Ukraine operates with a completely different mindset.

One that’s much more about preservation and smart tactical decisions designed to keep people alive, minimize losses, and catches enemy offguard.

Knowing that it has a much smaller army, Ukraine can’t afford to just throw lives away.

Its commanders don’t want to treat their troops like disposable pieces of meat either.

Unlike Russia, they’re not obsessed with measuring frontline losses and gains or stressing about tiny slivers of insignificant land.

They care much more about keeping their own casualties to a minimum while maximizing the enemy’s losses.

That’s why tactics like bait and bleed are so effective.

Everything about this strategy is designed to protect Ukrainian soldiers.

For example, when Ukraine launches its counterattacks on Russian assault teams, they don’t rely on men on the ground armed with rifles and told to storm the enemy’s position.

Instead, they use the likes of artillery shells, drone strikes, and loitering munitions or weapons that can deal extensive deadly damage without putting troops lives at risk.

When the Ukrainians teams retreat too, they instinctively disperse and take up various strategic positions in the surrounding landscape.

That way, even if Russia launches its own follow-up attacks, it will find it difficult to take out the entire Ukrainian team with more wasted shells, shots, and resources.

Ukrainian commanders also use their home turf advantage to maximum effect, making the most of the local terrain to place their people in the most strategic defensive locations where they have the lowest risk of being flanked and eliminated.

They also rely on persistent drone coverage to scan the battlefield and gather data to inform every decision they make.

Everything is smart, strategic, planned, and timed to perfection, backed by cold, hard data, and designed to shift the odds in Ukraine’s favor as deeply and heavily as possible.

In short, the entire bait and bleed strategy is about flipping the script, canceling out Russia’s manpower advantage, and preserving Ukraine’s defensive lines without needless sacrifice.

Of course, it’s not a perfect plan.

It does have its risks.

For example, if Ukraine waits too long to pull the trigger on its traps, Russia can move its own drone crews and artillery units into key locations to support the assault teams as they take over Ukrainian territory.

If that happens, Ukraine’s own drone coverage may be reduced.

And with their eyes in the skies blinded, they won’t have the intel they need to orchestrate their attacks.

That’s why a plan like this demands flawless execution and efficiency.

Ukraine cannot afford to dwarle or dally.

Every part of the plan, from the tactical retreat to the counterattack, must be swift and without delay.

As long as its teams are able to get into position and strike back at the right times, they won’t even give the Russians a chance to get their drone crews in position.

That allows them to maintain control of their trap locations and the surrounding kill zones in order to reuse them in the future.

The end result of this strategy is what we’ve seen over and over again throughout the war so far.

Every now and then, Russian forces seem to break through the Ukrainian defensive lines.

It might look as though they’ve gained control of an important patch of land or establish a foothold for further attacks deeper into their enemy’s territory.

The Russian side celebrates with nationalist military bloggers talking about how a complete crushing victory just moved one step closer.

While Russia’s president Vladimir Putin receives bias reports from his lackey commanders about important gains in key regions.

Then days or even hours later, reports emerge that Ukraine has managed to reclaim its lost positions, pushing back and regaining territories that seem to be in loss for good.

We’ve seen this in Daetsk, in Luhansk, in Sumi, Kkefe, and elsewhere.

Over and over, Moscow seems to have gained some sort of upper hand before Keefe quickly restores the status quo.

The big difference, however, is that Russia is the one losing way more people and resources than Ukraine in each of these exchanges.

And it’s not even getting any benefit out of the equation since so much of the land it gains just gets taken back soon after over time.

There’s no doubt that this is having a horrific impact on the Russian war machine.

First, it’s chewing through troops in extraordinary numbers.

Every time a Russian assault squad gets routed, that’s dozens of soldiers killed or wounded, many of whom will not be able to fight again.

And in the past, Russia may have been able to find enough recruits to compensate for those losses.

But that’s starting to become a much more challenging prospect these days.

Many of the people who are actually willing to go and fight in Ukraine have already volunteered or been incentivized enough to go there.

Those left behind are increasingly reluctant to sign up, no matter how much money recruiters dangle in front of them.

Second, exchanges like these are undoubtedly denting Russia’s morale.

Every time an assault squad seems to make a quick win, only to be defeated and destroyed in the hours that follow.

It reinforces the narrative that these assaults are little more than suicide missions.

More and more Russian soldiers are waking up to the fact that they’re being sent to their deaths, and that in time will make them far less likely to go ahead and follow orders.

We’ll likely see increasing rates of troops either disobeying orders, fleeing combat zones to save themselves, or waving the white flag at the first sign of danger.

That in turn is going to make it even harder for Russia to actually make even marginal gains along the front lines, let alone the sort of vast sweeping gains it really needs in order to actually push on and drive its war machine deeper into Ukraine’s territory.

In other words, through its death trap, rope and dope tactic, Ukraine has made it almost impossible for Russia to succeed.

and the rest of the world should be taking note because Ukraine is proving that in this day and age of drones and evolving military tactics, the old doctrine of hold the line at all cost no longer applies.

