The United Kingdom is buying 5,000 Lightweight Multirole Missiles from arms firm Thales—and plans to donate them to Ukraine. The 13-kg LMM, fired one at a time from a shoulder launcher, ranges as far as 8 km under infrared guidance.

The 5,000 missiles, built at Thales’ Belfast factory, could cost as much as $3.4 billion. The UK government announced it will loan the money to the Ukrainian government—with generous repayment terms spread over 19 years.

The LMM buy, first floated in March, “is not only a major boost to the UK’s defense capabilities but will also keep Ukraine in the fight, boosting their defense against Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion,” the government in London stated. 

But 5,000 missiles alone can’t keep Ukraine in the fight for very long. Russia is already overwhelming Ukraine’s air-defenses with vast numbers of explosive drones.

The LMM is just the thing to shoot down a relatively low- and slow-flying target such as Russia’s 200-kg Shahed attack drones, which range thousands of miles with 90-kg warheads. 

In three years, Russia has launched around 29,000 Shaheds—also known as Gerans—at Ukrainian positions and cities. 

Ukrainian forces shot down or jammed most of them. But Ukraine’s air-defenses are running low—and new models of the 440-pound, propeller-driven drone have additional satellite navigation receivers, making them jam-resistant.

Meanwhile, the pace of Shahed launches is increasing—meaning more and more of the drones are striking their targets … and killing or maiming Ukrainians. 

Ukrainian analysis group Frontelligence Insight crunched the numbers. “The 2,736 drones launched in June, many targeting Kyiv, make up nearly 10% of the total” number of Shaheds launched since Russia widened its war on Ukraine. 

This proves “growing production,” explained the Frontelligence Insight’s founder, Tatarigami.

“This aligns with earlier warnings from Ukrainian intelligence, which estimated Russia’s monthly output at around 2,700 Shahed-type UAVs and roughly 2,500 decoys,” Tatarigami noted. The decoys distract Ukrainian defenses, helping the armed Shaheds reach their targets.

Swarms of drones

In August 2024, Ukrainian officials said Russia was producing about 500 Shaheds a month. “Since then, output has multiplied, and the drones have become deadlier: the warhead weight has increased from 50 kg to 90 kg, and maneuverability has improved,” Tatarigami wrote.

Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, warned that Shahed production could soon exceed 1,000 per day. “I’m not intimidating anyone,” Brovdi wrote. His warning is based on “analysis of the intelligence,” he said. 

“The growing scale is a serious problem for Ukraine,” Tatarigami intoned. 

Ukraine is shooting down the drones with mobile gun teams, surface-to-air missile batteries, fighter jets, gunship helicopters and interceptor drones. It’s also sending them off course with electronic warfare systems.

But the sheer number of drones overwhelms Ukraine’s defenses. Part of the problem is that many of the munitions the Ukrainians use to down the Shaheds are more expensive than the drones are. 

An LMM costs more than $500,000. A Shahed costs $200,000. 5,000 LMMs costing $3.4 billion, if they struck 100% of the time, would be enough to destroy a few weeks worth of Shaheds costing $1 billion.

For the Ukrainians, “it’s not just about increasing production” of anti-drone systems, “but also about reducing the cost per interception—making it much cheaper to intercept drones than to manufacture them,” Tatarigami explained.

The cheapest defense is jamming. It costs roughly $8 million to surround a city with jammers such as the Night Watch electronic warfare team’s Lima. The few cities that have enjoyed Night Watch’s protection have suffered almost no Shahed strikes for months at a time.

The Russians can jam-proof a drone by adding more antennas for satellite navigation, compelling the Ukrainians to add more channels to their jammers—or risk the electronic defenses failing. Right now, the Russians are evolving their drones faster than the Ukrainians are evolving their jammers, the Night Watch rep admitted.

Asked if Ukraine was losing the war on the Shaheds, a representative of Ukraine’s Night Watch electronic warfare team responded simply. “Yes, it is.”

5,000 missiles that cost slightly too much for anti-Shahed duty may not change that.

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Ukraine’s perfect German missiles never miss—but Russia’s drone factories never sleep

The Russian military knows it has a nighttime camouflage problem. It’s begun circulating a field manual instructing befuddled troops on the proper fit for their thermal blankets. 

The main point, according to the manual, is to make sure the blanket isn’t warmer than the nighttime landscape. “Before putting on the anti-heat-vision cape, it should be taken outside in advance and cooled by hanging it in the shade for at least one hour,” the manual advises, according to a translation posted online by Canadian drone expert “Roy.” “It is necessary in order for the cape to reach ambient temperature.”

By the same token, soldiers should make sure their thermal camo isn’t cooler than the landscape. That advice is a matter of life and death. 

Consider what happened to a trio of Russian troops that tried to sneak across open terrain toward the front line presumably somewhere around Novomykolaivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast in late June.

The Russians did the smart thing and moved at night, under thermal camouflage that should—in theory—hide them from surveillance drones with infrared sensors. But the Russians hid under thermal blankets that were cooler than the surrounding summertime terrain was.

Instead of disappearing from Ukrainian drones’ heat sensors, they stood out. A bomber drone from the Ukrainian army’s 59th Assault Brigade spotted them—and approached with a clutch of grenades. 

The Russians knew they were in trouble. They apparently heard the drone coming, crouched in place and pulled their blankets tightly over them. But it didn’t help.

It wasn’t some exposed limb sticking out from under a blanket that gave them away—it was the blankets themselves. The temperature differential between the ground and the outside of the blankets was so great that that blankets appeared as black shapes amid the gray and white landscape on the bomber drones’ infrared sensor.

The drone operator took their time aiming their grenades. The first round hit within meters of the crouching Russians. Arterial blood spray from one badly wounded Russian glowed hot on the drone’s camera. The ammunition the Russians were carrying, which cooked off following the second grenade impact, glowed even hotter.

The blasts left the landscape painted with blood, body parts and hot fragments.

How not to hide

Drones are everywhere all the time as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds into its 41st month. Even on a quieter stretch of the 1,100-km front line such as that held by the 59th Assault Brigade. Even at night.

Both sides urge their troops to conceal themselves from the ever-present drones. “Use thermal blankets, similar to those that are often placed in … first-aid kits,” the Ukrainian government advised its forces in its own counterdrone field manual. “If possible, take care and use mylar capes, blankets, cloth. They effectively reflect infrared radiation.”

But the thermal camo can work poorly—or too well. Cheaper mylar blankets tend to trap too much heat or too little. When the ground is warmer than the outside of the blanket is, the wearer will appear as a solid dark square on any infrared sensor. When the ground is cooler, the wearer will appear as a solid white square.

A thermal blanket must be the same temperature as its surroundings. Placing the blanket outdoors in the shade in order to cool it is one necessary step, according to the Russian manual. A proper fit—loose but totally covering the wearer—is another necessity. “Do not allow the cape to be pressed against your body,” the manual warns. “It will warm up the cape quickly in places of pressing and begin to ‘glow’ in the thermal imager.”

Given the many instances of Russian troops getting spotted and droned while wearing badly fitting, too-hot or too-cold thermal camo, the Kremlin surely hopes its surviving forces heed the manual. Ukrainian drone teams, hunting by night with infrared sensors, surely hope the Russians don’t heed it.

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Ukraine just declared open season on Russia’s drone nests in urgent strategy shift

The famed 1st Tank Brigade is the third of Ukraine’s five tank brigades to undergo the transformation. After its reorganization, the brigade now has just two ostensibly 31-tank battalions instead of three—but has added a second mechanized battalion with, on paper, 31 infantry fighting vehicles.

Big, cumbersome, easy-to-spot tanks are just too vulnerable to the tiny first-person-view drones that are everywhere all the time all along the front line. “The reduced time between detection and engagement, driven by real-time drone surveillance and the high velocity of FPV attack drones, has created a hostile environment for traditional armored platforms on the battlefield,” Ukrainian analysis group Frontelligence Insight explained.

Prior to the reorganization, the brigade operated T-64 and T-72 tanks and BMP fighting vehicles. Its equipment may change as its structure changes.

It’s the latest chapter in the long history of a legendary brigade, which fought in some of the hardest battles of the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and, as the invasion widened eight years later, won a decisive battle in the city of Chernihiv, 100 km north of Kyiv and just 60 km from the border with Russia.

Russian commanders assumed the 1st Tank Brigade would be an easy target on day one of the wider war. In the early morning hours of Feb. 24, Russian missiles and artillery struck the permanent garrisons of many of Ukraine’s ground combat brigades.

But these brigades, including the 1st Tank Brigade, had dispersed. The Russian bombardment mostly destroyed empty buildings. The 1st Tank Brigade’s several thousand troopers and roughly 100 T-64 tanks lay in wait in the fields and forests surrounding Chernihiv.

The Russian 41st Combined Arms Army barreled south from its staging areas around the Belarus-Russia border, quickly arriving at Chernihiv. On paper, the 41st CAA with its 20,000 troops and hundreds of T-72 tanks vastly outmatched the 1st Tank Brigade.

In reality, the 1st Tank Brigade held key advantages, analysts Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds revealed in a study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

The autoloader in the three-person T-64 and the Ukrainian army’s superior training made the most difference in the chaotic early fights around Chernihiv. “The first days of fighting saw numerous meeting engagements in forests at around 100 m to 200 m range, where restricted movement limited the Russian ability to bring their mass to bear against a specific tactical situation,” Zabrodskyi, Watling, Danylyuk and Reynolds wrote.

“Better crew training combined with short-ranged engagements where their armament was competitive, and the faster autoloader on the T-64, allowed Ukrainian tank crews to achieve significant damage against surprised Russian units.”

The 1st Tank Brigade bled the 41st CAA for several days until Russian commanders decided simply to bypass Chernihiv. As Russian battalions rolled past, the 1st Tank Brigade “found itself encircled.” A territorial brigade garrisoned in Chernihiv screened the 1st Tank Brigade’s T-64s as the brigade adopted an all-around defense of the city.

For six weeks the brigade and its supporting territorials held out. “Communication with the 1st Tank Brigade was maintained along a small supply road running northwards on the left bank of the Dnipro [River] that the Russians failed to sever, despite having an overwhelming force presence,” the RUSI analysts wrote. 

The Russian army ultimately failed to capture Kyiv and bring the war to a swift end. In late March, the Kremlin ordered its battered forces around the capital city to retreat. That’s when the 1st Tank Brigade attacked. On March 31, the brigade liberated the M01 highway connecting Chernihiv to Kyiv.

Victory in Chernihiv

The 1st Tank Brigade had won its hardest fight. But wider trends doomed its status as one of Ukraine’s five tanks brigades alongside the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 17th Tank Brigades. 

