July 17th, 2026 Next Summary July 21st
Thoughts
Over the last two days there have been few changes… I shall take up a detailed discussion again on Tuesday, but for now, I offer this...
Because many of you haven’t read anything from me for weeks to months - I am going to have a short (not too short, sorry) recap of the situation in Ukraine.
My apologies.
To reset what I was trying to do here: I started following the situation in Ukraine in detail in February 2014 - the occupation of Crimea. I noted to some folks at the time (May 2014) that if the US and Europe did nothing significant, they placed all of Ukraine at risk; nothing was done. The vague US assurance to Ukraine in 1994, followed by the insignificant response in 2014 set this war in motion. I have been following it closely since. Roll forward to the invasion.
Within a few weeks of the invasion, with tremendous amounts of coverage on line (March - April 2022) I noticed two things: the first was that the majority of the news reports on the war in Ukraine did not track from day to day. On the one hand Ukrainian Javelin teams and special forces elements and crafty foot soldiers were “slaughtering" the Russians, and on the other hands the Russians were gaining ground. While both could be true an any given day, they could not be true over any extended period of time. I started digging deeper, beginning every day with the assumption that each capital - Kyiv, Moscow, all of Europe and Washington DC - was if not outright telling lies, it was at least seriously bending the truth. And every time I saw an adverb, I knew it wasn’t news, it was propaganda.
The second thing I noticed was that 9 reports out of 10 read like seriously messed up sports scores: "The Bruins scored 3 goals in the 3rd quarter,” you might read, but no place in the story could you find out how many goals the Rangers scored.
So, while I wanted to understand the war, what was happening; that could not be done, that cannot be done, without trying to understand what is happening on both sides.
I understand some people think I am pro-Putin. If they think that then my analysis and my writing are abysmally poor and I apologize.
So, let me be crystal clear: I would love Russia to lose. I want Ukraine to survive. There’s only one thing I want more than that: I pray that no nuclear weapons will be used. If you don't think that is likely, I’m happy for you, it makes it easier to sleep at night.
So, where does the war stand right now?
Everyone suddenly is saying Ukraine is winning, or has turned the tide. I would not characterize it as such. The two armies are very similar in capability, how they stack up is shown by a closer look at the numbers and the tactics.
Drones have made headlines, particularly Ukrainian drones in the last 4 months (since February). What happened in February was that Starlink finally got the Russians off the system (which apparently was not as easy as one might think). In any case, during late 2024 and early 2025 the Russians had developed TTP (Tactics, techniques and procedures) that allowed for much more flexible command and control (C2) of drones over much greater distances. This lead to an increase in Ukrainian casualties in 2025 and several notable Russian gains as Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) were degraded and Ukrainian forces took higher losses. When Russian forces were pushed off Starlink, Ukrainian forces then used the C2 model developed by the Russians to strike into the Russian rear and strike Russian oil facilities, and attack the Russian GLOCs. The Russians are now struggling to duplicate the capability without having to duplicate the Starlink infrastructure. This was the point of the repeaters recently set up in Belarus. So far, the Russians have not replicated the C2. And Ukrainian forces are taking advantage of Russia’s size - 32X larger than Ukraine - to exploit gaps in air defenses. But that is not to say Russia has not continued to develop both drone warfare and drone defenses. And both sides are producing large numbers of drones.
Both sides are producing fiber optic controlled drones - with fiber optic spools of 100 km / 60 nm (Russian drones) and 60 km / 36 nm (Ukrainian drones); the key here, is the fiber optic spools provided to Russia by China. Russia is reportedly producing, and using, 50,000 per month, there is no good number on Ukrainian numbers of fiber optic drones, the limiting factor being the labor involved in winding the fiber optic spools. There are machines that can do it, but they have a high failure rate and hand wound spools are, to date, more reliable.
Both sides are making very large numbers of short range, small warhead (under 10kg, often just 1 or 2kg), First Person Video (FPV) drones, suicide drones. While these drones can fly further in a straight line, these overwhelmingly are flown at targets less than 6 miles away and usually half that.
