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00:00:00The war in Ukraine has seen a dramatic escalation over the past week.

00:00:04Ukraine has significantly upped the temper of its operations both on the front lines

00:00:09and in the air, and appears to have hit a serious nerve inside Russia.

00:00:14A massive Russian strike on several Ukrainian cities using a record number of drones and

00:00:19missiles was answered immediately by a major Ukrainian strike on Moscow and multiple other

00:00:25regions. But the Ukrainians have also been intensifying their strikes on Ukrainian territories

00:00:30occupied by Russia, and it's one of those strikes in the town of Starobilsk in occupied Luhansk

00:00:36that's really got under Russian skin. In response, Russia launched one of its most severe strikes on

00:00:42Kiev in May, and has threatened to hit even harder in the near future. But continuing the one-upmanship,

00:00:48Ukraine responded with a devastating strike of its own, and now Ukraine and the world are bracing

00:00:53themselves for what comes next. Thanks to Ukraine's devastating response, the stakes in this war

00:00:59have arguably never been higher. Here's the full story of what Ukraine did and what might happen

00:01:04next. The strike on Starobilsk on the night of May 22nd to 23rd was one of the many that have

00:01:09been

00:01:10tormenting the occupied territories over recent weeks. Ukraine seems to have established a major

00:01:15kill zone along the crucial M14 highway. It's the primary logistics route in the occupied territory,

00:01:21running east-west and connecting the Russian mainland with Crimea. But what used to be

00:01:26considered a road of life has turned into a road of death. Footage shows dozens of military vehicles,

00:01:33oil tankers and other vehicles burning or burnt out alongside the road. The road, known as the R-280

00:01:39in Russia, became so dangerous that Vladimir Saldo, the Russian occupation head of Kerson Oblast,

00:01:45was forced to issue a decree restricting freight vehicle movement on a sizable section of the road.

00:01:50But the strikes in the occupied territories certainly didn't end there. On May 20th,

00:01:55Robert Brovdy, the commander of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, reported that his units had hit a

00:02:00Russian drone pilot training camp in the occupied town of Snizna. He claimed that at least 65 cadets

00:02:06and an instructor had been killed as a result. The following day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr

00:02:11Zelensky reported that another set of strikes had hit a Russian security service headquarters and an air

00:02:15defense system in the Kerson region in occupied Ukraine, killing and wounding almost 100 Russians.

00:02:21According to Ukraine's general staff, between May 25th and 26th, Ukrainian forces also struck a Russian

00:02:27command post in Ocherotina in Donetsk Oblast and a regional command post in Verkniya Kronitsya

00:02:32in Zaporizhia Oblast. Ground control stations used by Russian forces near Nestoryanka in Zaporizhia

00:02:39and Novorodivka in Donetsk Oblast were also reportedly hit. But the Ukrainians were just

00:02:44getting started. They also struck a Russian drone warehouse and logistics depot near Novorodivka,

00:02:50another logistics warehouse in the city of Donetsk, and a railway fuel tanker near Devoltseva,

00:02:55all in Donetsk Oblast. Ukrainian forces also claimed a successful strike on a Russian 1L125

00:03:01Niobe-SV radar station near Yarsk in Luhansk Oblast on May 24th. Although unreported in Western media,

00:03:09Russian media also claims an unprecedented attack on the town of Enhodar, home of the

00:03:14Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, on May 27th. The plant's communications director, Yevgenia Yashina,

00:03:20told Russian media that at least 50 explosions had been reported, leaving communications disrupted

00:03:26and part of the city without power. So clearly the occupied territories have been getting hammered

00:03:32and the Russians have been feeling the pain. But it's the Ukrainian strike on the town of

00:03:37Starobilsk in Luhansk on May 22nd that has really got the Russians' goat. That's probably an

00:03:42understatement of the mood in Russia following the strike. In fact, in many respects, this strike

00:03:47could turn out to be their butcher. As you probably recall, Russia had occupied the town of Butcher,

00:03:52located on the outskirts of Kyiv during its initial march on Kyiv in March 2022.

00:03:58After they withdrew, Ukrainian forces found hundreds of dead civilians in the streets,

00:04:03basements and mass graves. Victims were often found with their hands bound behind their backs

00:04:08and gunshot wounds to the head. The incident triggered global outrage and accelerated international

00:04:13support for Ukraine. But perhaps more importantly, it galvanized national unity and support for the

00:04:18Ukrainian government and forces to resist the Russian invasion, arguably more than any other

00:04:23single event in the early stages of the war. Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary,

00:04:28Russia denied the claims. President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and even

00:04:33Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko labeled it as a fake attack. But now in Starobilsk, in many

00:04:39ways, the roles are reversed. Ukraine claims that it hit a headquarters of the elite Russian drone unit

00:04:45Rubicon in the vicinity of the town. The general staff said it was just one of multiple strikes

00:04:50carried out on military targets that evening. But that's not what the Russians reported. In fact,

00:04:55far from it. The Russians claim that this was a cold-blooded strike on a teacher's training college

00:05:00that left 21 dead and dozens injured. The majority of those, they said, were students, teenage girls,

00:05:06aged 14 to 18. They say that Ukrainian drones first hit a dormitory where the girls were sleeping,

00:05:12then followed up with several waves of drones, 16 in total, targeting the survivors and those trying

00:05:18to rescue them. Footage of the site indeed shows multiple destroyed buildings at the Starobilsk

00:05:23College of Luhansk Pedagogical University, including what appears to be a five-story dormitory

00:05:28building in ruins. Following a heated and frankly deeply unsavory UN Security Council session

00:05:34called by Russia to discuss the attack, European nations like Denmark and Latvia flatly rejected the

00:05:40Russian account. In response, the Russians organized a trip for foreign journalists to

00:05:44the site. According to the Foreign Ministry, the BBC, CNN and all Japanese media declined the

00:05:50invitation for various reasons. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova has subsequently

00:05:56accused CNN of filming the preparation of the strike, based on a report by the channel's

00:06:00correspondent Nick Patton-Walsh. However, 50 journalists from 19 countries reportedly did make

00:06:06the trip. From the resultant footage, there's no discernible evidence of any military facilities

00:06:11on the site. At this point, it's very difficult to say what actually happened. Perhaps we'll never

00:06:16know. What's indisputable, however, is that the Russian response has been unprecedented, at least in

00:06:22terms of the war in Ukraine. Russian media has been laying it on thick, with blanket coverage highly

00:06:27reminiscent of the aftermath in Butcher. It's fair to say that the nation is shocked and outraged,

00:06:32not just at the strike, but because they claim Ukraine mocked the tragedy afterward. The impact

00:06:37of Ukraine's accelerating strikes on Russian infrastructure, the unprecedented attack on

00:06:41Moscow the previous week, and growing financial worries had already worsened the mood in the

00:06:45country considerably, particularly in the capital. But the Starobilsk attack seems to have crossed some

00:06:51kind of national psychological red line. In short, they want blood, and the pressure has ratcheted up

00:06:57several levels on Putin to respond forcefully. Putin called the attack a terrorist strike. He insisted

00:07:03there had been no military facilities, intelligence service facilities, or related services in the

00:07:08vicinity. Therefore, there is absolutely no basis for claiming that the munitions struck the building

00:07:13as a result of our air defense or electronic warfare systems. More ominously, the Russian foreign

00:07:18ministry said the May 22nd strike had pushed the war past a breaking point and warned that Russia's

00:07:23patience was now exhausted. Putin reportedly asked his military to present proposals for a retaliatory

00:07:29strike, and it soon arrived. The following evening, Russia launched one of the heaviest strikes on

00:07:34Kyiv and other areas to date. Ukraine's air force said altogether 90 missiles and 600 drones had been

00:07:40detected. It said that early data showed 55 ballistic and cruise missiles and 549 drones were shot down or

00:07:47intercepted, while 19 missiles may not have reached their targets. However, they acknowledged that there were

00:07:5316 direct missile and 51 drone hits in 54 locations. Ukrainian air force spokesman Yuri Ignat appeared to

00:08:00contradict those interception rates. We really had a serious attack. 90 missiles, 600 drones, almost all

00:08:07of them in the capital, so this is really a problem, he said. From the circulating footage, there's very

00:08:12little evidence of air defense activity over the city during the attack. However, it's of course possible

00:08:17that air defenses were more successful in other regions attacked. Chikasi, Kharkiv, Odessa, Poltava, Sumy,

00:08:23and Zitamir. The Russians also appear to have included at least one strike with the much-discussed

00:08:28supposed Russian superweapon, the Oreshnik. Zelensky confirmed the evidence from circulating geolocated

00:08:34footage that an Oreshnik hit the town of Bilasekva in the Kyiv region. Various clips of the strike

00:08:39emerged with one intriguingly geolocated to the city of Donetsk instead. Based on that footage,

00:08:45a second strike seems to have taken place in the north of Donetsk, somewhere along the line

00:08:49that passes from the city through Donetsk and eastern Kharkiv oblasts into Russia's Belgorod

00:08:54region. Other reports claim that a second Oreshnik was fired but failed, crashing somewhere

00:08:59inside Russia or the occupied territories. This is the kind of insight you're not going to

00:09:03find on any old military channel on YouTube. If you want the daily scoop on the most important

00:09:08stories and why they matter, click the subscribe button. Now it's unclear what exactly the Russians

00:09:14hit in Bilasekva and whether it was the intended target. There is an airfield near the impact site

00:09:19and an industrial zone that may house military facilities, but on the face of it they appear to

00:09:23have struck civilian agricultural and industrial facilities and only done superficial damage.

00:09:29Nevertheless, the use of the Oreshnik drew sharp condemnation from European leaders.

00:09:33French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the strike as a signal of the dead end and impasse

00:09:39of Russia's war of aggression. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz labelled the attack a reckless

00:09:44escalation and affirmed that Germany remains firmly at Ukraine's side. And Kaya Kalas,

00:09:50the EU's foreign policy chief, described its use as a political scare tactic and reckless nuclear

00:09:56brinkmanship. The Oreshnik is primarily intended as a nuclear weapon, but its payload of six missiles,

00:10:02each releasing six sub-munitions, can only be used as a purely kinetic weapon with no warhead attached

00:10:08at all. Putin has previously claimed that the special materials used in its construction burn

00:10:13almost as hot as the surface of the sun and that the missiles could penetrate deep into fortified

00:10:18structures as a result. The strike on Bilasekva was non-nuclear. No mushroom cloud or radiation was

00:10:24recorded, but the nuclear threat that Kalas referenced is clear. The Russian message is that the next Oreshnik

00:10:30strike could be carrying nuclear warheads. And at this point, there's no evidence that Ukraine,

00:10:35or indeed anyone else, has air defenses that can stop it. But the Oreshnik was far from the only type

00:10:40of missile used during the attack. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the strikes were carried

00:10:44out using Oreshnik, Iskander, Kinzhal and Sirkon missiles, as well as air, sea and ground-based

00:10:50cruise missiles and attack drones. They claim to have struck command posts of Ukraine's Ground

00:10:55Force's main command, the main intelligence directorate of the defense ministry, and other

00:10:59Ukrainian command posts, as well as unspecified military infrastructure. As they always do,

00:11:04they also claimed no civilian objects were targeted. But the evidence strongly suggests otherwise.

00:11:10Residential buildings, shopping centers, and emergency services buildings were reportedly struck.

