We are now beginning to enter the stage of the war where Russia is unable to sustain a general offensive all the way up and down the frontline and must resort to terrorism to project fear and the illusion of unstoppable, corrupted power.
Expect more and more of this crap as Russia is less and less able to credibly fight a ground war.
Remember, acts of terrorism definitionally rely on propaganda creating mass panic for their power as if the perpetrators of the terrorism possessed true power they would have resorted to actual coordinated military action such as fighting on the frontline or taking territory.
In otherwords if Russia chooses to attempt something like this, it is by definition a sign of extreme weakness on their part as was the lazy attempt to claim Ukraine tried to assassinate Putin.
They still have a lot of direct military power. They have better and more equipment (including fpvs), they have a lot of bodies and don’t really care about their long term survival, they have support of china, india and usa (diplomatic only at this time).
They really don’t have a giant supply of labor to send the the front lines. The problem is that every man you draft for the front lines is another man that isn’t working in the munitions factories, the farms, or any of the innumerable industries needed to keep a war effort going. Or the man they draft is working a non-defense job but paying the taxes needed to pay for all this.
Yes, they could send ten million naked men to the front armed with nothing but pointy sticks, but that would not win them the war.
I am sure there are some areas where Russia has better equipment but in general… no Russia does not have better equipment and I am not even sure they have MORE equipment in many areas since the Ukrainian military is at this point far more mechanized than the Russian military is, especially when it comes to number of vehicles being utilized by a military that have survived at least one engagement with the enemy. Russia’s number for that metric is approaching the theoretical limit of zero as fast as it possibly can.
Russia has worse tanks, worse APCS, worse combined arms coordination, worse counter-battery artillery radar, worse towed and self propelled tube artillery (the Bohdana shits on pretty much all Russian artillery, especially when you consider Ukraine’s ridiculous production capacity for the system), worse missile artillery with no equivalent capability to HIMARS, worse machine guns (Ukraine has M2 browning 50 cals which shit on Russian machine guns) and crew served weapons, worse medical evacuation capability, worse target acquisition, recon and intelligence capabilities, worse air defense systems… ok their jets are better? That is about it and I am not really sure that advantage will hold either.
The only Russian armor I respect is the Nona 120mm mortar vehicle, the rest is pretty much mediocre at best and the training for using said armor is almost non-existent for most of the crews actually on the frontline this late into the war… and even in the case with the Nona I would far rather have something like the Patria Nemo mortar system (which Ukraine doesn’t have currently to be fair, but I still would rather have a decisive 155mm artillery advantage than 120mm mortars mounted on obsolete armor).
I am less able to exhaustively compare Ukrainian drones with Russian ones but where is your evidence Russian drones are significantly superior to Ukrainian ones?
They absolutely have a lot more equipment and more importantly they have ammo for it, our mortars and most of artillery is literally useless or semi-useless due to not having ammo to fire with. They have aerial superiority and use it effectively (missiles, aerial bombs). They have both ballistic and cruise missiles and produce a lot of them. They produce a lot of long range aerial drones (shahed/geran) they have bigger explosives and have advanced capabilities like forming a mesh network and working as retranslators, shorter range ones are better as well we actually copied lightning and they are already moving on producing newer version. These days armor is almost useless, front line is oversaturated with drones. As for the drones, they have a huge edge in fiberoptics drones (was obvious that we need to move in this direction as well from the start), also they just have a lot more of them with better range. Most of their newer drones have optical stabilisation, ‘ai’ features powered by orangepis and the like. Also partially just my bad luck that their best pilots are close as well (rubicon).
There is a numerical advantage when summed up wholistically for Russia but my point is that in many ways it is far more hollow than people realize.
There is a disparity in artillery but note something very important here, Russia is currently heavily relying on glide KAB bombs as a crutch for artillery pressure at the front specifically because Ukraine is so much better at hunting Russian artillery down than Russia is at hunting Ukrainian artillery down. Russia has had to pull their artillery back too far to have a critical impact on the frontline.
