Ukraine daily update February 3, 2025

The March Lions ✊✊

This is what HEROES look like.

God bless them all 🙏 pic.twitter.com/RocSU9Y7G4

— UKRAINIAN SQUAD🇺🇦 (@ukrainiansquad) February 2, 2025

Having completed military service, having children of one’s own, and being jumpy at the slightest thing, I always think that one can empathize with the engineer who lies in his trench in Donetsk, getting FABs dropped on him between attacks by 15 North Koreans five times a day, straight into his one-man hole for months on end.

But one cannot – sure, one may have experienced acute fear of death a few times in situations in countries one perhaps shouldn’t have visited and places one should have avoided, but to subject oneself to this for several years and refusal to surrender is a different beast. My guess is that one is destroyed when coming out of it, and readjusting to civilian life becomes too difficult for many. Those who are lucky have parents or a partner who refuse to give up, but many self-medicate with alcohol or take their own lives. For example, apparently around fifty visitors from that peace festival in Israel that Hamas stormed have taken their lives. It was an extreme situation where young partygoers were exposed to without the slightest preparation, and Hamas went hard on the participants.

On the other side of the coin, there are incredibly many who manage to avoid combat throughout the war, but the comparison is with the tip of the spear, not the valor of the chair.

Down here, we were supposed to take a helicopter to Mexico today for a site visit on another project, a 2.5-hour flight one way over the sea in old Vietnam-era helicopters. The company doesn’t have my insurance in order, and my own travel insurance that I got as a “safety first” Swede doesn’t apply in Mexico. And I have seriously started to consider if the company is just a front for drug smuggling 😀

So instead, I suddenly got a stomach bug and am sitting at home writing today’s post, the boss sent an administrator with stomach medicine.

But the shooters in eastern Ukraine don’t have that luxury, the group is there in their advanced position, facing massive attacks week after week, and if they’re lucky, they have ammunition.

If one doesn’t do everything right, one dies, or at best gets a shrapnel in the stomach, and chance strikes completely blindly – there’s no way to improve the odds at all by being the best in class Swedish style.

You’ve probably all seen this film, but it can never be watched too often as a reminder of what it’s like to be in the middle of a mechanized attack, deafening death 😬

One of the most impressive videos of the war so far pic.twitter.com/aD9DTEUzKr

— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) May 14, 2022

Up until now, the tip of the spear in eastern Ukraine has almost guaranteed disability or death, as 80% of the wounded return to service and the maneuver brigades have become increasingly understaffed, and it’s a high-intensity war.

One cannot expect equal treatment, fair treatment, or that others will do their job. One simply has to behave very un-Swedish to survive.

Here’s some news that I received with pure joy – the neglected northern Luhansk has started deploying drone warfare against the Russian bastards. This means that neglected fronts have started to move.

Last week, we got some hard numbers –

16% of refinery capacity shut down.

20% of oil exports halted.

And now one of the largest LNG processing plants is also damaged by gunfire 🤩🤩🤩

Everything else is pointing straight downwards as well – agriculture, food production, the IT industry, and the financial sector.

They have financed the war industry by forcing banks to provide $250 billion in loans to them, which will of course be written off.

A wave of layoffs on the way

And then it emerged that their national fund (like Norway’s oil fund) is starting to run out, scraping the last coins from the bottom of the barrel.

They tried to create a forex buffer in Turkey that the US snatched, but it was so little, only $5 billion…

Now the arsenals are empty when it comes to equipment – unsurprisingly, it turned out that the last 30% was just scrap, like T72 tanks with open hatches where the autoloader had completely rusted and all technology was missing from the vehicles.

We’ve done these summaries so many times in the war that I can’t do it again, but if one were to add up losses + 30% + what little is left at the fronts, it probably wouldn’t be far from 100%.

Yes, Russia still has some and is still trying to pose a threat to the Baltics with its two ACs, and here an entire Armata unexpectedly drives by.

It's alive.

ruSSian conscripts marching on the background of a T-14 tank. pic.twitter.com/ortwYZdlnN

— 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝕯𝔢𝔞𝔡 𝕯𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔯𝔦𝔠𝔱△ 🇬🇪🇺🇦🇺🇲🇬🇷 (@TheDeadDistrict) January 20, 2025

And then there are 400,000 in internal troops in all different groups with good equipment, but they are there for power struggles, balance, and to oppress the population. They cannot be sent to Ukraine – we have discussed this before as well.

Russia cannot mobilize 1-2 million men either, for they would pose a greater threat to Putin and the elite than Ukraine.

And the nuclear card has been played out in the most humiliating way, with one missile detonating in the silo and the other not being armed, so no one cared – how much have you heard about nuclear saber-rattling in recent months?

Nothing, right? And the question is, how have the discussions with China and the US gone behind closed doors after the latest fiasco?

The last hope seemed to lie with Mango Mussolini, but he’s not delivering even though there are some highly suspicious things, like high trade tariffs against all allies.

Here he goes hard against the EU, for example

Trump: "The UK is way out of line and we'll see. The UK, but European Union is really out of line. UK is out of line but I'm sure that one, I think that one can be worked out. But the European Union, it's an atrocity what they've done." pic.twitter.com/ewKn7cae0Q

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 3, 2025

My thought is that perhaps he has a task to stir up everything so that UA gets deprioritized?

