Generally, the big war news this week is continued, though certainly modest, Ukrainian offensive success in the southern sector. But also, the Ukrainian drone forces appear to be back to full tempo hitting targets in Russia. The Russian power grid and heating infrastructure strikes are still happening, but the intensity and damage caused – as this review and others predicted – is weakening.
There was more than the usual volume of poorly sourced reporting about Ukraine this week (that I noticed anyway), which isn’t exactly news but really news about something that was purported to be news, but wasn’t.
News from the front – Hulyaipole and Pokrovsk
For the record, once again, reports are surfacing that Pokrovsk and its adjacent town Myrnohrad have been taken by the Russians; it seems possible, but again, we’ve been hearing about the fall of Pokrovsk now for about six months. Milbloggers vary; some say it’s true, some say: “difficult situation.”
RIA Novosti, for its part, helped out by making things more confusing; on Monday, they issued a bulletin declaring Myrnohrad was not fully under the control of the mighty Russian army, then about four hours later, they canceled the report and told subscribers it was an oopsie.
“The report published on the agency’s news feeds with the headline ‘Gerasimov announced complete control over the southern part of Dimitrov’ is being canceled at the request of the Ministry of Defense,” RIA Novosti wrote.
This follows a Dec. 31 televised event in which Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov congratulated the 5th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade on the complete “liberation” of Myrnohrad. Generally speaking, the Ukrainian line on Myrnohrad that I can see is that there are still a few Marines in there, but they are under pressure – like they’ve been for months.
In the southern sector, the counter-offensive/opportunity counterattacks I flagged last week turned out to be real and more or less on the scale that they appeared to be at the time. There were about eight to ten attack operations carried out to capture lightly held villages in the gray zone, about half of them in the Hulyaipole sector and the rest either in the Donetsk or Kharkiv/Siversk sectors.
The number kicking around by Friday is that the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) had liberated about 200 square kilometers (77 square miles) of territory in about five days. Roughly speaking, that’s about one-to-two months of Russian assaults that need to take place for the Russians to recover that ground.
In all cases, the Ukrainian gains were by assault infantry backed by small groups of armored vehicles. As far as I can see, in no place has the individual attack been bigger than a company. There are more than a few Russian reports of “destroyed Ukrainian armored columns,” but nothing like that from the Ukrainian side, and a couple of the Assault Infantry units are now declaring mission complete. We were told to take villages X and Y, and we did.
As is normal in such situations, in the AFU, it’s OK to violate Operational Security (OPSEC) if your unit just captured someplace and you need to get photos of your guys next to the town entrance or city hall onto the internet for the world to see, so no one else can take credit.
Also, on Wednesday, the commander of 1st Assault Regiment, Dmitry “Perun” Filatov, in comments to the state-run Suspilne news agency, said of operations so far:
“I can assure everyone that we should not expect any grandiose counterattacks from our side. These are actions that are limited to the operational level. But these are important regroupings, important strikes that put the enemy in an awkward position.”
Here’s a link to a more detailed breakdown of the attacks, but the real news here is that the Ukrainians had an opportunity to take some initiative, and their choice was to grasp the opportunity, but they weren’t daring about it, which is in character for the AFU. It was very much: “We attack where we’re pretty much sure we’ll succeed.” Which is characteristic of AFU ground operations once the Americans got out of the business of telling the Ukrainians how to run ground operations.
Thursday development: The daily GenShab situation report said that the hottest sector on the front, viz., counts of Russian attacks, is Hulyaipole. This is pretty good confirmation that the Ukrainians did advance, and now that the Russians are reacting. The standard expectation will be to see evidence of Russian casualties because you can’t attack in strength without putting your troops out in the open, and drone coverage is dense.
All in all, battles are still in progress, but roughly, the Ukrainians seem to have recaptured in about ten days ground that the Russians fought and bled six months to conquer and then lose, is my read.
Missile Mensheviki
There was more evidence supporting my theory that the Russians are running out of missiles. Overnight on Sunday-Monday, there was this weird mission where the Russians fired four Zircon missiles (converted anti-ship, very fast, supposedly “hypersonic”) at Ukraine during the day. The Ukrainians announced they shot two down with Patriots and posted a video of one engagement. At the same time, the typical warnings came over the Telegram channels that the Russians were preparing another “big” attack.