In fact, it’s a one-way ticket to disaster.

Instead, at a time when drones provide persistent surveillance and a constant stream of intelligence, frontline troops have to be more mobile, more tactical, more willing to temporarily give up ground in order to more effectively strike back at their opponents and reclaim it from them.

This isn’t a question of cowardly retreat or panic.

It’s about intelligent economic strategy.

Because it’s far smarter in the long term to give up a meaningless patch of mud for a few hours and save dozens of soldiers lives in the process rather than leaving them all to die defending land that in the grand scheme of things doesn’t really matter all that much.

So the next time you hear about Russia gaining ground or Ukraine losing a position, take it with a pinch of salt.

It doesn’t necessarily mean what it would have meant in years gone by.

When it invaded Ukraine, Russia had almost every conceivable advantage on its side.

It had the larger and stronger army, the bigger military budget, more powerful military equipment, more experience, commanding officers and smarter strategies, which should have all added up to a swift and crushing victory.

Instead, years went by, but victory never came.

Now, Russia spent more time fighting its war with Ukraine than the legendary Red Army of the Soviet Union spent fighting the Nazis in World War II, and it’s no closer to victory today than it was back in 2022.

What’s more, its many advantages have been whittleled away one by one.

And even its final advantage, its ability to sustain a long war of attrition, is slowly starting to become more of an expensive and unsustainable weakness rather than a benefit.

So to understand how we got to this point and the true shocking scale of Russia’s unprecedented failure, it’s first important to look back over the course of the war so far.

Back in February of 2022, the World Watch with baited breath as Russia amassed its enormous army beside the borders of Ukraine.

Facing almost insurmountable odds, Kee seemed on the brink of complete collapse with experts and intelligence agencies around the world, expecting the Russian war machine to rampage across the border at any moment and steamroll through whatever
meager defenses the Ukrainians might manage to erect.

Almost no one expected Ukraine to be able to properly defend itself.

Not against such a mighty and massive force as Russia, which had so much military experience and such a strong reputation in the battlefield.

With hindsight, it’s easy to see how wrong these views turned out to be.

At the time, however, they made total sense.

Russia was rolling into war with one of the world’s largest and toughest tank fleets.

tens of thousands of armored vehicles estimated at 190,000 and vast amounts of jets, bombers, artillery, and other equipment.

Ukraine, meanwhile, was certainly not regarded as any sort of major military power at the time.

It had a relatively small selection of old Soviet tanks and armored vehicles to choose from, along with other equipment, which largely dated back to the days of the Cold War.

Its domestic defense industry was small and undeveloped and in every metric that mattered, it simply couldn’t come close to matching Russia.

In short, the stage was set for Russia to easily achieve its military objectives.

It appeared that the days of the Ukrainian government were numbered and Russia’s Federal Security Service FSB was already in the process of planning its next steps, preparing Kev Apartments for the new Kremlinbacked officials it intended to install.

Ukraine, it seemed, was destined to become another of Moscow’s puppet states, similar in style to Bellarus.

And Russia’s President Vladimir Putin would get exactly what he wanted, just as he had so many times before.

However, as history has proven so many times before, war is unpredictable.

It’s not merely a matter of numbers or which side has the stronger or larger force.

Instead, war is chaotic, dynamic, and organic, changing, and evolving over time, and influenced by a vast web of variables.

And even a significantly smaller and weaker force can surprise the world and defy the odds through sheer grit and determination, like a wounded animal backed into a corner.

And that’s exactly what Ukraine did.

While Russia made sizable gains in the early stages as Ukraine initially struggled to get to grips with the conflict, the tide soon started to turn and all of the assumptions that much of the world, including Russia, had made about the war soon started to unravel along with its many advantages.

Many expected Russia’s massive army would quickly be able to isolate Ukrainian forces, for example.

But that didn’t happen.

As countless Ukrainians decided to volunteer and defend their land, even with minimal or zero military experience, a multitude of men and women showed remarkable courage and genuine willingness to lay down their lives for their country.

Russia’s commanders also thought that their army’s overwhelming strength would see them march all the way to Kev a mere matter of days after invading.

Again, it didn’t happen.

Despite suffering losses and seeing its citizens fall victim to horrific war crimes in places like Bha, the country rallied against Russia’s invasion.

It mounted stern resistance, proving a much tougher nut to crack than the Kremlin could have anticipated.

And Ukraine was also helped by Russia’s arrogance.

The Kremlin’s commanders could and perhaps should have made more of their early advantage, using their vastly larger, stronger aerial forces to take control of the skies and pave the way towards further gains.

Instead, they went into the war almost believing that they would win by default and so made many mistakes along the way.

They failed to capitalize on their initial gains, never truly attained aerial superiority, and started to lose large numbers of tanks, vehicles, and troops due to a lack of tactical planning and forethought.

All of a sudden, Russia’s many advantages no longer seemed as large and influential as they originally seemed.

