Attrition Of Lies
Why Ukraine is resurgent in 2026
The Ukrainians made Kupyansk into a symbol of victory when they liberated the town during the Battle of Kharkiv in 2022. Russians then made it their goal to retake Kupyansk, or at least pretend to retake it. Gen. Valery Gerasimov told Vladimir Putin the town was already theirs before it was actually under Russian control. Based on maps seen in videos of Russian war rooms, it was obvious that Putin was being fed with very happy lies about the real state of the battlefield.
During December, the Ukrainians sprang a trap around Kupyansk, inflicting 27 Russian casualties for every Ukrainian killed, wounded, or captured in the ensuing weeks. Ground drones reportedly led the assault that destroyed Russia’s special forces, marking the battlefield debut of UGVs in limited offensive action at scale. This is the current state of the art of war in Ukraine, and importantly, it is completely reliant on multiple, overlapping, redundant communications just to function. A rule of thumb for the state of the art of war in Ukraine.
President Zelenskyy took a selfie in front of the town sign to show Putin that it was not in Russian hands, after all. This was a complete propaganda victory, as Putin had publicly declared that Kupyansk was secure, since that is what he believed. Russian drone operators targeted the sign throughout the next day while their infantry were being mopped up and squeezed into a tiny perimeter that remains under siege, a drain on Russian resources. This is the Russian way of dealing with a lie that has been exposed: destroy it with explosives.
The Ukrainians are also counterattacking in the angle of Zaporizhzhia. Here too, Russian commanders had adopted the practice of sending a single soldier, or pair of soldiers, to show a Russian flag at some objective, which they then reported to the Kremlin as being under Russian control. However, one soldier who infiltrates into a town, and then hides in a basement reenacting 30 Days of Night with drones, does not actually control that town any more than Eben Oleson ‘controlled’ Barrow, Alaska while it was under siege by vampires.
Rather, the days of opposing lines some distance from one another, marked more or less accurately on maps, are over; that soldier represents a forlorn hope. Clément Molin, a French international relations student and accomplished OSINT sleuth, wrote during January that “the differencies [sic] on the maps” produced by opposing sources that used to match up well “are sometimes measured in 5, 10, or even 15km” now. A difference in standards emerges when the troop density is so low. One dead Russian counts as an advance, or not, depending on rules that mean nothing in the real world.
“The result? Completely absurd maps that does not show the reality on the ground, and when an error is admitted, a Ukrainian counter-offensive that came out of nowhere is presented.” Examining the very area in Zaporizhzhia now under Ukrainian counterattack, Molin found that Russians were wishcasting. “Many villages are actually unoccupied”, he observed. “The Ukrainians have withdrawn, and the only Russian soldiers who manage to reach them are either killed by drones or forced to take cover in cellars.” He estimates that a “continuous gray zone … probably about 5 km long” exists all along the front in which movement is highly restricted.
Molin actually understates the case. The battlefield is fully transparent to both sides in a UAV attack zone almost 40 miles wide. Within that zone, it is impossible to concentrate a group of people of any size to do anything for very long. Ukrainians are paying a stiff price for their ‘advances’ in this sector. But it is worth noting that many of the Russians being overrun in Zaporizhzhia were actually behind Ukrainian barbed wire lines that have considerably thickened in recent weeks, again through the deployment of UGVs.
Each side adapted to this unexpected battlefield through innovation and imitation. Russians were particularly keen to get their hands on Starlink systems, which Ukrainians were already putting to good use. Rather than develop their own alternative — an imitation — the Russian Ministry of Defense allowed their force to become totally dependent on a tactical communications system that Russians did not control.
Then last week, without warning, Starlink disabled every system inside the borders of Ukraine that was not whitelisted by the Ukrainian government, and suddenly Russians lost the most efficient, useful means of communications they had ever found for the Ukrainian battlefield. They are now improvising, for example by lofting 5G equipment into the sky with balloons. Old technologies, like hard-wired field phones, are also available, but they will not provide the same flexible bandwidth. Sudden, forced innovation is disruptive on a good day.
