Ukraine's Summer Counteroffensive: Ominous Rumblings
Shifting winds on the information war front hint at a shift in Ukrainian posture. Scaling up drone operations to adequately cover every kilometer of the front in Ukraine fast is key to what comes now.
The thirtieth week of 2025 is a wrap, and early signals suggest a major Ukrainian punch winding up. By the end of September, if it’s really happening, it’ll be well underway.
While it’s very unwise to place too much stock in anything Trump says, a marked shift in his tone on Putin of late strongly suggests that Trump is trying to get on the right side of imminent events. Above all else, he hates to be associated with a loser. So it’s significant that he has finally moved to adopt the ready-made argument that Putin is only stringing everyone along with talk of wanting peace.
This weekend he unexpectedly truncated his former fifty-day deadline for Putin to commit to peace talks for real to just twelve. His advisers, namely Kellogg, fresh back from Ukraine, must be warning that events could unfold much more quickly than expected.
For the first hundred days of Trump’s term, he threw red meat to every supporter who ever wanted to see their most-hated “liberal” institution get punched in the face. It’s been increasingly apparent through summer that this was done in the hope of turning a few of them out in the midterm cycle, which a large chunk of Trump voters will sit out because he’s not personally on the ballot. Promises “kept” Trump can shift to making all the people who called him a fascist in 2024 look like unpatriotic progressive wackjobs.
This is how the game of appealing to multiple audiences with conflicting interests but a common cultural enemy is played. So: in the very same week Team Trump claimed that Obama was a traitor who pushed the russiagate thing to meddle in the 2016 election, he also starts talking tough on Putin. He’s not subtle by any means, but he doesn’t have to be, not when the USA is a gigantic consumerist megachurch where refusal to pick a team is the biggest sin of all. Once you activate a certain American demographic with words like Obama, Hillary, immigrant, or russiagate, rational thought ceases. Team Blue partisans have their own equivalent triggers. It’s all participatory theater, just like politicians only just now realizing that Israel is starving people to death in Gaza, after images started emerging that made more people feel like they should care.
It bears repeating: Trump isn’t really shifting his Ukraine policy, just how he talks about it. This along with chunks of the media now shifting back towards portraying Ukraine as having a chance again, strongly implies big move being prepped.
A perhaps inevitable knock-on effect is the media outlets that cater primarily to a Team Blue audience shifting their own coverage of Ukraine. After being adopted as a hero figure by the American left out of a misplaced sense that Ukraine represented a vulnerability for Trump, now that the orange one isn’t openly selling Zelensky out as so many pundits predicted, the latter is due for the treatment heroes always receive in the postmodern narrative arc, powered as it is by a warped version of the stale hero journey cycle template beloved by inept American English teachers.
This is what the vast majority of English-language media coverage of those large Ukrainian protests against a controversial law recently passed by the government really comes down to. More or less, going by the tone and thrust of what felt like a few thousand simultaneous op-eds this week, everyone is to believe that Zelensky has suddenly gone over to the dark side, revealing himself as a corrupt authoritarian using the war to entrench his power.
Yeah, and Kyiv would fall in three days, the rest of Ukraine meekly surrendering soon after. There’s always a deeper story than the news is willing to tell.
I’ll spend the first portion of this week’s geopolitics brief discussing the core forces at play. To be clear: corruption is a serious problem in Ukraine, and Zelensky is in an incredibly awkward position right now. But there are important details being left out of the emerging narrative that certain groups, that have always been using Ukraine’s fight to advance their own interests, are now pushing in what looks a lot like the prelude to an attempted astroturf color revolution. Small wonder Muscovite propaganda is advancing this case, naturally distorting it to claim a kind of palace coup is planned.
It isn’t just the Vance-Musk neo-right that has always had it in for Ukraine. Since mid-2022, quiet pressure has been building across the American center-left, which is culturally uncomfortable with military affairs as it stands. This shadow movement seeks to cast the Ukraine War as a sad terrible thing that’s nevertheless not really our concern any more than the rampage of the latest warlord to pop up somewhere in Africa. That makes Ukraine just one more cause.
In the churn of activist causes seeking attention, which to them is money, Ukraine’s turn was up about six months after Putin’s all-out invasion began. After that, Ukraine’s one job in the eyes of most was to do nothing that might embarrass poor grandpa Joe, because everything in some way feeds back into partisan politics.
Interests are powerful material forces. And because agents in a system have a standing incentive to confuse others about their true objectives, evaluating them using a systems-based approach is pretty much mandatory if you want reliable results. Time-dependent trends in behavior are what you’ve got to focus on, using these to infer the dependencies provoking action.
It’s not all that different on the battlefield, which is where this post will now turn. The situation on most fronts this past week has been stable or improving, Pokrovsk being the main exception. Ukrainian sources formally confirmed that one of several villages in Sumy seized by the orcs this summer has been fully liberated, with hundreds of orcs killed or captured in the process.
The impression overall is of a severe tactical defeat inflicted on the Muscovite invaders with potential operational significance. Drones, as always, were heavily involved, though the Ukrainians appear to have taken advantage of bad weather to move teams forward. This local counteroffensive, as well as drone-only assaults like the recent one in Third Assault Brigade’s sector that ended in orcs taken captive by remote, serve as beta tests of Ukraine’s emerging drone doctrine before it gets fully codified into practice across ever front.
Add up:
Signs of exhaustion even among supposedly elite orc troops;
Ukraine’s ability to hunt Muscovite logistics elements hundreds of kilometers behind the front;
Effective parity in airpower, neither side able to control the skies near the front line;
Soviet-era stocks of armored vehicles depleted below critical levels, requiring reliance on improvised civilian models;
A strong push by European partners to rush support without everyone specifying in advance down to the line item level what they’ll send;
Much improved Ukrainian battlefield coordination and better organization of forces all around;
Then throw in a self-promoting narcissist like Trump who invested a lot of capital on treating Ukraine like dirt only to suddenly pivot a full 180 degrees, right when the media was content to portray Moscow’s forward grind as a fact of life. Yes, he needs to appeal to classic Republican voters who will make or break the latter half of Trump’s last (legal) term, but Trump wouldn’t bother with that right now if Ukraine was truly doomed.
Something is simmering in Kyiv, and I doubt it’s just borscht. The evidence is indirect and circumstantial - but that’s as it should be ahead of a series of operations that one would hope come as a shock to the enemy.We’ll soon see if my forecast is correct. And the Pokrovsk front in particular looks set to test my general theory about the main thrust of Ukrainian operational planning over the past year.
Overview of the Fronts: Week 30
Ukrainian forces have stopped the orcs pretty much cold on nearly every front this past week. That’s another thousand or so orc assaults mostly ending in disaster. Pokrovsk and Kupiansk are the main exceptions, though in neither case did Moscow register substantial gains. Just more creeping progress at extreme cost - seven thousand additional confirmed casualties, a very high proportion fatalities.
And up on the Sumy front, the orcs look to have repeated the mistakes of the Kharkiv offensive in 2024. After marching a few kilometers into a planned killzone, the Ukrainians checked their advance and turned the area into a death trap. Local counterattacks now threaten to unravel all orc gains.
Moscow continues to apply immense pressure on Ukrainian troops at many points, but is nowhere able to threaten a true breakthrough. Pokrovsk is again Ukraine’s biggest concern, but if Sumy offers a taste of what’s to come, Putin risks a serious setback here as well. One even more crippling, given the cost in blood and treasure to get to Pokrovsk from Avdiivka. Though for Ukraine to avoid a serious defeat of its own, at least a local counteroffensive will be required and soon.
It’s a roughly half-hour peacetime drive between Avdiivka and Pokrovsk. I doubt that anyone who lived there before the war could have ever imagined how soaked in blood, wreckage, and unexploded ordnance the region would one day become. Putin and all his enablers deserve to pay the ultimate price, not Ukrainians who honestly probably never cared what language their neighbors spoke.
