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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   24398 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Your Quarterly Ukraine War check-in

Three and a half months ago, we checked in on the war in Ukraine. That post was itself a check in to follow up on dire predictions from the pro-Russia posters in fall of 2025 that the loss of Pokrovsk was heralding the collapse of Ukrainian front lines and encirclement of Ukrainian troops. Amusingly, @No_one went back and deleted all of their posts after the last check in, so I can only leave you with this:

Going by the aphorism 'If you're reading this, it's for you', it looks like the American press is preparing the public for a closing act of the majestic capeshit arc that started with the Maidan massacre. Ukrainians are generally eager to negotiate, nobody believes in winning anymore

I expected the Iran war to be a major tailwind for Russia (oil prices, sanctions relief, US distraction) but on the contrary, the western information space seems to argue that things will remain stalemated for the foreseeable future. Ukraine seems to be pumping out drones (is this all that matters now?), and has started hitting Russian oil refineries. People have been hyping up what seems to be a mostly symbolic bombing of Moscow. The map hasn't moved, supposedly Russian recruitment is down. The Russian spring offensive has been underway for several weeks and made no progress:

Russian forces have so far failed to make meaningful gains in their ongoing spring-summer 2026 offensive, Ukrainian forces have contested the tactical initiative in several areas of the frontline, and Russian forces have failed to defend the Russian deep rear against increasingly devastating Ukrainian strikes.[8]

On the flip side, people write articles about how bad the Russian economy is, and then drop this line near the end:

Russia’s national debt is low at around 17% of GDP, the banking system is stable, employment rates are high, and wages are still creeping up.

I'd be interested to hear whether anyone has insight into the rhetoric on the Russian side or the pro-Russian perspective at the moment.

So - any new/modified predictions? We had @ABigGuy4U saying collapse in July-August (still a few months to go), @Lizzardspawn saying to look at the frequency of blackouts in Kiev (still unchanged at 6-8 hours a day afaict).

2022 we saw a massive Ukrainian counter offensive in Kharkiv and Kherson. retaking a decently sized city, multiple towns and a sizeable piece of land.

2023 there was the infamous summer offensive but it was large scale and a powerful attack.

2024 Ukraine launched a major offensive into Kursk pressing 24 km into Russia proper.

2026 Ukraine has recaptured some positions that have recently been captured by Russia and were poorly consolidated. Despite Ukraine heavily prioritizing its offensive units when it comes to manpower and equipment they have managed to achieve their most lacklustre counter-attack in the war. Looking at the Russian numbers they are taking roughly as much territory as they were last year. The difference is that the net gain is lower due to a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Meanwhile Ukrainian losses are high while Russian confirmed losses are unusually low.

Meanwhile Ukrainian losses are high while Russian confirmed losses are unusually low.

It seems like you snuck this in so you can compare unconfirmed Ukrainian losses against confirmed Russian losses?

It doesn't seem "snuck" to me; he did specify it overtly. But sure, it's a questionable point to make.

Russian confirmed losses are unusually low.

Where are you getting that from? I just read today that Russia lost more personnel than they recruited for the fifth straight month. Those are Ukraine's estimates but they're far from 'unusually low'.

Ukraine's equiptment losses are far higher

Ukraine has an enormous number of desertions that are difficult to explain in any other way than soldiers wandering into the steel storm and not returning. Russia is pounding Ukraine with 8000 airstrikes a month. That is one airstrike every 125 meters of frontline every month. These airstrikes aren't random but guided and aimed at Ukrainian positions. One bomb is enough to level an apartment building.

Hey an actual pro Russian, we're low on those since @No_one left, and @ABigGuy4U is more ironic as far as I can tell and mostly thinks that smaller countries shouldn't mess with their local superpower. If Russia is revealed to be a poorly performing regional power rather than super, he might not be on your team anymore, but that's up to him of course.

Do you have a source for that table? It doesn't seem to match much else, but it could be accurate. Stranger things have happened, I just can't remember when.

Certainly the equipment losses gap has closed, but that appears to be because Russia is critically low on much of its kit and now sends handfuls of men on foot to infiltrate and try to take ground, anything bigger died or is being held back from Ukraine's kill zone. However, I think the table might just be wrong.

Could I check, why do you think that the rate of Russia's advance has collapsed this year? Do you think Ukraine hitting the refineries and rear logistics lines with new drones are a concern? Do you think the pro Russia military bloggers who are saying the situation has deteriorated to the point that either mobilization must occur or peace be signed by fall are deluded?

I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s ironic. I would say that I think the war was foolish and probably avoidable. And that Ukraine could have easily ended up like Turkey, balancing NATO and Russian interests and getting rich in the process. I also think that Russia will win, barring some major black swan like NATO overtly entering the war with ground troops, nuclear weapons, Russian economic collapse, etc.

Russia is critically low on much of its kit and now sends handfuls of men on foot to infiltrate and try to take ground

That’s not necessarily because they’re low on gear, that’s just the meta in the age of drones and cheap cruise missiles. This is how Ukraine fights now too after their larger scale tactics failed. Ironically, it’s a hell of a lot like what everyone in the 1950s predicted the nuclear age battlefield would like: everything done with small units because big assaults would get zotted with tactical devices. Ukraine and Russia are actually adapting a lot of their old Soviet nuclear land battle strategies for the Ukraine war.

Russia's advance has collapsed this year?

I really don’t think this is true. Russia has made major advances in the south, and around Kramantorsk, and some new fronts in the North. Ukraine has done a genuinely good job of reducing the Kupyansk cauldron these past few months, which is a good example of what they could have achieved more of if they hadn’t wasted three years and a trillion dollars trying to LARP the Fulda Gap.

Well, I guess we'll have to wait and see for the next quarterly update then, or another couple, to resolve much of our differences.

Has anything recently made you update in favor of Ukraine? You were making very strong predictions that they were on the ropes, and they should be collapsing around now right? Pokrovsk fell, they lost their key logistics hub by your analysis, but Russia is literally stuck there. Anything at all updating you away from your maximalist Russia will take Lviv pitch? Russia seems to be seeking terms well below that, and are messaging internally to that effect, maybe they know something you do not?

And, I can reply to all you posted above if you care, but on a specific point you must know it's pure distilled cope that Russia's doctrine now of tiny foot infiltration is anything other than desperation and a lack of any other choice? Like, you posted:

Ironically, it’s a hell of a lot like what everyone in the 1950s predicted the nuclear age battlefield would like: everything done with small units because big assaults would get zotted with tactical devices. Ukraine and Russia are actually adapting a lot of their old Soviet nuclear land battle strategies for the Ukraine war.

That's not even close to Soviet nuclear doctrine, which was deeply mechanized (the BMP was designed for their conception of a nuclear battlefield, famously) and focused on rapid maneuver of units at least at battalion strength, though moving at greater dispersion prior to contact and concentrating again before the attack. I know that, others reading know that, and you must know that. Why bother posting it?