FPV drones haven’t rendered tanks obsolete. But they have forced tank crews to operate extremely carefully—hiding most of the time in buildings or dugouts and rolling out only occasionally to fire a few shells.

It’s a new “era of the cautious tank,” David Kirichenko, an analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C., announced in September.

Tanks are even more cautious now than they were last fall. “Overall, there is less armor being deployed to the front, especially compared to 2023,” Kirichenko said. “So we are still in the era of the cautious tank, or we could say that it has even gotten more cautious now.”

The Ukrainian army responded to the changing environment. The 17th Tank Brigade reorganized in October or November, reducing its tank inventory to become the first of the Ukrainian army’s new heavy mechanized brigades. The 5th Tank Brigade underwent its reorg in December.

The Ukrainian ground forces are also adopting a new corps structure that places similar brigades fighting in the same sectors under a single command. It’s possible these corps—there should be 13 of them—will each have just one separate tank battalion.

The forces for these battalions—the tanks and crews—could come from the tank brigades, some of which “may be disbanded,” Militaryland reported. Meanwhile, the tank battalions in the mechanized, motorized and mountain brigades “will be reduced in size.”

Today, the Ukrainian military should have 30 or so tank battalions with around a thousand tanks. The possible reorganization could cut that structure in half. Fewer battalions—and many more tanks in reserve to replace losses from drones.

The tanks are assuming a secondary role as infantry—and the armored trucks and tracked vehicles that speed them to and from their trenches—take on the lead role in this new era of ever-present drones and cautious tanks.

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Ukraine deploys Leopard 1A5 “sniper tanks” with 7 brigades

Desperate to blunt escalating Russian bombardment of its cities, Ukraine contacted Germany with an urgent request four new air-defense systems and as many as 2,000 new missiles for them.

Germany responded with equal urgency—and said yes. Now Ukraine is set to receive four additional launchers for IRIS-T missiles as well as a huge stock of the 130-kg missiles, which range as far as 40 km under infrared and radar guidance. 

The IRIS-T isn’t the kind of missile you’d shoot at an incoming ballistic missile. Ballistic missiles such as Russia’s Iskander move too quickly for smaller air-defense missiles. It takes a heavy missile in the class of the US-made Patriot to kill an Iskander.

What the IRIS-T is, is a drone-killer. In its primary role defending against slower and lower-flying targets—Russian Shahed drones and cruise missiles, for example—the IRIS-T has a nearly 100% success rate, according to Helmut Rauch, the CEO of Germany’s Diehl Defense, the lead manufacturer of the missile. 

The Ukrainian 540th Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade corroborated that figure. During one recent Russian cruise missile barrage, the brigade’s IRIS-T launchers shot down all 27 incoming missiles. “The enemy did not accomplish its mission,” a brigade officer said in an official video translated by German Aid to Ukraine and an associate.

Russian industry has ramped up production of the 200-kg Shahed and can now fling hundreds and hundreds of them at Ukrainian cities every day. Ukrainian forces jam their navigation signals, shoot them from the air and the ground and even ram into them with special interceptor drones—and yet, 10% or more of the Shaheds get through.

The devastating air raids targeting Ukrainian cities on 4 July involved 539 Shaheds, according to the Ukrainian air force. 268 Shaheds were shot down, and another 208 flew off course, likely owing to Ukrainian jamming. 63 Shaheds struck, damaging buildings and killing or wounding civilians.

“There must—and there definitely will—be more protection for life,” Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in the aftermath of the raid.

Yesterday, the 540th Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade — which has just received the 7th IRIS-T SLM fire unit Germany has delivered to #Ukraine — has shared a video featuring IRIS-T SLM launchers, a TRML-4D air surveillance radar and an IRIS-T SLS launcher.

Thanks to @S1epanS, I'm… pic.twitter.com/GSKu2gt46o

— German Aid to Ukraine (@deaidua) July 4, 2025

No panacea

The new batch of IRIS-Ts will help, but they’re no panacea. 

Reading between the lines of leaked documents that German newspaper Bild obtained, German Aid to Ukraine concluded new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had already signed off on Ukraine’s request for four new IRIS-T launchers and 2,000 missiles. Each launcher costs $140 million. Each missile costs $600,000.

Ukraine already has seven IRIS-T launchers donated or financed by Germany and Norway. It has lost one launcher and one supporting TRML-4D radar to Russian action. Prior to the current request, Germany and Norway had pledged another 13 launchers. 

The IRIS-T is on track to become one of Ukraine’s most important medium-range air-defense systems. It alone can’t fully protect Ukrainian cities, of course. For starters, it might take years for German industry to deliver all the launchers and missiles.

Moreover, even 2,000 missiles is a small number of missiles when Russia can launch many hundreds—potentially 1,000—of its $200,000 Shaheds every day. It’s not for no reason Ukrainian industry is working so hard on jammers that can throw the Russian drones off course—and also building more and more interceptor drones that cost less than a Shahed does.

The jamming might be the most cost-effective defense. “Since the enemy counts Shahed production at 500 to 1,000 per day, jamming is the only economically viable solution,” said “Alchemist,” the head of the Night Watch electronic warfare team in Kyiv.

With newer Shaheds climbing as high as 3,500 meters and flying right through heavy clouds that can obscure them from view, Ukraine’s interceptor drones “can’t keep up,” Alchemist claimed. “Cost, scalability, resources—all prohibit such countermeasures.”

Ideally, IRIS-T would be the final line of defense, plucking the last few Shaheds that make it through the jamming and interceptor drones. 

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Ukraine learned how to jam Russian bombs. So Russia made them fly beyond the jammers

The United States will resume shipping Patriot air-defense missiles to Ukraine, US Pres. Donald Trump said on Saturday. “They’re going to need them for defense,” Trump said of the missiles. “They’re going to need something because they’re being hit pretty hard.”

Trump’s comments came a few days after news broke that a top US official, potentially US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, unilaterally froze the transfer of as many as 30 Patriot missiles that were already en route to Ukraine.   

The Pentagon confirmed shipments of “defensive” weapons would resume.

Trump reversed the aid freeze one day after Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities endured one of the biggest Russian air raids in the 41 months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine. Not coincidentally, Trump spoke to Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin around the same time—a conversation Trump said left him “unhappy.” 

“He wants to go all the way, just keep killing people—it’s no good,” Trump said.

Russian forces launched 550 drones and missiles on Friday, according to the Ukrainian air force.

539 were Shahed drones. The raid also involved seven ballistic missiles and four cruise missiles. Ukrainian forces “neutralized” 478 of the munitions, the air force claimed. 268 Shaheds were shot down and another 208 flew off course, likely owing to Ukrainian radio jamming. The Ukrainians also downed two of the cruise missiles.

The ballistic missiles apparently got through, however. Those are the targets the Patriots are supposed to intercept. 

After losing some launchers and radars to Russian missiles, Ukraine still has at least seven full Patriot batteries. The PAC-2 version of the Patriot missile weighs 900 kg, ranges as far as 160 km and costs $4 million per round. The Patriot is one of the few air-defense systems in the world that can reliably shoot down incoming ballistic missiles, which might travel thousands of meters per second—too fast for less sophisticated air defenses.

The Franco-Italian SAMP/T can also hit ballistic missiles, but Ukraine has just two SAMP/T batteries. And the Eurosam consortium builds Aster missiles for the batteries at a startling low rate: just 300 or so. By contrast, US missile-maker Lockheed Martin is completing nearly 1,000 Patriots annually.

Low missile inventory

How many of those missiles made their way to Ukraine is a secret. But it’s worth noting that the single shipment Hegseth or some other official froze included 30 missiles. And Germany has, for months, been trying to scrape together the financing to replace 100 Patriots it wants to donate to Ukraine from its existing stocks, adding to the 350 or so it has already sent. 

It’s possible that, in the two years since Ukraine received its first Patriot batteries—entire batteries or parts of them have come from the United States, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Norway and Romania—the Ukrainian air force has also received around 1,000 missiles for those batteries.

The air force has fired some Patriots at Russian warplanes as part of elaborate surface-to-air ambushes, but tends to save them for strictly defensive missions swatting down ballistic missiles barreling toward Kyiv and other cities. 

It might take more than one Patriot round to intercept a single Russian missile. The Ukrainian air force claimed it shot down 22 Russian ballistic missiles in June. That may have required 50 Patriot missiles. 

The math is unforgiving. It’s possible Ukraine has already fired 1,000 Patriots—meaning it has practically no missiles in reserve. The Ukrainians launch the missiles almost as fast as they take delivery of them.

Unless and until Europe can expand production of Aster missiles or Ukraine can develop its own long-range air-defense system, the Patriots are the Ukrainians’ main defenses against the most damaging Russian munitions. When Trump said “they’re going to need them,” he wasn’t exaggerating. 

Germany is reportedly paying for the production of 500 Ukroboronprom AN-196 Liutyi (Furious) long-range attack drones. While Germany continues to withhold Taurus cruise missiles despite Ukraine’s clear need for the missiles, the Furious drones are a nice consolation.

Amid a wider military buildup under its new government, which formed in May, Germany plans to pump at least $100 million into Ukraine’s expanding deep-strike campaign targeting factories, airfields and other targets deep inside Russia. 

The regime of Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin is clearly unhappy about the drone deal. “The Russian side had repeatedly warned that flooding the Kyiv regime with weapons only protracts the conflict,” Russian state media complained.

According to German newspaper Die Welt, the government of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz will pay for 500 of the propeller-driven, satellite-guided Furious drones. A Furious carries a 50-kg warhead farther than 800 km. The $200,000 drone can follow a complex flight path and change altitude in order to avoid Russian air-defenses. 

The AN-196 already had German connections even before Berlin’s big investment in the type. The 4-m drone sports a German-made Hirth F-23 aviation engine producing 50 horsepower. Last month, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed Germany and Ukraine would collaborate on joint production of long-range strike systems.

Zelenskyy anticipated Ukrainian industry would build 30,000 long-range attack drones in 2025. The AN-196s are among the most capable of these drones. There are better models, such as the ramp-launched FP-1, but they’re more expensive and thus more difficult to build in large numbers.

The Furious drones have been responsible for some of the most damaging strikes on targets deep inside Russia. Before Ukraine paused strikes on Russian oil facilities this spring, bowing to pressure from the United States, the AN-196s accounted for up to 80% of hits on refineries. “For Kyiv, the long-distance drones are fundamental,” Die Welt observed.

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Factory raids

More recently, Furious drones may have been behind the repeated strikes on factories that produce components for Russia’s most dangerous precision munitions. 

On 23 May 23 and again on 3 July, the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces struck the sprawling facility belonging to the Energia enterprise in Yelets, 250 km from Ukraine in Russia’s Lipetsk Oblast. And on 9 June, drones struck VNIIR-Progress’s factory in Cheboksary, 1,000 km from Ukraine. The Energia factory makes batteries for bombs, missiles, and drones. The VNIIR-Progress plant makes navigation units.

“Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russia has been developing nicely for a long time,” noted analyst Andrew Perpetua. With more and better long-range drones, Ukraine is poised to strike deeper and harder inside Russia as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds into its 41st month.

Lyutyi kamikaze drones attacking Russian military plant in Izhevsk. 1300km from the frontline.

This is the first time we seen the Lyutyi drone without landing gear, which suggests it has been modified for launch via catapult instead of the standard runway takeoff. pic.twitter.com/QvtSG526qk

— Special Kherson Cat (@bayraktar_1love) July 1, 2025

There’s not a lot Russia can do to stop the drones. “Russia simply doesn’t have the air-defense it requires to defend against a long-term, dedicated long-range attack on its infrastructure,” Perpetua added. “And over time, it will lose defensive capabilities as they are systematically destroyed with continued—and increasingly more technically sophisticated—drone attacks.” 

The escalating drone campaign can’t directly stop Russia’s own brutal bombardment of Ukrainian cities, but it can indirectly suppress the Russian bombs, missiles, and drones by disrupting production of the munitions.

A Furious drone traveling no faster than 400 km per hour with a 50-kg warhead can’t inflict the same amount of damage as a Taurus cruise missile carrying a 480-kg warhead as fast as 1,200 km/hr. But the Germans are willing to fund the drones even as they continue rejecting Ukrainian pleas for cruise missiles.

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Ukraine just brought back its Bayraktar TB-2 drones—and they’re breaking through Russia’s air defenses

By 10 June, the 1,203rd day of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, 999,200 Russians had been killed or wounded in Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian general staff in Kyiv.

So when a Russian assault group, possibly from the 3rd Combined Arms Army, attacked toward the town of Siversk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast on June 10 or 11, it had the potential to achieve a deeply tragic symbolism.

For months, the Russians had been losing more than 1,000 people a day all along the 1,100-kilometer front line of the wider war. The math was sound: the Siversk assault had a chance to produce the millionth Russian casualty.

Sure enough, the assault group—three up-armored infantry fighting vehicles led by an up-armored tank—ran afoul of missiles, drones, and artillery from the Ukrainian 4th National Guard Brigade. More than a dozen Russian troops leaped off their damaged vehicles, only to come under fire from more drones and artillery.

Incredibly, it meant almost nothing—because Russia had learned to buy soldiers faster than Ukraine could kill them.

More from this series:

How Ukraine can win, p.2: The single drone target that could cripple Russia’s oil empire

How Russia sustains massive losses while avoiding a draft

Yes, a million casualties are a lot of casualties for a military that, before February 2022, had just 900,000 active troops on its rolls.

No, a million casualties isn’t too many casualties for the wartime Russian armed forces—not under current economic and political conditions. Incredibly, the Kremlin is still recruiting more fresh troops every month than it buries or sends to the hospital.

And that, more than any other trend, explains why Russia can keep fighting even as its original war aims—regime change in Kyiv and the total disarmament of the Ukrainian state—slip farther out of reach.

How the Russian regime has sustained a mobilization campaign—one that can only be described as wildly successful—not only speaks to the regime’s theory of victory. It also hints at a possible theory of defeat.

If recruiting is how Russia wins, a collapse in recruiting could be one way it loses.

Russian commanders no longer orchestrate sophisticated attacks involving mutually-supporting tanks, fighting vehicles, and artillery. Instead, they just hurl bodies at Ukrainian defenses until some of those bodies fall into cracks in the defenses.

Then, the Russian commanders surge more bodies—along with whatever few armored vehicles they can scrounge.

It’s a manpower-first approach to warfare for an army whose last remaining strength is its abundance of men.

Seemingly against the odds, the Kremlin has been able to motivate more than a million men to sign up to fight in a war that’s been killing their countrymen at a rate of 30,000 a month.

Russia’s 600,000-strong force: bigger than the invasion army

Ukraine sprawls across 603,470 km², less than 20% of which is under Russian occupation. At the current rates of advance and loss, the Russians would capture the rest of Ukraine in the 2250s at the cost of more than 100 million casualties. For context, the current population of Russia is 144 million.

Incredibly, the slow pace of Russian advance and staggering Russian losses in Ukraine—the Russians have lost around 20,000 armored vehicles and other heavy equipment—haven’t yet crippled the Russian army in Ukraine.

The Kremlin is equipping its forces with thousands of civilian vehicles, including scooters, compact cars, and even at least one old bus.

Meanwhile, it’s recruiting no fewer than 30,000 troops per month, Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the commander of US Army forces in Europe, told American lawmakers in early April. Since many of the wounded eventually return to the front line, the Russian armed forces ultimately add more people every month than they lose.

As a result, the Russian force in Ukraine is actually growing, Cavoli said. It now numbers around 600,000 troops, “the highest level over the course of the war and almost double the size of the initial invasion force” in February 2022, according to Cavoli.

More from this series:

How Ukraine can win, p.3: The only counteroffensive strategy that could break Russian lines

Why Russia avoids a draft: the economics of voluntary mobilization

The Kremlin’s recruiting strategy comes down to two things: money and mood.

Record enlistments are “driven by high sign-on bonuses and speculation that the war will soon be over,” explained Janis Kluge, the deputy head of the Eastern Europe and Eurasia Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

“Recruitment is driven by huge payouts—sums of money most Russians have never seen in their lives,” pointed out Artur Rehi, an Estonian analyst who has assisted Ukrainian forces on a volunteer basis.

Last year, Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin boosted the baseline enlistment bonus to 400,000 rubles ($5,100), which is 10 months of income for the median Russian. The average bonus is much higher: 1.4 million rubles ($17,800). That’s nearly three years of income for many Russians.

If the United States spent the same proportion of its national wealth on enlistment bonuses that Russia does, it’d shell out no less than $112 billion. That’s more than 10% of America’s annual defense budget.

No one knows for sure how long the money and good vibes are sustainable in Russia. But there’s no denying Russia’s war economy is hot—and perilously close to overheating.

By comparison, the United States spends 13% of its budget on defense. “The Russian economy is on a war footing and will remain so for the foreseeable future,” Cavoli said.

Lavish government spending in Russia doesn’t just pay for enlistment bonuses. It also pays for the weapons contracts that sustain millions of jobs. These abundant jobs have buoyed Russian civilians’ attitude toward the war, even as Russian losses in Ukraine mount.

“As a direct result of its defense spending, Russian investments in its industrial base have reduced national unemployment to 2.4%,” Cavoli said.

Economic tightrope as Russia’s defense spending reaches 40%

But a war footing isn’t always efficient as more and more cash gets spent on munitions that get expended and vehicles that get blown up.

“As federal funds are spent on war and the military, fewer funds are available for other types of federal spending and investments,” explained the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University in Rhode Island.

“The foregone opportunities involve ‘opportunity costs,’ including the lost opportunities to invest in other areas that are important to societal health, well-being, productivity, and the environment. … One of the most significant opportunity costs of military spending is in job creation. Research has consistently shown that dollar for dollar, the military produces fewer jobs than education, health, infrastructure, or clean energy.”

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov has vowed to maintain the elevated military spending even as erratic oil prices and the damage from Ukrainian drone attacks squeeze revenue from energy exports, cutting economic growth in Russia by more than half compared to a year ago.

To prolong the wartime spending spree, Putin raised personal and corporate taxes last year.

“Russia’s leadership is not only prepared to increase the tax burden on Russians but is also shifting its economic development priorities,” explained Alexander Kolyandr, an analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C.

Obviously, war industries are one priority. Enlistment bonuses are another. Moscow must pay for both to keep the vibes positive.

The demographic math: 19 million vs 5 million military-age males

Losing a lot to gain very little in Ukraine and prolonging the costly effort through massive spending, Russian leaders are walking an economic and political tightrope.

But not a demographic tightrope. If the wartime economy overheats—perhaps due to rising borrowing costs and runaway inflation—it may become harder to sustain the current high level of monthly recruitment. It would be even harder if the bonuses needed to be bigger to keep up the current enlistment numbers.

Any collapse in military manpower won’t be the result of an actual shortage of men, however.

There are roughly 19 million males between the ages of 20 and 39 in Russia and fewer than five million men in the same age range in Ukraine.

“The total number of permanently lost personnel is estimated at approximately 560,000 for Russia and 300,000 for Ukraine,” the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group concluded in March. “This results in an approximate loss ratio of 1:1.87 for irreversible manpower losses.”

“While these numbers may seem favorable for Ukraine, it suffers from a smaller mobilization base and weaker mobilization,” Frontelligence Insight added. “Russia, with a population at least three times larger and a more effective recruitment system, should ideally suffer from a loss ratio closer to 1:3.”

“From a strictly manpower and force generation perspective,” Frontelligence Insight concluded, “our team has a negative outlook for Ukraine.”

An influx of 80,000 trained infantry “could transform Ukraine’s front-line situation,” according to Frontelligence Insight. But Ukraine’s rickety mobilization system—prone to corruption and reliant on an unpopular draft—struggles to generate those 80,000 fresh recruits.

Russian draft vs volunteers: why Moscow avoids conscription

“You can only get discharged now if you’re missing both arms, both legs or simply don’t have a head,” one former Russian soldier told Bereg, a collective of independent Russian journalists.

“Trying to get discharged legally is simply pointless,” another former Russian solider, a deserter, told Bereg. “This is a real war, and no one’s allowed to leave. And I don’t want to fight.”

“It may seem like Russia has an endless supply” of manpower, Rehi wrote, “but that’s not the case.”

The supply of people is as much about sentiment as it is the sheer availability of bodies. Rehi, for one, already senses the sentiment in Russia turning against the war. “The incentives are losing effectiveness, and fear of the front is growing,” Rehi claimed.

Russia could widen its annual conscription and change its policy against sending conscripts to the front line. In other words, it could begin drafting front-line troops the way Ukraine does.

To understand how unpopular and destabilizing that would be for Russia, look to Ukraine. No, the Kremlin wants volunteers. It’s willing—and, for now, able—to pay for them.

David Axe

David Axe is a writer and filmmaker in South Carolina in the United States.

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On Wednesday, Russian state media posted a video captured from a Russian first-person-view drone flying low over the town of Pysarivka, in northern Ukraine’s Sumy Oblast 10 km from the border. Around 10 Ukrainian brigades with no more than 20,000 troops are holding off a much larger Russian force—50,000 troops in all—along a defensive line a few kilometers north of Pysarivka.

