The big news this week has to be the confirmation of major, long-term, substantial, and, above all, probably sufficient Western arms support to Ukraine, with hard figures in hard currencies attached. Without.The.United.States.
But this week also saw more Russian bombardment, a big mess with Russian frontline communications systems, and maybe a mini-Ukrainian counteroffensive.
The US is the irreplaceable ally – just don’t mention Ukraine
OK, we have now gone through about a year of the Kremlin and the Americans saying that Europe can’t do anything, Ukraine can’t do anything, that the superpowers will decide Ukraine’s fate, and Europe can just watch.
Last week, we saw the EU approve €90 billion ($106.7 billion) in loans to Ukraine secured by Russian money held in European banks, which basically is sufficient to keep Ukraine fighting for two years without other outside support. The Russians are very unlikely ever to see the “loans” repaid, because to do that, they would have to get the Ukrainians to agree the Ukrainians have no claims against the Russians. The Ukrainian government has been keeping count, the claim for destroyed buildings, killed people, and so forth, by the Russian army in Ukraine, is now north of half a trillion dollars.
The other important thing about this cash infusion is that it is critical support in serious volume, without the United States. They’re out.
Specifically, on Friday, there was yet another meeting of the Ukraine support states, which we know and love as the Ramstein Group. The result was hard numbers and credible commitments. From the point of view of the Kremlin, this is a geopolitical disaster of the first order. It means Russia’s strategy to break Western arms support to Ukraine has failed. It means that if and when it comes to peace talks with Ukraine, Russia is in no way in the driver’s seat.
The total figure was $38 billion. Here’s how that will break down, ally by ally:
UK – £500 million ($681.9 million) for air defense, £150 million ($204.5 million) to buy US equipment for Ukraine immediately (PURL). Total for Britain this year promised – £3 billion ($4.09 billion).
Germany – €1 billion ($1.19 billion) for the purchase of drones for Ukraine, financing to integrate air defense over Ukrainian cities, and financing for drone assault units. Total for Germany this year promised – €11.5 billion ($13.64 billion).
Norway – $7 billion promised in 2026, of which $1.4 billion for drones, $700 million for air defense, $200 million for artillery, $125 million for PURL.
Netherlands – Pledged at least 0.25% of GDP, which works out to about €2.95 billion. Short term €90 million to PURL.
Belgium – €1 billion ($1.19) promised for 2026, no short-term figure
Sweden – €1.2 billion ($1.42 billion) in aid, €100 million to PURL. Commitment for 2026 – €3.7 billion ($4.39 billion).
Denmark – Commitment to $2 billion in total in 2026.
Spain – Commitment to $1.2 billion in 2026.
Canada – $50 million to Ukraine for the production of arms, $45 million for medical support.
Iceland – $8 million to the PURL, $2.4 million to other weapons
Lithuania – Commitment $265 million for 2026.
Latvia – Commitment to around €106 million ($126 million) for 2026.
Estonia – Commitment to around €105 million ($125 million) for 2026.
Australia – Will help buy US weapons for Ukraine, no figure given.
Portugal – Will help buy US weapons for Ukraine, artillery shells for Ukraine, and will transfer armored vehicles and drones under the SAFE program.
Turkey – “Will strengthen Ukraine’s air defense with its contribution.” Who knows what that means.
Slovenia – $5 million assistance package.
Russia bombards Ukraine
I’ll spare you last week’s list of strikes, but in general, the Ukrainian drone units are returned to standard operations, hitting a mix of military production and energy infrastructure targets.
Yes, the Russians are still trying to make the Ukrainians surrender by knocking out the power grid and city heating, but the missile and drone counts have peaked and from where I sit, the attacks pretty clearly are tailing off. Also, the very-cold-for-Ukraine minus 10/15 degrees Celsius (14/5 degrees Fahrenheit) temperatures are passed, and generally the forecast for the rest of February is daytime temps hovering around freezing, like normal.
On the actual attack numbers, there’s been just one big strike in the past week, overnight Wednesday-Thursday. This was six days after the previous attack, and smaller than the previous attack, which I won’t deconstruct because you can read about that in the previous review.
This time it was 24 Iskander-M + S-300 missiles, plus a single X-59/69 cruise missile, plus 219 drones. This is more evidence the Russians are running low on proper ballistic missiles, the pattern is when they are bombarding hard for a while they go through Iskander-M stockpiles and start firing off S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, a weapon that is highly inaccurate in a ground role (CEP of 100s of meters) and although good for killing people if it happens to blow up near them, it’s not overly destructive or good for destroying power grid or heating plants, because the warhead was designed to shred an aircraft.
