Ukraine's Victory Plan B: Dismantling Putin's Empire From The Inside
Most wars only truly end when one side is forced to admit defeat. Accomplishing this through battlefield triumph is the default option. But Ukraine may be able to get the job done another way.
Before this week, a full third of Moscow’s active strategic bomber fleet going up in smoke across the empire was a scene straight out of Bond and Clancy’s classic 80’s fictional war thriller, Red Storm Rising. Ah the times we live in. And the Ukrainians didn’t even need dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from nuclear submarines - and the sacrifice of a couple submarine crews - to do the job. Just some really gutsy covert ops types and the right tech.
Putin’s mighty empire just lost a big chunk of one of its prestige assets, long-range bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Dozens of Tu-22M and Tu-95 strategic bombers - NATO reporting names Backfire and Bear respectively - located at hugely important orc air bases were taken out by around a hundred and twenty first-person view drones smuggled into position over the past year and a half by Ukrainian Intelligence. Some great video compilations have been posted by WarTranslated and Special Kherson Cat on Bluesky - two great accounts on a less irritating version of Twitter.
These aircraft have been used for years to unleash cruise missiles - in the case of annihilated Mariupol back in 2022, even large gravity bombs - that have killed hundreds of Ukrainian civilians. Every few nights for months Ukrainians across the country have been forced to take shelter because a large number of bombers had been detected leaving their bases. Tens of millions of Ukrainians just got a bit of revenge. Hopefully more sleep, too. Once Putin’s tirade in reply is over.
Putin is hardly out of bombers or cruise missiles to mount on them, but the bomber force was already struggling with wear and tear from flying with heavy combat loads. They’re old Soviet make, essentially impossible to replace. Though officially Moscow has several hundred bomber aircraft, fewer than a hundred were operable even before dozens got burned on the ground.
Ukraine is owed a debt of gratitude for making the rest of the world safer. If three dozen of the forty-one aircraft Ukraine has confirmed were hit were bombers - at least a couple were transports and another two hugely-valuable A-50M AWACS (just four left!) - that’s about a hundred fewer cruise missiles that can be simultaneously thrown at a country Moscow someday decides is bad.
This was a covert op for the ages, but caveats are in order before rushing to proclaim drones alone to be the future of warfare. Those of us who have spent the past few years watching the drone war evolve in Ukraine tend to be divided into two main camps. One embraces drones as a military revolution leading to warfare by remote control, dramatically reducing personnel overhead without sacrificing lethality. The other views drones as an essential and powerful tool that has to slot in alongside other types of equipment, old ideas often gaining new relevance as technology drives unpredictable feedback loops of innovation and experimentation. I’m obviously well on this side of the debate. The drones may be the stars of the show, but without operatives in country Operation Spider’s Web would not have been possible.
Ukraine mounted a brilliant covert operation that exploited a novel vulnerability - the tactic probably cannot be directly replicated. That drones were used as the carriers of Ukraine’s just retribution is incidental, their success a function of ruscist hubris as much as the potential of remotely controlled weapons. Had Ukraine a secret stash of missiles with enough range that only required special forces operators on the ground to report when aircraft were present at the target base, smuggled drones would have been redundant - if admittedly a lot cheaper.
There’s also the fact that the nature of the russian fascist system renders it particularly vulnerable to this kind of bold covert attack. All you need is a small group of operatives able to blend into an apathetic local population and receive smuggled shipments, which you’ll always have plenty of anywhere some authority is trying to hoover up all available revenue through taxes, tariffs, and fees to fund a war. This will create black markets that make it a lot more difficult to discern legitimate economic activity from illicit movements, especially if everything you’re doing except the final attack looks exactly like normal shipments moving packages around. Raw geography is also working against Putin’s security services - Moscow has a lot of border territory to control.
That’s not to detract from what the Ukrainians accomplished; only a reminder that they did what they did the way they did for specific reasons. Drawing radical conclusions about the future of warfare is only warranted if this happens a few more times. I doubt that very much, though I’d be glad to get proven wrong. Although, the principle of remotely seeding a target area with drones that wait for the right moment to activate will probably lead to some pretty vicious minefields in a few years.
I’m also bullish on the prospect of assassinations using wire-guided drones. Really, what’s the Secret Service going to do against a threat like that if someone really wants to make J.D. Vance president when Trump is celebrating his birthday at that silly parade he’s putting on in a couple weeks? Or Pete Hegseth, though it would take a few hits at once for all his wildest fantasies to come true, and I don’t think whatever god he worships is strong enough to make that happen. If it were me, I’d go for a full eleven, promoting fellow transplanted Californian-turned-Oregonian Lori Chavez-DeRemer straight from Secretary of Labor. Prune that presidential line of succession right back to the branch.
Anyway, the evidence so far points to Ukrainian teams inside Putin’s empire pulling several key components of the plan together over a year and a half. Drones built with explosives embedded into the chassis were smuggled in, then loaded into hidden compartments set in the roofs of some modular wooden houses which also contained batteries and, presumably, transmitters. After being shipped to within a few kilometers of the orc bases, sliding doors built into the roof opened by remote control, operators logged on, and the drones played 21st century Pearl Harbor, streaming video back to Ukraine until moments before impact. Supposedly operators used image recognition AI to lock on and ensure aircraft were hit in vulnerable spots even if the control signal was lost.
Aside from the material impact of the hit, this whole operation is a slap across Putin’s face. Something like it should have been anticipated. There were warning signs. Smuggling small drones close to valuable targets has been proven possible a few times by Budanov’s people over the past few years. A drone armed with a bomb big enough to shred aluminum isn’t terribly heavy, and a shaped charge can ensure that a jet of heat penetrates. Spare tires are insufficient protection. Normally you’d use a cluster warhead on a ballistic or cruise missile to shred aircraft parked on a flight line. Placing a bomblet on a drone is definitely a lot more elegant.
But the specific means of destruction is, again, a function of what option brings the highest chance of success. Missiles, a horde of angry chimpanzees, or genetically engineered sabotage weasels would be deployed if available and able to accomplish the task.
As many accolades as the Ukrainians have earned with this brilliant strike, the success does, unfortunately, prove a point I’ve been making for some time now. The democratization of warfare is accelerating, making cycles of violence exceptionally difficult to control. In a very real sense, the power of the State is everywhere under threat as small, relatively poorly funded groups shatter the effective monopoly on violence traditionally held by military forces. Even if you have a strong appreciation for anarchist thought, as I do, there’s no getting around the fact that the transition away from a few elite-dominated groups being able to physically bully their way to dominance over huge swaths of territory is bound to be messy.