Ukraine has the current edge, and is flying about 15,000 short range drones per day. Of that, not quite half (6,500 - 7,000 per day) find a target - per Gen. Syrskyi. That doesn’t mean the target is destroyed or the soldier killed, just that they made an attack on “a target.”
Russia is flying about 11,000 per day, and, per the Ukrainian General Staff, some 1,600 per day are “shot down” - which also includes electronic jamming. That means 9,000+ get through, but doesn’t tell us how many find a target.
Both sides have production goals of 19,000 per day by the end of this year, and 30,000 per day by the end of next year.
Electronic warfare is a major part of the effort on a daily basis. Russian recon teams (2 - 5 men) reportedly don’t move forward unless they have at least one portable jammer with them, and often several, backpacks devices that will defeat an FPV drone in the attack (teams also usually have a couple of FPV drones with them, as well, and no one moves without an “IR Cloak”). Ukrainian sources admit the Russian electronic warfare is very good and the results have been interesting: for example, Russian EW for the most part negated the efficacy of the HIMARS rockets, and was effective enough against the Excalibur 155MM artillery shell to make it less accurate than a dumb round.
Other Russian EW efforts resulted in two Ukrainian drones not only “crashing” into fuel storage tanks in Latvia as they flew northward along the western Belarus border, and in one case two drones hit the same building, suggesting not that the weapons had been jammed but that the “jammer” had intruded into the drones and redirected them at the building and the fuel tanks. Other EW efforts included taking control of a Ukrainian navy surface drone and driving it into a ship in Constanta harbor.
What is clear is that Russian EW is very good, but obviously, they have a supply problem - not enough of these jammers. There would also appear to be a range problem: they are effective in protecting point targets but targets that cover large areas are routinely attacked.
Also note, Russian forces continue to use some 12,000 rounds per day (about 4,000 each) of 152MM, 122MM and 120MM mortar rounds. Ukrainian forces are primarily using 155MM rounds, at a rate of about 3,000 - 4,000 per day. US and European combined production appears to be just holding at that humber.
Russian forces are also using 200 or more FAB glide some (JDAM-ER equivalents) per day, while Ukrainian forces use appears to be on the order of just a few per day.
Russian forces also continue to produce adequate numbers of larger ballistic and cruise missiles to keep up a steady pace of deep strikes. How it is that Russia, with an economy we are repeatedly told is on the verge of collapse and the US and Europe - with a combined GDP 20 times larger than Russia’s, and after 4 years of trying, still can’t figure out how to make more weapons, bewilders me.
Returning to the issue of both sides, it turned out that there have been wild reports of casualties. Partly this is the poor control of language: casualties are to simply casualties. Killed and severely wounded and lightly wounded and missing and POWs are all casualties and the numbers are conflated. To simply say “there were 10,000 casualties last month” forces anyone trying to understand what is really happening to dig into history, to look for analogs to this fighting, and to extrapolate from any snippet of hard data that oozes out of the propaganda mills on both sides.
In fact, there is only one public source that has a credible methodology to track Russian KIAs, and none that tracks Ukrainian KIAs.
Mediazone’s tracking shows Russian KIAs to be in the range of 235,000 to 350,000 as of the beginning of 2026, and perhaps a 35,000 - 45,000 since, giving an upper boundary of 395,000 KIAs.
Depending on which source you look at, the number of severely wounded - will not return to active duty - is roughly 60-80% of the KIA figure. The number of lighter wounded (will return to active duty) has cycled between 1.5X and 2X the number of KIAs. There are also some other numbers that need to be looked at, POWs and deserters.
POW numbers have been quite low on both sides, with soldiers preferring to simply dig in and hold rather than surrender. There have been slightly more prisoners taken by Russians than taken by Ukrainians, but the number is probably less than 20,000 over the course of the war and many have been returned in POW exchanges.
