We’re soon going to discuss the headline thesis, advanced by Douglas Macgregor in a new discussion on Daniel Davis’ Deep Dive channel, that threats in Central Asia will press Russia to move much faster than it might have otherwise to wrap up the Ukraine conflict. While this view is certainly plausible, and bears monitoring, consider some context:
Russia has been picking up the pace all spring/early summer and already ratcheted it tempo up another gear or two with its close-to-daily massive drone and missile strikes across Ukraine, with Kiev regularly getting pounded much harder than before. Note the increased air barrage took place almost immediately after Trump’s recent chat with Putin, after which Trump complained vociferously about Putin’s refusal to budge an iota on his existing demands. That call took place shortly after press reports of pauses of shipments of key weapons categories to Ukraine, such as Patriot and Hellfire missiles. Note that Trump reversed that in the last 24 hours after a talk with Zelensky. But given dwindling and badly-taxed stocks due to the 12 day war with Iran, and the perceived need to restore Israel’s defenses, it is hard to think any additional deliveries will be much higher than a token level.
The sharp increase in Russian missile/drone barrages right after the Trump-Putin discussion was not a result of that talk since targeting does not happen quite that quickly. But if Trump felt embarrassed, so much the better.
To get more of a sense of where things stand, please see another video from Daniel Davis below. Even though it is from a couple of days ago, it highlights some telling changes in how Russia is prosecuting the war.
While Russia is still hewing to its attritional approach, now described as “lava flow,” of pressing along the entire line of contact, note that Russia is now often bypassing cities to seek to substantially encircle them and/or cut their supply lines further west. I am not a military person, but this says to me that Russia feels it has enough control of the battle space that it can leave what amounts to local flanks open, confident that Ukraine can’t mount much of an attack on them. To put it another way, earlier in the war, you’d here commentators like Dima of Military Summary point to a Russian operation as sometimes intended to shorten the front line. Now Russia appears indifferent to extended front lines (due to lots of local incursions into Ukraine territory) as putting even more stress on depleted Ukraine forces.
Indeed, in a bit of cheek, Lavrov has added to the list, saying that a peace deal with Ukraine must include the return of the Russian frozen assets (something beyond Kiev’s ability to deliver), no Ukraine in the EU, and Ukraine re-committing to its 1991 deal with Russia, which included a commitment to neutrality and no nukes.
However, despite Davis’ excitement that per his headline, the eastern front could collapse, Mark Sleboda, who has been by far the most accurate English language YouTube commentator on the trajectory of the war, says it could be another year or even two before the conflict is wound up. In his latest post, Simplicius quoted Le Figaro in estimating the Ukraine forces at under 400,000 versus about 650,000 in theater for Russia. Something presumably in the 350,000 to 400,000 range is a bigger number than I expected given Pentagon reports as of year-end that Ukraine would be out of troops in six months.
Also bear in mind that Russia has taken only one of the four oblasts it deems to be part of Russia. Yes, Russia is happy to have Ukraine keep bringing men and material to contact lines that are not far from Russia. But at a minimum, Russia has to occupy and clear these oblasts at some point. “Clearing” becomes important to reduce later terrorism.
John Helmer argues in a post over the weekend that the US admission it was having trouble continuing to supply Ukraine (even if it has tried to walk that back) is confirmation that the US support is close to a tipping point, which will then lead the General Staff to recommend greatly increases the intensity of the attack.1 Keep in mind that Helmer has good contacts at the General Staff; among other things, they enabled him to do a great deal of exclusive reporting on the Russian electricity war against Ukraine. Helmer has also described General Staff frustration, that they believe that Russia could have ended the conflict long ago by acting to greatly reduce Ukraine’s electricity generation and distribution, but they’ve been checked by the political leadership. Perhaps Putin is loath to create the resulting Gaza North (albeit of the ethnic cleansing rather than genocide type) that would result. Perhaps he hopes to limit physical destruction so as to reduce rebuilding costs. Or maybe he hopes that a slower campaign will wear out more of the public, leading more of those who can to depart and more of those who remain to accept Russia rule of some form as less bad than continuing the war.
NATO has so clearly lost its mind that it can’t possibly get any crazier than it is now. So whether Russia merely crosses the Dnieper or goes to the Polish border seems unlikely to make a practical difference in what they do:
VLADIMIR PUTIN🇷🇺:
‘They invented that Russia wants to attack NATO. Have you completely lost your minds? Dumb as this table? It’s nonsense. Utter rubbish.’
‘It would be rubbish if it wasn’t a plan just to trick their own population by saying ‘Help! Russia is going to attack… https://t.co/OyM7xivlZa pic.twitter.com/oNKFmvwE6y
— Afshin Rattansi (@afshinrattansi) July 7, 2025
Details from Helmer’s account:
A Moscow source in a position to know explains: “The Russian calculus recognizes the tipping point [for US arms supplies to the Ukraine]. Until then the General Staff will grind away methodically, slowly. Then when the Western supplies run low, we will hit fast and hard. If you total the June attacks, the picture emerges clearly that Putin has chosen the Oreshnik option – without firing it yet — over compromising on Trump’s terms. The outskirts of Kiev are burning like never before.”
An aside: one way Ukraine might crack is if Zelensky and his circle abandon Kiev. Recall he is a physical coward; he was apparently afraid for his personal safety when Russian forced got close to Kiev in 2022 and calmed down only when he got assurances that the Russians weren’t out to kill him. We featured this tweet in Links today; it may be disinfo, but the fact that Kiev has been taking serious and sustained strikes for the first time in the conflict can’t be good for Zelensky’s peace of mind.
