Victory Day 2025: Putin's Last Grand Parade?
Underneath his chipmunk grin, Putin knows that he's in trouble. Trump isn't playing nice, Ukraine is burning down bits of the empire every night, and motorcycle rushes are not a war-winning tactic.
A couple weeks back, I suggested that Putin’s regime might turn to killing its own people in a false flag attack then blame the incident on Ukrainian drones. At the time, I’d completely forgotten about Moscow’s annual dress-up ball and parade held to celebrate the fall of Berlin in 1945.
Well, it’s nearly May 9th, and Ukrainian intelligence as well as the ATESH partisan movement inside Putin’s crumbling empire are warning of FSB-organized terror operations around the big event. Putin’s deeper ploy with proposing a three-day ceasefire around May 9th may be making it look like Ukraine attacked a sacred ruscist event.
You’d think a play like this would be too obvious for Moscow, but Putin doesn’t have many other cards and may not be able to resist the symbolism at this stage. Of course, it would be both hilarious and appropriate for elements of Putin’s own regime to instead take the chance to off him themselves.
For anyone in the ruscist nightmare not named Vladimir Putin, the best-case outcome in the Ukraine War is the little man getting zeroed out without delay, allowing some subordinate to take over who can immediately do what Khrushchev did with Stalin and blame all failures on his predecessor. Putin’s successor could then takes Trump’s ridiculous proposed deal to lock in Moscow’s gains since 2014 in exchange for basically nothing and even retreat a bit along portions of the front in occupied Ukraine to sell the message.
Pro-war hardliners can be assuaged by hanging a few Putin associates out to dry on allegations of corruption and promising that the inevitable next round of the war will go much better for Moscow. Team Trump will be ecstatic to force Zelensky into accepting a comprehensive ceasefire since he’s publicly agreed to one, betting that Putin can never say yes. That opens the door to peace talks and probably elections that will likely see a more reliably western-influenced Zaluzhnyi take over in Kyiv with a mandate to pretend that someday Ukraine will reclaim the occupied territories through diplomacy, somehow.
All the big power players in D.C. and Moscow would be more than satisfied with that outcome. The only thing standing in their way now is Putin, who can’t accept a frozen conflict again after spending three years and a million casualties promising Ukraine’s final destruction for the glory of mother russia.
Putin presently faces the toughest choice of his life as a consequence of his failed war. Running out of viable military resources, he can’t keep on pretending that Ukraine’s lines are bound to break eventually, not long past the end of 2025, anyway. Mobilization of every resource in the empire is his only hope of sustaining enough combat power in Ukraine to hold the line into 2026. Any failure to stop Ukraine’s impending counteroffensives will strip away the illusion of invincibility that he’s bet his regime on. But expanded mobilization will come with destabilizing consequences on the social front and further accelerate the already rapid deterioration of his economy.
Instead of pulling back from an obvious failure of a war, Putin is bent on pressing forward at the cost of other people’s blood. He thinks that because he’s got a few million more bodies who can be thrown away without immediately breaking the economy, all is well. You can tell the guy is a lawyer advised mainly by economists and corrupt generals. If his enemies don’t fold, he’s toast.
For all the real challenges that wave after wave of orcs on motorcycles may present to Ukraine’s defenders at the tactical level, Putin’s army is still down to seizing a couple fields on a good day - only to lose them again a great deal of the time now that Ukraine is back to playing active as opposed to area defense. The tactical gains don’t ever add up to a major operational level success, which means there will be no strategic breakthrough that turns the tide in Putin’s favor.
This is not rocket science (you seem to have a problem with that too, Elon Musk). But a wholly ineffective paradigm still prevents proper broader understanding of this conflict’s nature or course.
Ukraine firmly holds the strategic initiative now, steadily building up combat power behind the lines even as Moscow’s declines through abuse. While D.C. and Moscow carry on their ceasefire dance while Putin orders pointless costly advances to prove he’s invincible, every indicator that I’ve monitored since 2021 warns of setbacks when Ukraine is ready to prove that Kursk was only a taste of what Ukraine’s defenders can do.
This is the summer of 2022 all over again. Ukrainian forces are again quietly building up advantages in equipment and doctrine that, when unleashed at scale, will once more shock the world, leaving the boring talking heads on TV grasping for new incredible pet theories to explain how it happened.
It’s amazing, really, just how far Ukraine has come in a little more than three years - something only rarely acknowledged by foreign media. In 2022, I was in no way confident that Ukraine would get this far, to say nothing of thinking about actually winning back the territory Putin stole. Until the Kharkiv and Kherson counteroffensives didn’t lead to the nuclear demonstration that Putin had begun threatening as standing ruscist doctrine demanded, I suspected that the conflict would wind up frozen, Team Biden playing off Ukraine losing another huge chunk of territory as a victory and proclaiming old blundering Joe the savior of Kyiv.
But instead of forcing a strategic showdown, Putin blinked, resorting to mass missile terror and mobilization. And not because the Biden Administration made a few hollow threats about intervention that would amount to the start of the very third world war they’d decided could never be allowed to happen. It was Xi Jinping telling Putin that there are lines which must not be crossed, and not American policy, that kept the nuclear Pandora’s box shut for a little longer.
Two and a half years later, Putin’s armies are sending civilian vehicles at Ukraine’s drone-backed front lines. Donkeys are appearing in logistics trains - and not because they’re suited to the terrain. The Soviet arsenal of real military kit has been largely depleted, right on schedule. It takes one or two hundred casualties to seize a single field, with the cost increasing every month as Ukrainian tactics and doctrine are refined.
Since 2022, the disparity in real combat power has diminished to the point that Putin really might stage a series of false-flag terror attacks and blame them on Ukraine to justify further mobilization. I expect that Ukraine will either refrain from hitting anything on ruscist home turf from about May 7 to May 10 to avoid adding fuel to the fire - or ignore the event entirely, hitting a couple of Moscow’s military sites to demonstrate its discretion compared to the enemy. The latter is probably the best move, since if the orcs are planning an atrocity against their own civilians, it won’t matter if Ukrainian drones were in the air or not.