00:11:15Zelensky said four people had been killed and 100 injured in total. A water supply facility was also

00:11:21attacked and the Chernobyl Museum in Kyiv had been effectively destroyed. Ukraine's Interior Minister

00:11:27Ihor Klimenko called the attack on the museum, a deliberate attack on history, memory, and truth.

00:11:33Earlier, Kyiv's mayor Vitaly Klitschko reported that a person was killed after a nine-story residential

00:11:38building in the central Shevchenko district was hit and a fire broke out on the top floors. In the same

00:11:44district, a strike near an air raid shelter at a school blocked its entrance with debris, trapping

00:11:49several people inside. Every district of Kyiv reportedly suffered damage. Tellingly, the only

00:11:55military infrastructure confirmed to have been hit by Ukrainian authorities was the Ukrainian Ground

00:11:59Force's command building. However, according to a well-known advisor to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry,

00:12:05Sergei Flash Beskresnov, the facility has not been used since the beginning of the war. He also

00:12:10confirmed that the Lukyanovka plant, which had already been damaged by previous shelling, had also been hit.

00:12:15So it's unclear ultimately what the Russians accomplished for all of that, besides making

00:12:19Kyiv look like the center of the apocalypse as the sun rose. Did the Ukrainians take the attack lying

00:12:24down? Of course not. Retribution was swift, devastating, and continues unabated.

00:12:30In the early hours of May 27th, Ukraine struck a military aircraft repair

00:12:34plant in Taganrog in the Rostov region. Governor Yuri Slyuzhar claimed air defenses had shot down a missile

00:12:41over the city, with debris injuring two women, one seriously. But footage analyzed by Russian outlet

00:12:46Astra suggested the strike hit near the 325th Aviation Repair Plant, a facility that services Russian

00:12:53military aircraft, including an AN-12 and IL-76 transport planes, Su-24 bombers, Su-25 attack jets,

00:13:00and Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters. The facility has been sanctioned by the EU, the US, and Ukraine over

00:13:07its role in supporting Russia's war effort. Further north, explosions from a Ukrainian missile attack

00:13:12rocketed the area around the Baltimore military airfield in Voronezh. The base is home to the Su-34

00:13:17fighter bombers Russia uses heavily in attacks on Ukraine. Voronezh Governor Alexander Gusev said,

00:13:23two high-speed targets were destroyed over the city, adding that debris damaged civilian structures but

00:13:29caused no casualties. Ukrainian monitoring channel Xelenova Plus claimed the targets were British-French

00:13:34Storm Shadow cruise missiles aimed at the airbase. Videos circulating online showed thick black smoke

00:13:40rising above the area after the strike, suggesting direct hits rather than debris damage.

00:13:45On the same night, Ukrainian forces struck the embattled city of Tuapsa in Krasnodar Krai

00:13:50again. It's at least the fifth time that this strategically important city has been hit

00:13:55during the spring of 2026 alone. The city houses an important oil refinery and marine terminal for

00:14:01loading the refinery's products onto ships for export. A previous strike on May 1st turned the

00:14:06city temporarily into an unlivable hellhole, complete with air so thick with smoke that breathing became

00:14:12hazardous, toxic oil-filled black rain, and a major oil slick that still hasn't been entirely cleaned up

00:14:18almost a month later. The latest attack seems to have targeted the marine oil terminal and refinery,

00:14:24sparking a large fire. The Krasnodar Krai operational HQ predictably described the damage as having been

00:14:30caused by falling drone debris, but more often than not, as we saw in Taganrog and Voronezh,

00:14:35that's a euphemism for a direct hit. Lastly, occupied Crimea also came under attack, as it very often

00:14:41does. Sevastopol Governor Mikhail Razvozaev reported that Ukrainian drones and Storm Shadow missiles targeted

00:14:47the city overnight, with one missile striking the Southern Directorate building of Russia's central bank.

00:14:52The hit ignited a roof fire and shattered windows and balconies in nearby residential buildings with

00:14:57no casualties reported, local officials said. Russia's Defense Ministry later claimed its air

00:15:03defenses intercepted and destroyed 140 Ukrainian drones over seven Russian regions and Crimea overnight,

00:15:09but made no mention of any missile strikes. Now Ukraine and the world is bracing itself for what comes next,

00:15:15even as the country undoubtedly plots its next strike. On Monday, before Ukraine's retaliatory strikes,

00:15:22the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that its armed forces would begin conducting what it called

00:15:26systematic strikes on Ukraine's military industrial facilities in Kyiv, as well as what it dubbed

00:15:32decision-making centers. It urged foreign nationals and diplomatic staff to evacuate the city,

00:15:37and residents to avoid military and administrative areas. Even the US hasn't been able to avoid the fallout.

00:15:43Shortly after the warning, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reportedly called Secretary of State

00:15:49Marco Rubio and told him in no uncertain terms that Washington should evacuate diplomats from the US

00:15:54embassy in Kyiv. But his warning seems to have been largely ignored. On Wednesday, Kaya Kalas said that

00:16:00EU diplomats would not be leaving, and according to her, only one nation had begun vacating its embassy,

00:16:06the US, which promptly denied the claim. The US embassy is open, there are no changes to our

00:16:11operations and reports otherwise are false, it posted on X. It's the latest in a long string

00:16:16of embarrassing utterances from Kalas, which has prompted growing criticism from the media and

00:16:20analysts. Nonetheless, European diplomats seem to be staying put despite the stern Russian warning that

00:16:26seems to suggest that Kyiv's administrative district might be about to get pummeled. Ukraine's Foreign

00:16:31Minister Andrei Sabia dismissed Moscow's warnings as shameless blackmail, saying the threats would not

00:16:37intimidate Western diplomats operating in the Ukrainian capital. Indeed, EU ambassador to Ukraine

00:16:42Katerina Modanova rejected the evacuation calls, insisting Western missions would remain in the city.

00:16:47But underneath the bravado, there are signs that Ukraine is worried about just how severe the next

00:16:52set of Russian strikes might be. On Wednesday, prominent Ukrainian analyst Lieutenant General Ihor

00:16:58Romanenko claimed that Russia was amassing ballistic missiles and could launch a massive strike in about

00:17:03a week. The former deputy chief of the general staff and founder of the Safe Skies over Ukraine

00:17:08said that Russia is increasing the proportion of ballistic missiles in its attacks to take advantage

00:17:13of Ukraine's shortage of anti-ballistic missiles for air defense. Also on Wednesday, Zelenskyy penned an

00:17:19open letter to President Donald Trump, which was reportedly delivered to Congress by the Ukrainian

00:17:23ambassador to the US, Ola Stefanoschina. In it, he laid bare Ukraine's precarious shortage of anti-ballistic

00:17:29missile defenses and requested faster US deliveries of Patriot interceptor missiles.

00:17:34When it comes to protection against ballistic missiles, we rely almost exclusively on the United

00:17:38States. The current pace of deliveries under the PEARL program no longer corresponds to the reality of

00:17:44the threat we face. I ask for your help in protecting Ukraine's airspace from Russian missiles, he wrote.

00:17:49It's unclear whether Trump has responded or how he might respond. But in the meantime, Russian bloggers

00:17:54have noted that this week's strikes focused on Russian air force related targets, particularly what

00:17:58they say are fields and facilities from which Russia launches missiles at Ukraine. They speculate that

00:18:03this may be an attempt to prevent or delay a massive strike that, as Romanenko claimed, is very much in

00:18:08the

00:18:08works. But there's a question no one wants to contemplate and for good reason. Will Putin authorize the

00:18:14use of a tactical nuke? Hardliners in Russia have been stung by recent setbacks on the front,

00:18:20Ukraine's increasing ability to reach deep into Russia with impunity, and now the Starobilsk attack.

00:18:25They are demanding extremely tough action, but it's debatable whether Russia actually has the

00:18:30conventional power to deliver a truly crushing blow to Kyiv or to deal with potential consequences.

00:18:35Voices like Professor Sergei Karaganov, honorary chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and

00:18:41Defense Policy, have long been pushing for Putin to take the gloves off in dealing with Ukraine,

00:18:46but they've largely been shut down by Putin. Now Karaganov's message appears to be gaining

00:18:51resonance. He claims that if Russia's vast nuclear stockpile isn't sufficient in and of itself to

00:18:56deter aggression, Russia will have to use some of them to restore deterrence. And he's not just

00:19:01pushing for strikes on Ukraine. He also wants to take aim at the European nations that support it

00:19:06most as well. Symbolic strikes to start with, then perhaps less symbolic ones, he told Russian outlet

00:19:12Vesti. Putin has repeatedly laid down red lines during the war, only to humiliatingly allow them

00:19:19to be crossed without much in the way of a response. Ukraine and the many nations supporting it have

00:19:23seized the opportunity each time to raise the stakes. But this feels different. Will Putin once again

00:19:29fail to defend his own line, or was Starobilsk really the last straw, as Lavrov put it? And if Russia

00:19:35is

00:19:35both willing and more pertinently able to launch a truly devastating strike on Ukraine or beyond,

00:19:40how will the Western world react? Much of the reporting on the Russia-Ukraine war focuses

00:19:45exclusively on the front lines. There are regular stories about one side or the other gaining ground

00:19:50or capturing a contested settlement, with analysts poring over statistics concerning each side's

00:19:56territorial gains and losses. But this war is not just being fought at the front. There is in fact

00:20:02a second war, taking place many miles back, deep in the occupied territories of Ukraine,

00:20:07like Kherson and Crimea. It's a war that arguably matters much more than the fight for frontline

00:20:13control, because it has a much greater influence over each side's long-term prospects of victory.

00:20:18It's a war that Russia is losing, and the evidence is clear to see.

00:20:23Once safe roads are now turning into highways from hell, long-standing supply lines are being severed,

00:20:29connected. Connections are being cut, convoys are being burned, and movements are being stifled by

00:20:35drones and missiles, and surprise strikes that nobody could have predicted or prepared for.

00:20:40Bit by bit, Russia's ability to feed the front lines, to fuel its massive military machine,

00:20:45and to wage this war, are being eradicated by Ukraine. This is the war behind the war. And to

00:20:52understand why it matters so much, we have to first understand a golden rule about modern conflicts.

00:20:56They're not necessarily one by the side that has more tanks, soldiers, or other assets,

00:21:01but by the side that masters the art of moving those assets around efficiently.

00:21:06As the legendary US General Omar Bradley once allegedly said,

00:21:10Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.

00:21:14Especially in a conflict that has lasted as long as this one, logistics matter just as much as overall

00:21:19firepower. If Russia wants to keep up the pressure on Ukraine along the hundreds of miles of frontline

00:21:25territories, it needs to be able to safely move troops to those territories. But that's not all.

00:21:30It also needs means of transporting other important supplies such as weapons and ammunition.

00:21:36Repair teams need to be able to get to places where tanks and armored vehicles have been damaged.

00:21:41Medical teams need to be able to move into dangerous areas to evacuate wounded soldiers.

00:21:46Fuel has to continuously flow to the front, so Russia's assault squads are actually able to keep

00:21:51their vehicles running and execute their attack plans. Behind every frontline force there has to be a

00:21:57vast and complex network of logistics and supply chains to feed and maintain it. And if that network

00:22:03collapses or is even disrupted, everything else falls down around it. Without those supply lines to feed it,

00:22:10any army becomes dramatically weaker, opening up opportunities for its opponent to strike back.