On a lighter note, any predictions for the next Dune movie, after the trailer dropped? I really liked part 1 as a Dune fan, agreed with you that part 2 massacred the character of Chani, and now they have to be back in love? Would have worked better having her be a true believer for sure. Plus, Messiah is a brutal book to adapt, seeing it's mostly politics, monologues and inner thoughts. I do love me some Dennis though, maybe he can cook up something still.

Has anything recently made you update in favor of Ukraine?

On the actual line of contact? No, not really. There are some positive developments. Zelensky seems to have gotten his house in order; and realized he’s the President of Ukraine, not Joe Biden’s press secretary. Ukraine’s deep strike capability seems to have developed from a cosmetic show of force into an actual problem for Russia, although I don’t know if it’s a big enough problem to help. And the fact that they haven’t spectacularly collapsed yet implies some level of durability.

The problem here is that the war has bad fundamentals for Ukraine, and the fundamentals haven’t changed. Every day burns through limited manpower. Every day the line collapses a little more—and if you actually watch the map on a daily basis you’ll see that the advances are slow but pretty steady.

Pokrovsk fell, they lost their key logistics hub by your analysis, but Russia is literally stuck there.

Pokrovsk fell, and then now the two major fortress cities it supplied (Huiliapole and Sloviansk-Kramantorsk line) are falling as well.

On a lighter note, any predictions for the next Dune movie, after the trailer dropped?

This is a transparent attempt to get me banned. The moderation staff has enjoined me from speaking on this topic. I don’t care. I will not be silenced. The whole spirit of the Dune books to show what the spirit of humanity is capable of, unrestrained by the machine and the xenos. To them take that story and cast an ayylmao actress in the lead role crosses the line from mere species-mixing propaganda to intention humiliation. And Disclosure Day is releasing at the exact same time! Why couldn’t they have just cast her in that??

Messiah is a brutal book to adapt, seeing it's mostly politics, monologues and inner thoughts.

I think that’s why they re-tooled the jihad to be more of an actual war and less of a slow-rolling political purge. It injects some action. It’s probably more realistic too, the ugly stuff tends to happen when the Revolution is genuinely under threat.

Powerpoint slides with no attribution or methodology breakdown shared on reddit aren't considered authoritative sources? Especially for the hundreds of civillian vehicles blown up counted as military vehicles which is kinda rich coming from russians doing the kherson safari. Russian telegram calls ukrainian children 'maggots' as well and revel in pictures of dead ukrainians (they don't condone rape fantasies so that makes them better than arabic telegram), so maybe civillian apartment blocks are considered barracks too.

Russian rate of advance collapsing is obviously because Russia is consolidating and carefully cultivating resources in the background while putting pressure on the khokhols, so once the Ukrainians are sufficiently exhausted they'd be wiped out easily like the vermin they always were compared to glorious Russia. Anytime now, the mighty rush will be sprung. Aaaaaany day now. Aaaaaaaaaaaany day....

My prediction is that the focus of attention is going to move to the EU. It's funding Ukraine, its factories are producing the materiel that Ukraine's using, its intelligence services are supplying Ukraine with information. Russia finds itself in the same situation the US was in the Vietnam War: fighting Viet Cong in South Vietnam, but not allowed to touch its power base in North Vietnam.

That's why I am afraid Russia sees only one way out of the stalemate: it needs the EU to take its threats seriously, to realize that further escalation is possible. That's what the highjacked Ukrainian drones over the Baltics are about. It's a probe that threatens to salami slice the countries into an armed conflict. And I hope the discussions about picking an EU representative are the sign that the message has been received.

Russia isn't going to directly bring the EU in for the same reason the US didn't invade North Vietnam. They fear they'll lose of they bring a major power into the war.

The US bombed Laos and mined the Gulf of Tonkin. With the EU deciding to rearm, it's better to provoke them now, when they have missile shortages and very limited anti-drone capabilities than in 2030. And letting them supply Ukraine with practically everything except manpower is still a loss.

But didn't invade. Starting a war with dozens of first world militaries would be a horrible idea for Russia they can't even handle Ukraine. The modern fighters in the EU alone would doom Russia's Ukrainian adventure. Not to mention the EU's almost two million active duty soldiers.

Does the EU have the stomach for an actual war using their own soldiers though?

Something like 90% of young Germans recently responded that they have no interest in fighting for their country.

I wonder if german youth fatalism also is influenced by knowing if they die Von de Leyen has a million migrants ready to import to keep the population high. The notion of dying so that you can be easily replaced by foreigners, and lets be real the foreigner here isn't Pierre or Johnny its Ahmed or Rajiv Von de Leyen wants to bring in, must surely make one fatalistic about your states concern for you.

That's possible. How I understand what you seem to be getting at is: if you fight and die for your country now, it will not remain the country of yours and your kin's country in the next generation, so you die in vain, or even for the benefit of people who are not aligned with you and your preferred future?

Pretty much. Stripped down to its studs every fucking normie can see that the new MENA refugee arrivals prized by their governments are leeches that prey on soft institutions, not preservers of traditions that made the country what it is to begin with. A whole decade of being told these refugees were doctors and engineers that would boost the economy and contribute to german society, only to be met with rapist's and welfare exploiters. Why should a young man die for a society that rewards his sacrifice with a slide towards barbarism and his sisters meat for nonacretive migrants

edited for tone

Germany != EU

For a significant portion of Northern and Eastern EU Russia is an existential threat. That a bunch of German youth are mindkilled by pacifist propaganda does not mean that the EU (which has 26 other countries in addition to Germany) is not willing to go to actual war in such situation.

Germany != EU

There almost should be a feature to automatically remind people of this extremely salient point every time EU comes up for discussion.

Also, of course, it wouldn't be the EU Russians would be fighting but the NATO - even if US bows out there would still be Turkey to deal with, for instance.

We need another reminder whenever free speech comes up that UK and Germany are very much not the norm for Europe.

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If Russia attacked them sure. And I doubt those 90% are in the Army now and even so when the first Russian missile hits Berlin that number will change real quick.

I feel like you are borderline nutpicking the "pro-Russian" side here, but then the nuts may be disproportionately visible because for the more realistic people on it there is nothing to be excited about. Therefore, let me just put down a prediction of "once again, nothing much will happen" for the upcoming quarter here. Maybe the Russians will finally grind their way through the rest of the ruins of Konstantinovka or Kupyansk (though the 90% confidence interval for that is more like 1 year from now), and maybe the Ukrainians will start yet another "successful" counteroffensive that will gain some 200-400km² to then be slowly rolled back over the course of the next 1-2 years at a great cost in life and treasure to Russia, Ukraine and the European taxpayer.