All that will happen is that Tesla gets hit with 100% tariffs in the entire West 🤣🤣

The real question is whether Trump and Musk are actually good for the EU because they force us to pull ourselves together.

Macron, whom everyone loves to hate, and whom I try to nuance a bit, once again takes the lead in everything.

Have you, just like me, also thought about how plane crashes come in groups?

Last time there were probably 3-4 accidents, and now there have been 4 more in the US over a few days. For me, this is outside the norm, and in times of Russian warfare against the West – at least reason for suspicion.

Everyone blames Trump for stopping new hires at the FAA and shutting down the DIA program or something as reasons for the accidents, but there’s a risk of leaving the instigator in peace if one pushes that line too hard.

Now Zelensky has really spilled the beans and informed us all of the dark secrets the US doesn’t want us to know.

-The US has been

If you feel just like I do that the absence of red lines there is not exactly equal treatment, then you are not wrong – this is a historical injustice from the USA and one cannot criticize them too much.

But then you know just like I do that when history is written, and the movies are made, it was the USA that saved Ukraine, which barely managed, those clowns, shooting tank shells in the wrong direction and getting punctures on Bradleys.

I received criticism for my claims about this, so it’s nice that Zelensky now confirms it and it moves on to history instead.

Then the USA has sent less than half of the promised funds.

And finally, Zalizhny tried to invade Belgorod already in 2022 – even surrounding the city 🤩

But the politics did not approve.

A reasonable guess – the USA put a stop to it. Now everyone will claim that it wasn’t like that and that I have no evidence, but there is something called probability as well, and the more we know over time, the more of our guesses have proven to be correct – the probability that my guess is 100% correct is 1 according to Newton’s third law.

I know that some people think that the USA should no longer be criticized, but I think they deserve to be tarred and feathered for how they have acted in this war.

It’s not the knife stabs from your enemies that hurt, but those from your close ones – or something like that, right?

Those who are supposed to be UA friends but betray – that is the great betrayal.

Scholz and CPD come in as a good second, and they want to turn on the gas tap immediately after the ceasefire, as they want now.

Germany has rarely been on the right side of history, as everyone knows, but the USA’s self-painted image of themselves as defenders of justice is a bit tarnished.

Their previous MENA rampages have been partly explainable, and then we have never had information directly from a party allied with the USA but rather from the opposing side, so it can easily be dismissed.

The puzzle we have put together with the USA from this war is very sad – cynical, obstructive, only thinking about their own business, and turning a blind eye to tortured and murdered children.

It may be that the USA’s instant Karma is Trump, they simply get what they deserve 😀

Anyway, it probably wouldn’t hurt for the EU to pull itself together and bad times breed strong men (and women and all other gender identities), so we can get some order in politics, defense, and domestic policy.

That the Green Party has changed its mind and thinks nuclear power is good after six (6) decommissioned reactors, they should be sentenced to life imprisonment for that, but in Sweden, you can burn down the parliament if there is a political majority and then receive a parliamentary pension.

But not everything is pitch black (it isn’t, but it sounded good) because Russian indirect fire, including FAB, is now at very low levels.

You remember 4000 FAB per month before, now it’s down to 112/day and 6000 artillery shells/day instead of the 30,000 at the start of the war.

Since UA takes 70% of its losses from indirect fire, this is very good.

And as we could reveal yesterday on Bluesky as the first news provider in the world after all the OSINTers and established media, UA either knocked out a command center or higher staff up in Kursk with high-ranking RU officers and North Korean officers 🤩🤩🤩🤩

Ukraine’s intelligence gathering is completely superior, and you remember how they could hit staff meetings within an hour and put a 155mm right on them while they were still close to the front. The Russians have adapted a bit after too many losses of high-ranking officers, but UA still finds their staffs and command centers even in depth and knocks them out – cut off the head of the North Korean lizard.

Within two months, we will know if Rocket man is sending more soldiers or not – right now I actually don’t know, there is information about both, that it’s over and that now the main force is coming.

We have also seen various vehicles with new weapon stations, the latest being an MTLB with a new advanced weapon station, and we have previously seen it on BMP-1, BTR-70, and VAB (French Renault cars).

The chassis is okay, but a hand-cranked 12.7mm or my favorite ZSU22-2 doesn’t make as much noise as a heavy violent weapon station with good aiming devices – UA is converting old wagons into the latest luxury version quietly here, and they have thousands.

We know from before that the entire EU is helping with these remote programs in addition to servicing the vehicles, so over time, they have surely started deploying a not insignificant amount of armor protection now with heavy weapon stations.

Not to mention the drones – they built 4 million of them in 2024 🤩🤩🤩🤩

Even a preschooler realizes that several million is a high number, especially since RU produces robots in the hundreds and drones in the hundreds of thousands at most (threw in something that I thought sounded credible).

And above all – UA’s strategic drone warfare, do you think it will slow down or increase 😁

It’s hard not to be -positive -positive here actually, even though one might be a front for drug smuggling, I need to think another round about those two suitcases the boss asked me to bring to Sweden on vacation full of gifts for his family, thought his family was in Italy…