Although there are plenty of comparisons between the London Blitz and the Russian bombardment of Ukraine, and certainly Putin has pounded the Ukrainians a lot longer than Hitler and Goering the British, here is one way the Ukrainians have it better: Name me another war when the civilians being targeted for air strikes get 72 hours warning the attack is coming, on their personal devices, even if the power in their homes is out. It doesn’t say a lot for Russian OPSEC, though…
So anyway, in due course, overnight Monday-Tuesday, Feb. 16-17, the Russians launched their latest “big” attack. Most of it was shot down, with one exception, as expected, the ballistic missiles. Here are the numbers, as reported by the Air Force:
Launched/shot down:
- 0/4 Iskander-M
- 20/20 Kh-101 air-launched cruise missiles
- 4/4 Iskander-K cruise missiles
- 1/1 Kh-59/69 guided aircraft missile
- 367/396 enemy UAVs of the Shahed, Gerbera, Italmas type, and other types of drones
Odesa, Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih, and Lviv/Stryi were targeted.
The Iskander-M was the type of ballistic missile used. There are two possibilities for why the Ukrainians didn’t shoot any of them down.
Possibility 1: The missiles got fired where the Ukrainians didn’t have any Patriot systems, which shoot the only missile the Ukrainians have, on paper, that can shoot down a ballistic missile, the PAC-3.
Possibility 2: Ukraine is out of PAC-3 missiles again. I am inclined towards this interpretation, and as willing as I am to slam the Americans for taking blood money so that Ukraine can have PAC-3 missiles even sometimes to defend its cities and people, I’m pretty sure the basic problem is that Raytheon doesn’t make PAC-3 missiles as fast as the Ukrainians can shoot them off.
Data point: Japan also makes PAC-3 missiles, but its constitution specifically forbids weapons sales to a country at war.
So how’s the damage in Ukraine?
Visibly, the Ukrainians are building their way out of the damage the Russians are causing, and as noted in the last review, the way I see it, the Ukrainian repair crews are clearly gaining on the Russian damage.
Where I am, early in the month, the power was on maybe four to five hours a day; now it’s up to 11-12. I am led to believe that a big piece of that is the arrival of European mobile generators, mainly from Poland and Germany, which have deployed and given the Ukrainian grid a 20 MW boost, and, fair or unfair, Kyiv likely got more than a fair share of that.
However, on Wednesday, the Kyiv city authorities reported that about one-fifth of the city, Darnytsia region basically, is going to be without heat until April because of damage caused earlier in the month by the Russian missile strikes on two heating plants. In general, the situation is visibly worse in Kharkiv, while Dnipro, Odesa, and Sumy appear to be marginally better off than the capital. Blackouts are less common elsewhere. The overall picture is unpleasant, inconvenient, problematic, costly, and nasty. But not anywhere near collapse.
Looking ahead, most obviously, the severe cold of the winter seems to have ended. But this is the third review I’m saying it. In my view, the bombardment battle will come down to quantities of available hardware, and specifically, Russian missiles and Ukrainian interceptor missiles. I have just seen a report that the Russians have now run through their stocks and so will have to stop big strikes until they can accumulate more missiles, which should be in 10 days to two weeks. That would be in March, and in March, heating buildings and meeting power grid load demand is a good deal easier than in the coldest part of the year.
Drones over Russia. Lots of drones. No, seriously, lots and LOTS of Drones
The Ukrainian drone operations are back in full swing after a relatively slow January and early February. The data isn’t confirmed, but per early reports, the Ukrainians, overnight Feb. 16-17, launched the biggest-yet attack on Russia, of the war, ever. That is, 200-plus drones, propeller- and jet-propelled mixed.
On the tactical level, I just hope NATO is watching. The Ukrainian drone strikes against Russia aren’t just clever and innovative and plucky and asymmetric, and so easily written off as not relevant in modern warfare. We are witnessing undeniable and worse-for-Russia effective military skill by the AFU drone forces. It maybe isn’t a surprise since they’ve been hard at it for more than six months, and ramping up to the present for about a decade. But in fact, the Ukrainians have honed systematic drone strikes down to a sophisticated, refined, maturing doctrine, and we are the witnesses.
Ukraine’s strikes vs. Russia on Feb. 17-18 are an excellent illustration, but the real point is it isn’t a one-off war-fighting achievement. The important bit is, this is how the Ukrainians do business, this is how they have been hitting targets in Russia with drones for months. The open-source data on this set of air raids worked out to be fairly extensive, so it’s a good opportunity to lay out the template for how the Ukrainians are attacking targets in Russia. True to type, the most recent strike operation had all manner of preparations and duck-lining-up work, and more than a little misdirection, that all took place well before the big event.
