Bulletins and International News Discussion from November 24th to November 30th, 2025 - First as Farce, Then as Kinda Just Embarrassing - COTW: Mexico

SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.net · 2 days ago

Bulletins and International News Discussion from November 24th to November 30th, 2025 - First as Farce, Then as Kinda Just Embarrassing - COTW: Mexico

Tervell [he/him]@hexbear.net · edit-2 55 minutes ago

https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/strategic-sedatives-for-the-mutant

well, I guess another HTML for today, I’ve had this post bookmarked for a while, and I just saw that substack gives you one free post to unlock, so what the hell, might as well do it now

overall - really bleak times for the Ukrainian military

Strategic sedatives for the mutant army

Drunk commanders expending sick soldiers. The 2023 stillbirth.

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Today we’ll be taking a tour through the Ukrainian army. Luckily for our health, a virtual one, relying on reports from Ukraine’s brave warriors for European Civilization. First, testimony from a man held in the dungeons of the Vinnytsia manpower distribution center. Commanders drill hidden phones to the wall, mobilized men cough up blood amidst the damp and mold, showers are only allowed twice a week at best, the healthy get sick, and escapees are beaten to a bloody pulp:

They bring in everyone here without distinction — chronic alcoholics who can’t stop shaking, drug addicts with burnt veins, skinny and toothless people. They even bring in homeless men in terrible condition — covered in sores, eczema, and all kinds of chronic illnesses. Everyone’s psychological state is horrible

Meanwhile, even nationalist militarists have been complaining about the mobilization of one of the country’s premier medical engineers, responsible for producing equipment that saves lives at the frontlines:

I asked Pavlo: “But you have eyesight problems!” (he wears glasses). “They don’t give a shit, they said I’m fit to serve…” — he replied.

Next, the future. Why complacency in the western media about the ‘100 year Russian offensive’

covers an ‘operational clusterfuck’ with a ‘strategic sedative.’

Meanwhile, how all this translates into the frontline. First, the situation in the south. Amidst Russian advances, the commander of a battalion from the 142nd brigade sent to save the situation is an

incompetent rogue and, according to some reports, arrives at the command post EXCLUSIVELY while intoxicated.

we should bring back calling people “rogues”, it’s a really cool insult

Besides his drunkenness, the commander’s proclivity towards lies has already led to ‘frightening… considerable losses’. This is apparently all in due course for the 142nd brigade, whose only purpose is to supply expendable infantry for other worn-out units:

It’s worth adding that these commanders had previously effectively annihilated the brigade on the Pokrovsk axis. In some companies fewer than ten people remained.

Meanwhile, recent proclamations by high command that the corps reform has been completed are ridiculed by military bloggers. In fact, the old practice of ruthlessly burning through the infantry of units ‘relocated’ from elsewhere continues. Our correspondents explain how this practice has meaninglessly expended lives on the Pavlohrad axis, where command has:

decided to fight an old problem with old methods that, as it turned out, only make the problems grow exponentially.

Finally, a more theoretical post I translated today begins with the premise that:

As of 2025, the Ukrainian military is a bizarre mutant in which the most talented and the most inept people coexist side by side. The brigades, battalions, staffs, tables, and positions are identical — but some cosplay the U.S. Army during the “Desert Storm,” while others resemble Iraqis.

Besides explaining the heterogenous tendencies existing in the army today, the text also explores the past. It argues that the only high-quality sections of the Ukrainian army destroyed themselves in the steppes of Kherson in 2023. That is, even before the failed counteroffensive of that year, which was simply ‘the nail in the coffin’. Since then, the army has become a Gogolesque phantom:

Our “classical” army has become an army on paper — an army of stillborn brigades, untrained personnel, and incompetent staffs. In this army people worry more about overpayments of additional pay and nonwritten-off equipment than about losing personnel. On paper you have a combat-ready battalion — respectable (not) members (fuck) of the commission signed off — but in reality there are 300 mobilized men: 150 of whom are fucked in the head, an incompetent commander, dreadful training, no commanders at most levels or NCOs, and a lack of supplies needed for modern war. On paper you have 100 trained soldiers, but in reality they literally know nothing, and every brigade asks that people be sent to complete basic combat training immediately within the units.

The future

The Economist put out an article on October 17, triumphantly proclaiming that Russia would have to keep fighting for 103 years to take all of Ukraine.

real WW2 nazi propaganda hours

also reminds me of those alt-history videogames/settings which are like “World War 1 has been going for a hundred years!” and it’s like, going on with what manpower, are they fucking breeding poilus and tommies in cloning vats? (this would at least be an actually interesting concept for a sci-fi dystopia setting, where a brutal WW1-style attritional war can only go on by virtue of the parties involved literally mass-manufacturing soldiers - the anime Ergo Proxy actually had an episode like this, where a post-apocalyptic arcology was fighting off a robot invasion and only surviving by just breeding more soldiers, but it was just the one episode)

But, Ukrainian ‘Officer’ did not feel reassured, writing the following the same day:

Shall we fight for another 100 years? Can somebody tell these ‘experts’ that it doesn’t work like that. I get really pissed off when those analysts try to calculate the time it would take Russia to capture certain territories based on what happened once before. First of all — to what end? What use is that information? Probably to soothe someone and cover an ‘operational clusterfuck’ with a ‘strategic sedative.’ Like: our stomach hurts, but we’re still a long way from needing an appendix removed, so we can keep eating whatever we want. Unfortunately, the snowball effect doesn’t occur to any of these authors. Second, war is not subject to any formulas, theorems, or axioms. Yet for some reason people still bluntly compute timelines for enemy territorial gains based on past events, while the factors that influence all this are not constants but variable inputs. Has the war of 2024 changed compared to 2025? — Obviously yes. If one side quickly adapts to new rules of warfare, pulls a trump card, or simply exploits the opponent’s problems — all your mathematical calculations collapse completely.