And they only diminished further when Western countries rallied together and came to Ukraine’s aid, sending everything from missiles to air defense systems to help Ukraine not only defend its land and airspace from Russian attacks, but also strike back against its enemy.

What should have been a brief so-called special military operation was about to become a long-running conventional war with all the casualties and complications that entails.

Neither side was truly prepared for that.

and the playing field slowly but surely started to tip in Ukraine’s favor.

Its ranks also started to swell as more and more volunteers joined the fight, evening the odds against Russia’s enormous army.

Kev also began to benefit from the invaluable sites of Western intelligence agencies while unlocking new offensive and defensive capabilities as more weapons and systems were delivered from places like the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France.

Ukraine even managed to launch a
couple of offensive operations of its own in regions like Kerson and Khaki.

In response, Moscow became increasingly desperate.

It launched a partial mobilization, sending hundreds of thousands more troops to the front while also investing heavily in expanding its military defense industry.

It eventually enjoyed one notable victory in the battle for Bakmut after many months of brutal and bloody conflict.

But the war effectively entered a kind of stalemate situation from that point on with Russia making only small gains here and there, but struggling to capture a single major town or city of note.

During that time, Ukraine found ways to nullify or counterattacked almost every advantage Russia had.

The immense power of the vast Russian tank army, for example, was quickly counteracted by Ukraine’s shrewd use of mines, drones, and other anti-tank weaponry, which forced the Kremlin’s commanders to rethink their tactics.

Russia also had an enormous edge in the air back when the war began with a vastly superior and stronger air force.

It could have used that to take control of the skies over cities like Keev and Kkefe.

Again, however, Ukraine found ways to eliminate this advantage, setting up one of the world’s smartest, strongest layered air defense networks, featuring everything from advanced radars and missile systems to AI operated turrets and mobile defense teams.

In terms of artillery, too, Russia went into the war with an unmatched quantity of systems and munitions.

Its commanders intended to lean heavily on their enormous artillery power, relentlessly bombarding Ukrainian strongholds in order to overwhelm and wear down their opponents over time.

Again, Ukraine found a way with the help of its allies and its own domestic innovations.

It found ways to strike back, locating and taking out Russian stockpiles and ammo depots, giving the Kremlin far fewer shells to work with.

Even when Russia thought it had found a new advantage, Ukraine consistently found a way to combat it.

When Russia invested heavily in drone wear, for example, and started to launch dozens, then hundreds of drones towards Ukrainian cities on a nightly basis, KE’s commanders found stronger and more efficient ways to defend against them with the aid of their Western allies.

Ukraine then went one step further, developing its own domestic drone industry, launching attacks against Russian targets, laying waste to everything from oil refineries to air bases.

One at a time, Keev undermined almost all of Russia’s conventional advantages in mass, armor, air power, and firepower.

It didn’t have the budget or resources to match or exceed them, but it still found ways to cancel them out.

Which leads us all the way up to the current state of play in the war and Putin’s last rapidly diminishing advantage.

His country’s ability to keep a war of attrition going week after week, month after month.

But before we go deeper into that, if this is the kind of insight you want more of, make sure you’re subscribed to the military show.

We break it down like this every week.

Now, as soon as it became clear that conquering Ukraine was going to take much longer than originally expected, many military experts still felt that Russia would ultimately be able to grind its way to a win.

That’s because, even when facing multiple waves of economic sanctions and suffering heavy battlefield losses, Moscow has consistently demonstrated a remarkable ability to simply keep going.

When hundreds of thousands of its soldiers have been killed or wounded, it devised effective methods to keep on recruiting more to replace them.

When tanks and armored vehicles have been destroyed, it’s turned to its vast Soviet stock piles to find more.

When former allies have turned away, its strengthened connections with other countries like Iran and North Korea to keep its war machine afloat.

And even when its economy has been pushed to breaking point, it somehow scrambled and found solutions to stave off an unprecedented recession.

But time continues to pass.

Losses continue to mount and progress on the ground remains remarkably slow.

As long as that continues, Russia’s advantage will continue to erode.

And that’s exactly what Ukraine is counting on.

Indeed, Ukraine’s entire strategy effectively revolves around making the war as futile and unsustainable as possible for Russia.

Kev’s commanders knew they were never going to actually win a war with such a bigger and stronger opponent.

Instead, they focused on minimizing territorial losses, pushing Russian casualties as high as they can possibly get and inflicting as much damage on the Russian economy as possible, primarily via drone and missile strikes on high value targets like oil refineries and fuel depots.

Moscow, meanwhile, continues to rely on that same brute force, overwhelming strength strategy it’s pinned its hopes on from day one.

It keeps on pining pressure along the front lines, expecting that eventually big breakthroughs will come while Ukraine will suffer enough infrastructure damage and economic losses that its leaders will agree to end the war.

The trouble is that Moscow’s manpower advantage is no longer anywhere near as effective as it once was.

And here’s why.