In the video, the Russian FPV accelerates into a Leopard 2A6 tank. The video ends as the drone strikes the front of the 69-ton tank’s turret. Don’t grieve for the tank or its crew. The Leopard 2A6 and its close cousin, the Swedish Strv 122, may be the best-protected tanks in the Ukrainian inventory. And their heaviest armor—hundreds of millimeters thick—is at precisely the spot the Russian drone struck that tank in Pysarivka.

Tanks are playing a smaller and smaller role along the 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 41-month wider war on Ukraine and tiny drones proliferate, making any movement by big, slow vehicles extremely dangerous for them and their crews. Tanks tend to hide inside or underground most of the time, deploying only briefly in order to fire a few rounds at targets kilometers away, before retreating back into hiding.

Russian fiber-optic FPV drone strikes a German-made Leopard 2A6 main battle tank operated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the settlement of Pysarivka, Sumy Oblast of Ukraine.

The vehicle was hit to the turret area.

Geolocation below. pic.twitter.com/NZ9FyWDfpg

— Status-6 (Military & Conflict News) (@Archer83Able) July 2, 2025

Some Ukrainian tank crews have defied expectations, however. One German-made Leopard 1A5 recently rolled out in broad daylight to engage Russian infantry at point-blank range outside the eastern fortress city of Pokrovsk. Another Ukrainian tank—seemingly an ex-Soviet T-64 or T-72—may have fired one of the decisive rounds against nearby Russian troops as the Ukrainian force finally stabilized the front line in Sumy last week.

Ukrainian tanks seem to be unusually active in Sumy—and that exposes them to drone attack. But as dangerous as drones can be, especially when they swarm in large numbers, they lack the explosive punch to knock out a Leopard 2A6 in a head-on attack. 

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Hard targets

Western-made tanks are tough. German vehicle-maker KMW designed the Leopard 2A6 with two compartments for its 120-millimeter main gun ammunition: one in the hull and another in the turret. The turret compartment has blow-out panels that vent a blast outward in the event the ammo is struck and cooks off; Ukrainian crews don’t use the more vulnerable hull stowage, which lacks a blowout panel.

Russian tanks by contrast stow their ammo in the bustle under their turrets. When the ammo cooks off, it blows the turret—and the crew—into the sky. That’s the main reason it’s a lot easier to damage a Leopard 2 and rattle its crew than it is to destroy a Leopard 2 and kill its crew. Whereas a clean hit on a Russian T-90 might catastrophically blow up the tank and crew.

Consider how resilient Ukraine’s small Leopard 2A6 force has been since the first of 21 ex-German and ex-Portuguese Leopards arrived in Ukraine in the spring of 2023. One analyst has tallied several dozen confirmed hits—by mines, drones, missiles and artillery—on Ukrainian Leopard 2A6s.

But the same and other analysts can confirm the destruction or capture of just eight of the 21 tanks, leaving as many as 13 in service after more than two years of hard fighting. The Ukrainian army’s 21st Mechanized Brigade operates all 13 surviving Leopard 2A6s alongside the handful of surviving Strv 122s, out of 10 Ukraine got from Sweden.

The Russians have inadvertently underscored how hard it is to defeat a Leopard 2A6. They’ve captured two—maybe three—immobilized Leopard 2A6s, and have tended to celebrate the rare captures with elaborate media productions. 

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Ukraine’s new M-1 Abrams tanks are ready—but their brigade might not be

Riding out in broad daylight outside the village of Yablunivka, 10 km from the border with Russia, a three-person T-64 or T-72 tank from the Ukrainian army’s 1st Tank Brigade engaged Russian troops at point-blank range last weekend. It fired several rounds from its 125-mm main gun—and then pumped out a smoke screen and darted back to safety. Mission complete.

The exploding tank shells possibly marked the end of a grueling, month-long battle for Sumy. Seizing the initiative after pushing Ukrainian troops out of western Russia’s Kursk Oblast, a strong force of around 50,000 Russians marched into Sumy, aiming to create a buffer zone along the border and potentially even capture Sumy city, 35 km from the border.

It was a hard fight, but a smaller Ukrainian force—drawn from parts of at least 10 brigades, each with a few thousand people—halted the Russian advance just south of Yablunivka.

“In certain areas, our units are successfully using active defense tactics and liberating Ukrainian land in Sumy Oblast,” Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief, stated on Saturday, around the same time that 1st Tank Brigade tank was rolling into battle. “We have re-constrained about 50,000 personnel of the Russian armed forces, including elite brigades of their airborne troops and marines,” Syrskyi added.

The Russians employed their latest tactics, largely leaving behind their increasingly precious heavy armored vehicles. Having lost more than 20,000 armored vehicles and other heavy equipment in the first 41 months of their wider war on Ukraine, and struggling to build more than a few hundred new T-90M tanks every year, the Russians increasingly ride into battle on motorcycles or quad-bikes—or simply walk.

The vehicle-free army

The paucity of Russian armored vehicles in Sumy was striking. “Not sure anybody noticed this, but so far [Russia] has visibly lost one MRAP in Sumy Oblast,” analyst Moklasen noted on 15 June, using the acronym for mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored trucks. “Everything is done either on foot or by bike and quad.”

“As an assault platform, motorcycles are generally seen as weak and unreliable, rarely delivering decisive results,” Ukrainian analysis group Frontelligence Insight explained. “However, when used in a proper role—alongside fire support, electronic warfare support, drones and armored vehicles—they can be highly effective.”

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“At roughly $2,000 to $4,000 apiece (depending on model and condition), these bikes are far cheaper to replace than infantry fighting vehicles, with minimal maintenance costs,” Frontelligence Insight added. “Their mobility and low silhouette allow them to slip past obstacles and evade detection more easily than larger platforms—especially when paired with on-board electronic-warfare gear.”

“Concealable even in small buildings, and nearly silent at night in electric variants, they preserve the element of surprise. A motorcycle can reach a position in minutes, outpacing a noisy, slower BMP or tank and narrowing the window for enemy [first-person-view] drone response.” 

But to defeat heavier Ukrainian forces and capture and hold significant terrain, bike troops need strong support. And that support requires coordination that’s still lacking among many Russian formations. “The challenge, of course, is execution,” Frontelligence Insight observed. “Russian forces have struggled to coordinate such combined-arms operations even at the company or battalion level, limiting their ability to use motorcycles as efficient force multipliers.”

Unsupported bike troops, lacking the protection afforded by overhead drones and the extra firepower provided by nearby artillery, would be easy prey for an aggressive tank crew. “Despite the stereotypical view that tanks are obsolete and ineffective in modern warfare, there continue to be examples of their successful use,” the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team noted.

That one-tank Ukrainian counterattack outside Yablunivka is one of those examples. That T-64 or T-72 crew may have halted the last Russian advance in this phase of the fight for Sumy.

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Ukraine deploys Leopard 1A5 “sniper tanks” with 7 brigades

Nine months after Australia pledged 49 surplus M-1A1 Abrams tanks to the Ukrainian war effort, the 69-ton combat vehicles are finally about to reach Ukraine. A photo that circulated online on Friday depicts one of the heavily-armed tanks in Poland, presumably awaiting onward shipment to Ukraine.

Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy celebrated the Abrams’ imminent arrival way back on 18 May. “I’m grateful for Australia’s comprehensive support, for the Abrams tanks that are helping our warriors defend Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said at a meeting in Rome with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Taka miła niespodzianka czekała na mnie ostatnio w Gdyńskim porcie

100 punktów dla tego, kto zgadnie z jakiego kraju pochodzi ten kamuflaż pic.twitter.com/DwBzZD7ofe

— Krzysztof Sowa (@Krzysztof_s0wa) June 27, 2025

Ukrainian troops surely welcome the fresh tanks, even as heavy armored vehicles play a smaller and smaller role along the drone-patrolled, mine-infested 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 41-month wider war on Ukraine. 

But the brigade the US-made tanks are likeliest to join, the 47th Mechanized Brigade, was recently in the throes of a leadership crisis. Citing “clueless leaders” ordering troops to execute “stupid tasks,” one of the brigade’s battalion commanders, Oleksandr Shyrshyn practically begged for his chain of command to relieve him of duty in a 16 May post on social media.

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“Let your children follow these orders”: Ukrainian commander in Kursk quits over “idiotic tasks”

It’s unclear what, if anything, resulted from Shyrshyn’s protest. But the turmoil in and around the 47th Mechanized Brigade risks wasting precious tanks the Ukrainians have been waiting a long time for. It’s possible, however, that the Ukrainian army will distribute the newly arrived M-1s across more units than just the 47th Mechanized Brigade.

Pat Conroy, Australia’s defense industry minister, announced the M-1 donation in October. “These tanks will deliver more firepower and mobility to the Ukrainian armed forces, and complement the support provided by our partners for Ukraine’s armored brigades,” Conroy said.

The four-person M-1A1s equipped the Australian army’s armored brigade until the brigade upgraded to newer M-1A2s last year. The older tanks are still in “reasonably good working order,” J.C. Dodson, a Ukraine-based defense consultant who helped negotiate the tank transfer, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Ukrainian officials had asked for the old Abrams in 2023, but the Australians waited until their new Abrams arrived before pledging the excess tanks. The US government holds the export license for the M-1s, which were made in Ohio—and the Russia-friendly administration of Pres. Donald Trump waited to sign off on the deal, adding further delay.

In any event, it seems at least some of the tanks are finally on the last legs of their long journeys to Ukraine. It’s apparent what the Ukrainian army will do with the ex-Australian Abrams. First, it will up-armor them with extra reactive armor, anti-drone cages and radio jammers. And then it will probably assign at least some of them to the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s tank battalion, the only Ukrainian unit with any experience on the M-1.

The 47th Mechanized Brigade got all 31 of the surplus M-1A1s the United States pledged to Ukraine in 2023. In 18 months of hard fighting, the brigade has lost at least 12 of the original M-1s: 10 destroyed, one captured and one so badly damaged it wound up as a museum piece in Ukraine. 

Other M-1s have been damaged—and at least a few are probably write-offs. The 47th Mechanized Brigade may be down to half its original tank strength.

Fresh tanks

The 49 Australian M-1s are enough to restore the brigade’s tank strength while also equipping a second battalion in another brigade—or in one of the new multi-brigade corps the Ukrainian army is standing up.

The same sweeping reorganization that’s introducing the army to corps operations is also reducing, or even eliminating, Ukraine’s four separate tank brigades—each with 100 tanks—in favor of smaller but more numerous separate tank battalions with just 31 tanks apiece.

In the meantime, it’s apparent that some brigades are making do with just a single tank company with a dozen or so tanks. That seems to be the plan for Ukraine’s growing fleet of German-made Leopard 1A5s.

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Ukraine deploys Leopard 1A5 “sniper tanks” with 7 brigades

Ukrainian officials clearly appreciate that tiny explosive drones, and not 69-ton tanks, are now the dominant weapons along the front line. 