Perhaps the very best news over the past few months is that Ukrainian casualties are reported to be declining even as Moscow’s remain brutally high. The Ukrainians are blazing a trail towards a form of warfare that can substantially reduce the human toll, safeguarding friendly lives and civilians trapped in the middle in a way that American, Israeli, and Muscovite operations consistently fail to. That could prove to be even better news for the future than Ukraine’s growing strength. Drones can substantially mitigate the longstanding cost-precision tradeoff. Excuses for harming civilians en masse are wearing mighty thin.
Yet, as I repeat every week or so: while drones radically alter the vital rhythms that keep a military organism intact and functional, they are merely an added ingredient in the endlessly evolving combined arms warfare mix. They alter risk calculations and affect the scale at which operations have to happen, but in the end the key to successful operations in the Network Age is no different than in any other: move faster and hit harder than the enemy can cope in multiple dimensions and scales.
For every battlefield measure, a countermeasure exists. The essence of the art of war is working out how to smoothly and efficiently get sufficient resources where they need to be in time. Unfortunately for many military personnel currently serving around the world, the institutions they are part of are often more concerned with looking a certain way than accomplishing their mission. Identity can be a hell of a drug.
Just something to keep in mind while reviewing another two-part post. First up is the rapidly intensifying action on the fronts, daily orc assaults along the entire 1,200km front trending towards three hundred. After comes a quick overview of global developments.
Overview of the Fronts: Week 18
Although US involvement in pushing talks to end the Ukraine War has not ended, the past week has seen a significant and sustained shift in the Trump Administration’s tone with respect to Ukraine. This has been paired with a strong intensification in orc efforts to advance that’s as big of a tell as Putin’s ploy with proposing a three-day truce.
But aside from some slight shifts in where Moscow’s attacks have been weighted lately, the operational intent of the current assault wave is as simple as Putin’s broader strategy for survival: keep Ukrainian troops spending time and energy holding the line to sustain the impression that it cannot be cracked. The orcs want to force Ukraine to scatter reserves everywhere so that they cannot concentrate on the vulnerable southern theater.
If Ukraine’s campaign this summer stalls like the one in 2023 did, Putin must reason, then a renewed diplomatic push in fall could push Trump to pile pressure on Ukraine again. The costs of doing that this spring mounted too quickly for Trump, hence his reversion towards the polling mean the past couple weeks. His administration has given the green light to Ukraine purchasing supplies from American industry, for example, and mostly cut back on efforts to flatter Putin into concessions by parroting his propaganda, with Hegseth and Witkoff appearing likely scapegoats for failing to secure a ceasefire.
If Putin can raise costs in a different dimension, though, especially if Europe does not adequately resource Ukraine’s counteroffensive this summer and the US gets bogged down bombing Iran, Trump might be induced to pull another about-face. Still, Putin has not forgotten that he badly needs a serious victory to be able to freeze the conflict without risking another Wagner-style revolt at home.
A whole lot of hardcore nationalists in his empire are finding Putin’s inability to win a severe challenge to their worldview. While clinging to the delusion that Ukraine isn’t real and their empire has a right to do whatever it wants in the world (a clear reflection of their own fragile egos), they’re also seeking reliable explanations (but won’t like the answers) for why the front line isn’t moving despite enormous effort spent over what is now a solid 5% of the average russian lifespan. That’s a force which has brought down more than one Muscovite regime of yore.
A very telling indicator of how Muscovite military planning is now driven as much by perception management as common sense is the routine effort to claim advances by showing a soldier waving a flag somewhere. Most open-source coverage will generally use such evidence to mark an advance and change in territorial control based on physical presence of forces, which is totally justified. But because most journalists don’t understand what makes for a meaningful advance in military terms, some lone orc in the ruins waving a flag a few hours before he gets wiped out is prone to being portrayed as a shock attack that has crumbled Ukrainian lines. Adding meaning to the data is what analysts do - it’s part of why journalists secretly dislike us almost as much as they do generative AI, shoddy as it usually is thanks to training data derived from low quality sources.
The irony is that most efforts at cognitive or information warfare are so thinly transparent as to represent a total waste of resources. If you want to lose a fight, play to the crowd. War is not won on points, it’s about material survival. At least, for those actually in one. Yet propaganda wars are waged nevertheless, despite lack of evidence they do more than socialize their own society to distrust everything they’re told.
So, to sum up: Putin is still attacking for show, despite dwindling resources and dramatic improvements in Ukrainian capabilities. This can’t possibly go wrong for him, can it?
Northern Theater
Kharkiv remains static despite a few battles for positions waged most days, and Chernihiv quiet except for the odd skirmish or infiltration attempt, so the action in the north is still focused on Sumy and the border areas of Belgorod and Kursk. Here opposing Ukrainian and ruscist-North Korean groupings are still fighting on the Muscovite side of the border, plus a few small hamlets inside Ukraine that keep absorbing groups of orcs.
Sumy is one of those areas where the lines as they appear on maps are deceptive, with at least ten kilometers of gray zone subject to rapid drone attack separating both sides’ main positions. Between there will usually be small teams performing various jobs that do come into contact, but most attacks as described by Ukrainian reports involve a determined effort by a group of orcs to take up position closer to where maps show Ukraine in control. Overall, Moscow wants a buffer zone in Sumy to prevent a future incursion into Kursk, and Ukraine wants Moscow to try exactly this.
Within this grey zone, fighting can be intense and dynamic without triggering an open-source map update. Citizen reporting generally cannot function at a finer resolution than daily level updates, hence it taking a week to generate enough data to generate reliable conclusions about what is about to happen. Longtime readers will likely have noticed that where I lay out more optimistic projections for either side is during moments where a weekly sampling window happens to capture the first half of a larger-scale advance. Project out from a smaller sample, and error increases. But nothing says the orcs aren’t doing the same thing - and must, if they want to avoid being caught out.
Ukrainian troops appear to have breached the Sumy-Kursk border in a new area, attacking towards the Kursk-Belgorod district border in what looks like an attempt to strike orc troops moving to retake Popova and Demidovka from their right flank. It doesn’t appear that Ukrainian teams were able to reach Goptarovka, but the orcs definitely had to move troops to meet this new threat, giving drone operators a chance to work on them.