Back to Helmer:
The first announcement came from the Pentagon on July 1. “The Pentagon has halted shipments of some air defense missiles and other precision munitions to Ukraine due to worries that U.S. weapons stockpiles have fallen too low.” The sources were authorized to identify Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, “after a review of Pentagon munitions stockpiles”. “The Pentagon had been dividing munitions into categories of criticality since February, over concerns that the DOD was using too many air defense munitions in Yemen…Plans were in place to redirect key munitions, including artillery shells, tank shells, and air defense systems, back to the U.S. homeland or to Israel.”..
The Colby-[Deputy Defense Secretary Stephe] Feinberg idea was….to persuade Trump the Israel war should take priority over the Ukraine war; and that if that choice was made public, the Jewish lobby would prevail over the Ukraine lobby in supporting the president. Trump was also persuaded to acknowledge publicly there is a domestic shortfall of weapons, and in private get Putin to accept the ceasefire Trump had been promoting since their first telephone call on February 12.
Trump dutifully announced at the NATO summit on June 25: “we’re going to see if we can make some [arms] available, they’re very hard to get”…
Putin has acknowledged publicly there has been no movement from Washington or Kiev towards the Russian end-of-war terms. “These [Russian, US-Ukrainian] are two absolutely opposing memorandums,” he told the press, “but that is precisely why talks are set up and held – to find ways to bring positions closer. The fact that they were diametrically opposed does not seem surprising to me, either. I would not like to go into details, as I believe it would be counterproductive – even harmful – to get ahead of the talks.”
From Ushakov’s read-out of the July 3 call, it is clear Trump and Putin were unable to agree on a date for a new round of Istanbul negotiations. “The two presidents will naturally continue communicating and will have another conversation soon,” Ushakov reported. This is Russian for don’t call me, I’ll call you.
The General Staff then launched its largest air attack on Kiev since the war began, continuing the operation from the night of July 4 through the night of July 5. The majority of the weapons used were Russian and Iranian drones. According to Boris Rozhin, the leading military blogger in Moscow, “it is not entirely clear how the supply of missiles for the Patriot air defence system — if the United States will allow them — will save Ukraine from the growing flow of Gerans [and Gerberas ]. Shooting down the Geran heroes with Patriot missiles is absolutely pointless from an economic point of view.” July 4 Min 22:54…
The Moscow consensus now is to escalate westwards from the front on the ground, and by air attack on Kiev, and wait for Trump. “Either Trump agrees on fresh direct shipments, or he will pretend that indirect shipments are a compromise, or he will abandon Zelensky to his fate. So we talk peace and keep moving on all fronts, keep hitting everything military. It is fast reaching the point where even if there was no Israel sector, Iran sector, Yemen sector, the US cannot save Ukraine. The US and Europe certainly can’t defeat Russia. That’s the calculus.”
In other words, while Helmer anticipates a difference in degree in how Russia prosecutes the war, he does not yet see a difference in kind.
Contrast this with the latest view from Douglas Macgregor. One big caveat is in order; Macgregor, like many US military men, cannot wrap his mind around the Russian attritional approach and keeps positing that at some point they will revert to a great big arrow attack. Nevertheless, he focuses on the issue that Conor, in a must-read post, and others have taken up in the last couple of week: Turkiye-Azerbaijan big time troublemaking. Macgregor sees this as a prelude to an invasion of Iran to bite off a piece:2
Starting a bit after 6:00, by Macgregor:
President Putin and his his leadership were understandably very focused on Ukraine. And being so focused on Ukraine, I think they took their eye off the ball in the Caucasus. They weren’t watching carefully what Mr. Aliyev, the president of Azerban, was up to. I don’t think they really worried about it because Aliyev’s father who was a KGB major general, a member of the pilot bureau and was viewed as absolutely loyal uh to both the Soviet Union and subsequently Russia suggested there was nothing to worry about in Azerbaijan.
Well, that’s turned out to be wrong. The Azeris have formed a very close relationship with Israel and that relationship also includes greater Turkey. In other words, Mr. Erdogan, but primarily Israel and Erdogan and the United States all share a similar interest right now in Azerban. That is to destabilize and harm Iran in any way possible.
Well, what’s the worst thing that could happen to Iran? Well, the worst thing that could happen to Iran is for the Iranian country, the nation itself, to break up. And we know for a very long time that Iran has had various pockets of nationalities, though well integrated and part of the Iranian national state and society, they nevertheless still exist. And and that includes the Azeri Turk population in northwestern Iran. There is now a a definite deliberate conscious what use whatever terms you want planned to invade northern Iran by Azerban in the hopes of raising a rebellion in northwestern Iran centered around Tamre which is the center of the Turk population in northwestern Iran. There are lots of Azeris in Iran who are currently interested in this. So the threat to Iran is very real.
That’s one part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that Azerbaijn was already offering or providing a platform for use by the Mossad, MI6 and CIA against Iran. We’re not sure how much was used. In other words, did they launch drones? Probably, but they certainly moved agents from Azerbaijn into Iran, which were then able to set up and and cause havoc inside Iran during the 12-day war. So th this is part of the problem.
And then you have to look further to the west at Syria. Understand that Syria is basically part of greater Turkey. Everything that happens in in Syria happens because Mr. Erdogan wants it to or doesn’t want it to. Golani is not an independent agent. He is a figurehead. And Erdogan for the moment wants to get along with the Jewish state. However, there are limitations to his cooperation… Golani is just a figurehead in Syria that we, the Israelis, MI6, in other words, US CIA and Erdogan installed.
