By Jim Geraghty
Monday, June 02, 2025
President Trump, angrily, to Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, February 28:
“You don’t have the cards! You’re buried there! Your people are dying! You’re
running low on soldiers!”
Since that time . . .
In March alone, the Russians suffered an estimated 41,000 combined killed or wounded in action,
with 272 Russian tanks, 1,644 artillery systems, and 607 combat armored
vehicles destroyed or disabled. (Since the start of the war, Russia has lost an estimated
12,835 tanks and armored vehicles, 305 aircraft, and 22 naval vessels.)
Without anything resembling a manned navy, Ukraine has largely nullified the effectiveness of the Russian navy and is
winning the war at sea:
“In May 2025, Ukraine
demonstrated another technological breakthrough when two Russian Su-30 fighter
jets were shot down over the Black Sea by AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles launched from Magura-7 naval drones. It was
the first time that a crewed jet was downed by missiles fired from uncrewed
surface vessels; naval warfare continues to evolve over the Black Sea.” . . .
Drones equipped with
surface-to-air missiles, machine-gun modules, and FPV drone “carriers” shifted
the advantage back to Kyiv. These upgraded drones are relatively sophisticated
but still cost-effective, “with costs ranging from $250,000 to $300,000 per
unit,” said Kuzan. “This is about five times cheaper than a Harpoon antiship
missile and slightly more than the cost of an M982A1 Excalibur shell or a
Javelin ATGM.”
Yes, the Russians have largely forced Ukrainian forces
back out of Kursk Oblast, the Russian territory that the Ukrainian military
seized in a surprise attack in August. But for four consecutive months, the Russians gained less
territory than the preceding month. In March, Russia advanced 99 square miles,
a land mass roughly the size of the city limits of Sacramento. In April, Russia
broke the streak by gaining 166 square miles, a land mass roughly the size of
the city limits of Wichita.
According to a Bloomberg analysis published in May 21, “Battlefield data
indicate that — despite a consistent advantage in manpower and steady gains —
Putin’s military has fallen far short so far of satisfying his war aims. The
pace of Russia’s main advance in eastern Ukraine has halved since the start of
the year compared with a similar period through the end of 2024.”
On May 28, Ukrainian long-range drones hit a cruise-missile factory in
the town of Dubna in Moscow Oblast, as well as the Kronstadt drone factory,
Angstrem microelectronics plant, and the Dmitrievsky Chemical Plant in Ivanovo
Oblast. The night of the attacks, the Russian defense ministry claimed it had
shot down 296 Ukrainian drones across multiple regions.
But all of that was just prelude to this past weekend,
the really big attack. From the Wall Street Journal’s report:
Ukraine launched audacious drone
attacks on four military airports inside Russia, destroying more than 40
warplanes in the biggest blow of the war against Moscow’s long-range bomber
fleet.
The attack, dubbed “Spider’s
Web,” took a year and a half to prepare, officials at Ukraine’s main security
and intelligence agency, the SBU, said on Sunday. Ukraine’s drones targeted
Russia’s Belaya, Ivanovo, Dyagilevo and Olenya air bases, all of which house
Russian military planes.
Ukrainian intelligence officials
said the agency moved dozens of small quadcopter drones to Russian territory.
It then moved wooden containers to Russia, which were used to hide the drones
ahead of the attack. When it came time to strike, the containers were placed on
trucks and the lids of the containers were opened remotely. The swarm of drones
flew out to find their targets. . . .
The scope of the damage would
take time to assess but it appeared to be a significant blow to Russia’s
long-range aviation capacity, said Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at
the Royal United Services Institute in London.
“Ukrainian special services have
struck by far the heaviest blow of the war against the Russian Long Range
Aviation bomber fleet,” Bronk said.
(I didn’t even count the March 3 fire at the Ufimsky
refinery plant in Ufa, Bashkortostan, Russia, because Russian authorities
insisted the fire was due to a “technical issue.” The Ukrainians contend the “technical
issue” was one of their drones hitting it.)
The country that the president famously insisted didn’t
have any cards to play keeps finding new cards to play. Couple this with
President Trump’s surprise that Russia was targeting civilians, and
his stated bewilderment that Vladimir Putin has changed and has gone
insane, and it’s fair to wonder just how accurately our president understood
the circumstances of the war during his Oval Office smackdown of Zelensky — or
how well the president understands the situation on the ground on any given
day.
Just who is shaping the commander in chief’s thinking on
these matters?
We know that Trump and Tucker Carlson talk regularly. (Although maybe
they’ll talk less frequently now that Carlson
looked at the Trump family’s business deals with wealthy Arab kingdoms and
concluded, “That seems like corruption, yeah.”) Throughout the war, one of
Carlson’s favorite guests and “experts” on the Russian invasion has been
Douglas Macgregor.
You may recall that Douglas Macgregor spent much of the
past few years declaring that the Ukrainian forces were on the verge of
collapse. (I documented at least 15 times he made some version of this
prediction.) He’s still singing the same tune, but hey, what’s a guy like that
going to say? “Whoops, I totally underestimated the resolve of the
Ukrainians and fell for a bunch of self-serving Russian propaganda”?
In his last
interview with Carlson, Macgregor warned that Ukrainian agents in the U.S.
were murdering people who spoke out against helping Ukraine, and that President
Trump was a likely target.
Macgregor: We’ve got,
what, 200 ,000 of them here in the United States, and I don’t know how many
thousands of them. are working for the SBU, the Ukrainian secret police, that
are now running around threatening everyone that has criticized Ukraine or
opposed support for Ukraine.
Carlson: An Alex Jones
staffer was just murdered two days ago, who was on some list put together by
the Ukrainian government or its supporters of critics. He was murdered outside
of his house. I mean, I don’t think it’s crazy to think, given the number of
assassinations they’ve pulled off or attempted, that he was killed by them. You think that’s possible?
Macgregor: Well, I would
be very worried about our president. I think the president is very much at
risk, and these people seem to know no sense of limitation. They’re capable of
anything. So, I hope the Secret Service is on its toes.
Right, right. I’m sure the Ukrainians can’t wait to make
JD “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other” Vance the
next president. As for the murder of Jamie White, a reporter for InfoWars,
Austin police arrested and charged four teenagers for his
murder during a carjacking.
The president of the United States needs the best
information possible to make his decisions. Tulsi Gabbard’s latest idea is to change the president’s daily
briefing to look and sound more like a Fox News report. Hey, whatever it
takes to get the president to pay attention.
Then again, who knows what the president believes;
Saturday night he shared on Truth Social a post contending, “There is no #JoeBiden –
executed in 2020. #Biden
clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you
see.”
Would the president care to elaborate on that theory?
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