Zoo To Win: Secret To Ukraine's Adaptive Success
Diversity is a scientific principle, not a slogan. Ukraine's fight is powered by it.
It sure has been a week to remember in the Ukraine War!
Kinda crazy that Crimea being turned into a logistics island is only part of the good news.
Because one strike at the true heart of the russian empire isn’t good enough, the Ukrainians followed up on whatever hole they found or made in the Muscovite air defense network in a big way, again. And not once but twice more, in addition to the previous attack, one bit of damage sending part of Moscow’s main refinery halfway to orbit. Almost literally.
Not a bad way to take appropriate revenge for Moscow bombing a historic Orthodox church complex (true Orthodox, not the violent desecration that is Moscow’s perversion of the faith) as well as a film studio housing tens of thousands of costumes from old Ukrainian films. What’s actually holy to Ukrainians and russians certainly differs, and you can see it in what gets attacked.
For russia, oil is the high holy, because it’s the one thing russia controls that the world values. Like Trump just learned, don’t mess with the flow of oil and the wealth it brings to a lucky few.
The epic kaboom that sparked memes around Ukraine wasn’t even the worst of the damage inflicted, and the best part is that the Ukrainians weren’t directly responsible for it. In the process of disabling the core of the plant, it’s distillation systems, the Ukrainian drone attack convinced several russian surface to air missiles to switch sides, and it was one of them that hit the big oil reservoir, blasting the thing’s lid as high as a Moscow skyscraper.
Halfway to orbit is an exaggeration, sure, but frankly, not by that much in any meaningful sense. A part of a gigantic oil tank isn’t supposed to fly that high, ever. The consequences? Everyone in Moscow saw the mushroom cloud, and the wreckage is visible from space.
How’s that for “cotton” orcs? Special military operation going as planned, then?
The people running Moscow’s final line of defense somehow managed to forget that heat-seeking missiles have a really tough time differentiating the thermal signal coming off a drone from a plume of fire at a refinery. They’re better than they used to be, no longer thrown off solely by the sun, but still, the job of the seeker is to bring the explosive charge close to a really hot thing. Only so much you can do without pushing costs too high, in which case you run out of missiles to shoot too quickly - lesson the US just learned against Iran.
In addition to what looked like a Pantsir missile diving straight into the oil tank, a couple other videos emerged showing dipshit russians on a busy highway firing shoulder-fired SAMs at drones - only to wonder why one turns ninety degrees away from the targeted drone immediately after launch. Training standards in mordor continue to impress.
Anybody who has ever seen the comedy show Reno 911 - which if you’ve ever been to Reno, Nevada you know to be as much documentary as parody - the inept gang at the Reno sheriff’s department would still do better than whoever Moscow has on last-line air defense duty. This is not going to end well for russia or anybody who lives there.
It’s positively ridiculous that the orcs weren’t ready for this. A full two years after Ukrainian long-range drones started breaching the empire’s skies and bonking refineries, giving all the warning the Kremlin should have needed of worse to come, and whatever edge on mass-produced good-enough drones the twits had earlier in the war is gone.
What so many western experts then brushed off as lucky hits which did little lasting damage - unlike everything the US does, of course… which is why Iran just scored an incredible win with the ceasefire deal Team Trump accepted - were live combat tests. Proof of concept, if you will.
In 2025, Ukraine tested scaled-up strikes. 2026 has seen the campaign take the next logical step towards full maturity. One of the enabling factors that isn’t getting enough attention is the diversity of options available to Ukrainian strike teams.
Once it was established that an explosive charge reaching a particular part of an industrial complex could cripple it for weeks or more, the path forward was academic. And it didn’t depend on developing or acquiring a magical wonderweapon produced by Lockheed, Raytheon, Anduril et al. Or any single line of drone.
Instead, the answer lay in embracing the surplus of options Ukrainian and foreign suppliers could offer. While often seen as an impediment to efficient warfare, over a longer period of time this has proven to be the exact opposite where it counts the most.
It is objectively more difficult to plan and manage inventory when you have to keep track of specialized stuff originating from a dozen different countries. Ukrainian forces operate so many different howitzer and tank types that individual brigades end up building their own supply chains to keep them operational.
To a management culture obsessed with efficiency above all else - adaptive in the summer season of the adaptive cycle, but not others, at least not in the same way - this state of affairs is close to intolerable. Yet the urge to pick one option and invest in only that to maximize short-term efficiency has a serious downside that Moscow is now discovering.
A more diverse inventory sustains the potential for more frequent adaptation, and therefore, the element of surprise. This is another of those ecological principles that proves itself in a fight. It runs even deeper than ecology, stemming from the underlying principle that drives all biology: genetic inheritance.
Survival of the fittest is one of the most misunderstood ideas in all of history. Fitness is mistaken as a trait of an organism when it’s actually part of an ongoing dialog between an organism and its environment.
