Attritional strategies get a bad rap. When someone mentions a battle of attrition, many people think of the years-long-stalemate of World War I, or the endless and strategically pointless body count battles that characterized the American involvement...

Kyiv’s forces are backed by thousands of troops and Western arms as US official says: ‘This is the big test’

@Tatarigami_UA: Recently, I mentioned the issue of Russian colonists replacing Ukrainians, who either fell victim to violence, was forcibly displaced, or had to flee. Today, I will provide several examples of tactic...…

@P_Kallioniemi: In today's #vatniksoup I'll talk about Russian Nazis and introduce Russian neo-Nazi movements and paramilitary groups like Rusich and PMC Wagner. They're best-known for being funded by the Kremlin an...…

No one is particularly happy about the pace of events in the Ukraine counteroffensive. President Volodomyr Zelenskyy isn’t happy. Ukraine’s military leadership isn’t happy. Those participating ...

Joseph Stalin supposedly once called artillery “the God of War.” Regardless of the historicity of the comment, it gets at a certain truth about the Russian and Soviet armies since well before the time of Napoleon: Artillery has been, and continues to...

"Charge of the Light Brigade" is still used ironically to characterize an enterprise that is carried out with great courage and discipline but with inadequate preparation and unsuitable means. Hopefully, the Ukrainians will avoid such an "act of...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has frequently expressed admiration for Josef Stalin, very consciously linking his image with that of the late Soviet leader, whom Putin credits with “defeating Nazism” and saving Russia. This linkage—of the old regime...

Ukraine is beginning to advance on multiple fronts, with gains reported on the Tokmak, Velyka Novosilka, Kherson, and Donetsk in recent days, while Ukraine continues to press the flanks around ...

Everyone seems to be disappointed by the rate at which the Ukrainian counteroffensive is liberating territory … only it’s not clear that the Ukrainian military is actually part of that “...

There’s much fretting about Ukraine’s pace in its counteroffensive, having liberated only a handful of small settlements despite two weeks of heavy fighting. One of the reasons is certainly ...

Mark Sumner wrote about the place yesterday, in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, on the road to Melitopol. It’s a tiny nothing kind of place. Its name literally translates to “five huts,” and it’s close to being accurate. Yet after liberating the settlement over...

Last Friday, Russian sources reported that Ukrainian armor had begun moving toward Pyatykhatky. As with so many locations in Ukraine, there are multiple settlements of that name, including a small ...

The earliest impression of Ukraine’s attack on Russia’s defense line was defined by an early Ukrainian disaster—the loss of multiple Leopard 2 tanks and Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles in a minefield north of Tokmak. In the subsequent weeks, it...