As to the Wednesday-Thursday overnight strikes, the targets were Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odesa, and, once again, the power grid and heating infrastructure were in the crosshairs at all locations.
So, without being overly optimistic, just by the numbers, that’s two big strikes in a row where the Russians have tried to beef up their ballistic missile numbers with S-300 filler. The history is, this is an indicator they’ve run out or are running out of “real ballistic” missiles like the Iskander-M.
The Ukrainians claimed 15 ballistic missiles, types not identified, 197 drones, and a cruise missile shot down. In general, if and always if you believe the Ukrainian kill claims, this was a fairly solid air defense victory. I, for one, can’t remember when the Ukrainians shot down that many ballistic missiles in a single night. We should bear in mind that it’s probably a lot easier to shoot down an S-300 anti-aircraft missile than an Iskander-M missile.
This is also a good place to record that during the day on Wednesday, the Russians launched two Kinzhal missiles – these are “aeroballistic” missiles, meaning a fast-moving jet drops them and if all goes well, they fly for a while at close to standard ballistic missile speeds. The drops were over the Kursk region, and the target was somewhere in the Lviv region. The Ukrainians say they shot both down, which, if true, is funny because the Kremlin for years said the Kinzhal is impossible to shoot down. I haven’t seen any reports of ground damage in Lviv.
It’s clear that for the past three weeks the Russians have been trying to black out Kyiv and the other major cities, and that though damage has been caused, it’s also clear the Ukrainian repair effort is gaining. I assume this is thanks to a combination of emergency deliveries of small generators from Western countries, reduced Russian missile and drone hits, and better/more ruthless management of the existing power grid by the power company.
Last weekend, the central part of the country was living on very tightly rationed electricity, and everyone knew why: The Russians had hit a giant substation near the city of Khmelnytsky, and that made delivery of power from the nuclear stations elsewhere impossible, and that was felt worst in Kyiv, which sucks up much more electricity than any other city. There was no announcement, but it was pretty obvious when the damage was either repaired or bypassed; available electricity went from two to four hours per day to six to eight. Right now, where I am, they seem to promise five to six and deliver eight to ten.
As to heating, in Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the strikes knocked 460 buildings off heating and that the count of cold buildings in the city went up to 2,600, most of them on the left bank around the Darnytsia district.
How bad is that? One indicator is the Ukrainian government, which announced, on Thursday, several hours after the attacks, that Kyiv’s TETs-5 and TETs-6 heating plants had been damaged, as had gas pipes and compressors that the stations need for fuel, as had pumps and water filtration systems. So TETs-5 would be offline for 24 hours, TETs-6 for 48 hours. I can confirm the heat appears to be returning on that schedule, and in some places faster.
Same-day calm predictions of repair completion deadlines are not the kind of communication you would expect from a government panicked and unable to deal with the situation. See the section below on Telegram for an example of what panicked and incapable looks like.
There are different results in different neighborhoods; I know people in the Darnytsia region who have power 24/7 because they don’t have heat. The authorities made public ahead of time that this was the plan. I haven’t heard people gripe much about “unfairness” in power cuts; everyone is still blaming the Russians. That may seem reasonable to you, reading this in a wealthy Western country, but for Ukrainians, not blaming the government for power cuts, or government corruption for power cuts, is already peculiar, and not doing so for months at a time – speaking as an outsider here – borders on the miraculous.
All in all, the Ukrainians took the punch, and it knocked them back a little, but it didn’t stagger them at all. The punch a week ago was worse.
So, as the last review stated, the way I see it, the bottom line is unchanged. This is an air war where material will be decisive. Russia needs to deliver a certain amount of destructive force to cause serious damage to Ukraine’s power and heating grid, and Ukraine needs as much air defense and repair capacity as it can get to inhibit that. As I write this, it’s very clear the Russians don’t have anything like the firepower they would need to cause permanent, lasting, critical damage.
They’ve been trying for nearly two months now, and although they’ve caused problems and real difficulty, they’ve also demonstrated they are incapable of achieving that basic objective. This is a serious victory on the psychological front for the Ukrainians, because every time the Kremlin is shown to be incapable of doing what it says it has set out to do, the next Kremlin attempt to be the tough guy gets that much more difficult, and if pushed too far then the Kremlin starts getting public unrest. Which brings me neatly to the next section.
