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Vitaly

@M0nstas

Jun 4

Russian Vision 2036
A Clear Image of Victory in the Ideological War Based on Forecasting and Design;
Annexation of Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkov, etc. Victory in the ideological struggle, final consolidation of a sovereign worldview;
Establishment of bipolarity while maintaining opposition, in which Russia plays the main role;
Dissolution of the EC;

Negative scenario
Defeat in the North-Eastern Front and confrontation with the West;
Ukraine in NATO, A sharp increase in the threat to state security and territorial integrity;
The tendency towards the complete loss of all post-Soviet states (their wait-and-see, observer position on Russia). The emergence of new conflicts (South Ossetia, Transnistria);
Preservation of "regional" sovereignty in a truncated form

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Vitaly

@M0nstas

May 30

https://x.com/M0nstas/status/2033297884582461696

Season of the Weak Arrows: Spring 2026 Retrospective

Russia entered spring with three objectives and left it with none of them meaningfully advanced.
The primary effort was always Kramatorsk. Zaporizhzhia was the secondary push. The northern border was supposed to become a formalized buffer zone.
The Green offensive launched on schedule in May. The results, so far, are not worth the schedule.

https://x.com/M0nstas/status/2033297884582461696

Spring is over. Time to take stock.
In three months, Russia seized roughly 334 km² according to DeepState — a modest number under any interpretation, and May was particularly thin. What made it worse was the nature of the failure. This was not a case of one bad break or one stubborn defensive line.
Russia collected nearly every problem available to collect: recruitment pressures, logistical strain, and the slow but consequential emergence of Ukrainian tactical small-air dominance at full occupation depth.
Each problem fed the next, and the cumulative result was visible decay across multiple fronts simultaneously. That combination is harder to recover from than a single setback.

x.com/M0nstas/status…

The Northern Buffer: Mission Accomplished, Then Not
March and April produced something that looked, briefly, like progress.
Army Group North did what it was asked to do — raided the border zone, disrupt the defense, extended the front, painted the map. The buffer materialized. Then May arrived, the momentum evaporated, and Russian forces began losing portions of the very ground they had just taken. The control was always going to be symbolic out there.
What nobody in Moscow planned for was losing even that.

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Vitaly

@M0nstas

May 19

The Half-Life of Control

Maps lie slowly. A colored zone on a operational overlay implies permanence — a held village, a secured tree line, a defended ridge. But color is a claim, not a fact, and the gap between the two widens the moment the ink dries.

Drone warfare has made that gap visible in ways that were once only felt. Every contested patch of ground is now observable in near-real time, and what observation reveals is not neat frontlines but gradients — areas where control is asserted by day and contested by night, where a position is held in the sense that no one has yet paid the price to take it, rather than in the sense that anyone is actively defending it. The map stays painted. The reality underneath it decays.

Attention follows fire. Analysts, commanders, and audiences alike orient toward the active sectors — the towns being ground down building by building, the drone corridors buzzing with FPV traffic. What happens in the quiet sections rarely makes the briefing. But the front does not pause where the cameras aren't. It is probed, listened to, slowly tested. Holding ground that isn't being attacked is not free. It requires logistics threading back along supply routes, rotation of personnel who would rather be anywhere else, and the maintenance of the fiction that any response is coming if things go wrong.

Read 6 tweets

Vitaly

@M0nstas

May 18

Mashovets Oleksandrivske Summary

Russian forces on the Oleksandrivske direction continue attempts to restore positions lost during Ukrainian counterattacks earlier this spring. Additional units, including elements of the 120th Naval Infantry Division, were committed in support of the 36th and 29th Combined Arms Armies in an effort to push back toward the Vovcha River and secure the Hulyaipole–Velyka Novosilka road.

Fighting remains centered around small infantry assault groups on multiple sectors simultaneously. Russian troops achieved limited tactical infiltrations near Olexandrohrad, Sichneve, Stepove, Verbove and west of the Yanchur River, but most advances remain shallow and measured in hundreds of meters to a few kilometers after weeks of fighting.

