UPDATED: UKRAINE WAR GOING VERY BADLY FOR UKRAINE AND UNITED KINGDOM

Here is an update. This is a new map of Ukraine with President Putin's suggested 600 km buffer zone inside Ukraine. Ukraine will be reduced to that small blue strip on the left. I really dont know how they intend to manage and maintain such a huge area but in the past the Soviet Union (Communist Russia) did manage the whole of Ukraine quite well for over 70 years.

Here is an update video. 4 minutes. 

Another Ukrainian activist (meaning anti Zelenskiyy and anti United Kingdom) has been assassinated in Madrid, Spain yesterday. He was shot four times in the back and once in the back of the head - in front of his children.

Summer is here (or there) in our northern hemisphere. In Ukraine the mud has disappeared, the ground is dry and has hardened. In Ukraine the topsoil layer is about 30 feet thick. The past couple of weeks the Russians have really picked up the pace of the advances. The Russians are advancing steadily all along the 1000 km frontlines.   Everyday now multiple Ukrainian villages and towns all along the frontline are falling to the Russians like ten pins.

They are expecting a major Russian summer offensive. It looks like it may have already started. If the Russians cut across to the port of Odessa and seize Ukraine's entire Black Sea coastline the war may conclude much sooner. 

Mr Putin has announced that he wants a 100 km buffer zone between the Russian held frontier and the rest of Ukraine. Now they are talking about a 600 km buffer zone - which means the whole of Ukraine.

Dmitri Medvedev's suggestion (he is a former president and prime minister of Russia under Putin) to carve up Ukraine between Poland, Rumania and Russia may become a reality yet. Here is Medvedev's idea for a future Ukraine.

 

The Russians are using their Iskander hypersonic missiles to target and take out the American Patriot anti-missile system. The Iskander is so fast that even the Patriot missile cannot shoot it down. This is a battle field development the whole of the West (and the rest of the world) are observing very carefully.

The Russians are also upgrading and introducing new weaponry which are changing the script at the battlefield. Among them are anti-drone defenses including small calibre shoulder fired rockets (which are cheap) and bird-shot type pellet guns which can bring down low flying drones. 

The Russians have also created three full divisions of unmanned naval weapons (surface, below surface and aerial) one in the Black Sea, one in the north (Arctic Ocean) and one more in the Pacific far east. In Ukraine they have expanded their unmanned drone warfare capability on the ground and in the air. The variety of weaponised ground drones (wheeled, tracks) is quite unbelievable.

Andrei Martyanov keeps repeating that war depends on the level of your industrial capacity. And in the Soviet model (the old communist Russia) to keep costs down, weapons production was spearheaded by State owned weapons manufacturers. But post-Soviet Union there is a twist - to keep them competitive and uptodate the government weapons makers have to compete with private sector manufacturers. 

To compete with the government owned weapons manufacturers the private weapons makers have to keep their costs low. To compete with the private manufacturers the government owned weapons makers have to be innovative and be more technologically advanced.  This model seems to work quite well in Russia, China and in India.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.