The dinosaurs were among the fittest creatures on Earth, until they weren’t. Dinosaurs weren’t wiped out by an even more deadly creature evolving, but a radical change in their environment which made the expensive metabolic load required by gigantic creatures too costly to maintain.
This is why attempts to engineer fitness are almost invariably doomed from the outset. You can only do this if you know for sure the conditions the organism produced will thrive in. Any error, and fitness proves illusory. In biology, genes may be the carriers of inherited traits which are selected for or against by the environment, but usually many are involved. Switching off one gene because it’s associated with cancer risk can inadvertently break some other thing essential to an organism’s survival.
Ability to change substantial aspects of an organism’s own function is the heart of adaptability. This is embedded in having access to as diverse a genetic heritage as possible.
The exact same mechanism governs social relationships as well. There is no end-state “fittest” social institution, no self-contained ideology that always works without creative interpretation, which forces evolution by prioritizing certain types of relationships over others. This isn’t about everybody getting along, but maintaining the potential for near-total reorganization in response to environmental change.
Ukraine and russia are case studies in comparative adaptation. Moscow has attempted time and again to make things work according to how the regime wishes they would, while the Ukrainians have taken the situation as it is and figured out how to thrive. The divergence has led to a radical shift in the balance of power in the war.
Modern warfare crucially depends on figuring out what your opponent can’t live without, developing a means of getting at it, then hammering their precious over and over again until they realize that protecting it requires accommodation. The modern world wasn’t built for total war, only grinding conflicts at the margins, because it was made to prioritize efficiency.
So much of the prosperity so many people enjoy today stems directly from not wasting as many resources on fighting as was typical before 1945. When you don’t have to build your factories and facilities to withstand attack, they can be cheaper.
The physics of explosions are unforgiving. Shock waves can penetrate deep into structures and damage sensitive equipment protected by concrete. And it is now possible to tailor nearly every aspect of any attack to the target, from the size of the kaboom needed to inflict sufficient damage at a given distance from an impact point to the number inbound objects the enemy’s defenses have to knock down.
Anything that isn’t designed to cope with damage through some combo of rapid repair, hardening, and distribution, is doomed. Countries like Iran with a lot of mountains are inherently tougher because they can bury things deep enough that only a few weapons not produced in large numbers can destroy them. A cave can always be re-excavated if only access routes are lost. Ukraine learned to bury everything it could a long time ago.
While Moscow inherited a lot from the Soviet era, redundancy in its core oil infrastructure is not. There are a select number of targets that, if hit hard enough frequently enough, will cause a huge reduction in the quantity of fuel reaching the russian economy and military. Battlefield vulnerabilities will emerge. This is just math.
And what’s really set to do Moscow in now is that the Ukrainians have so many different attack options to choose from. This means that only an exceptionally flexible defense can prevent the Ukrainians from chipping away at Moscow’s defensive systems until gaps are too large to plug. The damage will only spread from there.
And what is Moscow adamantly sucking at right now? Getting ahead of the unraveling.
In the attack on Moscow, the Ukrainians used not just one or two, but four, possibly even six or more different types of drones. Some were jet-propelled, others were more or less Shahed clones like the entirety of Moscow’s own strike arsenal. No cruise missiles were confirmed at this stage, however they were more likely to be spotted and shot down anyway.
Which means they can be used as highly effective decoys. Muscovite defenses have to prioritize them, enabling smaller and more accurate drones to slip through. Only so many shots can be directed at a raid passing through a given area, and with some drones flying fast and others slow, they can converge to totally overwhelm defenses.
Moscow’s air defense system has always been optimized to stop a NATO-style air assault. As illustrated by the US bombing campaign against Iran, that entails hundreds of aircraft launching cruise missiles of various types against a menu of targets worked out and incorporated into strikes that come in waves.
Thing about missiles is that, aside from being too expensive to throw a thousand at the enemy at once, they’re meant to fly fast, which makes them easier to detect using radar thanks to the Doppler effect. Drones and other slow-moving targets, like balloons, don’t produce much of a Doppler signature. This helps them evade radar detection almost as much as being able to exploit the terrain by flying super low thanks to the need to apply algorithmic filters to avoid burdening operators with lots of false returns. Since trees don’t usually move very far or fast.
Where a Tomahawk cruise missile would probably be noticed only once it reached a flat area, and the bigger Flamingo likely flashes red on even civilian airport radars in semi-rugged country, a drone’s signal is liable to be filtered out. Higher quality systems perform better, but Moscow generally goes for mass, since twice as many weapons that are even sixty percent as capable as a premium option can generally get the same job done, statistically. And the enemy has more stuff to track and knock down.
This is part of the reason why Ukrainians have acoustic sensors everywhere: the characteristic sound of a drone, aircraft, or missile can be used to filter out radar ghosts. Presuming you’ve got everything properly networked. Because correlating signals from different sensors requires another layer of processing.