00:22:15This is why, even though the frontline firefights matter and territorial control statistics matter too,

00:22:21this war isn't just about which sides controls which patches of land. Not anymore. Now, into its fifth

00:22:27year, it's becoming more and more about which side can actually sustain its operations and outlast the

00:22:33other. It has become a conflict of endurance, and Ukraine understands that. It realizes that it doesn't

00:22:39necessarily need to destroy every Russian tank if it can instead ensure that those tanks don't have

00:22:45the fuel they need to move. It doesn't need to kill every Russian soldier if it can sever the lines

00:22:50that

00:22:50keep them fed. And so it's shifted away from targeting individual battlefield units towards

00:22:55attacking the overall system that powers and connects them. It's a shift that could prove decisive,

00:23:01because we've seen how logistics can make or break even the strongest militaries before.

00:23:06Many times, in fact, all throughout history. The famous French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, for example,

00:23:11learned how crucial logistics could be the hard way when he marched his great army into Russia,

00:23:17anticipating a swift victory. After all, he had assembled one of the most powerful fighting

00:23:21forces that Europe, if not the world, had ever seen. But the deeper his army got into Russia,

00:23:27the more strain was placed on its supply lines. Eventually, those lines were simply stretched too far

00:23:32and inevitably snapped. Food supplies began to dwindle. The flow of ammunition to the front wasn't

00:23:38fast enough. Horses died and the harsh winter conditions made everything more difficult. The

00:23:43Germans endured a similar nightmare during the Second World War. Again, this occurred in Russia,

00:23:48where the Nazi forces rushed into Soviet territory, hoping that their blitzkrieg tactics, which was so

00:23:52reliant on speed and momentum, would prove too much for the enemy to cope with. But the further they went,

00:23:58the harder it became to maintain those all-important supply lines. And all of a sudden, even the most

00:24:03fearsome military force in the world was forced to wave the white flag in Stalingrad. In modern settings,

00:24:09too, logistics remained the bedrock of every successful military. The United States' success

00:24:14during Operation Desert Storm, for instance, wasn't just down to the fact that it had better trained

00:24:19troops and superior equipment. It was also because the US forces found the most effective and intelligent

00:24:24ways to move vast quantities of fuel, ammo, and other supplies, even in difficult desert conditions.

00:24:30Modern conflicts like that, and like the war in Ukraine, consume resources at a remarkable rate,

00:24:36making logistics and supply chains more important than ever. To not only exert pressure along the front,

00:24:42but also maintain control in the territories that it's captured, Russia has been forced to build

00:24:47and rely on an intricate web of rail hubs, depots, convoys, command posts, and transport corridors.

00:24:53And those are the very targets that Ukraine is committed to destroying.

00:24:57Recent weeks and months have seen numerous successful strikes across the occupied territories and even

00:25:02beyond, targeting the logistical nodes Russia needs the most. Ammo depots have been set ablaze.

00:25:09Rail hubs have been obliterated. Road networks have fallen under siege by Ukrainian drones,

00:25:15hovering overhead, scanning the ground, just waiting for the first sign of a Russian convoy to come

00:25:20view before raining fire down upon it. But Ukraine isn't stopping there. It's ready to ramp up the

00:25:26pressure with the country's own defense minister, Mikhailo Fedorov, announcing a so-called logistics

00:25:31lockdown campaign on May 27th. In a detailed telegram post on his official account, Fedorov revealed

00:25:38that this will be a two-stage program, designed to scale up middle strike and systematically destroy

00:25:43Russian capabilities at operational depth. Our task is to further increase pressure on the Russians in the

00:25:48rear and deprive them of the ability to conduct active assault operations.

00:25:53The first phase of the logistics lockdown is all about funding. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense is

00:25:58injecting a whopping 5 billion Ukrainian Rovinas, which will be used to purchase more impactful

00:26:04middle strike weapons for targeting Russian logistical nodes many miles behind the front lines.

00:26:09These weapons include the likes of FP2, Hornet, and Bulava drones, which are capable of traveling longer

00:26:15distances and remaining in the air longer than other models. Some boast operational ranges of up to 200

00:26:21kilometers or 125 miles. They're also often able to operate autonomously once they enter enemy territory,

00:26:27using their own AI brains to scour the terrain and identify targets, rather than having to rely on human

00:26:33pilots to guide them. More of Ukraine's units will soon receive these weapons, but not all of them.

00:26:39Fedorov revealed that the Ministry is operating on a reward-based system, where only the very best brigades get

00:26:44to use the latest and greatest weapons. The funds will be received by the most effective brigades and

00:26:49units according to the E-Point system, teams that specialize in destroying the enemy at operational

00:26:53depth and demonstrate the best results in this specific area. The first units have already received

00:26:58funds, and direct procurement has begun. It's a logical decision. Middle strike weapons cost more to

00:27:04make than cheaper FPV drones, and Ukraine doesn't have an infinite supply of funds to work with.

00:27:09It's always operated in a resourceful way, using the assets at its disposal with care and

00:27:13consideration to ensure that nothing goes to waste. There wouldn't be much sense, therefore,

00:27:18in handing out these weapons to units that can't necessarily make the most of them. However, by

00:27:22handing them to the best performing brigades, Ukraine is increasing its chances of launching

00:27:26more successful strikes against Russia, thereby making its logistics lockdown even more effective.

00:27:32Fedorov also explained the second phase of the program.

00:27:34We are centrally launching tenders for the purchase of a large batch of middle strike weapons.

00:27:39Open tenders are not only about speed and scaling up production, they're also about competition

00:27:43between manufacturers, minimizing corruption risks, transparency, and efficient use of public funds.

00:27:49In other words, the first phase is about the here and now. It's about getting weapons out to the

00:27:53brigades that need them to keep up the pressure on the enemy. The second phase, meanwhile, is more

00:27:58long-term. It's about scaling the system on a national scale to rapidly increase the production of

00:28:03middle strike drones, create more competition among drone manufacturers and standardize procurement at

00:28:08scale, so that many more of these weapons can be rolled out in the months and years to come.

00:28:13Before we look at why this matters and the impact it's already having on the ground,

00:28:17you are watching The Military Show. If you haven't subscribed yet, now is the time.

00:28:23Fedorov expects that it won't take long for Ukraine to begin seeing the benefits of this program,

00:28:27noting,

00:28:50He goes on to explain that as recently as October 2025, Russia was losing around 67 soldiers on

00:28:57average for every one square kilometer of territory gained. By April of this year,

00:29:02that number has almost tripled to 179 losses per square kilometer. The minister continues,

00:29:08Russia is suffering record losses. Over 35,000 soldiers killed or seriously wounded every month,

00:29:14and we continue to pick up the pace. He notes that Ukraine has quadrupled the destruction of enemy

00:29:19logistics, warehouses, equipment, command posts, and supply routes at operational depth over the course of

00:29:24recent months, and the effects are clear to see. The more Russian logistics are destroyed,

00:29:29the fewer assaults take place at the LBZ line of battle zone. Fedorov cites two key reasons for this.

00:29:35First is the fact that Ukraine has adjusted its strategy to focus more heavily on targets that

00:29:40are further back from the front. Second is the fact that Russia no longer has access to the Starlink

00:29:44satellite service that helped its troops pilot their drones, communicate with one another,

00:29:48and manage their battlefield movements. Deprived of this technology,

00:29:52Russia's forces are running blind through frontline kill zones, and behind them all hell is breaking

00:29:57loose. This can be best seen in the occupied southern regions of Ukraine, particularly the

00:30:01southern sections of Donetsk, as well as Zaporizhia and Kherson. There, Russia has for years relied on

00:30:07a relatively small selection of supply lines, turning what were once Ukrainian highways into military

00:30:12convoy routes. And for years it got away with it. The routes were too far back for Ukraine to

00:30:17realistically and consistently target. Even if it could carry out the odd strike now and then,

00:30:22it simply didn't have the technology to do so with any regularity. But that's all changed.

00:30:27Now Ukraine has the technology. It has the weapons to strike these locations,

00:30:31and it's using them to incredible effect. In Donetsk, for example, Ukraine's Azov Brigade of the

00:30:361st National Guard Corps recently revealed that its long-range drones are actively bringing Russia's

00:30:41supply routes under fire control. More specifically, they're targeting two major roads leading into the

00:30:46Ukrainian city of Mariupol. One of those roads runs to the Russian port city of Taganrog to the east,

00:30:52while the other stretches further north into the Donetsk region to Volnavaca.

00:30:56These routes form part of the larger land corridor, linking mainland Russia to occupied Crimea,

00:31:01and passing through several occupied regions in the process. It's a vital passageway for the Kremlin

00:31:06to transport food, ammo, and other supplies to the Crimean Peninsula, especially now when all

00:31:11other routes have been either destroyed or deemed too dangerous to use. The Azov Brigade released

00:31:16footage on May 25th showing their drones actually scanning traffic flows along the highways,

00:31:22picking out Russian military vehicles and striking their targets with ease.

00:31:25In the accompanying caption, Azov wrote,

00:31:28Azov patrols the border area around Mariupol. Ukrainian territory must be free of Russian troops.

00:31:33The most reliable way to achieve this is to move the sanitary zone for enemy logistics

00:31:37closer to Russia itself and the occupied Crimea. The unit concluded,

00:31:41There will no longer be a safe Azov sea region for the occupiers.

00:31:45And if this evidence is anything to go by, they're absolutely right. With increasing numbers of

00:31:50Ukrainian drones patrolling these highways, it may soon become too risky for Russia to use them.

00:31:54That will leave the Kremlin with no viable options to move supplies into Crimea,

00:31:58which is also under heavy siege at the moment as Ukraine's drones and missiles damage and destroy

00:32:03the region's remaining air defenses and military installations. This isn't just happening in

00:32:07Donetsk, but elsewhere across the occupied territories too. Around the same time, Azov was

00:32:12sharing its control over the highways into Mariupol, another Ukrainian brigade, the 412th or Nemesis Brigade

00:32:18to be exact, also revealed that Russian officials had actually decided to close down one of their main

00:32:23logistics routes running across the south of Ukraine. Highway R280, which the Kremlin called

00:32:29the Novorossiya route, extends through the occupied cities of Mariupol to Melitopol in Zaporizhia

00:32:34and Simferopol in Crimea. It's the final stretch of the Crimean land corridor and arguably the most

00:32:40important piece of the Kremlin's logistical puzzle, because there really are no alternative

00:32:44roads available in this area for Russia to move its supplies from point A to point B. The Kremlin's

00:32:49forces have grown to rely on it to move various pieces of military equipment and other supplies

00:32:53westward. That was until the Nemesis Brigade came along and unleashed what it's calling a secret

00:32:58new attack drone that hasn't been publicly seen before, and is reportedly proven highly effective

00:33:03behind enemy lines, taking out dozens of Russian trucks and fuel tankers. On Telegram, Nemesis wrote,

00:33:09The scale of the losses forced the Russian command and the occupational authorities to restrict the

00:33:14movement of heavy equipment along the so-called Novorossiya Highway. The enemy's attempts to use field

00:33:19and dirt roads for detours are also proving futile. Ukrainian drones successfully detect and

00:33:24eliminate targets on any terrain. This ties in with images and footage that have also spread across

00:33:29social media recently, showing major roads out of Mariupol lined with the burned-out remains of

00:33:34military vehicles and smoldering tank chassis, proving beyond any shadow of doubt that these

00:33:40routes are no longer safe places for the Russians. As the Nemesis Post notes, even though Russia has tried to

00:33:45use alternative dirt tracks and off-road routes to keep supplies moving, Ukraine's drones have no

00:33:50trouble at all seeking and destroying them wherever they go. Logically, Russia should be able to do

00:33:56something about all of this. It claims to be the second best military in the world. It boasts about its

00:34:00state-of-the-art air defenses. It pours billions of dollars into its armed forces every year. Yet the

00:34:06very supply lines it claims to control are rapidly turning into vehicle graveyards. Even as hardline Russian

00:34:12nationalists and Zed bloggers call for the Kremlin to take action and install nets or other anti-drone

00:34:17measures along these roads, they remain under siege from the skies. This is likely due to the fact

00:34:22that Ukraine hasn't just focused on targeting the routes themselves, but the various defenses

00:34:26surrounding them. Kyle Glenn, investigator at the Center for Information Resilience, recently revealed

00:34:32that there have been a 300% increase in Ukrainian strikes on Russian air defenses and electronic warfare

00:34:38assets in March and April of this year, with around 80 systems targeted in total.