Northern Theater
Sumy is conveniently the northernmost active front, so this week readers get the good news up straight away: Ukraine has caved in the leading edge of the orc advance, reportedly surrounding the enemy forces infesting Kindrativka before annihilating them outright. In nearby Oleksiivka, elements of the infamous 155th Naval Infantry Brigade nearly shared the same fate, reportedly forced to retreat through a gauntlet of Ukrainian fire.
Oleksiivka hasn’t officially been declared liberated yet, but Centre for Defence Strategies is often a bit ahead of DeepState Map when it comes to raw reporting of recent Ukrainian gains. DeepState has been especially careful about mapping Ukrainian successes in Sumy and Kursk, only adding blue to the map once a place is firmly under Ukrainian control. So even more good news from the Sumy front ought to be coming in the near future.
Ukrainian forces continue to pile pressure on the exposed orc settlement of Tetkino, maintaining a posture that suggests a readiness to seize much of Glushkovo district if the enemy gives them half a chance. This threat to the western flank of the orc front in Sumy was pretty visibly intended to slow the enemy advance towards the forested high ground north of the city - and it worked.
I get the strong impression that Ukraine’s plan is to throw the orc advance back into Kursk before rapidly moving up to half a dozen highly experienced brigades presently near Sumy to join a counteroffensive in Donbas in the second half of summer. Veteran formations like 47th and 21st Mechanized are maintaining the impression of being committed in Sumy, but their geoconfirmed activity is sporadic compared to what assault regiments like the 225th and 33rd get up to. That same pattern preceded their sudden appearance in Kursk last year. You don’t need to have some half-bakedGoogle AI tell you about a dead guy named Jomini’s theory of interior lines to understand that Ukrainian forces have a shorter distance to travel to reach a given front than Moscow’s. Much easier to move forces where they’re most useful.
It’s also hard not to notice how few modern Ukrainian vehicles are getting reported destroyed these days. Contrary to media reports, Ukraine is still using plenty of heavy armor at the front despite the drone threat - just much more carefully than before. One of the most unreliable journalists covering Ukraine, David Axe, inaccurately claimed a few weeks back that nearly all of Ukraine’s 31 US-donated Abrams have been destroyed. It’s true that a full ten have been confirmed lost with one more captured, but if the orcs had taken out additional Abrams they’d have footage to prove it and a strong incentive to broadcast it.
Granted, another dozen at least have been confirmed damaged, so given natural rates of wear and tear I’d say it’s entirely plausible that only a dozen of the original Abrams are still operational. Indirectly supporting this guesstimate is the arrival of half of the 49 Abrams donated by Australia - 10-12 plus 24 is enough for one full-sized battalion or, as seems more likely, two smaller ones.
The story is likely the same across the other categories of NATO armored vehicles Ukraine has received. Of around 300 Bradleys, just over 100 have been confirmed destroyed or captured, another fifty damaged. A recent US aid package to Ukraine included funds for repairing Bradleys rather than sending new ones, implying that Ukraine maintains a substantial force, I’d bet around 200. By this logic, about 100 Marders and 75 Leopards are still operational - and 12 Challenger 2s - as are about 1,200 M-113s (including various international variants), 300 Strykers, 200 VABs, and who even knows how many mine-resistant trucks.
Just check out Oryx numbers for destroyed/captured Ukrainian gear against known deliveries, if you don’t trust my math. Despite the vast increase in the number of orc drones on the front since 2023, were one to plot the dates of the confirmed losses on a chart, the rate of Ukrainian losses would be seen to sharply decline. Small wonder that Ukraine is now upgrading experienced Territorial Guard brigades into Heavy Mechanized Brigades. Ukraine is also domestically producing a lot of armored vehicles now, including modern CV-90s - though I have no idea on quantity.
Bottom line: Ukraine has been storing up resources. You only do that while slowly but steadily giving up territory on several fronts if the plan is to unleash a concentrated strike at the correct moment. You don’t have to know who Clausewitz was to get the essential logic of this plan. No sane military professional aims to maintain a steady state at the front forever. That’s like treating an infection with a half-dose of antibiotics. Eventually, the target will adapt, and then you’re in a new kind of trouble.
At this point, the orc advance towards Sumy looks as likely to be rolled back completely in August as reach its objective. I expect the same will prove true of the halting orc efforts to secure the northern bank of the Vovcha river on the Kharkiv front, to say nothing of an attempt to get across in force.
Some minor advances were recorded in this sector over the past week; Muscovite troops seized part of a forest near Tykhe. Tactical gain at best, and reported attempts to push west of Vovchansk and near its center accomplished zilch. The new orc incursion at Milove, between the Kharkiv and Kupiansk fronts, also didn’t get any worse.
Moscow’s efforts on the Kharkiv front continue to look like a distraction and a hedge against Ukraine trying something on the orc side of the border. More and more, Putin’s generals appear to be reaching the conclusion that their only hope of continuing the bluff that Moscow isn’t losing the war is taking Pokrovsk. That will allow for four to six months of creeping gains ahead of a broader attempt to surround urban Donbas from the south next year.
Eastern Theater
The reluctance of Muscovite leadership to truly go all-in on the Kupiansk front suggests that it too is an ancillary theater, despite the increasing threat of Moscow eventually building a stable bridgehead north of the important logistics hub. This week an orc infantry advance north of the Kupiansk suburbs threatens to firm up Moscow’s bridgehead in the area.
A previous orc push along the west bank of the Oskil into Radkivka about a month ago has slowly built into a functional assault grouping that this week expanded rapidly in several directions. Enemy teams are entrenching on the northern outskirts of Kupiansk, and the counteroffensive required to mop them up is bound to distract from efforts to hold in the Dvorchina sector further north. Ukrainian command has been very slow to reinforce the Kupiansk area, which is a bit baffling considering how close the enemy has been to the town for over two years without the line ever cracking.
All is far from lost if Moscow is ultimately able to establish a firm bridgehead - the Ukrainians have more defensible terrain to work with a few kilometers back. However, that doesn’t much matter if the orcs are able to constantly break teams through the front into areas with plentiful cover. Hopes for any Ukrainian counteroffensive north along the east bank of the Oskil are now very dim.
The Borova and Lyman fronts stand in stark contrast to Kupiansk this week, with no reported orc progress. It also seems that there was some confusion about the state of affairs on the Lyman front, with the enemy not in fact threatening to cross the narrow Nitrius river, only coming close to reaching it at Karpivka. Intense fighting appear to still be underway near Ridkodub, which may have actually changed hands several times.
There have been reports that the orc-to-Ukrainian fatality ratio on the Lyman front has reached an incredible 66 to 1. That’s the kind of statistic that suggests something has changed in Ukrainian doctrine which is starting to dramatically shift the balance of power in the field. I’ve marked out the estimated positions and sectors of the orc combined arms armies responsible for the Siveskyi Donets area. Though now that I think about it, 1st Tank Army definitely no longer warrants the “Guards” title.
An unusually large Muscovite assault using more armored vehicles than usual was shattered by Ukrainian fighters on the Siversk front, though there are reports of surviving orcs trying to entrench close to Ukrainian positions. 81st Airmobile and 54th Mechanized cooperated to create a shooting gallery the likes of which you don’t see all that often any more. 11,000 burned tanks later, the orcs don’t have as many left to use.
Incidentally, contrary to the expectations of several generations of Pentagon planners, tank-on-tank action has been rare on the battlefields in Ukraine. Even in the early phases of 2022, when orc tanks tried to roll through 1st Tank Brigade’s training grounds near Chernihiv, tank duels weren’t common. They did happen, but by and large if tanks were spotted it was usually easiest to have artillery or hunter-killer teams with portable missile launchers try to ruin their day. Tanks are great for wiping out bunkers and ambushing troop carriers. Even before drones could drop mines in their path, they had a specific and surprisingly limited mission set.