It is more likely that there will be some additional unpublicised backdoor decisions that will influence the longer-term trajectory of the war, such as the addition of further "gentlemen's agreements" about what sort of facilities may not be targeted by long-range bombings. From a purely military standpoint, I expect these to be detrimental to Russia (because from a purely military standpoint, I think the winning play for Russia more and more obviously amounts to escalation, now that NATO and Europe is further strained by Iran - blow up NPPs and make sure that any city in Ukraine that still can support a civilian drone workshop becomes uninhabitable for civilians, send your own leadership to the bunkers, and absorb the retaliation in kind with your superior bulk), but I do not have anything resembling a complete picture of how thin a thread the Russian economy and internal control system is hanging by, and if any greater mobilisation or damage to their own civilian infrastructure would actually result in them collapsing (in which case they maybe have no better option than to sit and wait out their gradual decline and hope for some deus ex machina).

blow up NPPs and make sure that any city in Ukraine that still can support a civilian drone workshop becomes uninhabitable for civilians

We've had evidence since WW2 and right now we see Iran and Gaza and Lebanon all being 'terror bombed', with civillian infrastructure destroyed. That shit never fucking works. People adapt and would rather eat dirt than surrender to someone far away. Until you've got a boot on the ground, and often not even that, populations can hold out. You need full governmental capitulation on top of military defeat to force the issue, and the Russians simply don't have the mass to actually move in. Their theory of victory seems... absent? Thats the kindest way I can put it.

On the other hand, WWII "terror bombing" is generally accepted to have been useful. I don't get the impression that Iran actually has been anything near "terror bombed"; Gaza for sure and Lebanon maybe, but I'm not convinced those could be compared to a hypothetical similar bombing of Ukraine because the baseline living standard in Ukraine is much higher and both surrender to Russia and emigration to Europe would be a significant carrot that is simply not available to Middle Easterners, whose neighbours can't be assed to help them and whose conquerors want to exterminate them.

Even then, I didn't mean to suggest that the optimal strategy involves terror bombing followed by a complete occupation; instead, what they could realistically hope for is terror bombing enabling occupation of some more adjacent parts (Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Sumy and the rest of Donbass are probably an upper bound on what they could achieve with a conventional terror bombing campaign against the whole country + final push without significant conscription) and the rest being so weakened and ruined that it will not be a net threat to them even if they can not extract any negotiated conditions. (EU and NATO could then repair and rearm what is left of Ukraine, but if that much population and resources are gone then doing so might wind up costing so much that it would actually weaken the bloc.)

Then there is the pour encourager les autres element: at this point there is a distinct sense that the Baltics are actively flirting with the idea of baiting the Russians into attacking them, because they figure that fighting against Russia does not actually look so bad away from the frontline and if they can secure NATO or EU support early on the frontline doesn't have to be on their territory (and Estonia's feelings about Narva getting the Vovchansk treatment probably amount to "don't threaten me with a good time" anyway). Building a reputation for indiscriminate/vindictive bombing would probably dampen that enthusiasm.

Then there is the pour encourager les autres element: at this point there is a distinct sense that the Baltics are actively flirting with the idea of baiting the Russians into attacking them, because they figure that fighting against Russia does not actually look so bad away from the frontline and if they can secure NATO or EU support early on the frontline doesn't have to be on their territory (and Estonia's feelings about Narva getting the Vovchansk treatment probably amount to "don't threaten me with a good time" anyway).

"Baltics are just on the verge of baiting a general NATO-Russia war because they are INSANE RABID DOGS" has been a vatnik theme for the entire duration of the war and doesn't seem any closer to actually happening than previously.

Hm. After reviewing the situation, I have to withdraw my implication that the Baltics have gotten particularly more bold since the start of the conflict; I was assuming that the recent Ukrainian drone attacks on St Petersburg used their airspace for transit with their explicit approval, but apparently they themselves still dispute it (and the "EW misdirecting drones there from Russia" story seems no less plausible). There's a steady drumbeat of rather more belligerent rhetoric than the European average and attempts to up the tensions around Kaliningrad from them, but I guess this has been constant since the beginning of the conflict. Sorry.

I often think thats what Russians actually really want to happen. Losing to Ukraine, even NATO supported, is embarrassing. Losing against NATO gives cover for cessation of hostilities. "NATO aggressors were checked at the border by our forces pulled from Ukraine but to preserve life like all Russians do we shall talk like gentlemen". Need to have a small victory (destroying a few finnish lakeside banyas should do the trick) and then rapid escalation of kinetic response to justify rapid retreat across the borders. "If mother russia mobilizes the loyal baltic subjects will surely rise up and rejoin the motherland but that is exactly what perfidious albion wants so we shall deny them their war and settle like gentlemen". Easy out, makes all the previous failures in Ukraine secondary to standing up to NATO.

I don't think that's what Putin - basically an unimaginative relative centrist authoritarian operating within the limits of a demented/apathetic political culture - wants or is ready for.

Eh I'm thinking less putins will and more shoigu having an excuse to present to putin for why a hard pivot from the ukraine meatgrinder is necessary. "NATO! ITS NATO! ITS REALLY NATO I SWEAR!!!"

The maximal case of WW2 mass bombing is the case you raised as a means to move the needle that Russia should employ to win, and my point is such terror bombing didn't work in either destroying civillian morale/resilience (adaptation is quite rapid we can go back to eating roots and huddling around smoking dry wood piles) or meaningfully degrading operational momentum independent of frontline pressure. And thats with saturation bombing actually destroying entire districts, not just the fear of bombs dropping onto a building at a time which characterizes semiprecision (or rather rate-limited) warfare.

Gaza lebanon Iran are raised as examples because they are contemporary and visible and categorized as such, but if such examples are dismissed, which I personally do as well, it introduces new definitional problems. What is this terror bombing the russians should do to effect the needle moving you state can be done? Full constant bombardments of thousands of drones every day to blow a city to smithreeens? The volume of munitions needed to level a city fully with terror bombing exceeds what Russia can generate a year. Tokyo required 2000 tonnes of firebombs to inflame wooden cities, Dresden needed something like 8000 tonnes. Russia doesn't have the airframes or depth to lob that volume, and that's even assuming every package goes through. Even targets within tube artillery range can't get saturated to death because counterbattery and better targrts exist. Severidonetsk and Adviika held out forever despite being in tube artillery range until meat could actually grind through. Citing Kharkiv Sumy or Zaporozhye is insane when the donbass prize of Slovyanks still holds and that was the target since 2014. Fuck, even Kupiansk isnt Russian anymore.

If the Russians could terror bomb Ukraines frontline cities into submission they'd have fucking done so. Its not a lack of will, since Russians gleefully document their atrocities for updoots and donations on VK and telegram, they can't terror bomb because it doesn't fucking work and they don't have the means to do so. Frankly the shahed striking stinks of trying to do something with an available asset, not a true cogent action. Maybe Poland opening all its doors to Ukraine would make people move but really everyone still left in those targets you identify are the stupid and the stubborn (this latter being a particularly slavic trait). They'll die in their soil just like their ancestors before and curse you for trying to drive them out.

You are conflating different levels of city functioning here. You need a far greater level of destruction to get a city in "fortress mode" that is being defended by a military garrison which is being supplied from the outside, than you need to degrade a city in functioning civilian economy mode to the point where its ability to operate military production facilities is significantly degraded. Severodonetsk, Avdiivka etc. were examples of the former: I doubt that, while they were under siege, a significant number of drones, military uniforms or even food ration packs were assembled in either of them. Instead, those workshops are in cities like Kiev, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and Vinnitsa, where I gather civilians still can go to the supermarket to buy groceries, go to a 9-5 job in a factory (producing drones, or producing something that will be used by someone else producing drones), and stop by a restaurant for dinner after. However, would the frontline cities you listed held out for so long if the backline cities had stopped supplying them, or even if the volume of supplies had to be cut by half? This seems doubtful to me.