With time, patience, and the right contacts, I suspect that a fair few radical groups could pull off an attack of this magnitude on any given American military base - or the White House. Even nuclear infrastructure is no longer safe - how much damage to a ballistic missile submarine could be done by a few drones hitting the right spot? The US Navy already faces a severe maintenance backlog - if half a dozen boomers were slightly damaged, how quickly could repairs be effected?
Heck, what about nuclear silos? They might look tough, but coping with overpressure and ground vibrations from a nearby nuclear blast is a different kind of engineering challenge than a drone dropping a shaped-charge bunker-busting warhead, even if small. If the silo lid jams shut, your fancy intercontinental ballistic missile isn’t flying anywhere.
And it goes without saying that groups willing to indiscriminately attack civilians can have an absolute field day with drones, making random rocket attacks that a system like Iron Dome can mostly knock down a memory of better days. I’ll resist a cheap crack about the way the Israelis fight in Gaza here or how it is bound to blow back on Israelis in the medium to long run (okay, I suppose won’t).
I will say that it’s a very good thing that the lunatic bigots who keep attacking Jewish people around the world appear uninterested in or incapable of understanding the power of drones. As for keeping people safe from morons out to hurt people using politics as a thin excuse, does any police department anywhere in the USA have a drone that can knock down another drone? Half of them have armored vehicles for their SWAT teams, but fat lot of good that would do them if facing a bad guy or two who learned something from the war in Ukraine. If a drone can drop a grenade, it can drop other things almost as unpleasant and typically more readily available.
In short, Americans are very lucky that there actually aren’t all that many people in the country both willing to resort to violence and able to crack open a few textbooks or watch some online how-to videos. Abroad, if the USA ever faces a sufficiently strong and motivated enemy, Americans are set to experience a shock not unlike what is passing through the ruscist system right now.
Imagine the congressional hearings and screams for nuclear retribution in the media if some Iran-backed team took out half of the USA’s stealth bomber fleet in Missouri with few drones during one of the USAF’s elephant walk displays some time?
Luckily for military professionals, what traditional armed forces have that most militant groups or militias usually lack is the right combination of resources and professionalism necessary to employ combat power with effect. I would not be surprised if organized warfare in about five years time is defined by a thin front line held by fire teams who rely on an entrenched armored vehicle as a combination of base camp, drone defense, and heavy fire support to control their local area - and a ride out when things go wrong. Infantry teams maintain a layer of physical security for drone teams who generate an umbrella of surveillance drones and a cloud of strike drones. Anything that comes within about five kilometers gets hit by increasingly heavy varieties of firepower delivered in whatever fashion suits the target’s defenses.
To break through this modern shieldwall requires pushing a far higher density of resources into the target area than the enemy can cope with faster than they can dispatch reserves. Successive pushes coupled to intense strikes targeting the whole of the enemy’s physical presence on and well behind the front leads to rapid attrition, paralysis, and destruction of target formations. Fast-moving, hard-hitting strike teams remain the essential maneuver elements, moving to secure areas that drone operators can use to extend the drone front. This is bottom-up warfare taken to an extreme, but that doesn’t mean any group of random yahoos will be effective at it. There can simply be no expectation that anyone not in contact with the enemy fully understands the circumstances of someone who is.
Acceptance of this principle is what separates the tech-bro and professional communities when it comes to the future of drones. The former is working towards an egoist vision of a few brilliant people with advanced AI ordering swarms of mindless automatons about from the comfort of their office. The latter sees only new layers of complexity amid an already crowded environment filled with things that can get people killed. Where the former embraces Ukraine’s use of drones, the latter recognizes that this specific mode of attack is probably never going to work in any other context.
So: extrapolating too much from Ukraine’s use of drones on this occasion is probably a mistake. That being said, Ukraine’s drone strike campaign is rapidly evolving in a direction that may create an alternative pathway to triumph over the Muscovite threat. Victory Plan B, you might call it.
What could be termed the holy grail of warfare is some kind of method, technique, doctrine, or combination of the above that can cause the enemy to falter from within, without having to destroy their military power on the battlefield. Every couple generations thinkers work themselves into theoretical knots trying to figure out how to make it happen. It almost never does. The 1991 Gulf War came closest, but it helps having a twit like Saddam Hussein as an opponent.
Could the Ukraine War be different, thanks to smart use of drones? It’s an intriguing possibility, but victory will still come about because of material destruction of components of the orc war machine as opposed to pure shock effect on ruscist morale - though this certainly can’t hurt.
One of the essential ties that binds in Putin’s empire is the majority of his subjects feeling certain that those who break the rules get punished. In a dictatorship, some people gain a sense of righteous power from enforcing rules, often down to ridiculous levels of detail. It’s a symbol of seeming civic participation that can make small-minded people feel important.
When anyone in the empire or its sights visibly gets away with something, that delivers a shock to the ruscist senses. Hence the Ukrainians immediately releasing details about the planning that went into the attack, to the point of boasting that a major planning center was located right next to a local ruscist internal security HQ. For true believers in the russian world delusion, where Moscow is for all things good and against all things bad (so no need to question the leadership!), those pesky Ukrainian colonials should not have the intellect or resources to pull off something this big.
But the orcs can’t easily blame NATO this time, because there were no NATO missiles or surveillance assets involved. Bombers are always on the ground at one or more key airbases, so if you can attack all of them it doesn’t matter if there’s been a recent satellite pass to confirm which bombers are where. This was a simple straight-up covert operation planned and executed over many months that caught Putin’s intelligence services with their pants down. The ruscist war-blogger set is livid, by all accounts.
The orc professional officer class doesn’t come off looking great either. Approaching three and a half years into a war that has witnessed a steady improvement in Ukrainian capabilities, and Moscow’s strategic jets aren’t at least parked under some kind of shelter? Or guarded by someone with a shotgun? Whoever didn’t approve the cost just let the Ukrainians burn $7 billion in irreplaceable assets.
In the videos released by Ukraine, aircraft on the flight line can be seen with tires lining their wings, a deterrent against attack that manifestly failed. Drones were able to take off one at a time and fly over the flight lines of some of Moscow’s most important bases, moving nice and slow to make sure they lined up a good hit, and nothing was available to shoot them down?
Hard truth time: anybody who ever thought that it necessarily takes much raw ability to get called a general hasn’t met many. As with every profession, some blazing idiots get promoted. People are people, and when who you know trumps demonstrated ability, a system rots from the inside. The really amusing twist, if you stop to think about it, is that there are almost certainly unemployed orc war bloggers who would have long ago implemented necessary measures to keep this from happening. Outside of a few unusual cases, beyond about the company level there just aren’t many competent professionals in Putin’s army these days. They can order their solders to assault regardless of casualties and organize replacements, but real innovation basically ceases above the tactical level.
