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If you were a Ukrainian soldier on the ground during the Avdiivka operation, what would the battlefield look like? The front lines look deserted. They seem to be depopulated. It's about whether it's a disaster zone or a war zone. This ongoing air war seems to be clearing the battlefield. So you get a zone, say, 20 to 40 km wide, where almost nothing is visible. It's like World War I: if you flew over the battlefield in your Sopwich Camel, you wouldn't see much because everyone was buried in the ground. You would see trench lines, but not too much movement. Because you wouldn't survive long if you were on the surface. You
won't survive long if you're on the surface. This still remains true in Ukraine. So, this was the problem that Ukraine faced: how to get out of the ground and unite forces so that they could concentrate on capturing territories. The Russian method was to infiltrate small groups of infantry. This was the German approach during World War I. Very small groups of determined infantry break through, find a weak spot, and then send a larger number forward in a wave. This tactic doesn't work in Ukraine because more people are immediately hit by a combination of drones and artillery as soon as they approach the target. So the Ukrainian approach was to say, "Okay, what do we need to do," and this is an extremely important
mental step that they took: " Before you try something like this, neutralize the system that sees your actions, because it is information in war that leads to the result." So they studied the Russian drone system in the area very carefully and spent months patiently building an intelligence picture of where the Russians were operating their drones from and how they were replenishing them. Drone warfare requires large resources, and their first stage in Avdiivka was to destroy the supply nodes that provided the drone system, as well as the headquarters and operator targets once they were detected. And once you take on that
system and deprive it of its supply, it creates a window of opportunity. This is so interesting. So you blind and exhaust the Russian forces that are trying to advance to surround the belt of fortresses. But there was something else that everyone saw this summer and fall-the same dramatic medium-range strikes as Ukraine struck deep into Russian territory. People talk about mid-range strikes, people talk about long-range strikes. Help us understand this difference: if you are Ukrainian, how do you distinguish between them? Yes, that's a valid question, because the third corps acted independently. And while they did this over relatively short distances, the broader system also lacked capabilities over long
distances. It was here that the Ukrainians introduced the term "medium-range strike," which, according to various opinions, is from 200 to 400 km behind the front line. This is aimed at hitting any system higher up the supply chain. Imagine you ordered something from Amazon: it's better to hit the warehouse than attack the delivery van. So medium- range strikes are useful throughout Ukraine, and they are largely the prerogative of unmanned systems forces, which are specialists in this area. These are large, powerful drones. Large, powerful drones capable of covering long distances. They are controlled remotely via Starlink terminals. So while they are operating along the front lines, as an important part of this preparation, the priority
for medium-range strikes was to cut off supplies to Crimea. Has the war in general turned into an air war, where drones decide everything? The Air Force still remains extremely important to the military system. The most interesting thing about this campaign of strikes around Crimea is that it is doing the job that the Air Force would do if it were in Ukraine. The tasks they perform are very similar to those faced by tactical aviation during World War II. Let's say the destruction of supplies and convoys. a campaign to destroy railways and supply hubs.
They were squeezing the "neck" of Crimea. And here we see an interesting shift to long-range targets, political and economic: the drone forces around Crimea began attacking shipping in the Sea of Azov and economic targets on Russia's western coast , such as Novorossiysk, in the summer. And this is where, I believe, the connection to the broader picture of what is happening behind the scenes arises. Alex, we have a graph that shows Ukraine's long-range strikes, deep strikes on Russia. Tell us what this graph shows us, Alex.
This graph displays everything outside a 250 kilometer window. So, we are talking about targets that were hit by very long- range drones. And the rapid growth we see is not so much a change of intention. Ukraine would like to do this at the beginning of the war. It is the presence of these "Fever" drones as the main workhorse among long-range drones that allows them to hit targets that were previously unreachable. The most interesting thing about this diagram, to me, is that despite all the talk about oil refineries and their political significance-and these are very effective targets, especially if you hit them during some economic forum where people come.
