AI lies, frontlines slide
The ongoing crisis in the south. Losses and blocking detachments. AI-generated victories. Yermak-Pompeo corruption.
The past week, Ukrainian politicians have been sounding a number of rather pacifistic narratives.
Yesterday, former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba blamed the recently ousted Yermak for the failure of peace negotiations, and called for a ceasefire to preserve Ukrainian statehood:
It will be very difficult. Difficult to come to terms with reality. We are about to enter a very very difficult period, when we will have to accept a very very bitter truth. We won’t be saved by instagram posts or slogans. It will be very painful to accept this reality, but we will able to build a normal future.
The refusal to acknowledge reality will hold us back. Ahead of Ukraine lies a tactical defeat, but a strategic victory. Tactical — because in the moment it will be unpleasant. But if we look at what this invasion began with, namely the desire to destroy us as a state, to destroy us as a nation…
Kuleba’s statements about Yermak and peace talks are particularly interesting. Kuleba’s removal as foreign minister back in 2024 was widely perceived as Yermak’s doing, Yermak had always been obsessed with foreign policy, and the ministry of foreign affairs was always powerless due to Yermak’s habit of conducting his own secret negotiations with Russia and the US. I wrote about how Yermak first rose to power in 2019 here — it came about because of his secretive talks with Rudy Giulani and Dmitry Kozak.
Anyway, Kuleba claims that he advocated building closer ties with Jared Kushner, who supposedly could have been a more ‘pro-Ukrainian’ voice. Yermak dismissed the initiative, claiming that his ties with Mike Pompeo was the true key to winning Trump’s heart.
Indeed, true Yermakian diplomatic genius. Instead of Trump’s beloved son-in-law, focus all energy on a man Trump considers a traitor.
Many have drawn a link between this and Pompeo’s acquisition of a number of lucrative assets in Ukraine over the past year. First there was the 2023 news that Pompeo became Supervisory Board member at Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest telecommunications company.
And in November, it emerged that Pompeo is on the board of directors of Fire Point, Ukraine’s leading defense concern.
Fire Point is a company that emerged out of nowhere in 2023, run by a young women with experience in concrete artforms. But in 2024, Fire Point received the most budget funds of any company - a third of all defense spending.
Many Ukrainian militarists believe that the company is producing overpriced hunks of metal that barely work. The Europeans, bless their souls, continue to pour their money into it — access to a recent $5 billion euro ‘deal’ with the Germans, for instance.
Many have pointed to the employment history of Fire Point’s management. While the management of Fire Point has no experience in drones, it does have experience in show business. Before 2022 they worked alongside Zelensky’s Kvartal 95 comedy studio. Not only that, they were close to the head of Zelensky’s presidential administration, film producer Andriy Yermak. The same anti-corruption organs that raided Yermak and forced him to resign have also been investigating Fire Point over the course of the year.
Anyway, Ukrainian corruption enabled by the Americans, a bipartisan story as old as time. The Pompeo link is interesting for another reason. Kuleba’s blame on Yermak for ruining peace talks is part of a growing narrative that Yermak was the evil advisor preventing Zelensky from bringing peace to Ukraine. And after Yermak’s resignation over the weekend, the way is apparently clear for Zelensky to get things moving on peace negotiatiobs.
As if to confirm, Zelensky commented on peace talks with the US on December 3 with the following:
There will be no simple solutions. The question is not about the difficulty of their implementation. I am capable of making decisions - what is important is that they are fair.
Though I don’t check them religiously, the last I saw was that said peace talks
Personally, I think that making Yermak into a scapegoat of all evils is rather silly. The real reason why Ukrainian officials are increasingly open to the sacrifices demanded by Moscow has less to do with intrigues in Kyiv, and more to do with frontline battles. It is these battles we will be concerned with today.
Frontlines
According to Ukraine’s main military mapping resource DeepState, November saw twice as much land taken by Russian troops than September - 505 square kilometers. This is almost as much as the June-July peak of 2025 (556 and 564 kilometers). November 2024, when the Russian army took the most territory since early 2022, saw 730 square kilometers lost. Note that other mapping resources believe that DeepState systematically under-estimates Russian advances.
