President Trump, angrily, to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, February 28: “You don’t have the cards! You’re buried there! Your people are dying! You’re running low on soldiers!”
Since that time…
In March alone, the Russians suffered an estimated 41,000 combined killed or wounded in action, with 272 Russian tanks, 1,644 artillery systems and 607 combat armored vehicles destroyed or disabled. (Since the start of the war, Russia has lost an estimated 12,835 tanks and armored vehicles, 305 aircraft, and 22 naval vessels.)
Without anything resembling a manned navy, Ukraine has largely nullified the effectiveness of the Russian navy and is winning the war at sea:
“In May 2025, Ukraine demonstrated another technological breakthrough when two Russian Su-30 fighter jets were shot down over the Black Sea by AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles launched from Magura-7 naval drones. It was the first time that a crewed jet was downed by missiles fired from uncrewed surface vessels; naval warfare continues to evolve over the Black Sea.”
…Drones equipped with surface-to-air missiles, machine-gun modules, and FPV drone “carriers” shifted the advantage back to Kyiv. These upgraded drones are relatively sophisticated but still cost-effective, “with costs ranging from $250,000 to $300,000 per unit,” said Kuzan. “This is about five times cheaper than a Harpoon antiship missile and slightly more than the cost of an M982A1 Excalibur shell or a Javelin ATGM.”
Yes, the Russians have largely forced Ukrainian forces back out of Kursk Oblast, the Russian territory that the Ukrainian military seized in a surprise attack in August. But for four consecutive months, the Russians gained less territory than the preceding month. In March, Russia advanced 99 square miles, a land mass roughly the size of the city limits of Sacramento, California. In April, Russia broke the streak by gaining 166 square miles, a land mass roughly the size of the city limits of Wichita, Kansas.
According to a Bloomberg analysis published in May 21, “Battlefield data indicate that — despite a consistent advantage in manpower and steady gains — Putin’s military has fallen far short so far of satisfying his war aims. The pace of Russia’s main advance in eastern Ukraine has halved since the start of the year compared with a similar period through the end of 2024.”
On May 28, Ukrainian long-range drones hit a cruise missile factory in the town of Dubna in Moscow Oblast, as well as the Kronstadt drone factory, Angstrem microelectronics plant, and the Dmitrievsky Chemical Plant in Ivanovo Oblast. The night of the attacks, the Russian defense ministry claimed it had shot down 296 Ukrainian drones across multiple regions.
But all of that was just prelude to this past weekend, the really big attack. From the Wall Street Journal’s report:
Ukraine launched audacious drone attacks on four military airports inside Russia, destroying more than 40 warplanes in the biggest blow of the war against Moscow’s long-range bomber fleet.
The attack, dubbed “Spider’s Web,” took a year and a half to prepare, officials at Ukraine’s main security and intelligence agency, the SBU, said on Sunday. Ukraine’s drones targeted Russia’s Belaya, Ivanovo, Dyagilevo and Olenya air bases, all of which house Russian military planes.
Ukrainian intelligence officials said the agency moved dozens of small quadcopter drones to Russian territory. It then moved wooden containers to Russia, which were used to hide the drones ahead of the attack. When it came time to strike, the containers were placed on trucks and the lids of the containers were opened remotely. The swarm of drones flew out to find their targets.
…The scope of the damage would take time to assess but it appeared to be a significant blow to Russia’s long-range aviation capacity, said Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
“Ukrainian special services have struck by far the heaviest blow of the war against the Russian Long Range Aviation bomber fleet,” Bronk said.
(I didn’t even count the March 3 fire at the Ufimsky refinery plant in Ufa, Bashkortostan, Russia, because Russian authorities insisted the fire was because of a “technical issue.” The Ukrainians contend the “technical issue” was one of their drones hitting it.)
The country that the president famously insisted didn’t have any cards to play keeps finding new cards to play. Couple this with President Trump’s surprise that Russia was targeting civilians, and his stated bewilderment that Vladimir Putin has changed and has gone insane, and it’s fair to wonder just how accurately our president understood the circumstances of the war during his Oval Office smackdown of Zelensky – or how well the president understands the situation on the ground on any given day.
Just who is shaping the commander-in-chief’s thinking on these matters?
We know that Trump and Tucker Carlson talk regularly. (Although maybe they’ll talk less frequently now that Carlson looked at the Trump family’s business deals with wealthy Arab kingdoms and concluded, “that seems like corruption, yeah.”) Throughout the war, one of Carlson’s favorite guests and “experts” on the Russian invasion has been Douglas MacGregor.
You may recall that Douglas MacGregor spent much of the past few years declaring that the Ukrainian forces were on the verge of collapse. (I documented at least fifteen times he made some version of this prediction.) He’s still singing the same tune, but hey, what’s a guy like that going to say? “Whoops, I totally underestimated the resolve of the Ukrainians and fell for a bunch of self-serving Russian propaganda?”
In his last interview with Carlson, MacGregor warned that Ukrainian agents in the U.S. were murdering people who spoke out against helping Ukraine, and that President Trump was a likely target.
MacGregor: We’ve got, what, 200 ,000 of them here in the United States, and I don’t know how many thousands of them. are working for the SBU, the Ukrainian secret police, that are now running around threatening everyone that has criticized Ukraine or opposed support for Ukraine.
Carlson: An Alex Jones staffer was just murdered two days ago, who was on some list put together by the Ukrainian government or its supporters of critics. He was murdered outside of his house. I mean, I don’t think it’s crazy to think, given the number of assassinations they’ve pulled off or attempted, that he was killed by them. You think that’s possible?
MacGregor: Well, I would be very worried about our president. I think the president is very much at risk, and these people seem to know no sense of limitation. They’re capable of anything. So, I hope the Secret Service is on its toes.
Right, right. I’m sure the Ukrainians can’t wait to make J.D. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other” Vance the next president. As for the murder of Jamie White, a reporter for InfoWars, Austin police arrested and charged four teenagers for his murder during a carjacking.
The president of the United States needs the best information possible to make his decisions. Tulsi Gabbard’s latest idea is to change the president’s daily briefing to look and sound more like a Fox News report. Hey, whatever it takes to get the president to pay attention.
Then again, who knows what the president believes; Saturday night he shared on Truth Social a post contending, “ here is no #JoeBiden – executed in 2020. #Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see.”
Would the president care to elaborate on that theory?