Ukraine’s Theory of Victory: This Week in Ukraine

Victory, permissions, green beret shoots possible Russian spy, the US military industry being trite, and more!

The Russians lost nine jets in May.

1. Victory at Any Cost

In addition to using indigenously produced Neptune missiles to attack Russian oil infrastructure, this week, the Ukrainians used drones to hit a nuclear early warning radar 1,100 miles inside Russia. The Ukrainians couldn’t care less about escalation. Actually, they care a lot about escalation because this could be their theory of victory.

The West is providing Ukraine with a perverse incentive. Now that Russia is attempting to open another front in Kharkiv, the Biden administration has allowed Ukraine to use US weapons to attack inside Russia (see below). It’s setting a bad precedent. If you start losing, the West will relax its red lines. Western countries put these restrictions in place to avoid escalation, but Ukraine welcomes escalation.

Let’s look at Ukraine’s war aims. Ukraine wants its land back. It wants justice for the wrongs committed by Putin and his lackeys. At a minimum, this justice must come in the form of the end of the Putin regime (ideally, the death of Putin, his lieutenants, and a number of Russians guilty of war crimes). And they want security assurances that this will never happen again.

What does the West want? Resolution to the war. Punishment for Putin, but in a different form than Ukraine. Putin must be punished for upsetting the global order and his aggression. The West wants to assure that this Russian aggression won’t happen again in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova. And they want to show China that this aggressive behavior doesn’t pay, invading Taiwan would be a poor choice.

While the West and Ukraine's war aims do not align, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Neither wants Ukraine to lose. Both want to inflict maximum damage on Russia. Although Ukraine’s strife is existential, stability in Europe and the South China Sea is necessary for Western prosperity.

So what is the West to do? I believe the solution is to embrace escalation. Push the boundaries of Putin’s red lines. Allow the Ukrainians to destroy Russia. But, the West should have the final say in how that chaos is administered, not the Ukrainians. If this war continues along this path into the inevitable direct confrontation between the West and Russia, it should be the West’s responsibility and their prerogative. At that point, Ukraine will simply be another unwillingly participant in a conflict that the West let happen but didn’t have to will to conduct on their terms.       

Champing at the bit! Ukraine got the go-ahead to strike targets inside Russia.

2. To the MotherFatherland!

Although I wrote about it last week, it’s official this week. The US and Germany will allow their weapons to be used by Ukraine to strike targets inside Russia. The permissions come with some restrictions, mainly the limit on targets near Kharkiv and the prohibition against ATACMS missiles. Even without those long-range missiles, Kyiv will have plenty of firepower to interdict Russian assembly areas and supply lines well before the Ukrainian border. The standard GMLRS missile fired from the HIMARS has a range of 70 km. And Ukraine wasted little time wasting the orcs. On Saturday, they launched a fusillade of HIMARS rockets into Belgorod.

The interesting question is how the Patriot missile system will be used to target aircraft inside Russia. When Kyiv tried this in May of 2023, it was a surprise to the Russians and a resounding success for the Ukrainians (they downed 3 helicopters and 2 jets in one day). Subsequently, the Biden administration quickly admonished the Ukrainians, and that was the last we saw of Patriot missiles inside Russia until now.     

Is this new targeting authorization a significant escalation of the war? Of course it is. I don’t believe the Biden admin (or that of Olaf Scholz) would have acquiesced on this point unless they believed that the situation for the Ukrainians was more dire (yes, I used “dire”) than they let on, especially in the Kharkiv oblast. But, this is good for the Ukrainians beyond just enhancing their military capability. It shows a continued resolve by the West to defend Ukraine, even if it was forced by circumstances and not freely offered by the West. What is the next rung on the escalation ladder for the West? If I had to guess, it would be shooting down Russian missiles by systems located in Western countries.

Burning orcs. Ukraine hit a ferry near Krasnodar, and the ferry hit the stratosphere.

3. Amerikan Jihad?

Did a US special forces soldier just kill a Russian spy, in America? This week Stars and Stripes reported that a special operations soldier was under investigation for killing a Chechen national in North Carolina. Apparently, the Ramzanian was suspiciously taking pictures when the soldier shot him at least four times. There’s not a lot of information available, but the interesting part of the story to me is that the soldier has not been charged. That fact seems to validate the idea that this Akhmadian was up to no good.   

If this was a Russian spy, this media attention isn’t going to make China happy. They’ve been spying on America, in America, for years. The Chinese don’t need this kind of heat when they’re trying to buy up farmland next to US military bases or rebranding and renaming their firms in America to avoid scrutiny.          

Pure Baba Yaga. Boeing wishes they had come up with something like this.

4. [Video] Reinventing a More Expensive Wheel

I apologize that this week’s video is a quintessential military-industrial complex, garbage propaganda video from a company called Teledyne FLIR. It appears they’ve created a new military technology called an “FPV” drone. Truly amazing! Best of all, they’re selling it to the US Marine Corps for $94,000 each. Yes, some lucky marines will be getting a few mega-expensive drones instead of the $500 drones that the Ukrainians and the Russians are using to kill anything that moves. This graft is going to limit the Marine Corps’s options when they face the Chinese, who will be using thousands of cheap drones to kill everything that moves. See a video of a Chinese drone horde here.

You really can’t blame the greedy US military contractors. They will build whatever the military will buy. The real problem is that political and military leaders consider all drones, even these small FPV drones, a “platform” to develop, similar to tanks and planes, or even Javelin missiles. These drones are not platforms. They’re commodities. They are simply ammunition, like grenades. In fact, I can imagine the near future where every rifleman will carry a bandoleer of four small drones to throw at the enemy or at the enemy’s FPV drones coming in on them (this commodity idea also goes for AI-enabled drones, etc.). When it comes to small drones, cheap mass production is the capability.