However, a neat little engagement was caught on video the other day showing a Ukrainian tank stalking and blasting an enemy turtle tank on approach to Ukrainian positions. Only damage was done, but the turtle tank had to retreat - only to be hunted down by drones. What’s better than a tank? A tank plus drones.
Though if you use tanks according to the latest U.S. Army doctrine, which serves as an excellent manual for getting your expensive armor platoon wiped out in under five minutes, you’ve made a terrible mistake. Shameless screengrab found online below to illustrate:
Cold War doctrine would work better than this. The intellectual foundations of the American military machine have been utterly corrupted. Lesson learned: never, ever commit to a lengthy counterinsurgency, people of the future. It always consumes you, body and soul.
I’m frankly amazed at how well the Ukrainian brigades in this area have performed. Siversk is at the outer edge of Ukraine’s logistics and Muscovite assaults have been fierce. But while the perimeter has shrunk, it’s never broken.
Despite the tenacious defense put up by the quasi-corps covering Siversk, it’s another frontline town and logistics hub that Moscow will try hard to take sooner or later and does remain vulnerable to a determined assault. Like a lot of Ukrainian towns, it sits in a river valley a the base of a slope. On the plus side, this makes occupation while the western bank is under Ukrainian control close to suicidal. The negative of this setup is that if Ukrainian fighters are forces off the ridge to the east of the Bakhmutovka river, they also have to endure the enemy firing down on them if they hold positions in town.
Heading south, it’s been a week of almost zero gains for the orcs on the Kostyantynivka front. Just a couple short advances near Kudiumivka and into Yablunivka, which I’m glad to see that the Ukrainians aren’t fighting to hold. The Kleban-Byk reservoir makes a nice shield. Boats can get across, but even a single drone platoon on watch can make that a debacle.
Most of the supplies and reinforcements that Moscow sends to the bridgehead over the Bychok appear to be devoted to advancing closer to Pokrovsk, which could explain the orcs with 8th Combined Arms Army fighting near Toretsk apparently working to get around it instead of advancing straight through to Kostyantynivka. Efforts to claim all of Toretsk and Chasiv Yar will likely never cease - and I have to assume will succeed at some point - but right now they’ve effectively been downgraded to supporting efforts. Ukraine will almost certainly have developed plans to cope with their fall.
Limited Muscovite resources is responsible for slowly strangling the orc ability to move faster than a bare crawl in most circumstances. Where progress is more rapid, as a rule it’s because the Ukrainians have chosen to put up only token resistance. Even the orc generals seem to be starting to understand that they can’t continue to run the war like a franchise, each strategic grouping pursuing its own disconnected objectives in the hope that collective efforts will cause Ukrainian lines to fail. Moscow assumed that it was possible to stretch Ukraine too far by fighting on so many fronts, but it’s the orcs who have been burning through resources too quickly for too long.
If, however, the Muscovites can work out how to concentrate their remaining combat power and apply it effectively, Ukraine will still be forced into a major crisis on the Pokrovsk front, which has evolved back into Moscow’s main effort. The situation remains very dangerous, though it has not seriously worsened over the past week. The orcs have further expanded their bridgehead, and appear to be entrenched on the west bank of the Kazenyi Torets.
Ukraine may have launched tactical counterattacks against the bridgehead near Razine and Volodymyrivka. If so, these could and should become much more. 82nd Air Assault Brigade, which is supposed to be heading up its own full corps, recently appeared in the area. Ostensibly, other corps members - even several full corps - could appear to mount a substantial counteroffensive with some of Ukraine’s best formations at any time.
At the very least, what happened on the Sumy front in Kindrativka will hopefully be repeated north of Pokrovsk in the near future. In Sumy the Ukrainian defenders more or less allowed the orcs to take a string of villages near the border that were bound to be annihilated by bombardment anyway. But as the orcs tried to build up reserves sufficient to power a rush to the next town in line, the Ukrainians maintained a constant barrage to hold them in place while maneuvering to cut off their supply lines.
My expectation for Pokrovsk is that once the current orc surge has run out of energy, the Ukrainians aim to throw the enemy back in a big way. And once the front line is broken anywhere, it should be possible for the Ukrainians to maintain a high enough tempo of action that the enemy finds it impossible to restore a coherent line of defense again. If Ukraine can strike back before the enemy has properly entrenched in areas recently taken, the hole carved might stay open long enough to expand a tactical-scale campaign into something much bigger.
Time is pressing, though, because the Ukrainians holding Pokrovsk now have to contend with drones flying in from three directions. If Moscow is able to distract and weaken the Ukrainian defenders enough on the flanks, despite the extreme costs involved it may be possible to push into the center of Pokrovsk. Slowly wedging the Ukrainians out Toretsk-style would take months, but unless rendered moot by a major Ukrainian success somewhere else the fall of Pokrovsk would be taken as a huge political setback.
While it might seem as if I’m contradicting about a year’s worth of arguments that giving up ground isn’t bad if it’s not worth the cost of defending, this position only holds (no pun intended) in the context of preparing a future counteroffensive to take it back. There are certain foundations for that which must remain in place - in other words, places that you actually do have to shed blood for.
Ukrainian fighters have held the enemy at the gates of Pokrovsk and repelled prior attempts to encircle it time and again. To let it fall now, when there is a real chance to use it as a springboard rendering the orc commitment to taking Pokrovsk at such immense cost an unambiguous failure, would be criminal. Pokrovsk is not Avdiivka. If it falls, the voices calling for Ukraine to accept a bitter peace will grow loud indeed.
It’s less than ideal to be forced into counterattacking because of the enemy’s actions or political imperatives, but sometimes it’s best to let the other side throw a punch before countering it directly anyway. There are some worrying reports coming out of the Pokrovsk area right now that might, however, imply a disconnect between the reality experienced by soldiers on the front and expectations in Kyiv. We will soon see how it goes.
South of Pokrovsk, the Novopavlivka front is still shaping up as expected. Ukrainian troops are pretty clearly dug in along a prepared line near the Dnipro district border. Moscow’s operations here are about half political, trying to claim occupation of a portion of another Ukrainian district, and half military, hoping to slowly turn the flank of the Pokrovsk front. I expect that a bloody nose is forthcoming.
As I point out pretty much every week, Ukrainian forces are now conveniently close to a belt of cover that should be incredibly difficult for the enemy to seize. I still expect the enemy to be held along the line of the Vovcha. I would not be surprised if the ruscist horde technically seizes portions of Dnipro district - and indeed seem to have taken the village of Makiivka, but the cost will be steep and the advance priced in, both in the strategic and operational senses. I continue to evaluate the western flank of this orc grouping vulnerable to a Ukrainian counteroffensive aimed at Volnovakha, so the more it remains occupied trying to advance, the more precarious its position becomes.
It appears that at least part of a new Muscovite rail line running closer to the Azov Coast is up and running, which would seem to negate the logic of the offensive I’ve repeatedly described in posts, one aiming to cut the rail connection to occupied Crimea, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. Thing is, even if the new trunk is indeed complete, any route running along the Azov Sea has to contend with multiple streams and rivers, meaning there are lots of bridges that have to function for any train to make it through.
As any effective Ukrainian campaign will have to systematically interdict rail lines with drones, anyway, that makes any southern railway line even more vulnerable than the one ground troops are needed to fully cut. The enemy will still be forced to rely on the old route that passes through the Azov highlands for a reason: less water to cross. If the Ukrainians are able to reach a line stretching from about Kamianka to Volnovakha, the coast is just sixty kilometers away - well within HIMARS range.
Southern Theater
From Zelene Pole all the way to Orikhiv, mapped Muscovite progress has been nil. Whatever was happening near Hulaypole lately looks to be either a probe or a diversion. Though there are suggestions of reinforcements moving to the south after months of most people and gear heading the other way, so maybe the orcs want to make it look as if they’re really plotting a major move. Or they’re worried about what Ukraine is about to try.