So Erdogan was always interested in dislodging Assad, but for reasons that were different from the Israelis. The Israelis are now in southern Iran and they intend to stay there. So they say this is a permanent point of friction with Turkey. Uh the Turks would like to see the Russians leave, but they don’t want a confrontation with the Russians, but they would like to control what today we call northern Lebanon as well as this enclave of Syria that touches the Mediterranean.
So the Turks have certain goals uh in the region. The Israelis have their own greater Israel goals. Azerbaijan wants to create greater Azerbajan as part of a greater Turk enclave or confederation if you will with the hope of eventually exercising some degree of hegemony over the region. Then you have Iran to the south of Azerbaijan that is preparing for another round in the war. They I think they expect the war to restart probably in in September. it will take that long for radars, missiles, munitions, and other things to find their way to Israel. So, they’re preparing for the next round of war. And at the same time, they’re looking at this probable invasion from Azerbaijn, which they probably expect to coincide with an Israeli resumption of the war against them.
Now, if you’re sitting in Moscow and you realize all of these things have happened, it’s unraveling to some extent Moscow’s southern security area. In other words, Azerban was seen as a component of Russian security strategy, as a as a friend, as someone that would be a force for stability. Azerban has turned out to be the opposite. So, the Russians are going, I think, to accelerate the end of the war in Ukraine.
Helmer foresees Russia increasing the tempo in Ukraine strictly due to considerations in that theater. Macgregor argues that the unexpected threat in the Caucasus will pressure Russia to greatly accelerate its timetable. It may not be easy to see who has made the better call, but again keep in mind that Helmer was early to describe that Russia could drop the electricity war hammer on Ukraine. Use of that tool, which Russia has held off deploying in full, might indicate that Macgregor is correct.
In the meantime, the pacing of the war has implications for whether Russia can win the peace (or at least keep disruption to a very low level). We’ll turn to that in a later post.
____
1 It seems hard to fathom. but apparently Trump really did believe that if he paused some weapons supplies to Ukraine, Putin would agree to a ceasefire. How long has Russia been in “What about ‘no’ don’t you understand” mode? Among Putin’s terms for a ceasefire were an end to all weapons deliveries and provision of intel, plus independent ceasefire monitors.
2 I would greatly discount the discussion early on by Davis and Macgregor about Putin’s remarks about the People’s Front. They are not Russia experts and I don’t even see them as regular readers of Putin’s speeches and interviews. Right from the very outset of the SMO, there was a large, grass roots effort to support the troops, and my impression is that it’s been pulled together under this umbrella. Putin is a pothole President and makes a point of paying attention to initiatives and ideas in the boonies. As an example, in one of his monster Q&As where he was taking questions from the public (his team having screened requests sent in en masse to address as many as possible), he talked with a woman from Siberia who asked for community movie viewing rooms. He was initially resistant to the idea but was eventually persuaded by her.
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reportedly from Russian public sources, the RU industrial base has geared up to sustain a conventional, high-intensity “forever war”.
Like most dumb ideas, why the Azeri president insists on playing with an irredential expansionist dream instead of being a good-faith neutral player, go figure.
Money,probably.
Ugly Americans, with similar disposed Brits and Israelis.
One wonders if the Azeris in Iran prefer thousands of years of culture to western meddling like US played in IndoChine.p and recently Kiev.
Were Iran to need help, Quds and Iraqi Shia militia can be bused in, as well as help from DPRK, and PRC.
Russia has interest, but PRC has care there as well.
In RF calculation bleeding US/EU on the Donbas probably wins in competition for resource.
RF could do some Iran and PRC the rest from other countries
Azerbaijan is a feudal mafia state. Nobody asks the “Azeris” about anything, and if you ask them what they want, the answer will be “money”.
Which “thousands of years of culture” cannot provide.
Patrick Lawrence isn’t a military blogger or a Russia blogger but buys into the “tipping point” idea.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/07/08/patrick-lawrence-trump-dead-ends-putin/
Lawrence’s sentence about Versailles in 1919 is pertinent, since Germans DID think they had a say, or at least the German oublic did. That set the stage for a lot of, eh, stuff.
“The sharp increase in Russian missile/drone barrages right after the Trump-Putin discussion was not a result of that talk since targeting does not happen quite that quickly. But if Trump felt embarrassed, so much the better. ”
Something to consider: the targeting may not happen quickly, but the order to strike could happen more quickly.
Putin has actually made a point of being unduly deferential to Trump in his public remarks, which IMHO it the real proof of this having been already scheduled (my impression further was Trump asked for the call, since he had just cinched the BBB and would assume Putin was well enough briefed to know this had bolstered his domestic position). And this particular strike was described as extremely complex. My impression is the normal strike takes 48+{ hours of planning. This only likely took longer.
I was thinking while scheduling/targeting could be one factor that takes time, the actual command to fire may have been a separate factor.
“my impression further was Trump asked for the call” – maybe the Trump administration hoping against hope that they could get more strikes called off?
No, you have to move planes and naval assets (some of the missiles are launched from the Black Sea, others from planes as standoff weapons). You can’t keep them on hold for very long.
For the Iran front, no one I have read is assessing the possibility of Iran counterattacking Azerbaijan if the former commences hostilities. A common border can be used for incursions in both directions. The secret sauce here is the degree to which the Iranian Azeris are integrated into Iranian society. There is nothing better for State stability than an attack from an outside source.