00:34:42Many are expensive and hard to replace, and every time Russia loses a defensive system,

00:34:47it becomes even easier for Ukraine to hit it again, even harder than before, as Glenn notes.

00:34:52The danger for Russia is these collective losses of air defense systems effectively leading to a

00:34:56cascading failure, as each individual loss makes further Ukrainian drone raids more effective.

00:35:02And it's not going to stop. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed as much on May 5th,

00:35:07writing on X. The number of mid-range strikes has also increased significantly.

00:35:11There are now twice as many strikes at distances of 20-plus kilometers compared with March,

00:35:16and four times as many compared with February. And there will be even more. This is a priority area.

00:35:21As a direct consequence, Russian units are already feeling the heat,

00:35:25just like Napoleon's forces and the Nazis before them so many decades ago. They're beginning to move

00:35:30their most important assets, like ammo depots and command posts, further back from the front lines.

00:35:35This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it may help to keep these locations a little safer.

00:35:40On the other hand, it complicates logistics even further, because suppliers have to travel longer

00:35:44distances. And as Ukraine's drones get even better at traversing these longer distances,

00:35:49it may not matter how far back Russia repositions its command posts and supply nodes.

00:35:53They'll all soon be found and destroyed by Kyiv's fast-evolving UAV army.

00:35:58Even Russian journalists are starting to see the coming crisis, with war correspondent Dmitry Steshin

00:36:03warning that unless urgent action is taken, in the coming months logistics will collapse.

00:36:08That's exactly what Ukraine is banking on.

00:36:11When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022,

00:36:16he was confident that his so-called special military operation would succeed.

00:36:22It's easy to understand why. Putin had the larger army, the stronger economy,

00:36:27and a seemingly endless supply of soldiers and military hardware to get the job done.

00:36:32Yet, as the war raged on, year after year, the Kremlin's resources began to diminish.

00:36:38Tanks and infantry vehicles were wiped out. Fleets shrank. Defenses dwindled.

00:36:44And now, at long last, Putin is running out of perhaps the most vital military resource of them all.

00:36:50People. And without people who are willing to put on helmets, strap up their boots,

00:36:55and march into fearsome frontline kill zones, laying their lives on the line for the glory of the

00:37:00motherland, Russia has zero chance of winning this war. Putin never saw this coming. When the war began,

00:37:07Russia had one of the largest armies on earth, with an estimated 900,000 active duty personnel

00:37:13and hundreds of thousands more paramilitary personnel in reserve. Ukraine's army, by contrast,

00:37:19had fewer than 200,000 troops. Historical trends show that invading forces tend to suffer more

00:37:25casualties than defenders, for various reasons, so Russia's commanders likely expected to see a

00:37:31certain number of losses. But they couldn't have possibly imagined the sheer scale of the casualties

00:37:36that lay ahead for their army. As Ukraine defied the odds and demonstrated remarkable resilience,

00:37:41Russia's losses started to mount. In the early stages of the war, the Kremlin suffered several

00:37:47thousand casualties a month. By 2023, that figure had risen to around 15,000 to 20,000. In 2024,

00:37:54it broke the 30,000 mark, even briefly surpassing 40,000 towards the end of the year.

00:38:002025 saw similarly devastating losses, averaging around 30,000 per month,

00:38:05and that has continued right into 2026. To put that figure into perspective, during the Soviet-Afghan

00:38:11War, which ran from 1979 through to 1989, the Soviets lost between 15 and 20,000 troops total,

00:38:19over the span of almost a decade. Now Russia loses more than that every single month. In total,

00:38:25it's estimated to have suffered over 1.3 million casualties, with an estimated 500,000 dead,

00:38:32and almost a million more wounded. That figure is over five times greater than the country's total

00:38:39losses from all Russian and Soviet wars since World War II combined, including the Afghan war and two

00:38:44Chechen wars. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes, Russia has endured

00:38:50more losses than any major power in any war since World War II. Yet perhaps the most staggering fact of

00:38:55all is that these horrific losses were actually seen as sustainable in the eyes of Putin and his Kremlin

00:39:01cronies for the first few years of the conflict. It didn't matter that tens of thousands of Russian

00:39:06soldiers were being sent home in body bags. It didn't matter that brothers, sons, husbands,

00:39:11and fathers were being slaughtered en masse or suffering life-changing injuries. It didn't

00:39:17matter because the army was still advancing, albeit quite slowly in most areas, and there were always

00:39:22more recruits ready and waiting to replenish the ranks. In fact, the Russian army actually managed to

00:39:28get even larger during the opening years of the war, thanks to a partial mobilization in 2022 and heavy

00:39:34investment in recruitment in the years that followed. Countless able-bodied men across the

00:39:39country willingly signed up to fight in Ukraine. Most were led to believe that the war would be over

00:39:44and done with in no time or that they'd only need to serve a few months before packing their bags

00:39:48and

00:39:48heading back home. Many were fooled into thinking that they could make some easy money by signing up,

00:39:53serving somewhere relatively safe, far from the front, and then heading home to enjoy the fruits

00:39:58of their labor. Some, meanwhile, were blackmailed or effectively forced to sign up, with Russian

00:40:03recruiters resorting to some very underhanded tactics like pressuring ethnic minorities and

00:40:08threatening people with deportation if they refused to sign contracts. The methods didn't really matter.

00:40:14As long as enough new soldiers were entering the army to compensate for its casualties, then the Kremlin's

00:40:20war machine could continue its relentless assault on Ukraine. But this couldn't continue forever.

00:40:25Even in a country with a population of over 140 million people, there's only a finite number of

00:40:31able-bodied individuals who are actually willing and ready to join the fray. And the more time that

00:40:36went by, the more those same individuals began to realize that if they did sign up, they'd more than

00:40:41likely be signing their own death sentence in the process. So recruitment became more challenging,

00:40:46and Russia became more desperate. It went beyond blackmail, dragging rapists and murderers out of

00:40:53their prison cells and offering them their freedom if they'd agree to do a year at the front. It sent

00:40:58people with debilitating and terminal illnesses into the fray. It began new military marketing campaigns

00:41:04filled with lies and propaganda aimed at tricking struggling students into going to war, telling them

00:41:09that it would be just like playing a video game and promising that they could safely serve far from the

00:41:14front lines. It started issuing orders for schools and businesses to actively seek out students and

00:41:19employees and make them sign military contracts. It even began looking beyond its borders, leveraging

00:41:25its influence across Africa to fool thousands of people of other nationalities into fighting a war

00:41:30that they had no stake in, risking their lives for a country that didn't care about them.

00:41:36Out on the battlefield too, Russian commanders became more ruthless and brutal in the way they

00:41:41treated the troops under their command, torturing, beating and exploiting those who show even the

00:41:46slightest hint of wanting to desert. But none of this was enough to stem the flow of casualties and

00:41:51stop the Russian army from slowly but surely starting to shrink. The numbers prove it. In December 2025,

00:41:58for the first time since the war began, Russia officially lost more troops than it was able to recruit,

00:42:03with 22,000 new personnel either recruited or mobilized compared to over 30,000 confirmed casualties.

00:42:10Optimists hoped that this was the start of something special. Pessimists feared it might just be a

00:42:15one-off, an isolated incident that was worthy of a celebration but unlikely to have much of an

00:42:19impact in the long term. Then came January 2026 and the same thing happened. And again in February,

00:42:27March and April. For five entire months running, Russia's casualty rate exceeded its recruitment rate.

00:42:34This wasn't a one-off, it was a trend and it's now becoming a trend that Russia is struggling to

00:42:38find

00:42:38any answers for as its recruitment strategies failed to generate sufficient results and its

00:42:43battlefield tactics continue to cause devastating losses. Indeed, in February 2026, on the fourth

00:42:49anniversary of the invasion, The Economist published its own modeling of Russian casualties,

00:42:54concluding that the country had suffered as many losses in the previous 12 months

00:42:57as it had suffered in the first three years of the war combined. In other words,

00:43:02losses are skyrocketing right as recruitment begins to decline. It's a recipe for disaster for the Kremlin

00:43:09and with some estimates suggesting that around 1,000 Russian soldiers are wiped out every single

00:43:14day, either killed, wounded or captured, the country's army is almost guaranteed to get weaker

00:43:19and smaller the longer the war goes on. And the picture gets even uglier for Putin when we compare

00:43:25the country's casualties to those of Ukraine. Early on, of course, Ukraine did indeed suffer

00:43:29serious losses. The opening months were brutal on Kyiv's forces as they struggled to come to terms

00:43:35with the weight and ferocity of Russia's invasion. With enemies attacking from several sides,

00:43:40Ukraine's soldiers and brave civilian volunteers struggled to find their feet.

00:43:45The country's failed counter-offensive in 2023 was also a low point, leading to large numbers of

00:43:50deaths and wounded troops too. However, as the war progressed, Ukraine found ways to limit its losses.

00:43:56It shifted more towards drone warfare, it received game-changing aid from its Western allies,

00:44:02and its commanders adjusted their tactics accordingly, making the most of the resources

00:44:06at their disposal and refusing to copy the Kremlin playbook of simply treating soldiers like cannon fodder.

00:44:12As a result, the latter stages of the war have been significantly better for Ukraine,

00:44:16with a reduction in the number of casualties per month. In a way, the two countries have followed

00:44:20completely opposing paths. Ukraine had a poor start to the war, but got better as time went by.

00:44:26Russia started strong, but has since suffered a dramatic drop-off. So what does all of this mean

00:44:31for the next phase of the war? Before we get into that, there's more where this came from.

00:44:36So if you're getting value from the military show, don't forget to subscribe.

00:44:41Facing such serious losses and recruitment challenges, many leaders would understand

00:44:45that now is the time to swallow their pride and potentially look at either starting ceasefire

00:44:50negotiations or at least reassessing their military objectives. But that's not Vladimir Putin's style.

00:44:56According to numerous reports and even insider officials within the Kremlin who have spoken to

00:45:01Western journalists on the condition of anonymity, the Russian president remains stubbornly set on

00:45:06seizing the Donbass and persisting with the war for the foreseeable future. One official even claimed

00:45:12that they have been pushing Putin to simply call the war off and take the territory it's gained so

00:45:17far. According to them, however, he keeps saying, no, I can't compromise on this. Putin even seems to

00:45:23think the Donbass can be completely captured by the fall. The data, however, suggests otherwise.