The orcs don’t, and as a result, a significant fraction of Ukrainian drones launched come so close to their targets that short-range systems have to be in place to knock them down. Moscow has a lot more of these than NATO, but they still can’t be everywhere, and even in places like Moscow that boasts a hundred or more on duty, they can only launch so many missiles before having to reload. With so many drones in play, any gap in coverage stands to be found and exploited.
Nobody should envy the job of the Muscovite officers responsible for trying to game out which of their weapons - long, medium, or short range - need to be used and against which specific targets. Ukraine’s zoo means that precious little can predict the exact character of a given raid, and each attack on a target can try different tactics.
An attack on Moscow may include Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG precision cruise missiles with 450kg warheads, Ukraine’s domestic Neptune cruise missile and variants which have warheads in the several hundred kg range typically, the even more powerful but less accurate Flamingo cruise missile and its 1,000kg class warhead, long range drones like the FP-1 and Liutyi with 50-80kg warheads, long range drones like the Bober, Peklo, and Morok with 20-30kg warheads, and mid-range strike drones with warheads of 100kg or more. In each weight and range class there is usually a jet powered version with double the flight speed.
By the end of summer the Ukrainians stand to have medium and short-range ballistic missiles by Fire Point and Luch (maker of the Neptune family) to throw as well. With so many weapons with different characteristics to worry about, planning a leaker-proof defense is just about impossible.
Now add in the strain of years of combat on missile inventories and launchers, especially when the Ukrainians have spent the past six months aggressively hunting Muscovite SAMs. Also, by knocking back Moscow’s A-50 series AWACS and a fair few long-range radar sites during the war, the Ukrainians look to have guaranteed significant coverage gaps along the border region.
Hitting S-300 and especially S-400 launchers and radars operating within a couple hundred kilometers of Ukraine wore down the empire’s outer wall. Then the mid-range Buk and short-range Tor and Pantsir systems came under pressure, the resulting need to protect strategic sites as well as the space immediately behind the front doubled the strain.
A hypothetical Muscovite air defender who sees a contact come up on their screen has to pay close attention to specific attributes to get a sense of whether it’s better to expend a pricey S-300 or wait for an opportunity to get the target with a Buk - or even leave it for a mobile fire team. The Ukrainians have drones which send signals imitating other drones, further complicating matters. And no two raids may be the same. The Ukrainians are also starting to exploit vulnerabilities faster than Moscow can react, if repeated hits on Moscow are any indication.
As important as taking out the refinery supplying around half the capitol region’s diesel and gasoline is, equally as dangerous to the orc war effort is the increasing power of Ukrainian attacks on core military production facilities. In addition to landing a Flamingo or two on the premises of one large concern last week, this weekend the Ukrainians popped a semiconductor plant in Voronezh with a flight of up to ten Storm Shadow missiles and decoys, probably more of the latter.
Though there is some uncertainty about whether Storm Shadows or a new weapon was used. Ukraine is supposed to start receiving newer small cruise missile models from the USA and Europe. Just to add to Moscow’s problems.
There’s also the ongoing massacre of occupier logistics nodes in and around Crimea to be aware of. On either side of the Kerch Strait, right next to that big and increasingly temporary-looking bridge of Putin’s, Ukrainian drones savaged ferries and fuel terminals this week - and a big chunk of an S-400 battery guarding them to boot.
Basically, Kyiv is warning the russians that the bridge will soon be permanently inoperable. Succumb to injuries incompatible with life as an engineered structure, to paraphrase in English how Ukrainians tend to report deaths.
Ukraine’s seemingly confusing zoo of strike options obscures a blatant pattern of developing just the right toolset to solve each problem standing in the way of victory. What is lost in raw efficiency as well as the objectively more difficult management situation are both justified by the results.
Depending on the target, Ukraine may need to hit it with a Flamingo to maximize raw damage, a Storm Shadow or Neptune to get just the right spot, an FP-1 drone to threaten enemy air defenses, or even an FPV drone released by a mothership or hidden in a truck to slip onto a base unnoticed until it hits a bomber or ship. The ability to threaten any target with all of the above dramatically complicates Moscow’s defense strategy, and when Sapsan and FP-9 ballistic missiles are in play later this year, sorry Putin, bu the game is no longer on easy mode.
The orcs had two years to perceive the risk and prepare, but they manifestly failed to get the job done. In Moscow, someone apparently believed that simple nets used to impede FPV drones closer to the front would have any useful impact on something substantially larger. Several of the drones hitting the refinery burst before impact, but this only caused flaming wreckage to scatter across a flammable area. Worse for the russians, the Ukrainians might have been using warheads designed to detonate before impact to throw a penetrating molten slug into the target while also sending fiery bits raining down.
Muscovite forces will eventually field interceptor drones at scale, which would put a real damper on Ukrainian drone attacks as they stand today. But these do nothing against missiles, and the attrition of Moscow’s air defense system stocks plus a likely exorbitant rate of SAM usage could already be leading to serious shortages. So even when small cheap drones become less effective, Moscow will be chasing down a new and even more intractable problem.
