Ukraine has lost its war with Russia and now is only trying to inflict enough damage on Russia that the Russians will come to the negotiating table and give up its demands. From Big Serge at bigserge.substack.com:
Russo-Ukrainian War: Autumn 2025
The Russo-Ukrainian War seems to have been engineered in a laboratory to frustrate people with repetition and analytic paralysis. Headlines appear to be circulating on a choreographed loop, all the way down to the place names. Kaja Kallas at the European Commission recently announced, without a hint of irony, that Europe’s new sanctions package – the 19th one – is the toughest yet. Ukraine’s supporters are insisting that Tomahawk missiles are the weapons system that will finally change the game and break the war decisively in Kiev’s favor – reiterating the same grandiose claims that they made about GLMRS, and Leopards, and Abrams, and F-16s, and Storm Shadows, and ATACMs, and virtually every other piece of military hardware in NATO’s inventories. On the ground, Russia is attacking settlements named Pokrovsk and Pokrovs’ke; it recently captured Toretsk and Tors’ke and is now attacking Torets’ke. The more things change, the more things stay the same.
The analytic frameworks applied to the war have also changed relatively little, buried and obfuscated by the nebulous concept of attrition. On the Ukrainian side, there is continued insistence that Russia is suffering exorbitant losses and straining under the pressure of Ukrainian deep strikes, while Ukrainian setbacks are blamed in large part on the failure of the United States to expand its largesse and give Ukraine everything it needs. Many pro-Russian lines of thinking mirror this and suppose that the AFU is on the verge of disintegration, while the Kremlin is accused of failing to “take the gloves off”, particularly in regards to the Ukrainian energy grid, Dnieper bridges, and dams.
The result is a very strange sort of war. This is an extraordinarily high-intensity ground war. Both armies remain in the field, holding hundreds of miles of continuous front after years of bloody fighting. Both armies are (depending on who you ask) taking unsustainable casualties which ought to lead to collapse soon, and yet Moscow, Keiv, and Washington are all (again, depending on who you ask) guilty of failing to take the war seriously enough. All of this is maddeningly repetitive, and one could be forgiven for tuning out entirely. Even the diplomatic tango between Trump, Zelensky, and Putin, after delivering a few entertaining moments, failed to really move the needle in any discernable direction.