00:45:29Because Russian forces aren't just losing men in massive quantities, they're also massively

00:45:33struggling to take territory with any sort of speed. According to data from the Institute for the

00:45:38Study of War, for example, Russian forces have captured around 220 square kilometers 85 square miles

00:45:45in 2026 so far. That's about the same size as the city of Seattle. In response, Ukraine has managed to

00:45:52recapture around 189 square kilometers, 73 square miles. That gives Russia a net gain of just 31 square

00:45:59kilometers or 12 square miles in 2026. That's virtually nothing. And the worst part is that

00:46:05Russia has paid an extortionate price for that nothing. Some estimates suggest that over 300 Russian

00:46:11soldiers have been killed or seriously wounded for every square kilometer of land taken in the Donbass

00:46:16region so far this year. And the number of deaths is actually becoming significantly larger

00:46:21than the number of injuries. That is extremely bad news for the Kremlin. In fact, it's almost

00:46:27unprecedented. Typically, in modern warfare, casualties tend to be made up mostly of wounded soldiers.

00:46:33There are usually three troops wounded for every one killed, to be precise. In some cases,

00:46:38the ratio is even higher. In Iraq, for example, the US suffered around seven wounded troops for every

00:46:43death, meaning that the vast majority of the country's casualties weren't actually deaths, but injuries.

00:46:49With many of those soldiers eventually being able to make full or partial recoveries and return home

00:46:54to their families. In Russia, the ratio has been inverted. For years, the country's meat grinder tactics

00:47:00meant that it suffered a higher than average number of deaths, with around two Russian soldiers wounded

00:47:04for each one that died. But according to some more recent reports, it's now looking like Russia is

00:47:09suffering two deaths for every injury, with Ukrainian sources stating that around 62 percent of all Russian

00:47:15casualties are kills, with the remaining 38 percent being injuries. That's one of the deadliest kill

00:47:21to wounded ratios in modern history. Of course, Ukrainian officials have plenty of reasons to exaggerate

00:47:27or pick and choose statistics that align with their agenda, but there is an increasingly large amount of

00:47:32compelling evidence to back up their claims, and it all boils down to one single thing – drones.

00:47:38The Russia-Ukraine war has, in many ways, become a drone war. The front lines are absolutely saturated with

00:47:45missiles or UAVs. They soar through the skies, scanning the ground for any signs of life before

00:47:50striking with precision and impunity at any enemy targets they find, and they don't just operate

00:47:55along the front itself, but several miles either side of it. As a result, for Russian troops it's

00:48:01almost become a coin toss of whether they even make it to the front lines in one piece or not.

00:48:06For the lucky few who do get there, more drones are just waiting to pick them off. Many die

00:48:11immediately in the explosive blasts caused by kamikaze drones. In a way, they're the lucky ones,

00:48:17because those who are wounded are often simply stranded in no man's land, slowly bleeding out

00:48:22from their injuries, unable to be aided or evacuated, because Russian medics are also forced

00:48:27to navigate those same treacherous territories, evading entire swarms of drones just to get close

00:48:32enough to provide any sort of assistance for their wounded comrades. As Phillips O'Brien, professor of

00:48:38Strategic Studies and head of the School of International Relations at the University of

00:48:42St. Andrews notes, if the Ukrainians are now killing two Russian soldiers for every one wounded,

00:48:47that will be notable in warfare. It does not seem implausible to me because of the accuracy of

00:48:51first-person view drones and the fact that the battlefield makes it very difficult indeed for

00:48:56wounded soldiers to be evacuated. Of course, this problem isn't limited only to Russia.

00:49:01Ukraine also has to deal with enemy drones along the front lines. It also has to worry about how to

00:49:06evacuate injured soldiers without putting more lives at risk in the process. But unlike Russia,

00:49:11which persists with the same stubborn and wasteful tactics treating its troops like pieces of meat

00:49:15rather than human beings, Ukraine has adapted. It has found smarter and more effective ways to

00:49:21solve the challenges it faces, like using unmanned ground vehicles to assist with EVACs, for example.

00:49:26Ukraine has also moved ahead of Russia in the drone race, developing a more diverse and impactful

00:49:31arsenal of UAVs to outwit and overwhelm its opponent. This is the biggest and most vital

00:49:37difference between the two sides. Russia sees problems but doesn't actually search for solutions.

00:49:43It just throws more men at them and hopes they'll go away. Ukraine sees problems and finds ways to fix

00:49:48them. It never settles, always looking for ways to improve, to become more efficient and minimize its

00:49:53losses. And what this all means moving forward is that the trends we've seen so far in 2026 are likely

00:49:59to

00:49:59continue. Russia is going to continue losing upwards of 30,000 troops per month. In fact, Ukraine's

00:50:05military leaders are eager to push that number even higher, all the way to 40 or even 50,000

00:50:11towards the end of the year. If they can get anywhere close to that target, it will be devastating for

00:50:16the Kremlin. Russia will almost certainly continue to struggle to recruit soldiers in the quantities it

00:50:22needs to counterbalance its casualties, and it's not hard to see why. The Russian people may have been

00:50:27easily duped at the start of this war, but after four years and countless failures, many of them

00:50:32are now able to see right through the Kremlin's lies. They know that the war has become a disaster,

00:50:37and many of them want no part in it. Even those who do sign up aren't exactly the best of

00:50:42the best.

00:50:43They're often people from ethnic minority communities who felt pressured to fight,

00:50:47people who are sick or have criminal records, people from other countries who don't even speak a

00:50:52word of Russian, or people who felt like they were left with no other choice, but don't have any kind

00:50:57of military experience or training to speak of. So when they get to Ukraine, the vast majority will

00:51:02continue to die, joining the hundreds of thousands of their countrymen who have already fallen before

00:51:08them. As a result, the Russian army will get progressively smaller and weaker, and there's no way

00:51:13for Putin to stop that decline, apart from some sort of mass mobilization, which would be greeted with

00:51:18extreme anger among the public. With Putin's popularity and freefall, he can't really risk

00:51:24incurring the public's wrath any further, leaving him stuck between a rock and a hard place with no

00:51:28obvious escape route. As the army grows weaker, its progress will most likely continue to stagnate and

00:51:34stall along the front lines, with only tiny pockets of land captured in exchange for thousands of lost

00:51:40lives. This, in turn, may open opportunities for Ukrainian forces to exploit. As their enemy weakens,

00:51:47they might find it easier to recapture even more territory, pushing the Russians further back and

00:51:52squashing Putin's hopes of a complete Donbas capture by the end of the year. At the same time,

00:51:57it's important to note that Ukraine also has its problems. As Lawrence Friedman, professor of war

00:52:02studies at King's College London, recently stated, While problems are mounting for Russia, Ukraine has

00:52:08also got serious issues. Chief among those is Kyiv's ongoing inability to recruit enough troops,

00:52:13resulting in a relatively porous front line, policed largely by drones. So both sides are facing

00:52:19recruitment challenges, and if Ukraine can't get the soldiers it needs, it too may struggle to make

00:52:24gains at the front. On balance, however, Russia has far greater and more numerous issues than Ukraine

00:52:30right now. Its losses are vast, its progress is slow, its economy is in crisis, its leadership is in

00:52:37turmoil. Its allies have abandoned it, and the man in charge of the whole show, Putin himself, appears

00:52:43increasingly out of touch with reality. Five hundred thousand of his people have already died, and he

00:52:50appears to have no qualms about sacrificing hundreds of thousands more. The only question left is how long

00:52:56will the rest of Russia stand for it? In the summer of 2025, military experts everywhere speculated that in

00:53:03its war with Ukraine, Russia would soon be able to launch one thousand or more long-range drones at its

00:53:09enemy every night. Major General Christian Freuding, head of the German Ministry of Defense's planning and

00:53:15command staff, Major Robert Brovdy, commander of the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces, and the Institute for

00:53:21the Study of War, all speculated that Russia could reach this quantity by November. But the threat never

00:53:28materialized. Instead, the opposite happened. It wasn't Russia that dramatically increased the

00:53:33number of nightly long-range strikes, but Ukraine, and a reckoning may be on the way for embattled

00:53:39Russian President Vladimir Putin. Ukraine's large-scale attack on Moscow and 13 other regions on May 16th

00:53:46and 17th was one of its largest and most consequential on the Russian capital. For many Russians, it's brought

00:53:52the war home in an unprecedented way. For the regime, it's prompted a frantic scramble to try and

00:53:59interdict what comes next, the threat of even larger attacks, and much more often. Here's how

00:54:04Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's long-range sanctions on Moscow have caused a lot of commotion,

00:54:10and how that's likely to shape what comes next. It must give Freuding and Brovdy satisfaction to know

00:54:15that their predictions that swarms of one thousand Russian drones would be terrorizing Ukraine nightly

00:54:21within months proved to be greatly exaggerated. Russia has only arguably achieved that number

00:54:26once. On the nights of May 14th and 15th, it fired more than 1,560 drones at Ukraine,

00:54:33with the bulk of the attack occurring overnight on May 14th. The number of nightly attack drones has

00:54:39indeed been increasing since January, but nowhere near the 1,000 per night mark. An average of 143 was

00:54:46launched in that month, followed by an average of 180 in February, 197 in March, and 240 in April.

00:54:53The daily average looks like it will fall to around 185 during May, with Russia seemingly now

00:54:59stockpiling drones for less regular mass attacks, rather than going whole hog every night.

00:55:04But that's a far cry from the original predictions, especially since on the flip side, Ukrainian long-range

00:55:09strikes have been increasing by leaps and bounds. And it's now not the Ukrainians who are fretting about

00:55:14the prospects of regular 1,000 drone attacks, but the Russians. That number might still be a way off,

00:55:20but it's indisputable that the gap between the numbers of Ukrainian drones being launched at Russia

00:55:25and vice versa is shrinking rapidly. During 2025, Ukrainian long-range strikes increased five-fold.

00:55:33By March, they'd not just matched the average number of daily Russian strikes, but topped them,

00:55:38averaging at over 230 per day. Now, the number of drones being fired is important. Even if they're shot down,

00:55:44they consume valuable and limited air-defense missiles. Like Ukraine, Russia claims to shoot

00:55:49down more than 90% of incoming drones. But unlike Ukraine, Russia is still primarily using air-defense

00:55:55missiles to shoot down Ukraine's long-range strike drones. And as we'll see a bit later,

00:55:59they don't grow on trees. But more important than the number of downed drones is the range of targets

00:56:04that they're able to hit, and the number that gets through and strikes their targets successfully.

00:56:09On both of these counts, Ukraine's strike effectiveness is also rising impressively.

00:56:14In particular, Ukrainian drones are now regularly causing damage in Moscow. Now,

00:56:20it's far from uncommon on this planet for a nation's wealth and power to be concentrated

00:56:24in and around its capital. But Moscow and Russia are a special case. As Russian-born,

00:56:30US-based author and analyst Elvira Baghi explains in a recent essay,

00:56:34Moscow is literally the political and emotional heart of Russia.

00:56:38For years, border regions have lived much closer to the war. Belgorod, Kursk, Bryansk,

00:56:44and others have heard explosions, seen fires, dealt with evacuations,

00:56:47and watched the front move psychologically closer. For people there, the war was never fully abstract,

00:56:52she writes. But in Russia, the regions have no say in how the country is run, she continues.