In the early stages of the war, the front lines were clearly defined, which enabled Russia’s commanders to precisely plan out their next moves and launch large-scale assaults against Ukraine’s positions.

As the war has progressed, the battlefield dynamic has shifted massively, reaching a point where the front lines are no longer defined, but vague and porous instead.

It’s no longer clear which side holds which patches of ground with the entire frontline area feeling more like an amorphous cloudy kill zone dominated by drones with pockets of Ukrainian fortifications here and there and small Russia squads doing their best to encircle them.

The roads here are covered in counter drone netting.

vehicles are equipped to electronic warfare systems and personnel carriers are covered in nets and spikes and other makeshift defenses in a desperate bid to withstand drone attacks.

In short, the entire zone is a bloody and brutal mess.

And while both sides spent much of their time battling to control it throughout 2025, both struggled to assert any kind of dominance.

But that’s actually much better news for Ukraine than it is for Russia.

Because as long as Russian troops and resources are tied up in the kill zone, they’re not making any real progress or taking control of truly crucial locations that would actually allow them to push on towards victory.

Instead, they’re simply throwing more men and resources into the meat grinder, weakening their forces bit by bit in the process.

And if Russia persists with its current strategy, its losses are only going to get greater with very little to show for them in return.

because this approach isn’t working.

Using small groups of infantry and lightly motorized troops to bypass Ukrainian positions is simply not enough to generate sufficient momentum.

Even if those small squads managed to evade the drones long enough to breach the enemy’s defenses, those breaches are too small to turn into genuine breakthroughs.

As such, Russia’s once powerful structured offensive, which rampaged over Ukraine’s borders and captured vast swades of land in the early weeks and months of the war, has devolved into a messy directionalist slog, utterly incapable of generating genuine gains.

And that’s not the only problem.

For years, it didn’t necessarily matter that Russia’s tactics were wasteful and reckless, or that it suffered such colossal numbers of casualties.

It was always able to keep on recruiting more men, hitting its targets, and even at some stages, recruiting more new soldiers than it lost in any given month.

It did this via various means, including offering hefty financial incentives to able-bodied men who were willing to fight, as well as exploiting ethnic minority populations, threatening immigrants with deportation unless they signed up, and even taking prisoners out of their cells and shipping them off to the front lines, too.

From 2022 to 2024, these tactics worked.

Recruitment was so strong, in fact, that Russia was actually able to expand its army, which grew from around 190,000 at the start of the war to around 1.

3 million by 2025.

However, throughout 2025, much of Russia’s recruitment, which amounted to around 30,000 new faces each month, was used purely to replace combat losses.

In other words, the army finally stopped getting bigger.

Then it started to shrink.

By the end of the year, the number of unreoverable casualties, meaning those who had either been killed or too seriously injured to ever have any chance of returning to the fight, began to exceed the number of new recruits.

Russia still has a large manpower advantage over Ukraine, but its army is no longer able to expand indefinitely or counterbalance its constant stream of casualties.

Instead, it appears that unless the country can solve its impending recruitment crisis somehow, its numbers will now start to dwindle, and every loss will hit that much harder as a result.

And the Kremlin should have seen this coming.

For years now, it’s boasted about being able to withstand Western sanctions and continue fighting year after year, no matter what.

It arrogantly assumed that its people would keep on willingly signing up, allowing themselves to be shipped off to their dooms on Daetsk and other occupied regions.

But attitudes have slowly started to shift.

Many of the Russians who are actually willing to accept money and fighting the war have already done so, and those that are left behind are largely people have no interest in signing up for what they see as little more than a futile suicide mission.

Moscow must now resort to other means to keep its numbers up.

It’s already been forced to call up reser in order to guard important sites of infrastructure from Ukrainian drone attacks.

But even a country of such vast size doesn’t have an infinite number of people to call on.

The quality of its personnel has also started to slip, with so many of the more recent recruits having little to no military experience, making it even more difficult for the Kremlin’s commanders to orchestrate effective offensive maneuvers.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Moscow is running out of men, but it’s finding it harder and harder to recruit them, and it’s losing more than it’s gaining.

The longer that continues, the more the country’s war machine will suffer, with individual units becoming weaker and increasingly imbalanced as combat losses continue to mount.

In turn, it will become even harder for Moscow to achieve the breakthroughs it so desperately craves, and the prospect of any kind of victory will become more remote and unattainable.

Putin, meanwhile, is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

He’s too far gone with the war to back out now, and his country’s economy has become too heavily intertwined with the military-industrial complex.

If he waved the white flag or ordered some sort of retreat, he’d face absolute ruin.

At the same time, despite his boastful public pronouncement, the facts are staring him right in the face.

His army isn’t making anywhere near the kind of progress it needs to make on the ground, and it’s getting weaker by the day.

Added to this is the fact that Ukraine continues to carry out regular strikes on Russian infrastructure, disrupting the country’s fuel supplies, damaging its economy and crippling its war machine even further.

