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;

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Mashovets Kostiantynivka review

Russia has entered a critical stage of the Kostiantynivka campaign, concentrating forces from several army groupings in what appears to be one of its priority operational sectors. The immediate objective is to seize Kostiantynivka and Druzhkivka, which would open the southern and southeastern approaches to the larger Sloviansk-Kramatorsk defensive agglomeration. To support this effort, Russian command has reinforced the sector with units from multiple formations — including elements drawn from AG Centre and AG Dniepr to supplement AG South own 8th Army and 3rd AC — indicating both the importance of the objective and the difficulty of achieving it with local forces alone. The current offensive is developing along several converging axes. From the south, Russian troops advancing from Berestok pushed through an overgrown ravine to reach the southwestern outskirts of Ivanivka, while simultaneously massing infantry in Berestok itself in preparation for a larger infiltration into western Kostiantynivka via the T-0504 road corridor.
On the southwestern axis, Russian assault groups have been fighting for over two weeks along the Yablonivka–Stepanivka line, attempting to push through toward Dovha Balka, though so far only a tenuous foothold in the southern part of Stepanivka has been established. Further south, assaults continue near Pleshchiivka and Ivanopillia, likely intended to push Ukrainian defenders northward and secure the flanks of the main attack.

Mashovets Huliaipole

Russian forces are trying to resume offensive momentum toward Huliaipole, while simultaneously stabilizing the situation on the Novоoleksandrivka axis after Ukrainian counterattacks.

On the Huliaipole axis, Russian troops achieved limited tactical gains south of the sector, advancing toward Verkhna Tersa and intensifying pressure along multiple directions. However, their progress remains inconsistent and slowed, especially due to Ukrainian resistance around key defensive areas like the Huliaichur river line and settlements forming defensive "triangles". On the Novоoleksandrivka axis, the situation is more unstable. Ukrainian forces are actively counterattacking, trying to expand their positions and threaten Russian flanks—particularly aiming to disrupt Russian operations by pushing toward Uspenivka–Temyrivka. These actions have forced Russian units to focus on holding ground rather than advancing.

Overall, the battlefield is highly fragmented, with frequent close-range fighting, infiltration by small infantry groups, and "mixed" frontlines. Russian forces are currently struggling to regain strong offensive tempo, while Ukrainian forces are successfully slowing advances and applying pressure on vulnerable sectors.

Season of Arrows: Russia's 2026 Offensive

The Season is open, and there have been many valuable threads and articles covering individual fronts, both recent and historical. Before diving into the details, it is worth stepping back to examine the broader operational picture. Russia is currently operating five Army Groups along the front line, with an additional Northern Screening Group whose primary purpose is border raiding, harassment of AFU positions, and fixing Ukrainian forces in place.

AGs act separately but will be forced to cooperate.

Striking February 5060 Drones, 288 Missiles (including 116 Ballistic missiles), 6224 Bombs.

A system designed not to last, but to win time

Look at the battlefield as a system of crumple zones - areas deliberately designed to fail under pressure while absorbing as much damage as possible, still protecting the vital nodes behind them.

https://twitter.com/M0nstas/status/2013733710705692717

Ditches and earthworks define the overall pattern of this system, but the actual defense relies on a constellation of strongpoints of varying size. These positions are meant to hold for as long as conditions allow and to be abandoned when necessary. Their value lies not in permanence, but in the time, attrition, and disruption they impose on the attacker.

GSUA
Russians made 5976! assaults at 229 settlements - 59 settlements werent mentioned since October, 36 were mentioned for the first time;
extended by 531km2: capturing 468km2, gray out 62km2.
One of the most attack Intensive months led to mediocre results in exchange of 31190 ivanZ in infantry friendly conditions.

Race to Zaporizhzhia
Russian Army Group East is slowly advancing through the fields of the southern front, with the defensive nodes of Orikhiv and Huliaipole standing between them and the main battle. The poor road network and mostly flat terrain shape every movement on this axis The Zaporizhzhia front is built around two rivers: the Konka and the Haichur.
Along the Konka lies a chain of settlements forming a dense rural agglomeration. The valley is similar to the Kryvyi Torets corridor, it forms a natural defensive arc with exceptionally strong cover

Lyman and Beyond

The situation around Lyman is pretty straightforward: secure the flanks, cut the supply routes, and only then take the town. Everything else depends on that. Yarova and Yampil are the keys on the sides, and cutting the routes feeding Lyman.

https://twitter.com/M0nstas/status/1801373870974505037

Wile main forces will be pocketing the town small infiltration groups can quietly dig in inside of it and wait for the right moment to strike, while AFU will try to counter that with surveillance and counter measures.

The front has a limit.

You cannot cover everything. Each army can only handle a certain capacity - men, logistics, command, and attention. Once you exceed it, you lose control and start wasting people. 🔽 Stretching the front is not about survival - it is about pressure. You do it when you have spare resources and want to force the enemy to bleed, to react, to stretch too. Otherwise, it is suicide disguised as courage. 🔽

Striking October There were 6 massive combined attacks in a month

Russia used 5330 drones, 1109 (~20%) hit the target, some fall as debris damaging almost as many locations.

#Map Donbas after Pokrovsk

Dont expect big changes after Pokrovsk. Yeah its a hit but not a turning point. Just another town on the long road west. Russians will keep crawling 100-200 meters a day spreading pressure along the 60 km front slipping between defense points. Villages are russain boosters little steps to jump forward and micro assault groups keep poking every corner. Endless Ukrainian defensive lines mean less than they should when the enemy throws bodies everywhere they always find a weak spot.

MoD RF reportedly captured 10 settlements and extend by 88km2.

Despite all the claims Ivanivka didn't get into report.

No minor settlements left left to capture in the Pokrovsk pocket.
GSUA reported 1034 attacks in total, 30% less than a previous week.

Shepherds of sponge war
The sponge front makes it tempting to push forward, but drones make any movement excessively dangerous. Still, doing nothing is even worse unless you have proper hideouts. A network of isolated, dispersed hideouts creates a true sponge defense.
1/12 Fortifications alone don't stop anything. Without coverage, drones and bombs suppress observation and make deliberate breaks deadly. The real sponge defense is a network of isolated, dispersed hideouts - hard to target and easy to melt into.
2/12

Rashanverse has no time dimension; Frontline isn't an exception, hence all time-based predictions consistently fail. With this and the Russians' recent dynamics in mind, let's explore how the Donbas offensive will evolve. Beyond dense settlements, terrain remains the main factor. Roads are important but rarely used for assaults. Fortifications may slow down the advance but don't affect the vector of attack.

Settlements constellation

from small villages with less than 1000 people to 100 000+ cities.

Donbas is dominated by big stars, in the void of fields. Only large settlements with 5000 and more