We’ll go further into the causes of this success, but one more banal reason is the foggy weather. This has allowed Russian forces to advance more easily, hidden from the eyes of drones. The Ukrainian military blogger ‘Officer’ posted a video of Russian tanks in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast on December 3, blaming the fog for advances:
The tactics of application are standard on all fronts: under rain and fog, a column with a landing force is advanced, which they try to land either at a specific point or as far back as possible in our rear, which sometimes succeeds for them.
Back to the results of November. DeepState reports that Russian forces saw the most success in the area of Hulyaipole, a town in the southern section of the frontline, Zaporizhzhia oblast. That sector accounted for 40% of all advances last month, but only 16% of recorded assault activities. Meanwhile, the more well-known Pokrovsk area in the Donetsk oblast accounted for only 11% of all advances while experiencing 32.5% of all Russian assaults.
The reason for this disparity is simple, as the Ukrainian militarist channel ‘Tales of the Fourth Reich’ stated a few days ago in a post I translated here — due to the media prominence of Pokrovsk, Ukraine’s best forces are centered there, leaving the south undermanned.
Despite the endless western predictions of Russian exhaustion, the statistics paint another picture. DeepState recorded 5990 assault actions in November, a monthly record for 2025. It was only exceeded by December 2025.
Southern slide
On December 2, Ukrainska Pravda put out an article analyzing why exactly Russian troops have been moving forward so quickly in the southern oblasts of Zaporizhzhia and Dnepropetrovsk.
The article begins by noting that Russian forces have moved forward 20 kilometers in this area over the past 6 months — ‘a real breakthrough, by the current standards of the frontline’.
Soldiers apparently joke that with such a tempo, the Russians will reach the city of Zaporizhzhia (population ~700,000) unnoticed. Zaporizhzhia is less than 20 kilometers from the front to the south (though there has been less movement here), and less than 80 kilometers from the frontline to the east (where most of the movement forward has occurred). Mandatory evacuation is already underway for residents living just 10 kilometers from the city of Zaporizhzhia.
My previous coverage of the southern section of the frontline has focused on the disorganization of Ukrainian units. This is true across the frontline, given the steady disappearance of experienced troops and officers. But it is worst of all here, since high command ignores it to the benefit of the Donetsk oblast.
Ukrainska Pravda dedicated this harrowing section to signs of this disorganization:
Information about the active advance of the Russian army in the Huliaipole direction leaked out through a very painful gap called “missing in action.”
Over the past few months, the relatives of soldiers from at least two brigades — the 102nd and the 125th — have written dozens of posts on social media demanding to find out what happened to their fathers, sons, and husbands in the Zaporizhzhia region. In particular, in the areas of the villages of Malynivka, Poltavka, and Olhivske, from which the Russians began their push toward the Huliaipole direction.
In just the 102nd Territorial Defense Brigade, at least 80 servicemen went missing from June to November 2025. This is what the administrator of the brigade’s missing persons page told Ukrainska Pravda. Eighty missing in six months means losing 3–4 people per week.
Ukrainska Pravda gives a number of factors explaining these losses. The south is under the command of Colonel Yaroslav Sydorov, commander of the 17th corps. But he assumed this position only a few months ago. Though some claim that Sydorov is more effective, this doesn’t seem to be manifesting on the ground.
There is also apparently ‘weak command at the level of individual brigades’. These brigades are largely made up of ‘exhausted and fragmented’ Territorial Defense battalions (TD) and mechanised brigades that had previously been TD. This includes the 102nd TD battalion and the 125th mechanized brigade.
Ukrainska Pravda’s sources tell it that the 125th brigade ‘had almost zero command and control capacity’ when Russian forces broke through to Huliaipole recently. The commander ‘had lost communication with his subordinates, and subordinates stopped receiving orders’.
This chaos apparently mirrors a similar situation in May 2024, when the 125th was forced to withdraw from the border with Russia in the Kharkiv region. It and other units were ‘attached’ to a more influential unit — this practice is widely criticized in Ukraine as leading to the meaningless ‘expenditure’ in battle of the personnel of attached units. Despite its intentions, the 2025 corps reform has done little to eradicate it.
