Ukraine navigated out of the crisis, 24 July 2024

The single most important thing for a country like Ukraine, given their situation, is that everyone pulls in the same direction. History shows countless examples of countries and other state forms collapsing due to betrayal, unwillingness, internal conflicts, being late to act, and many other reasons.

The old classic story of the traitor who always opened the city gates at night for all the small kingdoms and was then hanged by the new owners as thanks for the help taught us in school that such behavior was bad.

Since Ukraine is a complex country with high corruption and an “old Soviet culture,” probably the single most important factors for their survival are that the citizens took up the fight and that they have inherited the approach of meeting violence with violence. I believe we can safely say that a low-arousal approach towards Russia ends in torture-murders and ethnic cleansing as thanks for shown restraint. Unfortunately, we in Europe have the luxury of letting Ukrainian children be tortured and murdered instead of our own, so we can still feel morally superior with low-arousal approaches on nice discussion forums with bottled water.

You can be completely calm that if Russia had succeeded in overrunning Ukraine, it would have resulted in enormous refugee flows to us. Then Russia would have sunk its claws into them and turned the tide against us instead, with the Ukrainians at the forefront just as they did with the breakaway republics in Donbass, always first as cheap human mine-clearers.

Either an expanded conflict or a Ukrainian underworld that took over Europe with the help of FSB, GRU, and SVR. A million unemployed soldiers who would have taken the pay they considered themselves entitled to in the way they knew best after five years of work experience.

Europe owes Ukraine everything, but still in 2026 we probably buy just under 15% of our LNG from Russia with poor excuses and visas we absolutely still throw out. In 2025, it was +450,000 Schengen visas from memory, now some Baltic minister has gotten upset about that again.

We are far beyond acceptable tardiness and now focused on our own priorities, which do not exactly include protection against Russia as point number one on the list. Firstly, Russia can still send in whichever operators they want to Europe with regular flights and legal visas, which is directly astonishing. If they had to be smuggled in, at least they would have had to sleep in the woods and grill sausages instead of, as now, sitting in the lounge with cheap champagne in ill-fitting tracksuits.

LNG is billions directly to the Russian war chest, the aluminum plant in Ireland provides them with the material they buy with all the euros they get from our LNG purchases – aluminum that then becomes drones to hunt Ukrainian children to death.

Not to mention all the German companies that have sold/sell technology to Russia still, or the machines for barrel manufacturing from Spain – from memory?

Greece has provided the ships so Russia could transship its dirty oil into legal fine oil for Europe to buy when we started tightening dirty oil purchases a while ago.

India has been the other outlet for Russia to build its war chest by buying Russian dirty oil that was refined and then sold to Europe, fuel Made in India is great, everyone exclaims happily.

Because we are environmentally friendly in Europe, we have a large import need, so in real money we are probably still a major provider of hard currency for Putin. The figures that we have stopped buying Russian are about as reliable as any parliamentary party’s election promises this summer.

If Europe had been this inventive and goal-focused when it comes to supporting Ukraine and clipping Russia’s wings, it would have been a very short war. Because when it comes to support for Ukraine, it has been completely stopped at times on technicalities that have directly caused momentum or offensive operations to die out. The conspiratorial might suspect that we used the support as a choke collar for quite a while.

Pretty simple to steal a page from the USA and inform everyone that if they are caught buying oil, LNG, or fuel of Russian origin, they get a 200 million euro fine straight away and a four-year business ban or 82 years in prison if the crime is considered serious, where the threshold for serious is more than 10 liters. Then you unleash thirty IT nerds who get to work full-time hunting sinners with bonus-based pay.

Despite all this, Ukraine keeps grinding on to protect Europe’s children against the Russian hydra, but this war has been allowed to go on far too long already. It is a tragedy every day that is still difficult to handle.

Everything has been said about the Baltics even though the Baltics are now starting to get worried; if it comes, it looks like we have described, nothing more to add. This article is good and in line with my own concerns. You also know the remedy for this: send in our brigades to the Baltics today and honor the long-standing agreements with our allied brothers/sisters/all other accepted gender identities.

https://unn.ua/en/news/russia-near-nato-borders-baltic-countries-actively-warn-of-possible-aggression

Ukraine thus has a loosely connected mosaic that pulls in the same direction as long as they have a clear common enemy, and they do until a ceasefire, which makes such an event high risk, as you know from previous posts. But in between, the conflict comes to the surface as now with Fedorov because he did not stay silent.

There is some concern because the Germans have had some secret meeting with the Russians in Azerbaijan which they are trying to deny.

