August 18th, 2025   NO SUMMARY TOMORROW 

Politics  - Meeting in Washington 

Combat Ops - Salient squeezed

Weather

Kharkiv

73 and partly cloudy, gusting to 20. Mostly sunny all week, rain showers on the weekend. Daily lows near 60, daily highs near 80. Winds westerly, 5-10kts.

Melitopol

75 and sunny, gusting over 20. Mostly sunny all week. Daily lows in the low 60s, daily highs in the mid to upper 80s. Winds variable, 5-10kts.

Kyiv

68 and partly cloudy, gusting to 30. Partly cloudy all week, thunderstorms possible on Friday. Daily lows in the upper 50s to low 60s, highs in the upper 70s. Winds westerly, 5-10kts.

Politics 

Meeting talking place now at the White House: President Trump, President Zelenskyy, PM Meloni, Chancellor Merz, PM Starmer, Pres. Macron, Pres.Stubb.

Over the weekend SecState Rubio repeated President Trump's statement that it is not for the US to accept or reject a deal from Russia, that that is Ukraine’s decision.

He also commented that the US desire is for an agreement that allows Ukraine to rebuild and to be assured that a Russian invasion “never happens again.” But, he added that a peace agreement was  “a long ways off...We’re not at the precipice of a peace agreement… We made progress in the sense that we identified potential areas of agreement, but there remain some big areas of disagreement.”

Ambassador Witkoff also commented yesterday that Putin was willing to agree to “robust security guarantees” for Ukraine’s.

Ground Operations

SUMY - KHARKIV OBLASTS

Imagery confirmed gains by Ukrainian forces near Novomykolaivka, north of Sumy City, advancing one tree-line north.

Further east,  Ukrainian forces claimed similar gains near Yablunivka, but these were not confirmed.

North of Kharkiv city there were unconfirmed claims of small Russian gains north-east of Kharkiv city.

NORTH OF THE DONETS RIVER

There has been no confirmed changes in the lines around Kupyansk in the last several days but there are reports of increased Russian activity to the east and south-east of Kupyansk.

Further south, all the way to the Donets River there were claims of gains but there are no confirmed changes in the line.

BAKHMUT - TORETSK - POKROVSK

  Fighting continues north-east and east of Siversk, but there were no confirmed changes. Russian officials are claiming that Russian forces now control the town of Serebryanka (3 miles north-east of Siversk, along the south bank of the Donets River), but this has not been confirmed. If Russian forces do control Serebrianka, this would give their artillery direct fire into Siversk, and improve their  positioning to attack Siversk,

Further south there were few reports of activity around Chasiv Yar; whether that was because of the focus on the fighting north of Pokrovsk or because of an actual lack of action around Chasiv Yar is unknown.

An imagery report notes that Ukrainian forces advanced just south-east of the village of Nelipivka (about 15-20 houses, located about a mile north-east of the eastern tip of the Kleban Byk reservoir), but this appears to be mainly advancing across unoccupied fields.

Further west, in the general area north of Pokrovsk - the site of the recent Russian advances, Ukrainian forces are pushing back into the Russian salient and have retaken at least a quarter of the terrain Russian forces “occupied.” Per the Ukrainian staffs, the Russians do not appear to have significantly reinforced any of the units that had pushed forward, most of which appear to be sub-platoon sized elements (less than 40 troops) and in many cases squad sized. Per one noted Ukrainian blogger, the total number of Russian troops involved in the entire “breakout” was less than 350 troops.

At the same time, imagery does show Russian forces west of Novoekonomichne, pushing further westward, towards Myrnohrad, continuing to squeeze the pocket that has developed east of Pokrovsk.

Further south of Pokrovsk, to the Vovcha River, fighting continues but there were no changes in the front line.

SOUTHERN UKRAINE 

  There were reports of fighting south of the Vovcha River to the area just east of Huliaipole, as well as west of Orikhiv to the Dnepr River, but there were no noted changes in the front line.

Air Operations

During the night of August 17th-August 18th Russian forces launched 4 x Iskander ballistic missiles and 140 x Shahed drones into Ukrainian air space. The UAF claimed it shot down, or defeated by EW, 88  Shahed drones.

Damage from drone strikes was reported in Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Odessa, and Sumy oblast; at least one of the ballistic missiles struck Kharkiv, at least one ballistic missile struck in Zaporizhzhia, and at least one ballistic missile struck Odessa.

