15/08/2025
Big Serge with another good one:
On Friday, August 15, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are slated to meet in Alaska to discuss steps to end the war. Whether those talks will be productive remains to be seen, although Trump’s acknowledgement that Ukraine will have to cede territory to Russia signals that the White House is at least drifting towards a realism. Predictably, the Alaska meetings are being decried by the Europeans and the Professional Fascism Noticers as a redux of Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement with Hi**er, but this does not really matter. In the same sense that, for the alcoholic it is always five o’clock somewhere, for a certain type of person it is always 1938. For these people, World War Two is the only thing that ever happened, it is always happening, and it is always just about to happen.
Just as a brief aside, this is one reason why Alaska is actually a meaningful and pointed place to hold the meetings. The more paranoid sorts believe that there’s some sinister meaning owing to Alaska’s origins as a Russian colony, but the actual symbolism of the site lies in the fact that America does not need to interact with Russia through Europe, and indeed never has. America and Russia can relate to each other bilaterally, without Brussels or London or Kiev as an intermediary.
On the ground, the Alaska meetings coincide with a major rupture of the front. We want to avoid using overly dramatic verbiage, particularly the much dreaded “collapse” label. To be clear, it should not be expected that the AFU is on the verge of being routed completely from the field. Russian forces are not going to roll over the Dnieper next week or sweep into Kiev or Odessa. Ukraine is not “collapsing”, but it is losing, and more specifically it is about to suffer a major defeat at Pokrovsk.
What is happening is not the wholesale disintegration of the Ukrainian army, but we are clearly at a major inflection point with two separate dimensions. First and foremost, the front has ruptured around Pokrovsk (and to a lesser extent around Kupyansk and Lyman), creating one of the most severe operational crises of the war for the AFU. The second dimension is more structural and is the cause of the first: Ukraine’s mounting manpower crisis and its severe shortages of infantry have reached the point where they can no longer properly defend a continuous frontline. Indeed, it may no longer be proper to speak of a “front” at all, but rather a sequence of urban strongpoints with major seams in between them, held together only by the transient threat of drones striking exploiting Russian elements.
The critical development is relatively easy to understand. Over the last week or so, Russian forces worked into a seam in the Ukrainian line north of Pokrovsk and have penetrated deep into the AFU’s rear areas. Notably, the breach is both deep and wide in the context of this war. The gap stretches roughly between the villages of Rodynske and Volodymyrivka and is thus nearly 8 miles wide, and Russian forces have exploited as far as Dobropillya (some 10 miles to the west) and Zolotyi Kolodyaz (11 miles to the north). They have thus exploited on two axes and wedged open a sizeable hole in the Ukrainian front, crossing several unmanned defensive belts which were designed to be Ukrainian fallback positions, and severing one of the main highways connecting the southern front to Kramatorsk.
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Ukraine has a problem with the brute mathematics of the situation: casualties far exceed intake of men. It has exacerbated these issues, however, by choosing to expand its force structure, creating new mechanized brigades rather than allocating new personnel as replacements for existing formations. It has political reasons for doing so: since Ukraine insists that it is fighting not merely to hold the line, but also to go back on the offensive and roll the Russians back, it must appear to be raising and hoarding fresh forces for that purpose. By allocating freshly mobilized personnel to new brigades, however, Ukraine artificially constrained the flow of replacements (already inadequate) to the front line. Thus, we arrive at the current situation, where the Ukrainian Army is short 300,000 men, with frontline brigades at as little as 30% of their regulation infantry strength.
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The summer campaign has now put Ukraine in an untenable position. The Russians are staged to assault as many as four cities at once, and we should see concurrent operations to take Pokrovsk, Kostyantynivka, Kupyansk, and potentially Lyman, creating pressure at widely separated points. The AFU can only react to so many crises before it ceases to react at all, and the dissipated threats to multiple strategic cities creates command paralysis for Ukraine, which is only exacerbated when the Russians thrust forces into unmanned seams in the line, as they just did north of Pokrovsk.
The broad picture that emerges is one where Ukrainian units are attrited to the point where the AFU is being thrust into a state of permanent reactivity. Constant pressure on the line is absorbing all the available combat power, and the demands placed on Ukraine by their attempts to defend four strategic axes will leave them without the reserves or resources to attempt a meaningful counterblow of their own. The front will be squeezed from all directions until it begins to pop. It is popping in Pokrovsk, with Kostyantynivka, Lyman, and Kupyansk to follow soon.
Putin will descend on Alaska with full confidence, as events on the ground proceed in Russia’s favor.
Russo-Ukrainian War: Summer, 2025