The Ukrainians contracted for something like thirty thousand strike drones of all types in 2025 and double that in 2026. It stands to reason that this doubling of production is only now empowering a doubling in the number of drones sent at Moscow in a given week. And between 2025 and 2026, more drones stand to be sent into russia than the orcs have missiles to shoot them down. Once stocks are exhausted and the enemy must rely on new production alone, it’s over.
This is how a system is forced into collapse: one sub-system at a time is overloaded until internal metabolism fails.
After four years of pretending that they’re not actually at war with Ukraine, will or can russians as a people step up to take the sorts of measures and sacrifices in their daily lives that Ukrainians have?
I very much doubt it. It would violate the social contract holding russia together. Once that dissolves, there is no more russia.
Once everyone stops thinking their neighbors are all murderous Raskolnikovs held in check only by the imposed penalties and artificial morality of the mighty russian state, they don’t need Moscow any more. It’s power over them dissolves.
Most russians aren’t going to riot or attack government institutions unless fuel and food are both scarce. Instead, they’re going to look to their local mayors and governors and demand they do something before it gets to that stage. This will eventually mean not doing what Moscow demands, until everyone collectively realizes that Moscow can’t impose its will any more.
More local identities long suppressed should then re-emerge. Though I doubt it will happen quickly, the process looks inevitable. Unless Moscow retreats right now.
The best argument from the russian side for Putin simply bailing on his war and blaming corruption in the military is probably the drain on resources it guarantees that he or whoever replaces him badly needs to hold things together. It is not possible to achieve russia’s objectives in Ukraine, and a frozen front line is the best outcome the orcs could possibly hope for.
Though this is now unlikely: a return to the 2021 status quo is far more realistic. Ukrainian strikes stand to make the occupation untenable, but there’s an argument to be made for russia being given time to evacuate Crimea and Donbas before Ukrainian sovereignty is fully restored. This is the deal that could possibly end the war before it’s too late for Putin, or at least his regime.
Will the renewed talk of Team Trump actually doing the smart thing and applying all possible pressure on Moscow translate into something tangible? Perhaps. We’ll see.
Having failed to walk into the midterms as the second incarnation of Reagan, only better, now Trump’s only hope is convincing enough classic conservatives that it’s not actually better to let the Democrats impale themselves on being the opposition to Trump so the party can reboot itself in 2028. This could translate to the administration taking the correct US policy stance with respect to Ukraine - which is that the weaker russia gets without collapsing, the better.
Me, a lot of Ukrainians, and plenty of people around the world would certainly like to see russia shattered for good, but geopolitics doesn’t usually work out like that. Deals are done when the bastards responsible for screwing everything up fear they’ll get burned themselves.
People like them really do think they’re different than the rest of us. And “them” includes a significant number of world leaders. Put them in a killzone infested by drones and these toffs would learn an important lesson or two about human empathy. Might be that they’d finally stop waging kinetic wars and confine their competition to the economic domain.
State of the Fronts - Week 25 2026
Not much has changed this week anywhere on the fronts, so this week’s brief will actually be that.
Roughly a thousand russians a day enter the killzone only to die, killed by what ten years ago could have been described as toys with explosives strapped to them, their demise caught on video for future historians to argue about. Pretty sure that if you went back in time about eighty years and said this was the way of the future, most people would shake their heads sadly and go about their day without further comment. Especially combat veterans.
Not because the people dying are mostly russians, but that people will probably keep on doing this to each other forever at some scale. Every few generations, no matter how much evidence is available, societies have to relearn the same lessons. Then economics prevails again.
This time around the loop, the long-predicted end of Muscovite offensive potential has arrived. Unable to do more than push doomed infiltration teams into the killzone, lacking the armor or coordination follow up and seize ground or supply forces that take new positions, orc officers are still throwing good money after bad.
Only the Kostiantynivka sector is under serious pressure right now, with the situation in other hotspots essentially unchanged over the past week. Slight orc gains amounting to a tree line or so here and there, nothing more. It’s early days, but there’s reason to suspect that Ukrainian middle strikes are starting to have an impact on frontline logistics, especially in the south.
The Dobropillya, Kostiantynivka, and Sloviansk areas may all be affected soon too. Ukrainian middle strikes against logistics routes serving occupied Donetsk are dangerously frequent.
Summer is only beginning, and it looks to be a hot one. In more than one sense. Gotta love a super strong El Nino...
North
A week after the president of Belarus said that war between Belarus and Ukraine was all but impossible because of mutual vulnerability, the Belarusian opposition came out and warned that he’s actually planning to attack Ukraine after all. But as that’s what you’d generally expect the opposition to say in this situation, I’m not sure how credible the warning is.
Zelensky however issued an explicit threat to Belarus demanding that repeaters used by russian Shahed drones flying at Ukraine be removed - or else Ukraine will do the job. My sense is that this is an attempt to probe Minsk and gauge actual intentions. Belarus is closely integrated with russia at this point, Moscow’s respect for its sovereignty deeply questionable.
