All things good and bad come to an end, and the war hasn’t gone anywhere. The following was written mostly from outside Ukraine. The only real perspective “outside” gave me is that, yes, really, major nations and millions of people can have a giant conventional war in progress next door or close to next door, and for them it’s like weather in Antarctica: Probably unpleasant for the people there, but not having anything to do with me.
Drone wars
Sitting in peaceful Europe, it was appalling how little the news outside Ukraine communicated the scale of the Russian strikes for the past couple of weeks. The information is there, it’s widely confirmed, Ukraine is being subjected to the most intense long-term wartime air bombardment of a country, by some metrics, since Vietnam.
I go through some hard numbers in another section, but generally, hundreds of drones, nightly, dozens of strikes, nightly. Usually, a single city is targeted. Dozens of people are injured or killed nightly.
I’ll leave the hard statistics to someone who loves filling in spreadsheets, but, in layman’s terms, the number of Russian strike weapons flying into Ukraine every night probably maths out to 300 to 3,000 air engagements somewhere over Ukraine every 24 hours.
For reference, during the Battle of Britain, the single biggest German air raid took place on Sept. 7, 1940, when around 300 German bombers, escorted by 600 fighters, attacked London, killing about 430 civilians and injuring 1,600. The German “Blitz” against targets around London and southern Britain lasted 57 days.
I’ve swiped a colorized pic taken following a Luftwaffe raid on London, an image recently published by the Daily Mail. Doesn’t look much different from Kyiv or Dnipro or Kharkiv, does it?
This is not to imply that what the Germans did to the British with their bombardment during WWII is comparable to what the Russians are doing to the Ukrainians now, the level of destruction of life and property in southern Britain was an order of magnitude worse. But, in terms of aircraft in the air and air space over which battles are being fought, my contention is more than comparable.
I know people in multiple Kyiv neighborhoods who, on some nights, lost count of how often there was firing in the sky on a given night.
Although one certainly can’t compare the Russian bombardment of Ukraine with the Allied bombing of Germany or the US bombing of Japan or Vietnam, the Russian air bombardment campaign against Ukraine is huge and, in layman’s terms, probably comparable to the Battle of Britain or NATO’s bombardment of Serbia.
Yet, by the news that I see in Europe, what the Russians are doing to Ukraine translates to one or two Ukrainian buildings blown up every few nights and a few seconds of video of Ukrainian women standing in their robes next to a smashed apartment building, and some ambulances and rescue crews running around.
In the States, aside from outliers like CNN, it seems like the war is just Trump arguing with Putin, and the Ukrainians are just sitting passively.
The soap opera about Melania Trump, Friedrich Merz, and the Patriot missiles is getting reported in all manner of detail – yet it seems like Ukraine and the Russian air bombardment is this random, boring process where nothing is happening and people in Ukraine are sitting around living normal lives and waiting for the Great Powers to decide their fate.
Anyone living in Ukraine sees things very differently.
This is leaving aside the ground war, which, as intense as the air war is right now, is where, by far, the war is being decided and the vast majority of lives are being lost.
I’ll focus on the ground guys in the next review. But the lead image is “Viking,” a fairly well-known Ukrainian Mi-24 pilot, who recorded a video honoring not flyboys nor even ground crew, but the paratroopers of the 25th Airborne Brigade, a unit celebrating its birthday this week.
Ukrainian air defenses and smoke in the air!
Zelensky last week said that the Russian Shahed threat, although serious and substantial, was coming under control. Based on the numbers (see below), this is at least optimistic and possibly inaccurate.
However, there is a spike in reports of Ukrainian air defenses beefing up.
According to the sources I’m reading, no one has come up with a Ukrainian air defense silver bullet. The government and air force are hinting at better data fusion on incoming threat aircraft attack profiles.
I’m seeing mobile air defense teams which are intercepting Shahed drones faster by anticipating their flightpath earlier.
The Ukrainian military information people are talking up the appearance of an interceptor drone called an Odin, whose list speed is about 50 percent faster than a Shahed. And supposedly, the Odin has AI that flies the interceptor into the Shahed during the terminal phase.