But as far as the data goes, only the Kamianske area, along the former course of the Dnipro west of Orikhiv, has seen orc advances. Here the enemy appears to have settled on a simple attempt to seize ground close enough to Zaporizhzhia that artillery can drive in to shell it.
Alternatively, advancing north to Stepnohirsk might help the orcs put pressure on Orikhiv from the west, ideally getting close enough to hit the road from Zaporizhzhia with drones. Another diversionary strike, and one the Ukrainians seem to be planning to defeat the usual way: let the enemy advance a bit, make them pay a huge price, roll them back as the situation allows.
Finally, there’s Kherson. Still plenty of skirmishing reported on islands along the Dnipro, but the biggest concern is the increasing number of orc drone attacks. Civilians continue to be routinely targeted. Hey orcs, if any of you are listening, you do realize that certain actions make a lot more people look for ways to help find and kill you? Didn’t learn that from Afghanistan? Well, I suppose the Americans didn’t either before they ran away just like you.
Aviation Duel
Ukraine lost a Mirage 2000 last week to a mechanical failure, and the orcs saw another Sukhoi burned by saboteurs, but there haven’t been any combat aviation losses to speak of on either side lately. The aviation front is at present all about each side’s efforts to defend against drones - and maintaining a steady barrage of glide bombs in support of ground troops.
Well, that’s what the Ukrainians do with theirs - the orcs often have other goals. This week they decided to bomb Kharkiv with new extended-range glide bombs. These are set to become a big problem for Kharkiv, Sumy, Dnipro, Kherson, Sloviansk, Zaporizhzhia, Krivy Rih, and any towns nearby. Jamming is certainly as possible with these as other kind of glide bomb, but a heavy explosive fired at an urban area doesn’t have to be accurate to inflict unacceptable damage.
It would be really nice if the recent talk of rushing more air defenses to Ukraine would be matched with provision of truly long-range air-to-air missiles like the D-model AMRAAM. That would let Ukrainian Vipers with AWACS support hunt Sukhois with minimum possible risk. But as expected, even sending more Patriot batteries, as recently promised, is set to go slower than hoped. It does look like the Europeans are shipping at least one battery as quickly as possible, expecting to absorb Patriots intended for Switzerland when they start to arrive next year. But the full five systems and seventeen launchers recently promised might take many months to reach Ukraine.
Additional AWACS aircraft would definitely be a big help, though it is possible that a drone-based package will soon - or has - emerge with similar strengths. Britain is already testing sensors on high-altitude balloons, which looks very promising. A Ukrainian I chatted with online at one point was eager to put air defense missiles on them - interceptor drones now look like an even better option.
There was a bit of aviation news that shed some light on Ukrainian operations this week. During a large strike on western Ukraine with drones and missiles, very probably aimed at Ukrainian air force assets, a flight of Ukrainian jets was flushed from their base and sent out of the danger area. They inadvertently crossed into Romania, though, revealing what Ukrainians do to keep jets from being struck on the ground. No surprises here, just interesting to have confirmation of what has long been expected.
Same goes for recent footage of Ukrainian Vipers heading out on missions. Most displays F-16s flying with six Sidewinder short-range missiles and a couple drop tanks as their standard combat load. That configuration strongly suggests that the main job of Ukraine’s Vipers at present is shooting down Shaheds. Thankfully, if Ukraine reaches the stated target of churning out 1,000 drone interceptors a day any time soon, more Vipers can be freed to do more damage closer to the front. Provided they receive appropriate missiles.
Strike Campaigns
Ukraine’s drone strike campaign is reaching new heights this summer, evolving exactly as it must to help interrupt frontline logistics. Stefan Korshak published an excellent analysis of Ukraine’s drone attacks on ruscist railway infrastructure over the past few months. His conclusion is that the Ukrainians are executing a plan to maximize damage to Muscovite logistics lines feeding the war in southern Ukraine. A happy side bonus is interrupting holiday travel plans for thousands of affluent Muscovites, reminding them just how weak Putin actually is. In a system predicated on big papa Putin being unassailable and anyone in his favor made, that’s no small victory.
Wise to not get too carried away attacking enemy morale, however. Another common failing of western military thought is the postmodern (and Nazi, ironically - though to be fair, this line of thought appears throughout history) obsession with valorizing individual willpower. When push comes to shove, personnel are supposed to rely on grit and fortitude to carry them through. Good luck with that in the age of the drone; it cares not how many push-ups you can do.
Morale is always a function of material factors, not any mystical mental force - just like willpower is a concentration of mental focus that comes with hard physiological limits. It isn’t summoned in the abstract or amenable to direct influence. It’s all about perception of risk and reward, from the perspective of the individual: is the job worth it, and how likely they are to die doing it.
A lot of people like to lie to themselves and imagine that morale is about positive thinking. For anyone in fear of their life, it’s mainly about having enough of what you need to feel remotely human while working to stay alive. No amount of team spirit beats lack of water, in time. Conversely, if you attack an organism repeatedly but fail to impress it sufficiently to alter its behavior, attacking it more and harder is unlikely to solve the problem. Morale is both simple and complex, so it’s best to go after the part of it that overlaps directly with the task of breaking the enemy’s ability to exist: logistics.
I’ve long discussed the importance of hitting the enemy rail system given the importance it plays in orc frontline supply. The enemy is down to using donkeys and mules on some fronts because of lack of vehicles - sadly, even animal-loving Ukrainian drone operators can’t ignore an orc pulling a pack animal covered in supplies towards the front. Hitting orc supply lines even farther back is the most efficient way to strangle supply throughput - and save some poor abused animals. I include many orcs in that category.
Rail infrastructure is an attractive target because of the direct impact on transportation schedules even if damage is quickly repaired. There are also nodes of critical infrastructure like loading docks, switching yards, and bridges which if hit can cause even bigger and more lasting disruptions. The potential to more broadly damage the Muscovite war effort by messing with domestic shipments is also attractive when compared to options like bombing factories.
Ukrainska Pravda published a solid report on why it’s very difficult to destroy Muscovite arms production at the source. There is a lot of redundancy in Muscovite factories, as they were designed to survive intensive attack. Hence Ukraine scoring more spectacular and immediately measurable results from hitting energy infrastructure, until the quiet ceasefire began that both sides have chosen to observe.
However you go about it, strangling supply lines is a slow, steady, relentless business. Every channel of damage that can be established matters insofar as it induces friction into enemy battlefield logistics. If Ukraine is able to use large numbers of strike drones to systematically tear apart the orc rail network in occupied Ukraine and southern russia over the next two months lack of throughput will out as whole orc line units lacking ammunition, eventually water, as ones with better-connected commanders ensure they have priority for what supplies come through.
That’s how a collapse begins. Give the Ukrainians even a small window of opportunity, and they’ll thrust a knife into the jugular of the occupation.
Naval Matters
Still not much happening on the Black Sea at the moment. The orcs do sortie a submarine to launch some Kalibr cruise missiles now and again, but this seems mostly designed to bluff that the Black Sea Fleet actually exists in meaningful form. Sinking the rest of it isn’t even a Ukrainian priority, though Kyiv likely has the capability to wipe it out.
I really do believe that Turkiye should be induced to lift all Montreax Treaty restrictions and allow warships to transit in and out of the Black Sea at will. That whole body of water is a hunting ground for drones. Not even submarines are safe. And I’d really, really, really like to eliminate Moscow’s Pacific Fleet. Hey, if you live within a few minutes as the drone flies from the Pacific and had a father whose job in the Navy was helping track Soviet submarines, the idea of orc subs being able to freely approach the coast as they once often did does not appeal.
Of course, history shows that most Muscovites weren’t meant to sail anyway. They actually had to cancel their annual Navy Day parade in St. Petersburg last week under threat of Ukrainian drone attack: pretty humiliating for big strong mighty mother russia. Instead of reviewing his little fleet, Putin did a “working meeting” with senior staff as exercises were held a safe distance from Ukraine. Out in Vladivostok some orcs in a helicopter had fun demonstrating, with the aid of a remote control rubber boat, one of the least effective means of destroying a modern Ukrainian combat drone: peppering it with machine gun fire from a circling helicopter. 2023 wants its tactics back, guys.
