YouTube link here.

YouTube link to excerpt of Putin interview here.

RT, 7/13/25

Western nations’ hegemonic aspirations and dismissal of Russia’s security concerns have led to the ongoing standoff between Moscow and the West, President Vladimir Putin said in an interview released on Sunday. Ideological differences are only a pretext to advance the West’s geopolitical interests, he claimed.

Putin added that he expected the collapse of the USSR to alleviate tensions between Russia and the West.

“I also thought that key disagreements [between us] were ideological in nature,” he stated. “Yet, when the Soviet Union was gone… the dismissive approach to Russia’s strategic interests persisted.”

The president went on to say that his attempts to raise Russia’s concerns with Western leaders were in vain. “The West decided… they do not need to follow the rules when it comes to Russia, which does not have the same power as the USSR.”

All of Moscow’s proposals regarding mutual security, strengthening international stability, and reaching agreements on offensive weapons and missile defense were rejected, Putin said. “It was not just negligence. It was based on a clear desire to reach some geopolitical goals.”

“It has become clear that, unless Russia positions itself as an independent sovereign nation… we will not be reckoned with,” he added.

The Russian president has accused Western nations of betraying Russia and not fulfilling their promises. Last month, he said Moscow was “blatantly lied to” about NATO expansion for decades as the US-led military bloc approached Russia’s borders.

“Everything was good as long as it was against Russia,” he said at the time, adding that Western nations have supported separatism and even terrorism directed against the country.

Moscow has listed Kiev’s NATO ambitions and Western military assistance to Ukraine key reasons behind the Ukraine conflict. Prior to the escalation in early 2022, Russia sought to address its security concerns by seeking guarantees from US and NATO, as well as non-aligned status for Ukraine, which were rejected by the West.

By Simplicius, Substack, 7/11/25

The topic of casualties is one we periodically revisit when necessary. Now is such a time, as Marco Rubio has made the absurd claim—coordinated with MSM outlets—that the Russian Army has suffered a whopping 100,000 deaths just since January of this year alone; purely deaths, not even total casualties:

This was immediately backed up by new articles, like the following from the Economist, which likewise claims Russia is experiencing its deadliest year on the front yet, with 30,000+ deaths just in the past couple months alone:

The above article is a particularly egregious example. Just take a look at their methodology, or lack thereof. This small extract constitutes the entirety of their ‘scientific’ premise for Russian losses:

There is no official tally of losses on either side. But our daily war tracker offers some clues. Our satellite data and shifts to areas of control suggest when the fighting is intensifying. This lines up well with more than 200 credible estimates of casualties from Western governments and independent researchers. By combining this data we can, for the first time, provide a credible daily death toll—or an estimate of estimates.

In short, they claim their satellite data alerts them to where fighting happens to ‘intensify’, and from that they—by some incredible leap of logic—infer that Russian forces are experiencing massive losses. The baffling part is that this facile methodology should apply to the AFU in parallel as well, yet when it comes to Ukraine’s losses, the Economist’s staff are without even a hint of curiosity:

Read that again: satellite data showing “intense fighting” inherently points to Russian losses merely on the assumption that any fighting, as a general rule, results in Russian but not Ukrainian losses. This is an astoundingly juvenile, biased, and to be frank, fraudulent, level of analysis.

Recall this previous revelation, which tells us everything about the West’s info-hygiene:

These publications claim to have such ‘sensitive’ attunements to the battlefield fluctuations as to give exact Russian figures, but when it comes to Ukraine, they are suddenly lacking data.

The fact is, there’s a reason why MediaZona very abruptly changed up their methodology to include “projected” deaths rather than real counted ones, as done previously—because contrary to this coordinated propaganda campaign, Russian losses have actually been at the lowest in a long time. This is precisely the reason such an orchestrated campaign was necessary: Ukraine is badly losing, and the only remaining aspect of the war the propagandists could feasibly utilize to try and spin the narrative are the casualty figures, because they are typically the most ‘subjective’ and ambiguous in nature—which makes them perfect fodder for devious manipulation.