So anything is technically possible, and Ukrainians have no choice but to stay wary. Minsk could be pushed to try and open a new front. But after Moscow has already been raiding Belarusian stocks of gear for years, this feels like a bluff, and not even a particularly good one.
Sumy
The orcs probed a bit more near Kindrativka with no effect and along the border south of Sumy, but didn’t get far there either. The latter bunch took an airstrike for their trouble. Situation in Sumy is broadly unchanged, and the pace of enemy attacks isn’t high.
If Putin had the forces to make a fight of it in Sumy, it would have happened already. There are other, more important fronts right now.
Kharkiv
As in Sumy, there are ongoing russian efforts to infiltrate along the border, and plenty of shelling and drone attacks, of course. But not seeing any indications of a major push planned in this area.
Muscovite troops remain stuck in Vovchansk, their infiltration efforts shifting a bit further east lately, but still sticking to the script of creeping through woods towards Ukrainian villages. Where they’re found by drones and killed.
An army running on autopilot is a tragic thing. But the orcs are determined to throw lives away on the off chance the Ukrainians over-commit in one place and lose ground in another. Which operationally speaking is evidence of a tremendous failure to adapt.
What will be grimly amusing is if russian forces wind up being far more effective against their former comrades when Putin tries to make the regular military shoulder the blame for his crappy grasp of strategy. Civil war in russia is probably a 50/50 bet at this point.
Kupiansk
Moscow is still not done trying to get back into Kupiansk, and even advanced across a field or two east of town this week along the vector orcs have been infiltrating towards the Oskil for many months. 1st Tank Army is so very good at war.
At the current pace, Kupiansk will once again be infested by about a hundred orcs sometime late this year. And the Ukrainians will send a brigade in to clear the ruins again, hopefully this time using nothing but drones.
Putin is liable to keep attacking Kupiansk until the war ends simply because he once declared to have captured it. No evidence of the Ukrainians starting up any kind of grand counteroffensive from the Oskil bridgehead yet, but summer has only just started. And the more the Ukrainians do flashy stuff in Kherson and Crimea, the more I keep an eye on the north. Lesson of 2022. And 2024.
Lyman
Third Army Corps held the orcs firmly in place for another week, clearing some infiltrators from the edge of Lyman in the process. Lately Moscow has been upping the intensity of attacks in this sector, mostly north of the Siverskyi Donets river.
Lyman remains essential to Moscow’s hopes of taking Sloviansk someday, and is still just out of reach. I am still convinced that 3rd Corps will go on the offensive eventually. But this move won’t be rushed.
No longer is it strictly necessary for Ukrainian forces to advance west in order to get drones in position to cut off orc access to Luhansk and Donetsk. But if the Ukrainians can exploit the cover and terrain to break the northern pincer of the Muscovite claw coming at Ukraine’s Donbas fortress, watch out, Putin. Half of Luhansk may slip out of the old murderer’s grasp in a few weeks.
Sloviansk
It looks like the orcs are increasingly focusing their advance towards Sloviansk on the Siverskyi Donets river valley, where they’re apt to find more cover than further south along the highway from Bakhmut. But they’ve only managed some tiny advances despite mirroring efforts on the other side of the river, so this shift to a frontal assault through cover isn’t promising so far.
As expected, the closer they try to get to Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the harder the going gets. Right now, the only success they’re having is to slowly force the Ukrainians back from some useful bits of real estate that are stubbornly keeping the orcs from pushing along a wide front between the highway and river.
This area is unlikely to remain unoccupied forever. Still, the time it’s taking the enemy way too much time and effort to secure even the western outskirts of Siversk. Even a relatively decent performance by russian forces in an operation is still incredibly weak by the standards of earlier in the war.
Kostiantynivka
Moscow’s long bitter crawl into Kostiantynivka reflects this dynamic. There was a time that a sufficiently powerful and organized orc assault could, if it disregarded losses, breach a Ukrainian defense line and get some disposables ten kilometers into the Ukrainian rear.
No longer. Now, the best they can do is squeeze an infiltrator or two every day through a narrow corridor to try and hide out in some ruins. What success they can boast is only visible after months of effort and subject to rapid reversal.
Intermixed positions across the killzone are now the norm, yet less dangerous to Ukraine than they once were thanks to the reduced explosiveness of orc campaigns. A Ukrainian team that finds itself in close proximity to some orc infiltrators can usually go to ground, wait for drone resupply, and emerge to eliminate targets when conditions are favorable.
This does cut both ways: when Ukrainians advance, it takes some time to root all the orcs out of their holes. But whoever can more reliably satisfy logistics demands usually prevails.
Muscovite infiltrators have been spotted in most of Kostiantynivka, but actual control over any part of the city escapes them. Unless and until they can sever the road leading into down, the city won’t fall. To be of any use to Moscow, the city has to become a safe holding area for reserves. Even Pokrovsk half a year after its effective capture is barely able to perform this function.
