War update: back to the madhouse

'The most fucked up satire I've ever seen'. Sumy, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk. Zombie units, false reports, desertions. Throwing away men for the administrative border.

The past week I’ve been looking at political tensions within Ukraine. They’ve been inflamed over the course of 2025 largely because Trump’s attitude has given succor to Zelensky’s enemies. However, the Office of the President is unlikely to actually lose control of the situation, bar serious defeats on the frontline.

Today we’ll be taking a look at the current state of the frontline, as related to us by our Ukrainian militarist friends on telegram. I’d also like to give a shout out to Pavel Durov for his unwillingness to fix the telegram translate feature, possibly on the request of the French government. Thanks to him, the following content is even more exclusive than usual.

Today, our topics include:

— Detailed analysis of the current situation on the Sumy, southern Donetsk, and Zaporizhzhia frontlines

— Useless newly-created ‘zombie units’ sent to the Sumy direction, with Ukrainian military bloggers predicting a spike in desertions

— The issue of false reports made by commanders and the general staff regarding the real situation at the frontline

— Weak units wracked by desertion resulting in open flanks for their neighbours

— The debate over whether Russian forces have entered the Dnepropetrovsk oblast, and the reality of an emerging encirclement beneath the Russian spearhead

First, the bigger picture. Ukraine’s main OSINT resource DeepState put out a graph on July 1 showing monthly Russian progress in square kilometers from January 2024 to June 2025:

🏹 In June, the enemy occupied 556 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, the worst figure recorded in 2025.