00:57:04But when drones reach Moscow's airspace, the emotional balance changes, because Moscow was

00:57:09supposed to be the safe room. As Ukraine's large-scale attack on Moscow earlier in the month

00:57:14ably demonstrates, that safe room is no longer safe, and that changes everything for Muscovites,

00:57:20Russians in other regions, and the leadership. For slam-dunk proof that Ukraine's strikes on

00:57:25Moscow have changed the status quo in Russia fundamentally, look no further than this week's

00:57:29announcement from the Russian Interregional Public Organization of Pilots and Aircraft Owners,

00:57:34AOPA for short. According to this announcement, in just a few days at the beginning of June,

00:57:39all flights of civil aircraft at altitudes below 16,732 feet will be completely prohibited in the Moscow

00:57:47Air Zone . The no-fly zone also extends to the state border with Belarus, the St. Petersburg

00:57:53FIR to the west, the St. Petersburg FIR to the north, the Ekaterinburg FIR to the northeast,

00:57:58the Samara FIR to the east and southeast, and to the temporary regime established in the south of

00:58:04the Russian Federation. It's an outcome very few Russians would have thought possible even a year

00:58:09ago. The airspace above Moscow and the heart of Russia closed to lower-flying traffic indefinitely.

00:58:15Now, besides when taking off and landing, the altitude specified means that passenger jets

00:58:19should still be able to cross the no-fly zone skies safely. Civilian passenger jets typically

00:58:24cruise at altitudes between 30 and 42,000 feet due to the increased fuel efficiency, avoidance of bad

00:58:31weather, and extra safety buffer that this altitude allows. But the no-fly zone isn't meant to restrict

00:58:36these planes. Exceptions to the no-fly rule are in fact provided for regular and charter passenger

00:58:41flights operating to and from airports. The restrictions will also not apply to medical evacuation,

00:58:45sanitary aviation, aviation chemical works, infrastructure monitoring, and flights under

00:58:51government contracts. So the measures are clearly aimed at clearing the skies so that Russian air

00:58:55defenses are better able to take down Ukrainian drones. Ukrainian drones typically fly below that

00:59:0016,700-foot mark. Most Ukrainian long-range strike drones such as the Firepoint FP1, RS-1 BARS,

00:59:07and modified UJ-22 Airborne operate between 1,600 and 9,800 feet, well below the cut-off altitude.

00:59:15Flying at these lower altitudes allows drones to evade radar and avoid high-altitude air defense

00:59:20systems like the S-400 and S-300. That forces Russia to lean more heavily on short-range systems

00:59:26like the Pantsir and TOR as well as visual detection, which are significantly less effective

00:59:32against drone swarms. That's a huge problem for Russia because its layered air defense system has been

00:59:37significantly degraded, and the more often Ukraine strikes, the more degraded it becomes. Of course,

00:59:43the problem of degraded air defenses isn't unique to Russia. One of the most critical learnings of

00:59:48the war in Ukraine is that traditional air defense systems like the US's Patriot system,

00:59:53the German IRIS-T, and indeed the Russian S-300 and S-400, are not feasible as anti-drone systems.

00:59:59These are expensive systems with missiles costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars

01:00:03to produce. The missiles also take a long time to produce. It's just not feasible to spend those

01:00:09kinds of amounts and deplete your arsenal shooting down drones that cost tens of thousands of dollars

01:00:13to produce, and can be churned out at a rate of hundreds per month. The US and Israel's war on

01:00:18Iran has thrown this conundrum into stark relief. The Patriot system has proven to be effective

01:00:23against Russian missile attacks. In fact, the system is a critical component of Ukraine's anti-air

01:00:29missile air defenses. Before Operation Epic Fury, Ukraine was already struggling to secure the

01:00:34quantities of Pac-2 and Pac-3 missiles it needed to adequately stock its Patriots. Today, it's

01:00:39scrambling for whatever scraps it can get. Earlier in May, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuri

01:00:45Ignat stated, Today the launch is assigned to certain units and batteries are half empty,

01:00:50and that's putting it mildly. We have found ourselves on short rations when it comes to

01:00:54missiles due to certain supply problems. He added that Ukraine has had to ask allies for as few as

01:00:59five to ten missiles at a time for systems such as NASAMS and IRST. Considering that Russia launched

01:01:05more than 700 missiles at Ukraine in 2025, you can see how acute the problem has become. But the

01:01:11Russians have the same problem, although it's not as acute, at least not yet. That's because to date,

01:01:16Russia has had to fend off a lot fewer long-range missiles than Ukraine. That's certain to change

01:01:21as Ukraine ramps up production of its Neptune, Flamingo, and other new missiles. But in this respect,

01:01:26Russia has had it relatively easy and been able to fire S-300 and S-400 missiles at Ukrainian drones,

01:01:32if it's so desired as a result. However, at anywhere from $300,000 to $4 million each,

01:01:38it's as unsustainable in the long run to fire them at much cheaper incoming drones as it is for Ukraine,

01:01:43the US, or anyone else. Ukraine has adapted to the problem by developing a wide range of anti-drone

01:01:48systems domestically and acting as an incubator for a myriad of systems being developed in partner

01:01:53countries like the US, Germany, the UK, and Sweden. Barely a week goes by without some new mobile fire

01:02:00system, interceptor drone system, directed energy system, or other innovation being unveiled.

01:02:05Russia has been slower off the mark with these alternate systems and is paying dearly for it now

01:02:10as Ukraine's attacks ramp up. Its air defenses may still be bringing down the majority of Ukrainian

01:02:15drones, but the constantly increasing numbers of drones it must contend with mean ever greater

01:02:20degradation of its defenses and ever more drones getting through and destroying critical infrastructure.

01:02:26Enjoying this deep dive into the latest news from Ukraine? Well, that's what we do here at the

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01:02:41Ukrainian analysts Oboz and Information Resistance ran the rule over Russia's air defenses and identified

01:02:47four main reasons why Ukraine is increasingly able to penetrate Moscow's air defenses successfully.

01:02:53First, they point to the fact that there simply isn't enough of it in place,

01:02:56and that's despite having some of the most comprehensive air defenses on the planet.

01:03:01As of Spring 2026, Moscow is protected by two dense rings of air defense systems,

01:03:06in addition to several positions within the city and various engagement zones in the wider Moscow region.

01:03:11That's four layers of air defense. According to OSINT analysts, around 130 air defense positions are

01:03:18deployed in and around the capital in total. The backbone of the internal ring consists of around

01:03:23100 Pantsir S-1 air defense systems and a small number of TOR systems, in place specifically to

01:03:29intercept Ukrainian drones and cruise missiles. They're bolstered by around 25 S-400 batteries,

01:03:35used to intercept cruise and ballistic missiles. Like Ukraine, Russia also uses its air force to shoot

01:03:41down drones. Ukraine uses the guns and missiles on its F-16s and Mirage 2000 fighter jets and Mi-8

01:03:48-17

01:03:48and Mi-24-35 helicopters. Russia does the same with its Su-35, Su-30SM and Mi-31 fighter jets

01:03:56and Ka-52

01:03:57and Mi-28 helicopters. It's also recently started mass producing AI-enabled Yolka hand-fired interceptor

01:04:04drones and new supposedly high-tech anti-drone systems like the ZAK-30 Citadel, Zuba and Titan,

01:04:11and yet despite all of that, something like 10% of Ukrainian drones fired on May 16-17 still got

01:04:17through. As Ukrainian news outlet Oboz Revatal observes, even though four rings of echelon air

01:04:23defense were formed around Moscow and the density of countermeasures was the highest in Russia,

01:04:27they were not enough to intercept all targets. As it turned out, there were enough gaps and

01:04:31vulnerabilities in the defense to break through the created rings. The reason for that is likely in

01:04:36part due to the second factor identified by the Ukrainian OSINT teams, they are running out of

01:04:41ammunition. In late April, the head of the Ukrainian military, Oleksandr Siersky, noted,

01:04:46systematic strikes on Russian production facilities further degrade the enemy's air defense capabilities,

01:04:52which are already experiencing a shortage of missiles to counter Ukrainian unmanned systems and

01:04:56strike assets. As noted earlier, the primary system Russia uses for inner-city defense is the

01:05:02Pantsir, but in February, Ukraine announced that it had destroyed half of Russia's key Pantsir

01:05:07systems, and Russian military bloggers seem to bear those losses out. Earlier in April,

01:05:12one of Russia's most prominent military blogger organizations, Raibar, wrote,

01:05:16simply fabricating tens of thousands of Pantsir missiles out of thin air is physically impossible,

01:05:21clearly implying a shortage. The channel added that Russian anti-aircraft missile forces were

01:05:26being stretched to the limit and expending ammunition at an accelerated rate. Raibar suggested that Russia

01:05:32adopt a counter-drone strategy like Ukraine's, including an emphasis on mobile fire groups and

01:05:37intercept drone crews. The introduction of the Yolka and other systems suggest that at least some

01:05:42elements of the Russian military-industrial complex see it the same way, but is it going to be a case

01:05:47of too little too late? The third factor identified is what a Bozrevartel calls technological backwardness.

01:05:54They say that some Russian air defense systems have problems with fire control systems, guidance,

01:05:59radars, fixation, tracking, and destruction of targets, particularly the Pantsir. They write that

01:06:04the Pantsir copes extremely poorly with the tasks assigned to it due to multiple technological

01:06:09problems that cannot be fully solved due to sanctions. They are trying to partially fix them

01:06:13by placing this most common and basic means of combating drones in a small radius, on towers and

01:06:18roofs of buildings, but the improvement in efficiency from such measures is insignificant.

01:06:23Now, a separate analysis conducted by the Ukrainian military site Militanyi

01:06:27contradicts the second part of that statement to an extent. In a recent analysis of Moscow's air

01:06:32defenses in the aftermath of Ukraine's major strike, they report that the Pantsirs are installed in

01:06:37two main types of air defense positions. Earth embankments with concrete access pads and metal

01:06:43towers where systems are lifted into position by crane. Raising these systems above ground level

01:06:48increases the radar horizon and improves detection and engagement of low-altitude small targets,

01:06:53they say. Whether this has, in fact, improved their effectiveness is difficult to ascertain with

01:06:58any certainty at this point. Rybar also disputes that the Pantsir is ineffective. In June last year,

01:07:03they wrote, before the SMO , they were criticized by everyone, but after improvements

01:07:09based on combat experience, the system has become extremely effective and perhaps the most successful

01:07:14Russian air defense system, even shooting down attackants. They point to a new missile configuration

01:07:20for the Pantsir that carries 48 mini-missiles specifically for anti-drone swarm operations,

01:07:25as evidence of improved efficiency, as well as the introduction of the Pantsir SMD-E variant.

01:07:31This is reportedly a mini-version of the system that uses similar small missiles for protecting

01:07:36stationary objects. While these developments don't sound like technological backwardness,

01:07:41how these new and still rare systems actually perform in reality is still an open question.

01:07:46One thing is for sure, Ukraine is certainly systematically degrading the number of air defense

01:07:50systems that Russia has at its disposal, which they say is the fourth factor cited by a Bozrovatel.