As for the Ukraine; it is a “Dead State Walking.” What happens to the corpse after the formal announcement of defunctness is anyone’s guess. The fractious history of Mittel Europa shows that literally anything can happen. Who would have predicted back in the 1600s that Lithuania of all polities would hold sway in the region?
Perhaps the Russians will take their cue from Curtiss Lemay of all people and “Bomb them back to the Stone Age.”
Pass the popcorn.
Iran has not been the aggressor in nearly 300 years. They are not going to deviate from form by striking Azerbaijan first.
But Azerbaijan was under no such constraints and it did strike first.
So what do you do?
And yeah, it is not a simple situation, because while Iranian Azeris are well integrated (the current Ayatollah is of Azeri descent), on the other side of the border they have been brainwashed with the “one nation two countries” idea (the other country being Turkey) for three decades.
So if Iran and Russia (and it will have to be both, for a lot of reasons) do go in, you can easily have a serious insurgency. You won’t have that in Ukraine, with its catastrophic demographics, but the Azeri population is young, militant and high on recent success.
But do you have a choice? The Israelis already have bases in Azerbaijan, now there is talk of a huge Turkish/NATO bases to be built there.
Can you allow that? You can’t.
How can you stop it? Well, you have to go in and occupy the place.
This is what happens when you are asleep at the wheel and make one catastrophic strategic mistake after another for decades. You are left with bad and worse options.
But if you are left with bad and worse options, you have to pick the bad one and deal with the consequences.
P.S. One reason the USSR fell apart (it wasn’t the main one, but it did contribute to it) was the concern of the Slavic core that birth rates in Azerbaijan and the *stans were much higher than everyone else’s. So the projections were that the USSR would be demographically transformed by that process and thus destabilized.
Indeed, if you look at the current situation, what do we have:
One on hand: Russia (145m) + Ukraine (let’s say 45M if it was intact) + Belarus (10M) + the Baltics (7M) + Moldova (4M) + Georgia (4M) + Armenia (3M) = 218M people. And that will be stable at that level.
On the other: Azerbaijan (10M) + Turkmenistan (7M) + Uzbekistan (37M) + Tajikistan (11M) + Kyrgyzstan (7M) + Kazakhstan (21M) = 93M, and that is projected to grow to 120M in the next two decades.
Then you account for the fact that inside Russia itself >15% of the population is Muslim, i.e another 25M.
So they were looking at a country that is 140-150M Muslims and 180M non-Muslims by the mid-21st century.
But was the decision to that problem to shed the problematic weight? Of course not, it was to double down on making proper Soviet people out of those populations. Had they done that, birth rates would have fallen and they would be much less susceptible to outside diversion too. In late Soviet times they were not capable of capturing minds like that though, ideologically it had all run out of steam.
So what they got instead was that they lost control of the territories, in which, naturally, anti-Russian regimes were established (because that is what you do in such a situation in order to put some separation between yourself and Moscow), birth rates exploded even more than they would have had the Union remained, and the territories are now used to attack Russia.
Visionary decision making, wasn’t it?
I think it unlikely that the Azeris will invade Iran unless Turkey is willing to backstop it and maybe put boots on the ground.
Keep in mind that with a population around 10.4 million that Azerbaijan is around the same size as Israel.
There are more Azeris in Iran then there are in Azerbaijan wich makes internal problems possible for Iran, but I don’t know how popular the Azeri state with Iranian Azeris.
Perhaps I’m off about Azeris, but Saddam Hussein thought Arab minorities in Iran, esp around Khuzestan, would rally to Iraq once he invaded. That didn’t happen. I get the sense that Azeris are more integral to Iran than the Arabs are.
The Iranian Azeri viewpoint would seem to be the big wild card in all of this. On the surface it’s similar to the rationale Russia used for invading Ukraine, to protect the eastern Russian-majority population. In that case there were very clear signs of dissatisfaction – eight years of outright civil war is a pretty strong clue, the east/west political divide goes back decades, and the eastern oblasts outright requested Russian protection or to join Russia on several occasions.
I’m not aware of any similar unrest in Iran. I’m sure if it became necessary, Western media would find some disgruntled individuals to provide sound bites and invite sweeping generalizations, but it seems unlikely that the kind of split we saw in Ukraine exists. Also unlike Ukraine, Iran isn’t a post-Soviet construct, but occupies more or less the same area it has since antiquity.
There is another consideration for what it’s worth. Azeris, especially in the southern part of azerbaijan, and in Iran itself, are mostly Shia, like the Iranians. The Turks are not. Incidentally, Khamenei’s father was Azerbaijani
Shia or Sunni means little in secular Azerbaijan, and especially less in relation to Turk brotherhood/tradition.
Did you read the post?!?! That is what Macgregor contemplates.
Azerbaidjan is a quasi-totalitarian state, with a ruler set for life, with the son to follow. By any measure, Iran can be considered a full fledged democracy compared to Azerbaidjan, including religious freedom, which is not guaranteed in the police state on the north…
An Iranian Azeri has better long term prospects than an Azerbaidjani Azeri.
There are of course a multitude of factors (in the decision making) that you haven’t been able to include. No matter what, I always privilege the one Russian perspective that I heard around the start of the operation that the very best scenario for Russia given all factors is a very long and slow war. So I think it would take a significant change in variables to prompt a significant change to this preference.
That is a point I intend to make in the post to come on the risk of losing the peace. A slow war among other things really grinds down the opponents in all sorts of ways.
I am really perplexed and bothered by so many in the peanut gallery wanting Russia to hurry up, as if they have a vote.
I guess the peanut gallery believe this is a Hollywood movie or just some sort of MMA fight without real-life consequences on many levels in many directions.