The May leadership crisis may also complicate the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s tank refresh. “I haven’t received any more stupid tasks than in the current direction,” Shyrshyn wrote.

“I’ll tell you the details sometime, but the loss of people has dulled my mind, trembling before the clueless generalship leads to nothing but failures,” Shyrshyn added. “All they are capable of is reprimands, investigations, imposition of penalties. Everyone is going to Hell. Political games and assessment of the real state of affairs do not correspond to either reality or possibilities. They played around.”

It’s possible Shyrshyn was referring to Ukraine’s six-month incursion into western Russia’s Kursk Oblast, which saw a strong Ukrainian force of around a dozen battalions cling to a 650-square-km salient around the town of Sudzha before an elite Russian drone team finally deployed—and severed the only main supply route between Sudzha and the border with Ukraine, destroying hundreds of Ukrainian vehicles in the process.

The 47th Mechanized Brigade was in the thick of that fighting and, soon after retreating back to Ukraine’s Sumy Oblast in early March, supported smaller-scale raids into Kursk—raids that risked heavy Ukrainian casualties for fleeting territorial gains of questionable strategic value. 

More recently, the 47th Mechanized Brigade has been defending Sumy Oblast from an infantry-led Russian counteroffensive that has, at great cost in Russian lives, brought Russian artillery to within firing range of Sumy city.

That the general staff in Kyiv continued to order brigades to fight their way into Kursk even as Russian troops massed for their coming Sumy operation was an ominous development for the units, including the 47th Mechanized Brigade, that had to carry out the pointless or even counterproductive orders. It was even more ominous for the innocent residents of Sumy Oblast.

The 47th Mechanized Brigade is probably on the cusp of receiving new tanks, thanks to Australia’s largess. Shyrshyn and other brigade troops surely hope their superiors don’t ask them to squander those tanks on ill-conceived missions. 

Especially when they have a Russian counteroffensive to defeat.

A photo that circulated online last week confirms it: the Ukrainian army’s 142nd Mechanized Brigade is the latest unit to operate Leopard 1A5 tanks. The vehicles were built in the 1960s and heavily upgraded in the 1980s.

The 40-ton, four-person Leopard 1A5 boasts a reliable 105-millimeter main gun and accurate fire controls, but its armor—just 70 millimeters thick at its thickest—is thin compared to other tanks. That’s a third the protection a contemporary T-72 enjoys.

Still, “it is too early to write off this tank as scrap metal,” insisted the Ukrainian army’s 508th Separate Repair and Restoration Battalion, which repairs damaged armored vehicles. “It just so happened that it first met the opponent it was designed to fight 60 years later—and it’s a completely different tank now, to be fair.”

It’s completely different because it now rolls into battle with at least two extra layers of armor: bricks of explosive reactive armor attached directly to the hull and turret and, over the reactive armor, a skirt of anti-drone netting.

The reactive armor explodes outward when struck, potentially deflecting explosive munitions. The netting catches incoming first-person-view drones before they can strike the tank. 

The add-on armor works. Back in January, one Ukrainian Leopard 1A5 survived at least eight hits by Russian FPVs before potentially three more explosive FPV drones finally finished it off. It’s unusual for a single vehicle to draw the attention of 11 FPVs.

All that extra protection gives Ukrainian Leopard 1A5 crews the confidence to engage Russian troops at close range—something fewer and fewer tanks do in Ukraine as Russia’s wider war of aggression grinds into its 41st month. 

The growing threat from tiny drones, which are everywhere all the time along the 1,100-km front line, compels tank crews on both sides to hide their vehicles in dugouts or buildings, rolling out only to fire a few rounds at distant targets.

Sniper mode

That’s a mode of fighting the Leopard 1A5 is pretty good at. The Leopard 1A5 works best as a “mobile sniper tank,” the 508th SRRB explained.

“A well-trained crew can fire 10 rounds per minute while its Russian opponents fire six to 10 rounds, the battalion noted. “Add a modern fire control system that allows accurate fire from a distance of 4 km during the day and about 3 km at night and you get a real hunter capable of taking down prey that doesn’t even know it’s being hunted.”

But as Russia extends its summer offensive, attacking all along the front line and making incremental gains in Sumy and Donetsk Oblast, some Leopard 1A5 crews have had no choice but to fight close.

On June 18, a powerful Russian force—around a dozen up-armored BMPs and other vehicles—rolled northeast from the village of Novoolenivka in Donetsk Oblast, heading for the village of Yablunivka, the next stop on the road to the town of Kostyantynivka, a top Russian objective in the east.

The Ukrainian 36th Marine Brigade and 12th Azov Brigade spotted the approaching vehicles—and hit them with drones and potentially other munitions, halting the mechanized attack. 

But a few Russian infantry managed to sneak forward and gain a lodgement around Yablunivka. A drone from the Ukrainian 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade spotted the Russians—and one of the brigade’s Leopard 1A5s counterattacked.

The tank engaged the Russians with its main gun from just meters away. “Clear work, accurate fire and cold calculation,” the 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade crowed.

In addition to the 142nd Mechanized Brigade and 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade, five other brigades or regiments possess Leopard 1A5s: the Rubizh Brigade, the 21st Mechanized Brigade, the 44th Mechanized Brigade, the 68th Jaeger Brigade and the 425th Assault Regiment.

It’s possible each unit has just a single company with a dozen or so tanks. Those 84 assigned tanks would account for almost every since Leopard 1A5 that’s currently active in Ukraine. A German-Dutch-Danish consortium has pledged 170 of the tanks, and around 103 have shipped. Of those, at least 13 have been lost in action.

Ukrainian troops might have to wait for more Leopard 1A5s to ship before they equip an eighth brigade or regiment with the swift, accurate-firing tanks.

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“No Russian tank would survive”: German Leopard 2A4 withstands 10 FPV drone strikes in Ukraine

When Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, the famed commander of Ukraine’s elite Birds of Magyar drone unit, accepted a big promotion and took command of the entire Unmanned Systems Forces, the Ukrainian military’s separate drone branch, he immediately got to work reforming Ukrainian drone groups.

And now we know why. Brovdi just declared war on Russia’s own drone groups. Brovdi “has made drone operators his main target,” explained Roy, a Canadian electronic warfare and drone expert.

Brovdi has even gamified the mission. A new app-based system allows Ukrainian drone teams to upload videos confirming their successful strikes. Hits on Russian troops and equipment earn the teams points they can trade in for new equipment. 

The new targeting priority and the game—it’s all the right call for the Ukrainians. Struggling to match the quality and quantity of Ukraine’s wireless first-person-view drones and radio jammers for grounding Russia’s wireless FPV drones, the Kremlin has increasingly shifted to fiber-optic FPVs.

Sending and receiving signals via kilometers-long optical fibers that are a fraction of a millimeter thick, fiber-optic FPVs are unjammable. The only way to directly defeat them is to shoot them down, dodge them, absorb their blows, hide from them or cut their fibers. 

But there are indirect ways to defeat fiber-optic FPVs. Ukraine’s long-range attack drones have been bombarding the factories, deep inside Russia, that produce optical fiber and other FPV drone components. Closer to the front, short-range Ukrainian drones can target Russian FPV operators in their dugouts just a few kilometers from the line of contact. 

That’s Brovdi’s plan—and the Russians don’t like it. “Bad news from the front,” one Russian blogger intoned. “After the appointment of ‘Magyar’ as commander of the unmanned systems of the armed forces of Ukraine, the hunt for our bird houses began.” 

“From my own experience,” the blogger noted, “I can say that now the pressure on logistics has been eased and all efforts have been thrown into identifying and destroying our UAVs.” 

Fiber-optic drones in the crosshairs

Ukrainian drone teams will “pay special attention to fiber-optics,” the blogger warned. A few months ago, one enterprising Ukrainian drone team discovered it could track Russian fiber-optic FPV teams by scanning for castoff optical fibers, stretched across the battlefield from past FPV strikes and leading back to the operators’ positions—assuming, of course, the operators hadn’t moved.

Moving may now be a matter of life and death for Russian FPV teams. “We need to strengthen camouflage and change positions more often,” the blogger advised.

But a second Russian blogger warned that moving too often can expose drone teams to Ukrainian surveillance. “Less movement—longer life,” they wrote.

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Decoy positions could help Russian drone teams avoid the deadly attention of Ukrainian drones. “Start using a large number of false antennas,” the second Russian blogger advised. 

And in the real drone positions, the crews—operators who fly the drones and the engineers who maintain them—should spread out. “Separate the points with your engineers,” the second blogger recommended. “Operators sit separately and engineers sit separately.” 

Regardless of any preventative measures they take, Russian drone teams should expect an uptick in aerial attacks on their positions. “The enemy understands the threat, so they use their entire arsenal to strike,” the second Russian blogger observed.

The first blogger wrote that more attacks by Ukraine’s best High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems are possible. “When they calculate [the positions of drone] nests, they use all means of suppression. They do not skimp—and send HIMARS.”

The best defense for Russia’s drone crews might be to return the increased attention—and escalate their own surveillance of, and attacks on, Ukraine’s drone crews. “It is necessary to intensify work on the enemy’s birdhouses,” the second blogger advised.

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Surprisingly, Russian soldiers used scissors to down a Ukrainian fiber-optic drone — but Kyiv also knows a trick or two

First there was the porcupine infantry fighting vehicle. Then the porcupine tank. After that—the porcupine engineering vehicle. Now the Russians are adding metal anti-drone quills to “bukhanka” vans.

The first video of an ex-civilian bukhanka—a 4.4-m, six-passenger van—with add-on spikes made of steel rebar circulated online on Sunday. In just the past month or so, Russian troops in Ukraine have become increasingly convinced the metal quills can prevent strikes by Ukraine’s tiny first-person-view drones, which are everywhere all the time along the 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine.

They’re not necessarily wrong. The spikes look ridiculous, of course. But then, so did the very first anti-drone screens—so-called “cope cages”—the Russians added to their armored vehicles in the early months of the wider war in 2022. Cope cages are now factory-standard on both sides of the wider war—and many armies around the world are adopting them, too.

Also silly-looking: the layers of metal sheeting the Russians added to the many vehicles once Ukrainian drone operators learned how to steer their drones underneath the cope cages. These “turtle tanks” work well enough. They’re heavy and ungainly, but they can survive multiple drone strikes.

It’s unrealistic for the Russians to convert all of their vehicles in Ukraine into turtles, but it’s feasible they could add rebar quills to many vehicles that don’t warrant—or can’t support—a full metal shell. Don’t be shocked if the porcupine bukhanka that appeared earlier this month produces a lot of clones. 

The first Russian porcupine vehicle, a BMP with hundreds of quills, didn’t last long. Apparently immobilized by a mine around the town of Troitske in Donetsk Oblast in mid-May, the BMP was later blown up by Ukraine’s famed Birds of Magyar drone group, which flew an explosive FPV directly through an open hatch on the idling BMP.