How much bombing does it take to significantly degrade, say, Dnepropetrovsk's civilian economy relative to its current state? I doubt it is actually all that much. We hear reports of facilities in the city being hit all the time, but usually it is repeat hits on hardened Soviet-era factories like Yuzhmash, which evidently don't have a lot of long-lasting effects (and anyhow Yuzhmash's output at this point may not be as important as that of some random drone workshop in a basement somewhere). What if everything being directed at them were instead sent to randomly chosen coordinates in the city's residential areas? Surely this would result in normal civilian life in the city becoming much more dangerous, regular businesses shutting down, and people leaving, making life harder for those who stay behind, and accordingly reducing productivity. Even having to go from "get it from the corner electronics shop" to "put in an order with the military" if your drone assembly shop is missing some widget would entail significant loss of time.

Sorry, real life isn't a command and conquer game where you can 'destroy military production' and 'destroy civillian revenue generation' to stop the frontline. Again, its not like Russia hasn't been trying to degrade Kyiv with mid hundred quantities of missiles and drones. The sheer amount of destruction you need to inflict is, again, in the order of thousands of tonnes of actually on site munitions, not the low hundred if even high ten tonnes that actually make it to the backline. Russia is * already * sending bombs to random buildings both because of poor target knowledge and also because they're just incompetent dickbags. Human adaptability is really high, the history of adaptation to constant bombing has history since the blitz. Fuck, even when Berlin was actually being bombed to oblivion they didn't break, and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't kill the desire of the IJA to make a heroic last stand. Unless you've got boots pressing the ground, terror bombing doesn't work, much less at the tiny quantities Russia brags about sending but strategically are not needle movers.

Do command and conquer games model a civilian economy...? I thought they were a classical RTS, where you just have military production buildings and maybe resource extraction and upgrade research. Even if that were the case, "it's like this in a game" is not an argument that something is not the case in real life. You have to actually articulate what you believe is different. I gave concrete examples of ways in which I believe an indiscriminate bombing campaign would lower military productivity; do you have an argument against that that is not just waving your hands about adaptation and heroism? If not having public transport and shops actually had no adverse impact on military production, why does Ukraine not shut down its public transport and shops and have the people run them produce more drones instead?

You readily, even enthusiastically concede that Russia is being incompetent. Do you think that this incompetence does not extend to their choice of targets and risk assessment, so individual decisions like e.g. throwing a dud Oreshnik at Yuzhmash instead of aiming it at the Khmelnytskyi NPP or downtown Dnipro was a competent decision? In fact, can you state your theory of why they have been bombing conventional power plants but leaving nuclear ones alone? It seems to me that you would have to go through extreme argumentative contortions to fit it with this "whatever targets Russia hasn't hit would make no difference or they are incapable of hitting them" narrative.

What is the civillian economy and backline drone production you advocate for destruction jf not resource generation RTS style. As for conventional versus nuclear its because Russia is attacking power distribution substations, and Russia alreafy controls the largest nuclear power plant but still keeps it running because wars a funny bitch. And Zaphorizia NPP wasnt bombed into inoperation it was seized kinetically and held. Also, Nuclear Power Plants are actually really really really hard to destroy. https://youtube.com/shorts/xESkLydLt3Y Reinforced concrete really is magic, which explains alot about my downstream points.

My argument for the lack of effectiveness of indiscriminate bombing is literally the entirety of military history and the reality we can see right at this moment. Russia is engaging in indiscriminate volume bombing, otherwise what the fuck would you characterize the bi weekly multi hundred shahed and kalibr launches as. They are rate limited by launch platform count, this is literally the best they can do. My argument is that even literally going full out balls to the wall like they did in the beginning of 2022 and didn''t manage to actually destroy the "colocated production facilities" you say exist.

Again I read your argument and I think you seriously just overestimate both the quantity of launch platforms Russia has available to engage in this "terror bombing" you so advocate and the sheer quantity of munitions required to move the needle. I gave concrete info about how much munitions are needed to level a city in true terror bombing terms, and thats for brickwork, not reinforced concrete or soil dampened underground structures. Either Russian terror bombing needs the mass to saturate and truly annihilate a city entirly in a single alpha strike, or they need precision fires to destroy the "production hub" that would effect a military advantage which in the reality of modern warfare simply isn't how things work with distributed logistics and sustainment nodes.

I call Russians stupid because their attack decisions are downstream of incapability, launching Shaheds and Kalibr at backlines because theres a surplus of this easy to launch munition and a shortage of actually good targets combined with insufficiency to actually truly destroy the backline. You're the one just throwing magic 'terror bombing' numbers, I gave the stat of Tokyo reuqiring 1700 tonnes of explosives. The Russian long range bombing package is about 300-700 weapons (usually lower end), with a usually 70% minimum being Shahed style to distract from higher payload Kalibr/Kinzhals. At the uppermost thats 210 Kinzhals and lets generously call it 500kg of pure explosive focused poser in each. Thats not even 55 tonnes of munitions including the 30kg of explosive per Shahed. Even if you x10 that you're not getting a Tokyo firebomb which needed incindearies to create an inferno on flammable wooden buildings.

No mention of this?

Seems like Putin floating the trial balloon for negotiated settlement to me.

Interestingly there has also been a reported leak of the internal messaging Russia was planning on using to sell a climb down from their maximalist war goals to their population and supporters in the west. It seems plausible as a document, and has a few interesting elements.

First - their expected terms of peace:

Format. A framework peace agreement. Likely US–Russia and US–Ukraine.

Territories. All of the DPR and LPR transfer to Russia. Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts split along the line of contact. Russian forces withdraw from Sumy and Kharkiv.

Demilitarization. Neutral status. A buffer zone.

Denazification. Symbolic, limited.

Sanctions. The US lifts theirs. European sanctions stay in place.

Money. Part of the frozen assets goes to rebuilding war-affected territories — both in Ukraine and in Russia.

We also have some good quotes on how they will message, including:

The peace Putin achieved is a huge victory. Putin made the West bend. We thwarted the West’s plans to expand and prolong the conflict.

Victory over whom? Over international imperialism and globalism. Not Ukrainian nationalism — a far stronger, more skilled, more powerful enemy: the united West.

The whole world has now seen who is right and who is wrong. We showed that we are tougher, taller, better, more humane. The Ukrainian Nazis showed they really are Nazis, sadists, and moral degenerates. The Ukrainian elites had a full coming-out.

Know when to stop. Going too far is defeat. Continuing the SMO would be a Pyrrhic victory.

Promoting the right behavioral track for SMO veterans — public-service ads, blogs, news, artistic formats. On the model: “NN became a respected member of the community / bought a Russian car / rebuilt his house / started his own manufacturing or service company / hotel / got into a prestigious university. His fellow soldier, meanwhile, drank away everything he earned / killed himself / wound up in prison.” Promote the norm, not the extremes; push new heroes and opinion leaders to the front.