01:07:56Currently, the Russian occupation forces are losing dozens of air defense units every month,

01:08:01while they can only produce units. Compensation for losses is critically lagging behind the level

01:08:05of losses themselves, and every month Russia's air defense assets are becoming fewer and fewer,

01:08:10Rybar writes. Data from the Ukrainian armed forces backs them up. According to an analysis

01:08:15of official Ukrainian stats by OSINT analyst Kyle Glenn, between January and the end of March,

01:08:21Ukraine hit 85 units of air defense equipment, including surface-to-air missile systems and radar

01:08:27systems. That's almost three times the attrition rate recorded during 2025. Glenn notes that the

01:08:32increase is about 240 percent compared with the previous three months. According to him,

01:08:38this fact almost certainly explains the increased effectiveness of Ukrainian long-range strikes in

01:08:422026. Meanwhile, the Keel Institute estimated that as of early 2025, Russia produced four medium and long-range

01:08:50air defense systems and 14 short-range air defense systems per month. Russia increased production of

01:08:56the S-400 components that year, but it's clear that Russia's high-end air defenses are being destroyed

01:09:00at a larger rate than they can be produced. Put it all together and you can see exactly why,

01:09:05in practical terms, the Russians are starting to panic about the prospects of 1,000 Ukrainian drones

01:09:10terrorizing Moscow daily. But there's a psychological aspect as well, and it's arguably going to be more

01:09:16devastating in the long run. Baghi argues that strikes on Moscow have shattered Russian confidence

01:09:22in Putin's ability to protect them. Moscow is filled with people who feed the war, she explains.

01:09:27They may not oppose the war, but they can panic and demand explanations. They can ask why air defense

01:09:32failed, why airports were disrupted, why the state did not warn them, and why officials said everything

01:09:37was under control when everyone saw the videos. For an authoritarian system, that matters more than the

01:09:43suffering of ordinary people far away. The Kremlin cannot ignore anxiety near its own machinery,

01:09:48Baghi writes. Baghi also says the strikes have smashed the illusion created by the Russian propaganda

01:09:54machine that Russia is winning. While the war stayed far away, this worked, she writes. But drone

01:10:00attacks on Moscow create a brutal contradiction. If Russia is winning, why is Moscow being attacked? If Ukraine

01:10:06is a failed state, how does it reach the capital region of a nuclear power? If the army is advancing

01:10:11every day, why are oil facilities, airfields, factories and airports inside Russia becoming

01:10:16targets? Ukrainian drones hitting Moscow is not just a military embarrassment, she argues. It attacks

01:10:22the myth at its foundation. It makes ordinary Russians question what they are being told, the authorities,

01:10:28and most importantly, the previously unassailable position and image of Putin himself. Now, as Baghi points

01:10:35out, in the long run, strikes on Moscow that destroy the illusion of safety may ultimately lead to the

01:10:39toppling of Putin's regime, which might force Russia to play an even deadlier hand. It's basic psychology.

01:10:46Scared people want more protection, and the more scared they are, the more irrational what they

01:10:50perceive as protection often becomes. For now, as Baghi notes, in Russia, the impact of Ukraine's

01:10:56worsening strikes on the beating heart of the country isn't leading for calls for negotiations to end the

01:11:01war. Quite the opposite. The mood in Moscow, and indeed around the country, seems to have hardened

01:11:07significantly, both among the population and the elites, and the risk is growing that this could

01:11:12all escalate into a nuclear confrontation. Hardliners like the influential insider Professor

01:11:18Sergei Karaganov have long been calling for Russia to restore its deterrence by dropping a few tactical

01:11:24nuclear weapons on Ukraine. Whether that would invite a full-blown nuclear war with NATO or indeed

01:11:28restore some form of deterrence is debatable. What's not debatable is that as of late, he's been calling for

01:11:34strikes on European countries involved in drone production for Ukraine. First, he says they

01:11:39should be struck with conventional weapons. If that doesn't bring them to their senses, they should

01:11:43then be nuked. Now, Karaganov isn't just any old academic. He's been advising Soviet and Russian

01:11:49presidents since the 1980s and is one of the most powerful people in the country outside of Putin's

01:11:54inner circle. He fell out of Putin's inner circle precisely because of his more hardline approach

01:11:59compared to Putin. Two years ago, most Russian elites backed Putin's more gradual approach.

01:12:04Now, he claims his views hold a clear majority. Judging from Russian media and social media,

01:12:10as Bargy predicts, the population is in a similar mood. The calls are for hitting them harder and

01:12:16teaching them a lesson, not capitulation, and Putin seems to have responded in kind.

01:12:21In the aftermath of last week's Ukrainian attack on Starobelsk in the Russian-occupied Luhansk

01:12:26blast, which the Russians say deliberately hit a college dormitory, killing 21 students and

01:12:31injuring dozens more, Russia lashed out with arguably the heaviest strike on Kyiv and other

01:12:36regions since the onset of the war. Reportedly, almost every region of the city was hit.

01:12:41The Russian foreign ministry has warned the Starobelsk attack had exhausted Russia's patience

01:12:47and that the Kyiv strike was just the beginning of a new round of much heavier strikes. It advised

01:12:51foreign embassy staff to evacuate the city and residents to avoid administrative and military

01:12:56facilities. In response, Zelensky remains defiant, promising even more long-range sanctions.

01:13:02It remains to be seen whether the Russians are bluffing, whether they have the conventional

01:13:06power to seriously degrade Ukraine, or whether Putin, or whoever follows him if he's ousted,

01:13:11is willing to push the big red button. As the Kremlin continues to push the narrative that the

01:13:16collapse of Ukraine is inevitable, the reality on the battlefield tells a very different story.

01:13:21Russia isn't storming through Ukraine. It's suffering for every inch of territory that it gains.

01:13:27At the current rate of advance, Russia would need to churn through 1.5 million of its soldiers to take

01:13:32Donetsk, and would need 183 years to occupy all of Ukraine. Forget about winning, Putin.

01:13:39It looks like it's time to start working on a cryogenic chamber so you live to see the day of

01:13:44a Russian

01:13:44victory that you claim is inevitable. First, we head to Donetsk. Long coveted by Putin,

01:13:50Donetsk has been at the center of the fighting ever since Russia's leader launched his invasion of

01:13:54Ukraine. Now, Putin is acting as though 2026 is the year that Donetsk will fall. His spring offensive

01:14:01is focusing on the fortress belt of cities that stand in Russia's way of taking the Donetsk Oblast.

01:14:07Russia is even so confident in its inevitable victory that it has issued an order for Ukraine to

01:14:12withdraw all of its troops from the Donbass, of which Donetsk is apart, by the end of May.

01:14:18If you only paid attention to what Russia is trying to do, you might buy into Putin's narrative that

01:14:23Donetsk is set to fall. But behind the bravado lurks a dark secret. Donetsk is so far away from falling

01:14:29that it will cost Russia an entire army, or even several, just to take the region.

01:14:34Speaking at the Security Council meeting on April 20th, Ukraine's permanent representative to the UN,

01:14:40Andrei Melnyk, revealed the truth that Putin is so desperate to hide in Donetsk.

01:14:45As Putin calls for Ukraine to withdraw and cede, he is losing soldiers at a staggering rate,

01:14:50and he will have to lose many more before he captures Donetsk by force.

01:14:55According to this brutal logic of war, in order to seize the whole territory of the Donetsk region

01:14:59by military means, Mr. Putin would have to send at least another one and a half million soldiers to

01:15:04their deaths, Melnyk told the Council. He added that Russia's claims that Ukraine should withdraw from

01:15:09Donetsk are ludicrous, where there remains about 6,000 square kilometers of territory in that region

01:15:14that Ukraine still holds. Those 6,000 kilometers are home to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian

01:15:20civilians, and any call for Ukraine to cede would amount to surrendering these innocent people to a

01:15:25barbaric Russian regime that wants to destroy everything that Ukraine holds dear.

01:15:30The numbers are shocking, but does the math bear up? Based on Melnyk's figures, it does,

01:15:35and the worst of it for Russia is that 1.5 million may even be an underestimate.

01:15:39We'll explain how in a moment. First, let's use Melnyk's numbers.

01:15:43Ukraine's UN representative reached his 1.5 million figure using a simple equation.

01:15:48There are about 6,000 square kilometers of Donetsk left for Russia to occupy.

01:15:52Right now, Melnyk says, Russia is losing soldiers at a rate of 254 for every square kilometer that it

01:15:58captures. Multiply 6,000 by 254 and you get 1.524 million casualties. If anything, Melnyk has

01:16:06underestimated Russia's Donetsk losses. An extra 24,000 casualties is nothing to sneeze at,

01:16:12even if Russia has been happily sacrificing more than that number of Russian lives

01:16:15every single month in Ukraine for years. But here's where things get much worse for Putin.

01:16:20As devastating as 254 losses for every square kilometer gain sounds, the actual number in

01:16:27Donetsk may be higher. That's according to an April 15th report by RBC Ukraine,

01:16:32which quoted Ukrainian Defense Minister Mikhailo Fedorov.

01:16:35We are making every meter of Ukrainian land extremely costly for the enemy, Fedorov claimed.

01:16:40Adding, Russia is now losing 254 soldiers for every square kilometer. In the Donetsk region,

01:16:45the enemy loses, on average, 428 soldiers per square kilometer. Did you notice something about

01:16:51that quote? 254 soldiers for every square kilometer is the average for all of Ukraine.

01:16:56In Donetsk, the figure is much higher. 428 are dying for each square kilometer gain.

01:17:02And that has a drastic effect on the figures that Melnyk shared with the UN.

01:17:06If Ukraine can maintain that rate of attrition for as long as it takes for Putin to capture Donetsk,

01:17:10then the Russian casualty rate for taking the oblast won't be 1.5 million.

01:17:14It will be 2.568 million. Another million or more bodies added to the list,

01:17:19all sacrificed at the altar of Putin's tunnel vision in Donetsk.

01:17:23Somehow, what would clearly already have been a catastrophe for Russia and Donetsk

01:17:27could be even worse than it seems on the surface. Regional averages have done a real

01:17:32number on Putin's claims that Ukraine should cede Donetsk. If you need a little more context for all

01:17:37of this, even the best-case scenario here means that Russia more than doubles its casualty rate for

01:17:42the Ukraine war so far. Between when Putin launched his full-scale invasion and April 22nd,

01:17:48Ukraine says that Russia has lost over 1.32 million soldiers. If Fedorov's figures are correct,

01:17:53we'll see close to a tripling of Russia's casualty rate by the time that Donetsk falls.

01:17:58Let's stick with the approximate doubling of Russia's casualties for a moment. Does that mean

01:18:02that Russia is going to need another four years on top of all the deaths to take Donetsk? Not necessarily.

01:18:07What we're not accounting for if we look at the doubling of Russia's casualties alone is that

01:18:11Russia's progress through Ukraine has slowed to an absolute crawl over the last four years.

01:18:16Making that problem even worse is that Ukraine is inflicting a higher casualty rate per square

01:18:20kilometer than ever before. To demonstrate that, we can look at what Russia achieved in 2025.

01:18:26According to the BBC, Russia managed to grab 4,700 square kilometers of Ukraine in 2025.

01:18:32The commander-in-chief of Ukraine's armed forces, Oleksandr Siersky, says that Russia lost almost 420,000

01:18:39soldiers to make those gains. Some more simple maths tells us that this works out at a casualty rate

01:18:44of 89.3 per square kilometer. The rate in Donetsk is anywhere between triple and five times as high as

01:18:50that. So what we see from this is that it's not really about Russia slowing down to a complete crawl

01:18:55in Donetsk, to the point where it will take four more years to capture the region. Don't get us wrong,

01:18:59there's a slowdown and it feeds into the massive Donetsk problem that Putin now has on his hands.