Ukraine’s goal in Kursk has always primarily been to draw off proportionally more ruscist combat power than Ukraine is forced to commit to the northern theater. According to Ukrainian media the Ukrainians never had more than 20,000-25,000 personnel assigned to the Kursk operation at any given time, including logistics and support elements that stayed in Sumy. Moscow dispatched around four times as many soldiers over several months, basically losing an army of 60,000 in the process of building up one with the requisite 90,000 bodies that Moscow required to push Ukraine out of the populated areas of the province. The dead and living were all needed to take Pokrovsk.
Right now, by launching small spoiling attacks with the brigades still assigned to Sumy, Ukraine is probably holding the area with half as many troops as were there in prior months. Many Kursk veterans will be resting - haven’t been hearing much from 82nd, 80th, or 95th Air Assault lately for a reason. Other standout brigades like 47th and 21st Mechanized are apparently still present in a supporting role, with assault regiments like the 225th and 33rd to take the lead in operations.
A major orc breakthrough is more unlikely than a sudden Ukrainian offensive into Belgorod - or even Kursk, with some reports suggesting an operation might be beginning in Glushkovo, west of where the orcs have been failing to break into Sumy. See where that stands in a week. 21st Mech has been fighting well since the core of it returned to Ukraine from Sweden, and their participating in a surprise attack would not be a shock. As of now, several orc videos showing the destruction of Ukrainian engineering equipment suggests breach attempts have been made and repelled, but often these are followed a day or so later by evidence of Ukrainian success somewhere else. A strike on a headquarters in nearby Tetkino could suggest an attempt to decapitate and then attack a target orc unit.
Whatever is happening, it’s good to probe ruscist flanks frequently. The political impact of losing even a single settlement draws thousands of troops to an area. A comparatively small Ukrainian attack can force the orcs to waste a lot of resources even if it was never meant to go far. As I’ll lay out in much more detail in a future post, there are three essential steps to advancing in the Network Age without suffering crippling casualty rates: 1. Blind and overwhelm, 2. Clear access routes, 3. Reinforce and fortify. Drones lead the way, followed by engineers and scouts, then the assault troops come to take control, and if one step fails, the operation aborts. While Moscow imitates the tactics that led the Germans to defeat in 1918, Ukraine’s task is to mimic the Allied victory in the subsequent Hundred Days Campaign that broke the Kaiser’s army to end World War One.
Eastern Theater
The Kupiansk front went relatively quiet this week, with Ukraine-based Centre for Defence Studies suggesting that Moscow’s forces are regrouping ahead of another bid to expand the bridgehead over the Oskil. CDS also forecasts that Moscow will renew frontal assaults on Ukraine’s bridgehead east of the Oskil in an attempt to reach Kupiansk.
Both claims seem plausible, given the failure of ruscist flanking operations on this front to date. The bridgehead at Dvorchina that’s been slowly expanding since winter still can’t sustain heavy equipment, so the reach of the orcs within remains limited. Motorcycle rushes might allow the enemy to spread out some, but all that’s liable to do is encourage more orc infantry to move into a trap.
Motorcycle assaults do cause Ukrainian defenders problems, because the one or two in ten orcs that survive to reach Ukrainian positions will attempt to seize them. And with Ukraine’s frontline positions now held by fire teams of 3-6, ten enemy soldiers getting too close is enough to force a withdrawal to the next tree line. But sustaining this deeper and deeper into Ukrainian territory is simply not viable. This sort of skirmish work is now a job for drones.
I continue to see a potential opportunity for a Kursk-like raid into this part of Belgorod, as indicated on the map. The upstream portions of the Oskil would make a nice buffer that should help interfere with orc efforts to reach Kupiansk.
More concerning than Kupiansk right now is the Borova front, which has recently seen further expansion of the ruscist bridgehead over the Zherebets. So far no large-scale Ukrainian counterattack has been registered, and Ukrainian sources suggest that Moscow has a major numbers advantage in the area. Third Assault Brigade and the corps it is building around itself has to be very wary of an encirclement attempt so long as Moscow maintains the bridgehead to the south as well as a presence on the east bank of the Oskil to the north.
Elimination of one or both will eventually be necessary to avoid pulling back towards the Oskil. This won’t represent a major reversal, but will make subsequent orc pushes towards Borova and Lyman easier to organize, complicating the operational situation in this area. Ukraine might actually be using Third Assault Corps to hold the last bit of Luhansk district not yet occupied by the enemy for political purposes, but that’s not a sustainable choice unless the flanks are secured.
The Siversk and Chasiv Yar fronts have been mostly static this week, probably because the local orc commanders are having to reinforce and resupply before resuming operations (again). Siversk is one of the most vulnerable portions of Ukraine’s front at present in a purely geographic sense, but is defended by tough brigades that have probably been acting as a coherent corps for a long time, based on performance and the promotion of a couple brigade commanders assigned to the area to corps leaders. Renewed orc pressure should be expected soon. (I really did not intend to have so many re-words in this paragraph)
It’s been very hot on the southern edge of the Kostyantynivka front, by contrast, the space between Toretsk and Malynivka coming under heavy orc attack again this week. Moscow is going after Kostyantynivka from this angle pretty much as I forecast was the best move a year ago, before the orcs decided to make their misguided play for Pokrovsk instead. One orc motorcycle push along the Bychock appears to have actually been reasonably successful, with Ukrainian POWs taken in Tarasivka. I have to wonder if a seam between 157th Mechanized and 109th Territorial was exploited before the orc push was later wiped out.
The orcs will get some wins - statistically speaking, that has never been in question. It’s whether these reliably add up to anything worth the cost that’s important. I’m not casting judgement on whatever Ukrainian formation is actually responsible for the area, particularly given the recent trend of Ukraine letting orc rushes penetrate a few kilometers so they can be efficiently wiped out.
Moscow may now have another path across the Bychock, but until the flanks are secured, it will just be another chokepoint swarmed by drones. Losing people as POWs does suggest something went wrong, but sometimes bad luck intersects with competent foes. Be nice if Moscow would treat them appropriately and send them home in a prisoner swap, but with the orcs there are no guarantees on even that much.