At the same time, Rubio has met Lavrov.

The USA obviously wants an end to this horrific war as soon as possible to save the children. At the same time, they are bombing Iran to ruins and do not want to hear about any demands to protect the children there – a hidden agenda with Ukraine we can thus assume and entirely in line with how they have acted since 2022.

Fedorov and then Syrskyi have been fired, the new acting FM is Khmara and Drapatyi became Chief of Defense. In 2024, when Zalizhny was fired, Syrskyi threw out all of Zalizhny’s staff as well as many brigade commanders to appoint his own.

All the new appointments have one thing in common: plenty of marks in the protocol from Syrskyi, so it is not unlikely that some from Syrskyi’s gang will either resign voluntarily or be fired.

Yes, if they had not reshuffled at all, it probably would have been best right now because Ukraine is about to start offensive operations, but since the corps are ready, the defense forces are not paralyzed at all. Think of a Swedish parliamentary election when they cannot form a government and the country keeps going for a few months, and just when everyone starts wondering if national politics is needed, we have a new indispensable government.

Drapatyi’s and Khmara’s appointments also caused full panic on the Russian side – apparently a very big negative for them.

EU did right to keep quiet because this is an internal matter, but in the long run, it is our taxpayers’ money they use, and if it becomes too clear that much is being stolen, that tap will be shut off quite quickly. All Putin-controlled parties will scream about budget discipline as soon as that door is open. If tax collection starts to decrease this autumn in some kind of financial crisis, it will be even easier to push through.

The conflict between Fedorov and Syrskyi probably stems from where the money should go. Fedorov is the prodigy who has been working since 2022 on the drone weapon and finally became defense minister, where he immediately started reorganizing so that drones became a prioritized weapon system. He wanted to become Zelensky’s chief of staff after Yermak, but Zelensky thought he would cause less damage as defense minister, which was completely wrong.

Syrskyi is a “boots-on-the-ground” old fox within the armed forces and presumably has his contacts with the traditional arms industry. For a few years, we have been receiving a flood of information about overpriced products, unnecessary purchases, and all sorts of other things that are a natural part of the ecosystem in all countries, including Sweden.

You have to decide for yourself what is most important to prioritize; the drone weapon today accounts for over 90% of Russian losses. It is also not the case that all other capabilities drop to zero – there are still shooters and fragmentation protection that have previously conducted offensives with significantly less equipment than they have today.

In addition, Fedorov has actively cleared out corrupt bureaucrats in the MoD and started tender procedures, which naturally led to an outcry.

There are also many reports of abuses within the armed forces where some regiments have functioned better than others, and Skala is one of the worse. So it continues for quite a while with various comparisons, and one can certainly hold the opinion that tough new leadership is needed in a war, but the line is thin before it turns into something else, which has been simmering beneath the surface and led to the protests.

Yes, Fedorov was far ahead of his time; in construction, our municipalities always give contracts to the big giants PEAB and NCC, who steal 30%, hand the entire contract to a subcontractor, and go to sleep with pillows full of bills doing nothing. The drone weapon swallowed budgets from elsewhere, and moreover, there were new manufacturers who got direct contracts. The MoD redirected money flows from established companies to completely new ones without them being able to cut their 30%, which NCC and PEAB apparently have written into the constitution. You can consider whether M would ever have agreed to this after the defense industry and Wallenberg massaged them for a while.

Then Fedorov canceled directly inappropriate contracts that were overpriced or simply unnecessary. When I worked at Solna municipality for half a year during university work practice, I went through costs with a new head of the waste unit – found 15 containers that had been standing for 10 years and cost 25,000 SEK/month each, which no one knew what they were for; the company invoiced monthly. The small company could not explain it either, of course, but it probably led to a funeral drink and voodoo doll with needles for me after that move. The unit manager canceled a whole bunch of strange contracts, but I heard from her a few years later, so she was at least not thrown into a garbage truck and removed.

This was probably the real background to the conflict, and that Fedorov was hard-clearing the MoD among the arms industry’s contacts that they had bribed over time. Seeing such investments go down by five would make any CEO see red, especially if the bribe account had been a large budget item.

Syrskyi was probably the person who could take the fight with him since his side places orders for much of the other through the units’ requests but which then became deprioritized.

Corruption cannot be avoided; it exists everywhere, including with us as is well known if you have followed the media somewhat, even though it always dies out completely without action after some “we have been naive.” In Ukraine, there is more money and poorer control due to the war, but I think Zelensky should have handled this much more neatly.

