Mark Sumner

The Ukrainian counteroffensive in the Kherson area is continuing, but as Ukrainian forces advances into positions that Russia has fortified and reinforced, they’re running into an issue. It’s not that need to send them 1,000 new artillery, a million more rocket launchers, and whatever else is being demanded on social media today. It’s the problem every army has: advancing into a prepared defensive position is extremely difficult.

There are few reasons to admire Sen. Lindsey Graham. Actually, that’s not quite right. There are no reasons to admire Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Still, every now and then, just by accident, Graham gets something exactly right, and at the “Faith and Freedom Coalition” meeting held this week in Nashville, Graham managed to do something that might even seem amazing. In just two sentences, Graham deftly defined the difference between Democrats and Republicans.

It has now been two full months since Russian forces completely withdrew from the areas around Kyiv, Sumy, and Chernihiv. In the process, Russia left behind an amazing collection of ruined vehicles, a maddening series of ruined villages, and sickening evidence of massive war crimes. 

In the time since what the media had treated as Russia’s unstoppable “convoys” turned around and rolled back to Belarus, Russia has made significant gains in eastern Ukraine.

There’s no way around it. In spite of taking heavy losses. In spite of an artillery exchange that at the moment seems to seriously favor Ukraine. In spite of bad organization, bad logistics, bad leadership, bad training, and bad maintenance … Russia is still putting enough forces into place in eastern Ukraine to slowly grind their way toward the objective of capturing critical sites in Luhansk and Donetsk.

It’s not necessary for an occupying power to win a battle in order to cause irredeemable damage. They don’t even have to destroy a building. After all, they have something that gives them a leverage unmatched by the people giving everything in the effort to drive them out: hostages. Thousands, even millions, of hostages.

On Monday, the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of a new treatment for a specific form of cancer. In that trial, all 12 patients that completed treatment with the new drug, called dostarlimab, had what was called a “100% response.” That is, every one of these patients saw their tumors completely eradicated.

Drug trails, especially early trials, often give murky results.

On Tuesday, the situation in Severodonetsk continues to be volatile, but the latest reports have the city more or less split down the center. Ukrainian forces control the industrial area on the west, as well as outlying villages and the southern edge of the city near the bridge to Lysychansk. Russia is positioned in the northern area and fighting with Ukrainian forces in the east.

At some points in the war, it’s been not only possible, but sensible, to doubt reports from either side, especially when they have sounded too rosy. Russia has repeatedly made claims or even shown videos that were absolutely at odds with the reports of those on the ground—that includes happy-happy-joy-joy videos showing smiling people in the areas occupied by Russia going about their day in cities unscarred by weeks of pounding artillery.

With the concentration of forces—and attention—on the Battle of Severodonetsk, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the war to expel Russian invaders continues from Kharkiv to Kherson. Nathan Ruser has prepared a pair of images to show the movements across the entire face of Ukraine over the last month, and what those images show is not only very little overall change, but as many Ukrainian advances as Russian advances.

As kos talked about this morning, after a couple of weeks in which Ukrainian troops seemed to be catching their breath, the Kharkiv counteroffensive is back in business. On Thursday, Ukrainian forces captured the town of Vesele, which had not only been a long-time hard point for the Russian line, but was also one of the sites from which Russia was firing artillery into the city of Kharkiv. 

Ukraine is once again whittling down the Russian-occupied area above Kharkiv.

A funny thing happened on the way to Russia’s capture of Severodonetsk. After reports from Ukrainian officials that Russia held about 80% of the city, and a full week after Chechen forces claimed to have taken the whole city (which never happened), Ukraine now appears to hold more of Severodonetsk than it did on Wednesday.

Some statements are now going as far as saying that Severodonetsk was a trap to lure in Russian soldiers.

The area east of the Izyum salient continues to be the zone of hottest contention, and on Thursday the pattern there hasn’t changed—Russia, having concentrated heavy forces in the area, is slowly grinding forward, capturing more villages, and moving closer to major targets like the cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.

In looking at this article in the Ukrainian edition of Forbes, the biggest concern the author displays is about the consequences of losing Severodonetsk and the possibility that thousands of Ukrainian troops could be cut off and destroyed unless Ukraine pulls back in time.

The list of NATO equipment headed into Ukraine continues to grow. On Sunday, it was reported that Poland is dispatching 18 AHS Krab self-propelled howitzers, which followed reports on Saturday that—though not an official part of any announced assistance package—the U.S. was sending an unknown number of self-propelled 155mm M109 howitzers.

On the ground, Ukraine’s military has been remarkably effective at halting Russian advances and extracting a price for every inch of ground surrendered. Oryx currently has Russia’s verified losses at over 4,000 pieces of equipment, including 715 tanks. By comparison, Ukraine’s documented losses are at just over 1,000 pieces of equipment and 177 tanks. Russia has been losing equipment at a rate that’s 4 times that of Ukraine. It still is.