This all makes it harder for Moscow to sustain the war financially, leaving the country facing a growing deficit, numerous regional budget crisis, plummeting oil prices, and declining revenues.

With Western sanctions also intensifying, the problems are mounting up, but there are absolutely zero solutions for Putin to latch on to.

He’s trapped in an unwininnable war.

And while he may still for now have the money and resources to keep it going at least a little longer, he has no hope of emerging from this situation in any sort of positive way.

It’s only going to end badly for him and his country.

And the only card he has left is to simply keep it going as long as possible, delaying his inevitable demise.

In 2025, the Russian president had two big hopes.

The first was that sustained military pressure would eventually lead to a collapse in the Ukrainian lines.

The second was that the US and other Western nations might finally stop supporting Kev.

Neither one worked out the way he wanted and neither will this war.

Russian troops are starting to realize this too with more and more of them turning against the Kremlin and expressing their anger towards Putin.

Russia thought that it was being smart.

Moving from combined arms warfare to infiltration tactics enabled Putin’s forces to make some gains, but it also sent those soldiers into traps.

Ukraine has adapted and its deadly new tactic has created a nightmarish new reality for Russia’s forces.

They’re being hunted down and killed when they’re found.

This is search and destroy.

And it’s Ukraine’s response to Russia’s shortsightedness.

And to make all this worse for Russia, Ukraine’s new strategy has put an end to a tactic that was working.

On a February 1st video, President Stewart lays it all out.

He points to the PRs axis where Russia has had so much success with its infiltration strategy that many mainstream media outlets had already given up on Prosovka’s lost.

Ukraine near’s biggest loss, the Telegraph said in November.

Russia has claimed the capture of the city.

The Moscow Times reported in early December.

However, it’s February now and Picro is still being defended.

Still, these claims were happening because Russia was indeed getting its soldiers into the city.

Stuart explained the tactic.

What Russia is doing is they send small groups forward, two, three, four, five at a time.

Those soldiers move as far forward as they can, trying to take cover, usually in a basement of a destroyed building and then follow on Russian forces as sent.

Stuart says over time, this strategy was supposed to punch small holes into Ukraine’s defenses that Russia could widen with follow-on soldiers and mechanized units that it sent.

It’s a creepingly slow process.

One successful infiltrator turns into two, then four, then 10.

And if all goes to the Russian plan, it isn’t long before there’s a strong unit inside a Ukrainian city such as Picrosk that can then divert the defense forc’s attention away from other areas of the front.

That creates more gaps for Russia to exploit.

Rinse and repeat.

It’s a tactic that Stuart says is very effective if the country using it doesn’t care about the number of casualties that it’s suffering.

And that’s more than the case for Russia.

1.

25 25 million casualties in counting are more than enough to show that Putin sees his soldiers as little more than cannon foder.

Still, it was working in Pakovsk and other cities like Kapansk until Ukraine made a major change.

It started to create search and destroy units.

We’re going to dig deeper into the specific example of how effective those units were in Kyansk in just a few minutes.

But on the more general level, this is how Ukraine’s new strategy works.

What Ukraine did, Stuart says, is essentially turn Russia’s own tactics against it.

This is the heart of the search and destroy strategy.

Rather than trying to maintain a stable combat line with the invading Russian soldiers, Ukraine had to adapt to become more fluid, more capable of reacting to what Russia is trying to do.

Ukraine started to split up its own assault forces, usually into squads of around eight infantry, which all move off in different directions to confuse the Russian infiltrators who may have eyes on them.

These units operate covert.

They move from building to building, almost infiltrating Ukraine’s own territory as they search for Russian soldiers.

But these groups don’t get themselves bogged down in large battles once they find what they’re looking for.

Instead, they detect the enemy and communicate back to headquarters.

That’s when Ukraine’s drones take flight.

These drones travel to the locations of the search squads highlighted to carry out the destroy part of the strategy.

The Russian infiltrators don’t even know they’ve been found out.

They only learn the truth when the nightmarish buzz of incoming drones is heard.

By that point, it’s too late.

The drones destroy and Ukraine’s assault units carry on moving forward, continuing the search until they find the next target.

Preston adds that Ukraine’s approach can evolve, too.

Artillery can be brought into the field to reinforce the drones, adding more firepower to the destroy aspect of the strategy.

Ukraine is also attacking the logistical arteries that Russia is trying to set up for its infiltrators, which leaves the so-called successful soldiers cut off from their comrades and isolated inside Ukraine’s cities.

Inevitably, these soldiers get encircled, and they’re either eliminated or contained while the search and destroy squads continue their work.

What we’re seeing here is the active attrition of Russia’s forces by Ukrainian strategy that has flipped the script of what Russia tried to create.

The numbers speak for themselves.

In January, Ukraine’s drones killed more than 31,700 Russian soldiers.

Now, many of these kills would have taken place in gray zones that Russia soldiers have to infiltrate before they even get into the cities where the search and destroy units are operating.