Apparently nobody told the orcs that Ukrainian drones carry surface-to-air missiles now. If Ukraine or even some bored billionaire can outfit a cargo ship as a drone carrier and send it to the Sea of Japan, I’m pretty sure the entire orc Pacific flotilla can be disposed of in port while Putin is asleep. Meanwhile, Moscow is still trying to figure out how to best cut up poor Kuznetsov, the last Soviet aircraft carrier - since ex-Varyag is Chinese now, rebuilt into Liaoning. It seems the Kuznetsov design isn’t entirely flawed, it’s just that without the Ukrainian shipyards in Mykolaiv Moscow’s ability to construct and maintain large ships is highly suspect.
I pity the crew of Admiral Nakhimov (ex-Kalinin), if the old battlecruiser’s refit is ever complete. I’d bet good money on the ship being officially declared ready to replace Pyotr Veliky (ex-Andropov) despite serious flaws. Only so much to be done with a forty-year old hull left in mothballs for over a decade. And Muscovite mothballs at that: judging by about half of the tanks held in reserve, maintenance is not a Muscovite strong suit.
The future of large warships is probably less in question than other classic military tools like tanks and crewed jets because they are natural carriers of drones. Of course, if you spend years modifying one to cope with the wrong threat, well, I expect Moscow won’t be alone this decade in learning the hard way how that pays off.
They’re probably never going to be very useful in confined areas like the Black Sea, however. If fighting on land has been rebooted by the arrival of thousands of drones, the limited magazines on warships makes going up against anybody better equipped than the Houthis a dubious prospect at best. And they, quite frankly, held their own.
Staff Affairs
Turning back to the war on land, something that Ukraine - and ultimately, everyone else - has got to get right is properly organizing the emerging drone force. This is one of the areas where established military institutions across the world are primed to fail.
Up until about a year ago, I - and I think most planners working for a NATO military - assumed that drones would be smoothly integrated into existing force structures and doctrine, taking on risky operations wherever possible. Infantry teams would deploy quadcopters for recon. Tanks could use ground drones to check for mines along their route. And everyone would be constantly streaming data back to headquarters, where a team of geeks like me would predict the enemy’s next steps as far in advance as possible.
As it turns out, all of this is possible - and more. But not by making every squad or even fire team figure out who gets to be the designated drone specialist and who will take on the duties their comrade formerly performed but now can’t because they’re usually wearing an FPV control headset. You can’t just add personnel to teams to handle every function instead - they get unwieldy fast. Either solution causes more problems than it solves.
Instead, drone teams have to be their own thing, working for their own independent branch, as Ukraine has learned. This branch has to support dedicated drone brigades with their own battalions that field companies filled with platoons comprised of drone teams. While standard line companies handle all the usual infantry duties on the front, the drone platoons assigned to support each and every one of them from a couple kilometers behind the front will be providing constant overwatch.
The Ukrainians have been steadily moving in this direction as more drone operators are trained. Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Force is led by Robert Brovdi, alias Magyar (sometimes spelled Madyar), whose now-famous Birds consistently account for a quarter to a third of all Moscow’s losses. A recent meeting between he and a group of similarly elite drone commanders was allegedly targeted by the orcs, who are desperate to knock them out.
Taking the risk of having half a dozen top leaders meet in one place was likely judged necessary to continue standardizing certain practices across the drone force. To make training and organizing easier, it’s essential to develop doctrine - which, at heart, is a set of practical principles and the theory needed to put them to use.
I think it’s possible at this point to outline in broad strokes what Ukraine’s emerging drone-first doctrine entails by way of organization. Every one of the new corps will eventually have its own dedicated drone brigade comprised of 4-6 drone battalions, one per line brigade in the corps. These battalions will be permanently attached to the same brigade to maintain rapport, but remain separate, the drone operators acting according to their own place in the broader doctrine, only interfacing with line soldiers as needed to give them needed support. Usually through their company command team, but sometimes directly.
It’s useful to zoom in to the tactical level and build a bottom-up understanding of how drone and line teams interact in their assigned sector. At present, the front is held by fire teams of 3-4 fighters set several hundred meters apart. They should have interlocking fields of fire, so that any orc motorcycle team that gets close to one position while the defenders are in their bunkers sheltering from bombardment can be shot up by comrades working from another.
On average, Ukraine appears to maintain about a hundred front line brigades in action at any one time across a 1,200km active front line. Some areas are more threatened than others, so coverage is not even, but on average each of the corps Ukraine is expected to field has to handle 60km of front. Most corps should end up with five line brigades, and for the most part Ukrainian brigades have been enlarged during the conflict to have not three, but six infantry battalions as their foundation, about half equipped with only light vehicles like Humvees and MRAPs. If each brigade keeps four of the six line battalions at the front, rotating one out for a break in the operational reserve every few months, that means each battalion is expected to handle 3km of frontage.
How many companies are assigned to each battalion is less clear, but my understanding is three, likely two that actually generate teams to hold positions while the third sits in immediate reserve. Two additional companies in each battalion house company-level support weaponry like Javelin ATGMs, Stinger SAMs, and mortars which can quickly reinforce a line company that needs prompt fire support.
Those companies should may field four line platoons supported by a weapons platoon and a headquarters element. On a typical stretch of Ukrainian front where the landscape is dominated by farm fields separated by forest strips, Ukrainian teams will array along a pair of tree lines and the perpendicular one linking them, with reserve positions maintained a kilometer behind. Each company will be responsible for 1.5 kilometers of front, plus or minus half a klick depending on terrain and threat level.
Minimizing the number of orcs that survive to make it into effective range of the fire teams’ machine guns and anti-tank rockets - about a kilometer at most, visibility depending - is the main task of their drone support. My expectation is that four tactical drone companies, each with six platoons, will be present in every drone battalion, ensuring that one can be allocated to each active line battalion. Each line company is assigned a drone platoon consisting of six drone teams.
Here’s a rough schematic overlaid on a section of the front to help illustrate the general setup. V signs denote line platoon areas - several positions in fairly close proximity. + signs show reserve line positions. Ds indicate drone hides.
Drone platoons work to keep one surveillance, one interceptor, one bomber, and three strike drones operating at all times, flying to a depth of 10-15km. Hostile surveillance drones must be downed as quickly as possible once sighted, and strike drones too wherever feasible. Inbound enemy ground attacks must be spotted a full ten kilometers out to give friendly infantry time to prepare and strike drone teams plenty of opportunities to score a kill. Their priority is to break up inbound orc troops, damaging vehicles and forcing dismounts to go to ground, allowing the reusable bomber drones to pick them off.
Each team can be comprised of as few as three people, though four is safer. One trained driver handles a van - armored truck, hopefully - another literally rides shotgun to ward off drones and infiltrators. Two operators, a primary and an assistant/bombardier, cover actual drone ops. Each team should be able to keep a drone in flight nonstop by having the two trained operators switch off roles, the senior handling more sensitive flights. Or they can push a full six at the enemy simultaneously then repeat the trick a few minutes later.
A drone platoon with six well-drilled teams can inflict a truly astonishing amount of damage. Every drone-supported Ukrainian company on the battlefield under this model be able to count on hitting advancing enemies with the equivalent of three incredibly precise rocket-propelled grenades and a couple mortar strikes multiple times before the orcs get close to friendly positions. Ground teams will also have continuous support from a surveillance drone and at least some ability to knock out the enemy’s. And all without having to figure out how to incorporate drone operators into every rifle squad.
Another critical advantage of keeping drone operators in their own administrative grouping is that several drone platoons can more easily cooperate to help fend off larger attacks, which will usually tend to focus on one company or even platoon sector more than another at a given time. When Moscow has on occasion come at Ukrainian lines with dozens of armored vehicles at once, several drone companies or even battalions have united to smash it, knowing that no single group had the capacity but all together could coordinate their efforts to devastating effect.