Yesterday, Henry Kissinger said that Ukraine should trade land for peace, that everyone should be nicer to Russia, and that attempting to actually force Russia to surrender the territory it occupies within Ukraine would be “not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself.” Even though none of that war would actually be in Russia.

There are reports on Tuesday that Russian forces have occupied the town of Lyman after an extended period of heavy combat that saw the town attacked from three sides. Those on-the-ground reports appear to be confirmed by high-resolution satellite imagery and by the NASA FIRMS data which, after several days of rain in the area, cleared up over the last few days to show a pattern that seemed familiar from some other sites that have fallen.

I’ve written before about the danger of basing any interpretation of what’s happening on the ground on the data from NASA’s FIRMS instruments. A collection of orbiting spectrographs and infrared sensors are not a substitute of any sort for reports on the ground. They can’t distinguish artillery from a forest fire, can’t tell what the source of any fire might be, and absolutely can’t fit all those little colored squares into any kind of narrative.

On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered his 84th daily update to the people of Ukraine. He also spoke on the phone with the president of the United Arab Emirates in an effort to get a new source of fuel, discussed a new assistance package with the president of the European Union, welcomed the U.S. embassy back to Kyiv, and dealt with the 1,001 items it takes to keep a nation afloat in the midst of a military invasion that represents a genuine existential crisis.

One thing that’s happened very publicly over the almost three months since Russia rolled across the border into Ukraine is that NASA FIRMS data has become a widespread way of tracking activity on the ground. Sometimes it’s used to confirm chatter already flowing through social media, or statements from official releases.

The Siverskyi Donets River has already played an outsized role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. East of Izyum, Russian forces attempted to cross the river three times with disastrous consequences that kos has documented in detail. In the east, Ukrainian forces in Severodonetsk, the last Ukrainian stronghold on the east side of the river, may be forced to move back to the west bank of the river, using its natural protection to halt a Russian advance.

According to statements that Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have made on state-run media, there are three goals for the “special military action” in Ukraine.

One is to secure all of Donetsk and Luhansk oblast and bring them into Russia. The idea that either will be an independent “people’s republic,” or that there might be some kind of referendum to determine their fate is now old hat. They’ll just be part of Russia. And like it.

The fact that 24 hours later we’re still waiting for confirmation of Ukrainian forces at Ternova is certainly concerning, but then, it took at least that long to confirm that Ukraine had recaptured Staryi Saltiv. It’s almost as if the Ukrainian troops at the vanguard of assaults in the Kharkiv area have been told to not immediately send video clips and photographs—conveniently geolocated—of their every move.

For days, it’s seemed every story about activity in Kharkiv has included the phrase “and we don’t actually know what’s happening on the west bank of the Siverskyi Donets River.” After racing up the river to surprise everyone by grabbing Staryi Saltiv, Ukrainian forces then began shelling the area surrounding the bridge near Rubiznhe. When that bridge was blown, shells began falling farther north near Starytsya.

For those who gathered in Moscow for the May 9 parade, there was one big let down on the pomp-and-circumstances front: Reportedly, very few aircraft passed over the city, with none of the low altitude flyovers from fighters, bombers, and support aircraft that marked such occasions in years past. Many planes that were practicing about the city just two days earlier turned out to be no-shows on the day itself.

Maybe most notably — there was no flying ‘Z.

When I first wrote about the town of Popasna on April 16, I had absolutely no idea that this was an important military stronghold for Ukraine, or that it would become the focus of Russian attention for the following month. I stumbled across the town in a list of locations, looked it up where everyone looks things up—Wikipedia—and realized it had an interesting history.

Maybe Ukraine’s patron saint isn’t actually St. Javelin, but St. Patrick. Whoever is running the show, they don’t seem to like Russians who hang around Snake Island. 

#Ukraine: A birdie flew past & gave us another angle of the Ukrainian TB-2 strike against a Russian Tor SAM system on Snake Island- another TB-2 was watching no less than 108km (67mi) away. Seems the missiles went a little crazy after the strike.https://t.co/eft74Bgj2H pic.twitter.

There’s a line in the Lord of the Rings trilogy that appears in both the books and the films, though with slightly different words and at slightly different times. The wizard Gandalf, having been thought lost in the depths by most of his company, returns unexpectedly, appearing before a group of his friends in his new, bright white robes. “Be merry!,” Gandalf says to them. “We meet again, at the turn of the tide.

At this morning’s press event at the U.S. Department of Defense, Brig. Gen. Joseph E. Hilbert quoted Ukrainian sources as saying, “The worst thing the Russians did was give us eight years to prepare.” During that time, Ukrainian forces worked closely with the American military, including seeing numerous National Guard forces who spent extensive time in Ukraine training and working with the military there.

Russian media is now bragging about the one aspect of the Ukraine invasion where Russia is actually demonstrating an ability to conduct operations on a frighteningly large scale. That thing doesn’t involve standing up to the Ukrainian military; it involves the wholesale processing of Ukrainian civilians for torture, kidnapping, and enslavement.