The porcupine vehicle’s fate may not have been the fault of its add-on anti-drone protection. An unmoving vehicle is an easy target for any FPV pilot. On the move, a vehicle with quills may be able to deflect many FPVs before they can strike the vehicle’s hull.

At least, that’s the Russians’ assumption. They’ve subsequently added rebar quills to tanks, BREM engineering vehicles and—most recently—that bukhanka.

Porcupines are spreading

Operating near or along the front line, BMPs, tanks and BREMs are exposed to a lot of FPVs. Many Russian bukhankas don’t operate near or along the front line. Instead, they haul troops and supplies to and from the front.

But even that can be dangerous. Ukrainian workshops are churning out literally hundreds of thousands of $500 FPVs every month. And Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, now under the command of Robert Brovdi, the former head of Birds of Magyar, is exploiting gaps in Russia’s radio-jamming to build a veritable wall of drones extending into Russian-occupied Ukraine a distance of 15 km from the line of contact.

As Ukrainian FPVs—not just wireless models, but also jam-proof fiber-optic models—range deeper and deeper into the Russian rear, more Russian supply vehicles are coming under drone attack. In that context, it makes sense to turn bukhankas into porcupines.

Of course, some unfortunate Russian regiments ride their bukhankas into battle owing to a growing shortage of BMPs, tanks and other purpose-made armored vehicles. Assault bukhankas need quills even more urgently. 

It may only be a matter of time before Ukrainian brigades produce their own porcupine vehicles. The Russians are often first to deploy some desperate new defense against drones—a logical state of affairs, given Ukraine’s slight but enduring quantitative and qualitative drone advantage. But Russian forces deploy hundreds of thousands of FPVs every month, too—and also target the Ukrainians’ supply lines.

The Ukrainians must protect their own cars, trucks and vans from tiny drones. If the metal quills work—and there’s growing evidence they do—Ukrainians troops won’t hesitate to install them. Even if they look stupid.

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Russia’s latest porcupine tanks are actually working

A video that the Ukrainian navy posted online on Tuesday depicts a series of precision strikes on Russian troops traveling in boats along the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine. We know the video depicts the propeller-driven TB-2 because the Turkish-made drone features distinctive symbology on its control screen.

The TB-2 led Ukraine’s initial drone counterattack in the first weeks of Russia’s wider invasion in early 2022. But the big, expensive drone—it weighs nearly 700 kg and costs millions of dollars—eventually lost relevance.

TB-2s were big, fat, and hard-to-replace targets for Russian air defenses. Smaller, better, and cheaper drones—many of them made in Ukraine—soon displaced the survivors of the approximately 60 TB-2s Ukraine had received from Türkiye.

That some TB-2s are back in action over the Dnipro speaks to the insatiable demand for drones as Russia’s wider war grinds into its 40th month. But it also hints at gaps in Russia’s air defenses over the southern front. The TB-2s were vulnerable three years ago. They’re even more vulnerable now, but only when the Russians can deploy their best air defenses.

The Ukrainians have been degrading those air defenses, in part by targeting the radars and launchers with the same small drones that largely replaced the TB-2s in Ukrainian service. The new generation of drones has afforded the previous generation of drones another opportunity to fight for Ukraine.

The TB-2—a 6m-long, satellite-controlled drone with day-night optics and hardpoints for small, 8km-range missiles—was decisive in Ukraine’s defense of Kyiv in the spring of 2022.

After recovering from air and missile strikes that destroyed some of their 20 pre-war TB-2s on the ground on day one of the wider war on 24 February 2022, the Ukrainian air force and navy surged the drones into action.

The TB-2s opened an ever-widening robotic counteroffensive. By mid-March, analysts had confirmed nearly 60 tanks, air-defense vehicles, supply trucks, and even locomotives that had fallen prey to missile-armed TB-2s.

A sign of things to come

The Russians retreated through the fall of 2022, consolidated their hold on Ukraine’s easternmost and southernmost oblasts while rebuffing the Ukrainians’ 2023 counteroffensive in the south—and then counterattacked in 2024. But the pace of Russian advances dramatically slowed as 2024 turned into 2025 and the wider war entered its fourth year. 

Ukraine’s drones are a main reason why. But the TB-2s no longer lead the aerial assault. The Russians shot down 26 of the Turkish-made drones in 2022 and 2023. Some of the survivors were still active as late as the fall of 2023, but they too soon faded from view. 

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Ukraine’s fast-growing defense industry replaced the few dozen multi-million-dollar TB-2s with literally millions of tiny first-person-view drones, each weighing just a few kilograms and costing a few hundred dollars. Controlled via radio or fiber-optic cable by a headset-wearing operator who sees what the drone sees, the warhead-clutching FPVs have utterly devastated the Russian war machine. 

It’s hard to say how many of the roughly 17,500 armored vehicles that the Russians have lost since February 2022 were hit by drones. But it’s no exaggeration to say that, right now, Ukrainian FPVs are the main killers of Russian troops and wreckers of Russian vehicles. 

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s helicopter-style bomber drones drop grenades, its fixed-wing surveillance drones patrol the front line and its long-range attack drones—also fixed-wing—range as far as 1,600 km inside Russia to strike air bases, command posts and factories. Even the best long-range attack drones cost less than a TB-2 does.

The TB-2s aren’t strictly necessary given the abundance of more affordable alternatives. That TB-2s are venturing back into what was once heavily contested air space points to the depletion of Russian air-defenses across swathes of southern Ukraine. 

Drones, some launched by Ukraine’s fleet of unmanned surface vessels, have been relentlessly hunting Russian radars, surface-to-air missile batteries and air-defense vehicles in Crimea this year, recently striking S-300 and S-400 SAM batteries and Buk and Tor vehicles as well as several radars and jammers.

The TB-2s have rejoined the fight because they can—and because they still pack a punch, even as newer drones have left them far behind.

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Ukrainian drones strike Russian air defenses in occupied Crimea (video)

Production of the 51-ton, three-person T-90M tanks has more than tripled since 2022, despite tightening foreign sanctions on Russia’s Uralvagonzavod tank plant.

The T-90M is Russia’s best tank. Thickly armored and boasting high-end optics and a powerful 125-millimeter main gun, the T-90M is the closest Russian analogue to America’s best M-1A2 tank and Germany’s best Leopard 2A7. 

Despite losing more than 4,000 tanks in Ukraine since widening its war on the country in February 2022, and despite successive rounds of sanctions on Russia’s arms industry, Russia has managed to expand production of the T-90M at Uralvagonzavod. 

That’s the conclusion of a new study from the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team. “According to our estimates, Uralvagonzavod produced 60 to 70 T-90M tanks in 2022. In 2023, amid efforts to mobilize the defense industry, output may have increased to 140 to 180 tanks, and by 2024, it may have surpassed 200 units annually, possibly approaching a production rate of 250 to 300 tanks per year.”

It’s likely, with the ongoing production boost, that the T-90M is the most produced tank in 2025, on an annual basis. US firm General Dynamics Land Systems has built no more than 90 new M-1A2s annually in recent years. The Ukrainian army operates the survivors of 31 ex-American and 49 ex-Australian M-1s.

Uralvagonzavod expanding output, in defiance of sanctions, allows Russian regiments and brigades to replace any T-90s they lose in action in Ukraine, while also allowing Russian forces to build up a small reserve of T-90s for possible future conflicts. In 40 months of hard fighting, the Russians have written off more than 130 T-90s—not just the latest M-models, but also older T-90As and T-90s. 

“Given that over 130 of [the T-90Ms] have been destroyed, an estimated 410 to 500 remain in service,” CIT concluded. They represent approximately 15% of the tanks deployed along the 1,100-km front line in Ukraine, according to CIT. Older T-80s, T-72s, T-62s and T-55s—some recovered from long-term storage after decades of disuse—account for the rest of Russia’s deployed tanks.

But as the wider war grinds into its fourth year, these tanks only rarely participate in direct assaults on Ukrainian lines. “In a battlefield where neither side holds air supremacy and large-scale combined-arms operations remain difficult to execute, combat has shifted to smaller tactical formations—usually at the squad or company level, backed by armored vehicles,” Ukrainian analysis group Frontelligence Insight explained. 

“In this environment, traditional platforms like tanks and [infantry fighting vehicles] face growing challenges, especially amid constant artillery fire and the widespread use of cheap, fast drones,” Frontelligence Insight added.

So tanks usually remain in hiding inside structures or in camouflaged earthen dugouts, occasionally breaking cover only long enough to fire a few main gun rounds at targets potentially miles away—and then retreating back into concealment. It’s a new “era of the cautious tank,” according to David Kirichenko, an analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C.

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Saving the T-90Ms for later

With infantry taking the lead in more assaults, often riding on motorcycles or other civilian-style vehicles, Russia can preserve its slowly-growing fleet of T-90Ms—and save them for a major future offensive in Ukraine. Or for some other conflict. The Danish Defense Intelligence Service warned that Russia could launch a war in a country bordering Russia six months after the war in Ukraine ends.

Ukraine’s allies could constrain Russia’s T-90Ms by tightening sanctions on Uralvagonzavod. The firm once imported certain crucial tank parts, including optics and circuit boards. These imports are now sanctioned, so Uralvagonzavod increasingly uses Russian-made versions of the same parts. 

“It is clear that while Russia continues to grapple with production delays, quality control issues and the challenges of sourcing components under sanctions, it is also making tangible progress in both manufacturing and the deployment of new technologies,” Frontelligence Insight warned.

But these parts are still manufactured on industrial machinery that Russia bought from Chinese or Western firms. The machines don’t last forever—and this is a key Russian weakness. “Existing machinery, now in its third year of nonstop, around-the-clock operation, will also increasingly require replacement,” CIT noted. 

To suppress production of new T-90Ms, Ukraine’s allies must prevent Russia from replacing the machinery at Uralvagonzavod. “Enforcing stricter sanctions is key to limiting Russia’s defense potential growth,” CIT asserted.

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Russia’s latest porcupine tanks are actually working

First there were cope cages: metal grills surrounding a vehicle. After that—turtle tanks with sheets of metal attached to their cages. Now the Russians are adding metal quills to more and more armored vehicles, transforming them into “porcupine” vehicles.

A striking image of a bizarre modification to a Russian armored engineering vehicle is the latest evidence that a layer of metal spikes—like the quills of a porcupine—can protect vehicles from some types of explosive drone.

A photo recently circulated online depicting a Russian BREM engineering vehicle, based on the chassis of a T-62 tank. But it wasn’t just any BREM. No, this vehicle sports seemingly hundreds of lengths of rebar or some other thick metal wiring, jutting from an anti-drone screen bolted to the vehicles’ hull.