Starlink, WhatsApp, YouTube and Telegram and Russian communications
This has been a very bad week for Russian 21st-century communications. The first problem is a carry-over from last week, as many of you recall the Ukrainians asked Elon Musk to cut off Russian users from Starlink, which were accessing the SpaceX satellite network using gray or black market Starlink terminals.
Last Friday, the cut-off went into effect, so for all this week the Russian military has been grappling with trying to fight a war while frontline units have no internet.
In terms of actual fighting, it seems like Russian attacks are down about 20-25% and effectiveness at least isn’t improved, but, the small groups of infiltrating infantry haven’t stopped. It is possible to say that Ukrainian shoot-downs of Russian drones appear – this based on videos and Air Force statements – to have increased somewhat, again maybe 20% or so, and if one wishes, one might link that with Russian operators’ being forced to use something besides the internet to navigate with, which makes the aircraft more vulnerable to detection and interception.
The most visible Russian reaction has been to set up, where possible, antennae that broadcast WiFi from internet access delivered by a land line or mobile phone. Aside from the obvious difficulty of creating a network of antennae near front lines where the power is pretty much always off, the antennae are visible and they broadcast. I’ve seen lots of reports that Ukrainian frontline drone teams are taking out the antennae as fast as the Russians set them up.
The biggest tactical effect of the shutdown for the Russians appears to be with UGVs (ground robots) because those things use Starlink almost without exception, and now the Russian ones have stopped. Since the primary use of UGVs by both sides is carrying supplies forward and wounded rearward in drone-dense sectors, it is safe to assume that things got worse for Russian infantry stuck out in some accumulation position or a Russian infantryman wounded and needing evacuation. Those jobs now need to be done on foot or by manned vehicle, either way increasing exposure to Ukrainian drones.
If one looks at how the Ukrainians use Starlink, then, Russian combined arms planning and flexible targeting just became much more difficult, because the easy way to communicate the location of a spotted target and to coordinate killing it with a drone, artillery or raid needs to be fast, Starlink and internet foster that, and now much of that capacity is lost to the Russian army. All in all, Russia losing Starlink isn’t going to win the war for Ukraine, but it probably will increase Russian casualty rates and could possibly reduce Ukrainian casualty rates.
But there was also a funny side to Starlink getting yanked from the Russians. Over the week, news reports surfaced, not really solidly-confirmed, that Russian forward operators were so desperate to get Starlink back they were pressuring Ukrainian prisoners of war to get their relatives to buy legitimate Starlink terminals, which would be, somehow, turned over to the Russians.
Then, on Thursday, reports come out that Ukraine’s inimitable HUR military intelligence agency set up bots offering quick and easy purchase of new Starlink terminals, or “whiteization” of gray/black market Starlink terminals, just contact this address and tell us where your terminal is. By this expedient, these very unconfirmed reports say, more than 2,500 potential collaborators sent in their contact information to HUR, a portion of them with grid locations of Starlink terminals still in possession by Russian units. Another 31 morons apparently sent in their contact information volunteering, in Ukraine as Ukrainian citizens, to get a Starlink terminal to the Russian military in exchange for cash. Speaking of which, again, there is no corroborating information, so take this or leave it, supposedly, the platform took in several thousand dollars from Russian service personnel desperate to get themselves a functional Starlink terminal.
Ukrainian hackers from the 256th Cyber Assault Division, as well as the volunteer group InformNapalm (whom I suspect to be the same people), took credit for this clever scam.
This is so in keeping with the way HUR fights a war that even if it’s all invented and just messaging to make HUR seem all-powerful, it’s such great advertising and clever tactics that it’s still brilliant. So the Ukrainian internet is chortling about that.
On Tuesday-Wednesday, moreover, the Kremlin, for real reasons best known to itself, but ostensibly in order to protect national security, enforced a major slowdown on the Telegram messaging app, shut down the WhatsApp messaging app for sure, and shut down YouTube, probably – haven’t been able to confirm that.
The hue and cry from the Russian milblogger crowd and even the Russian general public was massive: Telegram is overwhelmingly the main way Russians exchange digital information and get news. So civilians were mad they couldn’t exchange videos and scroll their favorite channels whenever they felt like it.
Meanwhile in the Russian army, most units that were not pure Russian regulars – so DPR, LPR, “volunteers,” the milblogger crowd, and a few actual fighting units, it seems – went through the roof. Telegram is how we set up meetings, transfer target information, request supplies, report arrival on objective, etc. Etc. A common irate complaint was along the lines of “the idiot generals want us to communicate with carrier pigeons.”