The 102nd Territorial Defense brigade has been responsible for the Huliaopole area since 2022. Ukrainska Pravda writes that it has suffered from problems with supplies, manpower, and training. Ukrainska Pravda spoke to one of the battalions in this brigade — up to a hundred soldiers had not even completed basic military training.
Like other territorial defense units, these individuals had joined the army in 2022 out of patriotism. Having volunteered to join the army gave them the bureaucratic stamp of ‘100th military occupational specialty’, the equivalent of having basic military training. However, they lack anything of the sort:
“No one among us had fought; most were teachers, shop assistants, laborers who joined purely out of motivation and sometimes went to training grounds. There were a few veterans of the ATO/JFO [the 2014-2022 conflict - EIU] whom we looked up to,” a serviceman from one of the battalions recently pulled out of encirclement near Huliaipole told Ukrainska Pravda.
All this has meant that the 102nd has suffered immense losses. The senior sergeant and deputy commander of one battalion were even killed at infantry positions. The under-equipped, un-trained brigade is unable to deal with Russia’s crack drone operators, particularly those from the ‘Rubicon’ team. With Russian drones dominating their logistics, they have been forced to constantly retreat.
“At one point, we made a difficult decision not to evacuate the dead, only the wounded. Across the entire frontline we had only three drivers left,” our source from one of the battalions said.
In the attempt to stem Russian advances around Huliaipole, units from the assault forces were deployed. The assault forces, officially created just a few months ago, are often described as the ‘firefighter’ forces. Their task is to desperately mop up catastrophes across the frontlines — at the cost of high losses. The assault forces are led by Valentin Manko, a highly colorful and much-hated individual I will write about in more detail today.
However, the assault brigades simply created new problems. DeepState reported that the arrival of the 225th assault battalion engaged in friendly fire with the 102nd territorial defense brigade due to lack of coordination between the two.
The article ends this section by describing the outskirts of Huliaipole as a ‘greyzone’ controlled by neither side. However, the situation seems to be even worse, with small numbers of Russian troops often entering the city. Excerpts from this November 30 post from ‘Dnipro Osint’ give an idea of how things really stand:
A week has passed since the enemy entered Zatyshshia and was far ahead, in places where the maps of the high-ranking generals showed no enemy presence at all.
So what has changed? Not all that much, really. Behind the grand words, one really wants to believe that big actions and big changes stand.
But what I see, once again, is only “stabilization” from Operational Command South. The respected roosters are incapable of anything more, and when your commander is a very “gifted” general (not), that’s what happens.
The direction of events in the Zaporizhzhia sector is far from optimistic — everything is fragile. The weather [foggy] plays strongly in the enemy’s favor, and they are using it successfully. We passed the point long ago where things could be changed with simple decisions.
…
I am not convinced that the faggots entering Huliaipole directly can be called “stabilization.” We really do see that the enemy has been pushed back somewhat along the Dobropillia–Varvarivka–Huliaipole road, but infantry cutting the road is only a matter of days.
We are watching our infantry being gunned down. This is not happening because things are going well. Especially when everyone already seems to understand that the situation in the area is a complete disaster. The failures are simply colossal.
None of the “stabilization measures” by the swaggering 33rd assault regiment or other special units give even the slightest hope of saving the town. The very high activity of enemy aviation only confirms that the enemy wants to bite out yet another small victory for themselves at any cost.
And they will bite it out.
The same post also bemoaned the low-quality of forcibly mobilized troops, and complained that the assault forces are given priority in terms of fresh troops (a common complaint):
It’s time to rethink how brigades are staffed through the “manual” principle — everything for some, nothing for others.
IT IS FINALLY TIME TO CHANGE SOMETHING IN THE MOBILIZATION PROCESS.
What is caught on the streets and shoved onto buses will not fight. It will only burden the units, create unjustified payouts, and once again distort the statistics on personnel numbers — the very statistics that “bright minds” later use to throw assault groups into attempts to recapture positions...
A December 3 post by ‘Thoughts of a Frontliner’ also noted Russian troops inside Huliaipole itself:
We’ll now move onto the situation in the Dnepropetrovsk and Donetsk oblasts, Manko’s AI-powered lies about frontline ‘successes’, and recent claims of systemic crisis in the Ukrainian army.