Easy to believe too given the war experience we have in the West: Hollywood movies, CNN/Fox erc. broadcasting bombings of Iraq, Afghanistan without showing the death and destruction just some nice firework in the night and then the individual killings of so-called Hitlers like Saddam Hussein and Khaddafi like some sort of happy movie ending. All this war against weak states and armies. Neither Ukraine nor Russia started with weak armies. Ukraine was weakened faster due to stupid decisions by Zelensky and Syrsky and others.
Others = Ukraine’s handlers in Washington, London, and elsewhere…the same people who don’t know real wars notwithstandong the stars on theur uniforms.
Losing peace operates on both sides. Russia would lose much by losing peace, but what about Germany, Italy, Finland, and Israel, let alone Turkiye and Azerbaijan? (Wrt Israel, I’m thinking about losing peace vis a vis Russia as they never had much peace with its neighbors).
I’m only a sample of one, but I can relate to the feelings in the peanut gallery as a card-carrying member.
I think that there is a wish for a beautiful scene of vengeance on the neo-cons, as in a “shock and awe” collapse of the Kiev regime, complete with Russian tanks rolling through the streets. This would finally bring the humiliation and downfall of Lindsey Graham, Nuland, and all the other evil actors who have plagued us. Chastized by such a blatant failure, they’d have to sulk in the weeds for a decade or so. Perhaps they’d have to take refuge in a think tank, never again to return to their former position of influence.
That’s probably a fantasy. Objectively, that crowd never admits defeat. They’d probably shift the focus to some other project, like the Azerbaijani one. And no doubt the left would be there to provide cover for them.
In other words, it’s a schadenfreude exercise.
Peanut gallery folks want Putin to solve their problems, and get mad because he does not cooperate (though they have clearly written the instructions all over the Internets). So, more-or-less Trump-like.
There will be good chances to actually see Lindsay foaming at the mouth, beside all the santoriums that he gets.
This sample of one would be hard-pressed to deny Schadenfreude 100%, but for me the dominant feeling is hope (maybe even optimism?) for emergence of a better model of political economy than the current western neoliberal “democracies.” I think “democracy” western-style is terminally broken by the combination of the Internet (infinite distinct communication channels, non dominant enough to foster social/political coalescence) and, in the US, Citizens United (high bidder dictates policy), and as a result, it’s increasingly cultivating unhealthy and inhumane societies.
Among the large, sophisticated, multi-ethnic non-western states (Russia, India, Iran, Brazil; I omit China on non-multi-ethnicity[?]), Russia looks most likely to me to have a stable polity and economy that are acceptably responsive to their nation’s human needs without widespread egregious cruelty. Maybe I suffer from rose-colored glasses (or ignorance of other candidates?), but what other hope is conceivable?
One of the key lessons of the Peloponnesian War (at least from Thucydides’ perspective) is that the longer a war continues, the more unpredictable and driven by chance it becomes.
Uncertainty makes people anxious. As long as the war remains an open-ended question, they’ll fret. In addition, people in the west are now accustomed to “wars” being decisive blitzes. A lengthy war with advances and setbacks recalls the slow failure of Vietnam or the Middle Eastern occupations. Conventional wisdom also warns against long campaigns in general. ChrisFromGA also makes a good point about many wanting to see the interventionists get a black eye.
My own view has been that wars quite often used to take years, and the way back to that paradigm was sketched out in 2014 Ukraine. The breakaway republics repulsed the UAF with old-fashioned infantry with artillery support and mobile AD. Aside from the Buks and MPADs it was remniscent of WWII.
More broadly speaking this is really a clash of multiple continent-spanning systems which take time to mobilize, are risk-averse, and therefore averse to escalation. It will likely take many more years to wear each other down to the negotiating table in earnest barring some kind of system shock that causes the steersmen to lose what control they have…
Anyway, the long view is all well and good but most people are following the blow-by-blows and reacting in the moment.
The anonymous peanut gallery includes a lot of Western trolls. When they personalize it all to Putin (“Putin is weak, we should use nukes”, etc.), it’s pretty much a dead giveaway that these are Western commenters trying to undermine the Russian leadership while pretending to be Russian patriots.
I am expecting that as the war continues its current trajectory, we will see more “Israeli-style” tactics used against Russia, i.e., assassinations of top Russian officials and drone attacks from within against strategic assets. I’m not sure what Russia can do to forestall that…maybe triple Oreshnik strikes on the Bank of England, MI6 headquarters, and the Faslane naval base? But I doubt anyone (outside the peanut gallery) wants the sub rosa war to come out in the open that dramatically.
When they personalize it all to Putin (“Putin is weak, we should use nukes”, etc.), it’s pretty much a dead giveaway that these are Western commenters trying to undermine the Russian leadership while pretending to be Russian patriots.
No–many Russians are also concerned about the slow pace of this (although I haven’t seen any Russian mention using nukes). You may disagree with the position, but it’s a bit unfair to just blanket dismiss them as trolls, and it leads to shoddy analysis.
Remember that:
1. As I mentioned above, the longer a war drags on, the more the war’s outcome can be swayed by chance. The view to hasten the war is akin to “not playing with one’s food before eating it”
2. A lot of people don’t want their friends, siblings, parents, children to come back in body bags. Prolonging the war by taking a “soft touch” as opposed to “shock and awe” means that more Russian soldiers will die. In fact, I am willing to bet (although I lack evidence) that very few Russian leaders would have been able to prolong this war as much as Putin is doing, and that Putin can only do so because of the immense credibility he has built with his people.