Things were about to get worse. The impact of the Starlink shutdown began to appear in Russian Telegram channels right away as milbloggers lost their minds. At nearly the same hour, Ukrainian counterattacks in Zaporizhzhia started, intensifying every day, grinding down the ‘gray zone’ that Russians had spent six months creating. Rather than ‘retaking’ 20 miles of land, the Ukrainians have reestablished control over an area that Russians had infiltrated in low density. Altogether, the UAF recaptured 78 square miles in the final four days of last week, the most significant gain since 2023.
Ukraine says this is spoiling Russian preparations for a major offensive planned in the area. It is not a counteroffensive — there will not be a breakthrough battle — but the UAF are making the most of a temporary advantage. As if on cue, the Kremlin decided to add an own goal by throttling the Telegram app. Milbloggers were beside themselves as a second major mode of communications was taken away from Russian forces that had become reliant on it to function.
Imagine that you are a Russian soldier. You have just invented a new, cheap, effective tactic that is devastating to Ukrainians. Who will you tell? How will you tell them? If your tactic requires a wireless signal connection, who would be able to use it? Of course, the Kremlin would like you to download the new Max app, their state-approved spyware in a social media skin, to do the same thing you were doing. If you are an average Russian soldier, you know this is asking for trouble every time you DM someone for an update, that the answer can never be honest.
“The men of the Communist Party, the leaders of the KGB and the military and the millions of provincial functionaries who had grown up on a falsified history, could not bear the truth” of the violent oppression committed in the name of their ideology, eyewitness David Remnick writes in the opening of Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. “Not because they didn’t believe it. They knew the facts of their past better than anyone else. But the truth challenged their existence, comfort and privileges.”
“When history was no longer an instrument of the Party, the Party was doomed to failure.” Nothing has really changed in Russia, after all. Regimes fall as lies begin to crumble. All wars being fundamentally macroeconomic affairs, the structure of lies that was rigged to support the Russian war economy is teetering, right now. Forced loans from Russian banks have filled balance sheets with debts that will never be repaid, no matter how many times the banks reschedule payments. Russian oil revenue is increasingly throttled by effective Trump administration action against the shadow fleet.
Lies die at material limits. A general can show Putin a video of one Russian holding a flag inside Pokrovsk and call it victory; the material limit of this ‘victory’ is the death of that soldier. Lies collapse when reality intrudes. Ukrainian operations since December have been shaped by the exploitation of Russian lies which the UAF methodically crush on the ground. Collapse enough lies, goes the thinking, and the regime in Moscow will also collapse.
Russia says they will produce 11 new divisions this year, ostensibly as a threat to NATO. Analysts have serious doubts that Russia can do it, since Gerasimov announced 10 new divisions in 2025 but only four were actually created. Putin has solved his manpower crisis through massive, unsustainable spending, but Ukraine has now exceeded Russia’s rate of recruitment with inflicted casualties for two months in a row. The new Russian strategic reserve is a lie. Ukraine is collapsing it.
Battlefield results usually extinguish old lies, requiring the creation of new lies. For example, the Kremlin would like you to believe the lie that Ukraine was on the verge of joining NATO, so they had to invade twice, in 2014 and 2022. However, there is abundant evidence that Ukrainian accession to NATO was not a serious pursuit in Kyiv until after being invaded twice. For example, public opinion in Ukraine clearly tracks with both episodes. There was no serious interest in ‘joining the west against Russia’ until Russia was invading Ukraine and murdering Ukrainians.
Exposed, the reaction in the Kremlin is to clench the fist even harder, to shut down the conversations that they cannot control, thereby blunting the adaptive and imitative potential of the entire force for innovation on the battlefield. Vladimir Putin fears one million armed men coming home more than he fears Ukraine. Those men are there to die in the gray zone making new lies for him. This year, Russia will reach the limits of many material lies. Ukrainian actions will continue to expose and exploit them. Russian plans for another offensive in 2026 are likely to turn into another Ukrainian opportunity, so that we may even see this dynamic at scale, producing significant changes to the map.
The key thing to remember is that the ‘map’ of the battlefront in Ukraine is always a lie, no matter who it comes from. Propaganda is one reason, but chaos is the better reason. Within this zone of empirical uncertainty, Russia creates a ‘gray zone’ lie, and then Ukraine crushes it out. This has been the pattern ever since the ‘rabbit ears’ attack east of Pokrovsk last August. We have seen it repeated in Kupyansk, and now Zaporizhzhia: three times is a pattern. Watch this space.