Being a true believer in the sacred russian world and having to confront drones blowing up something of importance somewhere deep inside the empire every night is bound to trigger some serious frustration. That’s a crucial enabling factor in bringing down the ruscist empire from within, which - after delivering a sharp military defeat on the ground - is the surest means of ending the threat posed by Putin forever.
This route to Victory is a longer and more dangerous one than a direct military triumph. It would be a shame and a tragedy to give up the fleeting chance to break Putin’s armed forces in 2025 by failing to flood Ukraine with the weapons it needs to counterattack in a big way this September. But hope is not a strategy, so a Plan B is always wise. Ukrainian leaders have been working on both plans for a long time.
Any empire can be profitably viewed as a complex interdependent organism driven by the need to expand. By its very nature the thing involves far-flung pieces welded together by a landscape filled with threats and opportunities - one to a given faction being the opposite to another. The only way to keep a semblance of internal balance is expansion. That’s why Putin is never going to stop, why no matter what anyone tries he refuses to end this war. And that’s also why he’s also weak: if he were truly the brilliant heir of Stalin he pretends, Putin wouldn’t be carrying on the fight in Ukraine at all. He’s stuck, and Ukraine is bound to make him pay.
Authoritarian systems have a lot less power than usually presumed; they are merely able to direct what is available more quickly towards a given purpose than leaders in a democracy. Both poles of organization, however, must achieve a degree of long-term consensus among powerful factions, or the arrangement unravels. Empires are inherently authoritarian at some level - usually many - subordinating parts of the empire to the desires of the whole, by force if required. Which it always is, eventually. If the empire cannot expand externally, its factions will turn inward to satisfy the prospect of mutual benefit that holds them together, consuming the least powerful members before going after each other.
Thanks to Putin’s war, Moscow’s hoard of cash reserves is almost depleted. The economy is running on fumes, massive military spending triggering an inflation wave that’s slowly rising up to consume the empire’s poor. When money stops adequately representing the material value of the things it’s supposed to buy, alternative mediums of exchange are adopted. The downward budget spiral in the empire will only worsen as taxable, reported income slips into the grey and black markets.
Unable to grow the real economy, military efforts a dismal failure, and society absorbing hundreds of thousands of wounded veterans - many well aware of how badly they were betrayed - is not a recipe for stability. Centralization of productive effort and rising inefficiency are common side effects of the process, which also happen to make production systems more vulnerable to focused attack. So in a very fortuitous confluence stemming from the imperial nature of the russian fascist system, Ukraine has the unique opportunity to advance both the destruction of ruscist power on the battlefield and at its source with the same approach: find and destroy critical production and logistics nodes. - or at least the stuff using them.
I’ve pointed out a fair few times how the sheer size of Putin’s empire is now a serious liability, and this strike offers even more proof. How many ports of entry into the world’s largest country must there be that operatives can exploit? Third party countries like Turkiye and Kazakhstan still do business with Moscow, with many of the chips powering missiles dropped by dozens of now-defunct strategic bombers evading western sanctions by passing through Istanbul and Almaty (I have it on good authority that nobody goes to Astana if they can avoid it - culture over politics). This also means that Ukrainians and allies not on Moscow’s radar can slip in and out at will, even without going on a long hike through a desert.
Between covert operations, sabotage done by ATESH and other partisans opposed to Moscow, and hundreds of ordinary strike drones that Ukraine can now send over the border literally every night, and hits on every piece of Moscow’s military machine can be expected to escalate as long as the war continues. Aside from the psychological impact of seeing their almighty leaders helpless to hold back the tide, the constant toll taken on productive facilities will cause serious issues on the battlefield as impacts mount.
Collapsing a hostile empire from the inside with precision strikes without having to defeat it on the battlefield is something approaching ultimate triumph when it comes to security policy. I doubt it will ever be possible - this is Ukraine’s Plan B for a reason. But there’s a first time for everything, and in a material sense the effort is well worth making so long as it doesn’t negatively impact the fighting on the fronts. As a rule, do not bet against Ukraine. Or anyone else fighting for their lives.
Victory Plan A for Ukraine remains a battlefield win on the order of what happened in 2022 that throws the orcs onto the defensive permanently. Ukraine will be able to launch sequential limited operations to clear as much of the southern theater as possible, forcing Putin’s regime to admit defeat by entering negotiations without ridiculous preconditions - if it doesn’t just fall to a coup. Probably led by mid-level military officers who know they’re doomed to take the blame for the war going bad if they don’t act first.
Victory Plan B is the slow, deliberate dismantling of the empire: actively worsening economic conditions and damaging military production to such a degree that Putin has to pull back from the conflict to stave off popular revolt in two or three years’ time. Arms smuggled to partisan and insurgent groups may lead to violent attacks on security forces as Ukraine attempts to ignite ethnic tensions, diverting combat power away from the ever-unstable front. Sabotage of the railway system becomes endemic, Ukraine physically encouraging the empire to separate into distinct economic regions.
The reality of any country is that it’s actually quite a fragile thing, a bundle of rules that most people agree to follow because they seem to serve a purpose and don’t badly interfere with day to day life. If enough people refuse to comply, the rules will eventually die, because enforcement is costly and eventually not enough people want to pay the price. Hence all the moral claims typically laid on citizens who are said to be joined together in something called society - another fragile illusion, requiring voluntary compliance with rules of behavior enforceable solely by threatening scorn.
That’s why who gets to control the powerful institutions that can enforce compliance is the trickiest question in human affairs. These will always exist, because people will collectively demand them and spontaneously generate them if they are absent. Only democratic political systems can prevent the abuse of them from forcing a major reboot and renovation more frequently than every few generations - a process that may lead to some dramatic and rapid shifts.
Putin is a living embodiment of every story about how power corrupts. In control of his failing empire for a quarter of a century now, he’s nothing more than a parasite. He only exists because he inherited a fading empire that is home to about fifty million people who want to take revenge on the world for not being the way they think it should be. To defy his power so visibly, so often, and so successfully, is to slowly pry free the handle of a hand grenade he’s spent his years in power threatening to throw at anyone who questions him. Hence Putin’s inability to call off his war in Ukraine.
It’s only too bad that well more than a million people have been killed or wounded on both side to bring Putin to this humiliating place. All it would take is a single well-guided drone to end this whole ridiculous charade once and for all. But in Ukraine, the fighting rages on.
Overview of the Fronts: Week 22
The pace of ruscist attacks across the fronts has held firm at nearly two hundred a day, resulting in a daily average of eleven hundred confirmed casualties, up to five hundred of these fatalities. Over the past five months, including attacks behind the front lines, two hundred thousand orcs in total have been rendered casualties by Ukraine. While the depletion of Soviet armored vehicle stocks means that tanks and BMPs are less common these days, Ukrainian drone teams still find plenty of those as well as artillery to smash, destruction of fire support an ongoing effort which limits orc advances almost as much as the inherent weakness of motorcycle-based assaults.