I personally disagree with the “peanut gallery”, strategically-speaking, largely because I believe that Russia is doing this in preparation for the following war. However, I am not the one who is worried about whether my child will come back in a body bag
I’m not sure trying to speed things up saves many Russian soldiers from death and disabling injury. If anything, the opposite might be the result. If Russia went too far in the shock and awe direction (destroying power plants, dams, railroads, civic centers, etc.) it would either end up stuck with a long-term occupation and endless Western-supplied guerrilla attacks, or possibly even a forceful Western intervention and outright war with NATO. The contacts of Helmer’s that are so disgruntled are probably not of rank to have much influence on the conduct of the war, so of course they can do a lot of second guessing of their bosses or senior colleagues. I don’t think Putin or Belousov are micro-managing the military’s actions either, they are giving general parameters for how the war should progress, with clearly stated overall aims, and the strategies and force movements are being decided at the level of Gerasimov or those just beneath him. Ukraine started out with a very formidable military and both sides encountered a type of technological warfare that no one really had any preparation for, similar to the two sides in World War I, so it is not surprising that we don’t see a Western-style immediate gratification outcome.
Bingo!
Russia was going to lose its whole strategic aviation and AWACS fleet on June 1st 2025 had Operation Spiderweb gone according to plan. The whole.
And they have been attacking early warning ballistic missile detection radars, there was the ignored by most raid from Kazakhstan towards Dombarskyi (and today again there were drones in the Orsk area), etc.
Yesterday they even shut the internet down in Kamchatks because of drones, though nobody reported any.
Then we had all the ships that were attacked way out of theater — in the Baltics (an ammonia tanker blew up in Ust-Luga the other day), in the Mediterranean, etc.
It should not be hard to understand what is happening and where this is going — the West is using the Ukrainian proxy to strike at Russia, and now it is no longer just “pin pricks” but they are hitting where it hurts.
This is why it was and still is absolutely vital to eliminate Ukraine as an entity. Then there will be nobody to hide behind.
Winning the war will not stop UK terrorism in Russia. Get a grip. The West will not give up even if the fighting in Ukraine stops.
John Kirakou (former CIA) has said they found when they interviewed captured supposed jihadis that to a person they had no interest in or knowledge whatsoever in the US. They were very poor and had been offered very good pay to fight, including death benefits to families (which apparently had been paid often enough for the promise to be credible).
So as long as there are poor recent migrants (recent migrants seldom land well), there will be plenty of people to bribe. That writ large was the story of the collapse of Syria.
It is very much to the point to ask what *will* or *would* end or sharply scale back the West’s undeclared asymmetrical warfare against Russia. Can they be backed off militarily? Once UKR is neutralized as a politically expendable proxy–and can no longer serve as NATO’s meat forces in the event of a direct clash–does Russia use that moment to identify UK, for example, as a party to the conflict and lay a beating on them? Or threaten to?
Unlikely.
Does Russia deploy its own Spiderweb-style attacks, using the Mexican cartels in the US, for example?
Unlikely.
I do wonder to what degree Helmer is just plugged into a cohort of military malcontents of the Prigozhin ilk. Of course militaries will always grouse about political interference but why do we assume the military *wants* to go faster? Assuming they’ve bought into attritional warfare, and aren’t West Point grads in Russian drag, they will want to go precisely as fast as conditions dictate.
Personally, I’m assuming that any big arrows that come will be attendant on any large-scale collapse of UKR forces, to fill a void before the West can.
Helmer makes clear his sources in the General Staff are senior level. And the issue was unleashing an electrical grid attack on a much larger scale to bring Ukraine to its knees. If I were a professional solider, I’d be mighty unhappy about sending soldiers into the field, some of whom will die, more of whom will be permanently maimed, when there was a ready way to wind up the war faster and greatly reduce the toll on Russian servicemembers.
And Progozhin was never part of the Russian military. He was running mercs and the regular military very much disapproved of how he rolled. And he was not running the ops. He had a senior guy in that capacity who also died in the helicopter explosion.
The negative view was confirmed when it came out that the prisoners enlisted in Wagner were used as meat in attacks in Bakhmut, which predictable high death rates (IIRC, 20%). This is one case where the Western accusations of “human wave” attacks did have a foundation.
His sources for the electric war may (not) have been senior, but they were correct.
This does not make his sources for many of his other pieces either senior or correct.
Going faster means *more* casualties. Of course if you shorten the war perhaps you lose fewer over time. But losing 100,000 extra troops to sprint to the Polish & Romanian borders brings you … what? A battered military now nose-to-nose with a NATO that’s been sitting back and watching. Your military is now very much within reach of NATO aviation and missile forces, close to their logistics and far from your own.
If something kicks off–you know they want to even if good sense tells them they shouldn’t–how many more Russian troops might you lose then, particularly if this expands also to the Baltic where NATO no doubt believes a naval campaign favors them?
The irony and tragedy is that Trump has the ‘golden ring’ in his grasp. However, he lacks the moral courage, strength, and ability to firmly grasp it. If he excersied ‘leadership; he would be the one calling for a conference to establish a security arrangement for Europe and West Asia. Instead of advocating for an outcome that would provide “the most good for the most people’, he pursues a plan that is self defeating unless, he himself, alone, gets credit for a ‘win’. The US, is now admitting it lacks the capacity to supply wars run by proxies on multi fronts ( no strategic depth). The lack of a clearly defined objective and the indecisive decision making of the Trump Administration is a guarantee for failure. Ukraine and the US will bleed and Russia will probably allow this to go on. As far as Azerbaijian is concerned, the US ‘deep state’ will probably encourage efforts that weaken and distract Russia. Interstingly, Iran did not attack Azerbaijian directly in its war with Israel, but it hit Haifa port and the fuel refinery, , both of which contribuite to Israel’s supply of jet fuel, and which are supplied by Azerbaijian oil. Iran will be given no choice, it will have to expect an all out multi faceted war with Israel and Netanyahu backed by Trump and the US. Neverthe less, the best outcome would be a standoff by all.