However, based on the tactics that we’ve just described, we can safely assume that plenty of Russia’s soldiers are falling to Ukraine’s drones when they’re actively operating behind the combat lines.

As an aside, January also saw Ukraine kill about 9,000 more soldiers than Russia was able to recruit.

which means that its kill zones and search and destroy squads are putting Russia in a position where it’s less able to offer the follow-on reinforcements that are needed to make its infiltration strategy work.

That’s huge for Ukraine.

It’s also a nightmare situation for Russia.

Ukraine has made a switch from conducting the kind of positional defense that it had been using in the past to a far more active sort of defense that ironically sees it going on the attack to limit the effectiveness of Russia’s infiltration tactics.

It’s the old the best defense is a good offense approach and it’s working wonders for Ukraine.

If you’re a soccer fan, then this is the equivalent of Ukraine switching from a zonal defense system which covers the largest area but can leave gaps for sneaky attackers to a man-to-man system that ensures there is always a response to any attempt that Russia makes to attack.

The Odessa Journal says as much in a February 11th article where it quotes the spokesperson of Ukraine’s southern defense forces, Vladislav Valinian, as he explains how this strategy is playing out in the Julia Polola and Alexandrika directions.

Velocin notes that Russia is using the same infiltration tactics that it used in Povsk and Cupansk in these directions.

And remember, we’re going to be exploring Capansk as an example of why Ukraine’s search and destroy strategy works in a few minutes.

As for Ukraine’s response to Russia and Julia Polola and Alexandria, Balosin says, “We have indeed taken control of a number of areas in the gray zone, carrying out up to two dozen search and strike and reconnaissance search operations daily and destroying enemy infiltration groups.

This is not a classic counteroffensive.

We are conducting not positional, but active defense.

Balosian dubs this strategy maneuver defense.

Again, that’s the searching part of the approach.

The destruction soon follows and it ruins the footholds that Russia’s infiltrators try to create, allowing Ukraine to liberate territory that in many cases was only ever occupied by a handful of Putin’s forces to begin with.

Still, that sort of liberation allows Ukraine to eliminate gray zones, which are areas around the combat lines that aren’t actively controlled by either side as it tries to achieve stabilization once again.

Before we move into what happened in Capansk and why it’s a perfect example of this strategy in action, Ukraine’s search and destroy tactic was given a major boost in February.

Following talks between Ukraine’s defense minister Milky Federov and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, SpaceX shut down Russia’s access to the Starlink terminals that it had been using to communicate with and coordinate its soldiers on the combat lines.

This move has an obvious negative impact on the larger assaults that Russia occasionally launches.

But for the infiltrators who are already being isolated by the search and destroy strategy, the loss of Starlink amounts to the disappearance of the final ray of hope that many have.

Imagine you’re a Russian soldier.

You’ve successfully infiltrated behind enemy lines and you’re awaiting reinforcements.

They haven’t come yet.

You’ve been here for weeks.

Every so often, you hear voices and drones fly overhead and you hunker down, praying that you won’t be found.

The only solace you have is the Starlink terminal is keeping you in touch with command.

At least with that, you have some idea of what’s happening on the front, even if you don’t know that much of what you’re being told are lies.

Then the connection goes dead.

You don’t know why.

You don’t know how.

All you know is that you are now truly alone.

And now the buzzing of the drones overhead and the occasional fleeting sounds of Ukrainian soldiers have become so loud that they’re sounding like a cacophony inside your head.

You are going to be caught.

Ukraine is searching.

It won’t be long before the buzzes you hear become the drones that destroy your position.

That’s the nightmare that now faces Russia with the loss of its access to Starlink.

However, the Kubansk example that we’ve hinted at several times already is remarkable because Ukraine pulled off the complete liberation of the city using its search and destroy approach long before Musk made his decision.

Toward the end of 2025, the situation in Capansk looked dire for Ukraine.

Russia’s infiltrators were advancing and the gaps they were creating were forcing Ukraine to spread its defenses thin as it tried to contain Russia’s fractured offensives.

All of this culminated in no less than Putin himself claiming that Cupans had fallen to Russia’s forces on December 2nd, which was a claim that was uncoincidentally timed to land ahead of Russia and the US taking part in peace negotiations.

The reality, as we soon found out, was much different.

Still, as the Times reports, Russia had been able to infiltrate Kupansk almost at will by using a gas pipeline to cross the Oscill River, after which it started sneaking soldiers into the surrounding villages.

Slowly but surely, the Russian push had come.

The pipeline kept feeding soldiers into the region, with each new arrival, creating opportunities for new infiltrations into Capansk itself.

The situation was becoming critical.

Ukrainian Colonel Sirhi Cidarine told the Times, “We could have completely lost control of the city.

If Ukraine had left this situation unressed, it would have lost Capansk.

” So Ukraine switched up its defensive approach.

Taking out the pipeline Russia was using to infiltrate Capansk was a big move with Ukraine saying that it had completed the destruction by mid December.