Right now, probably the biggest unknown when it comes to fending off Putin’s orc waves isn’t where they plan to strike, but whether they are able to increase the intensity of ongoing operations much farther. While some tactical gains have been noted over the past week on the Sumy, Lyman, Kostyantynivka, and Novopavlivka fronts, none yet threatens to seriously set back the Ukrainian defense. And some interesting command-level shifts suggest that Ukraine is finalizing arrangements for the summer fighting season, which I continue to expect will witness a serious Ukrainian counteroffensive push before the end.
Northern Theater
Although there continue to be rumors of a new ruscist effort on the Kharkiv front in the near future, aside from some probes in the Vovchansk ruins and Ukrainian drone strikes into Belgorod the fighting in this area is limited. The Sumy front, on the other hand, this past week saw the orcs broaden their effort to secure a buffer along the border.
The plan is pretty obvious: reach and secure a strip of high ground about fifteen kilometers from Sumy, allowing ruscist guns and drones to bombard it the way they do Kherson. They’ll aim to straighten out the border to simplify its defense over the long run while they’re at it. Biggest issue with the plan: Ukrainian forces have a lot of woodland to use for cover situated on high ground. Yunakivka and Myropillia are in the greatest danger, but
At the strategic level, the new orc bluff is that things are going so well on the battlefield that Ukraine will be lucky to hold on to Sumy and Kharkiv tomorrow if it doesn’t surrender Kherson and Zaporizhzhia today. This is an attempt to get Ukraine to accept losing urban Donbas as a win in the war and voluntarily retreat. So Moscow is trying for a buffer zone, not something that’s typically decisive in any conflict.
Since everyone likes the cards metaphor right now, Putin’s demands in ceasefire talks amount to holding two pair, tens and twos, against Ukraine’s full house of jacks full of queens. The audacity of Putin’s demands in exchange for peace reveals how desperate he really is. Being to Xi Jinping what Assad was to him is not a look Putin can easily live with.
Ukrainian troops assigned to the Sumy front continue to launch local attacks across the border towards Tetkino, but the prospects for major gains here are minimal. These are best seen as spoiling attacks designed to distract the main orc effort further east. With Moscow’s troops bound and determined to seize deserted grey zone villages where Ukraine almost certainly has artillery dialed in, this front looks set to serve as a convenient soak for some of Moscow’s combat power.
Interestingly, the five air assault brigades announced as comprising one of Ukraine’s air assault corps still appear split up, portions of 82nd Air Assault and 71st Jager (Mountain Assault) present in Donbas while a piece of the 79th, formerly fighting in Kurakhove, is apparently up in Sumy. This raises the question of whether the corps reform is in fact resolving the problem of units being shuffled between fronts, never gaining familiarity with any one.
Of course, an alternative explanation is possible. As brigades can’t mass together anywhere because of the risk of Iskander strikes - these keep targeting training areas for a reason - even those in the reserves are bound to be scattered across the fronts, battalions ordered to deploy driving to the assigned front from wherever their reserve position is located. Many may be pulling double-duty as strategic reserves in a sector, only called into action during a crisis. That would explain why some brigades seem to be fighting on two fronts at once even though they’re not one of those that’s always been pulled apart and assigned at the battalion level.
Regardless, in Sumy the orcs are fighting uphill against what should be a well-prepared defense. Any advances should prove costly and indecisive in equal measure. Just like the attacks on the Kharkiv front over the past year.
Eastern Theater
Moscow seems to be either lowering the priority of the Kupiansk front or recuperating the forces fighting there after heavy losses, because the attempt to expand the bridgehead over the Oskil has gone nowhere for weeks. The rest of the Kupiansk bulge remains intact, and though fighting has not ceased, it’s a lot more intense to the south.
The Borova front has also been characterized by mostly tactical back and forth type fighting, but the bridgehead over the Zherebets near Lyman began growing again. It looks like ruscist teams have reached the narrower Nitrius river near Karpivka, putting the advance at about the halfway point between the Oskil and Zherebets - six months to move sixteen kilometers. At this rate it will take until the end of the year to properly secure this new bridgehead, much less march on Lyman.
The orc generals on this front are reportedly unusually careful about maintaining reserves. Their troops move forward slowly, but don’t tend to wind up as overstretched and vulnerable as tends to be the case on other fronts. This could mean that they might be capable of more explosive movements than other orc groupings if given the right opportunity.
Ukrainian command has been strangely reluctant to reinforce this area, just as it long was Kupiansk, which is a bit odd, considering the ongoing threat to Third Army Corps’s flank. Every now and again I do wonder if Third Assault Brigade, heart of this corps, is in effect semi-exiled because of its popularity and relative ease of recruiting. Although, it remains of the few formations that could probably manage fifteen and liberate half of Luhansk with them after crashing east between Svatove and Kreminna if Ukraine fully committed to the effort. Not a bad threat to have poised and ready to unleash, and the orcs visibly fear it.
Little has changed on the Siversk front, though at some point Moscow has got to collapse this salient to close in on urban Donbas. Chasiv Yar is poised to see a renewed orc effort to break through towards Kostyantynivka, with reports indicating an orc campaign to totally annihilate the remains of the urban center. That’s probably a prelude to a big push, possibly one that tries to get around Ukraine’s fortifications by attacking to the north of the town instead of south.
The Kostyantynivka front is looking more and more like Moscow’s primary target this summer, Ukrainian forces defending Pokrovsk fixed in place by the threat of a direct assault on it while the main blow falls further north. If the orcs can bring Kostyantynivka into near-encirclement, Ukraine will be hard-pressed to stop a subsequent push straight towards Sloviansk from Bakhmut.
Preserving Moscow’s strength on the Lyman front while the Siversk bulge is slowly reduced looks necessary to make this work. The Kremlin might finally have realized that every time ruscist troops get within about fifteen kilometers of a significant urban or forested area, Ukraine’s drone operators have so many places to hide that simply sustaining soldiers on the front line becomes an impossible challenge.
Unable to take urban Donbas by storm, Putin’s next-best option is to bring the whole thing under fire control, as the Ukrainians term it when logistics lines come under regular attack. If all of urban Donbas can be shelled at any time, it will become uninhabitable in time. Even if the conflict is frozen without Putin’s forces breaking through, the orcs will still maintain a high degree of control over the parts of Ukraine they claim to own, able to menace anything within twenty kilometers of the contact line. If Putin can’t win outright, he’ll aim to ensure the conflict never ends.
First thing that Ukraine should do is prepare a lot of ditches and razor wire - the natural enemies of mass motorcycle assaults. And scale the Drone Line initiative as quickly as possible. There is some ground between Bakhmut and Sloviansk that can be traded for a few tens of thousands of ruscist casualties without unduly harming Ukraine’s defense.
