By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 8/6/26
Big Trouble in Ukraine
The Disappearance of Air Defense
I mentioned in a recent post that Ben Aris of IntelliNews, who has generally shown himself sympathetic to the political West’s war on Russia via Ukraine, seems to be increasingly disillusioned with its prospects. His reasons largely align with developments that I have captured over recent weeks.
First of all is the crisis of diminishing US weapons stockpiles, which has severely reduced the supply of weapons to Ukraine. The absence of air defense missiles means that few, if any, Russian missiles fired at Ukraine, are being brought down.
“The skies are open and Russia now has free rein to destroy anything it wants with its vast and growing arsenal of cruise and ballistic missiles. We are moving into the end game as Ukraine is increasingly defenseless against the escalating Russian onslaught. And winter is coming. That will be harsher than last year’s already punishing campaign that left residents living in apartments where temperatures dropped to -10°C or less.”
In a separate article today, Aris (IntelliNews) records that Russia fired 24 ballistic missiles, four Zircon or Onyx cruise missiles and 115 drones at Kyiv and the surrounding region overnight on August 5, killing 17 people and injuring 44. Ukrainian forces shot down 98 of the drones but intercepted none of the missiles.
“The attack tore through the logistics backbone of Ukraine’s consumer economy, destroying or damaging distribution centers run by Rozetka, Epicentr, Fozzy Group, NOVUS, Intertop and several other major retailers, part of a wider pattern of strikes on Ukraine’s civilian economy that Kyiv itself has mirrored against Russian retail with its own Operation Wildberries.”
The Duran (Duran) comments that Russia can now combine ballistic missiles, drones, cruise missiles and electronic warfare in layered attacks designed to exhaust interceptors and overwhelm defensive systems while, at the front, Russian Su-34 aircraft are delivering large numbers of precision-guided FAB glide bombs against fortified positions, reportedly dropping more than 8,000 during July.
“Missiles and drones attack the network behind the front. Glide bombs dismantle defensive positions closer to it.”
An attack on power facilities in Dnipropetrovska oblast left 126,000 households without electricity. Several towns have water problems, with one without running water for four days.
Ukraine’s Strategic Response
Ukraine says that its response to the shortage of missiles will be to focus on Russia’s missile launchers. But in the case of Iskander-M launchers, these are in constant motion and launch from 140-150 km behind the front line – beyond HIMARS range. Production of these launchers occurs deep underground. The Iskander is largely immune to sanctions because it is built almost entirely from Russian-made components and electronics. These problems could be assuaged by satellite-guided targeting over Russian territory itself, if Starlink agreed to cooperate, but Elon Musk has not granted permission for it to be used to strike inside Russia.
Were Musk to do so, by the way, it is highly likely that Russia would employ its new Russvat satellite system to interfere with Starlink signals.
Aris cites Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk as saying that the next 100 days could decide the outcome of this war, and the chances are 50/50, and that much depends on decisions taken by US President Donald Trump and by Musk over Starlink.
Ukraine’s drone and missile manufacturer, Fire Point, is already building ground-attack missiles designed to reach Moscow and which are due for first combat use in the fall. Fire Point is also the industrial lead on Freyja, a European-backed anti-ballistic missile system which is meant to combine Ukrainian-built interceptors with European sensors and infrastructure, with a target of the system’s first successful ballistic-missile interception by mid-2027. This is intended to be a much cheaper substitute for the Patriot system.
These developments will count for little if Russian missiles in the meantime are able to find their targets in Ukraine without any resistance and if Aris is right that Putin is looking to a Russian coup de grâce this winter.
And even if Ukraine does manage to get its new generation of missiles ready in time for them to be operational, reciprocity with Russian capability does not produce equilibrium. Rather, as the Duran notes today, it exposes the difference in scale and, on that score, it is clear that Russia has the decisive advantage.
And bear in mind the maxim that no system of air defense from the ground is likely to achieve a hit rate higher than .21%.
The Humanitarian Context
Even some influential sources inside Ukraine like Iuliia Mendel, Zelenskiy’s former press secretary, are calling for an end to what Mendel believes is an unwinnable war on the basis of the human suffering alone. She reports a mass exodus of Ukrainians for Europe although one must presume that this will be difficult if not impossible for anyone of military age.
There are worries that, in addition to continuing to target energy facilities (80% of Ukraine’s power generating capacity has been destroyed) Russia will turn its attention to the water system.
Ukraine has a chronic manpower shortage creating kilometer-long holes in the AFU’s defensive lines. In the Donbass, Russian soldiers are walking through the holes and then taking up position behind the defenders.
For the Duran, Alexander Christoforou today (Duran) reports on signs that Russia is preparing a major offensive toward Chernigov and even Kiev itself, as Ukraine’s front lines buckle under desperate new conscription targets and a total Black Sea port blockade. Even Ukraine’s most reliable resource, the drone, is now under threat from moves by China to cut off the drone components that fuel Ukraine’s offensive.
System Corruption
Aris has separately reported (IntelliNews) on the most recent instances of political corruption in Ukraine. Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) have charged Olha Stefanishyna, until recently Ukraine’s ambassador to the US, in a new illicit-enrichment case tied to the purchase of a Kyiv apartment, two days after she resigned her post.
Stefanishyna previously worked closely with former presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak. Stefanishyna denies wrongdoing. In another scandal (the Energoatom kickback), Tymur Mindich – once one of Zelenskiy’s closest associates – is accused of siphoning off $100mn from the utility that left Ukraine’s nuclear power sector defenseless against Russian missile attacks. Former deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernyshov was also charged with illicit enrichment and placed in pre-trial detention. A familiar pattern in these cases involves officials accused of buying property at a fraction of its market value rather than taking a straightforward bribe. Ukrainian media have suggested that Zelenskiy exploited the Stefanishyna scandal to conduct a government reshuffle that would distance him from a tainted inner circle.