Presently, MediaZona has the total Russian death toll at ~117k as of early July:

If you highlight only January 1st to present, you get 9,849 confirmed deaths:

You can do this yourself at the official site to confirm.

That means through the first six months of this year, they have registered a mere 9,849 Russian deaths, which amounts to 1,641 per month. Western and Ukrainian publications, on the other hand, claim Russia is suffering that many deaths per day. The discrepancy shows an unprecedented detachment from reality.

We do know MediaZona has a ‘lag’ because it takes time to confirm most recent deaths, and so the number will likely rise, but probably not by an inordinate amount. There is no evidence whatsoever that Russia is taking anywhere near the kinds of losses the West claims. In fact, someone made a good point: since it is Ukraine that purports that 70-90% of their kills on Russian soldiers come by way of drones, they should be able to show all these vast amounts of losses via drone camera recordings; yet there is nothing—and we know the AFU loves nothing more than showing off its ‘successes’.

In an article two months ago, I had highlighted the timeline of the Russian Army’s growth from Ukraine’s own sources. It went as follows:

• 2023: Bloomberg announces Russian troop count at 420,000.
• 2024: Head of Ukraine’s military intelligence tells Economist the number had swelled to 514,000.
• Early 2025: It was 600,000.

And what do we have now, at the midpoint of 2025? Straight from Zelensky’s own mouth:

So, to reiterate and simplify:

400k troops in 2023, 500k in 2024, 600k in early 2025, and already 700k in mid-2025.

This is all from Ukrainian sources, the originals of which you can find in my previous article here.

How can Russia possibly be suffering a claimed 100,000 dead in just six months—as per Rubio—when it is literally gaining over 100,000 per year?

In order for Russia to suffer 100k deaths in six months—annualized to 200k per year—and still gain 100k+ men per year, Russian recruitment would have to be staggering, given the contract churn we outlined previously. Hard to imagine people willingly signing up under the dark cloud of such losses, while in Ukraine—suffering “far fewer casualties”—people have to be forcibly kidnapped from the streets and herded into vans like cattle.

Strange how it’s Ukrainian cemeteries that continue to infamously fill up, rather than Russian ones, and how the past year’s ratio of dead body exchanges has jumped to such an astronomical disparity as to be off the charts:

Any honest journalist would pucker at such incongruities in the data—but alas, that species is about as common as a three-legged emu.

As a recent glimpse into Russian losses during active assaults, here is one honest post from Russian military sources about a settlement that was captured. They write that they suffered four “200s” during the operation:

There are many such assaults per day, so you can multiply the four by the daily amount to get a reasonable count—but it certainly isn’t hundreds, much less thousands.

—

Neue Zürcher Zeitung has a new piece which spells out that Ukraine only has two options to prevent collapse:

Now the Kremlin is going all out.

The Russian operational plan aims to tear apart the Ukrainian ground forces. The general staff in Kiev still has two options to prevent a breakthrough.

They begin by aptly noting that Putin spelled out the strategy himself at a recent forum:

“They already have too few personnel,” Putin went on to analyze, “and they are withdrawing their forces there, which are already lacking in the decisive theaters of armed conflict.” Putin is making little effort to conceal his operational intentions: the Russian General Staff wants to tear the Ukrainian army apart – and then attempt a breakthrough at a suitable point.

Then they reveal the two options Ukraine faces, which I’ll annotate:

Sirski, on the other hand, still has two basic options for saving Ukraine from a military defeat in the current situation:

1.Delay: The aim is to lose as little ground as possible during the Russian summer offensive and to avoid encirclement of larger troop units. In the fall, the front could then be consolidated and a starting point for negotiations created. At present, Kiev appears to be pursuing this course – in the hope that the USA will resume its military aid.

Here, they admit that Ukraine’s best chance is merely to stall until “negotiations” can be effected; but we know Russia has zero incentive for such a thing, unless you kowtow to the fake figures of Russian losses and believe Russia is “on its last leg”, as per Strelkov and the rest of the doomer clan.