the priority for Ukraine is actually to strike the military supply and production system that fuels this war, and in particular the war that is being waged against their cities and their economic infrastructure. This is truly impressive. You know, actually, as the bars get higher and the number of strikes increases, the proportion of refineries remains very small, right? In fact, most of the hits fall on completely different objects. What are they striking, if not oil refineries? If not factories, then they try to hit targets, guided by the old military saying: "destroy what kills you." So, glide bombs are a type of weapons system. These are essentially unguided bombs with small wings
that unfold and allow them to travel a distance of 80 to 100 kilometers. This allows the Russian air force to drop bombs on the front line from a safe distance. Therefore, they are hunting for facilities where they manufacture fuel and explosive casings, are engaged in the production and deep maintenance of aircraft that ensure the operation of this system, and, of course, ballistic missiles, which are a great threat to Ukraine. But that doesn't mean refineries aren't important; Because there are not so many of them, Ukraine can achieve the desired effect with only a small fraction of the strikes, and the impact on Russian oil refining capacity has been very significant.
They reduced diesel exports from about 800,000 barrels per day to about 140,000 barrels per day. Yes, and, of course, we should never forget the cruelty of war: if you strike the enemy, he will strike back, and Russia is striking Ukraine very hard in response. Let's look at the number of Russian strikes on Ukraine. My God, just a huge surge in the last few months of Russian deep strikes on Ukraine, including, let's not forget, civilians in the cities. Alex, help us understand what we're seeing here. So, this is a very good comparative chart because it is essentially on the same scale and shows how what Russia is doing in Ukraine is orders of magnitude larger, about five times. And on both of these graphs, what's also important from a
data point of view, are successful hits; these are drones that hit something, regardless of whether it was a target, not systems that were shot down. And part of the surge that you see on this graph is due to the huge increase in Russian production. So the workhorse of this campaign is the Geran drone, which is a derivative of the Shahed, and, you know, both production targets are now at about 28,000 per year, up from a few thousand for their predecessors a year or two ago. So you have a brute force, but Ukraine also has a hard time shooting them down because they are reactive, so the interception percentage has dropped from, say, eight or four out of ten to three or four out of ten.
Did Ukraine make a mistake? Because in fact, after the strikes on these refineries, global diesel fuel supplies are decreasing, and, as you say, this is causing a spike in prices worldwide. Did Donald Trump decide that the real pain was not inflicted on the Russian people, but on the American people, and that it was hurting him politically? So did the Ukrainians do something militarily smart but politically unwise? They failed or did not factor the Iran war into these broader equations. It is also very important to remember how desperate Ukraine is. You know, they're the weaker party, they're victims of a much stronger system that's attacking them, and sometimes
you can go too far and see a certain equality of suffering. Therefore, I do not blame Ukraine for trying to find certain pressure points. A very interesting area where I think they may have brought trouble on themselves is the Black Sea, because when they established a kind of grain corridor that ran very close to NATO territory and were able to restore significant grain exports and everything that goes with that, you had some ships sneaking along the coast to avoid going out to sea, like a kind of ancient navigator afraid to go where the dragons are. Ukraine's ability to deter the Russian fleet created a problem for Russia, as the only way for it to attack these ships was with something like a drifting mine or an accidental
drone, for which it could not take responsibility. But it would increase the cost of insurance for everyone in the Black Sea if the incident were not officially recognized. As soon as Ukraine began striking export facilities in the eastern Black Sea and, according to their data, damaged 116 merchant ships in the Sea of Azov, insurance prices in the Black Sea skyrocketed. Just this morning I read in the insurance press that the peak insurance rate-this is not an average, but a peak-reaches 20% of the value of the vessel if you call at the port of Novorossiysk. For comparison: during the Battle of the Atlantic in World
War II, the insurance premium for a merchant ship was only 1% of the value of the hull. And this was at a time when "wolf packs" were actively sinking ships in huge numbers. You very aptly describe Ukraine's dilemma: as a weaker party fighting for its own survival, it is forced to inflict very painful blows in vulnerable areas. But Russia's game is to spread this pain, so that Trump feels that this is American pain, so that other countries see the skyrocketing price of food in the world, and if Putin plays his cards well, he can convince people that it is Ukraine's fault