This isn’t as likely to happen if every ground team has their own drones, because each will also feel a strong urge to hold their fire in case the enemy comes for their sector next. Cognitively, line troops are on a different wavelength than drone operators, and should be. Doesn’t mean their world’s don’t productively intersect. Similar relationship holds with artillery and infantry.
Direct contact between the drone and line teams can remain pretty infrequent without compromising operations under this scheme, provided that both can talk to the same company-level command and are trained well. Line teams fight to preserve a thick membrane between the orcs and the drone operators, who take on most of the responsibility for repelling enemy assaults at a distance. Ideally, even line teams only need to use their own weapons to eliminate stragglers left by a particularly large orc assault while the next wave of drones is sent in.
Another advantage of deploying drones in this way is that when FPV and bomber drones aren’t working on targets, it only makes sense to have them support logistics, even build up distributed caches. Replenishing minefields is another task they perform well. Detecting them too, soon. Of course, the sheer diversity of types and potential functions is added cause for keeping most drone operations under the aegis of a single branch.
Ground drones are becoming more important all the time, and I expect that a full ground drone battalion will soon need to be established in every drone brigade - right alongside heavy interceptor, operational strike, and deep recon battalions. Drone brigades will wind up being as large as their regular army counterparts - and it’s straightforward to foresee the need for entire drone corps.
What is bound to frighten practitioners of classic NATO doctrine is the potential for all branches to be one day subordinated to the drone branch. It may well be that only a minority of personnel ever go near the front line, a combination of armor-clad elites trained to survive the drone hell with the support of techno-wizards throwing endlessly shifting combinations of drones at the enemy.
In Ukraine, the future of warfare is already here. For now, set aside all thought of lasers and stealth bombers: functional and ubiquitous beats high-end and rare.
I’ll definitely be writing more on the topic of organizing the drone fight in the future, but for now I hope this gives a sense of what needs to be happening in every military force everywhere right now: a total reconsideration of how to best repackage the ingredients of combined arms warfare along with drones. Think of them as a spice that you really don’t want to get wrong.
And if you’re trying to make drones fit into some pre-existing institutional paradigm, well, as The Doctor so often says, with full sincerity: I’m so, so sorry…
As for the Ukrainians, they know all of this already. What remains to be done is consolidating best practices into a system of waging drone war that can be replicated and taught. Scale up, move fast, win the race - and the war.
World System Brief
World news agencies widely reported this week on nationwide protests against a bill passed by Ukraine’s government that stripped prominent national anti-corruption agencies of their independence. What most failed to include was the deeper reasons why Zelensky’s team took this dramatic step - or that they had to know they were poking a hornet nest.
The anti-corruption agencies, like too many others in Ukraine, had a Muscovite mole problem. This may have contributed to the way they targeted senior leaders in Ukraine’s National Guard earlier this year. That action reportedly caused a near-rebellion and outbreak of protests in Kyiv by soldiers against the agencies involved, which would have been a very awkward sight.
As Stefan Korshak noted along with Ukrainian attacks on ruscist railways, what just happened looks an awful lot like a necessary step to knock out Muscovite infiltration and restore the anti-corruption agencies’ independence. The required legislation is reportedly already moving forward which is probably a sign; it seems highly unlikely that Zelensky’s team had no clue what kind of backlash they were in for. Indeed, the speed of execution and the lockstep response of foreign leaders condemning any threat to the fight against corruption suggests a planned maneuver.
Is there corruption in Ukraine? Certainly - Ukrainians constantly report it, and nobody has any reason to doubt their experiences. But the tricky thing about fighting corruption is that the bodies given the task can themselves be corrupted. Moscow is certainly aware of the potential for provoking no, you’re the corrupt agency! games inside of Ukraine. Infiltrating anti-corruption bodies is a great way to accomplish that. Nobody wants to question the people dedicated to such an important public service. Yes, the orcs are that cynical. They’ve even posed as Ukrainian intelligence agents to entrap Ukrainians who hate Moscow.
Just because this sort of thing doesn’t accomplish much is no reason why someone won’t always try it. The FSB really does cultivate seemingly innocuous assets in other countries merely because they fit a profile and might prove useful in some way.
What’s brilliant about infiltrating anti-corruption groups is that it’s necessary to presume that they’re not prone to abusing their power. They’re a major check on the corrupt who otherwise tend to have allies interested in and capable of eliminating any threat to their position. Lesser of two evils is less evil - but can still be pretty evil.
And the other thing about them is that anyone who has dealt with or researched international development knows that corruption allegations are the D.C.-Beltway-Neoliberal set’s favored means of blackmailing troublesome clients. A side benefit of the protests last week have been that a whole lot of foreigners who claim to support Ukraine just outed themselves in a flood of opinions and editorials published over the past week. Their universal leap to the barricades was one of the more blatant exercises of the organism some like to call the “Deep State” playing information war games.
The Muscovites exploit corruption concerns in their obvious way, but the western gaggle has their own stake in narratives about corruption for much the same reason: control. A group of Ukraine’s most vocal supporters in the west have, for many years, never truly had Ukraine’s interests at heart. They’ve posed as allies of Ukraine in order to drag Ukraine into their ideological forever fight with all things deemed uncivilized by writers at The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, or New York Times. They work the English-speaking media ecosystem to portray Ukraine and its struggle for survival in a way that subordinates Ukraine’s fight to their exploitation of the language of democracy to sell everyone else’s rights and freedoms to oligarchs. They’re colonizers of the worst order, and have always been a major barrier to victory in Ukraine.
Only if Ukraine is the front line of a forever war between East and West will they be satisfied. The position is not rational, but ideological: the western twin of the sick russian world con job. They want a play-fight with Putin following certain rules for the same reason he wants one with them.
How corruption is defined, and even more who gets the job of setting the definitions, is anything but straightforward. Most of the various data-driven corruption monitors and indices around the world make the critical mistake of ignoring cultural factors that can make an action labeled corrupt in one place be seen as totally normal in another. It might still be corruption in a universal sense, but it’s not felt as such, it’s a part of the fabric of life. Every culture has its own feelings about what varieties of corruption are more tolerable. This makes anti-corruption work vulnerable.
The scientific reality of corruption is that the term has been defined to entrench certain forms of functional corruption so deep that correctly-educated people assume them to be normal. Studies that separate practices from cultural context will naturally describe other parts of the world as deviant.
In European and North American policy circles, corruption is a convenient excuse for explaining away failure without addressing the rot that afflicts their own systems. Nepotism is totally rampant throughout western elite life, from politics to oh-so-noble academia, where the best predictor of someone earning a PhD is whether their parent already did. Everyone knows and tacitly admits this, but can do nothing about it but play along or try to opt out. Groupthink emerges naturally from the fog of life.
International anti-corruption work is incredibly important, don’t get me wrong. A huge component of corruption captured by the indices is real and can be addressed through application of good institutions. But just like international aid in general, anti-corruption efforts have long since been colonized by people with a distinct political agenda. They work to ensure that allies in the recipient country gain a disproportionate share of the gains.
When the western clique decides to discipline a client, snapping the corruption whip is usually step one, with actually pulling aid coming after. Media outlets eager to out anyone doing something bad so long as their owners don’t get burned have a field day spreading outright rumors in the guise of allegations. Those in the know keep their head down while the poor fools caught out in the wrong moment take the fall.
Long since tired of Zelensky, and having no further need of Ukraine as a cudgel to hit a Trump they’ve mostly decided to ride or die with in hopes of profiting from the wreckage left behind, the western set would dearly love to replace Zelensky with Zaluzhnyi, who has actively cultivated close ties with western types for years. He’s presently keeping up a nice shadow presidential campaign from his office in the Ukrainian embassy to the UK, penning excellent analytical pieces for the press that do a find job of portraying him as a military visionary. Now it seems he’s turning up in Vogue. Guy has a very, very good PR team.