Lowering the temperature on radicalism and bellicosity. Limiting the media presence of the “nuclear-option” turbo-radicals. Reorienting or marginalizing the most uncompromising of them.

An amnesty in honor of victory. A tradition and a marker. Russia has practiced this since the end of the Crimean War. Above all for those who spoke out in support of peace. Rehabilitation (decriminalization) of the word “peace” and of the concept itself. A peace-loving disposition is part of our character and our traditions — we have always strived for peace and continue to do so. Emphasis on Russia’s peacemaking acts throughout history — historical excursions.

I'll leave it to the audience here to decide if those peace terms seem realistic (*edit - realistically acceptable to the Ukrainians and likely to end the war if proposed) - they don't for me, however this does seem to suggest that Russia is hurting enough to consider actually negotiating rather than just pretending to in order to keep Trump on side.

Meanwhile, following the very serious drone developments this year where Ukraine is now killing more Russians than are mobilized/replaced and stalling out their attacks, we have pro Russian military channels like notes_veterans saying

The situation on the Ukrainian front today is such that this fall there will either be a mobilization or a move towards signing a peace treaty. There simply can't be a third option.

The situation is still very serious for Ukraine, and the timeline seems to be that the war will last at least into late this year, but Russia seems to be on the horns of a real dilemma here - take peace negotiations seriously, and accept that they are negotiating with Ukraine and not Trump, meaning they will need to make that deal sweet enough that Ukraine actually wants it. Or, option two, mass mobilize and try to break the Ukrainians somehow before that shakes apart the social contract.

Or, do a classic Putin procrastination, and end up in the same dilemma but a weaker position this time in the autumn/fall. I honestly think that might be what happens until something on one side or the other finally snaps.

There is no way Ukraine accepts any deal that does not include security guarantees. The risk of Russia regrouping and attacking again in the near future is just too high.

I am not sure what these mythical security guarantees should be. They can be anything including ineffective guarantees for South Vietnam ("respond with full force" by Nixon) which broke within months of enacting them. Or as in case of Afghanistan, where USA simply withdrew the guarantees and just asked Taliban to behave for 14 months needed to abandon their security partner.

I am not sure why either of those scenarios cannot happen at any time. Especially if there will be multiple countries doing that - e.g. USA, France, Germany and UK being the security partner. I can imagine a new US administration asking Ukraine for mineral resources rights in exchange of guarantees in 2029 and when denied, they will just say they are withdrawing them in 2 years or some such leaving everything up to France and UK and other countries who may do their traditional Munich Agreement solution to unwanted security guarantees.

Anything that would credibly deter Russia from attacking again. UN troops at the boarder, membership into NATO, or even nuclear missiles could do it.

Alternatively Russia could give back the land they conquered and pull back. That I imagine the Ukrainians would accept even without guarantees. Russia is never going to let that happen though.

UN troops at the border

You mean like in Lebanon? Didn't help them much.

I personally think NATO membership is the best option. Ukraine would get guaranteed military backing from other powerful nations, while NATO gets access to the best drone operators in the world. Whether this is possible with Trump as the American president is the big question though.

It seems realistic to me, which of course is different from stating that it's true.

Apologies, I meant that I don't think they'll realistically be the final terms Ukraine accepts absent a big change in the battlefield situation (and the lack of that is why we're here) or a loss of European support. Terms like that have a lot of Russian hopium baked in - especially seeing as that's pretty much the list Russia put forwards when they were stalling negotiations by being way too optimistic. I do however think it's realistic that that's a list of things Russia would like and could possibly sell internally if accepted.

Yeah, there's no way of getting reliable information anymore, so it's all going to be seen in retrospect.

Or he's just saying that because it makes Trump happy. A happy Trump is a Trump more willing to provide sanction relief.

Maybe, or maybe because the negotiations have an end in sight and the battlefield doesn't. Hard to say, we know nothing of the diplomacy and due to misinformation, less than nothing about the military state of things.

If we're doing a retrospective, it feels worth noting that around about now was about the time that predictions from years ago were estimating that the early-war Russian advantages in various pre-war stockpiles and early-war industrial mobilization would be petering out. The technological adaptations of drones shaped how it would work out in practice, and the north korean armories selling their shells changed the fighting season math, but the general trajectory of Russia's military-industrial expansion facing diminishing returns as western economic mobilization caught up was projected years ago.

The two big developments of the last year and a half have been the manpower and American dynamics.

Manpower was supposed to be Russia's trump card, and many people- both sincere supports and concern-trolling- argued that Ukraine needed to make major politically costly decisions to expand intake and fill out the trench lines. The spoiling factor was that drones have gotten so ubiquitous and slow that fully-manned front lines have been liability compared to partially manned lines supported by drones. Worse, or better, this coincided/enabled/exploited the Russian discovery/adaptation of their manpower-intensive infiltration tactics. Massed offenses were less effective than sending infiltrators between lines and trying to build up forces behind a Ukrainian line. This was manpower intensive due to how many would get caught, but pushed the line on the map more.

The net result, though, has been that it diminished the criticality of the very-real Ukrainian manpower issues (which were more restricted on infantry than drone users), while pushing the Russian manpower issue into its weakest dynamic, the replacement costs. The all-volunteer contract model required and requires ever-increasing amounts of money, money the central government tried to push off onto the provinces which had their own limits. Well, economic challenges are real, and there are reports that Russia has been trying to put in the mechanics for various degrees of drafting to supplement numbers. Except a draft for Ukraine has been an incredibly sensitive issue for the Kremlin since the first mobilization sparked an exodus, which is why the nominal numeric superiority to overwhelm the Ukrainians has been far less overwhelming than anticipated. Manpower political costs is one of Putin's signature issues as a strategic procrastinator, and will continue to drastically limit Russia's ability to utilize it's nominal trump card.

Which leads to the industrial dynamics. Even if there was a conscription wave now, it would be less useful than it would have been a year or two ago, as a lot of the relevant cold war kit has already been mobilized.

Conscript waves in repurposed civilian vehicles and other makeshifts are not as useful as conscript waves might have been in reactivated soviet-era armor before there were as many or as good drones. As the war has progressed, a lot of the soviet inheritance of vehicle parks have been depleted, and those reactivations were what fueled the core of Russia's claims of massively expanded industrial capacity. Part of the proof that sanctions weren't working was that Russia was able to produce tanks regardless, but as the stock of refurbishable vehicle types closes, those reactivations aren't being replaced by 'new' system production. There are certainly many vehicles left to go, but per the logic of prioritizing reactivating your highest payoff systems first, it's diminishing returns.

Industrial news hasn't all been in Ukraine's favor, which is where the American issue comes in. The American Trump administration cut down aid to Ukraine, carrying out pre-existing deals but not seeking to expend political capital on major aid packages. Worse from a Ukrainian perspective, the Iran War has expended many of the air-defense assets they would have preferred to receive themselves, and even put them in a bidding war against the oil-rich gulf states for the foreign military sales that remain. Russia's constraints don't mean a Russian collapse.

