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Ukraine: Long-range Campaign Fails As Russia Hits Back
My plans for today were to write a longer piece about the military situation in Ukraine, but personal maintenance issues interfered with that.
The bullet-point version:
— Two major agglomerations have moved under Russian control:
@Suriyak @Suriyakmaps – 16:16 UTC · Jul 28, 2026
The battles for Chasov Yar and Kostiantynivka ended simultaneously. 🇷🇺🇺🇦
After 9 months of fighting, the city of Kostiantynivka fell under the control of Russian army. This Russian victory has, however, overshadowed another victory of equal significance. After 27 months of fighting, the town of Chasov Yar was completely captured by Russian forces.
This battle, which appeared to be drawing to a close in August 2025, dragged on for several more months, with counter-attacks and infiltrations by Ukrainian forces in the western districts.
Whilst it seemed that the capture of Chasov Yar, situated on higher ground, would allow for a swift conquest of Kostiantynivka, situated on lower ground, it was ultimately the capture of Kostiantynivka that severed the supply lines to Chasov Yar and thus led to the withdrawal of the last Ukrainian soldiers from the town over the past few days.
[Map]
— Ukraine’s campaign against Russia in the Black Sea has left a landlocked country
Ukraine, with the help of U.S. and British intelligence, had launched a massive campaign against all Russia related shipping in the Black Sea. In a counter-campaign Russia has blocked Odessa and every other outlet to the sea that Ukraine had left. Any ship going to or from Ukraine was and will be attacked.
Ukraine is now landlocked. There will no longer be any sea borne export of Ukrainian crops or metals. Any arms import by sea has ended.
via Strana (machine translated):
One of the largest iron ore producers in Ukraine, Yuzhny GOK, is partially stopping work due to Russian attacks on civilian merchant ships.
This is stated in a statement on the official website of the company.
According to the company, in July, at least 12 civilian ships came under Russian missile strikes, which led to the complication of maritime logistics.
Due to the risks to crews, shipowners suspended voyages to Ukrainian ports. As a result, shipments of iron ore prepared for export have accumulated in the ports and warehouses of Southern GOK.
Due to the inability to ship products, the company is reducing production. …
— Ukraine’s 40-day pressure campaign against Russia has disabled Ukraine’s transport network
In mid June Ukraine had launched a 40-day campaign to “increasing pressure on Russia and pushing Moscow toward ending its war against Ukraine”. Drones were sent to hit hit Russian refineries and, more recently, civilian warehouse infrastructure.
Russia’s response included the destruction of up to a 100 of Ukrainian locomotives. Nova Posta, the official logistic provider for the Ukrainian army, has seen its warehouses destroyed. Some 200 Ukrainian gas station on major roads in eastern Ukraine were attacked and destroyed. Anyone who wants to move in eastern Ukraine has to fill the trunk with canisters as it has become impossible to find a working gas station.
After 30-days of the 40-day campaign have passed, the judgement is in (machine translation):
There was no equalization of opportunities and a turning point in the war: Russia has had and still has an advantage in fire capabilities.
This was stated in a video message by the mobilized editor-in-chief of the Censor publication Yurii Butusov.
“Russia has had such an opportunity from the first day of the war. Russia has destroyed and is destroying our infrastructure, unfortunately, on a much larger scale than we do. Previously, we did not have the opportunity to respond at all, now we do. But this does not mean that our strikes, which are very spectacular, are in themselves a sign of some kind of turning point. […],” Butusov said.
— Several large scale missile attacks have destroyed Ukraine’s long-range drone industry.
Most of the industry was settled in and around Kiev. New missile attacks are expected to arrive during the next days.
All together the recent media campaign which depicted Ukraine on the verge of gaining the upper hand against Russia was just that.
Reality painted a different picture.
Russia: home of Potemkin nuclear bombs?
By: Gwynne DyerPosted: 2:00 AM CDT Tuesday, Jul. 28, 2026
There’s a lot of performative militarism in Russia at the moment, which is unsurprising. given that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is still stalled halfway through the fifth year of the war. The style is more Mussolini than Hitler, however, and the effect is more tacky than terrifying.