Yuriy Myronenko, head of the Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, talking to Ukrinform, claimed Ukraine is manufacturing interceptor drones at scale and that production is going to be “tens of thousands.”
As far as I know, he didn’t mention the Odin specifically, which would be par for the Ukrainians; they typically have seven or eight weapons development projects going, each run by its team of mad scientists/geeks, usually financing is mostly crowd-sourced, and the military top brass aren’t doing much except not interfering.
So, how many airborne Russian explosives are getting through? Based on the numbers published by the Ukrainian Air Force, a simple answer, Russian Shahed drones, between 10 and 30 percent of the drones depending on the night, target, drone routing and probably things like weather and whether or not the Ukrainian rat patrol teams were drinking last night.
Russian cruise missiles are sitting ducks by that data; Ukrainian air defenses seem to shoot them down almost without exception.
Russian ballistic missiles (in this category I’m subsuming S-400 and Kinzhal missiles, which Mr. Picky might argue aren’t REALLY ballistic) pretty much always get through. This is primarily because the White House, supposedly for the sake of imposing a ceasefire in the Russo-Ukrainian War, cut off supplies of Patriot missiles to Kyiv, which can shoot down ballistic missiles. I don’t see the logic, but the White House did.
In detail, here’s Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine for July 2025, reduced to statistical form, based on numbers published by the Ukrainian Air Force.
The first figure is total targets detected in Ukrainian airspace. The second is the number of drones claimed shot down by all means. The third is the number of drones probably jammed. Subtract the second and third numbers from the first; that’s a reasonable estimate of the number of Russian “hits” by drones. Missile shoot-downs and hits are separate from the drone numbers.
July 1 – 52/14/33
July 2 – 118/40/39 (including 4 ballistic missiles, none intercepted)
July 3 - 52/22/18
July 4 – 550/270/208 (including 7 ballistic missiles and 4 cruise missiles, 1 cruise missile intercepted)
July 5 – 332/157/135
July 6 – 161/98/19 (including 4 ballistic missiles, 0 intercepted)
July 7 – 105/58/17
July 8 – 58/26/8
July 9 – 718/303/415 (including 8 ballistic and 13 cruise missiles, 1 missile of each type intercepted)
July 10 – 415/178/204 (8 ballistic missiles and 6 cruise missiles claimed, 4 ballistic missiles not intercepted)
July 11 – 79/44/16
July 12 – 623/319/258 (including 26 cruise missiles, 25 claimed shot down)
July 13 – 60/20/20
July 14 – 140/61/47 (4 ballistic missiles, 0 intercepted)
July 15 – 267/178/66
July 16 – 401/198/145 (plus 1 ballistic missile, not intercepted)
July 17 – 64/36/5
July 18 – 35/11/6
Here’s what jumps out to me:
- This is a real, ongoing, massed bombardment of Ukraine by Russia; it is a major military operation on a scale not seen since the Balkan Wars, and I would argue that Russian attacks on Ukraine right now are roughly comparable to Nazi Germany’s air blitz against southern Britain in 1940-41.
- The Russian pattern clearly is two to five days of dozens of aircraft (drones and missiles), probably to feel out air defense locations across the country and prevent shifts of defense systems to other sites, followed by one to three days of hundreds of aircraft concentrating on one or two Ukrainian cities.
- There seems to be a pretty clear link between cities “used” to air strikes and shootdown/intercept successes; relatively speaking, the highest Russian success rates are against cities that aren’t often hit.
- It’s pretty obvious the Ukrainians are unable to stop ballistic missiles, and the only thing preventing Russia from leveling Ukraine is that it doesn’t have that many ballistic missiles.
- The numbers don’t particularly support Zelensky’s claim that Ukrainian air defenses are “improving” vs. drones. However, and this is a little peculiar, the bigger the Russian effort, the more efficient the Ukrainians seem to be at cutting it up.