But even this front has a few more-than-slightly silver linings for the Ukrainians. While the Americans stopped donating to Ukraine, this was because the Trump administration transitioned to selling to the Europeans who would donate to Ukraine. Rather than the total cut-off the pro-Russian thought leaders fantasized in, this has resulted in a far more stable 'floor' for American enablers to Ukraine, since Donald Trump likes making money and the aid-skeptic camp was split from the aid-opposition camp once it was no longer a matter of charity. Ukraine itself is getting in on this air defense spending surge as a major prospective exporter of license agreements and training, even as the Iranians are like the Americans going to be rebuilding their drone and missile inventories rather than selling as many to Russia for Ukraine.

And while the Europeans are paying the fiscal costs for transferring American arms to Ukraine, this has led to both rationalization of purchases ('what has best cost-benefit' rather than 'Americans, spend more') and coincided with the EUropean rearmament programs. Both the US and European states are well into efforts to expand their defense industrial basis, and while the current and near term means 'less free stuff for Ukraine,' it can expand the longer-term support chains. This is an area where Ukraine has some real value to trade, since it's own indigenous development programs offer it knowledge / capacity to trade for European and American support and investments elsewhere, making other forms of aid more politically palatable as 'trade' or 'investments' rather than 'charity.' Which itself has just gotten more resilient, as the Hungary election as seen Putin's primary proxy in EUropean politics fall, with Hungary no longer blocking the sort of financial aid packages that keep Ukriane afloat on a fiscal level.

Overall, where 2025 was a giant ambiguous ? that Russia was putting its hopes on for getting the US out of the Ukraine coalition, the last year and change have been both volatile but also measured in aggregate. American support has been curtailed, but remains significant and has probably established a reliable 'floor' which it ebb above depending on context and interest. Ukraine successfully navigated the changes in its political soft-power position in the US and in the 2025 ceasefire negotiations in a way that neither compelled it to give up defensive territory or saw the Trump administration blame it for the failure, both of which were Russian failures consistent with Putin's strategic procrastinator tendencies. And finally, Europe has more or less (willingly and unwillingly) shouldered many of the costs to continue support to Ukraine fiscally and with longer-term material support.

I wouldn't say it's a 'good' position to be in- major industrial war is never good- but Ukraine certainly seems in far more stable a position than it was a year ago.

I think that every success of Ukraine so far is just the fallout of Musk cutting off starlink for Russia. Which was made worse by their crackdown on telegram. And their own constellations not being online. Momentum is a fickle bitch.

I don't know, these reports seemed suspicious to me. How would the Russians have gotten their hands on a sufficient number of those terminals that it would have made a difference to their operations? Throughout the war, we kept hearing that Ukraine had been holding off the numerically superior Russians thanks to their ingenuous quick iteration on top of the superior Western startup technology that is Starlink, and then suddenly, in one package, the story changes to "but actually, the Russians had Starlink too, but now they don't have it anymore, and so Ukraine will win for sure"; meanwhile, in reality, after a small jitter in favour of Ukraine that this story was timed to coincide with, we are already back to the same neverending stalemate we had before. The one OSINT-visible thing Ukrainians were doing that was definitively dependent on Starlink (drone boats operating in open water with real time remote control) was seemingly never replicated by Russia, even though other than Starlink no particularly unusual tech goes into it.

In the end, the more likely explanation to me is that the "Russia in shambles because Starlink was cut off" story was a successful plant from Elon's PR department, which was picked up by the usual pro-Ukraine social media channels to build hype for the random swing of momentum in their favour at the time.

There's talk of Ukraine being ahead in machine vision as well, thanks to Thiel-adjacent companies letting them test-drive their targeting systems. This gives Ukraine drones that can operate far beyond what fiber optics cables can support and that can independently identify and attack suitable targets even when jammed.

Realistically, all the hot zones on the line are going to be jammed to hell anyway, and drones would have to be fiber-optic.

The most "bleak sci-fi" thing I've seen in a while was images of the absolute spiderwebs of spent drone fiberoptic cables covering forests and fields and towns.

images of the absolute spiderwebs of spent drone fiberoptic cables covering forests and fields and towns

Are those bare fibers plastic or glass? Given the optimization for weight, I assume they're not that strong as fibers go, but I guess I don't have a good sense of how either would break down over time given the odd shape.

More bleak might be the reason we're no longer seeing that. It stopped being cost effective as fiber optic demand ballooned with the data center buildup.

Will make for some great cinematography in the movies that are sure to come. I'm sure.

The unexploded ordnance is probably worse.

Oh, that's almost certainly worse, but as far as bleak images go, an unexploded rocket just doesn't compare.

Amusingly, @No_one went back and deleted all of their posts

Well that is indeed amusing! I was looking forward to Mr. "Majestic Capeshit Arc" having to come up with excuses when his theories almost certainly failed to pan out. Unfortunately it seems his disappearance has more to do with getting modded by Amadan and deleting his posts out of spite or not wanting anyone to follow him to wherever he goes next or whatever. Amadan does a lot of uncontroversially decent modding, but also blatantly violates at least the spirit of the rules often himself, especially that "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary" bit. I've been more than a little skeptical of at least some of his modding decisions, so it's unfortunate to see No_one who should be here eating humble pie instead get taken out by something unrelated. Alas...

Ukraine is seeing a bit of a PR boom going their way right now, and as someone who's pro-Western I've been enjoying that a bit. But as anyone who's followed this war for long knows, that type of thing tends to happen in cycles. We're in a good cycle for Ukraine right now, but I wouldn't herald it as anything more than a temporary upswing. As always, Perun has probably the best take in that there's indeed some reasons for genuine optimism, but it's simultaneously not worth getting ahead of ourselves.

No_One would never have eaten humble pie. The reason I started posting on this forum was seeing No_ones post about stealth and radars that is cribbed straight from anti-US pro-russian slop about how X band radar reflecting off mountains or clouds can defeat frontal stealth and how IRST proves US stealth is inferior so Russia wins automatically. His responses involved special pleading of "you and i aren't privy to the inner workings of UAC AS the technology is secret so thats how we know it works" type of wishful thinking. Its pure cope straight out of ArmchariWarlord or BigSerge except without the tells of self-insert heroism or dour prose that makes those idiots at least amusing to read. No_ones takes were pure regurgitations of the lowest effort leavings of NCD without the courtesy of logical follow through supposedly the standard of this board or at least being amusingly wrong which is the standard of the internet.

As for the Ukraine war itself, the slow grind out past Pokrovsk just shows the incapability of the Russians to keep goals realistic. They were supposed to break out and lay siege to Kramatorsk after fucking Popasna 3 years ago, and since then its been a steady stream of small towns taken and then slowly meatgrinding forward. Theres alot of Russian meat but also alot of Ukrainian land, with Kramatorsk having multiple clear resupply from the west easily unlike the smaller satellites towns which had a single viable resupply line that if cut off resulted in withdrawal.

