Anyone who keeps banging on about peace on any terms does not fully understand the situation. They are hoping to finish us off with a “black swan” — a фронт collapse, targeting morale, strikes on Rozetka, ATB and publishing houses. But it has always been like this — it is not a response to our strikes and not a change in tactics. In March 2022, the occupiers used aircraft and artillery to smash Rozetka’s distribution centre near Brovary, and in March 2023 they destroyed its warehouse complex in Kopyliv with a missile strike. At the same time, in March 2022 an air raid burned to the ground ATB’s largest logistics centre in Makariv, which supplied the whole north and centre of Ukraine, and in April a cruise-missile strike knocked out their hub near Odesa.
Civilian logistics and culture were hit no less hard. Nova Poshta terminals became постоянними targets — from S-300 strikes on the hub near Kharkiv in April 2022 and the deadly attack on Korotych in October 2023 to the systematic destruction of branches across the country. The culmination of this infrastructure terror was an S-300 strike in May 2024 on the Kharkiv printing house “Faktor-Druk”, where books for the publishers Vivat, KSD and Ranok were printed: seven employees were killed, and more than 50,000 books burned in the fire.
Anyone who says we should have consulted business first before targeting WB and Ozon in 2026 has the memory of a guppy fish and the same intellectual abilities. And today, when Ukrainian UAVs with the same surgical precision cut into Russia’s own logistics, the enemy is living through the very same scenario on its own skin — only on the scale of giant marketplaces and with trillion-sized holes in the balance sheets of its main banks. It is simply a game that two can play. Of course, we get hit too. The other question for the likes of MAKEUP, Comfy and the rest is this: did you really watch as we spent months hammering their warehouses while they hammered ours for years, and still kept goods worth billions stored without dispersing them?
Here is a simple analogy about peace at any price: a neighbour who is heavier and taller beats you with a metal pipe. Other neighbours throw sticks and pipes over the fence, but carefully, so as not to provoke escalation — nobody wants to find out whether the attacker’s old shotgun is loaded. You have barricaded yourself in and fight back, seriously injuring the attacker. Catching his breath and wiping away blood, the aggressor proposes: put down the pipe, give me the barricades, clear the blockage by the door and we will talk. We will not sign a treaty and we will not prevent the next war — we will talk. That is what peace on any terms looks like: “put down the pipe, I won’t do anything, honest-honest”.
“We don’t want to seize Crimea”, “a corridor from Ilovaisk, officer’s word”, “it’s just an exercise”, “we will definitely-definitely sign the grain deal” — we have thousands of examples of how Russians view negotiations and honesty.
Putin, meanwhile, continues to wage war in Alpha Centauri — “controlling Sviatohirsk and Kupiansk”. The funniest thing is that in our sector the successful actions of the Third Army Corps have been going on for a third month already, and the city is 25 km from the events — the old man is literally raving at a country of 140 million. And the corridor they were stretching from the bridgehead west of Terny, skirting Lyman, has been cut since May; enemy positions in Ivanivka have been boxed in, and those who were pulling back were fairly well pecked by UAVs and worked over by artillery.
“Forward-forward, we seep through, resupply by drones, dash through on motorbikes” played a cruel joke on the Russians, who wanted to drag an условну line of control as close as possible to built-up areas before the greenery came in, and try to catch up on the ground with what they had been reporting upwards on paper.
It turns out that even supplying units of the 20th Army across the not-very-wide Zherebets on this side of the river, when many drones are working the crossings, is not so simple. Despite strict OPSEC in the sector, it is already known that we have serious successes here — roughly 250 square kilometres have been liberated, half a dozen villages have been freed, infiltration is under way into a fish farm and there is a threat of establishing a bridgehead on the bank occupied by Russia. The 46th Brigade has also reinforced the flanks of Kostiantynivka to prevent our positions in the western districts of the city from being encircled — pilots’ positions are still there, and the enemy keeps taking hits on the flanks, preventing any advance.
Operationally, it is hard to overstate this counteroffensive — it reduces pressure on Lyman and attempts to push through the fields between Izium and Sloviansk. If there is a huge desire to take Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, it has to be done head-on, through ditches with concertina wire and minefields, under drone strikes and guided Western bombs on assault troops who have seeped into buildings. We continue to launch several hundred UAVs a night and produce close to 40 Bohdan self-propelled guns a month; sea drones are attacking Sochi, and in Novorossiysk the flagship has been hit by a Neptune missile.
But overall Russia has a strong advantage in aviation; they used more than 8,000 guided iron bombs in a month, are actively ramping up jet-powered drones, use ballistic missiles by the dozens each month and retain the initiative. Over the whole of 2025 they fired about 500 ballistic missiles at Ukraine (this statistic includes their Iskander-M mixed in with North Korean KN-23 copies). On average, that is about 40 a month. This summer the peak was 174 — North Korea and stockpiles. Such peak summer expenditure (130–170 ballistic missiles a month) simply exceeds their current production capacity. As a result, in August the intensity had already dropped to around 89 launches. They are burning through accumulated warehouse stocks for short peaks, after which they are forced to pause again to rebuild reserves.
Modern Swedish and French aircraft capable of pushing back the bomb-throwers with Meteors will not reach operational readiness any time soon; Ukrainian ballistic missiles will not become массовою tomorrow either; Germany is only just beginning to produce interceptors for Patriot, so active defence — with special forces counterattacks like near Stepnohirsk, slicing up the bridgehead near the Oskil towards Dvorichna and Zapadne, or a monotonous three-month counteroffensive near Lyman against the backdrop of enemy pressure — is all that can be expected.
How many months ago did one ginger enthusiast of ending six wars say we had no cards and Russia would take whatever it wanted? And we still control a few streets of Chasik. What happened to your face?
Russia, as I wrote, has adapted to the fuel shortage — Moscow pulled everything out of the provinces; for queues caught on video, fines and community service are handed out. Rationing, additives, imports from South Korea, India, Belarus and Kazakhstan, спирти — that is how it was always going to be. But close to 30% of refining has dropped out, grain almost does not move through the Black Sea, and through Rostov they are shipping tears. While the crisis is at its height — oil and gas revenues were down 16% compared with August last year, growth in payments under the damping mechanism amounted to 83 billion, in St Petersburg half the filling stations physically have no petrol, grain stores are overflowing and the price of grain is falling.
We continue to hold the line and counterattack under pressure that not many countries on the planet could withstand. Another wartime autumn is in full swing.