Across this sector Ukrainian forces seem to be wisely pulling back from more vulnerable positions and inflicting damage as they go while holding firm on the Bychok flank and the Kleban-Byk reservoir area northwest of Toretsk. Typically positioning a defense behind a river line is the easiest way to hold it, but for a year and a half Ukraine has repeatedly held onto bridgeheads. My assumption is that this has been proven favorable for the efficient destruction of orcs.
Though Ukrainian command continues to report that Pokrovsk is Moscow’s top priority, I have to wonder if that isn’t intentional misdirection on Kyiv’s part. Evidence is starting to point towards Moscow resorting to a costly frontal assault on free urban Donbas this summer, with efforts on the flanks intended mainly to distract, not achieve a true breakthrough and encirclement of Ukrainian troops on a strategic level.
In that case, cutting the Pokrovsk sector off from Kostyantynivka is a necessary prerequisite, but taking Pokrovsk is not, despite the ongoing threat Ukrainian forces there pose to the ruscist left flank. If I’m right, this makes Moscow’s efforts southwest of Pokrovsk all about keeping Ukrainian forces too busy to effect a major counterattack - or the goal could be purely political, reaching the Dnipro district border for show. Either way, lacking the force to actually take Pokrovsk, threatening it or a deeper flanking move to the west is all the orcs can credibly accomplish.
Though the Pokrovsk area in general is seeing a rapid increase in the intensity of orc attacks, so far Ukraine is fending them off, even pushing the last waves back from a ring of towns surrounding Pokrovsk. Ukrainian troops are in essence shoving the enemy off the town’s outer walls while the orcs try to expand their presence on the south bank of the Solona in a bid to keep the bridgehead on the north side alive.
Ukrainian strikes are so badly affecting ruscist logistics in this area that they’re resorting to erecting nets over key roads. Ukraine simply uses artillery to blast open a section then flies drones into the hole. Another example of an orc adaptation applied at the wrong scale. Ukraine has employed similar tactics, but mostly in rear areas only vulnerable to damage by relatively inaccurate rocket strikes. Where HIMARS can function like a super sniper, Moscow uses massed barrages to achieve the same - usually less - effect.
A frontal assault on Pokrovsk remains a possibility, but this didn’t work out too well in Toretsk, where Moscow has the advantage of being able to shelter forces inside a major occupied urban area just ten kilometers away. Breaking into Pokrovsk would prove a one-way trip for thousands of orcs.
Further south, the Novopavlivka front is also drawing a disproportionate level of orc attention, Moscow seeking a purely political triumph like taking a slice of Dnipro district but also threatening a broader envelopment of Pokrovsk to the west. Here Ukrainian forces are still pulling back field by field, though lately it’s looking as if a solid perimeter may be forming up, the towns of Bahatyr and Oleksiivka anchoring it along the Vovcha. The orcs are trying hard to reach them and working to apply pressure to the flanks, but Ukraine’s defense will only get tougher the closer the orcs get to Novopavlivka.
I expect the ruscist push here to peter out well before it gets to the confluence of the Mokri Yali and Solona with the Vovcha near Novopavlivka - the visible operational goal. Perhaps because of their difficulties, the orcs have made another attempt to find Ukraine’s western flank, attacking towards Zelene Pole. Once more, a lot of people were sacrificed to seize a few fields in the grey zone.
Southern Theater
Moscow is still slowly trying to ramp up attacks in the south in another attempt to keep Ukrainian forces tied down. But the large assaults on the Orikhiv front from a few weeks back haven’t gone anywhere since, and there hasn’t been any suggestion that Ukraine is having to rush reinforcements to the area.
There are no prospects for a Ukrainian counteroffensive here, but Orikhiv is nowhere near at risk of falling or even being approached. What ground might have been gained in the large mass assault attempted here a couple weeks ago has already been cleared by Ukrainian forces.
On down the Dnipro in Kherson, the orcs are always trying to grab islands in the delta and threaten to establish a bridgehead on the far bank. Ukraine maintains several forward positions of its own across the river that Moscow is always pressing the local orc commanders to remove. But the odds are stacked against any large-scale crossing right now. Ukraine’s coastal brigades don’t seem to be having any trouble punishing the enemy any time they send some doomed souls over the Dnipro in boats.
Now, the appearance of naval drones armed with guided missiles and drones may shift the equation somewhat in the future. If naval-based fire support can be made strong enough, small brief landings along the coast might be managed. Though once Ukrainian troops dig in anywhere, they’re mighty hard to displace. The very last thing Moscow needs right now is having to send thousands more troops to Kherson - or Crimea.
To a degree, Moscow is using the south in the same way Ukraine is the north: deploying enough troops to pose a threat and prevent a surprise offensive, but mostly tying up reserves. Moscow can no longer hope to surround and destroy Ukraine’s forces east of the Dnipro, only stretch them as much as possible along the flanks in hopes that a pure frontal assault will work out.
The fact that the road from Bakhmut to Sloviansk has not yet drawn a sustained series of orc meat waves makes me suspect Putin’s endgame this summer involves one final all-out mass push on a narrow front - Wagner’s assault on Bakhmut times ten. That’s probably his best move short of declaring a unilateral ceasefire, finding some internal scapegoats to purge, and clinging to power through the backlash. Yet it’s almost certain to fail. Putin has been applying linear solutions to an exponential curve for too long. He no longer has the ability to get ahead of events. Welcome to Zugzwang, Vlad. You choose how quickly you lose.
Naval Matters
In honor of some more history being made by the Ukrainians, I’ll jump straight to the section where I evaluate developments on the Black Sea front. As you might have heard, Ukrainian naval drones scored their first-ever jet kills this week, using trusty AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles of some variety to swat a couple Su-30 jets from the sky off Crimea and Novorossisyk.
This victory came during a broader Ukrainian attack on the Novorossisysk area that may have used something like a hundred and fifty aerial and a couple dozen naval drones, though Moscow is obviously not a reliable source. Results of the attack have not been determined, whether due to defensive success or Moscow getting better at keeping citizens from filming endless orc defense blooper reels. Even now, they’re still shocked enough when Ukrainian drones fly over to provide some excellent confirmation of their type and targets. Never civilians, note. So far.