As far as the more active portions of the Kostyantynivka front go, for the most part further orc advances have been halted while gaps between pushes are filled in. And with the enemy approaching the barrier of the Kleban-Byk reservoir, quick advances are unlikely, unless Toretsk finally falls.
Elements of 82nd Air Assault Brigade have been reported in the area between Kostyantyivka and Pokrovsk, which if true could precede a substantial counteroffensive effort on this front, since it’s supposed to be the heart of an air assault corps. Or they could be getting thrown in as a fire brigade. There don’t look to be serious prospects for a counteroffensive here, but appearances can be deceiving.
In principle, letting the enemy rush forward, expending their effort attacking positions you mostly let go without a fight, can make for a wicked counterattack. A feigned retreat may give up ground then take more than was temporarily lost. It, in a strategic sense, is what I consider Ukraine to have been doing on the eastern front since late 2023 - about when the planning for the drone attack on Moscow’s bomber bases began. Serious operations are planned with a lot of lead time.
Still, the odds of pulling off a successful counteroffensive beyond something designed to restore the lines of a few months ago look low in this area. Moscow has a lot of urban space relatively close by to shelter resources. That’s what made the defense of Avdiivka in 2023 doubtful from the start.
Ukrainian control of the Toretsk outskirts complicates any ruscist plans to advance. A series of neighborhoods along the Kryvyi Torets river west of Toresk form a defensive bastion the orcs have so far been unable to clear, allowing Ukrainian troops to continue fighting the orcs in Toretsk.
That Chasiv Yar and Toretsk haven’t fallen over the past year is a testament to the grit of the Ukrainians fighting in both. Kostyantynivka is likely a lot better protected this year than it was in the summer of 2024, making Putin’s push for it a less effective strategy than once might have been.
Pokrovsk has seen few to no enemy advances, with most of Moscow’s effort now directed to the east or west. The ruscist bridgehead over the Bychok barely expanded this week, and no progress has been made towards the Pokrovsk town center lately. Glide bomb attacks are frequent here and increasingly in Kostyantynivka, and the towns themselves are being transformed into ruins.
Moscow’s slow march towards Novopavlivka and the confluence of the Vovcha, Solona, and Mokri Yali rivers grinds on, never moving quickly but so far not stopping, either. The closer Moscow gets to a line of larger Ukrainian settlements and forested patches in this area, the more painful every step west will become. Down by Zelene Pole, Ukrainian troops in an exposed position last week seem to be pulling back as expected.
The seeming advantages offered by a line set closer to the confluence point is why I’ve questioned the wisdom of fighting as hard as Ukraine has chosen to farther east. Have the fights to hold the Ulakly-Andriivka-Kostiantynopil triangle and Bahatyr-Oleksiivka line been worth it? I don’t know, and lack the data to achieve any kind of certainty. But I do have to wonder. Of course, it’s easy to say that abandoning this or that village should have happened sooner, when you have no way of knowing if that would mean one still unoccupied would have fallen instead. The query is (mostly) academic. But if the right simulation tools existed…
My expectation remains that Ukraine’s defense on this front will firm up while the ruscist advance runs out of steam in the next month or two. A sliver of Zaporizhzhia district will probably wind up occupied, a fact Moscow will trumpet as some kind of big success, but it won’t matter.
Southern Theater
The same balance holds for about four hundred kilometers as you head west-southwest, despite only two-thirds of this frontage divided by the mighty Dnipro river. Muscovite forces launch assaults somewhere every day, but threatened major offensives don’t ever shape up. Though ongoing orc assaults towards Orikhiv are likely, Moscow lacks the reserves needed to mount something in this area like the march on Pokrovsk. With Ukraine increasingly hitting rail lines, it’s hard enough for Moscow to supply the troops necessary to defend this theater, let alone sustain an intensive attack.
One of the major tells revealing that bluffing the existence of infinite ruscist reserves is now Putin’s only strategy for surviving his disaster of a war is that his forces can barely even mount effective diversionary strikes. No matter how hard Moscow tries to stretch Ukrainian forces thin, it never works. There’s always a brigade in reserve, and long stretches of front where the orcs might like to advance, but can’t, because they lack the force.
Whether the Ukrainians are prepared to take advantage of the situation is an open question. Signs are pointing in the right direction, but there’s an awful lot that can go wrong. Starting at the top of the chain of command.
Leadership & Personnel
In a surprise announcement, Ukraine’s relatively new and supposedly quite effective ground forces commander, Drapatyi, resigned from his position this weekend. The stated reason is that he feels compelled to take personal responsibility for the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers at a training center in Dnipro during an orc Iskander attack.
His resignation might not and probably won’t be accepted, at least not to the point where he’ll leave uniformed service like Zaluzhnyi did any time soon. This is the sort of move made by a professional with no better option, and it says a lot about the urgency parts of Ukraine’s armed forces feel about imposing needed reforms.
Unlike the battalion commander from 47th Mechanized Brigade who recently resigned because of the orders he was asked to carry out in Kursk, I view Drapatyi’s play as the correct one, given his position, assuming that what he’s asserting in his resignation statement as ground forces commander is taken at face value. As he has no apparent political ties or motivations and isn’t exactly a household name, I assess that he did what he did as a soldier in a bad position who knew there was no better way forward.
The battalion commander that I was somewhat critical of last week only erred, in my opinion, by not making his superiors fire him for doing what he as commander on the spot felt was appropriate. That’s how you reveal that high and mighty talk about values and doctrine by superiors are nothing more than so much human exhaust, while still preserving the lives of your people as well as you can. In Drapatyi’s case, remediation of the problem could not be achieved this way, because at his level political signals are inevitably sent by any resignation. His was already an interesting situation because he was both ground forces commander, appointed by Syrskyi last year, but also directly overseeing the overwhelmed grouping covering much of the eastern theater.
Drapatyi’s statement was phrased in such a way that it is abundantly clear he’s been facing down internal roadblocks to making necessary policy changes. In other words, as must always be expected in any transformation on the order of the reboot Ukraine’s ground forces have been going through over the past year, entrenched interests are fighting back.
I have to consider the specific reason given for his resignation - the sad loss of a dozen soldiers in an orc missile attack on a training ground in Dnipro - to be tied to important policy measures that have been resisted by officers above and below him. What Drapatyi appears to be doing is forcing a crisis that the Zelensky administration can’t just wait for the military establishment to fix. Usually, people in his position don’t take this step unless there’s a viable remedy in mind, but it’s only going to happen if nobody can pretend there isn’t a problem.