Yes, Trump had the golden ticket to wash his hands of this quagmire.
Trump is a Boomer (not being intentionally derogatory)….American exceptionalism is a foundational pillar for center and right-of-center Boomers. Americans don’t quit! Until we do—-then it’s “sour grapes”
Iran will be given no choice, it will have to expect an all out multi faceted war with Israel and Netanyahu backed by Trump and the US. Neverthe less, the best outcome would be a standoff by all.
Not quite. Israel (and the US, for that matter) has no answer for Iran’s ballistic missiles, and the longer a “stalemate” continues, the more people will leave Israel, making it a doomed project. Also, Netanyahu will go to prison and Iran will have the same “strategic ambiguity” regarding a nuclear arsenal that Israel currently has.
You may be willing to pay that price, but Israel and Netanyahu are not. This leaves Israel in a position where it can’t attack, can’t maintain the status quo, and can’t reorient towards peace.
They should have learned the lessons that Clausewitz called “the culminating point of victory” and that Michael Collins saw so clearly–but then again, if Netanyahu chooses to follow it, he will likely end up the same way that Michael Collins did anyway
Israeli nukes! Need to consider more than Iran.
Ted Postol pointed out that Israel is a tiny country, a dozen nuclear detonations would end it as a country. To do similar damage to Iran would take 100 nuclear detonations.
The environmental damage to a radioactive tear drop to the east would be immense.
That suggests that India, and Pakistan should put Iran under their “umbrella”
Israel version of MAD effects more than its fearsome Iran.
1.India, France, UK, and US will align with Israel, not Iran. Pakistan, China, Russia, and North Korea will align with Iran. MAD will be particularly interesting going forward
2. The rest of this post is admittedly very speculative, but Iran agreed to stop bombing for a reason, and my guess is that it was because the US/Israel made some huge concessions behind the scenes.
Something to do with a settlement with the Palestinians was likely one concession. I am guessing one of the others is that the US accepted that Iran will retain the bulk of its current 60% HEU (basically making it a latent or undeclared nuclear power). Again, at this point what can the US really do other than accept this as a fait accomplis anyway? Probably some easing of sanctions as well, although I can’t imagine the Iranians being stupid enough to fall for this promise again without some pretty strong guarantees, and I don’t know how they would get those guarantees
This would explain Trump bragging that he destroyed it all without follow-up, etc.
This speculation could be wildly wrong, of course–I wouldn’t bet any money on it. But Iran clearly could have bombed a lot more and for a lot longer (both in terms of morally and capabilities), Israel was clearly F!@#ed if Iran continued, and the Iranians obviously didn’t stop because they believe in US/Israeli statements, so… (??)
The biggest source of confusion is why Israel was so extraordinarily stupid to have started this war. Even their “best case” scenario must have showed that it was a massive gamble with low probability of success, specially after True Promise I and True Promise II. Maybe there was some desperation to draw attention away from the massive espionage leak?
Either way, I really don’t understand this one
No, Iran did not “agree” to stop bombing. There was no agreement. There was a Trump announcement.
As we said repeatedly, Iran’s long-standing position (even with the pre-war tit for tat exchanges) was that Iran would stop shooting when Israel stopped shooting.
Any discussion of a new security architecture in Europe from US will imply that Russia is an equal partner and that the US is not the hegemon. That is a big no no.
Except that you aren’t a hegemon when your friends tell you that you are–you are a hegemon when your adversaries recognize that you are.
By their actions (forget about the rhetoric), America’s adversaries seem far more concerned about slowing down US decline than about weakening it further.
< feels it has enough control of the battle space that it can leave what amounts to local flanks open, confident that Ukraine can’t mount much of an attack on them.
I doubt that the Rs are leaving flanks unprotected. It may be that they have enough troops and supporting assets that they can securely cover the longer front that naturally occurs when expanding a salient deep into the enemy's rear. And the implied longer front is also harder for the Ukrainian forces to cover, since they are so short of manpower.
Historically, I think it's the numerically weaker army that wants to shorten the front. In the Great Patriotic War, the Germans did this repeatedly, evacuating the Demyansk and later Rzhev salients to free up the infantry that was tied down covering the long fronts of these salients.
a key factor in the frequent recurrence of finger salients is that Russia apparently has found an effective tactical package: the finger salients threatening Ukrainian logistics and lines of retreat are being created by tiny Russian commitments: tactical formations of 6 or 12 on ATVs or motorcycles. Initially, there is almost nothing at risk to an Ukrainian counterattack, which counterattack will place proportionally more resources at risk. It is the kind of continually probing advance that makes attritional strategy work. It isn’t simply that Russia has more men and equipment to begin with, Russia has found a way to exchange to advantage in every transaction despite a heavily fortified frontier. Truly something to appreciate.
Yes as RF army move to encircle they keep avenues of possible maneuver and supply under fire potential, heavy arty, drones, air bombing, glide bombs, missiles.
That said everyone from Trump thru his SecDef claim Iran engineers built straight line to the centerfuges air shafts*. Like Top Gun two.