First step: Batter down the Russian air defenses where you’re going to make a hard punch.
I can’t say exactly when it happened, but the video was published on Feb. 17 by the drone forces, and per that video and a bunch of hue and cry and complaining on the Russian internet, over a few, before that date, special operations drone teams took out at least these Russian air defense system in southern occupied Ukraine: One each Pantsir-S1 anti-aircraft missile batteries near the cities of Kerch and Hvardiiske, and a medium-range S-300VM (NATO: SA-20 “Gargoyle”) launcher near the city of Mariupol. There were other potential strikes against air defenses in that area, but less data to back them up. Something blew up by Balaclava on Feb. 14, for instance. In any case, generally speaking, there is pretty good evidence here that there was a hole in Russian air defenses over Crimea starting around Feb. 15.
Second step: Make some general strikes in the area you want to hit, possibly to misdirect the Russians, but certainly to test whether the hole you cut out of the air defense network really is a hole.
Night of Feb. 15-16, fairly big wave of drones launched for the night, several targets, first, a fuel storage site by Sochi/Adler, Russian Kuban, second, an oil storage site by Taman, Russian shore of the Sea of Azov, vicinity Voina village. Both sites have been hit before; they are big and burn easily, and they were set on fire again. But the real pay-off for the Ukrainians, I am confident, is that the Ukrainian drones had to pass through the Russian air defense network over Crimea to get to the Kuban targets. I am speculating on this last bit, but it’s consistent with Ukrainian tactics in the past – same night, 20-40 Ukrainian drones penetrated airspace around Moscow, which naturally got a lot of important Russians’ attention.
Third step: Wind up and throw the big punch
Night of Feb. 16-18, here is what the Ukrainians claimed they hit, this was the 200-drone attack, it seems like some of the aircraft were FP-2. Everything listed below was claimed by the drone forces and they published photos and video:
Iskander missile storage site: 44.98895582966582, 34.42171802763875
Operating center for pilots from the Rubicon drone group: PTD of Rubicon pilots: 47.65527911014008, 36.39072377467088
Maintenance, fuel, and repair base: 46.975461367567156, 37.273045299558184
Military vehicle depot: 47.658760814385374, 36.69509945943041
Unit concentration: 47.85474526332487, 36.842571426185025
Ammunition depot: 46.977118979501235, 35.387999252781114
Maintenance Base: 48.135347364947314, 37.2907665676812
Military vehicle parking lot: 47.56791104222454, 36.7657963138158
The most important targets unquestionably were the first two. The ridiculously precise grid coordinates, I assume is the Ukrainian Drone Forces messaging to the Russians and world (possibly truthfully) that the AFU drone forces have NATO military-grade mapping and geo-location.
The Moscow attacks the night previously seem mostly to have aimed at ammunition storage sites; that’s a tentative conclusion, and no hard info on effects and damage, if any. But for sure, as a distraction, it worked.
Belarusian angle and electronic warfare
This is if you want a good look at how the electronic war is driving the drone war and, more widely, the air war. First, read this. It’s an interview on how the Ukrainian air defense network goes about dealing with Russian drones. You’ll need an autotranslator if you don’t know Ukrainian.
OK, now that you’re up to speed on electronics, jamming, networking, and mesh communications, here’s the news. According to Ukrainian milbloggers and, for instance, Euromaidan Press, the Russians have figured out a workaround to the shutdown of their Starlink terminals, which, as you recall, made their Shahed drones much less capable of flying around Ukraine under control.
According to the report, the Russians have set up a system of Shaheda “control relays.” This is effectively powerful transmitters/receivers in Belarus that communicate with Shahed drones across the border in Ukraine, and by this range extension are able to operate drones via Starlink comms, in Ukraine’s northern regions. So, particularly, this is Volyn, Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv regions. Further, supposedly, these repeaters were set up in the second half of 2025.
The original Russian idea behind the repeaters was effectively to strengthen/give an unjammed source of Starlink data to a drone over Ukraine when the drone is in the vicinity of something the Ukrainians are likely to protect with jamming, like a bridge, railroad switching site, or energy facility.
