind all the joy and dancing is a party that has, like its opponent, become a kind of aspirational religious order. There are rules about what you’re allowed to express and how - and I don’t mean identity stuff. Toxic positivity is quintessentially American, a common form of bullying used by people who are afraid of math to elevate feelings and aesthetics over empirical evidence. Dems are building a campaign around it.
It’s important, as a party, to be inviting. But people spot insincerity from a mile off, and that basically defines the modern day Democrat. They’ve become a secular church that hides the details of membership in fine print and fluffy speech. The appeal is limited.
As charged as American life is nowadays, most people’s minds are already made up anyway - and over a third won’t even turn out in November. The Dems have to convince millions of people who no longer trust the system and don’t actually feel like the economy is all that great to set aside their doubt and embrace joy without substance.
Unless the convention was the end of pandering to the party and Harris-Walz take a very serious turn in the coming weeks, this isn’t likely to end well. Trump will almost certainly contest a close election using the court system. The partisan Supreme Court could easily use allegations of state level voting rules somehow disenfranchising voters elsewhere to throw out whole slates of electors, sending the election to Congress, where Republicans will probably hold the balance of power.
That means the Democrats have to win by more than the skin on their teeth, like Biden did in 2020. That was no landslide, but a near-disaster exactly as I predicted. And whatever the outcome, half of Americans are primed to reject it as illegitimate.
No matter what, good luck passing any legislation going forward. This is why it’s so urgent that the Biden Administration get off its rear end and move on Ukraine aid before it’s too late.
Conclusion
To sum up the past week in the nascent Third World War: Putin’s war machine is starting to chug while Ukraine’s is gaining strength. The Kursk campaign continues, and fronts elsewhere are starting to get a bit quieter.
But that seems set to change. And soon. We’ll see.
Parting note - as Monday is a holiday, my next post may come on either Friday or the following Tuesday, depending on whether Kursk deserves another dedicated update. Take care and thanks for reading!
Overview
Science
Geopolitics