But even before that, the very splitting of Ukrainian assault forces inside Capansk that we mentioned earlier had resulted in the creation of search and destroy units.

The Times reports that these units worked alongside open-source intelligence groups so they could get their hands on real-time maps of the war and Russia’s claimed advances in the Capansk sector.

These claims, which as we mentioned earlier, often amounted to a handful of Russian soldiers trying to bed in after infiltrating, became the intelligence that Ukraine’s search and destroy groups began to use to locate the occupiers inside Kapyansk.

Ukraine’s forces were infiltrating the very lines that Russia had been attempting to create.

And the irony is not just that they were doing what Russia had been doing, only better, but they were doing all of this in the weeks leading up to Putin’s grand proclamation that Kapansk had been captured.

As United 24 media later reported, the creation of this search and destroy approach amounted to the quiet launch of a tactic that Russia never saw coming.

Ukraine’s general staff told the outlet, the operation was deliberately kept out of the public eye to ensure that Ukraine maintained the element of surprise.

As the Kremlin celebrated capture, the soldiers that it used to make that capture were being hunted down by Ukraine’s small assault groups and then being destroyed by the country’s forces.

This is Ukraine’s new tactic.

Observe, adapt, improve.

All of this has led to the search and destroy approach that Ukraine has developed.

What was once proclaimed as the capture of Capanska by Russia has become the complete liberation of the city by Ukraine.

Now Russia’s soldiers are helpless in the city.

Some are still there, but they’re out of options.

In an article where it showcased a video of strikes conducted against the Russian infiltrators by Ukraine’s 13th Operational Brigade, Army informed said that Russia’s Kupansk infiltrators have been reduced to doing little more than crawling out of cracks and dying.

As soon as a Russian soldier takes the risk of attempting to move out, perhaps in search of water or a better position, reconnaissance drones pick up on their location, assuming the search squads on the ground don’t do it first.

As the brigade put it, in the Capansk area, Russians continue trying to hold the city and are crawling out of every crack on mass.

So, our drone operators have a lot of work, which means many spectacular hits on enemy infantry and equipment.

According to Victor Traubov, who is the head of the communications department for Ukraine’s joint forces task force, the Russian troops that are left in Capansk stand no chance of surviving.

In reality, Capyansk is under Ukrainian control.

The only small group of Russians is holed up in several high-rise buildings in the city center.

But this group is incapable of combat operations except for defending their lives, Trigub reports.

And even if by some miracle a Russian soldier is able to evade the search and destroy squads and somehow make it out of Kapanska alive, they’ll be stepping right into the kill zone that Ukraine has created outside the city.

Drones are constantly on the lookout for new infiltrators in this kill zone.

Their operators won’t think anything of taking out a Russian soldier who’s trying to get as far away from the city as possible.

Perhaps there is one fact more than any other that showcases how effective Ukraine’s search and destroy strategy had been in Capansk.

Ukraine now holds 90% of the city.

Moving on to the bigger question, what does the emergence of the search and destroy strategy mean for the Ukraine war in 2026? For one thing, it potentially means the restabilization of the front lines though.

We’ll get to that soon.

First, as Stuart suggests, it’s unlikely that we’re going to see any sort of large-scale offensive conducted by Ukraine this year.

It doesn’t make sense for Ukraine to do that, Stuart says of suggestions that Ukraine might look to push on from the successes it had achieved in Capansk to liberate more territory.

No sort of desirable result would come from such an offensive as it would mean that Ukraine has to dedicate manpower and equipment to outright attacking Russia’s defenses when it could instead just hang back, launch occasional counterattacks, build fortifications, and use its search and destroy tactics to tear through Russian soldiers attempting to infiltrate.

That
might just change if Russia adjusts its approach again.

But it seems like Russia’s only other option is to revert to the large mechanized assaults that it favored earlier in the war.

At least that might have been an option if Russia hadn’t lost over 11,600 tanks and 24,000 armored vehicles already, causing it to burn through its Soviet era stockpiles.

One of the reasons why Russia started infiltrating is that it doesn’t have the ability to attack in the way it once did.

So what Ukraine will more likely do based on Stuart’s analysis is continue the sort of work that we’ve seen in places like Kupyansk and Prosovk.

The cities that Russia is trying to take will become death traps all across the front lines as they’re roamed by search and destroy squads backed by drones.

Ukraine already said that it’s conducting 25% of the offensive operations across some parts of the combat lines.

And it’s likely that most of these offensives amount to search and destroy squads.

Well, destroying small-cale counterattacks conducted by Ukraine are far more likely, Stuart claims.

And these counterattacks will likely be in service of achieving the stabilization of the front lines that we mentioned a moment ago.

It’s more about stabilizing the lines and reinforcing this kill zone that’s being created across the Eastern Front, Stuart says of Ukraine’s strategy.

Those kill zones are what Ukraine will be relying on to cause the 50,000 kills of Russian soldiers per month that the country is aiming for in 2026.

Search and destroy squads will, in that context, play the supporting role.