Wilkerson and Diesen: Concepts for Understanding the World ((Diesen))
This conversation yesterday covered a number of conceptual aids for an understanding of the present global crisis.
What is this crisis? Well, for the past couple of years, I have articulated it mainly in terms of an increasingly desperate attempt by the US to protect itself from the growing strength of the Global South (now the Global Majority in population terms and perhaps in terms of overall wealth in purchasing power terms), seeking to restore its “unipolar moment” (achieved in the brief period between the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989-1991 and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 which precipitated China’s economic growth into the stratosphere).
The US economic counteroffensive, as it were, has taken the form, primarily, of seeking to incite the fragmentation of the Russian Federation by means of a proxy war centering on Ukraine; destabilizing Chinese trade advantages by seeking to re-assert Western primacy with the assistance of Israel over West Asian oil and commodity trade routes involving Iran; and preparing for a broader war with China that would center on the use of Taiwan as proxy, in alliance with US-coopted regimes throughout southeast Asia including, most notably Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand as well as older imperial allies in Australia and New Zealand.
From these three central nodes of the US war against multipolarity we find numerous sub-branches: these involve conflicts – as examples only – from Moldova and Transnistria, Serbia, Kazakhstan, and Georgia so far as Ukraine is concerned, or Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan so far as Iran is concerned, and conflicts over islands in the China Sea or terrorist movements in Myanmar and Pakistan so far as China is concerned.
The following notes are somewhat disjointed, I have not had time to cover more than the first half of this discussion, and they may not altogether make sense, but I find them useful and some readers may do so too:
I continue to support the above formulation, but note the interesting application by Wilkerson and Diesen of the terms “maritime” and “continental” powers to describe a long-arc movement from the triumph of maritime powers like the United Kingdom over the global order from the 1600s to the triumph of continental powers like Russia and China in the 2000’s.
Central to the strategies of the maritime powers, and the power of the US during the Cold War, were tactics of divide and rule, splitting alliances, fomenting discord, as well as technological dominance.
For the United States, like the UK before it, this has led to considerable “imperial overstretch.” Wilkerson somewhat qualifies this by noting that nobody had really expected a phenomenon such as Trump and how this might impact on narratives about “what normally happens” in the cycles of imperial rise and fall.
Equally novel, perhaps, is the form of predatory capitalism that characterizes the late imperial stage of US power. This has brought into being a supreme form of something that a few decades ago we used to discern in the Soviet Union namely, a system of “state capitalism,” which now takes on gigantic dimensions as when Exxon-Mobile becomes the principal supplier to the Pentagon (likewise the top defense contractors). This system of predatory state capitalism is now being (even further) abused and misused by – to use Wilkerson’s sophisticated, scientific term – an “idiot” who is definitely not in control of the global dynamics.
The appropriate symbol for the end of the era of maritime powers, Wilkerson suggests, would be the destruction by a country like Iran of a US aircraft carrier, entirely forseeable given the reluctance of the US to put these monster vessels anywhere close to Iranian fire power.
Continental powers of today, and they include Russia, China and Iran, are not only vast but they stretch around the world. Amongst the maritime powers there is really only one strong member, even if it is bleeding wealth each day, and that is the USA. This is currently dismantling itself from within – illustrated in the obeisance of the political system to somebody whom Wilkerson clearly considers incompetent, malignant, if not demented.
That “somebody” is leading the US in its apocalyptic struggle with the forces of multipolarity, at a time when the US has punished so many people and countries, has destroyed so many civilizations, that it has become an object of hate and ridicule. The US cannot hope to exit this with even a sliver of the “dignity” which allowed the UK to slide back into mediocrity after World War 2.
That Trump is not in jail at this point is a consequence of the feebleness and atrophy of the US political structure. US founding fathers like Adams saw this coming two hundred and fifty years ago. Countervailing measure they recommended, such as education, have failed us (or we have failed to provide real education).
US globe-spanning power is over, and the only question that remains is how we will deal with this. Wilkerson reminds us of the US population at around 340 million, a modest fraction of the 1.5 billion people of China and the 1.5 billion people of India combined.
We have to accommodate ourselves to being a much less powerful entity. When Trump stood for his second period in office he sounded as though he wanted to scale back US empire, its forever wars and 800 military bases strewn across the planet but has ended up (fecklessly) trying to extend it.
The West had expected that it could sustain a two-legged hegemony (US plus Europe) but it is now all falling apart and we don’t know how to behave. Labelling our political systems as “liberal democracies,” we go about killing people on the high seas without due process, talking of our intended use of “military terror” to destroy a civilization like Iran and in other ways making a mockery of everything we said in the past that we stood for.
“We are the worst example of a great power going down, in history, in terms of the way we are doing it, and in terms of the damage we are doing to the good – and there was some good – that we did post-World War 2” offers Wilkerson, who can see no historical parallel, even the Roman.
We had a chance at the very beginning of the unipolar moment to convert that, husband that, into multipolarity, starting with a recognition of the new Russia as one of the “poles.” But we sacrificed that amazing opportunity for money – for backing NATO as a revenue-generating machinery for the benefit of US private defense contractors (thank you Bill Clinton).
So, we killed multipolarity in its cradle and ultimately, we will see multipolarity replaced by the triumph of the continental powers.
In the second part of this interview, Wilkerson considers the 20-30% chance, as he sees it, of a civil war in the US. But I shall have to leave that for another day.