Their second option is to withdraw to the new defensive line reportedly being constructed a few dozen kilometers behind the current LOC:

2. operational withdrawal: The Ukrainian ground forces could gradually withdraw from the front and take up new positions protected by natural and artificial obstacles. The aim is to prevent a capitulation and to maintain the army to protect sovereignty even in the event of an unfavorable outcome to the negotiations. One indication that this option is being examined is the construction of a Ukrainian fortification line 20 kilometers behind the front from the Kharkiv area to Zaporizhia in the southwest of Ukraine.

There are not enough forces for a surprise anywhere along the front, and the pinpricks in the depths of the Russian area will hardly have any effect except in the information area. The Ukrainians lack fighter aircraft such as the F-35 to gain at least partial air superiority. In addition, ammunition for the Himars missile artillery, the Taurus guided missiles, supplies for air defense – the list is well known in Western capitals.

Europe has gone on summer vacation and Trump is at least considering sending defensive weapons to Ukraine again. But the risk of a Russian breakthrough is growing. If a gap opens up somewhere, the occupying forces can suddenly maneuver and use the bridgeheads at Sumi and Kharkiv for large-scale operations. Sirski then gradually ran out of options.

However, the decision to switch from delay to operational withdrawal in good time does not lie with the head of the army, but with President Volodimir Zelensky in Kiev and his dilemma: between military necessity and the political principle of hoping that the Western allies will stand by their big words after all. Meanwhile, the Kremlin is going all out – politically and militarily.

But what would that do? Just like the inherent nonsensical nature of the first option, the second would hardly give Russia pause. We know Ukraine relies on PR to maintain continuity and casualty figures are one facet of this which can be deftly hidden, while territorial changes cannot. This means the organ grinder-in-chief Zelensky would prefer to quietly keep composting thousands of his men while feigning ‘strong resistance’ and pretending that Russia is ‘making no gains’. If a sudden large-scale breakthrough swallowed up a chunk of Ukrainian territory, Western support would likely collapse over night as Ukraine would be deemed a dead case.

—

Lastly, in anticipation of Trump’s supposed “big announcement” on Monday, several MSM publications are reporting that Trump is preparing to launch an unprecedented global oil embargo against Russia:

It describes a fancifully unrealistic plan to shackle any country in the world that buys oil or uranium from Russia with a massive 500% tariff. The chances of this passing are laughable, as it would destroy the economies of the US and its allies, rather than harming Russia.

The squabbles over ‘control’ discussed last time rear their head again:

Senators have said they would be willing to grant Trump the power to waive the tariff for up to 180 days, provided there was congressional oversight. The White House is, however, insisting that Congress should have no power to intervene if the president decided to end the sanctions.

Maximilian Hess, a fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute, predicted Trump would baulk at the 500 per cent tariff in the bill, which would be equivalent to a global embargo on Russian oil.

Hess elaborates:

“As it’s written, in my view it’s just too strong to ever be used, unless Trump gets out there and says, ‘We need to face the risk that Russia poses to Europe and the globe and we have to accept oil prices of closer to $100 or maybe even higher’,” he said. “Which I just cannot see Trump doing.”

The reason Trump wants such control is because he’s merely using the threat of these laughable ‘sanctions’ to try and frighten Putin into concessions, and wants the ability to immediately pull out, TACO-style, as soon as it backfires. The neocon segment of Congress—Graham, Blumenthal, and co.—want to deviously ‘bake in’ the sanctions by having power over them, so that Trump is forced into a major confrontation with Russia; obviously, the freewheeling deep state moles in Congress cannot allow a US-Russian rapprochement and need to create fissures at all costs.

It is also why they recently ‘leaked’ the audio of his threats to bomb Moscow at an opportune time: they’re doing everything in their power to stir the pot and fan the flames of the narrative of confrontation to browbeat Trump into escalation against Moscow.

The big question is, does Trump have the backbone to stay the course?

—

Lastly:

Ukraine reports Russia has accumulated a record number of missiles—2,000 total:

Even as we speak, another major strike on Ukraine reportedly featuring hundreds of drones and a few dozen missiles is ongoing—all unopposed, as usual:

How are those Patriots coming along?