Sometime around 2024 the Ukraine war reached the trough of grinding where individual town blocks and 150 person villages were treated as magnificent gains by the Russians. Every fucking Z(slur) acted like this was finally the moment of their ascension and then moved the goalposts when Nothing Ever Happened. Its two old stupid soviet armies slogging each other past the tenth round and neither really understands a strategy to unfuck themselves but also can't take time to figure out how to unfuck themselves. Ukraine 2026 PR boosting is as much an artifact of real successes as much as the Russians reaching effective exhaustion due to lacking any viable doctrine for exploitation.

No_One would never have eaten humble pie.

I mean, obviously not. There would have always been another cope, another reason to show why Ukraine's doom was imminent, but for real this time when in reality they'd probably be able to just muddle through again.

I had a vague inkling that he was shoveling Russian propaganda but had never perused that information space so I only had a hunch. Reading your post was interesting (and quite cathartic) for me.

No_One would never have eaten humble pie. The reason I started posting on this forum was seeing No_ones post about stealth and radars that is cribbed straight from anti-US pro-russian slop about how X band radar reflecting off mountains or clouds can defeat frontal stealth and how IRST proves US stealth is inferior so Russia wins automatically. His responses involved special pleading of "you and i aren't privy to the inner workings of UAC AS the technology is secret so thats how we know it works" type of wishful thinking. Its pure cope straight out of ArmchariWarlord or BigSerge except without the tells of self-insert heroism or dour prose that makes those idiots at least amusing to read. No_ones takes were pure regurgitations of the lowest effort leavings of NCD without the courtesy of logical follow through supposedly the standard of this board or at least being amusingly wrong which is the standard of the internet.

I will almost miss his favorite conspiracy theory about Euromaidan, which hinged on false-flag protestors shooting into the crowd to turn the crowd against the police, which was coupled with his most adamant refusal that there was no way the Ukrainian security state opposed to the protestors would ever be the ones managing those false-flag attacks in order to provide the police a pretext for the crackdown the security state had been lobbying for (because no nationalist would ever do such a thing, donchaknow).

Its just tired pro-Z bullshit that insists the west is the big bad conspirator funding colour revolutions and that actually everyone would be happy to live under any autocrats thumb so long as the west is opposed. What always amusing is that the vatnik brigades are WORDS WORDS WORDS with reams of photos and pointing arrows and histories and obscure engineering diagrams that all sound authoritative until a reader notices something doesn't add up and then a mild review shows literally every assumption rests on an insane assumption. The single phone call of Nuland saying Yushenko was "our guy" as if he was a deliberate CIA plant as opposed to simply a guy that made the calculus on his own recognizance that the Russian puppet brigade was doing a terrible job and he himself wouldn't have had access to that circle so to the other guy we go. Yet a single leak was taken as proof of western perfidy, a narrative repeated TILL NOW in vatnik circles that Ukraine actually really wants to join the motherland and the Azov NAFO fascists are suppressing the will of the people.

I get the anti USA animus can manifest in many ways and the totalizing presence of the USA means every axis is a pair of dynamics to flagplant on but like have an original thought please. Textdumping pages of conspiratard shit is for the heyday of tumblr and at least there was interesting porn adjacent to the weirdo walls of crazy.

Truly the second worst part of it was how mind-numbingly boring it could be. You can be a vatnik or a joo poster or whatever else all you want as long as you can mind your manners, but at least be an interesting about it. Interesting people can be interesting when invested in their hobby horses. They shouldn't make people's eyes glaze over predictable and predicted repetitions.

Yeah give me some real red meat for the conspiracy, not just the rehashed stuff. Nuland phone call... Russian language law... Donbass crucifixion...Boris Johnson tearing up peace process... Odessa hotel fire... thats all settled shit that immediately signals someone is holding out like Hiroo Oonada. Give me Zalushnii-Truss love affair, Budanov Azov, Pringles secret army good shit. Something that at least makes it seem the person trying to understand the situation did some novel work instead of just finding the first hits of vatnik wiki and then treated it as truth.

Its just tired pro-Z bullshit that insists the west is the big bad conspirator funding colour revolutions and that actually everyone would be happy to live under any autocrats thumb so long as the west is opposed.

I'm surprised by how popular this view is here on The Motte, either as-is or as a lite version where it's not directly stated but heavily implied. I could understand Russians saying that but seeing people who are clearly Americans based on their other comments embrace it is just so weird.

Its all downstream of culture war. The west, especially USA, is a totalizing and omnipresent factor that will always be available as a common referent. Within the USA there exist multitudes too so people anywhere can pick and choose what they like or dislike (usually dislike) about the west to hold an antipode against as contrast. Race mixing sexual degeneracy offends you? Heres good old orthodox slavic cultural conservatism to hold up. Evangelical eschatology stinks? Heres balinese spiritualism as the counter. Techbro oligarchy ruining your economy? Heres chinese state capitalism for you. Media now filled with ugly trannies drawing attention to themselves? Korean goonerslop to the rescue.

This forum is entirely founded due to culture war issues being unignorable so it seems obvious the russia ukraine war just like any war has a culture war colouring to it. Except because it has real kinetic implications and falsifiability the culture war claims can get tested far quickly, and the smarter ones know better than to tie their brain cells to the sinking ship that is Russian military capability.

I suppose it makes some sort of perverted sense if you think everyone except America, Russia and China are just NPC pawn pieces that cannot have their own motivations or act independently.

WORDS WORDS WORDS with reams of photos and pointing arrows and histories and obscure engineering diagrams

twenty-seven 8x10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one…

Destroying this one rail junction will cripple Ukraines backline logistics. To understand why here is a brief 10 page history of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth...

Unfortunately it seems his disappearance has more to do with getting modded by Amadan and deleting his posts out of spite or not wanting anyone to follow him to wherever he goes next or whatever.

I see, I missed that. In that case I apologize for the insinuation.

Amadan does a lot of uncontroversially decent modding, but also blatantly violates at least the spirit of the rules often himself, especially that "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary" bit.

A few sharp words is a small price to pay for someone voluntarily spending hundreds of hours of their life arguing with the trolls. Not to mention it's usually in response to another antagonist.

People say Amadan breaks the rules, but I haven't seen it? He seems to be pretty measured to me. Do you have examples?

I'm always sad to lose colorful posters here though. Sucks how few of the prolific folks seem to be able to regulate the heat in their posting.

This is the comment I keep coming back to as pretty clearly violating at least the spirit of "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary". He includes several personal attacks including the following:

Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite. a lot of people think you are and always have been a bad faith borderline troll

you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.

You have actually spouted a ton of bullshit

Transparent straw man. Stop this kind of disingenuous whining.

If stuff like this isn't against the rules, it should be.

Or when he's warned me of posting short comments. In this case he's justified since it's hard to tell if something is sarcasm on the internet. In my case it wasn't but it could be read as such, so I was fine with the warning. But then he does his own "ok bud" sneer comments which pretty clearly are sarcastic, and it's hard to read the situation as anything other than "rules for thee but not for me".