A recent news report out of Ukraine has it that commander-in-chief Syrskyi, Drapatyi’s boss, really is micromanaging battlefield details down to the level of individual fighting positions. Trouble is, bloggers claiming to have contacts in the Ukrainian Armed Forces have alleged as much ever since Syrskyi took over from Zaluzhnyi last year. Because of how closely this claim matches rhetoric that the anti-Syrskyi faction in Ukraine’s forces has always pushed without much solid evidence, I remain skeptical. It’s difficult to imagine anyone sitting in Kyiv actually believing they have enough insight into the battlefield to specify positions at the fire team level. Or is in possession of enough time to do that thousands of times over, which is what would be required to directly manage the entire front line.
It’s awfully easy for the media to pass off rumors or even a justified incident necessary because of incompetent mid-level leadership as something more. At the same time, the reports are consistent enough and the potential for a senior leader to get too into the weeds plausible enough that I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. Syrskyi is several months into his second year in charge, and it is unclear whether Ukraine’s military reboot is proceeding as quickly as it needs to. A moment is at hand where Ukraine has to decide whether Plan A or B must take precedence as the default assumption. Waiting for 2026 to try Plan A will repeat the mistake made in late 2022 of failing to properly equip for a decisive counteroffensive in 2023. There is a strong chance that Chinese support for Moscow will increase by 2026, making Plan B the only choice, guaranteeing that the conflict continues for years.
My hope is that this public scandal winds up leading to a kind of sideways promotion for Drapatyi. Create a new position for him, something like joint forces commander - eastern theater (or a better Ukrainian equivalent). Have him oversee all assets working on the front or supporting it from behind across Donbas, factory floor to trench. As Moscow is determined to make this area the focus of Putin’s last offensive wave, it is only appropriate to have a single command authority solely focused on this core theater. A trusted staff under him can act as liaisons, connecting Drapatyi’s headquarters with the corps assigned to cover the east.
It is to be hoped that an arrangement like this will bypass the poorly functioning operational group commands at last, as well as making the north and south secondary theaters for the time being, which they should be. Syrskyi can oversee the whole shebang at the strategic level, but at the theater level Drapatyi keeps his twelve to fifteen corps organized and free to act in their assigned sectors as they see fit. Ukraine mounts a major counterattack only if Drapatyi says it’s ready.
The stakes are so high and pool of personnel who truly understand what a front swarming with drones is like so small that the smallest number of jumps between Kyiv and the front possible the better. If I’m right, and Drapatyi made his move as part of a kind of healthy bureaucratic mini-coup, the end result should be better than if he’d just stayed quiet. Refusing to go until they fire you works in a situation where you can give the orders you know are right and take the consequences if some idiot gets upset. But if your orders don’t carry weight because there’s a secret club of people who work together to avoid accountability, walking away can be the best way to reveal them.
Addendum: as I edit this midweek, the news has broken that Drapatyi has been promoted to Commander of the Joint Forces as part of a series of command-level shifts. Robert Brovdi, better known as the leader of Magyar’s Birds, is now the commander of Unmanned Systems Forces. Sounds like the right kind of progress to me.
For the most part, though, I take reporting about supposed personality conflicts and other such drama with about a shot of salt. People always find a way to feel slighted or affronted if they really want to. And if you’re looking for bad feelings, they’re rarely hard to find. But notice how nobody seems to presume even worse drama on the orc side.
Aviation Duel
When it comes to the fighting in the sky, it’s best to sum up the score in the simplest possible terms. After a full year of trying, Moscow has been unable to kill a Viper on the ground and only shot down one in combat. Ukraine, in eighteen months, planned and executed an operation that took down over three dozen prized bombers and several supporting aircraft deep inside enemy territory.
That’s been the war for Ukraine’s skies in a nutshell across the conflict. Ukrainian pilots take risks and usually get away with it, punching well above their weight, though not without losses. Moscow’s - save the Su-25 close air support community - will become radically more conservative the moment the Ukrainians land a lucky hit. Ukrainian air force personnel manage to avoid letting fatigue and repetition cause major disasters, while Moscow’s effectively coddled air force doesn’t take the most basic precautions until punched in the face at least twice.
This looks more likely to happen again to the Sukhoi glide bomber community, because Ukraine’s Vipers, Mirages, and Patriots are finally set to get Link-16. AWACS support of the kind that helped Pakistan bushwhack a few Indian Rafales is supposed to arrive after Link-16 integration is ready. As a reminder, this system is the NATO-standard network enabling data about the battlefield to be quickly shared. A Viper pilot can get the same information as a technician in an AWACS or on the ground in Kyiv and act accordingly.
Every time Moscow sends hundreds of Shaheds and companion decoys into Ukraine, at least a dozen Vipers and Mirages, maybe double that number, can now scramble to intercept. Carrying half a dozen fairly inexpensive and plentiful Sidewinder missiles, their combined power is enough to destroy nearly everything Moscow is able to throw at the majority of Ukraine which electromagnetic warfare doesn’t defeat by sending wildly off course.
As many Su-27 and MiG-29 jets are in the fight, and ground-based flak and shoulder-fired SAM teams do their part, but with Link-16 Vipers and Mirages can more proactively position themselves to achieve multiple intercepts. Unable to cover all of Ukraine simultaneously, being able to dash between threatened areas is a must. Fortunately Vipers can boost their otherwise short range by carrying several external fuel tanks which, by slowing them down, might actually make it easier to lock onto relatively slow-flying Shahed drones.
And close-support missions at the fronts are also happening with surprising frequency, considering how superior orc MiG-31 and Su-35 interceptors are supposed to be over Vipers. But multiple strikes are recorded by precision bombs delivered by Ukrainian jets every day, footage dutifully posted online soon after. Notably, claimed Ukrainian airstrikes usually hit bridges, headquarters, or drone operators - every now and again a HARM missile gets an air defense radar or vehicle.
On the orc side of the ledger, glide bomb attacks continue, and their intensity isn’t decreasing. Ukrainian reports of being badly affected by them have diminished, though, suggesting that the new jamming technology recently announced is working to reduce accuracy. Shooting down some more Sukhois continues to be a prerequisite to fully stalemating the orcs in the skies.
Strike Campaigns
Getting at airfields, of course, doesn’t hurt when it comes to furthering this objective. The Ukrainian attacks on the bomber bases have been covered well enough above and in the broader media, parts of which are not incorrectly describing this defeat as Moscow’s Pearl Harbor.
Aside from destroying or crippling forty-one aircraft, Ukrainian drones have been getting at targets all across the empire lately. Factories have been taking a lot of hits, as Ukraine tries to degrade ruscist production by going after important nodes.
Though details are of course sparse, it can be assumed that the Ukrainians are trying to hit anything that will have cascading impacts if taken out - that is, it makes stuff needed by a lot of other factories. German ball bearings plants in the Second World War were a repeated target because they had so many industrial applications, using the most well-known example. Little parts like a particular kind of lens used in lasers may only be produced by a single enterprise, its equipment never reinforced because the “special military operation” wasn’t ever meant to come to his point.