---

Russia Matters, 7/14/25

1. While hosting NATO’s SG Mark Rutte on July 14, President Donald Trump unveiled a deal with this alliance that would send weapons to Ukraine within days while also threating Russia with stiff penalties in his renewed effort to end hostilities between Russia and Ukraine. “We’ve made a deal today where we are going to be sending them [Ukraine] weapons and they [NATO countries] [are] going to be paying for them,” Trump was quoted by Wall Street Journal as saying in Rutte’s presence. During the same event the U.S. president also threatened Russia with “secondary tariffs” unless a deal to end the hostilities in Ukraine is reached by early September. “We’re going to be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days, tariffs at about 100%, you’d call them secondary tariffs,” Trump was quoted by Financial Times as saying. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick later said Trump could choose to impose either tariffs or sanctions on countries that do business with Russia, according to Wall Street Journal. Last week saw Trump repeatedly state his unhappiness with Putin’s unwillingness to agree to an unconditional end of hostilities in Ukraine, promising a “major statement” on Russia on July 14. Thus, his July 14 threats came as no surprise, but they were also met with some skepticism. “It is unclear if… Putin will take Trump’s threat seriously,” Alexander Ward and his co-authors wrote in Wall Street Journal on July 14.“For a frequent flip-flopper like him [Trump], can anyone ever tell which flip or flop is for real?” Susan Glasser wondered in the New Yorker. “The president is a late and very reluctant convert to the approach of trying to confront and isolate Mr. Putin” and the approach he is taking “seems designed to keep him at least one arm’s length away from the conflict,” David Sanger and Maggie Haberman explained in New York Times. That Trump is “coming around on Ukraine” represents a decision that “isn’t isolationist or internationalist but realistic,” according to Peggy Noonan.
2. “Russia’s factories have begun churning out vast quantities of attack drones over the past year, producing a deadly fleet that is now taking to Ukrainian skies in record numbers almost daily,” Matthew Luxmoore and Jane Lytvynenko reported in a July 10 article for Wall Street Journal. Writing for the same newspaper Jillian Kay Melchior also noted the surge in Russian drone production, as did Andrew Kramer of The New York Times. “As Russia’s defense industry continues to ramp up, military analysts expect Russia to routinely launch more than 1,000 drones per volley by autumn,” Kramer warned. These articles indicate that the mainstream U.S. media outlets are catching up with the recent changes in correlation of drone production in Ukraine and Russia in the latter’s favor. In the first and second year of Russia’s full-fledged invasion into Ukraine, such outlets as Wall Street Journal were reporting how use of drones by Ukraine helped to turn the tide in Kyiv’s favor while New York Times reported how “Ukraine has stayed ahead in the drones arm race.” In the third year of the war Forbes declared that “For the first time, Ukraine is launching more long-range drone attacks than Russia.” The coverage of the drone race began to change, however, in 2025. For instance, in January of this year, ECFR’s Ulrike Franke published an article on the web site of this think-tank that estimated that Russia was matching Ukraine’s pace of drone production. Five months later, the press was also noticing this change. For instance, The Times of London’s Anthony Loyd reported from Donbas: “Russia has taken the lead in the drone race, outproducing Kyiv in the manufacture and use of medium-range FPV drones and fiber optic variants that have changed the shape of the entire 1,200 km front line.” Loyd’s May 2025 article was echoed by Politico’s Veronika Melkozerova, who reported in June 2025, citing Zelensky himself, that “Ukraine produces about 100 long-range drones a day, while Russia has managed to scale up production to 300 a day and is aiming for 500.” Russian drone producers managed to boost long-range drone production from 15,000 in 2024 to more than 30,000 this year, as well as up to 2 million small tactical drones, according to Melkozerova.
3. Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decision to nominate first deputy prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko as his next PM is a victory for his powerful chief of staff Andriy Yermak for whom there appears to be little love lost in Washington. “Svyrydenko is considered a close ally” of Yermak, according to July 14 article in Financial Times. Apart from the new prime minister, changes are expected at education, health, culture, social policy and possibly finance, according to the Economist. The Economist reported on July 6 that a cabinet reshuffle is “imminent” and that is being driven by Yermak whose lecturing approach to diplomacy Americans despair at. While being allied with Yermak, Svyrydenko is also seen as having “strong ties with Donald Trump’s team after leading the minerals talks alongside U.S. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent,” according to Financial Times.

by David Betz and Michael Rainsborough, The Daily Sceptic, 6/15/25

David Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London. Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security.