I am not saying he’ll make a bad president or that he’s doing something improper here. I’m sure I’d love to sit down and pick his brain - he’s an intellectual general, which I very much appreciate. Politics is what it is. I’m not partisan in any sense except not wanting the planet to die because of stupid humans. Just calling the power dynamics as I see them. I don’t see Zaluzhnyi as anyone’s puppet - he just knows how to network. That doesn’t mean he won’t be used or sell out, though.
As far as the western twit set goes, so far unable to get Zelensky himself on anything, attention has turned lately to his entourage, particularly chief of staff Yermak, who like literally every competent person in his position across the planet strictly controls access to the boss. When Team Biden did that, the media talked up how wise the old man was to keep the circle tight. Zelensky, on the other hand, constantly annoys western politicians by speaking impolitic truths - like the need to actually defeat Putin, not just try and freeze the conflict and kick the can of responsibility down the road. Western types have been laying the groundwork for accusing Yermak of corruption for years in a thinly veiled effort to get a grip on Zelensky’s team as a whole.
Look, it must be said: if Zelensky were truly looking to become dictator of Ukraine, he is in a better position than anyone in the country’s history to get there. He’s also got global credibility beyond any western leader or pretender.
But as thousands of Ukrainians who risked being caught in some orc drone raid proved, you don’t push Ukrainians around without having a real fight on your hands. And as healthy and essential as it is for a country to have frequent elections and regular changes of power, a solid majority of Ukrainians don’t feel that elections are appropriate right now, even if a narrow majority would likely back Zaluzhnyi if held. Though once his performance in 2023 comes under closer scrutiny, his popularity numbers might erode.
Unless something truly astonishing changes, though, Zelensky’s job is to lead his country out of the war as best he can. A full reckoning for everybody can come after. Part of the reason Moscow needs to be manifestly defeated in Ukraine is to create a safe space for that to play out.
Outside Ukraine, Team Biden and Team Trump types would both dearly love to see Zelensky gone. He doesn’t play the game, and often makes them look like fools. Yet nobody wants to be on the wrong side of history if and when Ukraine turns the tide in a big way.
Mark my words: if Ukraine scores a shocking battlefield victory this year, all the people who have spent the past two years insisting that Ukraine is doomed will turn around and insist that the west managed a magical misdirection campaign that lured Putin into a trap. That all of a sudden the narrative about Ukraine has shifted again indicates an establishment hedging its bets. They’ve got information about something coming, but what, where, when, and with what impacts - nobody knows. It isn’t up to them any more, if it ever was.
Down in the real world, politicians of all stripes are playing about sixteenth fiddle these days. Fighters on the ground, drone operators at their back, all the people in support roles keeping them in place, and everyone working to sustain the effort in general are the ones making history. As it has always been, and so shall always be, I’m afraid. Call it the first law of pagan science. Our gods are real. Fans of a certain kind of Swedish metal understand the lyrics that follow ;)
Men will fight, and men will die, wars will be lost and won
That’s how its been, and still will be, long after I am gone.
Doubting not, I give of blood, so I may enter hall up high:
The sky belongs to Asa-gods, as long as the raven flies!- Amon Amarth
By the way - Rest in glory, Ozzie. Without you, no metal as we know it today.
Once more: I don’t mean to in any way downplay the impacts of corruption on, well, everything. That the Ukraine War was not won years ago - even that it happened at all - is a function of the wretched corruption that has gripped the heart of the western world. The thing is an oligarchy built on a truly weird civic religion masquerading as a meritocracy that blames the arbitrarily condemned for their own plight. Most of the definitions and tools used by those who study democracy are contaminated by the presumption that the USA actually belongs in the same category as Canada or the UK. Same holds with corruption.
The answer to corruption is in every place the same: more and better democracy. This isn’t a call for outright populism, because political engagement isn’t actually supposed to be ongoing and sustained. The entire purpose of an election is to make it so that the majority of people need only express a general preference about the policies that matter to them ever so often. That constitutes a signal that political professionals then use to construct policy that will annoy the least number.
This is the politics-policy feedback loop that makes any political system work. Authoritarian regimes may be bad for manifold moral reasons, but in a pragmatic sense they are not desirable because they always catastrophically fail, sooner or later. That’s because unchecked concentrations of power always seek to self-reproduce: this must be prevented at all costs. Regular elections and an electoral system that prompts frequent shifts in the balance of power ensure fluctuating coalitions that can reasonably reflect the desires of the most people possible. That gives everybody at least some wins, which is necessary to prevent groups from losing so often that they gain a rational incentive to blow the whole thing up lest the system crush them into oblivion.
Ukrainians, despite not having the ability to conduct formal elections because of the war, still have the ability to keep their leaders in check through vigorous public protest. If ever Ukrainians feel that their government isn’t worth fighting for any more, the war is lost. What the past week has demonstrated, whether Zelensky’s team anticipated the response they received or not, is that Ukraine’s democracy if functionally healthier than the USA’s. No matter the cause, government did a thing, people got angry, government course-corrected.
Now, can more of the young people who went out to protest sign up to build or operate drones? Something to keep in mind is that it will be Ukraine’s combat veterans who will lead in the postwar era to come. One might say they have the right, but that’s a dangerous road to tread. Better to say that only they will have proven the skills needed to steer the beautiful anarchy that is Ukraine.
Either way, Ukrainians have every right to criticize their government as harshly as they desire. Everyone else should probably shut up and focus on putting Putin’s head on the flagpole on top of the Kremlin that a Ukrainian drone once blew up. Another victory that everyone conveniently forgot - and a harbinger of greater ones to come.
Atlantic
To global matters more properly. On the face of it, the past week would seem to have brought a serious rapprochement between Europe and the USA. Trump has agreed to a mere 15% base tariff rate, down from his initial demand of 50%, in exchange for a European promise to import more American natural gas. Sorry about your poisoned watersheds and landscapes littered with rusting hulks once the ~15 year life of most fields are up, local communities across the fracked states. But your politicians need their dirty hydrocarbons, and the pittance they’ll ever throw back to you is what you need to get through the next year, so… yeah. Less than optimal situation.
The whole tariffs episode only goes to show that Trump really is terrified of a serious recession on his watch, so the so-called TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) trade is a pretty sure bet. Until, of course, he’s pushed into making a huge mistake, taking some dumb gamble at the worst possible moment. And he’s not yet terrified enough of a recession to understand that you might see a lot of tariff revenues at first - but that’s just a tax on companies unable to flex supply chains in a short amount of time. They will adapt.
Inevitably, tariff revenues will shrink. And domestic companies are unlikely to benefit in the short run save by hiking prices because they lack the capacity for a rapid increase in demand. They’ve also got to contend with the parts of their supply chain that isn’t domestic getting hit with countervailing tariffs. When you start adding different systemic dynamics together, you’ve got a recipe for a crash in one sector spilling over to others. Hence tariffs never working as proponents expect. But the mess takes a few years to clean up.
I’m old enough to remember the years leading up to both 2001 and 2008, and what’s happening now in the USA is a lot more like the former than the latter. Tech companies are riding high on expectations about AI that look unlikely to be borne out, particularly if access to foreign competition isn’t severely restricted. As the foundation of AI is applied math - hardware helps too, obviously, hence graphic chip maker Nvidia becoming so incredibly valuable - anyone can develop AI. Ukraine is set to be a world leader simply because the Ukrainians have access to quality training data, not weird junk scraped from ridiculous comments posted on Twitter mashed up with inferior summaries of Wikipedia. I don’t just mean combat videos, either: communications between personnel can be just as valuable. Performance of units, same. Generals are more vulnerable to AI than sergeants.
The entire Atlantic maritime region is primed to see Europe step out of the long shadows cast by Moscow and D.C. at last. It remains to be seen whether the Europeans can strike the necessary balance between D.C. and Beijing to prevent the two from blundering into a pointless conflict that could easily take down the global economy.