Honestly, I don’t see this as a revolutionary development so much as an inevitability long foreseen. Helicopters have proven to be one of the more effective countermeasures to naval drones, able to use their superior speed relative to anything afloat to choose when and how to engage in such a way that their crews are at the least risk. As soon as drones started carrying guns, helicopters couldn’t just hover overhead and pick them off. Once Soviet-era R-73 (AA-11 Archer to us 90s flight sim nerds) missiles were integrated into Ukraine’s Magura-class drones, helicopters began to fall.
So the orcs began using their much-depleted Black Sea naval aviation regiment to hunt Ukrainian drones. But lack of effective precision weapons led to bombing and even strafing runs at low altitude and speed - not a happy condition for a multirole jet to endure. It didn’t take long for a Ukrainian development team to figure out how to integrate a different brand of missile, probably with a longer effective range.
Probably won’t happen again, because as soon as the orcs get burned with their aviation they adapt to become much more conservative. Now they’ll have to rely on more expensive standoff missiles to hit drones which cost less than the means deployed to destroy them. And these are vulnerable to intercept, too. Air defense drones escorting surface attack drones in a flotilla rather beautifully disaggregates the core military functions of a warship across distinct platforms. I’d bet that’s the future of coastal warfare, and the key to winning any fight over Taiwan.
I have to admit being much aided in this prediction by having played another real-time strategy game with applicability to training how to think about military policy systems. Supreme Commander and it’s sequel Forged Alliance featured a faction that did exactly this with naval units. The way these titles and their predecessor, Total Annihilation (great names, huh?) all worked, the object is generally to keep a combined-arms force perpetually engaged across important parts of the map. Done right, the player simply tells units built at factories to join a formation patrolling an area. Weight of firepower and the efficiency of the unit mix determines which side is slowly pushed back towards their main base, where resources are gathered near factories. Whichever side cannot effectively expand their resource base loses.
Games are supposed to imitate life. What I never expected to see was the orcs do their damnedest day in and out to act like they’re AI agents in a game.
Strike Campaigns
Ukraine is slowly dismantling Putin’s war machine, one factory and facility at a time - two or even three on a good night. One way (no pun intended) or another, night after night the drones come, and they usually hit something Putin cannot afford to have out of action for long. The orcs might be good at scaling up production of a solution once they find one, but they sure aren’t proving able to get ahead of even the most predictable curves.
You’d think that after months of watching stuff burn about once a week, Putin would have ordered a massive national investment in interceptor drones and people trained to use them. Instead, that chipmunk-faced twit is having friendly journalists toss softball questions about how great things are going over tea in one of Putin’s dachas. Old Adolf acted like that too, even near to the end, holding dinner parties every night where he’d harangue guests with diatribes even as his cities were pummeled into dust and armies retreated towards Berlin.
The orcs are still able to inflict damage on Ukraine with their own missiles and drones, but only sporadically and rarely to a degree that important operations are affected. Ukraine’s Viper fleet is an increasingly important part of that success.
Aviation Fight
Once again the Czechs are taking their due vengeance for decades of oppression by Moscow, adding to their coup of organizing the purchase of millions of shells for Ukraine from international markets by jointly setting up an F-16 flight school. Living outside of Prague learning to fly a Viper for a few months is a fitting reward for having to dash at treetop level towards ruscist missile systems to drop bombs on advancing orcs. Among other dangerous missions.
Though there haven’t been any more big announcements of aircraft deliveries lately, Ukraine’s partners have generally been sending a new tranche of Vipers and Mirages about the time pilots finish conversion training. A minimum of 16 Vipers have been confirmed delivered as of early 2025, with two lost in action. Probably double that number of pilots have arrived. With numerous aircraft pledged for spare parts and others already held back for training, it’s fair to assume that all 14 Vipers in the count are operational, at least a dozen combat-ready at a given time. I’d bet on the number being closer to twenty, with a proportional number of pilots.
As for the Mirages, confirmed numbers are 4, at least two more on the way and potentially as many soon available. This is why I expect Ukraine to operate two Viper and one Mirage squadrons by the end of the year, around 12 ready aircraft in each, which along with another eight Patriot systems - two more pledged last week - should finally give Ukraine a mostly-effective, almost-comprehensive air shield. No word on Gripens for Ukraine, but it ought to be noted that Czechia has leased a dozen from Sweden for about ten years now, the contract up in 2027.
I can easily envision a scenario where Czechia’s Gripen lease winds up in Ukrainian hands this year as part of a deal where Poland or Germany covers Czechia’s airspace until it receives new fighters already on order. Or realizes that it probably isn’t sensible for every small European country to have one or two fighter squadrons covering airspace surrounded by allied countries, just saying.
The Netherlands, Belgium, Czechia, Austria, Switzerland, Portugal, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, among others, could all be better off pooling their aviation assets. Just send contingents out here to Pacific America for training when they need to practice in spaces where you can play with electronic warfare without upsetting commerce too much. The Growler community up by Seattle has a nice playground off the coast, I hear.
Leadership & Personnel
Ukraine is still standing up its new corps, moving faster than official news reports suggest, I expect. Overall, the process looks to be structured as it should be: experienced, proven commanders are placed in charge of the new corps regardless of whether they are career military or not. Certain brigades don’t necessarily form the core of the corps (English and it’s weird homonymns) in an official sense, but you have to expect that a leader familiar with a particular formation will rely on it more in the field.
The final functional composition of each corps is also still unclear. My standing assumption that the five or so line brigades will be bound to supporting formations, like artillery and drone, appears to be sound. It will be interesting to find out if Ukraine does ultimately create a heavy brigade in each corps that plugs a tank battalion into an assault regiment to power offensive operations.
There is also a possibility that the top six or so drone regiments and brigades will evolve into full-on divisions, each supporting multiple corps rather than subordinated to them. This arrangement isn’t immediately intuitive, but the scale at which drone operations take place might make it more logical.
If there exists a simulation package somewhere that can systematically test questions like this, I’d sure like to know about it. And if not, get paid to help develop it.