The new wrinkle supposedly is that now these Belarusian repeaters are being used to allow drones to communicate with each other and so exchange (via controllers) data, so that if an initial drone, for instance, bumps into jamming or is engaged by air defenses and survives, following drones can adjust their course precisely. Even better, the drones – supposedly – communicate with each other in flight, so knocking one drone down doesn’t stop the overall data exchange. This is called meshing, apparently.
Which is all as may be, but this week the Ukrainian shoot-down rate of Shaheds is pretty high. But something worth watching. And unfortunately, it’s not safe to ignore it, because if we know anything about this war, this is far from the last tech enhancement we’re going to see…
Bad news from Russia
This is just random news items that crossed my screen this week. You see stuff like this all the time in Ukraine. One week. It never makes international news. So, when a person tells you Russia is massive and unbeatable and a colossus, to a person in Ukraine (and probably Russia), that person really sounds like an idiot.
- Krasnodar region stops all state-funded construction, no funds
- Bank confiscation of homes for loan non-payment in 2025 was eight times more than in 2022
- January price for a kilo of cucumbers in Moscow grocery stores: $3.90 to $13
-Russian oil hits new low price on spot markets: $29/BBL. As a reminder, for the Russian state budget to have a minor deficit in 2026, the planning price was $59/BBL
- Yandex Maps (Russia’s version of Google Maps) has started concealing imagery of military cemeteries (not confirmed nationwide)
- 20-25% of all stocks in the Russian market are evaluated as overvalued, with default possible
- Russian railroad, by conventional accounting, is bankrupt
- Bloomberg reports Russia slowed oil drilling in 2025 to the lowest level in three years
- Russian media reports Russia has overtaken Germany and almost caught up with the USA in terms of the average price of a new car, source is Autostat
- Gerasimov in a formal media statement on Thursday, reported to Putin that Kupyansk was captured. This is the third time since December. It isn’t, we are watching the credibility of the Kremlin crumble in real time, and more importantly, so are Russian taxpayers.
Palliative palaver
This may or may not be war-related news, depending on whether or not you think European solidarity in the face of US pressure, or not, is relevant to the war. The image is from a Silvester parade in Germany in which a float shows less than full respect for the Presidents of the United States and Russia.
Last Friday, during the Munich conference, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a really polished, transatlantic-sounding speech in which he told Europe the US really likes Europe and values Europe, but what Europe needs to do is run itself like Donald Trump is running the United States.
As to Ukraine and Russia, he mentioned Ukraine five times. The basic message: It’s a failed peace process, but only the United States was capable of getting the sides to talk. He claims military talks are a step forward. He went on to say that Russia possibly isn’t serious about peace and is playing for time. This doesn’t really support the argument that US foreign policy is advancing, which is not exactly a peace process to be proud of. Russia is mentioned seven times, five times in reference to the stalled peace process, twice in reference to US pressure on India to stop buying Russian oil.
Then Rubio skipped the group discussion at Munich on the Russo-Ukraine War, and then he left Munich to visit these two countries critical to US interests in Europe: Slovakia and Hungary. Both of whose leaders, as we know, support Putin and greater Russian influence in Europe.
So, the European reaction has been, well, European. By which I mean it was subtle, cutting, and probably too clever for the American decision-makers to realize they were being insulted.
The EU’s Kaja Kallas on US claims free speech is under siege in Europe: “Coming from a country that is number two in the Press Freedom Index, hearing criticism regarding press freedom from a country that is fifty-eighth on this list [the US] is interesting.”
Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski on US insistence it is driving Russo-Ukraine negotiations and has real skin in the Russo-Ukraine War:
“Let me be clear. Europe is now paying for this war. We are buying American weapons to deliver to Ukraine. US supplemental package ran out last year. We are paying, this is our security, and therefore we deserve a seat at the negotiating table.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Ukrainians’ view of US negotiating tactics: Americans too often return to the topic of concessions, and too often these concessions are discussed only in the context of Ukraine, and not Russia.
US Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius on how he doesn’t believe Rubio when Rubio says the US wants to work with Europe: “The Americans are looking with some kind of worry if any continent, or in any way, there might appear a country or power which starts to become hegemonic in that area. China is the danger for American interest in Asia. China can become a hegemon in Asia. In Europe, they see the European Union as an organization that can become a hegemon. And that is why they are saying that is not what they want to see.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on changes to US policy led by Rubio and his boss, Trump: “The international order based on rights and rules is currently being destroyed.”