This is the second time he has gone after those who want to sue corruption; the last time it was the anti-corruption authority he tried to force into obedience but had to give up.

I wonder if it was also like with Zalizhny, that Fedorov became a bit too popular – just thinking aloud and have no evidence at all. The only thing I know is that it has started to circulate that Fedorov has a political future, and we know that Zalizhny intends to run for president when that day comes. I wouldn’t be surprised if Fedorov appears in politics in the future.

Fedorov has refused to come back in any form other than FM, which Zelensky cannot give him now that he has been fired and also gone public in the media; that bridge is burned.

Syrskyi’s situation was completely untenable, so Zelensky had no choice but to also fire him to try to find a new balance – no one was allowed to stay instead of both staying, and Zelensky had set some clear boundaries instead.

Probably Zelensky underestimated the backlash.

Zelensky had one of the war’s most important decisions to make now – who would become the new Chief of Defense.

Last weekend he met corps commanders and all kinds of senior officers, so he probably tried to listen to the armed forces outside the general staff and seriously take in what the troop commanders had to say – after all, they are the ones who count, the corps commanders who represent the brigade commanders who represent the soldiers in the trenches in eastern Ukraine.

Now it turned out very well with Drapatyi and Khmera, so Zelensky managed to solve this by doing what was best for the country.

It is at least nice to see that Ukraine has democracy in the sense that parliament and citizens can speak up when power slips in the wrong direction.

The rumor mill is in full swing, so no point in writing a lot about it; the above is well known, but of course, there will now be full mudslinging and a Russia weighing in. I’ve seen some film where Drapatyi kneels before the British ambassador when he received some medal, so he is now (according to Russian psyops) the British paid man in Ukraine and an arch-capitalist.

Then you understand just like me that the reason Europe does not have any drone weapons today in 2026 but orders frigates so it smokes is exactly the same disease as in Ukraine.

Or Aurora 2026 where the entire defense Twitter praised the new capability of not being able to handle the drone threat at all as a great display of strength, and all criticism was to go Putin’s errands.

Ukraine is at least trying to handle its systemic problems; we buy frigates instead and call all criticism of tardiness Putinist treason.

Just like in a Swedish hospital where nothing works without the nurses, but they always save on them and instead hire layer upon layer of administrators who invent new tasks that are put on the nurses. Just as our administrators have to make themselves relevant, it works the same way in the Ukrainian armed forces.

Administration and staffs become top-heavy, corruption runs rampant, and everyone forgets the shooters, the critical resource that makes you either win or lose.

In October 2024, when Vuhledar fell, I was completely caught off guard but quickly understood why when the 72nd brigade, as the first unit and primary source, went on verbal defense and confirmed that they were a 300-strong brigade but covered an area for a full-strength brigade. This was after Zelensky went out during the summer and declared that the personnel shortage had now been addressed. It had simply spread a culture in the armed forces to try to find other tasks than lying in the trenches and taking the hit.

Understandable since 80% of the wounded returned to service and the brigades were acutely understaffed – front-line service was a death sentence or possibly a civilian life without arms and legs.

Now Russia will probably mobilize this fall after the elections in September, and Ukraine is trying to meet this with its own mobilization. It is now crucial that the citizens have full confidence in the armed forces, otherwise they choose to stay away. And that those mobilized choose front-line service, otherwise it makes no difference if no one goes to the front.

Putin is extremely pressured, the number of window jumps and purges within the former inner circle with people who have been alongside him since the 90s is becoming long. Most recently, Patrushev in hospital after some FSB poison, Rosenberg’s drug, and not least coup rumors within the officer corps that the FSB has begun to crack down on – more window jumps with obligatory underwear tugs for generals soon. Or Putin loses his grip and dangles, who knows. At least it is gratifying to see.

Thanks to the drone weapon, Ukraine can do great damage to the country Russia, and Putin has two cards left to play: escalate the war and mobilize to increase pressure in Ukraine.

It is therefore crucial that Ukraine holds together until Russia collapses, and that Europe does not let itself be talked out of it, but one should be clear that everything is constantly high risk so leaning back and believing everything will fix itself is a very bad risk management strategy. It has been terrible throughout the war but Europe has been extremely lucky that Russia made the mistake of attacking Ukraine first.

Ukraine has just navigated one of its worst crises in the entire war and it seems they have managed to come out on top, again.

Concerned about Germany’s shift in how they view the war but probably half-empty LNG tanks are becoming important for them?

https://www.reuters.com/world/azerbaijan-president-says-german-russian-talks-were-held-baku-2026-07-21

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