Two Kremlin spokesmen did not help things on Friday, with Dima Peskov telling reporters he “can’t believe” Telegram is even used by the Russian military to any serious degree (my read is it’s all over and on the tactical level it’s inescapable), and another hack named Andrei Kartapolov, Chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee, told reporters in Moscow Russian forces use Telegram “minimally” during combat operations and in any case Telegram is a NATO plot.
A common observation on the Russian internet about this mess is that the net effect has been to force millions of Russians who were happy just to live their lives and watch kitten videos on Telegram to use a VPN for the first time in their lives, which will expose them to dangerous and seditious foreign information sources like BBC and Fox News. I’m not sure it’s happening, but that’s the complaint.
The fighting and again with the assault infantry
Across the front the situation is stable, however, there is a new round of reports of Russian attacks and pressure in the Pokrovsk sector. If you look, Ukrainian milbloggers are using the term “difficult,” which in the past has been code for “our guys may have to retreat.” This may be the case but of course, the Ukrainians have reserves, and we have been hearing about the imminent fall of Pokrovsk for about the last nine months.
Apropos of Russian tactical issues connected with Starlink and Telegram, there has been little hard evidence of Ukrainian forces taking serious advantage of the new Russian weakness, if a real weakness it is. The most dynamic sector with Ukrainian troops gaining ground seems still to be in the Zaporizhzhia region, around Hulyaipole, where it appears the 225th Assault Regiment captured a village called Ternuvate. The 1st Assault Regiment was in action as well but I’m not clear exactly where.
Unconfirmed reports say two other assault outfits – 82nd Air Assault Brigade (allegedly deploying to the area of the village Novomykolaivka) and 475th Assault Regiment, 92nd Assault Brigade are deploying to the Zaporizhzhia sector as well, both reportedly from the Kharkiv sector. Close readers may recall that two weeks ago, reports cropped up that the Ukrainians were concentrating reserves in Kharkiv region, so perhaps this is some or all of these forces getting committed to Zaporizhzhia region. On Friday, more reports surfaced of Ukrainian “progress” in the Zaporizhzhia region.
My guess is the conventional one that the Ukrainians are in fact trying to take advantage of the train wreck state of Russian tactical communications, but it’s local attacks and not, as you may read elsewhere, any major counteroffensive.
But for me what was equally interesting was the report, on Monday, that Valentyn Manko, commander of Ukrainian assault infantry forces, has just been sacked. He and his troops, raised by and for most of 2025 subordinate directly to Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky and the General Staff, scored some decent victories around Pokrovsk in fall fighting, according to Manko, thanks to excellent training and good discipline and morale, and according to his critics because Syrsky funneled replacements to Manko’s units and starved the regular Ukrainian army.
However, about three days later, reports came out that no, the previous reports weren’t accurate, he’s still in the job.
So I can’t say for sure Manko got sacked. But what is interesting is that in the fighting around Hulyaipole, which started following a defensive failure by two territorial defense units stretched too far for their sectors, Manko’s infantrymen were the fire brigade units. In about three weeks of fighting, the Russians were stopped, but the assault infantry really didn’t retake too much ground.
The important, if obscure detail is that neither of the follow-on units supposedly on the way to Hulyaipole, neither the 475th Regiment of the 92nd Brigade nor the 82nd Brigade, are Manko-trained; they’re just pretty competent pieces of the regular Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).
So, if you believe the stories that in-fighting and back-stabbing at the upper levels of the AFU is up there with Chicago city politics and papal elections, we are seeing another step by AFU leadership away from personal units loyal to individual commanders, and towards traditional military discipline and normal chains of command. Or, attempts by the “regulars” to displace the non-standard “pets” of the army leadership.
In other words, politicking at the higher command levels of the AFU seems to be alive and well. But at least, 82nd Brigade and the 92nd Brigade are among the very best fighting formations the AFU has, and both are regular units that existed long before the war started.
Screen grab from unit video calling on troops to stay with their unit from 82nd Air Assault Brigade. A Ukrainian assault infantryman relaxes in winter conditions with some feline comrades. (Image published on Feb. 8 by the 82nd Air Assault Brigade).