Naturally, as industries usually locate close to urban areas with good transportation infrastructure, Ukrainian drone operations force a lot of airports to close throughout Putin’s empire any more. So attacks on industrial sites are another useful way to remind Putin’s subjects that he is doing an absolutely terrible job of protecting them. They’re very, very lucky that Ukraine works to avoid civilian casualties, or this war would get even uglier in a hurry. One could even question whether an arsenal of a few million small drones is actually as strong a deterrent as nukes.
If nothing else, Ukrainians appear set to test whether death by a thousand cuts applies to the orc war economy. At the very least, some fraction of potential production will be lost thanks to drones that cost only a few thousands of dollars.
Of course, Moscow can also mass produce and launch strike drones, and record numbers have been striking Ukraine lately. A few ballistic missile launches are mixed in too, including the ones that have been targeting training grounds in recent weeks. But though Shaheds flying at higher altitudes and in greater numbers poses challenges for Ukraine’s defenders, between electronic warfare and kinetic means the vast majority fail to reach their targets. And with Ukraine’s industry so dispersed and underground, the main job of the Shahed waves is just keeping Ukrainian air defenses busy.
All talk of missile tests appears to have faded away. There’s no hard evidence of Moscow’s launches having failed, but none suggests they didn’t, either - possibly never even happened. Some cruise missile strikes had already been likely, and even with a third of the bomber fleet gone, they remain probable now. Possibly even imminently inevitable, now that Ukraine has bonked the Kerch Strait Bridge again.
Naval Matters
Putin is almost sure to be tempted to involve his surviving Kalibr cruise missile carriers in any retaliation, all but the four surviving submarine missile carriers hiding in port on the eastern side of the Black Sea. If the Ukrainians plan very, very well and get really lucky, ambushing the fleet with drones the next time it sorties to launch a strike could make for the next big international headline. Vipers and Mirages can carry anti-ship missiles with a two hundred kilometer range and reach a firing point without flying too close to Crimea. A combined air and drone attack could overwhelm the orc defenses.
Alternatively, either a jet or drone might be modified to carry a version of the Ukrainian Neptun missile. Trading a smaller warhead for increased range could let Ukrainian Su-24 or Su-27 jets properly modified fire from well beyond the range of orc air defenses or the reach of typical air patrols.
Another fun air-sea joint operation could be a little game between Odesa and Crimea where Ukrainian jets openly threaten an air attack to lure orc air defenses into switching on. They then get pummeled by strikes from ground-launched missiles and drones, allowing Ukrainian strike jets to unleash some Storm Shadows on orc air bases in Crimea. Ideally, ruscist jets will flush, some moving to intercept - at which point some Vipers might lay a nifty ambush with AWACS support.
The great thing about Ukraine having more capabilities is that there are so many intriguing options to consider. And for Moscow to anticipate, then work out how to counter. It’s unclear yet exactly what happened at the Kerch Strait bridge, but Ukraine got at least some explosives to the base of a pillar, whether planted by operatives or brought by an underwater drone is yet to be revealed.
World System Brief
At the global level, the seismic shifts presently underway are now so far advanced that what was once big news now seems perfectly ordinary. By and large, every country, corporation, and charity dealing with international affairs is flying blind. All that anyone knows for certain is that change is coming, and nobody wants to be caught on the back foot.
Hence the flurry of international meetings between big shots of late, European leaders publicly embracing Zelensky while Team Trump flounders around the planet proposing deals that will never happen. Tragically, this looks and feels an awful lot like the powers-that-be getting ready for a real roller-coaster ride in the coming months and years.
As D.C. and Moscow continue to demonstrate their lack of power to meaningfully shape events to their will, a global power vacuum has formed. No one is really sure who can do what, so everyone is testing the waters, so to speak. This global autumn will more likely than not turn to a bitter winter before the decade is out.
An exceptionally dangerous confluence of crises threatens to merge simmering conflicts across the whole of Eurasia. A chain reaction not unlike what happened in 1914 is possible, though the pace of the collapse and its exact shape will not be a perfect clone. But the outcome will be the same: leaders everywhere trapped in a cycle of insisting that there can be no option but grinding struggle between allegedly ancient civilizations defined by incompatible values.
Day to day, though, it won’t feel like much has changed in people’s everyday lives. Only in retrospect will it feel incredible that matters were allowed to degenerate so far. With luck, that leads to the development of effective institutions that can lower the frequency of another generation having to learn the same lessons again.
North America
Stepping back from the endless furor over this or that terrible thing the other side did today is useful in filtering out signal from noise in political matters. With elections over with for a year and a half in the USA and Canada, the power mosaic north of the Mexican border is fixed. Canada’s policy is now greater independence from D.C., which means closer association with Europe, Britain, and Australia. It remains to be seen whether that policy is real or for show: the necessary signals will be sent through policy measures announced over a period of many months.
As for the USA, the banal partisan doom loop carries on, Congress and the White House grandstanding while the courts sift through the wreckage that is Trump’s executive orders blitz. A natural result is that everything business leaders with ties to the USA depend on to make plans is more or less frozen. Uncertainty makes investment a lot more difficult, so the fact that Trump’s tariffs are paused one second then temporarily on the next until the next layer of the court system can issue a ruling is bound to become a drag on the real economy.
The stage is set for the markets to start under-reacting to news, priming them for a massive over-reaction when a series of troubling signals finally break the illusion of everything being okay. Coping with the economic consequences of his team’s policy moves is liable to soak up as much of Trump’s attention as the growing odds of a strike on Iran.
On the Ukraine side of things, aside from pretending that the USA is still the most relevant player all the time Team Trump is largely quiet. The peace push charade is over except in the rhetoric leaders are using to maintain the convenient illusion that Trump didn’t just fall flat on his face as bad as Biden did in the most consequential diplomatic negotiation of the past decade.
Illusions and self-delusion are, as another excellent piece at History Does You does a fine job of illustrating, the default setting across senior American leadership circles right now. When the USA winds up in a real war one of these days, it will be up to mid-level leaders on the spot to innovate working doctrine on the fly. I strongly recommend that personnel develop a solid understanding of basic social systems science before it’s too late. Or just watch how the Ukrainian practices have evolved.
Europe
Europe is largely in the same place as North America, albeit further along the process of pushing through winter towards a more hopeful spring. Germany is throwing its historic restraint on matters of both debt and military spending to the winds under the new Merz government. Finally, German society is slowly being allowed to push past the unjust eternal guilt narrative foisted upon people with no responsibility for what their grandparents did.
