Once again, I’m leading off a review with a consumer warning to For God’s Sake, don’t take the American “peace initiative” seriously; it’s a joke and a waste of your time.
In this case, the White House is saying peace could probably arrive in a couple of weeks. I think the reason we are going to see a lot of news about it in the coming weeks is the Epstein distraction.
Also, possibly because the White House and the Kremlin are cooperating to force a bad peace on Ukraine, but I can’t prove that.
From what I can see on Friday (Nov. 21), this is just the Kremlin capitulation plan for Ukraine rewarmed: Ukraine hands over the Donbas, emasculates the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), promises never to join NATO, promises not to let foreign troops into the country, yada yada yada; and for all this, Russia graciously will agree to stop attacking. If you look closely at the language of the US peace proposal, you can see places where it was probably translated from Russian.
I also read (Reuters) that the Americans told the Ukrainians that if the Ukrainians don’t sign in a week, the US will cut off military intelligence data to Ukraine. That will shut down or damage the effectiveness, particularly of US-made F-16 fighter jets operated by the Ukrainian air force, and long-range rocket artillery systems (HIMARS and/or M270) operated by the Ukrainian army.
Another line item in the “peace plan” is a US “security guarantee” to Ukraine. The Russians unsurprisingly think it’s a great plan.
The Europeans and the Ukrainians have said that if Russia wants to talk ceasefire and nothing more, then there can be talks. It’s obvious the Europeans and Ukrainians will drag out talks until the Epstein case, Nov. 26 elections, or something else breaks the MAGA hold on Congress.
To a professional and competent US government, all of this should be obvious. I mean, what I just wrote, you can hear in pretty much any Kyiv cafe. It’s just basic geopolitics, the US can’t MAKE Ukraine do anything, and Europe is backing Ukraine, and they welcome the opportunity to send the Americans packing.
Pretending a giant conventional war is a real estate dispute in which the side with less expensive lawyers can be brow-beaten doesn’t change the fact of a giant conventional war, in progress, and that the US is siding with the aggressor. Simulating a peace process for personal political gain is not the same as working for peace. The US position is beyond stupid. Anyone who says it’s serious diplomacy isn’t a serious person.
I direct your attention to the section on Russia bombarding Ukraine – on Wednesday, the Russians killed dozens of civilians by blowing up a Ukrainian apartment building, and within hours, Pentagon officials were in Kyiv telling their Ukrainian counterparts Washington wants Ukraine to capitulate now. At the same time, rescue crews were pulling bodies of Ukrainian children out of the rubble.
That’s what a pair of United States senior military officials did this week, when confronted first-hand with murderous military aggression by a dictatorial country against a democracy, in the name of the American people.
They told the victim to surrender.
Comparisons with Chamberlain and Munich are getting so dull; I remind all and sundry that the British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare and French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval secretly drafted the Hoare-Laval Pact, in which Britain and France sold Ethiopian independence down the river in December 1935. Paris and London adjudged it easier to betray Ethiopia than to confront Fascist Italy. About 300,000 Ethiopians died from military action, poison gas, and starvation at Italian hands.
The front: Pokrovsk, Kupyansk, Lyman, and Zaporizhzhia
Fighting is dynamic in all these areas. As has been the case for years, there are no major changes in terrain control, but aggregate, the Russians gained a bit more ground than the Ukrainians. Relative to the size of the country, the gain was smaller than tiny.
How small?
If Ukraine were the size of a European football field paved over with bricks (A/I says that’s about 288,200 standard-sized bricks), then this week the Russians captured about the surface area of 28 bricks. Ukraine captured the surface area of about three to five bricks. That leaves more than 288,170 bricks up for grabs.
In Kupyansk, reports are clear that this week the Ukrainians recovered sections of the city in hard fighting, and I’ve seen reports that the Ukrainians have cleared the left bank of the Oskil River of Russians. Artillery, day and night bombardment, dense drones. The situation is still fluid; no one I’ve read is talking about the Ukrainians having fully stabilized things here. Both sides have elements of about ten brigade equivalents in the area, and a good two-thirds of them are mechanized/motor rifle, meaning there’s a lot of artillery trading bombardments here. Units to flag probably are the 92nd Mech on the Ukrainian side and the 16th Spetsnaz on the Russian side.