You can just read through some of his comments and it's not hard to find him being very aggressive like in this conversation:

You will not like getting into an IQ dick-measuring contest with me.

Are you aware that that there are numbers between 0 and 1? And other numbers besides?

Your hypothetical … is ridiculous and, of course, dishonest.

The problem with your farcical debate tactics is...

Do you actually know anything about Palestinians and Muslim culture besides what you have gleaned from the Internet about dogs and ‘honor culture’? No, you do not.

This was just one I found after scrolling on the front page of his profile. He's constantly getting into these hostile back-and-forths, so when I see No_one's profile has this banner: "Amadan is a power-tripping delusional idiot." It makes me think there might be an issue with how he was modded, although all his posts were deleted so I can't check.

I don't see the problem in the first comment. If you've been around online discourse long enough (let alone moderating), the writing mechanics of ideologically charged users become apparent to you, pointing that out a meta level pattern recognition is not a personal attack. And it's Darwin, that guy knew how to press your buttons, and just left after that comment. His last comment on his reddit account, as of me posting this was just 6 hours ago, so the man's peachy but still taking his sweet time getting to his queue.

I respond with great restraint to people with grudges taking swings at me. You are allowed to have a subjective opinion that is different from my subjective opinion, and I am allowed to assign the value I think is appropriate to your opinion. You are also allowed to message other mods if you want to discuss me or any other mod matters with them. I say this a lot, and I'm serious about it, but no one does this. Maybe because they think it won't do any good, and if the outcome they are hoping for is to see me removed as mod, they are probably correct that they aren't going to get what they want, but we mods really do have internal discussions about members, about reactions to moderation, and about our reactions to members. We do tell each other "Hey, I think you were out of line there" or "I need to back off where this person is concerned" or "If you are getting too worked up about this, maybe you should take a break."

As for No_one, he had one of the longest mod logs on the site. A string of abusive, sneering antagonistic comments with warning after warning and ban after ban, until we told him he was looking at a permaban. I was indeed the one who dropped the final permaban on him, but he was warned or banned by multiple mods at one time or another.

Yes, it is a shame that "interesting" posters flame out and get banned. When we tell them that if they keep doing something they will be banned, they should consider not doing that.

My issue with you isn't your actions as a moderator, it's your response style when you're acting as a normal user. I looked through a few pages of your comments here and all of your moderator actions were taken against posts that either clearly deserved, or were at least reasonably defensible. I'm pretty sure I've never gotten what felt like an unreasonable mod action from you either, even as I've gotten a few from other mods that were a bit iffy. I don't doubt that No_one probably got what he deserved.

But then I get warned for this while you're doing something very similar here and it feels like the traffic cops are speeding.

That's a small example and we could chalk it up to a one-off. My main issue is how often you devolve into making personal attacks when you're having a regular discussion with other people. I've seen you ban other people when they start swearing at each other -- which you should! But then you consistently get right up to that line with some of your posts doing so in practically every other paragraph (accusations of dishonesty, insults, mockery, sarcasm, etc). I'm sure you get a lot of unnecessary flak as a moderator and that can make you want to lash out, but as a moderator you should be held to a somewhat higher standard and not use that as an excuse.

Yes. I understand that you think what you think and you feel what you feel. Does it surprise you that I disagree on every particular? So be it.

Is there any reason to believe the stalemate won't just continue for the foreseeable future? Russia is nowhere near backing down and still has troops and equipment to spare while making progress at a pace slower than a snail's movement.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is unlikely to surrender without security guarantees and can expect increased European support now that Hungary will no longer be vetoing the aid packages. However, every Ukrainian victory seems short lived, as every time they come up with a new innovation, the Russians are sure to adapt in short order.

So my prediction is that the stalemate will continue for the rest of 2026. It seems to me that neither side has the decisive advantage needed to win, nor is Russia willing to negotiate any peace short of an unconditional Ukranian surrender. And so the only option left is for the Drone Wars to continue.

I do hope that once this is eventually over, Ukraine will teach the countries who helped them how to wage drone warfare from their specialists.

I don’t think Ukraine can hold out forever. They don’t have enough people to maintain both the infrastructure and fight the war. Their ability to continue to send drones and shoot artillery is dependent on the support of Western Europe. That support is dependent on the political will of those countries to continue sending weapons and money to Ukraine, probably less now with oil prices going up. Eventually without enough people, weapons, or money, Ukraine will have to take whatever deal it can get, and that at minimum means Donbas goes to Russia and they get minimal military support if any.

At the very least, there seems to be enough funding for 2026. If funding dries up next year, then I agree that looks bad for Ukraine. But that seems pretty far from guaranteed. With Orban no longer in power, the European will to support the war seems greater than ever. Support may diminish due to the Iran war, but that hinges on the Iran war continuing in the first place. And keep in mind that Russia is also suffering from attrition, that they have other neighbors beside Ukraine that they may want to defend themselves from, and that they have a lot less to lose here than the Ukrainians.

I genuinely think this could go either way in the coming years.

Lavrov has said in his statements that they have no intention of leaving Ukraine in a state of frozen conflict. If you look at their activities some months ago in Mariupol, they were determined to rebuild much of the damaged infrastructure there and reassert renewed political control of the territories they now occupy. I’m confident they probably have a policy of doing much the same elsewhere, going forward. Neither side wants to give up being able to impose the framework of discussion on the other, but Ukraine doesn’t have a lot of bargain with.

He would say that, given that the Russian goal is to win. The Ukrainians also do not intend to stay in a state of frozen conflict. They want to kick out the Russians and take back their territory.

But right now, it looks like neither side has the resources to turn their intentions into reality. The best they can do is keep fighting, which in practice prolongs the stalemate.

One of the best reddit accounts covering the war is /u/Duncan-M (who also has a substack). He has little bias and thus gets shit from the pro-UA and pro-RU cheerleaders in about equal measure.

Anyways the recent updates are that SpaceX disabled Starlink for the Russians, which they somehow were dependent on, thus heavily disrupting their comms system, enabling Ukrainian advances. The war is more drone heavy than ever, and fast unjammable comms are a must have to coordinate attacks.

In addition, previously Ukrainian recon drones were limited to about 10km past the FLOT (forward line of own troops) due to counter-drone AD, but have been able to penetrate past this, enabling reconnaissance and deep strikes into the Russian logistical rear.

This is not to imply that the Ukrainian manpower crisis has subsided, because it hasn't, especially since General 200 is busy plugging away with "Assault Forces" (ie Meat) as per Soviet doctrine. But it's less relevant than ever. In conclusion:

The shortage of infantry is being counteracted by advances in drone warfare. The Ukrainian capabilities have never been better, and Russian capabilities dropped at least a bit since February when they lost access to Starlink, which it comes to find out they had become dangerously reliant on through 2025.

So right now, considering the way both sides fight this war, unless Russia dramatically changes its operational planning and stops giving any shits about territory and focuses purely on increasing Ukrainian casualties, then Ukraine's infantry manpower shortage probably won't cause any sort of collapse.

What about an an autonomous AI advantage? Ukraine getting some western tech that's allowing independent identification and targeting of designated targets?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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