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