Overall, the battle is in progress, Ukrainians perhaps gaining a little.
That’s in the real world. At the same time, not making this up, the Kremlin announced that Kupyansk was fully under Russian control, Ukrainians kicked out, thousands more surrounded, excellent victory.
On national television. Valery Gerasimov telling Vladimir Putin in person. It was so disconnected from reality, even the pro-Moscow bloggers said it was BS. But there is a benefit: Any English-language platform reporting Kupyansk is under Russian control, for the next week or so, you can for sure classify as a Russian bot, so good for informational hygiene.
In Pokrovsk, I’m sorry, it looks like the Ukrainians have held. Sources across the board this week reported Russian infantry attacks had fallen off to almost zero, and that what Russian infantry was in the city had gone to ground, and now both sides are playing lethal hide-and-seek in the city. Tellingly, General Oleksandr Syrsky appeared in the Pokrovsk sector on Wednesday, and probably even more significantly, Major Robert Brovdi was there with him.
This is the second time in as many weeks that the head of the entire AFU, along with the head of the AFU drone forces, made personal visits to Pokrovsk. If that’s not enough, I read that President Volodymyr Zelensky over the week visited every single large drone unit in the sector. This is what it looks like when a national government decides to take a stand.
We noted last week the drone troops set one-day kill records in Pokrovsk and predicted that by logic, the Russians couldn’t sustain those losses; this week, that prediction seems vindicated.
Looking ahead, if the Dobropillia fight is anything to base conclusions on – and my guess, it is – the Ukrainians will take their time, mop up slowly, and let cold and starvation take their toll on the Russians in the city. This is not a battle that the AFU won, but objectively, this week it stabilized. However, be warned, this is a minority view; the conventional wisdom/general opinion remains that Pokrovsk is either a disaster about to happen or in progress.
An excellent video for anyone understanding Ukrainian was published by the 1st Assault Regiment this week. You want to know how the Ukrainians do counterattacks in 2025, this is how. This is not theory. They did it.
In the Siversk-Lyman sector, fighting intensified this week, and it seems that the Russians repeated their infiltrate-while-it’s-foggy-and-the-Ukrainian-drones-can’t-fly tactic. This is by and large in and around the Serebryansky Forest, or more exactly, what’s left of it. Lyman is a critical defense point and bridgehead that has held since 2022, so in this sector in general, it looks like the medium-term Russian objective is to somehow kick the Ukrainians out of Lyman and try and establish a solid front along the Siversky Donets River. On the other side of the river, the fighting is for the city of Siversk, which, if captured, becomes a Russian bridgehead going the opposite direction.
I’ve seen reports of Russian GRU teams trying to sneak into Lyman, of Russian infantry probing little villages in the hills and forest there, trying to get behind Lyman, and proper attacks on the main village between Lyman and Siversk, which is a little place called Yampil.
The historians among you will recall that in May 2022, it was right in this area that the Russians made their final, last-bid attempt to assault the bridge over the Sivierskyi Donets and surround a big chunk of the AFU; they failed spectacularly because the Americans and their buddies got NATO-standard 155mm howitzers to the sector that murdered the crossing attempts. It was a classic case of the Democratic West to the rescue. Those were the days.
Anyway, in this sector, the Ukrainians evacuated some covering forces, but the news is that this sector used to be quiet; now not so much.
The Zaporizhzhia sector is where the sharpest spike in fighting took place this week, although in part that’s because, relative to Pokrovsk, for months it’s been not as violent.
Over the week, the Russians seized something like four to six villages, depending on whom you believe, but more critically, they crossed the Yanchur River and took full control of a village called Rivnopillya; this is creating a serious threat where there wasn’t one before to the city of Hulyaipole.