Moscow’s war effort foundered from the effort of trying to seize Pokrovsk over two years. Kostiantynivka is apt to finish the breaking of Moscow’s army.
Dobropillya
Moscow’s halting efforts to advance north of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad are a testament to how little tactical successes can do for the orc position now. They’re as intensive as the attempts to break into Lyman and Kostiantynivka, and broadly even less successful.
Pokrovsk should be a secure base by now, and Ukrainian forces still hold just a few kilometers to the north and west. The Muscovite push through Dobropillya was supposed to support the advance on Kostiantynivka, but now it’s becoming purely about blocking any Ukrainian hopes of mounting a counterattack to liberate Pokrovsk.
With the casualties the orcs are taking, they should be seizing control of a lot more Ukrainian territory than they are. Right now, Moscow is busy throwing people and resources into one of the most intensive campaigns of the war, but everything is being cut apart so badly by Ukrainian drones and artillery before making contact with infantry that it looks like a stalemate on most fronts.
Yet if I’m right, the Ukrainians are using up fewer resources than ever blocking maximum efforts by the enemy. That implies a buildup of Ukrainian combat power which, if correctly applied considering emerging challenges, can break the orc front once and for all.
If Putin’s forces can’t get from Pokrovsk to Dobropillya in six months, Donbas is out of reach. His last best chance for declaring victory and having it stick is gone.
Zaporizhzhia
Moscow isn’t having any better luck between Dobropillya and the Dnipro, which I’ve been calling the Zaporizhzhia front, though really it’s three separate ones from an operational perspective. But the enemy’s advance along this 150km wide stretch of steppe has only achieved a meaningful breakthrough in Huliaypole for about a year.
Along the southern Vovcha, what the Ukrainians term the Oleksandrivka front, the enemy has been stuck and even rolled back a bit this year. Ukrainian positions here threaten Pokrovsk, and worth noting is that Magyar’s Birds appears to have been building the first Drone Wall here well before that effort became a universal thing.
Further south, the Huliaypole front saw Ukrainian reinforcements go after the seam between the Oleksandrivka and Huliaypole sectors with success earlier this year. These two areas could be sleepers so far as Ukrainian counteroffensive efforts go this year.
At the moment, Muscovite forces are still working hard to push west from Huliaypole and outflank Orikhiv. They’re barely managing to get a few infiltrators through Ukrainian positions, and I have to think the lack of cover in the area is a big part of the reason why.
What had started to look like a concerning enemy effort building up along the Dnipro early in spring has totally fizzled. The Orikhiv front continues to see periodic local Ukrainian counterattacks that keep the line stable.
Figure it’s worth breaking out the three sub-fronts within Zaporizhzhia, which also includes part of Dnipro district, just to make the geography more confusing, every now and again. Ukrainian forces could well stage a counteroffensive here to take advantage of the orc logistics nightmare forming west of Mariupol right now. But instead, they might be better served cutting straight to the heart of the matter.
Kherson
It’s time to start mapping the Logistics Lockdown campaign impacts specifically targeting Crimea in conjunction with the defense of Kherson, because it’s all interconnected, now. I’m by no means the only analyst who has long seen the physical isolation of Crimea as a prerequisite to Ukrainian forces crossing the Dnipro.
Even if the plan is obvious, if the enemy can’t stop it, so what? It’s in some ways fair to see Ukraine’s entire war up until now as a necessary sacrifice to bring the country into this exact position with respect to Crimea: west of the Kerch Strait, Azov Sea, and Rostov-on-Don, Ukrainian forces have operational-level fire superiority.
If Ukraine was a warship, it would have been spending the past years weaving through incoming fire to get in exactly the right position to unleash a crippling blow on a larger vessel. The ability to throttle Muscovite logistics in Crimea by transforming it into an island is huge, no other way to put it.
Every single bridge and ferry that can deliver fuel to Crimea is now subject to sustained attack. Without fuel, modern warfare is impossible. Generators powering electronic warfare setups won’t run. SAM radars won’t be able to confuse targeting by switching off and moving. Supply trucks won’t get to whoever is told they have to sit in a bunker near a beach to watch for Ukrainian marines attempting a landing.
Remember Kherson in 2022, anyone? Ukraine strangling orc logistics across the Dnipro forced the enemy to suddenly retreat. Had the enemy dug in, they’d have been starved out. No blood-drenched assault required: just relentless pressure.
If you’re gonna build a castle, you’d better make damn sure it can never be placed under siege. No matter how much you stockpile, a clock is ticking down until you run out. Immobility without distribution is death in the Network Age.
Strike Campaigns
I’ve already covered the big stuff and implications in this domain, so not a whole lot more analysis to add. Map tells the tale.
The Ukrainians did score a new range record, if I’m not mistaken, hitting a refinery well beyond the Urals with a drone. The damage to refineries confirmed in satellite footage keeps getting more severe, suggesting Ukrainian refinement of tactics and payloads.