RuAF tacair struck 8 Ukrainian towns.

During the night of August 16th-August 17th Russian forces launched 1 x Iskander ballistic missiles and 60 x Shahed drones into Ukrainian air space. The UAF claimed it shot down, or defeated by EW,  40  Shahed drones.

Damage from drone strikes was reported in Chernihiv Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, and Kharkiv oblast.

During the night of August 15th-August 16th Russian forces launched 1 x Iskander ballistic missiles and 85 x Shahed drones into Ukrainian air space. The UAF claimed it shot down, or defeated by EW, 61 Shahed drones.

Damage from drone strikes was reported in Chernihiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkiv and Sumy oblast.

On the 15th Ukrainian forces conducted another drone strike on a railway station (in Lisky, Voronezh oblast) and the strike appeared to briefly disrupt trains moving through the station. 

As I noted the other day, the track record for air strikes on railway stations is that they are difficult targets: with good crews track is fairly quickly repaired, stations may burn but a burned station doesn't affect the track, a depot may or may not have trains or supplies or ammo or fuel in them, so, a strike on such items is often serendipity more than good intelligence. 

Ukrainian Intelligence is claiming that a Ukrainian drone strike on Russian column in Kursk wounded the the Russian Northern Ground Forces deputy commander, LTG Abachev, and claim he required arm and leg amputation after the strike - this has not been confirmed.

During the night of August 14th-August 15th Russian forces launched 2 x Iskander ballistic missiles and 97 x Shahed drones into Ukrainian air space. The UAF claimed it shot down, or defeated by EW, 63 Shahed drones.

Damage from drone strikes was reported in Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy oblast; at least one of the ballistic missiles struck Dnipro city.

RuAF tacair struck 4 Ukrainian towns.

Economic Reporting

Feb22   May8 Jun9 July8 Aug8 Aug15 Aug18

Brent      94.71       61.93 66.80 70.44 66.90 66.22 65.58

WTI     92.10    59.00 64.89 68.65 64.29 63.29 62.46

NG       3.97          3.64 3.69 3.35 3.06 2.96 2.89

Wheat     8.52           5.34 5.49 5.49 5.18 5.07 5.26

Ruble     85          82.45 79.27 78.47 79.74 80.20 80.47

Hryvnia 36.4 41.55 41.55 41.80 41.39 41.25 41.34

Urals 54.13 60.84 64.07 63.17 63.49 63.16

ESPO 48.90 63.97 71.58 68.63 69.04 68.05

Sokol 57.39 61.51 64.38 62.57 63.02 62.74

Thoughts

About that salient north of Pokrovsk, following the breakout the Russian high command tried to move troops forward to reinforce but were unable to.

This is consistent with the Russian way of war since late 2022 (and post the Battle of Kursk, 1943): everything is slow, but there are no high-risk operations. This salient of the last 2 weeks was hardly high risk - what amounts to less than 1 battalion’s worth of personnel “less than 350” per the Ukrainians, scattered out like a shotgun blast, running ahead in some cases 15 miles.

What is disturbing here is that they were able to penetrate so far with such little Ukrainian response and that it took 10 days for several brigades of the Azov corps to move up to begin to dislodge them. It will be interesting to see if, when this Ukrainian response is complete, the Russian line has advanced at all from where it was 2 weeks ago when this started. If I were to wager, I suspect it did, and the Russians will have gained ground at very low cost. Further, the Azov corps, or large elements of it, have now been committed, further reducing whatever strategic reserves the Ukrainian army had on hand.

Finally, the relatively empty terrain the Russian recon elements passed through tells a better tale than any other of the Ukrainian manpower problem. 

As for the negotiations and meetings, there remain a host of issues that would seem to make any agreement difficult, Russia’s demand to address “root causes,” NATO membership vs security guarantees, de facto vice de jure recognition of Russian control, etc. I would suspect that each of these and others could be “word-smithed” and some sort of agreement reached. 

But I suspect the real sticking points are convincing Ukraine to de facto cede land to Russia, and establishing any sort of credible security guarantee (however it might be labeled) that would actually do what SecState Rubio suggested: ensure this never happens again.

Never is a long time, and the northern plains of Europe have been “inviting” invaders for millennia. The five decades of almost peace from the end of WWII to the wars in the Balkans is one of the longest periods without a major war in the history of Europe, peace arguably purchased with a nuclear umbrella… 

v/r pete