The really worrying aspect is that there is strong evidence that the AFU leadership basically parked a single National Guard Brigade in this sector and hoped it would stay quiet, and now they’re playing catch-up. I confirm the 3rd Battalion, 225th Assault Regiment is in the sector and mopping up where Russians have gone to ground, and according to the Assault Troops Command, those operations are proceeding normally.
But if the Russians come up with a lot more force here quickly, I’m not seeing a really organized Ukrainian defense here; I’m seeing Syrsky paying for having taken a calculated risk that bit him. So very dynamic here, and from my perspective, the most worrying.
NATO training: Yeah, it will be easier if we train without those Ukrainian drones
On Nov. 17, 2025, BBC documented what pretty much any soldier in Ukraine or Russia knows intuitively: NATO is not training for a future war; its exercises are simulating wars of the past.
Since I am about to slam European NATO, I include an image of “cutting-edge” US drone training at Grafenwoehr. By my calculation, the American army is at least eight years behind the AFU and the Russian army. Maybe 10 to 12.
What happened was a BBC reporter got access, apparently, to Ukrainian translators who had been working at a new training site called Jomsborg, built in Poland for Norwegian money.
It started operating in October. The place is part of a larger Polish-Nordic project to systematize training for Ukrainian troops above the individual level. The Jomsborg site supposedly is part of that training structure where, among other things, drone threat and drone warfare can be trained.
To that end, NATO – give credit where credit is due – invited Ukrainian marine drone teams. Some of you will be aware that way back in late October 2023, it was the Ukrainian marines and a then little-known and aging lieutenant named Robert Brovdi who decided the only way to support a marine toe-hold on the south/left bank of the Dnipro River was with drones.
According to the BBC report, for instance, when the NATO guys decided they were going to practice an amphibious assault, the Ukrainian marines – remember, these are guys that are veterans of the amphibious assault across the Dnipro from October 2023-June 2024 (roughly) – said to the NATO trainers: “Your amphibious assault doctrine won’t work. The way you plan to attack, amphibious vehicles would get swarmed by drones. All the soldiers would die, and all the vehicles would get burnt.”
At which the Polish trainers responded, reportedly, “Not so, our APCs swim pretty fast, and they’re armored.” I feel the Ukrainian marines’ pain. One of the irritating parts of this war is all the people who know so much about combat and what works and doesn’t in combat, without actually having been in any combat. And they’re not shy at all about explaining how combat works to those who have survived it.
Some topics, like small unit tactics, make sense. But navigation – still – is taught with paper maps. In October 2025, at a new NATO training base specifically built so drones could be used in training, in Poland, not only did not a single Polish trainer know how to fly a MAVIC drone, but there were also no MAVICS to fly; NATO hadn’t bought any (The Ukrainians, being Ukrainians, brought their own).
Medical evacuation assumed no drones, and that troops evacuating wounded will call in helicopters, and casualties will be whisked away to the hospital in a golden hour or less.
One of the Ukrainians talking to the BBC said that with that kind of medical planning, in modern war, lots of casualties will die or lose limbs, because they aren’t trained to loosen tourniquets. The Ukrainians know this not because they are smarter, but because they went to war with NATO training on tourniquets, which led to soldiers losing limbs because they weren’t evacuated for hours, and the tourniquet had been cutting off blood to the injured limb for all that time. A basic combat lesson paid for in Ukrainian blood. Not yet learned by NATO, apparently.
During a tactical exercise practicing assaults, the Ukrainians were asked to stop flying drones because the NATO assault troops kept getting detected too easily. In the assaults themselves, NATO is still training to drive an assault vehicle right up to an enemy trench, with no drone overwatch. That’s suicidal in modern war.
To reiterate, this is not just the Europeans. I personally confirm that US Army drone training (I can’t speak on the USMC) is even more primitive. It’s hard to believe, but “drone-that-drops-a-single-grenade” is considered advanced small drone operations in Big Army right now. In general, in the US Army, the idea is that special operations are allowed to mess around with drones if they feel like it and are encouraged, while the line troops are technically supposed to demonstrate a minimum interest in drones to please higher command, but to focus their energy on practicing winning battles where FPV drones basically don’t exist.