Both sides in Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine use BREMs to tow disabled vehicles, help build fortifications and breach the enemy’s own fortifications. Traveling near the line of contact, BREMs are in constant danger from the thousands of tiny first-person-view drones that prowl the 1,100-km front every day.

So it makes sense that the Russians would up-armor their BREMs. What’s surprising is that they’re adding porcupine armor in addition to the standard cope cage. One month after the first Russian porcupine vehicle appeared along the front line, there’s mounting evidence that the strange armor is becoming standard on the Russian side.

Which means it may spread to the Ukrainian side, too—as Russian anti-drone innovations have tended to do.

The first prominent Russian porcupine vehicle, a BMP with hundreds of quills, didn’t last long. Apparently immobilized by a mine or some other munition shortly after first appearing around the town of Troitske in Donetsk Oblast in mid-May, the BMP was blown up by Ukraine’s famed Birds of Magyar drone group, which flew an explosive FPV directly through an open hatch on the idling BMP.

The porcupine vehicle’s fiery fate may not have been the fault of its add-on metal spikes. An unmoving vehicle is an easy target for any skilled FPV pilot. On the move, a vehicle with quills may be able to deflect most FPVs before they can strike the vehicle’s hull.

Proliferating porcupines

It’s for that reason that more Russian vehicles are getting porcupine armor. In late May, Russia’s Zvezda T.V. news broadcast a report on a Russian tank unit on the Pokrovsk front in eastern Ukraine—and the tanks all had rebar spines, similar to the spines on the BMP. 

The spines are the fourth layer of anti-drone defense on those particular tanks. First, the tanks’ own armor offers some protection—although there are lots of weak spots on the top, in the rear, along the treads and between the turret and hull.

On top of the baseline armor, the tanks have cope cages. The spines are the third layer. “Bundles of metal wire like these are welded directly onto the cope cage,” Zvevda noted.

“Before a combat mission, they are fluffed up,” Zvezda continued. That is, the crew bends the quills outward. “The tanks turn into an iron hedgehog”—porcupine is more accurate—“and when FPV drones attack, they run into these needles.”

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The fourth layer of protection comes from the short-range radio-jammers that can be found on many Russian vehicles. That the Russians are adding additional layers of physical protection points to possible issues with the jammers.

It’s also possible the metal spines themselves might interfere with the jammers’ signals, according to the pro-Ukrainian Conflict Intelligence Team. “It raises questions about how such modifications affect the effectiveness of [electronic warfare] systems,” CIT noted.

But if the jammers are already ineffective—a distinct possibility given Ukraine drone operators’ transition to frequency-hopping controls or even fiber-optic drones that don’t rely on wireless radio links—why not try spines?

There’s another risk, however. It’s already difficult for the crews of up-armored tanks to escape their vehicles after taking a hit. The spines could exacerbate the issue. CIT wondered aloud whether porcupine armor may “hinder the crew’s ability to quickly exit the vehicle.”

It’s clear the Russians are willing to risk electronic interference and crew access if it means a vehicle stands a greater chance of blocking FPVs. The tiny drones now account for the majority of vehicle losses on both sides.

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Russia tests new anti-drone “porcupine” tank. Ukraine’s drones still win.

When Russian infantry seized a position east of Pokrovsk, a fortress city in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, one of the Ukrainian army’s German-made Leopard 1A5s left its hideout to blast the Russians with a 105-millimeter shell fired at point-blank range.

Frustrated in their attempts to directly attack Pokrovsk, Russian forces are trying to flank the city—by rolling through the town of Kostyantynivka, 40 km to the northeast. 

On Wednesday, a substantial Russian force—around a dozen up-armored BMPs and other vehicles—split into two sections and rolled northeast from the village of Novoolenivka, heading for the village of Yablunivka, the next stop on the road to Kostyantynivka.

They didn’t get very far. The Ukrainian 36th Marine Brigade and 12th Azov Brigade spotted the approaching vehicles—and hit them with drones and potentially other munitions. When the smoke cleared, half or more of the vehicles were on fire.

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But some Russians managed to gain a lodgement around Yablunivka on or just before Thursday. We know this because the Ukrainian 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade spotted the Russians with a drone—and deployed a Leopard 1A5 to take them out.

The up-armored tank engaged the Russians from just meters away. “Clear work, accurate fire and cold calculation—the enemy is demoralized, the positions are burned!” the 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade crowed.

It was a rare tank fight in a war increasingly fought by infantry and drones. And it was an even rarer close tank fight for Ukraine’s Leopard 1A5s. The tanks were built in the 1960s, upgraded in the 1980s, donated to Ukraine by a German-Dutch-Danish consortium four decades later and are now set to become the Ukrainian military’s most numerous Western-made tank.

The 40-ton, four-person Leopard 1A5 boasts a reliable 105-millimeter main gun and accurate fire controls, but its armor is thin compared to other tanks: just 70 millimeters thick at its thickest. That’s a third the protection a contemporary T-72 enjoys.

Still, “it is too early to write off this tank as scrap metal,” insisted the Ukrainian army’s 508th Separate Repair and Restoration Battalion, which retrieves, repairs and returns to the front line all manner of damaged armored vehicles. “It just so happened that it first met the opponent it was designed to fight 60 years later and it’s a completely different tank now, to be fair.”

The European consortium has pledged 170 Leopard 1A5s to Ukraine, drawing the old vehicles from surplus Belgian, Danish and German stocks and refurbishing them for onward transfer. The Ukrainian army further upgrades the tanks with add-on reactive armor and anti-drone cages.

The extra armor weighs down and slightly slows the otherwise nimble Leopard 1A5—but that’s a small price to pay. “Drones are the biggest threat to tanks nowadays so we had to take necessary steps even though the extra weight slightly impaired mobility,” the 508th SRRB noted.

Of the hundred or so Leopard 1A5s the Germans, Dutch and Danes have delivered since late 2023, the Russians have hit 18 of them, destroying 13.

Minimal losses

The 508th SRRB considers that an acceptable rate of loss—and credits the crews of the three or so army and national guard brigades that operate the tanks. “There are reasons to believe that they are being used properly,” the restoration battalion stated.

But the close fight outside Yablunivka was unusual. The Leopard 1A5 works best as a “mobile sniper tank,” the 508th SRRB asserted.

“A well-trained crew can fire 10 rounds per minute while its Russian opponents fire six to 10 rounds. Add a modern fire control system that allows accurate fire from a distance of 4 km during the day and about 3 km at night and you get a real hunter capable of taking down prey that doesn’t even know it’s being hunted.”

Given the growing threat from tiny drones that are everywhere all the time along the front line of Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine, tank crews on both sides tend to hide their vehicles in dugouts or urban areas, rolling out only to fire a few rounds at distant targets.

It’s a new “era of the cautious tank,” according to David Kirichenko, an analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C.

The Leopard 1A5 is good at this kind of combat. “After taking the shot that may disclose the tank’s position, a Leopard can quickly roll back to cover,” the 508th SRRB explained. “It is true the armor of the first Leopard is really weak, but it doesn’t matter if the enemy even has no time to see it.”

While suited to quick fire missions from concealed positions, the Leopard 1A5 isn’t necessarily appropriate for other tasks that heavier tanks might perform: direct assaults on defended positions and close combat with enemy armor, for instance.

“It is safe to say that the concept of a mobile sniper tank is quite successful and effective, although not very versatile,” the 508th SRRB concluded.

But the situation around Kostyantynivka is urgent, despite the Ukrainians’ recent successes defending the approaches to the town. 

“Ukrainian units prevented any deterioration of tactical positions” in recent days, the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies noted. But “the enemy continues to build up forces for further attacks.”

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Russia keeps burning through its last tanks — so why isn’t Ukraine winning?

It’s increasingly rare for Russian regiments to organize a large mechanized attack. Running low on armored vehicles but flush with fresh infantry, the Russians increasingly attack on motorcycles, quad bikes … or on foot.

So it’s worth taking note when and where Russians forces roll out some of their vanishingly rare tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers. The targets of the infrequent mechanized assaults are some of the Russians’ main objectives as their wider war on Ukraine grinds into its 40th month.

It should come as no surprise that the town of Kostyantynivka is one of those main objectives. Frustrated in their attempts to directly attack the fortress city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, Russians forces are trying to flank Pokrovsk—by rolling through Kostyantynivka, 40 km to the northeast. They’re willing to risk some of their armored vehicles for the chance to capture Kostyantynivka.

On Wednesday, a substantial Russian force—around a dozen up-armored BMPs and other vehicles—split into two sections and rolled northeast from Novoolenivka, heading for the village of Yablunivka.

They didn’t get very far. The Ukrainian 36th Marine Brigade and 12th Azov Brigade spotted the approaching vehicles—and hit them with drones and potentially other munitions. When the smoke cleared, half or more of the vehicles were on fire.

The Wednesday assault was one of several in the area. All failed. “Russian forces assaulted Ukrainian defense forces positions near Predtechyne, Bila Hora, Oleksandro-Shultyne and Yablunivka,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies noted. “Ukrainian units prevented any deterioration of tactical positions.” 

But “the enemy continues to build up forces for further attacks,” CDS noted. And at least one analyst isn’t optimistic Ukrainian lines will hold. The Russians may be low on armored vehicles, but they’ve got infantry to spare thanks to strong recruiting numbers—driven in part by generous enlistment bonuses.

Mounting damage

“Things aren’t going well for Ukraine,” wrote Tatarigami, founder of the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group. 

While the Russian military steadily inducts 30,000 fresh infantry every month—more than enough to replace permanent losses to Ukrainian action and establish a few new units, the Ukrainian military is still struggling to recruit the 80,000 new infantry it needs to fully staff existing brigades. “With current resources, Ukraine can’t win,” Tatarigami claimed. 

“Russians will likely take Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka, and Kupiansk is also at risk,” Tatarigami added, without saying when the Russians might take those cities and towns. 

But a Russian advance through and around Pokrovsk wouldn’t necessarily signal catastrophic defeat for Ukraine—nor decisive victory for Russia. “The most optimistic anticipated outcome here is where both sides lose,” Tatarigami explained.

“Russia’s realistic goal … may no longer be outright occupation,” Tatargami added, “but rather rendering Ukraine unviable as a functioning state—undermining its economy, depopulating its cities and precipitating long-term sociopolitical collapse.”

But “the Russian state itself suffers economic and demographic decline,” Tatarigami pointed out. In 40 months, more than a million Russians have been killed or wounded. War spending now accounts for 40% of the Kremlin’s budget. “Even a ‘successful’ outcome in Ukraine could leave Russia so depleted that it enters its own period of internal instability and geopolitical marginalization.” 