01:19:04But what's really happening here is that Russia is losing more soldiers per square kilometer than

01:19:09it has at any other point in the war. If Russia keeps on pushing in Donetsk, and there is no

01:19:13sign

01:19:14that Putin will stop if he doesn't get the so-called diplomatic solution that he wants, it will likely

01:19:18take Russia until the end of 2027 and perhaps into 2028 to finally topple Putin's biggest target,

01:19:25per the Institute for the Study of War or ISW. So not quite four years. It's about two years plus

01:19:31at least 1.5 million casualties to take a portion of Ukraine that is only 1,300 square kilometers

01:19:37larger than what Russia took in all of 2025. Not exactly good maths for Putin. What all of these

01:19:44numbers reveals is that Putin has a major Donetsk conundrum on his hands, and he's getting desperate to

01:19:49solve it without being forced to follow through on his threats to take Donetsk by force. There's also

01:19:54what all of these numbers say for Putin's ambition to take the rest of Ukraine to consider. But before

01:19:58we dig deeper into all of that, you are watching The Military Show. There's a lot more where this

01:20:03comes from, so make sure you are subscribed if you're getting value from the channel.

01:20:07So, Donetsk. It's a bit of a problem for Putin.

01:20:10Desperation is setting in for Russia's leader, which is why we are seeing the demands that Ukraine

01:20:14see Donetsk and the Donbass region intensify. These demands are nothing new. They've been part

01:20:19of Putin's maximalist demands for a peace treaty ever since negotiations began, and they've also

01:20:24been the major sticking point that has prevented negotiations from getting over the line for peace

01:20:28to be declared. But now there's something a little more hurried and anxious about Putin's demands for

01:20:33Ukraine to withdraw from Donetsk. Melnyk revealed why in his speech to the UN Security Council meeting,

01:20:39as he said,

01:20:40At present, Russia does not control more than 20% of the Donetsk region,

01:20:43territory which Mr. Putin has been demanding in the form of an ultimatum that Ukraine surrender

01:20:48without a fight. This is pure blackmail. Ukraine's UN ambassador also made an interesting point

01:20:53about what Russia's current casualty rate really means. He points to the Winter War between the

01:20:58Soviet Union and Finland that raged between 1939 and 1940 as an example. That war saw the Soviet Union

01:21:05absorb a casualty rate that was roughly 100 times lower per square kilometer gained.

01:21:10And that fight was still a failure for the Soviet Union, as it only managed to gain about 9%

01:21:15of

01:21:15Finland through the signing of a treaty. Now Russia is demanding a higher percentage despite losing

01:21:19many more soldiers than it did in Finland. Something doesn't add up here. Putin is trying to make the

01:21:24pressure that Russia is exerting in Donetsk pay off in a diplomatic settlement that, for want

01:21:28of better terms, will deliver Putin far more than his strategic ineptitude has earned during the

01:21:33battle for the region. And there's a big reason why. Putin knows that if he isn't able to cajole

01:21:38Ukraine into ceding Donetsk and the Donbass via a peace treaty, then Russia will have to fight for

01:21:43these regions. And despite all of his bluster and the deadlines that Putin puts in place,

01:21:47fighting for Donetsk is the last thing that Russia wants to do, as Donetsk is home to something so

01:21:52fearsome that it's already ruining Russian soldiers at a rate that we haven't seen up to this point in

01:21:58the war, the Fortress Belt. Perhaps the most dangerous region in all of Ukraine stands before

01:22:03Putin and the taking of Donetsk. And it's this belt that is already proving responsible for the massive

01:22:08casualty rate per square kilometer that we now see in the region. The ISW outlines the sheer scale of

01:22:15the challenge that faces Russia in trying to capture the Fortress Belt. Spanning about 50 kilometers of

01:22:20defenses running north to south along the H-20 Konstantinivko-Slovansk highway, the Fortress Belt

01:22:25is made up of several cities that had a combined pre-war population of 380,000. It gives you some

01:22:31context

01:22:32as to the size of these cities. For over a decade, Ukraine has focused on building up the defenses in

01:22:37these cities, which is a process that it accelerated to an immense degree as it held up Russia in other

01:22:42regions of Donetsk. Now the Fortress Belt is the sort of barrier that leads to a massive churn for any

01:22:47army

01:22:47that attempts to take it by land. The population density alone in such a relatively small space

01:22:52indicates a level of urban development that Russian soldiers haven't yet encountered. That means a

01:22:57lot of buildings for Ukraine's defenders to use against Russia. It also means a lot of buildings that Russian

01:23:02soldiers have to take to occupy Donetsk. Urban warfare is slow and dangerous work at the best of

01:23:08times, and it is made even more lethal when the invading army has to capture several cities all

01:23:13in close proximity to one another, throw Ukraine's fortifications into the mix, along with the fact

01:23:18that the Fortress Belt lies on elevated terrain, and Russia has a very literal uphill task on its hands

01:23:24if it is going to take Donetsk by force. Bear in mind that the Fortress Belt is far from the

01:23:28place

01:23:29where Ukraine would make a last stand. That term may apply in Donetsk, but as Russia throws cannon

01:23:34fodder at the Fortress Belt, the time needed to topple Ukraine's defenses is all time that Ukraine can

01:23:39use to reinforce fortifications further west. Even if the Fortress Belt eventually falls,

01:23:44any ambition that Putin has for using this victory as a springboard to take the rest of Ukraine

01:23:48would collapse as soon as his soldiers look beyond Donetsk and find that more of the same awaits them

01:23:53deeper in Ukraine. The Fortress Belt is tearing through Russian soldiers as we speak,

01:23:57and those soldiers have barely even made a dent. Not that you'd know if you listen to Russia.

01:24:03Russia's chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, made some interesting claims mid-April.

01:24:08He says that Russian troops have managed to capture over 1,700 square kilometers of Ukraine,

01:24:13along with 80 settlements so far in 2026. March and April have seen Russia take 700 square kilometers

01:24:19and 34 settlements as part of the spring offensive that is primarily focusing on Donetsk.

01:24:24These figures are designed to be just about believable enough to create the illusion that Russia is

01:24:29making some forward progress in Donetsk and elsewhere in Ukraine. Without being so large,

01:24:35they can be dismissed out of hand based on the speed of Russian progression so far in the Ukraine

01:24:39invasion. But notice that we said design. According to the ISW, over 1,700 square kilometers of Ukraine

01:24:46taken in 2026 is a massive overestimate. The less charitable would say that it is a complete

01:24:51fabrication. An ISW analysis suggests that even the most generous estimate claimed that Russia had

01:24:57only managed to occupy no more than 715 square kilometers since the beginning of the year.

01:25:03The odds are that the number is actually much lower. ISW's own count, which is compiled using open

01:25:08source data, suggests that Russia has only managed to take 381.5 square kilometers of Ukraine and 13

01:25:15settlements so far in 2026. There are also losses, almost 60 square kilometers of them alone in March,

01:25:23which shows us that Russia's already glacial rate of progress is also being made worse by Ukrainian

01:25:28counterattacks. We don't know if Putin is seeing any of these numbers. But then even the massaged figures

01:25:34likely being delivered to him by people like Gerasimov are enough to create desperation inside the Kremlin.

01:25:39Thus, the reason for Russia being so insistent that Ukraine hands over Donetsk is revealed. This isn't about

01:25:45Russia making demands from a position of power. Putin and his cronies see the slow rate of progress and

01:25:50the enormous casualties being absorbed to make that progress, and they are doing whatever they

01:25:55can to avoid having to take Donetsk by force, even though they are threatening to do just that.

01:25:59This is basically Putin telling Ukraine to give up a fight that Ukraine is winning.

01:26:04And the desperation in Russia's leader is already starting to show. Seeing that Ukraine has no

01:26:09intention of handing over Donetsk, Putin is making grand vows that Russia will keep fighting,

01:26:13all as he begs Russia's oligarchs for cash to help his cause. That's according to the Foundation for

01:26:19Defense of Democracies, which reported on April 1, that Putin used a March meeting with some of

01:26:24Russia's business elites to ask Russia's richest to pitch in. Those business owners shouldn't be

01:26:30tempted into spending their profits on their businesses, Putin reportedly said. They should be

01:26:34making donations to the state budget that is funding the war. Crazily, the pitch apparently worked.

01:26:39Suleyman Karimov, who is a prominent oligarch, supposedly handed over $1.23 billion. Other

01:26:46oligarchs also agreed to contribute. But let's call this what it is. Putin is going around with

01:26:51his cap in his hand because his war against Ukraine has driven Russia to the edge of bankruptcy.

01:26:55Oh, and there's another deadline in the Donbass. Russia now plans to have captured the region by

01:27:00September, according to the deputy head of Ukraine's main directorate of intelligence,

01:27:04Vadim Skibitsky. We mean Russia can claim that as much as it wants. All of the numbers we revealed

01:27:09in this video mean that we could politely call this latest deadline a pipe dream. If we're being less

01:27:14polite, Putin must be off his rocker. Now, there's one more bit of math that we can do to show

01:27:19you

01:27:19just how fruitless Putin's campaign for Ukraine is going to end up being for Russia. If we expand the

01:27:24scope of Russia's invasion beyond the Donetsk region, Russia still has about 80% of Ukraine left to

01:27:30capture. Despite Putin's claims that Russia would stop at the Donbass if Ukraine cedes the territory,

01:27:35it's obvious that Putin wants the whole country. He isn't going to stop until he gets it. Actually,

01:27:40he is going to stop. He'll have to. Putin will be far too dead to see a future where Russia

01:27:45controls

01:27:45Ukraine if the war keeps on going the way it is right now. Melnyk points that out. He says that

01:27:50for

01:27:50Russia to take all of Ukraine while absorbing its current casualty rate, it will need 183 years and

01:27:56122 million people to make it happen. You can do some math to see if Melnyk is right,

01:28:01at least on the casualty count front. According to GIS Geography, Ukraine is Europe's second largest

01:28:06country and it spans 603,628 square kilometers. As of March 4th, Russia held 19.4% of that territory

01:28:16and as you saw earlier, it hasn't exactly been making fast progress since. Based on this, we can say that

01:28:21Russia holds almost 111,104 square kilometers of Ukraine, which is a figure that includes the

01:28:27Crimean Peninsula that Russia illegally annexed back in 2014. Take what Russia holds away from

01:28:33what Ukraine has and you get 486,524 square kilometers of Ukraine left to occupy. Multiply that

01:28:41by 254 and you don't get 122 million casualties before Russia claims Ukraine, you get 123.57.

01:28:49This is an insane number and it seems almost too obvious to point out that Russia could never

01:28:54sustain us. But then there are 183 years to consider. Putin, you are already 73. We don't know

01:29:00what you think you know about the average human lifespan, but we're pretty confident you're not

01:29:04going to be around in 183 years. You could live over two lifetimes on top of the one you've already

01:29:09lived and Russia still wouldn't control Ukraine at its current rate of progress. Putin should forget

01:29:14about winning. Donetsk is showing Putin anything is that he should pull Russia out of this war while

01:29:20he still can. If he doesn't, he'll be long dead without having seen any real progress and whoever

01:29:25comes next will have to deal with running a country that is consumed by the sheer scale of sacrifice

01:29:30that Putin has demanded. And by the way, Ukraine is slowing Russia down even more by taking territory

01:29:35and remarkable counterattacks. The active defense strategy that we're seeing in the fortress belt

01:29:40has been extremely successful in Ukraine's south as the country has liberated a massive amount of

01:29:45territory. Find out more in our video and if you enjoyed this video, make sure you subscribe to

01:29:50The Military Show to see more analysis of the numbers that lie behind the Ukraine war. And thank you as

01:29:55always for watching.

Ukraine Hit Back So HARD… Russia Will Feel This for DECADES | Other War Stories

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