At the cutting edge of US Army tactical development, JSOC, advanced drone tactics is using a MAVIC to reconnoiter a route. Meanwhile, in real war, in Ukraine, a platoon assault is covered by a minimum of four observation drones and probably twice that many FPVs either ready to launch or circling in “taxi stand” mode above the battle area, and heavy bomber drones are on tap to hit bigger targets or enemy that’s gone to ground. Armored ground drones deliver supplies and even evacuate casualties. Meanwhile, the US plan, as nearly as I can tell, is that the US Air Force will somehow magically eliminate the enemy FPV drones.
According to the report, the Czech instructors seemed more willing to learn from the Ukrainians than the Poles.
The BBC article points out another issue in the training when it’s NATO people training Ukrainians – invariably, there will be Ukrainian combat veterans who, if they’ve been shot at enough, simply won’t listen to anybody.
This is a real problem in the AFU; there are so many combat veterans who have been through so much that they reject almost any suggestion from anyone who isn’t just like them. The solution is an effective and professionalized AFU officer and NCO corps, and I have been complaining about that since about the third month of the war.
Soapbox advice for NATO
This is not news; this is opinion, and it’s only a little pretext to post an image of some Jocks.
In case anyone asks, the best way for NATO to learn to fight in a modern war is by learning from Ukrainian best practices up close, with as few layers of bureaucracy as possible.
The Ukrainians’ lessons learned in war aren’t complicated, and you don’t need colonels writing reports that generals are rewriting that then committees are discussing so that other committees can review the findings. There is no perfect way to fight, but there is a body of knowledge of what generally works, and the best way to learn that is to put some NATO fighting soldiers next to some Ukrainian fighting soldiers. A training environment is fine.
All that is needed is an infantry platoon or company from one of the more professional NATO militaries, not special forces, not commandos, just solid battle line troops, and dump them in a training area with the Ukrainians. Leave it to the platoon or company to figure out what NATO tactics are outdated and which still work. It’s not as simple as “just use lots and lots of drones.”
Ukrainian frontline soldiers swear up and down that tanks and artillery aren’t obsolete, but they need to be used differently in modern war to be effective. This is all low-level, tactical doctrinal change, and the best way to do that is to find a NATO mechanized infantry company and order the commander and the chain of command in that unit to learn everything they possibly can from the Ukrainians in about six months of training. Then they make recommendations, and then NATO doctrine adapts, it takes the recommendations seriously and assumes that the NATO fighting style must be modified somewhat. Not to turn NATO into the AFU. But to create NATO units prepared to fight and win on the same battlefield as the AFU has.
That’s what NATO needs to do. We will see what they actually do.
Image of a company of the Royal Regiment of Scotland as a “for example.” I think a bunch of Scots would have fun learning drone tactics from Ukrainians, and you know, there would be funny stories about up-kilt sorties.
Some talk the talk, others blow up real drones in a real war
Once again, Rheinmetall, by its history and mission statement, has demonstrated that there is initiative and intelligence in the West, especially when there is money to be made.
Our favorite German arms mega-conglomerate Rheinmetall this week announced that not only had it completed test copies of its new AAA autocannon-on-a-tank-chassi Skyranger 35, but it had already placed four systems in the hands of the AFU, with (I assume) a solid supply of 35mm shells, operator’s manuals, and a general request that this Rheinmetall product be tested. This is probably the world’s premier short-range anti-drone system; it’s computerized, radar-guided, with excellent sensors, reliable mechanics, configured to kill what the Russians fly, and so on.
It is, however, still new, and testing these things against drones flying over the North Sea or Grafenwoehr or wherever would be time-consuming and expensive, and it’s obvious that the Ukrainians will find the bugs and at the same time almost certainly figure out new ways to use the system tactically, because they’re Ukrainians. As a result, Rheinmetall is going to get a battle-tested anti-drone system, in about a year, at exactly the same time the entire European continent is re-arming and drones are clearly the biggest single threat to a big army.