Ukraine is also quickly developing domestic 105mm and 155mm artillery shell production, it already produces an intimidating number of bohdanas, towed and self-propelled, domestically and it is going to be producing M119/L119 105mm howitzers soon which are hands down the best battle tested light infantry howitzers on earth…
Russia does not have aerial superiority, not at all, they shockingly DO NOT have aerial superiority for being on paper such a larger military power than Ukraine, according to western military doctrine they basically already lost the war on that failure alone especially when we are talking about a land war over such vast distances.
Armor has not become useless, the Russian doctrine of armor usage and design has become useless. FPV drones largely exploit the fact that Russian armor design never actually took protecting the crew seriously as a goal, which is pathetic in my opinion.
I think it has been established that Russia relies more heavily on fiber optic drones than Ukraine does, but where is the evidence that they have a true edge? I am sure it is true in some ways but also Ukraine is optimizing for a different strategy.
Edit ok Russia definitely has a major advantage in attack helicopters but they seem to still be mostly focused on anti-armor doctrine which isn’t useful against Ukraine’s drone saturated skies, but still it is a major advantage I will give to Russia there.
We haven’t seen tank for over a year in our area of responsibility neither ours not theirs. There are enough of them tanks and APCs, yet they are rapidly becoming obsolete (it’s temporary for this iteration probably) noone wants to get into them due to them veing death traps at the moment. Bohdana is great and there is a lot of them being produced, yet there is a lot of them being destroyed as well. Still hugeproblem with ammo remains. For the fiberoptics it’s one of those fields where numbers are extremely important and they can push out a lot of drones 3 maybe 5 times more and they make longer range ones as well. We might regain some edge in fpv with move to digital from analogue video (using retranslators and openipc). We have a lot of cool shit true, but numbers are on r*ssian side.
absolutely not applicable to this war and is failing to modernize currently, german (maybe it’s just them and other countries are different who knows) basic training is insanely out of touch with reality and promotes mid 20 century shit that absolutely ignores things like mavics and recon drones in general, has worse personal eqipment (was shoked tbh).
Tanks are always rare in war, and Ukraine doesn’t have enough of them too… I am pissed AF that my country (the US) hasn’t given more but I am confident the increase in artillery capability of Ukraine will have a strategic impact.
The M119/L119 is a beast and ideally suited for dragging around with HMMVs, if Ukraine can start getting a consistent supply of those out to the front that is going to have a massive systematic impact on the balance of power along the frontline. If I was a Russian general pushing the offensive on the frontline this would literally be the last thing I would want Ukraine to gain access to given how essential of a tool light infantry support howitzers are.
I am sure there are still awful shell shortages in Ukraine, war is always infinitely contradictory, complicated and utterly something you can’t know unless you experience it but compared to a year or two ago Ukraine is an infinitely better position in terms of artillery and in my opinion that provides a serious foundation of security for Ukraine.
Ukraine also just got a massive amount of German trucks to slap Bohdana cannons on, so production is just going to keep increasing for their 155mm artillery capability and honestly that should terrify Russians. Trying to assault a position with on call 155mm artillery support is an absolutely incomprehensibly terrifying proposition, especially because the only counter to it is to get as close as you possibly can to the defenders so the artillery stops firing… and those bohdanas are VERY accurate artillery pieces. Armor thickness considerations are also a joke to a well placed 155mm shell making armor design and doctrine for Russia increasingly dubious as a pursuit in the first place.
edit I am sure that German military doctrine is out of date, I am sure it must be infuriating as a Ukrainian soldier to see the ways in which foreign allied power’s militaries refuse to listen (the UK being one recent prominent example) but on the flipside I don’t actually think many of the assumptions of western military coldwar doctrine, nor of post coldwar western counter-insurgency doctrine are actually that far off the mark (in terms of tactics and technology not broad overarching strategy). Well… besides vastly underestimating the amount of artillery shells that western powers thought would be needed in a fullscale war with a neer-peer enemy, but that brings us back to the subject of Ukraine beginning to develop a dominant artillery edge.