- I strongly suspect a real but, for us, unquantifiable factor is how much the US is effectively assisting Ukraine on a given day with incoming target data.
Pete Hegseth cut off US satellite data that pretty much blinded Ukraine’s air defense network to cruise and especially ballistic missiles for close to a week at one point.
I am reliably informed that, behind his back, from time to time, US/NATO officers pass on intelligence and even critical components to the Ukrainian air defense network.
The point is that most likely the US still has influence on how Ukrainian airspace is defended, it’s just that one day the influence might be positive, and another day it might help the Russians.
The West “gets” it?
Yes, I have seen the “news” that Keith Kellogg talked to Zelensky about sharing Ukrainian drone tech with the US. I am skeptical: Ukrainian drone tech and Ukrainian manufacturing, if capitalized, would compete effectively with DJI and put pretty much any existing or potential US-based tactical drone manufacturer out of business.
That being the case, I doubt very much the lawyers hired by the Raytheons and Boeings of the world to make sure Pentagon orders stay big and corporate would allow Ukrainian drone manufacturers to assist the US military with better and cheaper drones.
In other words, Kellogg, in my view, is blowing smoke, and Secretary Hegseth will fail in his attempt to make Pentagon contracting more efficient and less profitable for the small group of corporations currently at that feeding trough.
Another window on US military thinking and its stagnation was opened this week with the publishing of a brand spanking new US Army tank platoon tactical drills manual (ATP 3-20.15, July 2025). The ignorance of the drone threat in modern war, as expressed in that official Pentagon publication, is astounding.
Just to make clear this isn’t just one grumpy journo in a bad mood because he had to go back to work after summer vacation, I offer you the comment of a Canadian observer writing under @GrandpaRoy2, one of the most intelligent and even-handed writers on the tactical side of the war in any language.
Part of the latest US armor doctrine is, in case of drone threat, for the tank platoon to separate itself into a 150m x 150m box and then each tank uses its weapons to blast FPVs incoming on any of the other tanks. He writes:
“The new US Army Tank Platoon Tactics Manual shows an incredible ignorance of the realities of FPV warfare. Apparently, a platoon has lots of time on sighting an FPV to make hand signals, close hatches, signal HQ, and change formation. In the real world, they will have seconds. The plan to leave a track and break into a herringbone will most likely result in multiple landmine hits. And the laughable instructions to shoot canister at a rapidly moving FPV could only have emanated from a general.”
I’ve attached two graphics from the field manual, which, I repeat, is the official US Army “how to do it” for a small tank unit encountering FPV drones. Anyone, and I mean even grandmothers living somewhere near the line of contact, would tell you drone defense tactics as laid out in ATP 3-20.15 are little less than suicidal. A tank platoon executing to those standards, if attacked by an average Ukrainian FPV outfit, would lose all its tanks and probably about 2/3 of its personnel killed or wounded, in a maximum of an hour, and it could be 15 minutes.
The really appalling part is that no officer or senior NCOs, mostly from the Armor Branch, involved in printing this travesty, took a public stand against this bone-headed doctrine.
Certainly dozens, and probably nearly 100 US Army career professionals, my guess, had a crack at a draft of this pub and so had the chance to object effectively – you know, resign in protest – so that US tankers won’t go to war using imbecilic doctrine that almost certainly will get US service personnel uselessly killed and wounded. As we can see, no one did.
Think I’m exaggerating? Anyone unsure, just go ahead, look at those images.
Then think of some of the drone-attacks-tank videos we’ve seen over and over and over in the past three years.
Now ask yourself: on what planet could tactics like that be anything but a sure-fire plan to wipe out a US Army tank platoon worth about $20-$30 million once all the extra equipment and survivor benefits are taken into account? At the cost of maybe 5-6 FPV drones for each Abrams M1A3 burnt, or maybe $4-6,000 all in, once the Scooby Doo van and the Red Bull the drone operators drink is included?
