Ukraine beheads its military as its performance begins to soar

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Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov’s ouster on July 15 was followed six days later by the replacement of Commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii. Both men were followed out the door by some of their most capable lieutenants. Ukraine seemed to have found a winning formula, making 2026 Russia’s worst year of the war for manpower losses, territory and economic performance at home. Some 193,500 of its troops have been killed or seriously wounded, said Ukraine’s defence ministry – the first year Russia has averaged losses of 32,000 a month according to Syrskii – and Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service estimates it is unable to reach recruitment targets. This pain has produced a net gain of just 81.1 sq km for Russia, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank that assesses territorial movements using geolocated open sources, and the trend of gains-to-losses is improving in Ukraine’s favour. If June was a disastrous month for the Russian operation, netting it just 30sq km, July has so far been worse, with Russian forces making net losses of 1.6sq km a day, according to the ISW. Meanwhile, Russia’s war economy, which boomed in 2022-24, has seen growth this year flatten at just 0.2 percent, Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted. Ukraine has replaced defence ministers and commanders-in-chief before, but this was the first simultaneous shake-up of the war and seems to have come amid an internal debate about strategy. On the day after Fedorov’s ouster, which produced street protests against the move, Syrskii spoke of “an effective strategy that is currently demonstrating concrete results”. A day after his own ouster, Syrskii wrote a column on the Militarnyi news website saying, “The Minister should not … be a war strategist. This is not his task and not his responsibility.” “War strategy, planning of operations, the situation on the front — by law, I am responsible to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief,” he said. The nub of disagreement seems to have been unmanned warfare. Syrskii created the world’s first Unmanned Forces Command, the SBS, and fought the world’s first war in which First Person View drones caused an estimated 95 percent of enemy casualties. Ukraine’s middle and long-distance drones have devastated Russian logistics and oil supply, slackening the force it can deliver to the front. Fedorov pressed hard in this direction during his six months on the job, buying more drones in four months than the defence ministry had bought in all of 2025, and even spending soldiers’ payroll money to swell orders. Syrskii disagreed. “Against us is an enemy that is superior in everything, who fights, in particular, with artillery, aviation, and infantry. I cannot transfer a million-strong army ‘to drones’ in two months and say: now we are fighting like this,” he wrote on Militarnyi. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who recently told The Financial Times that “the sky will be decisive in this war,” said on July 20 he was “continuing to determine what adjustments should be made to Ukraine’s defence strategy and what priorities in production and supply to the military must be implemented as quickly as possible.” Ukraine developed the use of short-range drones on the battlefield to reduce its own exposure and lower casualties. That strategy has yielded results, effectively halting Russia’s advance this year. Syrskii said Ukraine gained more territory than it lost in May, the month in which it began to strike Russian logistics using the overland route from Russia into its southern regions of Zaporizhia and Kherson. By the end of May, Ukraine was also disrupting logistics in the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, forcing Russia to float fuel and materiel across the Sea of Azov to Crimea. Ukraine then targeted those ships. Since June 6, Ukraine’s commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces Robert Brovdi said, Ukraine had disabled 196 fuel tankers and destroyed three-quarters of Russia’s ferry capacity across the Kerch Strait, the closest crossing from Russia’s Krasnodar Krai to Crimea. As an added benefit, Brovdi said, Russia had been forced to redeploy 200 units of its own unmanned forces command, called Rubicon, to protect an equal number of ships, weakening its frontline. “That’s how many vessels will be destroyed by SBS “Birds” in the Black and Azov Seas during the remainder of July and the first half of August – it’s a matter of honor,” he wrote on his Telegram messaging channel. The SBS has also struck 117 electrical substations and power stations this month, Brovdi said, most of them in Crimea, plunging much of the peninsula into darkness. Apart from hampering the armed forces and the economy, that has been a drain on Moscow, which was earmarking five billion rubles ($64mn) in compensation for darkened homes and furloughed employees, in addition to measures announced the week before. Ukrainian Navy spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk said Russian shipping had been paralysed in the Sea of Azov, and that the Kerch Bridge was being allowed to stand “so that the Russians can leave the Ukrainian Crimea,” because “it will reduce our losses during possible future actions directly in Crimea.” Ukraine’s long-range strikes this week destroyed a Tupolev-95 strategic bomber at the Engels airfield 800km from Ukraine, and a MiG-29 fighter plane at the Khalino airfield in Kursk, in addition to numerous air defence radars and launchers. Ukraine also struck the Slavneft-Yanos refinery in Yaroslavl, which it described as the largest “in the central part of the country”. In a shift from its usual military and energy targets, Ukraine struck four warehouses of the Wildberries online retail group, which it suspects Russian recruits use to order much of their protective gear and weapons. Russia has retaliated this month by targeting Ukraine’s port infrastructure on the Black Sea, to prevent it from exporting the grain harvest. Container shipper Maersk said on July 22 it was diverting container traffic originally intended to be offloaded at Odesa or Chornomorsk to Romania’s Constanta. This also meant that Ukrainian outbound container traffic waiting in Chornomorsk could not be loaded unless moved to Constanta. Ukraine has retaliated in turn, claiming to have bottled up Russia’s grain exports coming down the Don river to the Sea of Azov, via which Russia exports 30 percent of its grain. Russia is also retaliating by increasing the number of ballistic missiles in its nightly strikes on Ukraine’s cities. Since June 26, Russia has included missiles in almost every strike, contrary to past practice, when it held back its missiles for one massive combined missile and drone strike a week. Ukraine says it has learned how to intercept 95 percent of drones and 87 percent of cruise missiles, but fewer than half of Russia’s ballistics. “You hope that ballistics will do for you what everything else has failed to do,” Zelenskyy wrote to Putin in June. An analysis by Militarnyi suggested Russia was dipping into its missile reserves to achieve this, using more than its monthly production capacity in the first two weeks of July. 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