For example, pro-war comedian Mikhail Galustyan recently pitched his idea for a reality TV show called Battle of the Drones to President Vladimir Putin at the Everything for Victory! forum in Moscow. School kids, veterans and celebrities would play at being drone pilots in the show, presumably killing fake Ukrainians.
“This is an opportunity to explore the topic and make it understandable, engaging and popular,” Galustyan said, and Putin approved it on the spot.
“Good luck,” he said. “Propaganda is an extremely useful thing.”
In the country where the first Potemkin Village was built, it feels like a perfectly comfortable conversation.
The original Potemkin villages, according to legend, were built by Russian statesman Grigoriy Potemkin to influence his former lover, Empress Catherine the Great. She was visiting newly conquered Crimea, and he had entire villages — or rather, wood and plaster facades of whole villages — built along a Crimean river to impress her.
Each night, say some versions of the legend, the fake villages were dismantled and moved downstream to impress the empress again the following day. Potemkin probably just had some houses painted and repaired to fool Catherine, but it grew into legend because it resonated with something deep in the historical experience of the Russians.
Which brings us, naturally enough, to the topic of Russia’s nuclear weapons, and to the fact that Putin warns the rest of the world several times a year that he has them and that, in certain circumstances, he would be willing to use them even in a first strike.
Which circumstances? He doesn’t say, but the context suggests he is warning everybody that he might go crazy and go nuclear if the Russian front in Ukraine collapses and the Ukrainian army starts to retake the occupied parts of Ukraine. It’s the old ‘madman strategy’ revisited, but none the worse for wear.
On the other hand, Putin may have a problem we are not aware of: the dependability of Russian nuclear weapons. It’s now 35 years since the collapse of the old Soviet Union, and standards of maintenance in most areas are far below what they were in the old days.
Nuclear weapons take a lot of maintenance, and Russia faces a particular problem in this regard: the culture in the military, where for many years officers have been stealing and selling everything that isn’t nailed down.
We have seen that at work even in the midst of the war against Ukraine, and some of the most commercially valuable technology is in the warheads of Russian nuclear weapons. Tritium, for example, needs to be replenished in H-bombs every few years, it’s untraceable, and it costs $30,000 a gram. The officer who controls that contract may have a very grand dacha.
This does not mean that Moscow could not wage an all-out nuclear war (for a day or so, before everything is destroyed). At least a significant proportion of its 1,800 strategic nuclear warheads would make it off the ground, and quite a lot of them would explode over some target (if not necessarily the one they were intended for).
However, that’s not a war anybody in a responsible position intends to fight. The unreliability of these rockets and warheads, up to half of them over 30 years old, becomes a much bigger issue when you are using only one ‘tactical’ warhead, to ‘send a message’. Imagine how embarrassing it would be if you launched your Doomsday bomb and it didn’t work.
The reality is that ‘every strategic nuclear force’ is a kind of Potemkin village. It is not really suitable for its original role (winning a war), but it’s quite useful for deterring other countries and also for making even the most rabidly radical governments act more responsibly.
There was great anxiety when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, but nobody got hurt. Even more anxiety when China got its first bomb; no foreign war since Vietnam in 1979. Israel, check. South Africa, check: they even walked away from their bombs. India and Pakistan, check. North Korea, check.
Going to war to stop a country from getting the bomb is so obviously stupid and counter-productive that one automatically assumes that it is only a pretext for war, not the real reason. Like the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, for example.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/2026/07/28/russia-home-of-potemkin-nuclear-bombs
Posted by: tucenz | Jul 30 2026 11:04 utc | 316
“Last time I checked, people in the Middle East were known for keeping long, long grudges. Almost as bad as the Irish and the Slavic peoples. Did Saudi think it would all be forgotten?!?”
Posted by: Tel | Jul 30 2026 0:39 utc | 114
Tel – doesn’t really apply to the Irish. That ought to be made clear. And every effort should be made to ensure that in the future it doesn’t apply to the people of remnant Ukraine.