Just so I don’t seem to be picking on American tread-heads, to be fair, Defense Express just pointed out, citing Polish media, that the Polish army has decided that if they go to war with the Russians somehow, their artillery expenditure volumes will be about an order of magnitude less than what the Ukrainians have found necessary?
This is embarrassing – even US military propaganda is amateur, and the American taxpayer is funding that as well!
On July 10 video was released in which the US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth performs in the role of door-to-door drone salesman; his pitch is that the US military will “unleash” American drone production knowhow by “arming” US military units with money and – I assume – people and time so that they can all develop their own drones, thereby bypassing the fossilized Pentagon arms contracting process and
Really, Hegseth’s flim-flam man pitch and the bit where he grabs his defense department paper from a hovering drone and theatrically signs it was all over the news.
I was in Europe at the time, and Hegseth’s little act did not play well in European mainstream and security media: Basically, he was reported as a goofball fanatic Christian with a possible drinking problem, struggling to stay in the good graces with Donald J. Trump.
From the Ukrainian point of view:
- Anyone trying to impress anyone by grabbing a piece of paper dangling from a drone is about 10-15 years behind actual drone capacity in actual war. It’s like loading one of those World War II mainframe computers in a train box car, with all the fuses and tubes and switches and cooling fans and cable, and then looking someone with a smartphone in his pocket in his face and telling him how clever you are because you’ve discovered mobile computing.
- A good 10 seconds of the video Hegseth’s face is impossible to see because the drone operator decided to hover his aircraft between Hegseth and the recording camera. As a guy who has flown drones and done camera work, this is either evidence the US military drone operator couldn’t control his aircraft and blocked out the face of the screen talent (and the producer decided it wasn’t worth re-recording), or that the Pentagon public outreach team thought it was quality video to park a drone in between the stand-up talent, and the viewers.
- Not once does Hegseth use the standard term dating back for more than a century when anyone has talked about American advances in aviation, to wit: “American Ingenuity.” A US Secretary of Defense talking about drone innovation and unable to connect the dots to American Ingenuity – for which no less than the Wright Brothers were responsible for making a popular phrase – astounds me. It’s like talking about a hamburger patty to a US audience and deciding “juicy” wasn’t an appropriate adjective.
Image of the obvious historical US Army hero most widely known for battlefield technical innovation: Sergeant Curtis Culin, inventor of the “Rhino Plow” attached to Sherman tanks during WWII. Hegseth’s missed opportunity to invoke Sergeant Culin is the kind of messaging error pros see and how they identify amateurs.
For reference, here is the Chinese government engaging in public messaging about drones, obviously this is state propaganda. The military one officially is PRC army TV reporting honestly on a typical exercise conducted by 76th Combined Arms Army “somewhere in the north of China”:
I’ve added a still of some tough-looking Chinese infantry with dog-bots suspiciously similar to Boston Robotics products, for reference.
The US messaging countering this, is Pete Hegseth pulling a piece of paper off a string attached to a drone? It’s laughable.
More Patriots for Ukraine – but when?
As I write this (Thursday-Friday), it appears that President Trump has decided to try and frighten Vladimir Putin by “releasing” Patriot missile systems for sale to Ukraine, possibly because his wife Melania told him to do it, possibly because Pete Hegseth cut off all aid to Ukraine and didn’t tell Trump about it, possibly because Trump just feels comfortable talking to Friedrich Merz (whose background is mega-corporate law and whose English is distinctly better than Trump’s).
It certainly isn’t because of Trump’s concerns about dead Ukrainian citizens and blown-up Ukrainian buildings following Russian strikes; the July strike numbers above make pretty clear Russia has been blasting Ukraine for some time and somehow the White House was able to suffer through it and not particularly attempt to prevent the Russians from dropping more explosives on Ukrainian cities.
I’m like everyone else: I really have no idea what the actual US White House plan for delivering Patriot missiles systems to Ukraine is. Most of you will have seen the news reports that the US national leadership, and major allies like Germany had no idea or plan for Trump’s declaration that he was fed up with Vladimir Putin blasting Ukraine, so he was going to give Ukraine more air defense capacity.