For all the breathless commentary, one awkward truth has loitered beneath the surface of the Russia-Ukraine war, which is that most people beyond the immediate theatre of conflict don’t have any clear sense of what’s happening on the ground. The fog of war has been thickened not only by competing narratives along with fragmentary info-snacking YouTube clips of drone strikes, but by something more persistent — Western wishful thinking.

For nearly three years, a chorus of commentary penned by pundits whose proximity to the war — geographically or intellectually — is open to question have served up a diet long on optimism but short on evidence. A rotating cast of Atlanticists from Anne Applebaum to Timothy Snyder, along with just about every op-ed in the Daily Telegraph, have reliably assured readers that Ukrainian victory is in sight, or that Putin’s regime has been humiliated or teeters on the edge of collapse. These forecasts, rarely tethered to battlefield realities, have functioned less as analysis and more as morale management — designed to reassure rather than inform.

This faith-based commentary sits uneasily alongside the equally confident illusions that once animated post-Cold War Western military thinking. Western politicians and strategists imagined war in the digital age would be light, precise and swift — waged by lean expeditionary forces wielding smart weapons and networked command systems. The result, they hoped, would be relatively bloodless victories achieved from a polite distance, preferably before lunchtime.

Instead, they got Bakhmut.

As this short essay will seek to disclose, the war in Ukraine has shattered a generation of digital-age delusions. It has exposed the brittle realities beneath Western military thinking and underscored the extent to which the strategic balance has shifted—less due to enemy cunning than to Western self-delusion.

The End of History did not arrive. The Return of Artillery did.

The Digital Mirage

In short, digitalisation — once regarded as the West’s ultimate strategic advantage — has failed to deliver the political returns its proponents anticipated. The concept was deceptively simple: combine precision weaponry with real-time data and operational mobility to achieve swift, efficient and low-cost victories. In the words of one tract in the mid-1990s, the aim is to apply massive shock with minimal force, such that the enemy is stunned into compliance.

Yet war, as the Prussian philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz long ago observed, remains a clash of wills — reciprocal, unpredictable and fundamentally political. It is not a frictionless exercise in systems management, nor a technological showcase. It is organised violence pursued for political ends. Always messy and brutal. And always resistant to tidy solutions.

What Western strategists often overlooked was a basic fact: adversaries adapt. And many of them have invested not in apps or digital platforms, but in mass, resilience and industrial depth.

The assumption that digital superiority would render conventional war obsolete, where the future of war belongs not to mass armies and tanks, but to decentralised networks and precision strikes’, has not merely proven false — it has been inverted. Russia and other actors have appropriated these same tools, stripped them of their idealistic framing and employed them pragmatically — effectively, economically and at scale.

The West, by contrast, became increasingly enamoured with the imagined virtues of the digital society: a realm where information moves at light speed and liberal pieties hitch a ride on the algorithm. Nowhere was this more evident than in the enthusiasm for cyberwarfare — an area long hyped, but whose strategic effects have often fallen short. Figures such as then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson notably proclaimed that such high tech was transforming the nature of conflict.

The practical outcome of actual warfare, however, has not been the digitalisation or dematerialisation of war, but rather its real-time mediation — live streamed, framed and packaged for distant audiences. In a hyper-connected world, conflict is increasingly staged for global spectatorship. But if the medium has changed, the consequences have not: war remains bloody, destructive and — for all the intrusion of high-tech drones and AI onto the battlefield — still deeply human. “Technology may change how we kill, but not why we kill or what killing does to us.”

The Return of Walls: Fortresses in the Age of Fibre Optics

We should recall the broader intellectual mirage in which Western military thinking once basked—a time of post-Cold War euphoria when history had allegedly ended and borders were passé. Remember when Francis Fukuyama serenely informed us that ideological conflict was over? When Zygmunt Bauman waxed lyrical about ‘liquid modernity’, Michael Mandelbaum speculated about the obsolescence of major wars and Kenichi Ohmae proclaimed the borderless world, flattened by markets and lubricated by technology?