Historical resentments last for a while in the popular memory but they do fade away, given the chance. As an extreme example, the far end of the scale, the popular resentment felt after the Norman conquest of England can be traced as genuine folk memory for a couple of centuries and more – it was an exceedingly brutal and disruptive conquest – diminishing thereafter until it became no more than a useful meme in Elizabethan times, used more for ideological or political reasons than because it still reflected true popular resentment.
If one were now to launch a political movement for “liberation from the Norman yoke” it’d be a ludicrous fake, no more than a lucky dip into dead history to fetch out an entirely artificial reason to cover for current political objectives. Any true popular resentment at the Norman Conquest dissipated centuries and centuries ago.
Go to the other extreme. The position is different when the causes of resentment are refreshed through to the present day. Drogheda, even the Great Famine, can be set in the context of “That’s how things happened in those days. Nothing out of the ordinary for Europe as a whole.” And that’s true. But when the oppression continues to the recent past, as it clearly did in Ireland up to less than a century ago, and when it continues even to the present day, as it still does in Northern Ireland though mercifully not as bad as it used to be, then popular historical resentment remains a living political force, and a powerful one, that cannot be dismissed as merely cherishing dead grudges from a distant past.
As for the “Slavic peoples”, or in this case the Western Ukrainians, their resentments are not merely old grudges artificially fostered.
There is, one has to recognise, a strong element of the artificial in the current political climate in remnant Ukraine in that the Western Powers have, for geopolitical reasons, funded and encouraged a virulently anti-Russian and ultra-nationalist culture in such parts of Ukraine as are receptive to that culture. “We built the pyramids” school textbooks paid for by USAID are physical evidence of that and there’s plenty more. But that artificial process of cultural indoctrination is superimposed on a very real and still living popular resentment that still has explosive force. That is why the problem of remnant Ukraine has to be handled with kid gloves after this current war is over.
It’s not a question of ‘dishing out’ parts of remnant Ukraine to neighbouring countries as if those parts of remnant Ukraine had no say in their own future. Nor of crippling the region so much that it ceases to be a problem. That’s akin to Morgenthau Plan thinking and is repulsive.
Nor is it a question of the Russians just occupying in order to stop NATO using remnant Ukraine as a base for various attacks into Russia. That’s a logical solution to those NATO attacks and in the worst case the Russians might have to adopt it. At great cost. A Russian military occupation of remnant Ukraine would be a horror, long term, both for those living there and for the Russians themselves.
It would also give material to the Western propagandists (“See, told you the Russians were just after grabbing land!) and would also dismay the Africans and other regions suffering from or threatened by modern Western colonialism (“Westphalia my foot. These Russians are on the same tack as the Westerners.”)
Unless a settlement can be arrived at that does not involve dismembering or trashing remnant Ukraine, and that does not involve long term Russian military occupation, what is now Western Ukraine will remain a breeding ground for further grudges and resentments that will, as Sleboda so perceptively points out, leave that region a running sore long into the future.
There has to be a political solution to the problem of remnant Ukraine. Not a solution that just means getting out the club hammer and hoping that’ll do. That political solution has to evolve, even though current conditions are unfavourable to any such natural evolution.
There’s much talk on “b’s” site about the slowness with which the Russians are conducting their war. Partly because, as Jermy reminded us recently, the attrition’s not done yet. Partly because the longer the conflict in Ukraine drags on, the more the West gets dragged down with it and the less dangerous the West becomes. But also, it’s likely, because the Russians, long experienced in quietening down conflicts of this sort, are still hoping an internal political solution to the problem of remnant Ukraine might somehow be arrived at. Because that’s the only solution that will stick.
We found that in Northern Ireland, or at least are trying to if our UK politicians are on the level there. Same applies, though the resentments there are far worse and their expression far bloodier, to remnant Ukraine.
Posted by: English Outsider | Jul 30 2026 14:38 utc | 350
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