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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).
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.
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