To an American unaware of how Germany works, this sounds like a mild reprimand. To anyone even marginally aware of how root-basic Ordnung and procedure are in German society, Merz’s comments are close to – for a German – one of the worst insults possible. This was no less than the Chancellor of Germany pointing out that the United States does not respect Ordnung.
The funny part is that Merz spent a lot of time in the US, and there is zero chance he wasn’t aware how the comment would go over the heads of people like Rubio. The ironic aspect of all this is that by most standards, Rubio is a skilled, intelligent politician with good knowledge of foreign policy and who is well aware of how extremism within the White House is undermining America’s standing abroad.
Flying tigers over the Dnipro?
This is NOT news, this is my rubbishing a news item that I consider inaccurate.
So on Tuesday, the info platform IntelligenceOnline, which is a pretty reliable French group that writes on military and strategic issues, reported that a mixed squadron of US, Dutch, and Ukrainian pilots was operating in the skies over Ukraine and doing good work shooting down Russian drones and missiles. As you might guess, this blew up all over the Ukrainian internet, and then the report made some good ground in the mil-geek information feeds outside Ukraine.
The next day, the Ukrainian air force, with a rare attempt at humor, said no, there is no such squadron, only Ukrainians fly combat missions over Ukraine, the IntelligenceOnline report is just wrong, but if there was such a unit, then definitely Tom Cruise would be running it. Yes, it’s true there are NATO pilots that have helped out the Ukrainian pilots with transition and systems operations training, but again, it’s just Ukrainian pilots actually doing the flights, full stop.
I can add three points, all of which make me skeptical that anybody but Ukrainians is flying F-16s over my apartment building.
First, the presence of a small number of NATO fighter pilots in Ukraine as liaison/assistance guys working with the Ukrainian air force has been an open secret since about 2024. The common view here is that it is a given that there are a few NATO officers with flyboy skills in Ukraine, helping out with the transfer of whatever air defense intelligence NATO/France is passing on to the Ukrainian air force, and to a lesser extent, helping the Ukrainians figure out what NATO weapon might work against what threat. Since it’s the Ukrainians, it is safe to assume that a significant portion of those conversations is the Ukrainians thinking about using some NATO weapon or system in ways NATO never planned.
Probably also, the air officers in Ukraine help anticipate maintenance or spotting operational issues, a/k/a: “Dude, we know you are Ukrainians, but take it from us it’s a bad idea to think about landing an F-16 THERE, an F-16 can’t handle those kind of potholes and even if you have a high opinion of Ukrainian bovine patriotism, that F-16 won’t necessarily be flyable if one of those cows eating the grass next to the landing site you’re thinking about, decides to wander onto the runway.”
It’s not that big a leap that a foreign information platform not overly aware about the nuts and bolts of operating F-16s in an actual war in actual Ukraine could parse the information so that “foreign pilots confirmed on the ground in Ukraine” turned into “foreign pilots in the air in Ukraine.”
Second, from a practical point of view, unless said US/Dutch pilot was fluent in Ukrainian, just Russian wouldn’t cut it, then he’s going to be useless in the air war here. English is useless. Ground control speaks Ukrainian. Maintenance, personnel, and medical documents are in Ukrainian. Communications with other unit aircraft, Ukrainian air defense speaks Ukrainian. Aside from specific NATO systems, everyone’s display is in Ukrainian. Most of the text messages are in Ukrainian, with a small percentage in Russian.
(In this war, if a guy writes Russian or speaks Russian, then frequently it seems like it’s an emergency. But I digress.)
Anyway, you ask me, anyone who thinks an English-speaking F-16 pilot could just hop into a jet and go knock down Russian drones and missiles over Ukraine, in Ukrainian air space, without coordinating his flight plan and intercepts and deviations from same with the rest of the Ukrainian air defense command, has very little understanding about how the Ukrainian air defense works and how the Ukrainian Air Force works.
Third thing, this is not training or a dog-and-pony exercise to show big shots and journalists. This is actual war, pressure, and chances of errors are orders of magnitude higher than in peacetime. “Could be flying the planes for the Ukrainians” isn’t even close to reasonable grounds; the standard that has to be met is “Would be rational for them to fly the planes for the Ukrainians from a real-life, wartime point of view.”
Pilots are like gold; they’re hugely costly to replace, harder even than the aircraft themselves. No one involved, the Ukrainian air force, the national government, the NATO risk-mitigators, never mind the pilots, are likely to see all that potential miscommunication as a reasonable foundation for an acceptable risk.