Separately, an intriguing possibility thanks to Ukraine’s well-advanced drone game is the potential for a fairly thinly held, drone-backed front to allow a greater proportion of Ukraine’s soldiers to get proper rest than ever before. Though there hasn’t been any word about the long rotations that so many veteran soldiers badly need, Ukraine might be achieving a greater degree of organic restoration by having to less frequently rotate soldiers into frontline positions.
World System Brief
North America
Although US involvement in still-hypothetical peace talks to end the Ukraine War isn’t entirely over, for the most part Team Trump is finally backing away as expected. The prior termination of military aid flows to Ukraine is suddenly being blamed on that Hegseth imbecile, who is hopefully on his way out in Waltz’ wake. Trump does love his staff reshuffles. Keeps the ambitious squabbling underlings on their toes.
You’ve got to love how the insipid D.C. game plays out- as policy, cutting aid to Ukraine massively backfired exactly as it was always bound to. Never did I think Team Trump would be dumb enough to step on that land mine. Now Trump needs a scapegoat everyone can pretend acted totally on his own initiative. Ideally one who was already proving problematic and annoying allies. You think you can try and cut four-star positions from the Pentagon and not have knives coming at your back every thirty seconds until you die, Hegseth? Gotta love an unaware sacrificial lamb.
When your policy agenda is mostly trying to deliver on promises certain Americans have been waiting to have filled since the 1980s - Star Wars, revenge on Iran- there’s no incentive to push too hard for peace in Ukraine. Putin’s soldiers running around waving Soviet flags may actually have the opposite effect if certain members of Trump’s audience ever see the footage. Republicans are generally known to dislike anything remotely associated with communism or socialism.
It seems that Team Trump is happy to walk away with a signed minerals deal and play that off as a triumph of American dealmaking, and if so, fantastic, I say. Of course, after insulting Ukraine with ridiculous proposals that would have turned the country into an American colony in many respects, it is utterly hilarious to see Trump’s people tout the eminently fair deal they could have had wees ago without all the self-defeating hardball negotiating tactics. But in D.C., appearances are all that matter.
With luck, Trump will stop talking much about Ukraine at all going forward. The promotion of Marco Rubio to replace that dimwit Waltz as National Security Advisor is hopefully a sign that he’s happy to hand off all responsibility for Ukraine affairs. Rubio, at least in the past, seemed to understand how idiotic it is for the Party of Reagan to be weak on Putin, even if he has followed the Musk-Vance lead with his public rhetoric lately. But he’s one of those who, like Buttigieg, Harris, and Shapiro on the Democrat side of the aisle, understands that the path to power in modern America passes between elder gatekeepers who will only tolerate politicians who speak a certain way.
Incidentally, the Republican 2028 primary has already quite visibly kicked off, Vance and Rubio among the leading contenders to replace Trump in this irritating knockoff of his old reality TV show that the world is apparently stuck watching until drones come for the lot. Of the two, Rubio is a full order of magnitude more savvy, his necessary ideological conversions far more believable than Vance’s. Yesterday lying J.D. was an atheist anti-Trump darling of Northeast liberals, today he’s a diehard Trump-loving American Catholic - increasingly a distinct faith of its own wholly distinct from traditional Catholicism, effectively a branch of American Evangelicalism. Tomorrow? Rubio at least lets a corpse get buried before pretending he never knew the guy.
With polling showing Trump’s antics over the past few months being exactly what a strong majority of American political Independents do not want right about now, he’s got to pick his battles going forward to avoid a massive Democratic comeback in the midterms next year. Those look to be Iran, the president’s power to do anything at all with respect to immigration so long as they say there’s an emergency, and trying to figure out how to make tariffs work without turning an impending recession into a deep depression.
The Democratic primary is naturally already underway too, only poor Team Blue is so lost and confused it appears bound to throw up another banal moderate to take on a young pseudo-progressive - after soaking up about a billion dollars in donations over the next three years promising what they’ll never be able to deliver. Michigan governor Whitmer against Sanders’ pet AoC looks about as likely as any other combination, since they’ll avoid a multi-player primary like 2020 if possible. Some billionaire will probably be making a move too - there’s always at least one.
For what little it’s worth three years out, if I’m playing with brackets or whatever it is college basketball people get into every year, I’d bet on Rubio edging out AoC or Whitmer beating Vance. Rubio-Whitmer is a whole lot closer a thing. Betting on the Rust Belt one more time might just get the Democrats across the line… one last time, thanks to demographics, one of the cruelest gods there is. But a lot of Republicans may reject losing, so really the USA is off to the races in 2029 pretty much regardless.
Canada is actually a lot more interesting to observe these days from a policy systems perspective, especially as the re-elected Liberal government would seem to be a natural fit for working with Australia’s newly re-elected Labor government right about now. Political systems side note - gotta love how Liberal means something completely different in Australia and Canada.
Canada is one of those countries that might wind up benefiting from Trump’s trade wars, after coping with the initial shocks. Canadians are experiencing a bit of what Ukrainians did in 2014 and 2022 - to a far lesser degree, of course - and honestly, it’s healthy. Postmodern ideology rooted in elite aesthetics tends to fade away when confronted with bitter hazards of the real world most people prefer to avoid seeing.
With universal tariffs proving too impactful to sustain, Trump looks set to focus them on China, meaning that Canada could well wind up in a position where investing in one or more provinces would allow Chinese companies to retain access to North American markets through a lovely arbitrage setup.
Now do folks get why Trump is really talking about annexation, as if we’re living in the actual Fallout universe? Any American attempt to annex Canada by any means would trigger another American civil war, full stop. It would be Canada plus Pacific and Northeast America against the South and Midwest - and Team Trump would lose that fight.
But if Canadians can be frightened into following Trump’s lead on tariffs, Canada is trapped. He loves his cheap ploys as much as Putin. So long as Canadian companies can import Chinese goods, slap on a label and a margin, then send them down to the states, only the USA will lose out from imposing massive tariffs. Trump never wins unless other people let him.
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK collectively have a strong incentive to lead the way in replacing American leadership at every level - political, social, and economic. They can represent the English speaking world on the international scene far better than America. They should also, as they can, develop closer relationships with the many American states that do a lot of trade with them.