I’ve got no problem with modern Germany being committed to the cause of never letting anything like the Nazi years happen again. But making German leaders run around apologizing for the past is a meaningless ritual if today’s inheritors of the Nazi tradition are allowed to murder with impunity in Ukraine. That’s to make the inverse error of being the Nazis: letting them rise in the first place. The ultimate responsibility for Hitler and his crimes rests with all European leaders of the day, from London to Moscow.
But they’re all dead, and now even the memory of what happened in the twentieth century is under relentless assault. D.C. propaganda aims to subordinate Europe forever to America, using Hitler and the Holocaust as props to cast Europeans as weak and morally corrupt, requiring American oversight. Moscow’s propaganda is a funhouse mirror of the American narrative, trading the Holocaust - something neither the Soviets nor Putin ever gave much thought to - for pretending that the fact the Nazi Waffen-SS was a nominally pan-European organization makes Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union somehow part of a European conspiracy to keep russia down.
Europeans are keenly aware of their own history, having lost many of their ancestors to it. So it’s kind of cool, as someone who has spent a lifetime being frustrated with the elite colonization of what my and so many other Americans’ grandparents and great-grandparents actually fought for, to see Europeans rejecting American popular interpretations of history. If nothing else, despite Biden and Trump both playing Chamberlain in their own way, a repeat of the Munich Agreement didn’t happen. A mostly-united Europe stands in support of today’s Czechoslovakians clinging to the Sudetenland while Hitler sacrifices another generation to the delusion that anyone can ever dominate the continent.
Give Europe a couple years, and the combined power of half a billion people and the world’s third-largest economic bloc will put Moscow empire to shame where it matters: military production. Too many profit and power interests are now aligned: Putin’s war has finally united Europe around a common cause. Enough, at least, for European institutions to move in the right direction.
Whether the Europeans will move fast enough to give Ukraine the necessary advantage in military effectiveness to beat Putin’s orcs back in 2025 is unclear. The biggest hazard of profit as a motivation is that the promise of endless war beats a one-time pulse of orders. Incentives are a hell of a thing.
Middle East
There hasn’t been any significant changes in the posture of the players in the Middle East drama this past week. Israel is going hard in Gaza, killing a lot of civilians but admittedly not many of its own soldiers.
Iran has let it be known by way of an international report that it actually has a lot more nuclear material than previously admitted, which likely means that work to enrich enough uranium to make at least a couple small test bombs began months ago. Iran is already effectively a nuclear power, and an Israeli-American attack on the nuclear program won’t change that now.
But diplomacy looks destined to fail, very possibly because Team Trump and Netanyahu want it to. If Iran’s nuclear program gets set back just three years, that’s probably a massive victory in their mind. They’ll think they can simply mow the grass again as required.
If I’m right, June should see talks falter amid a sudden American buildup in the Middle East and reports of Israel preparing a strike. A surprise attack out of nowhere is possible too, but less likely because of the potential that threatening an operation might bring Tehran to the table. This would be better than starting a war which could all too easily morph into an attempt to change the regime.
The game here is almost as dangerous as the one India and Pakistan now look set to play going forward. India’s air force leadership started doing the media rounds to insist, in a manner highly reminiscent of the way ruscist sources operate, that everything went perfectly after some adjustments were made in the wake of losing three to six combat jets to Pakistani missiles. Come to think of it, Moscow, New Delhi, and D.C. must all draw from the same pool of professional consultants, because they all spin the same way.
India’s air force wants to protect its reputation, suggesting discontent within Modi’s government over how the spat played out. This probably makes the time to the next one shorter than average. Sustained drone exchanges look likely in the next flare-up, which will probably make the subsequent ceasefire harder to put into effect.
Big unknown: how quickly can each side expand the pool of trained drone operators? And when exchanges begin again, will operators quickly become primary targets?
Pacific
China is slowly starting to normalize naval task forces sailing between Taiwan and Guam, another sign of Beijing’s growing confidence. Other than that, and supposedly some sort of Ukrainian covert attack on a train in Moscow’s Pacific colonies, the Pacific has been pretty quiet.
Well, there are some slightly unusual movements by Chinese aircraft in the South China Sea, heavy bombers deploying to a disputed site around the time Nimitz group started sailing through the region. But this is all part of an ongoing game of China and the US moving prominent assets to places that are irritating for the other side. Liaoning in the Philippine Sea is a classic case. Someone will probably do another warship transit of the Taiwan Strait to prod Beijing, and one of these days China is going to send a carrier group with some ruscist boats tagging along between Hawai’i and the West Coast, just to tempt me into seeing if I can track them and plan an attack with open source materials.
I do respect China’s right to sail through international waters, but as for the orcs, well, it’d be hilarious if they sent a tanker along to support a couple warships which had a sad accident, leaving the poor orc sailors stranded and out of fuel. If the Ukrainians need an inconspicuous place to covertly store some gear, I’ve got just the place. If containers full of drones can be driven through Putin’s empire on trucks, imagine what a cargo ship passing by Vladivostok might accomplish.
Supposedly Moscow has already resorted to using decoy air defense systems instead of the real thing to protect its Pacific holdings. In a totally unrelated side note, Japan is also sending Ukraine billions in aid from frozen ruscist funds. The Japanese are another people that remember their history. At the end of the Second World War, a bigger fear in Tokyo than the atomic annihilation of cities already being relentlessly burned down by incendiary bombs was Soviet occupation of Japan. The painful choice to surrender to the Americans was the lesser evil. Moscow was always the bigger threat.
Concluding Comments
The wolves are always circling around the Muscovite empire, because it’s always been a degenerate imitation of the Mongol horde that first set it up. Where the Mongols actually created a zone of actual peace and prosperity in the wake of their conquests, as a proxy in spirit Muscovy could only ever handle the destruction part of the equation.
While this might sound like a condemnation of the people trapped in the empire, it isn’t. Peoples across the Muscovite empire have been ruthlessly colonized by a European-pattern imperial regime. Moscow’s leaders have always been culturally European, relying on violence to control their empire because they’re ultimately alien to it. This is why they’re so terrified of separatism and pretend the russian world lacks borders.
Ukraine proving the limits of Putin’s power over and over again is bound to have a corrosive impact on Moscow’s control over the empire. Continuing the war is now the worst possible option for Putin’s regime. Filled with blind fools, thing is trapped.
There are finite number of factories, rail lines, and aircraft supporting the Muscovite occupation of Ukraine. Ukraine is set to produce thousands of drones every month indefinitely. Eventually, the math supporting Putin’s infinite war falls apart. Either the orcs retreat, or the decrepit structure propping up the horde eventually dissolves.
Ukraine’s triple decimation of the hated orc bomber fleet is a sign of both how far Ukraine has come, and where the fight is going. Victory is not a delusion or dream, but the natural ending of the awful game.