“If Ukraine manages to repel Russian advances, why wouldn’t that constitute a victory? Because, as noted, winning a war is not only about holding ground—it’s about what remains afterward.” 

Half a million Ukrainians have been killed or wounded. Entire cities are in ruin. “A country left with ruined infrastructure, lost territories, millions of its citizens displaced and a dramatically aged population with a GDP per capita over twice smaller than Mexico cannot claim a strategic win.” 

It’s better for Ukrainian forces to repulse a Russian mechanized attack than to not repulse a Russian mechanized attack. But that’s fleeting good news in a war that’s catastrophic for both sides. “If you think this has a happy ending,” Tatarigami concluded, “you haven’t been paying attention.”

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Ukraine’s new bike unit mirrors Russia’s dumbest suicidal tactic — and that’s a strategic problem

Uttering one word, one man could end Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. 

With a single word, he could halt the fighting that, in 40 bloody months, has killed or maimed some 1,000,000 Russians and nearly half a million Ukrainians. He could ease the nuclear fears the conflict has stoked. He could relieve the strain on the Russian and Ukrainian economies—and allow the devastated landscape in eastern and southern Ukraine to finally begin healing.

That word is “stop.” And the only man who can say it is the Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin, on whose orders 200,000 Russian troops further invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. 

What will it take for Putin to say the word? That question, more than any other, informs Ukraine’s theory of victory as the wider war grinds into its fourth year and both sides show signs of exhaustion. Ukraine could defeat Russia militarily, effectively giving Putin no choice but to say stop—lest the Ukrainian army destroy whatever forces Russia might still have left following decisive losses in Ukraine. 

Or Russia could defeat Ukraine militarily, satisfying Putin’s original conditions for victory. Putin could say stop because he’s gotten everything he ever wanted in Ukraine.

But there’s a third and arguably likelier outcome. Putin could order his armies to stand down not because they’ve actually won, but because Putin says they’ve won.

Dictators, including elected ones such as Putin, tend to be political survivalists—and Putin’s sense of self-preservation could lead him to declare victory in Ukraine if and when he begins to sense he’s losing … and losing domestic political support as his armies falter.

Declaring victory without winning

This sort of thing happens all the time. Palestinian military group Hamas routinely declares victory in its various clashes with Israel, even when the outcomes of the conflicts are often devastating to the group. Hamas has repeatedly declared victory in the bloody war instigated by the group’s brutal cross-border raids into southern Israel in October 2023—despite Israeli retaliation that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian fighters and civilians and rendered Gaza all but uninhabitable. 

“The Hamas claim of victory … has further goals,” Palestinian writer Aws Abu Ata noted. “The movement seeks to form a safety belt for itself to avoid being held accountable for the very crises it has provoked.”

As long as a critical mass of Hamas supporters believe, despite their suffering, that they and the militant group are the victors, the Palestinian liberation movement may endure in some form.

Putin could pursue a similar survival strategy. He could simply declare victory in Ukraine, and then attempt to convince his base—Russian elites and tens of millions of everyday Russians—that the victory is legitimate and not the desperate projection of an imperiled dictator.

And yes, Putin is imperiled. Just two years ago, the Wagner Group—the notorious Russian mercenary company led by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin—staged an uprising against Putin’s regime. Thousands of Wagner troops marched on Moscow. The uprising ended when Prigozhin unwisely agreed to meet Putin in Moscow, only to perish when his plane fell to the ground in flames, likely shot down. 

Meanwhile in Ukraine, increasingly vehicle-starved Russian field armies are losing more than a thousand troops a day in grinding assaults on Ukrainian defenses—and gaining just a few hundred square kilometers a month in exchange for the massive bloodletting, in a country with a total area of 603,000 square kilometers.

The costly Russian attacks are sustainable because the Kremlin recruits slightly more troops than it loses every month. But that robust recruitment is possible for just two reasons. “Driven by high sign-on bonuses and speculation that the war will soon be over, more than 1,000 men join the Russian military every day,” noted Janis Kluge, deputy head of the Eastern Europe & Eurasia Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. 

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The bonuses and other wartime spending are eating the Russian economy.

“All told, Russia’s defense budget will account for 40% of all government expenditures, which is at its highest level since the Cold War,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commander of US Army forces in Europe, told US lawmakers on 3 April.

By comparison, the US federal government spends 13% of its budget on the military.

This is unsustainable. As the cost of servicing a ballooning debt crowds out other spending priorities, Putin has reportedly been casting around for conflict off-ramps. However and whenever Putin chooses to end the war, declaring victory for Russia is surely part of the exit strategy.

The US may give Putin the cover he needs

Talk is easy, of course. Real persuasion could be hard.

“Putin has laid out his maximal goals for this conflict,” explained Thomas Graham, a former US National Security Council staffer who is currently a fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. “At the moment, he needs to make a credible claim of success on each of these goals to declare victory—and that means no NATO membership for Ukraine, international recognition of the land he has seized as Russian, the demilitarization and ‘denazification’ of Ukraine, and the lifting of Western sanctions.”   

“He will not achieve these goals in a negotiated settlement,” Graham asserted.

That’s almost certainly true if the settlement is with Ukraine. But US President Donald Trump, who frequently apes Russian propaganda and has described Putin as strong and smart, has sent his envoys to speak directly with their Russian counterparts in an effort to negotiate an end to the war on terms that favor Russia. 

Trump could lend Putin the domestic political cover Putin needs to sell a unilateral declaration of victory in Ukraine—by giving Russia things Ukraine and Ukraine’s European allies won’t give it. 

What a US-brokered deal could mean for Ukraine

Trump could officially endorse Russian control over occupied territories. Indeed, the White House has already offered to recognize Crimea as part of  Russia. And since the admission of a new member state to NATO requires the consent of all current members, the United States alone could block any Ukrainian bid to join the alliance. 

The Trump administration could also lift US sanctions on Russia—and clearly wants to. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said an end to the war would be “the key that unlocks the door” for “potentially historic economic partnerships” between the United States and Russia. 

“The Russian president is in the extraordinary position where he sees the opportunity to entrust his American colleague with imposing a Russian-designed peace settlement on Ukraine,” observed John Lough, a fellow with Chatham House, a London think tank.

The stated Russian war objectives Washington can’t just deliver to Moscow are the most esoteric—and the easiest for Putin to simply claim: the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of the Ukrainian armed forces. 

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Russia has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian troops since February 2022: does that qualify as “demilitarization”? There are very few actual Nazis in the Ukrainian military, but there are surely thousands of right-wing Ukrainian nationalists among Ukraine’s war dead: is that “denazification”?

When both sides claim victory, the war may end

It’s evident Putin is already laying the rhetorical groundwork for claiming Russia has demilitarized and denazified Ukraine. Putin believes key war goals have been achieved, a source close to the Kremlin told Reuters in January.

As Russian casualties reached one million, Russia’s stocks of armored vehicles run low and borrowing costs continue to climb in the sanctions-squeezed, war-strained Russian economy, the temptation for Putin to declare victory and halt major offensive action—at least for a while—should only increase. Especially given how little ground Russian forces have gained in Ukraine since their retreat from Kyiv Oblast in the spring of 2022.

Incredibly, Ukraine could also claim it has won.

“In the end, both sides may claim some form of victory,” explained Tatarigami, the founder of the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group.

“Russia by pointing to territorial gains; and Ukraine by claiming its success in preventing Russia from achieving its stated strategic objectives.”

David Axe

David Axe is a writer and filmmaker in South Carolina in the United States.

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Russian motorcycle assault tactics have spread to the southern front of Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine. The result in the south is the same as in the east. A lot of Russia’s southern bike troops are getting killed by Ukrainian mines, drones and artillery. 

But as in the east, the few southern bikers who survive can make dangerous dents in Ukrainian lines. The bike attacks are almost always fatal for the troops who attempt them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work.

Ukrainian commanders should think twice before copying the method, however. The Russians can afford to lose troops. The Ukrainians can’t.

The Ukrainian armed forces’ southern task force claimed the Russians attacked “in the Malynivka area” on Friday. But analysts geolocated the site of the attack in Nesteryanka, 40 miles to the east in the same oblast.

In any event, the attack failed as around a dozen bike troops ran over mines, got plinked by drones or blasted by artillery. “Their plan was doomed to failure,” the Ukrainian southern task force stated. “Our soldiers met the motorcycle assaults with dense fire, and as a result, all the enemy equipment burned down! Not a single occupier passed!”

The Ukrainian defenders, possibly from the 65th Mechanized Brigade, were lucky. The thinking behind the Russian bike attacks is perverse, but not insane. “It involves heavy losses, but it still has certain results,” the Ukrainian Peaky Blinders drone unit explained.

“For example, 20 motorcycles are going, some of them are destroyed by artillery, some by drones, someone is eliminated by mining and our infantry will get someone in a gun battle. But several motorcycles still have a chance to jump into the landing.”

It only takes a few infiltrating Russian troops to create a lodgement inside Ukrainian lines—one that can grow into a larger breach. In deploying large numbers of bike troops, Russian commanders are playing the odds—and betting that a few will eventually ride unscathed past Ukrainian mines, drones and artillery. 

“Behind them is the same group, then more and more,” Peaky Blinders warned. The Friday bike attack in Zaporizhzhia may have failed, but the next one might not.

Abundant manpower

This costly assault method only works for the Kremlin because it has manpower in abundance. Motivated by generous enlistment bonuses and apparently believing Russia is winning the wider war, 30,000 fresh troops sign up for Russia’s war effort every month. That’s slightly more troops than Russia loses every month in Ukraine. Even the “suicidal bike attacks” haven’t tipped Russia’s manpower balance into a monthly deficit.

But Ukraine doesn’t have a durable manpower surplus. So it’s worth questioning the decision by one elite Ukrainian unit to form its own motorcycle assault group. The 425th Separate Assault Regiment organized its bike company, the first in the Ukrainian armed forces, last month. 

“During the training, the fighters spent hundreds of hours behind the wheel and practiced shooting in motion, firing thousands of rounds,” the regiment announced. “As a result, we have a modern cavalry whose main task is to rapidly break into enemy positions, carry out assault actions and quickly change the direction of strike.”

But can the regiment afford to lose almost all the bike troops it sends into battle? And will the Ukrainian people accept the loss of life? 

The Russians are determined to advance north in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. “Russian troops conduct six to seven attacks daily in the direction of Malynivka,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies noted. One of these attacks may eventually succeed—and open a gap in Ukrainian lines that Russian reinforcements can exploit. 

Even if the effort succeeds, it will come at the cost of most of the bike troops carrying out the initial assaults. “The majority of these bikers are suicidal,” Peaky Blinders observed. “But apparently they are completely satisfied with it.”

Ukrainians might not be so satisfied dying like that.

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