The kill zones take out most of what Russia tries to send, and the squads in the cities and settlements handle those that get through and occupy the gray zones so they can be fortified and made part of the kill zones.

All of this will serve any aspect of Ukraine’s strategy moving forward, taking out Russian targets in the near rear.

The Wall Street Journal suggests that Ukraine should be targeting the drone command centers and headquarters that Russia has set up in occupied territories.

Ukrainian forces could better resist the relentless Russian pressure if they’re focused more on targeting Russian drone operators and company battalion command posts many miles behind the line of contact.

The outlet says, drawing on comments made by the commander of Ukraine’s 225th assault regiment, Major Ole Sharayv.

That’s difficult to do when the combat lines are destabilized as Ukraine needs safe places from which to launch its drones if it’s going to attack these kinds of military nodes.

Search and destroy is the strategy that stabilizes.

And with that stabilization comes the ability to launch new midstrike drones that Ukraine has been developing to target the precise kinds of nodes that Sherei have mentioned.

Those drones can strike where Ukraine’s artillery and FPV drones aren’t able to reach.

The idea will be to create a circuit of failure for Russia.

Putin will continue to order assaults, but as the mid-strike drones take out command centers, drone operators, depots, and much more behind the lines, the assaults that Russia carries out will be weakened.

Infiltrators that do manage to
break through won’t get the support they need and they’ll be constantly hunted by Ukraine’s search and destroy squads.

The kill zones will get stronger.

More Russians will die and Putin will only be able to watch as what he thought was the winning strategy in Ukraine is turned against him.

Ultimately, this also means that Russia’s tricks will no longer work.

Sure, Russia will continue to claim that it’s taken territory as it did in Macros and Kapansk, but the reality will be that occupation amounts to one or two soldiers who get destroyed within days, if not hours, of trying to establish footholds.

Search and destroy sets up so much for Ukraine, and it leaves little more than increasingly unconvincing propaganda victories for Russia.

As Putin continues to demand that Ukraine seed the Dombas region to Russia, he’s trying to hide a big problem.

Donetsk, which is part of the Donbass, is home to a wall that is already stopping Russia cold in Ukraine.

Putin needs to break that wall to take Donetsk.

Russia’s forces can’t do it.

They’re smashing up against 30 m of territory where they pay for every inch that they gain with blood.

Now all Ukraine has to do is avoid the massive strategic mistake that one of its allies is pressuring it to make.

Collectively, those 30 mi are known as the Donetsk fortress belt, and they amount to an enormous barrier that stands in the way of Putin’s goal to take the Donbass.

Located in the western Donetsk region, the belt is among the most fortified parts of Ukraine.

As the country’s forces have spent the better part of a decade, transforming it into a wall designed to destroy Russian soldiers.

Several cities and settlements combined to form this belt.

Four major Ukrainian urban centers, namely Slavansk, Krammatsk, Duskiefka, and Constantin have created a nearly impenetrable barrier that Russia hasn’t been able to test properly yet.

The embattled settlements of Picroavsk and Chazy sit just outside the belt.

Once the heart of Ukraine’s industrial region, these cities now combine to form a series of fortifications that link with smaller settlements in the surrounding areas and the logistical artery that is the H20 highway to give Putin his toughest challenge in Ukraine yet.

It’s a challenge that Russia’s president doesn’t want to meet.

And we’ll be covering four reasons why it would be a strategic mistake for Ukraine not to force Putin to meet that challenge soon.

So, keep watching.

Ukraine has placed a special focus on the cities that make up the fortress belt because Russia has occupied them once before.

Back in 2014, the Wall Street Journal reports all four of the major cities that make up the Fortress Belt were seized by Russian paramilitary forces.

Ukraine booted those forces out in relatively short order.

However, the Russian warning shot had been fired and Ukraine took it very seriously.

Ukraine knew long before anybody else that Putin and his forces would be back to steal what Putin believes to be his.

So the country set about transforming the formerly occupied cities into the fortress belt.

That belt is now stronger than ever and ready to defend Donetsk and potentially the rest of Ukraine from the Russian onslaught.

The Wall Street Journal says that Ukraine has spent over a billion dollars on fortifications in the Donetsk region alone.

With much of the eastern part of the territory under Russian occupation, the obvious conclusion is that most of this money has been poured into the fortress belt.

Over a decade of effort has turned the territory into a Ukrainian stronghold made up of a network of trenches with anti-tank ditches, rows of concrete pyramids known as dragons teeth, barbed wire, and minefields, the journal says.

What this means, as The Economist noted in a January 7th article, is that Ukraine now has the 30-mile fortress belt that it wished it had back when Putin’s forces invaded in 2022.

Such complete defensive lines would have stopped Russia far deeper into Daetsk.

According to the commander of the drone battalion that is part of Ukraine’s 44th mechanized brigade, Vataslav Shitenko, the same outlet highlights how extensive these new defensive lines have become near Slavansk and Cratosque.

The defensive lines stretch for almost 200 m or about 656 ft.

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