The heaviest clashes are taking place between Ternove and Novohryhorivka, where Russian forces are attempting converging attacks from Berezove and Novohryhorivka to pressure Ukrainian positions near Novomykolaivka and Kalynivske. Despite some flank penetrations, Ukrainian forces continue holding these areas.

Russian activity also intensified west of the Yanchur River toward Pryvilne and Novе Zaporizhzhia, likely aiming to push Ukrainian forces farther from Uspenivka and threaten Ukrainian logistics near Dobropillia.

Overall, Russian forces have so far failed to achieve their operational objectives on the Oleksandrivske direction. The situation has devolved into persistent meeting engagements between small assault groups across several sectors. The most likely areas for renewed Russian pressure are the Novohryhorivka–Berezove sector and the area west of the Yanchur River, where additional reserves may soon be committed.

Read 4 tweets

Vitaly

@M0nstas

Apr 28

The Invisible Wall

Modern battlefields are becoming transparent. Cheap drones now hover over front lines for hours, feeding live video to operators who can call in artillery, direct strike teams, or simply watch and wait. The result is something military analysts are only beginning to fully reckon with: a battlefield where being seen has become nearly as dangerous as being shot.
This is the invisible wall. Not a physical barrier, but a detection threshold — the point at which massing enough troops in one place to actually attack becomes suicidally expensive. You can move. You just can't concentrate.

The Exposure Problem

The most important thing drones do isn't destroy — it's reveal. A drone that spots a column of vehicles doesn't need to carry a warhead. It only needs to transmit a location. Artillery, missile teams, or FPV kamikaze drones can handle the rest. This separation between finding a target and killing it has fundamentally changed how forces behave near the front. Vehicles are pushed back. Command posts move constantly. Supply runs happen at night, in small groups, along unpredictable routes.
Armies have adapted by shrinking. Platoons become squads. Squads become pairs. But dispersion has a floor. A single soldier can slip through a gap undetected — but one person cannot seize a village, hold a crossing, or push through a defended line. At some point, the attack needs mass. And mass is exactly what the drones are hunting.

It Cuts Both Ways

Here's what's often missed: the wall doesn't only stop attackers. Defenders face the same sky.
Rotating exhausted troops, shifting reserves, staging a counterattack — all of these require movement and concentration. All of them are visible. A defending force can hold a position more easily than it can maneuver to exploit a gap or reinforce a threatened flank. The result isn't a one-sided advantage for the defense. It's a mutual paralysis — both sides pinned, neither able to move freely. That's the deeper mechanism behind modern stalemate.

Read 7 tweets

Vitaly

@M0nstas

Apr 24

Mashovets Sumy a week ago

Russia continues developing its "buffer zone" operation on the Northern Slobozhanskyi (Sumy) direction, where forces of the Northern Grouping are attempting to expand cross-border incursions east and southeast of Sumy city. Rather than a single large breakthrough, the operation currently relies on multiple small infiltration thrusts across the border zone from Myropillia to Hrabovske. The apparent concept is to create several shallow penetrations, then later link them together into a broader foothold inside Ukrainian territory.

The offensive is unfolding through three tactical groupings. The northern group is attacking from the Demidovka and Popovka areas toward Prokhody and Myropillia, seeking to pressure the northern edge of the Ukrainian border defense line. The central group is focused on Pokrovka, where meeting engagements are underway, while also probing through forested terrain toward Novodmytrivka and further south toward Taratutyne. The southern group is advancing from Hrabovske toward Riasne, attempting to outflank Ukrainian defenders from both the north and south, including movement along the Korova River and local road approaches.

At present, Russian central and southern penetrations may have linked into a single connected salient, but the northern thrust has not yet joined them. Fighting remains active along the Prokhody–Maryine line and around Myropillia, where Russian forces appear to be operating mainly with small assault detachments rather than holding firm control of settlements. This suggests limited manpower density and continued Ukrainian resistance in the northern sector.

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