You’re allowed to pretend that the world can be unglobalized on a petty tyrant’s whim, but good luck with the consequences. Mighty among the ancient gods is political-economy. As Vladimir Putin is bound to finally understand before the end, poke that one too hard, and you’ll pay. All world leaders are at her mercy, forever.
Europe
Much of Europe is about to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany this week. How fitting that Hitler’s functional heir, Putin, has spent more than a quarter of that time twisting the memory of the Great Patriotic War into a predatory myth to sustain his own power. Behind ranks of marching children in pristine uniforms is the gritty reality of a horrific struggle between two monstrous imperial machines that killed tens of millions of people in their quest for domination of the European continent.
Muscovites are just as steeped from birth in propaganda about the Second World War as Americans, and so remain just as ignorant of its real causes and why the Axis Powers were bound to lose - in truth, American trucks played as vital a role as the blood sacrifice of millions of Soviets. But World War Two became the origin myth deployed to justify the policies of two murderous powers that each sought to dominate the planet in its own craven way. While D.C. was absolutely more benign on the whole, this depended entirely on where you happened to live. And no spirit of altruism drove the invention of the “Western World” destined to be led by America, but a simple desire to avoid the economic, political, and social catastrophes that had shattered the European Imperial Order across a generation.
Europeans were finally freed of the aristocracy that had shackled them for generations, but the cost was extreme. That’s why the World Wars are remembered as tragedy in most of Europe, unlike the USA. Of course, if you’d asked my grandfather about his memories of being part of a noble struggle against the forces of evil, he’d have preferred to not recall too many days spent in the belly turret of a bomber hoping the flak or Japanese fighters didn’t kill him.
For the average Soviet soldier of whatever nationality, the struggle from 1941 to 1945 was about nothing more than being enslaved to protect your enslavers from even worse slavers. The Soviets killed you based on what you believed, the Nazis the conditions of your birth as well as wrong beliefs, so they were the lesser evil.
But that didn’t make them not evil, nor justify the vicious class system that drove this army of comrades. Soldiers were no less disposable to their officers in the Soviet days than a poor doomed orc stormtrooper is his superiors today. Without Allied material support, Stalin would have lost the war, in the very best case forced to conclude a bitter peace with Hitler not unlike the one D.C. wants Ukraine to conclude with its oppressor.
And for all the improvement in the Red Army’s performance from 1941 to 1945, this came at the cost of sacrificing millions of soldiers in a strategic approach that reduced to simply overwhelming the opponent. Yes, there were cases of Soviet officers performing brilliantly, and many were high masters of the operational arts. But this was not the standard output of the system, but exceptions promoted in postwar propaganda as the norm.
Everyone everywhere should remember the Second World War as what it was: a simple extension of the first, the latter phase of Europe’s grand collapse. While the necessity of defeating the evil that arose in those days cannot be denied, averting it would have been better - and could have happened.
Hence it being so critical that European leaders continue to edge towards greater autonomy from the US in political and economic matters. Ukraine is serving as a necessary focal point in this regard. It’s been very interesting to see how even Spain and Italy, not countries with a strong historic or geographic reason to fear Moscow, have quietly been doing great work supplying Ukraine with armored vehicles and air defenses, among other supplies. While Germany, France, and the UK remain the biggest individual players in European security, and the Scandinavians and Eastern Europeans form the bulwark - and conscience - of Europe when it comes to relations with Moscow, the collective contribution of the southern and smaller nations have proven equally essential.
Muscovite propaganda has been trying to demonize the bigger players all along thanks to each of them having fought Moscow in the past. But when they’re joined by countries that haven’t, it sends an important message, inviting non-European countries concerned about Moscow to consider cooperation, since Italy and Spain are less visibly hostile to it and so less likely to draw fire. Unfortunately the need to fulfill all official NATO requirements continues to hold many European countries from sending more of their equipment to help Ukraine reclaim the occupied territories.
It continues to be immensely irritating to see military leaders try to pronounce armored vehicles obsolete simply because a lot of them get destroyed in the course of active operations. Light vehicles are invaluable in many roles thanks to the danger posed by drones, but speed has never been sufficient protection in the past: drones are faster than motorcycles, and targeting will improve - a simple AI can make quick work of anything with a hot engine that relies on speed. Without heavy armor, assaults don’t scale, it’s as simple as that.
Which is why if it has armor and moves, it ought to be heading to Ukraine. Most will eventually burn, but crews will survive. And though Ukraine is producing a lot of vehicles on its own, the inventory of modern kit really needs to double by summer.
Southwest Asia
The metaphorical and physical temperatures in the Middle East are on the rise as expected. Israel is now back to threatening a full takeover of Gaza and calling up reserves in a bid to push Hamas into a surrender it has zero incentive to offer. I’m shocked that any Israeli hostages are still alive at all, since the Israeli government has written them off several times only to have third party mediation bring about a pause and exchange of some.
The rest - well, if what Israel has done the past two years amounts to solidarity, then I will always believe that Israel’s true Zion is actually in Southern California. At the very least, if Jewish people are to have a safe refuge anywhere on the planet, it’s a whole lot more doable out in the Mojave than right next to millions of what you have to expect to be hostile neighbors for a couple more generations. Eventually, the greater capacity to inflict harm in the region may not rest with Tel Aviv.
We’ll see, I suppose, how many casualties Israel is really willing to suffer to root Hamas out from its tunnel networks. In the meantime, Israelis just got a bit of a rude wakeup call when a Houthi ballistic missile struck right next to Israel’s biggest airport.
Gosh, a couple months of Team Trump bombing Houthi targets didn’t stop their attacks? Who’d have thought that a campaign waged on the premise that Biden didn’t do it good enough is enough to envision and achieve victory?
This propaganda win came right after the Houthis took out an American Hornet on the Truman by sheer accident, the carrier taking a hard turn to make absolutely sure that a Houthi missile came nowhere near and in the process losing a jet overboard. Nobody was hurt, so all is well. Stuff gets lost during combat - it happens. Especially when your operating instructions almost certainly allow for no more than a .000013% chance of a Houthi weapon landing within a nautical mile if every one of the carrier’s escorts fail to shoot it down.
