Ukraine daily update 15th July 2025
15th July 2025
There is a lot happening right now, a bit of a mixed bag.
Anyway, I’m curious why FSB (of all people…) sent in a costly hit team into high-risk Ukraine to kill a GUR colonel.
Feels almost like a spywar?
Ukraine, being as law-abiding as they are, has prosecuted and sentenced war criminals in this war, and this could be a revenge for that?
Or that operation at the nuclear silos that failed within seconds after the first flash?
Or something else, wasn’t an FSB colonel recently freed in an exploding car accident?
Because even FSB doesn’t waste expertise unless it’s important, and here they probably wanted to show that causing harm to what the GUR colonel was involved in should hurt – to intimidate.
Historically, security services usually have some kind of truce since full-on spy wars get too messy and create a stressful work environment for employees.
It’s easier to agree not to kill the opponent’s security service personnel in exchange for keeping your own safe so that you can calmly plan murders and subversive activities aimed at the opponent’s civil society, whose politicians may not be fully aware that those tasked with protecting them have entered into a truce to protect their own skin.
Right now, it doesn’t feel quite like that between Ukraine and Russia, and there’s probably a lot happening that we’re not aware of, and RU will likely come out as the losers there.
Mossad has taken a few pages from Ukraine’s playbook, and Ukraine has probably received some insider tips from Mossad – they have become a security service to be feared, plain and simple.
If nothing else, the inner circles in Russia are probably starting to worry about all the killed (freed) military personnel and others involved in the war and when judgment will fall upon them.
Then we have the FAB usage, if I remember correctly, they peaked at 240 kills/day and 4000/month, hitting one target when Ukraine never had the ability to shoot them down due to Biden and a sleeping Europe.
Since they essentially broke the back of the artillery, FAB replaced the Russian artillery and managed to maintain balance on the fronts.
RU has been experimenting with doctrine and for a while now has been running – send unwanted children to identify firing positions, place FAB in firing positions, cover the area with drones, and swarm skilled shooters from competent units.
It has worked well and makes defense costly, with FAB being the backbone of that tactical pivot.
Now they are down to 70 kills/day, and according to previous reports, Ukraine’s EW is so effective that they have to shoot down 5-6 to hit each target.
So, efficiency must have decreased significantly, and RU has nothing to replace it with.
Every night there are huge drone mats from RU over Ukraine, but UA combats them with artillery-LV and electronic warfare (EW), for example, yesterday 108/136 drones were combated, 47 of them with EW.
Electronic warfare is here to stay for months now, and it’s reasonable to assume that UA heavily disrupts FAB as well.
Ukraine has also significantly deployed anti-drone drones, link from MXT on johanno1.se
We have been discussing that for a long time, and there is a plethora of capabilities in that area, which is one of the pillars in the ongoing whack-a-mole.
First, they were shot down with very expensive LV robots that cost 30 times what a shahed costs, and now they are combated with AI-controlled artillery-LV or anti-drone drones that cost a fraction of a shahed.
I give you – Russians who can’t move among all the drones, and there are countless accounts of that.
VS.
Ukrainian tank and PTGB advancing a few hundred meters from a Russian position in Kharkiv and blasting explosives into bunker openings.
This tells us that the Ukrainian drone threat is significantly wilder than the Russian one.
Then there’s the AN124 that Ukraine flew out from Kiev, RU’s radar coverage is probably poor…
Everyone has probably seen Grok’s rise and fall 😀
Russia has already been caught manipulating AI on a large scale to drive their narrative, a quick Google search will show you that.
Other AI applications are now coming from China.
Qanon became a wildfire that was hard to extinguish, so one can guess what the impact of AI will unfortunately result in…
Only those who have reached an age where they have a clear understanding will be able to see through this, and given the aggressive tone in, for example, our domestic politics, how many do you think can withstand thousands of younger ones who will champion narratives they don’t understand are coming from Russia?
Cancel culture entirely controlled by Russia and China in a country near us soon, or already.
Russia is unsettling just with this, and now they have a tool that far exceeds Cambridge Analytica or Facebook and in some cases is made in China.
The remedy is extremely simple – our politicians must realize that tough times are ahead and start doing their job properly, but considering the ridiculously high pitch in Swedish domestic politics and how it looks in, for example, the UK, I find it hard to see that responsibility will prevail, and then there is a lot of ammunition for the Russians to use.
Yesterday we discussed what Ukraine should do, and there is one more option – that node of all oil pipelines in Tatarstan (I think it is) – if you blow it up, you drain Russia, sort of.
Like not taking out Putin on May 9 when he sat there in the sunshine looking completely satisfied, Ukraine still has rules they must adhere to.
Israel seems to disregard such things actually – I came across information I didn’t save that they tried to wipe out the entire Iranian leadership when they regrouped to the bunker they had been positioned to through some spy, but there was an emergency exit after they closed the entrances they knew with JDAMS.
I think it’s true because Israel has tried to force a regime change in Iran, but Trump managed to barely avoid it if one were to guess.
Now Merz has managed to embarrass himself again – Taurus was not excluded a week ago if RU didn’t stop terror bombing Ukraine and would be on site within weeks.
Now in the Economist, they say no to Taurus.
It will never be credible to issue threats that you then back down on as soon as Putin violates them, we’ve been doing this for over three years now, and Putin has a pretty watertight record of exactly what the consequences will be for him.
The only unknown is perhaps Trump because he is so unpredictable, but I think Putin feels he has him figured out.
For those of you who believe that new weapons contracts will win the war for Ukraine, I can inform you that China is scaling up equivalently or how…
Sometimes in my dark moments, I feel that the West wants this war for all sorts of reasons and that the highest priority has not been to end it at all.
Putin is so sure of himself that he didn’t even play along with a Chamberlain, he just completely ignored Starmer, Merz, and Macron’s peace mediation efforts that they thought were legitimate because Trump did.
But we know Trump by now, right?
But the victory perfume is epic, you smell like a winner.
Just North Korea helping Russia is more than what the West has helped Ukraine, and then we also buy Russian dirty oil and don’t actively stop exports to RU, so we are probably helping RU ourselves more than we are helping Ukraine – with such friends, you hardly need any enemies 😀
If we take a step back, the EU will face retaliatory tariffs before Russia, and in those 50 days, there is a risk that our (EU) 18 sanction package will be delayed – we don’t want to escalate with Russia now when we are supposed to negotiate peace in 50 days.
I will return to the fronts tomorrow, it’s not exactly uplifting reading but it may need to be gone through.
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