Desertions are another issue. Russian forces had been regularly reported in Western media as some 30,000 and then 70,000 as of early 2026. At that time the reporting of roughly 300,000 (290,000 as of December 2025) Ukrainian deserters resulted in a series of reports that increased Russian desertions to between 300,000 and 1 million. Those numbers aren’t credible. Rather, 100,000 total seems to be an outside number. This yields the following upper limit numbers for Russian casualties:
395,000 KIA, 315,000 severely wounded, 555,000 wounded (return to active duty), 100,000 deserters.
There are a number of ways to try to estimate Ukrainian casualties, but perhaps the most conservative is the number of amputees.
By August 2023 Ukraine forces had suffered more than 50,000 amputations, per the leading European manufacturer of prosthetics. By the end of 2024 that number had climbed to more than 100,000. Under the best of conditions (rapid CASEVAC - maintain the "golden hour”), amputations run about 40% of KIAs, that is, if there are two amputees, there will be 5 KIAs. As medical care response times increase, that number worsens. (In the US Civil War there were 12 KIAs for every amputee. In WWI there were more than 10 KIAs for every amputee.) Because of the drone coverage by both sides, medical evacuation of wounded in Ukraine is, again per the UGS, not measured in hours but in days. This would suggest that a 3 KIA per 1 amputee ratio is too low.
But, even if we use that number, that would suggest that by early 2025 Ukraine had suffered 300,000 KIA, and that number would have grown in the 18 months since. That would suggest that Ukrainian casualties are essentially the same as Russian casualties, except in one regard, Ukrainian desertions almost 4 times larger. And, given that both sides are fighting using much the same weapons and the same tactics, that they are suffering similar casualties makes sense.
Finally, while it has become commonplace to pooh-pooh Russian training and Russian leadership, it is worth noting the numbers: The total Russian force just passed 700,000 as of late last year. It faces a Ukrainian force of 800,000 - 900,000. It is attacking, while Ukrainian forces are defending. The Ukrainians are defending home terrain and should have the morale advantage. The Russians have extended supply lines, the Ukrainians do not. The combined GDP of the Ukrainian side is 20 times that of the Russian side. The Russians have been outspent on the war 2 to 1 at least. The West has better technology and much better tactical intelligence. Yet the Russians, after an idiotic net assessment that started this war, and a foolish war plan, and after stretching themselves too thin, and taking hard lumps in the first year, came back and have fought a brutal but not ineffective war. And they have become better. The Russian army today is a better army than the Russian army of 2022. And China has learned from this war as well.
There is one more factor concerning people, and the understanding that Russia has 5 times the population of Ukraine.
It will be noted that between 650,000 and 900,000 Russian men left Russia in the year after the war started; 900,000 out of a population of 146 million.
During that same period 1.5 million men left Ukraine for Europe. Per the departing Ukrainian Minister of Defense, there are another 1 million Ukrainian men hiding inside Ukraine.
This is the final, and perhaps greatest concern here: in 1991 Ukraine’s population was 52 million. As of 2021 it was 43 million. It is now 32 million; 25% of the population has left. Denys Shmyhal, Ukraine’s Prime Minister from 2020 - 2025, believes few will return. An additional 100,000 - 150,000 people - net - leave every month. 40% of the population has said they want to live elsewhere. The Ukrainian fertility rate is 1.22, 219th in the world - only Lithuania, China, Malta, Singapore, Bosnia, Taiwan, Albania and South Korea have lower fertility rates. Various models show Ukraine’s population falling to less than half of its current population by the end of the century, some suggest it will happen in the next 15 years. Russia, by the way is projected to shrink to - worst case - 126 million by the end of the century.
The Russians continue to grind down the Ukrainian power grid and continue to strike into cities and towns across the country. There has been an estimated $600 billion to $1 trillion in infrastructure damage across the country.
True, the Kremlin continues to grind its people and grind the war. And, it’s possible that the Russians will simply give up. That’s a nice hope. But hope isn’t a plan. In the meantime, Ukraine is being destroyed. Russia may want to grab a few square miles of land, but they are not waging a war of land grabs, they are waging a war of attrition and Ukraine is being ground down. I find it hard to say Ukraine is winning.
v/r pete