Should RF or Iran be underestimated.
*. As to flying a GBU 57 down a vent shaft, today I had to push a cotter pin through a hole in a steel rod. It is not going in if not in same line vector as the shaft! Hegseth and Caine are selling the obliteration.
I did not say they were leaving flanks unprotected. But they did not make so many incursions into Ukraine territory before, creating a vastly longer line of contact in real terms. Russia has way more drones than before, among other things, as well as more raw dominance in manpower and other materiel.
I view the longer local flanks as additional confirmation of Ukraine’s weakened condition.
– I think they should be positing.
Very interesting article, thanks for the update. This switch, that both armenia and azerbaijan seem pro-US/allies now, has been a surprising show of competence by the US/allies. I was so used to endless shows of incompetence.
Competence? Or easy of bribing and aligning “incentives”.
Azeris are one of the ethnic minorities targeted in the new Syria. And Armenians are targeted in Israel.
In a word, yes.
Since pre-World War 2, the textbook response to an enemy attack is to counterattack the flanks of the penetration. At the least, this forces the enemy to divert troops from the point of attack towards flank security; at the most spectacular, the enemy pincer can be “snapped off” at the base, leading to massive casualties.
To a significant degree, this is the story of the Eastern Front in World War 2. The Battle of Kursk (southern flank), for example, was won not by “biggest tank battles in history” or whatnot, but by relentless Soviet counterattacks on the flanks of the three (!!) German spearheads almost from the beginning. They did not succeed in snapping these off, but enough striking power was siphoned off to the flanks that a week into the offensive the Germans could hardly advance any further. Post-war self-serving protestations from Manstein notwithstanding.
Two things have taken place in the past year or so. One, the Ukrainians destroyed a metric megaton of their mobile striking power in their invasion of the Kursk region. [And more still in the failed 2023 counteroffensive.] As well as their behind-the-line artillery assets, since these had to be deployed next to the Kursk region (or even inside it), allowing the Russians to hunt them with wild abandon. Two, the Russians developed enough drone expertise and capabilities to basically spot and begin to interdict any Ukrainian movement up to 10-15 kilometers behind the line. Read the official reports of the past two-three months’ worth of Ukrainian attacks on Tetkino (Kursk region), for example – Russian drones typically spot Ukrainian assault groups while still on approach, and then barrage them with FPVs way before they get into range of artillery and ATGMs.
Now, the drone thing actually does cut both ways; Russian military correspondents seem to think that the biggest threat to these new “pincers” is not any Ukrainian counterattack, but Ukrainian FPV drone attacks on the supply lines, i.e. the forward detachments literally running out of food and water. And this is also why any “big arrow” offensive in the future is…a questionable thing, since the Ukrainians would be able to spot it from many miles away (and pre-emptively mine the approach routes and get their FPVs in the air).
To be sure, drones are not an end-all against mechanized assaults. There is a recent video of a Russian mechanized assault on some village where one of the tanks gets hit by literally ten (10) FPV drones in the space of a few minutes, but manages to survive, albeit with a blown track, so still knocked out of action for the day or so it took to tow it back and repair it. And on the other side, the Russians recently posted a video where they hit an advancing Swedish-Ukrainian AFV five times, and it still got to the “point” and began to unload troops. [The sixth drone went into the conveniently open door, and that’s all she wrote, but the point is the previous five strikes did not even slow the thing down.] Nevertheless, they are still an issue.
What I suspect the Russians are doing now (low-key), and will intensify in the future, is a version of the “Ten Stalin Offensives” from 1944, where the Soviets would launch major attacks at different sections of the front in relatively quick succession, forcing the Germans to keep rushing their remaining mobile reserves hither and thither without really accomplishing much in any one place. If you assume that Ukrainians have now more or less ran out of powerful mechanized formations, and their specialized drone units are the only real mobile reserve they possess, then having these run around to plug different holes in the line (and attriting them as they do) will eventually leave someplace wide open for a more conventional advance. As I said, they’re already doing a version of this, like Group of Forces North first attacking in the Sumy region, forcing reserves to rush there, then 100-200 miles away in the Kharkov region, same effect, and now again on the “other side” of the Sumy region.
I’m not sure I see why Russia would have to change it’s plan because of a new war in Iran in the fall. If we’ve learned anything in the past 6 months it is that Russia has the an advantage in industrial production to support its military and it has 300,000 reservists it hasn’t fully deployed. We also know Iran is not a paper tiger state despite western propaganda. While Iran probably lacks the industrial power to sustain a long full contact war, it does have a defensive agreement with Russia who could readily supply its army. And China has publicly said it is against regime change in Iran.
While I do not doubt the possibilities of renewed fighting in the fall and that it could involve Turkey and Azerbaijan, I find don’t necessarily see this a reason why the Russians would think they need to wind up Ukraine any faster. I’m sure they would prefer to have only one active war theater on their doorstep at a time, but to me I don’t see any need for Russian boots to be on the ground in Iran so it’s just a question of supplying Iranian soldiers. Just because the west has lost the ability to ramp up military industrial production does not mean that applies to Russia (or China).
The proper strategic calculus for Russia is not how to end the war in Ukraine sooner, but what do we and our allies need to do to FULLY support another war against Iran by the west without compromising our objectives in Ukraine.
Side note… some data is already saying China is facing some headwinds economically from the Trump tariffs. While it can’t necessarily convert, overnight, factories that used to support US consumer exports to military production. It can start diverting some of those resources to increased military equipment outputs and don’t think Beijing hasn’t been considering that for reasons beyond Iran.