Yes, well: these ideas have not aged like fine wine.

Far from dismantling fences and ushering in a frictionless utopia, the digital age has made fortification fashionable again. Border walls, missile shields and fortified strongholds are proliferating. Bunkers are booming — economically, if not always structurally.

And on the battlefield — from Gaza to Donbas — it isn’t data packets, viral hashtags, networks or narratives that are seizing territory. It’s bulldozers, concrete and men in trenches or ankle-deep artillery shell casings.

The war of the future, we were told, would be weightless, networked, almost antiseptic. While it is true that drone warfare has made a dramatic appearance as highly advanced form of surveillance and precision guided artillery, these new technologies have serviced very traditional modes of warfare. Instead of some new conception of war in the digital age, what we got instead was a flashback: steel, trenches and the long, grinding calculus of attrition.

War hasn’t dematerialised. It has reindustrialised — only now with high-definition targeting and better graphic design.

Ukraine: A Cautionary Tale in Three Acts and No Exit Plan

The Ukraine conflict was supposed to be a masterclass in Western strategic superiority — a proxy war in which Ukraine would draw upon NATO’s high-end technology, soft power, economic leverage and moral confidence to reduce Russia’s ambitions to rubble. Instead, it’s begun to resemble a doomed product launch — overpromised, underdelivered and still limping along on the exhaust fumes of its own marketing, too costly to cancel outright and too awkward to acknowledge as a failure.

Let’s count the miscalculations:

• Soft Power: Meant to win hearts and minds. But hearts, as it turns out, aren’t for sale — and minds are busy doomscrolling through drone footage on TikTok, or more often tuning out altogether. Influence, it seems, doesn’t flow so easily from Pride-flag waving embassies and finger-wagging hashtags.
• Economic Warfare: The so-called ‘sanctions from hell’ were supposed to crush the Russian economy in record time. Instead, Russia’s GDP has outpaced much of the Eurozone, while Germany’s once-vaunted industrial base has gone into self-induced hibernation — collateral damage in a moral crusade that forgot to run the numbers.
• Strategic Credibility: Once burnished by Cold War mystique, NATO’s reputation now wobbles somewhere between ceremonial relic and crisis PR firm. The alliance increasingly resembles a séance for departed strategic purpose — hands clasped around the table, muttering slogans, hoping the ghost of 1991 will manifest and tell them what to do. It lurches between virtue-signalling and threat inflation, unsure whether it’s meant to deter adversaries or simply reassure itself that it still matters.

The unspoken truth in all this is bleak but not especially complicated: strategically, Ukraine has already lost. So too — albeit less dramatically and more expensively — has Europe. And for anyone paying attention, this wasn’t an unpredictable ending. It was the opening scene, played out exactly as the script always hinted it would. Viewed alongside the other glittering triumphs of Western statecraft — Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria — it raises the uncomfortable question: why does strategic failure keep happening and who keeps hiring these people? At this point, a moderately alert housecat could have produced a more coherent grand strategy — if only by knocking the relevant documents off the table before they reached Cabinet.

BRICS and Mortar: Realignments in a Shattered Order

One of the most egregious strategic miscalculations — and one that yet again should have been foreseen by anyone not still mainlining end-of-history optimism — was the West’s attempt to isolate Russia. In practice, this bold stand for ‘rules-based order’ only served to hasten the very multipolarity it once dismissed as a paranoid fantasy. China and Russia are now closer than at any point since the Brezhnev era. BRICS, once dismissed as a loose acronym in search of a purpose, is gaining unexpected traction — with countries like Turkey and Indonesia now eyeing membership as a potentially better seat at the global table. De-dollarisation, once confined to fringe economists and survivalist blogs, is edging into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, the West’s effort to turn the ruble into rubble instead left it suspiciously intact — at times more stable than a few G7 currencies. Meanwhile, the grand strategy to ‘cancel’ Russia economically has largely backfired, inflicting more damage on Western industry than even the most vodka-marinated of Kremlin plotters might have dared to dream. German manufacturing sends its regards — from behind a padlocked factory gate.