My best guess based on reading the news is that Germany is committed to donate two Patriot systems to Ukraine and buy replacements new from the US, while Norway will finance another system, not clear from where exactly. The “Norwegian” system appears to have been originally planned to go to Switzerland, but the Americans changed their mind. After saying they were done supplying Ukraine with weapons, they have now announced that Patriot systems destined for Switzerland would go to Ukraine, and be paid for by European states. It’s not at all clear how many of the “Swiss” systems (five on order, supposedly delivery from 2026-28) might be diverted to Ukraine.
LATE ADDITION: According to German media on Friday one Patriot fire unit, which was supposed to go to Switzerland will go to Ukraine and Germany will pay for it. It’s still being built and it won’t be delivered for at least six months. Possibly, the Bundeswehr could turn over ANOTHER Patriot system, but that is up to Germany.
In other words, the White House’s pretty promise of releasing Patriots is a possible fix effective at best in February 2026.
Pretty anyone owning real estate in Ukraine will tell you that the problem with Patriots is not the number of systems Ukraine has or does not have in the field, as much as interceptor missiles to launch, because the missiles are ridiculously expensive and slow to manufacture. German production of interceptor missiles supposedly is going to come online in 2026 as well.
The upshot is, although Trump said lots of weapons were ready to go and would reach Ukraine “in days,” he said he would end the war in 24 hours. For the medium term, all the White House is offering Ukraine to protect itself from Russian ballistic missiles, is words and promises of weapons deliveries the US isn’t paying for.
If we look at the White House rhetoric on its Russia policy, the party line is the US is going to hit Russia with some really, really nasty sanctions. Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, is on the record that the Russian army intends to win the war and capture all of Ukraine it wants (for now) by the middle of September.
The Russian response to Trump’s promise about arms to Ukraine – which the rest of the world can only see as a commitment Trump could reverse himself at any moment if he thought he could benefit from it – has been predictable. The Kremlin is saying they’ve heard it before, they are not impressed, the economy is strong, Ukraine is losing, the Russian army is loyal and happy to take crushing casualties forever and ever. Medvedev today blogged that the long-range attacks are going to intensify.
I know the Republican internal dialogue about being tough and how America decides what happens, but Trump is dealing not with a Republican moderate without a lot of campaign cash and worried about re-election and getting “primaried.” Donald J. Trump is in a contest of nerves with the Kremlin.
My prediction, unless the Russian economy implodes or the Russian army mutinies in the next 50 days, and I’m not expecting either of those developments that quickly, then the Kremlin is going to call Trump’s bluff. Russia will keep attacking.
The US may send some Patriot missiles, but no new systems will come for at least six months. This is assuming Secretary Hegseth doesn’t torpedo emergency deliveries of more interceptor missiles behind Trump’s back – which based on past performance seems always possible – then perhaps by the end of July or early August we might see some, but only some, Russian ballistic missiles intercepted again until the Ukrainians again run out of Patriot missiles. But right now, clearly, the Ukrainians are out of that ammo.
The main lesson here is that Trump said the US would help protect Ukrainian cities from Russian bombardment, in practical terms, aside from whatever individual missiles Secretary Hegseth deigns to allow the Ukrainians to have, no America isn’t doing anything like that.
A critic of the White House might say this is MAGA pretending to take immediate action to protect Ukrainian women and children, while actually throwing Ukraine under the bus. Again.
And a bonus for those who read to the end
I’ll close with an interesting graphic, it shows defensive position length and density, built by Russia in Ukraine, by region. The total figure is about 8,800 kilometers. Most people estimate the front in this war at 1,200 kilometers. For reference, I read that on the Western Front in World War I, frontline trenches stretched about 640 kilometers, but total trenches including secondary and communication lines was about 40,000 kilometers. By those numbers the Russo-Ukrainian War is not the same as the Western Front World War I; the front is twice as long, and trench density is about five times less.
Reprinted from Kyiv Post’s Special Military Correspondent Stefan Korshak’s blog. You can read his blog here.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.