Then there is the tech argument. The source article says that a big reason foreign pilots are supposedly flying intercepts over Ukraine is that they have a lot of experience with the Lockheed Martin Sniper targeting pod in operations over Afghanistan. What’s that?
Well, in simple terms, it’s a sophisticated day/night television/infrared sensor with a laser designator and data-processing, so that what the sensor “sees” can be translated to a target that the rest of the aircraft’s systems can attack. So basic issue, obviously, Dutch or US pilots flying over Afghanistan might be hugely experienced using the pod – but not particularly against airborne targets; there was no Taliban air force. Yes, the pod can detect an airborne target, and it certainly would be useful in targeting a cruise missile somewhere in the sky, but it’s a stretch to believe a Dutch or US pilot mercenary would be really wartime skilled at that kind of engagement.
The first time we open source guys spotted a Sniper Pod on an F-16 in Ukraine was just three months ago, in December, and it’s pretty certain the Ukrainians didn’t have the system much earlier than that.
Put it all together, and a much more reasonable explanation is that there are a few former F-16 pilots, Dutch and US, quite possibly being paid as consultants by Lockheed Martin, who are working with the Ukrainian Air Force to figure out how the Sniper Pod works best against cruise missiles and drones, which is knowledge very valuable to NATO. All in all, it’s more important for NATO, is to have detailed data on each engagement and what worked and didn’t, than to have some pilots driving F-16s risking getting shot down over Russia-controlled territory.
So, color me very skeptical. But the discussion, at least, is worth an F-16 image.
Heck, and a Warhawk a/k/aTomahawk Mk IIB in Nationalist Chinese livery for that matter.
The Economist just reported Budanov wants peace now
This is another non-news item that somehow has reached the mainstream, and I think it’s all a lot of hooey.
The report, I’m not making it up. The gist is that the head of Ukraine’s military agency is leading a dove/get a quick peace deal wing of the Ukrainian negotiating team in Geneva; he’s opposed by “hard-liners,” and Zelensky’s on the fence. Here’s the article (behind a paywall).
Now, I try to avoid directly challenging other media, and I have read The Economist for years, and frequently quite agree with them. However, either The Economist somehow magically got an inside channel to the Ukrainian peace talks negotiating team, or they were smoking something when they wrote the article. Seriously.
The nub of the report is that supposedly in the Ukrainian negotiating team there is a split between a hardline, no concessions group led by former (but somehow still pulling strings behind the scene) Presidential administration head Andriy Yermak, and a softer-line/make concessions and get-peace-now team (Economist uses the term “pragmatic”) led by our favorite superspy, Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency.
I am not Budanov’s buddy, nor do our children go to kindergarten together. However, at the absolute minimum, if what The Economist is reporting about Budanov is true, then Budanov has reversed major political positions he has held for years and in some cases for more than a decade, and I and hundreds of other Ukrainian media have been reporting on the guy for years, so this is all public record. To wit:
Budanov has consistently taken a hardline stance against territorial concessions. He has emphasized fighting until the full restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders.
He has repeatedly stated, in lockstep with the Zelensky/general Ukraine position, that Ukraine will not, under any circumstances, recognize or formally turn over Ukrainian citizens and the territories they live in to Russian control; this is an absolute red line.
His public position is that Russia doesn’t seek territory; it seeks Ukraine’s destruction, and there is also zero space between him and Zelensky.
In the recent Abu Dhabi talks, the Russians again demanded that Ukraine hand over Donbas and other Ukrainian territories to Russia. Budanov was on the negotiating team; the proposal was flatly rejected.
Budanov has said Russia will remain Ukraine’s enemy until there is regime change in Russia, and Ukraine can only negotiate from a position of military strength; concessions on that are tantamount to national suicide.
Budanov, from time to time, points out that his spies and operators move about Crimea and other occupied territories freely. He can point to Russian planes, bases, ammunition dumps, air defense systems, warships blown up, and collaborators and senior Russian officers assassinated, so it’s silly to say de facto Russia controls those places, prima facie, no, they don’t, not completely.
I’m sorry, the only way to read The Economist article and not giggle is to be unaware of what Kyrylo Budanov has said in public over the past decade. But if I’m proved wrong, then I promise to admit my mistake and unjustified criticism of The Economist here.
I ain’t gonna hold my breath though.
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.