Geopolitically, the unintended consequence is a slowly forming Eurasian compact: one increasingly convinced that the West — at least in its EU-NATO incarnation — is decadent, distracted and no longer capable of setting the global agenda. It’s not quite the overturning of the world order, but it’s one where states feel they have greater options than merely to choose between Western modernity and pariahdom. One thing is for certain, it is not the world order that Washington or Brussels believe they are still running.

Mass Isn’t Dead. It Just Moved East

For years, Western military doctrine enshrined speed, agility and precision as the hallmarks of modern war. Mass, by contrast, was treated as a dusty artefact — something best left in museums next to the flintlock and the bayonet. According to one set of commentators: “Mass is no longer a requirement for victory. Information superiority and speed of command will displace attritional warfare.” Large-scale mobilisation, in other words, was seen as a clunky relic of industrial wars: too slow, too costly, and too reminiscent of the bad old days when wars actually lasted longer than a news cycle.

Then came Ukraine. And Gaza. And with them, the blunt truth reasserted itself: mass matters. Industrial capacity — measured not in white papers but in shells, drones and replacement parts — still wins wars.

The hard numbers from Ukraine are telling:

• Russia is producing artillery shells at a ratio of roughly 3:1 over the combined output of the West.
• It manufactures more armoured vehicles, drones and missiles than all of NATO put together.
• It’s done all this without running up colossal debts or collapsing its domestic economy — relying instead on retrofitted Soviet factories and a grimly effective wartime mobilisation.

By contrast, the West struggles to supply even its own forces — let alone those of its Ukrainian proxy. The US production rate of SM-3 interceptor missiles, for example, is a grand total of 12 per year. That’s not a misprint. It’s barely enough to protect a single aircraft carrier, let alone a continent.

What we’re witnessing is not just a clash between Russia and Ukraine. It’s a collision between two theories of war: the Western model of information-age finesse, and the industrial-age brute force its strategists once declared obsolete. The former looks increasingly like a TED Talk. The latter, like it’s winning.

Manoeuvre vs Attrition: When Theory Meets Mud

Western military theory has long exalted manoeuvre warfare — rapid, fluid operations designed to outpace the enemy, strike weak points and collapse morale before a proper defence can even form. It’s a vision of war as ballet: swift and elegant, and preferably done by last orders at the wine bar. Attrition, by contrast, is treated as a kind of doctrinal embarrassment — too crude, too slow, too First World War.

But the battlefield, tells a different story.

Ukraine’s much-vaunted counter-offensives have bogged down in kilometre-deep minefields and trench networks that look like they were lifted from 1916. Russia’s static defences — dismissed early on as archaic — have proven not only resilient but maddeningly effective. Gaza, too, offers little comfort to the manoeuvrists: less lightning war, more bloodied crawl.

The promised revolution in precision warfare — guided missiles, smart bombs and real-time targeting — hasn’t rewritten the rules so much as underlined the old ones. ‘Smart’ weapons may hit what they aim at, but they don’t change the fact that the other side is still dug in, still shooting back, and often still there after the smoke clears.

What has emerged isn’t the war of tomorrow, but the war we thought we had left behind — less networked lethality and more Verdun with drones. And despite the glossy brochures, war, it turns out, still favours the side that can take a punch, not just throw one.

Operational Tempo: Fast, Dumb and Going Nowhere

Speed, we were assured, kills the enemy. Victory belongs to the swift. Wars must be fought fast, finished faster and ideally wrapped up in time for the next election cycle. The longer they drag on, the more politically toxic and strategically incoherent they become. But once again, theory has collided with reality — and reality, as usual, has no interest in being tidy, televised or tactically convenient.

From Iraq to Afghanistan to Ukraine, the West’s ‘fast’ wars have displayed an unfortunate tendency to turn into drawn-out strategic purgatories. Initial momentum gives way to mission creep, political drift and tactical improvisation dressed up as doctrine. Tempo without purpose quickly devolves into noise. Being able to react faster doesn’t help much if you have no idea what you’re reacting to — or why.