Ukraine bombards Russia or the flight of the Flamingos
This week saw the first proper, conventional strike by Ukraine’s long-advertised Flamingo missiles against a real target, and per early reports, it was effective. The attack went in on Thursday but since this is the AFU, the precursors and preparation took place several days and possibly weeks before. The site hit was a giant ammunition dump near the city of Vologograd, so geographically think central south Volga River, due east from the Donetsk region.
Over the past week and possibly even before it, Ukraine’s long-range drone troops have been dropping videos showing their drones blowing up Russian air defense systems. Sometimes the strikes have been geo-located, sometimes you have to take the drone guys’ word for it, and in all cases the videos probably weren’t showing up on the day of the strikes. Still, it was clear the Ukrainians were hunting for air defense radars, launchers, and support equipment, particularly in Crimea, Donetsk region, Rostov region, and Vologograd region.
(There also has been a separate air defense suppression effort in progress in the Belgorod region, but there the objective clearly has been to clear the way for HIMARS rockets and drones that have just about blacked out Belgorod city, its objective worse than Kyiv and possibly much worse. Here’s a link to a report on that.
On Wednesday, the long-range drone strike group 412 USF Brigade “Nemesis” published video of its aircraft destroying two Russian Tor-M2 (NATO: SA-15 “Gauntlet”) systems. The weapon is Russia’s main tool for intercepting low-flying, long-range drones. The location of the strikes wasn’t made public, but by timing the strikes likely took place in the past two weeks. Reportedly, one in Donetsk and the second in the Kherson region.
There was also, per a Tuesday report, a Tor-M2 “Arctic” system destroyed at an unspecified location. Russian air defense radars claimed destroyed by the Ukrainians over the past ten days, locations either in southern Russia or occupied Donetsk/Crimea: 48Ya6-K1 Podlets radar, 55Zh6U Nebo-U radar,1L119 Nebo-SVU radar. Again, none of this took place on the day, but most likely a week to ten days ago. It could have been just opportunity attacks, but it also could have been the Ukrainians’ chewing a gap into the Russian air defense belt.
But also on Wednesday, on Feb. 11, the long range drone troops announced they had hit and set on fire the Lukoil-Volgogradneftepererabotka oil refinery in Volgograd in an overnight attack. Russian civilian video and reports generally confirmed the strike and pointed to at least two hits to the site’s cracking tower. We have seen a lot of Russian refineries get hit and set on fire, nothing special here. This was another one. The business wires reported on Thursday that the refinery had shut down pending repairs.
What was really, really Ukrainian was what came next. The next night, so Feb. 11-12, at least five Flamingo missiles appear in the air space above Vologograd, GRAU military unit 57229-51, located in the village of Kotluban in the Volgograd region. This is a giant ammunition storage site, one of the key munitions hubs for Russian army operations in Ukraine and the Caucasus. It’s rated to hold up to 264,000 tons of ammunition, and according to the Ukrainians, that’s where the Russian army stores its Iskander missiles and Shahed drones before it launches them at Ukraine.
Civilians recorded five giant, orange flash explosions and black columns of smoke. The missiles showed up after sunrise. There were no reports of interceptions. Authorities ordered evacuation buses sent to Kotluban, and reported a fire “at a defense ministry site” there from “falling debris.” However, for the record, NASA’s FIRMS satellites showed no fires, and since we have been doing this work for years, we know the FIRMS satellites pretty much always pick up big fires when the Ukrainians blow up a Russian ammo dump.
Flamingos have a really big warhead, 800 kilograms. The Russians say they shot them all down. That there were big ground explosions – somewhere – is established. But the dump blown up? There may be evidence of that, but I haven’t seen it yet.
It’s not possible to say the Kotluban strike was a success; we’ll see, but the lead-up to it was textbook Ukrainian planning: detailed, long-term, focused, and relatively small scale. A half dozen missiles for a giant ammo dump is careful ammo expenditure; it’s not a saturating strike.
Supposedly 50 or even a 100 of these missiles have been manufactured in January alone, but, some, including me, have questioned whether the weapon is real or vaporware. Later in the day, the Ukrainian military took credit for the strike and published video of six launches.
So it’s fairly safe to say that the Flamingo missile is operational. That fact is more bad news for Russia, because beside the big warhead it has range enough – supposedly 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) – to reach not just to Moscow but places like the Russian bomber bases and submarine pens by Murmansk, Russia’s main Arctic Sea LNG export port Sabetta on the shores of the Kara Sea, or Russia’s heartland oil fields in central Siberian Tyumen region. It’s a huge territory that used to be safe from Ukrainian strikes.
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.