Moscow’s deep strike campaign has been relatively muted this week, no doubt because weapons are being stockpiled ahead of a new massive attack on Ukraine, with special emphasis on Kyiv. Though the civilian losses will, as always, be a crime, at least Moscow might be tempted into using its surviving Kalibr carriers in the Black Sea, possibly exposing them to attack. Still a couple submarines due for elimination in Novorossisyk.
And the more the enemy uses their bombers, the faster their engines wear out. More crashes like the one in Irkutsk last week that claimed a Tu-22M are welcome. Though with Moscow only able to muster up twenty or so, compared to over a hundred in late Soviet days, the bear is missing a few teeth.
Inability to stop enemy attacks is at this point mostly down to inadequate partner supplies of effective ballistic missile interceptors. Fire Point claims readiness to produce these starting as early as this fall, but while I consider the criticism of Flamingo to be mostly overdone, count me extremely skeptical that it is as simple as cloning an S-400 body and attaching a German thermal seeker to reliably kill Iskanders on final descent.
There’s roughly an order of magnitude of engineering complexity separating a cruise missile from a ballistic missile interceptor on the best of days. This generally implies more delays due to unexpected complications. Not anybody’s fault, just what happens.
If Aster-30 missiles have trouble making ballistic intercepts, that probably means the Patriot PAC-3 was designed with certain proprietary information not readily available. Hopefully, though, Ukraine has obtained the same knowledge through trial and error during the war. Or better.
A reliable anti-ballistic shield, even partial, by this winter, would neuter Putin’s best remaining argument for Ukraine to make concessions, which is the threat of another hard freezing winter. So if there’s a combination of Ukrainian ingenuity and European self-interest that can achieve an unexpectedly good outcome in this situation, cool.
As discussed above, Ukraine’s Middle Strike campaign is going just as well as the Deep Strike side. Crimean bridges and ferries keep being smashed, trucks are hunted by drones along the highways crossing the Azov steppe, and 42nd Brigade released footage of a close aerial surveillance mission over occupied Donetsk. There were a few logistics hits in that part of occupied Ukraine too, but nothing like what’s being visited on Crimea so far.
Not for no reason is Magyar apologizing to Ukrainians in the occupied territories about the coming noise and services interruptions. Man, who needs fireworks on 4th of July when there’s endless footage of much bigger kabooms on Ukrainian drone feeds?
Air, Sea & Signals
Air
Not much new of note on the aviation side of things specifically. It is interesting to see how much debate there is about Ukraine’s total F-16 count, though.
Some say Ukraine has as few as twenty active Vipers, others like myself count around forty. Part of the issue is what you consider active. If you’re talking about the maximum number of F-16s Ukraine can put in the air at once, then I’d say twenty or so is a fair guess. Add in three or four Mirage 2000s, and that’s two small squadrons able to fight. Enough jets to reliably take down over a hundred drones and cruise missiles in the space of a couple hours.
Me, I mentally account for readiness rates, so a fleet of forty total airframes translates into around twenty available at any one time. Totally reasonable to go the other way with it.
The main idea is that Ukraine has probably 40-50 veteran F-16 pilots and as many newer ones in advanced training. Not bad after just two years. Which is why I lean towards Ukraine rapidly standing up a full Gripen squadron by this time next year. Just to put one more nail into the coffin of Putin’s stupid war.
Sea
Ukraine and the orcs have both been exchanging attacks on cargo ships in the Black Sea lately, so it’s possible the ceasefire that’s held for so long around the grain corridor leading out of Odesa will finally fail. Facing defeat, Moscow can be expected to try stuff like that, in this particular instance hoping that Ukraine’s partners will fear the consequences of disruption of global trade at a sensitive moment and press Kyiv to negotiate.
Europe’s tone towards russia is steadily hardening, so this gambit is unlikely to succeed. Unlike Team Biden, Team Trump isn’t apt to care about rising food prices in the Middle East. Not now.
There was an incident in Odesa this week that looked at first like a russian naval drone attack, but turned out to be a Ukrainian exercise.
Signals
Disrupted satellite communications remains a major issue for Moscow, and the timing of the Starlink shift to ban non-approved terminals from operating in Ukrainian airspace is very interesting. After a year of talking so much shit about Ukraine, suddenly Musk’s company quietly pivots?
I guess one upside of the parasocial economy is that as long as Musk or some other rich clown says the stuff that fans want to hear, they are free to pursue rational economic interests, like making everyone think only their companies can do things. As long as Ukraine has SatCom and the orcs don’t, fine. Just be nice to have a little reliability from these boring moguls.
Staff Affairs
Since things are going pretty well on the fronts right now, you aren’t hearing as much criticism of Zelensky or Syrskyi right now. Opposition media hasn’t found the right line of attack.
Ukrainska Pravda ran a story about Ukrainian fighters being widely skeptical of the new defense ministry contract policy. But all it had was a few interviews passing on the kind of gripes and criticisms that you always hear about literally anything that transpires.