What we’re left with is movement masquerading as progress. Digital velocity, for all its dashboards and situational awareness apps, is no match for old-fashioned things like strategic patience, industrial resilience or political staying power. The West has become excellent at starting wars quickly. It has rather less to show when it comes to finishing them.

Information Wars and the Hollow Victory

Few phrases have received more adoration in recent years than ‘information war’: the idea of gaining advantage by protecting access to information flows, while destroying and disrupting those of the adversary. Think tanks, officials and consultants alike have extolled the virtues of strategic communications, narrative shaping and viral content as if policy papers and social media posting could substitute for tanks.

Ukraine, by almost every Western measure, has won the information war hands-down: cinematic footage, clever memes and Zelensky’s branded defiance — all flawlessly packaged for global consumption. Most recently, this spectacle was crowned in early June by the daring drone strike against Russia’s strategic bomber fleet deep inside its own territory.

Launched from modified civilian lorry containers, the operation thrilled the op-ed writers but carried rather less charm for anyone concerned with nuclear stability, risking as it does, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and practically inviting Russian reprisals against Western targets. One can only hope Moscow — or any other future adversary — isn’t tempted to return the favour in kind. After all, there is a certain irony in Western commentators applauding such actions as bold and justified while assuming, quite serenely, that their own military bases will be sacrosanct.

But the point is though, that none of this moves the needle in Ukraine’s favour. It is Russia that occupies territory, fires more shells and steadily dictates the tempo of the war.

The paradox is hard to ignore: while Western commentators celebrated Kyiv’s narrative dominance and drone-delivered showmanship, Moscow focused on artillery. One side perfected the aesthetics of resistance; the other brought bulldozers and blasting tactics. It turns out that shaping perceptions doesn’t stop projectiles — and that going viral is no defence against shrapnel.

Winning the narrative, in other words, is not the same as winning the war. It may not even be relevant once the shells start falling.

The West’s Strategic Malaise: ‘Something Must Be Doneism’

Since the Cold War, Western wars have rarely been existential. They’ve been gestures — emotional reactions to tragedy, terrorism or televised horror. The political logic has been consistent, if not exactly strategic: be seen to act. It’s foreign policy as theatre — enough engagement to look principled, but not enough to get seriously hurt or to seriously imperil the national homeland.

The results speak for themselves. Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq — all launched with moral fanfare and media buzz, all ending in fatigue, withdrawal or the polite burying of lessons left unlearned.

Ukraine, however, is different. The stakes are higher. The adversary is stronger. And yet the habits remain the same. The West’s response has been a familiar mix: morally emphatic, logistically improvisational and industrially unsustainable. It’s as if NATO is attempting to wage a 20th-century land war on 21st-century terms — with 1990s stockpiles and attention spans measured in quarterly press briefings rather than prolonged campaigns.

In truth, many of these interventions seem designed less for the battlefield than for the curated stage of liberal respectability — crafted to win plaudits in opinion pages, panel discussions and policy forums where moral posturing always trumps material constraint. They are calibrated for the approval of the right-thinking, not the requirements of strategic success. Here, victory is optional, while virtue-signalling is mandatory.

Conclusion: Welcome to the Post-Post-Cold War

We were told the digital age would flatten borders, replace firepower with fibre optics and swap armies for narratives. Instead, we got trenches, mass mobilisation and a resurgent Eurasian bloc. It’s not quite the holographic future imagined by the PowerPoint prophets.

The West’s military models aren’t failing for lack of virtue, but because they’re built on expired assumptions. The future didn’t arrive on schedule — and the past, rather rudely, refused to stay buried.

What lessons emerge?

1. Industrial capacity matters: You can’t tweet your way to artillery shells.
2. Mass still wins wars: Precision is nice, but only if you have a lot of it.
3. Soft power is not eternal: A civilisation unsure of itself can’t expect others to follow its lead.
4. Digital illusions are just that: Cyberspace didn’t transcend the battlefield; it just added lag, disinformation and another excuse for inaction.

In the end, strategic success depends not on who reacts fastest or trends hardest, but on the dull, unglamorous verities that underlies modern war: production, patience and purpose.

And right now, those are in short supply west of the Dnieper.