Moscow these days looks increasingly like a cornered animal, in diplomatic terms. Though Beijing increasingly props up the Muscovite war effort, so far there has been no large-scale transfer of armored vehicles or ammunition. North Korea handles that, and unfortunately appears to have almost as much raw capacity to make more ammunition as Moscow. The quality is reportedly very much lacking, though.
Whether the Europeans truly are finally flooding Ukraine with whatever they can physically provide will make a big difference in the fighting this summer and fall. With most aid deliveries no longer specified, it’s impossible to be certain what’s happening. But it seems reasonable to presume that NATO has finally realized that the eastern border of the alliance runs through Ukraine. Europe is now playing for time on several fronts, racing to gain autonomy from the USA before 2027 probably brings a new change in heart on Trump’s part.
Indo-Med
It’s been a pretty ordinary week in the world’s conflict arc, which is to say that violence continues unabated in Gaza while everyone else mostly waits to see what August will bring. Everyone seems pretty resigned to the Palestinians getting ethnically cleansed or starved to death at this point - France is recognizing the existence of Palestine, and in so doing proving how little anything but raw force matters. Maybe the UK’s threat to do the same will move Israel, but I doubt it. Feels like hand-washing to me. I guess old Pontius Pilate ascended to become the true spirit of the liberal west.
Hamas certainly transformed Gaza into a giant suicide bomb, but in the process of taking revenge Israel has degenerated into a giant ethnic militia nearly indistinguishable from any of the regimes that surround it. I don’t think anyone can say when the price will ultimately be paid for this by ordinary Israelis, but even American opinion with respect to Israel has shifted. Israel appears to be setting itself up for the apocalyptic Masada scenario its leaders try so hard to make Israelis fear, despite their military superiority: being left all alone to fight against a parade of threats.
Further east, the next kinetic exchange with Iran looks inevitable, though its exact shape and timing is yet to be determined. It is interesting that Trump continues to insist that Iran’s enrichment program was wiped out but also that the USA might have to bomb it again. It takes years to build something like an enrichment from scratch to the point it matters, so Trump is sabotaging his own claims. Not to matter: he’s discovered that you can start a war and the American media will be totally okay with it as long as no Americans die. He’ll mash that button again when it’s time.
Of course, inevitably a drone or missile will go astray and hit something on a US base Iran probably didn’t even intend. Then both sides will be primed to fall into something nasty without an obvious endgame.
Which is about where India and Pakistan sit right now. Everything depends on one of several militant groups only half under anybody’s control not managing to kill any Indian soldiers or civilians. Leaders across the world are discovering the power of launching some drone strikes and quickly declaring victory. But drones are so cheap that if you’re sending one, you might as well send a hundred to make sure the message is properly received. Which makes it mighty difficult to differentiate a messaging strike from an all-out attack.
Until adequate anti-drone defenses are so widely employed that attackers are forced to pay a higher cost to transmit such signals, the perception of drones being a cheap means of retaliation looks destined to have tragic consequences. I’m honestly amazed that errant orc drones haven’t accidentally killed a whole lot of civilians in Poland and Romania over the past couple years.
From Algeria and through Ukraine all the way to Singapore, the challenge of protecting personnel, civilians, and assets from drones has only begun. So have the experiments run by power interests trying to see what they can do.
Pacific
The global conflict cascade of the past few years has finally touched the Pacific directly, with Thailand and Cambodia getting in on the action this past week. The two countries share a long and sometimes ill-defined mutual border, and as is always the case in these situations every now and again one side does something the other considers provocative.
There have been incidents where soldiers walked into minefields or tried to stop them from being sown, a recent one resulting in Thai casualties. So the Thais struck Cambodian border positions - notably using bomber drones and tactics that could have been imported directly from Ukraine along with the several dozen T-84 Oplots the Thais use. The Cambodians fired rocket artillery in reply, killing civilians, and attempted to access a temple site both sides claim, so the Thais hit back with airstrikes delivered by F-16s.
Thailand is one of those countries that could be a useful source of gear for Ukraine, having imported about a brigade’s worth of armored vehicles last decade. But apparently Bangkok needs all that kit to teach the badly outmatched Cambodians a lesson in hard power politics. Sure looks like another leader decided to test their military’s mettle… wonderful. A ceasefire was declared yesterday, so here’s hoping it holds. Another few dozen people dead for… what, exactly?
Fortunately this spat doesn’t look to have much of any connection to anything far beyond Southeast Asia. By which I mean direct geopolitical involvement with outsiders - the Thais employ an admirably diversified mix of gear reflective of their autonomy. Cambodia is fairly friendly to China, but China and Thailand have a working relationship - the Thais source a good portion of their kit from China.
China is steadily displacing Moscow from all the old Soviet markets except India, which has beef with China over border territories in the Himalayas that aren’t of truly critical importance to either side. And India is working steadily towards being able to replicate anything Soviet domestically while trying to improve on stagnant Soviet thinking. All in all, it looks like the days of the T-series of tanks are drawing to a bitter close, burnt-out shells littering the fields and forests of Ukraine.
Though unlikely, North Korea might take the plunge and invade South Korea one day, and if it does that’ll soon do for most of the rest of the Soviet lineage. The South Koreans are a force to be reckoned with in their own right. I often wonder if the alliance with the USA is holding Seoul back.
Geopolitically, the USA’s claim to be pivoting to the Indo-Pacific is doing more to encourage Japan and South Korea to hedge against D.C. than cause either to rely more on it. It’s also fostering a degree of mutual reconciliation between the two, which is kind of shocking if you know anything about their shared history.
The Pacific continues to simmer, but thankfully aside from border spats and China finding new ways to bully Taiwan war doesn’t look imminent. Beijing may well want to wait on any military action to see just how much damage drones promise to do to cross-water operations. It may also occur to Beijing that the potential could exist to envelop Taiwan in a wall of drones. Drone technology is scaling well, and not in the form sci-fi writers long expected. Maybe killer robots are the future, but like lasers, so far they’re still just a dream. Instead, remote control toys were the next logical step forward. Who knew?
Oh, and just to remind the world that the Pacific is surrounded by a ring of fire and cantankerous faults, a massive quake off Kamchatka sent a small tsunami racing across the poorly-named ocean. Nobody was hurt - just the planet reminding us all how small our petty wars are. The greatest hazards of all slumber uncertainly beneath our feet. At least drones will work wonders in disaster relief. A topic for after the war.
Concluding Comments
I’m definitely keeping a close watch for any signs of Ukraine’s 2025 counteroffensive getting fully underway, as I expect will happen by September. Trump’s truncation of his deadline for Putin to commit to peace talks conveniently hedges against Ukraine starting earlier, if as I presume he is trying to be on the right side of any Ukrainian success.
After letting the Vance-Musk-Hegseth set have enough rope to hang themselves for about six months, in response to falling poll numbers Team Trump is letting the Rubio-Graham-Kellogg clique have a go at driving Ukraine policy. Yet thanks to the proven threat of the former crew getting Trump’s ear again at a later date, Europe has every incentive to pour money and arms into Ukraine in a bid to gain autonomy from the USA.
It’s a bass-ackwards, insane troll logic way to get there, but at least it’s finally happening: the Ukrainians have a tacit green light to hit Putin’s orcs as hard as they can before Beijing has time to decide Moscow ought to have a few thousand obsolete armored vehicles that were always cheap ripoffs of Soviet designs anyway. Worse, Beijing could get serious and send the Chinese version of HIMARS for “combat testing” at scale.
Here’s hoping 2025 proves as decisive for Ukraine as it really needs to be. While Ukraine is only set to get stronger, and Europe is re-arming, the future is never certain. And the raw mass that Chinese industry is capable of is mobilized should not be underestimated. Fighting a diseased bear is one thing. Taking on a dragon with a chip on its shoulder is another.