There’s plenty of competition: the US, South Korea, Sweden, Turkey, Poland, Serbia, Czechia, France, and Italy all make autocannon on tracked vehicle systems. Any of those countries could have had a corporation that just donated its newest test systems to the AFU. But Rheinmetall did it, and mark my words, in about 12 years, the Skyranger will be the most capable air defense system of its type on Earth. Image.
I am fully aware that praising the corporation with bloodlines you can trace directly back to the Third Reich and which, among other products, manufactured main guns cannon for the likes of the Tiger and Panther tanks, as well as those tanks themselves under license, and yes, that’s an image. But business skills are business skills.
And again: if you believe Mark Rutte of NATO, Europe is coming close to producing artillery ammunition on par with Russia – if you don’t count North Korea. Meanwhile, US efforts to expand shell manufacturing have stalled, and the difference between Europe and the US in this sector is that in Europe, Rheinmetall (and some smaller companies in France and Finland) is effectively running the gear-up, and in the US, it’s the Pentagon.
Welcome to the Russian world, or, This won’t make friends
The occupied territory media, to wit everything except Crimea, which Russia just treats as a part of Russia, was increasingly upset this week because it became clear that Moscow was serious with a Nov. 6 order to incorporate occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions into Russia’s southern military district, and draft notices are going out to men who were Ukrainian citizens and to whom Russia was a foreign country four years ago.
There is a digitized database of military-age men, and family members are already reporting messages from the local draft board going out to individuals to come and “confirm data.” This is usually a euphemism for getting press-ganged if you show up. And if you don’t, it’s a federal Russian crime. It’s also a war crime to mobilize citizens of an occupied territory to fight against their own country, and Russia signed the Geneva Convention to that effect, but it doesn’t seem like the modern Kremlin cares too much about that.
Russia bombards Ukraine
The big raid was on Wednesday; the main targets were Lviv and Ternopil. It was clear it was coming; the Ukrainian air watch channels were reporting Russian bombers concentrating and numbers of missiles probably aboard on Monday.
The worst damage was at least one cruise missile that hit an apartment building and blew out the top half, with lots of people sleeping inside. There were other hits and lots of people buried in the rubble, including entire families. On Friday, they were still searching for survivors, but the confirmed dead count was 31, of which apparently more than a dozen children, and close to 100 were injured. So not THE bloodiest Russian attack on Ukrainian civilians for the war, but one of.
I point this out because it was on Wednesday that the US “secretly” put forward its peace plan and began demanding Ukraine agree to the Russian, er, American terms in a week or else. On the day of the strike, there were US military representatives in Kyiv with the mission of telling the Ukrainians to sign the peace deal or else.
The names of those US military officials are Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the Army, and General Randy George, Chief of Staff of the US Army. Image.
To be clear, the Russian missiles finished killing the civilians in Ternopol at about 2 a.m., and about ten hours later, these two US government employees were in Kyiv telling representatives of the Ukrainian government the US thinks Ukraine should surrender to Russia.
Secretary Driscoll and General George certainly could have, but they made no public statement, notwithstanding the horrific attack that hit Ukraine only hours before.
I think it’s useful for the public to see evidence of senior US officials ignoring Russian war crimes, like the murder of more than two dozen civilians in their beds, taking place on the very day of their visit to a country under attack by Russia, and those American officials’ focus on brow-beating the country under attack to surrender.
As to the strike itself, actually, all in all, Ukrainian air defense forces had a reasonably successful night. Russia launched 476 Shahed drones and 48 missiles of various types, and the shoot down score was drones 442 of 476, Iskander-M ballistic missiles 0 or 1, Kh-101 cruise missiles (word is one of these killed all the people in Ternopil) 34 of 40, Kalibr cruise missiles 7 of 7.
Ukraine bombards Russia
The most significant attack took place on Tuesday, when the Ukrainians unleashed at least four ATACMS missiles at Voronezh, probably targeting a military base with troops and a nearby military airfield. Russian media tried to say all the missiles were shot down, but the Ukrainian internet called “BS” on that quickly. Here’s an article on that.