It sounds like there may be some loopholes that favor the military - hard to say, because no policy works out exactly as planned. Some stuff invariably gets worked out in court, meaning somebody had to feel wronged. Still, if you’re going to run a headline alleging widespread discontent, you really need some kind of survey data to back it up, not just conversations with a few select contacts, who are already a biased sample because the majority of people in uniform tend to be wary of talking to journalists.
Concluding Remarks
That’s it for the fronts this week. Certainly feels as if a turning point was reached a couple months back, and this is a new phase of the war. Hopefully the last.
Tactically, orcs are as clever and innovative as any other person. Underestimating them at that level is always mistake.
But at higher levels of the ruscist terror state there’s just too much rot for the system to indefinitely cope. And as for the ability to adapt with the speed and determination needed to get ahead of Ukraine - not happening, unless my theory of this fight suddenly turns dead wrong. The situation on the battlefield and behind it will only deteriorate.
The Ukrainians are only counting on a six month window of structural advantage, and that’s wise. But the trajectories of the Ukrainian and Muscovite systems are diverging. Its becoming part of the modern Muscovite identity to refuse true adaptation because that would admit something is wrong with the russian world in the first place. It’s a mirror of how US boosters are already trying to figure out how to forget or obscure the fact that Iran beat them in every way that matters.
Yeah, the official physical damage toll was a hell of a lot worse for the eventual victor, but all the damage US airpower could apply still didn’t get the job done in yet another war. The mighty USA, world-dominating superpower it pretends to be, could not destroy Iran’s nuclear program, missile arsenal, regime, or grip over Hormuz. And if the US had the strength or allies to “take over Iran” as Trump blustered this weekend, it would have already happened.
The USA is not russia, and its radically different origin story and internal structure means it won’t have a revolution over a humiliating military defeat abroad. Instead, the powers that be will spin the thing until everybody forgets what really happened - then something even dumber will happen again. And again. Until a completely different kind of shock, most likely economic, finally tears the USA apart.
For Moscow, the tension between the official narrative about imminent victory ordained by god and people seeing smoke plumes over Moscow and St. Petersburg will be much tougher to sustain than the USA’s self-serving story about itself. The physical shortages of fuel reported across russia and what russian vacationers in Crimea are going through as the Ukrainian peninsula loses power and water after Ukrainian strikes cut to the heart of modern russia even harder than gas prices going up do in the USA.
Also, the USA will have a new Congress in a little more than six months which is now almost certainly reverting to Democratic Party control - at least the House. Which is enough to render him a lame duck. And thanks to Trump giving in to Iran, the world now has proof positive that when the going gets tough he always bluffs.
The easiest idiot to crush at the poker table is the one who bluffs all time and raises whenever you do in a bid to assert dominance. Only in a game between friends does social posturing matter. Everything else is applied statistics, and Trump’s type always, always falls flat on his face when bluffing against someone who had a decent hand to start with and won the moment the first community cards went face up.
How to win: be patient, wait until the moment arrives, and clean house.
By extension this means that all talk and concern about Trump being a dictator, or staying in the White House longer than the end of his second term, can be abandoned for good. My own concerns about him trying something have evaporated - he’s less of a threat to the Constitution than the system that made his rise possible.
Trump doesn’t have the stones to be Caesar - or is just savvy enough to perceive that he’d get J.D. Vance’s knife in his spine the moment the die was cast. He’ll play Caesar or Nero to toy with the media, but in the end, he’s just a crass, gross, greedy, petty troll pretending to be a serious monster.
A certain class of American thought that if they called fascist on a politician like Trump, he would automatically lose come election day. That was all labeling him was ever about: political advantage. Still is. If Hitler rose from the grave and took over D.C., Democrats would still find reasons to insist that violence is never the answer and carry on with the farce of American federal politics right until they were sent to camps.
The illegal actions Trump has ordered the federal government to take absolutely make him a threat to the Constitution. But a pretty weak one, all things considered. A sign of the USA’s terminal decline, no more.
Iran forced Trump to show his cards at last in an unambiguous way, and when he had to either call and go all in or reveal that he’s been bluffing all along, he folded. He was only ever in the politics business to enrich his family by trolling people who, deep down, want to be trolled because it makes their political life easy. The moment he started screwing with people’s money, including his own, behavior changed.
Got it. Glad that’s settled. Anything Trump gets away with, the opposition secretly wants him to. Because they plan to do the same when their turn comes. Rig the system and loot the treasury for make benefit of own side, and nobody else.
American partisan politics is all a sick show and a con. Best to ignore it, as outcomes, no matter how hard each side gerrymanders, boil down to pure economics in the long run. Oil prices go up, the Independents who hold the balance of power when we bother to vote get mad and punish whoever made it happen.
It’s not democracy as anybody should want the thing to function, but hey - it’s not the russian world. And if Team Trump really is waking up to its own self-interest, the next few months should see them jump on the Ukraine bandwagon in a big way.
If and when they do, that’s the surest sign of all that victory is near.