My other biggest criticism would be I think European militaries largely failed to learn crucial lessons about how helicopters changed warfare and are still stuck a bit behind on that and thus Ukraine had to invent entirely new categories of organic close air support and forever change warfare to compensate for that blindspot…
Tanks and armor are currently unusable due to drone saturation they just cant move close enough in most places, even regular trucks can’t, we are slowly losing positions due this, when pilots need to move 10-15 kilometers on foot over fields it’s just unsustainable even with logistics handled by robots. We still don’t have domestic production of shells at least not full cycle I think and 4 years into existential war it really a big problem. Artillery is cool and all but there is no answer to fiberoptics drones currently (there literally none except shoot them or something) and they are extremely effective weapon that can be deployed up to 40 kilometers with 50 centimeter accuracy and cost fraction of what single artillery piece costs.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/01/01/frontline-report-2025-12-31/
^ Abrams were literally just used by Ukraine to successfully counterattack at the absolute most intense flashpoint of the war currently. Yes an Abrams was immobilized, but the crew survived and the operation was a success…
Fundamentally you really can’t get more efficient than a howitzer, which doesn’t mean that fiber optic drones aren’t devastatingly effective weapons but the difference is artillery can keep firing over and over and over and over and over again. What a lot of people don’t realize is the velocity part of the equation when it comes to the destructive energy an artillery shell imbues, the only real inefficiency is velocity lost to air resistance.
Yeah, I’ve seen this, cool shit, but in my mechanized brigade aemor crews were literally forced to become pilots of different unmanned vehicles due to bmps and other armor becoming one way ticket. Even modern machines like maxxpro are single use machines (they do work great and actually hold multiple hits) that can return but they are rare. Kozaks, hammers, various toyotas are far more popular for logistics and moving people to and from positions.
Artillery piqued in ww1 we never will return to 5 meterdeep trenches and walls of fire with million shells fired in a single day. 🥴 Not to say it’s useless but they require a lot of time to get going and actually hit something.
You say Russia has air superiority, but Ukraine uses jets every night to destroy incoming missiles and drones. Every night, Ukraine strikes Russia across the border and deep into Russia. Can you elaborate on what you mean by air superiority?
Ukraine uses fiber-optic cable FPV with 50 km reach, and hit targets deep inside Russia. Can you elaborate how Russia “has a huge edge in fiberoptics drones”? What do they have that is so much better?
From the top of my head some of them use different laquer that allows less loss on the fiber = longer distance travel on same battery with a bit bigger payload, they have universal mounts for payload, they have standartized a lot of things, they have just a lot more of them.
No one is debating that Russia has some advantage in fiber optic drones, the relevant question is whether we are talking about a horse race here or we are talking about Russia possessing a decisive advantage in fiber optic drones… and I don’t see concluisive evidence for the latter though I definitely acknowledge Russia is producing and fielding a massive number of them.
Where are you learning that Russia as inferior ISR capabilities? That seems… not likely. Very much so.
If they had superior ISR capabilities they wouldn’t be hiding their artillery and logistics far back from the frontline because Ukrainian artillery and drones keep wiping them out when they get anywhere close to the frontline.
If they had superior ISR capabilities there wouldn’t be daily footage of expensive high value anti-air defenses and radars crewed by highly valuable crew being blown up by cheap Ukrainian flying bombs.
If Russia had superior ISR capability they would be leveraging that to create bubbles of safety where they could safely enmasse forces near the frontline to punch through, and in most cases Russia is catastrophically unable to do that as evidenced by the incredible amount of armor Russia has lost around Pokrovsk alone.
Ok so you don’t actually know, but you’re assuming based on second or third order effects. It’s not important what experts and insiders know they actually do have, I was mainly just curious why you thought that they had worse ISR than UA.
I would consider a critical air defense asset getting struck in the face by a cheap flying bomb a maximally “first order” effect.
They have a ton of problems leading to that, and traditional ISR is somewhat one of them. Sure that’s first order, but I meant that you’re just assuming based on things that have happened down the line from the initial intelligence collection step, which are a myriad.
From your perspective you see a speculative assumption based on indirect evidence, from my perspective I see footage of a cheap flying bomb smashing into critical air defense assets as a wholistic measurement of ISR capability in realworld terms.
We are both right.