The big news, of course, is that first the US really did give Ukraine ATACMS after saying for the last nine months that it was a bad idea because it would harm the peace process by making Vladimir Putin mad. But besides that, a 180-degree turn on the US geopolitical dime, the missiles sent were a more modern version with a range out to 300 km (186 miles). This puts hundreds of soft sites like airfields and troop bases that the Russians had been planning to be out of cluster munition range, into Ukrainian cluster munition range. The critical question is how many missiles did the US send? Is this symbolic or is it serious?
Knowing what we know of the White House, the smart bet is it’s symbolic, and the moment the White House sees a marginal advantage in yanking the supply, it will.
Zero reaction from Moscow regarding the escalation by Washington, which this, by definition, is. Of course, on Friday, the news comes out (Reuters) that the US may shut down Ukrainian capacity to launch weapons like ATACMS by cutting Ukraine off from technical intelligence feeds. So maybe Moscow knew the Americans were just posturing.
As to this week’s long-range strikes, anyone who figures the Ukrainians can’t sustain the pace, so far, is wrong.
- Ryzan oil refinery, 14th USF, Nov. 15
- Volgograd, Lukoil oil refinery, big explosions and fires, + Rubikon site, Nov. 16
- Samara, Novinki power substation, Novokuibishev oil refinery, prop-driven drones, Bars rocket drones (4?), Gebshtab, Nov. 16
- Donetsk, city power station, total blackout, Nov. 17
- Omsk?, village Rostovka, natural gas pipeline pump site, massive explosion, flare-type fire, Nov. 18
- Starobeshevo, Zugres village? occupied Donetsk, heating plant, prop drones, light AAA, fires, Nov. 18
- Saki, occupied Crimea, city heating plant, report, Nov. 18
- Voronezh, 5 x ATACMS missiles, training ground hit? Nov. 18
- Ryazan, city power station, Novomichurisk, explosions and fires, Nov. 19
- Perm region, fuel train between Kordon and Shamary station, on fire, multiple cars, sabotage, Nov. 19
- Ryazan, city power station AND oil refinery, 10 explosions, fires, Nov. 20
- Saki, occupied Crimea, local heating plant, energetic small arms, Nov. 21
- Slayansk-Na-Kubani, Krasnodar region, oil refinery, damage?, Nov. 21
Ukrainian Air Force stuff – Rafales and F-16s
On Tuesday, Nov. 18, Zelensky was in Paris, and he signed an agreement with Macron that Ukraine, someday, will receive 100 Rafale fighter jets into the Ukrainian air force.
This is an excellent, fully modern aircraft, but neither president said where the money was coming from. Conventional wisdom: first deliveries may be in three years, and delivery complete in 2035. By which time, the Rafale will no longer be cutting-edge modern.
The Ukrainian Air Force on Monday released some statistics on the use of F-16 fighter jets since their appearance in Ukrainian skies in August 2024. They didn’t say how many have been lost, but we who watch this stuff are pretty sure the number is four; two because the pilot flew too close to a drone he was trying to blow up.
One F-16 was lost because the Americans had turned off data-sharing to “punish” the Ukrainians. This killed IFF, and an American Patriot missile decided an American F-16 was hostile, blue-on-blue shootdown. Dead Ukrainian pilot, destroyed European F-16 – but the White House showed its base it can bully foreigners. Thanks, America.
One more was lost in a very big Russian strike, so the theory is that some air defense system made the same mistake, but honestly.
On the happy statistics side, F-16s to date have intercepted more than 1,300 aerial targets, and in the big raid that murdered all the people in Ternopil with a cruise missile, F-16 and Mirage fighters shot down at least 10 cruise missiles fired by the Russians at Ukraine. So, it could have been more. Also, F-16s conducted more than 300 missions to destroy ground targets, which is guided bombs.
A video published by the Air Force profiled an F-16 ground crew that confirmed, yes, we pretty much never operate from a proper, fully equipped airfield. It’s always driving somewhere where the aircraft is received, turned around, and then driven somewhere else. If you listen carefully, the video gives the impression Ukraine puts 20-25 fighters in the air during a big strike, and it’s even clearer there are shortages of munitions for the F-16s, meaning both bombs and missiles.
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.