The one wrinkle here is that the Houthi shot that hit Tel Aviv slipped right through the world’s best air defense network. This weekend, Iran test-fired a ballistic missile it claims has optical tracking capabilities, so that it can maneuver in flight then reacquire its target with enough time to adjust for a precise impact. That’s just a claim, but if Tehran announced the capability, the Houthis probably already have a batch to do some combat tests. So caution with aircraft carriers is warranted.
I expect that Team Trump hopes to subdue the Houthis so that Truman can join newly-arrived Vinson in the Arabian Sea. This would double American naval-based firepower south of Iran, and I’d bet on Truman’s tour getting extended again. Come June, assuming that Team Trump is not satisfied with whatever Iran offers by way of restrictions on its nuclear program, Nimitz might be dispatched from the Pacific to make sure there’s a three-carrier overlap for at least a few weeks. If this happens, an attack on Iran must be presumed imminent.
Latest word this week is that Trump has come to a mutual ceasefire agreement with the Houthis. It will be intriguing to see what comes of that.
With all this happening, of course the India-Pakistan situation has chosen now to escalate, Pakistan warning that an Indian military attack in reprisal for the terrorist attack against civilian tourists in Kashmir is imminent. This round in their forever war may escalate more quickly than has been typical in the past, India foregoing a round of shelling and border incursions to launch something more flashy, a wave of air and missile strikes against alleged terrorist camps in the border area, perhaps (note - as I edit this after typing it out yesterday, exactly this scenario is reportedly underway. I really hate being right).
India’s Modi is one of those who I assess as feeling the need to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak, when it comes to flexing India’s power. Never mind that India is always teetering on the brink of civil war, Modi’s Hindu nationalist movement slowly strangling the rights of India’s many other groups. Like Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, this is another nasty domestic situation that westerners aren’t supposed to talk about because we need India to contain China. Sigh. Way to play right into Beijing’s hands, people…
Then there’s Pakistan, which is also perpetually hovering on the verge of civil war. It, like India, has nuclear weapons. The Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan produced a large pool of former fighters with what has to be assumed are few prospects, many of them boasting familial ties to Pakistan and used to moving smoothly over the border. Increased militancy in Pakistan, especially Kashmir, was probably inevitable the moment the US ran away from Kabul instead of at least trying to sustain a rump non-Taliban statelet. No way this can go really wrong in the long run.
Ah, what a wonderful part of the world to analyze. There are no good guys in the Middle East except all the people trapped in the middle.
Pacific
Not much new to report on the Pacific side of things, just the slow buildup of capabilities as the power players all try to work out how everything will shake out elsewhere. China will likely be on a bit of a diplomatic blitz for the next year trying to take advantage of what Trump has done to America’s relations with South Korea, Japan, and the countries of southeast Asia which presently sit on the fence between D.C. and Beijing. Beijing will only be aided by Democrats - mostly from the Northeast, but some Pacific Americans will indulge in cheap China bashing too - deciding that they need to be even harder on China than Team Trump.
Now that China is at effective parity with the US in the Western Pacific, if allied forces aren’t involved, Beijing can sit tight and watch how the year of fighting abroad unfolds. More exercises around Taiwan are likely, because those are now normal. But if China were to make a surprise move, the optimal moment for that should come after the American midterm elections wrap up in 2026. Historical patterns suggest that Trump will lose the House, leading to total gridlock in D.C. and escalating partisan tensions as each partisan team fights to keep its own internal power struggles under wraps as long as possible.
This, along with Trump’s rage at being left largely impotent, constrained by the courts, may well lead to a massive Constitutional Crisis. Taking advantage of this, whether to exploit the chaos and go for Taiwan or simply lure Trump into a military trap that decimates American capabilities in the Pacific for a decade (and probably cause the federal government to collapse entirely), could be Xi Jinping’s plan for 2027 or 2028. Ironically, the faster America collapses the slower he’ll probably go, betting on the balance of power shifting in Beijing’s favor even more. Of course, if internal tensions in China rise for some reason, watch out for misadventures.
Concluding Comments
Alright, that wraps up another long forecast from a self-styled policy systems analyst, as I guess I’d better start calling myself. Since I’m now very darned sure that my work is at least more valuable than that of the average properly employed professional working in the Pentagon. Before it’s illegal or uneconomical in the USA to do so, I figure I should offer my services to private and public interests in the near future.
As I evaluate the ever-evolving media ecosystem, I’m increasingly inclined to keep this blog as a long-term personal project that doubles as a professional portfolio. It seems to me that the moment you start charging subscribers or running ads, incentives shift in such a way that an echo chamber inevitably forms. The thing becomes about the audience, not the topic, and that’s anathema to good science. It’s how you become a Michael Kofman - an American constantly cited as an authority by the press, but doomed to be a case study in failed policy analysis that has actively served Putin’s interests and helped extend the war, even helped make it more likely in the first place.
I’d rather do contract work for Saab or Airbus or some smart startup abroad and use that income to subsidize the time I spend on publishing. Most people don’t know it, because the fact is uncomfortable for a lot of tenured professors, but some of the most revolutionary advances in signals theory that laid the foundation for the modern internet came out of a place called Bell Labs - a phone company. Not the government, and not a university - though to be fair, access to university resources has always been a major boost for research.
Regardless, I very much appreciate everyone who reads and shares this odd website of mine. Here’s hoping it serves those who can most benefit from this style of policy analysis. I’ll keep it up as long as the war is on.
And to tie back in to the headline, for those who read this far, here’s the answer to the question: Far more likely yes now than last year or any before. And not because Putin is getting older. Failure this glaring, in a society so devoted to raw power for its own sake, begets unpleasant things. Putin has an exceedingly narrow glidepath to survival. And though he appears to sense that he’s in trouble and so on the hunt for new scapegoats, he doesn’t understand how close to the end he’s already come. Exponential curves are terrifying once they get in full swing.
While I hope very much that the warnings about Putin’s goons attacking civilians in the next few days are wrong, I wouldn’t put it past him. But I also wouldn’t put it past some sensible party in the empire taking the chance of him coming out in public for a while to do what needs to be done. Regardless, unless I’m very wrong, 365 more days is a rather generous allowance for his longevity.