On October 18, Officer wrote about how the dangerous effects of winter. Since Ukrainian sources constantly complain of Russian drone superiority, he seems to be implying that the Russians are the ‘hunters’ with the advantage:

We’re entering a rather interesting phase of combat in the modern drone war: in this autumn–winter period, when kill-zones have already formed on both sides of the line of contact in most sectors, logistics will become maximally complicated because the greenery is almost gone, leaves have completely fallen — the terrain’s camouflage value is minimal, and the number of revealing factors (snow, etc.) will increase. The conditions for infantry being in the field and for their approaches to positions will become much harder; accordingly, whoever is hunting will have the advantage, and whoever is hiding will be in a less favorable position. The headaches for infantry will grow, because mechanization and lots of equipment are all well and good, but it is the infantry that actually forms the frontline battle zones—and we haven’t moved away from that.

Engineers to the infantry

On October 19, a telegram run by a veteran of the ultra-nationalist paramilitary ‘Shakhtarsk-Tornado’ (closed down years ago for extreme violence against civilians) complained that specialists were being mobilized:

️I’m asking for maximum reposts! And please read carefully what kind of *** is going on. Ternopil’s military enlistment officers have detained a man whose company is the only one in Ukraine that manufactures surgical instruments, without which not a single military hospital can operate — as well as civilian hospitals, including Ohmatdyt. They’ve already assigned him to a brigade, and the military medical commission was “passed” in a matter of minutes. I asked Pavlo: “But you have eyesight problems!” (he wears glasses). “They don’t give a shit, they said I’m fit to serve…” — he replied. He’d asked me many times to help him get enlisted, but I understood that his work was far too important. And not as a joke — quite seriously, I told him: “There are so many guys here who are crippled, and without your work it’s impossible. So keep doing what you do.”

…

Remember the story of another man from Ternopil — Bohdan Pokitko. The situation is almost identical. But Pavlo’s work is real help that saves lives — both military and civilian. I know many people who’ve been “taken.” But I’ve never written about anyone — until now. I can’t stay silent. … You might ask — what about an exemption from mobilization for such people? Well, apparently, you have to pay a lot for that. But a man who’s taken out loans and donates almost his entire salary to the Armed Forces of Ukraine can’t afford that! That’s how we damn live!

The Aidar Batallion’s Stanislav Buniatov also commented on the incident:

The military medical commission, as usual, was completed in just a few minutes. People like him, as always, have no exemption from mobilization — unlike McDonald’s employees, who do.

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Tervell [he/him]@hexbear.net · 58 minutes ago

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On October 21, the publication strana.ua shared the testimony of a recently mobilized man at a ‘manpower distribution centre’ in the central region of Vinnytsia. I illustrated it with some photos of a mobilization centre in Kyiv. Conditions in a regional city like Vinnytsia are likely worse:

Our training unit can be compared to a real prison. There are 120 of us living in a cramped basement — bunk beds are packed tightly together. Out of the 120 people, some have tuberculosis, and a few clearly have an open form of it — they cough up blood, and some have blood on their pillows and sheets. Everyone sleeps practically on top of each other; it’s impossible to turn away from the person coughing next to you — no personal space at all, the beds are right up against each other. The walls are damp, condensation runs down them, everything is covered with fungus and mold. There’s no air to breathe at all. It’s suffocating. People with serious illnesses, even those with high fevers, beg for medical help, but they’re only taken to see a doctor once every two or three weeks. After that, at best, they’re sent to a hospital. Even those who arrived here healthy have already gotten sick — everyone is coughing. We asked for ventilation to be installed in the basement, but the command simply ignored our requests. After the training ground, we come back filthy. But we’re allowed to shower only twice a week. And even that started only recently, after things almost reached a riot — when our group first arrived, we didn’t see a shower for two weeks.

The toilet is outside, filthy, completely unsanitary. There’s no toilet paper; we have to buy it ourselves. The food is terrible — meager and monotonous: for breakfast, porridge with a sausage, weak tea with bread; for lunch, some kind of thin slop, again porridge or pasta. For dinner — leftovers from lunch, no vegetables at all. When we first arrived, they confiscated all our phones. We’re allowed to use them once or twice a week, for only half an hour. Even prisoners in jail communicate with the outside world more often than we do. Of course, under such conditions, many try to escape. But every escape brings repression for those who remain. Recently, one man escaped. They found him in a nearby village, beat him, knocked out his tooth, brought him back covered in blood. After that incident, a new rule was introduced in our unit: at night, we’re allowed to go to the toilet only in underwear and slippers, so no one can run away. And only in groups of five — until five people are ready to go, the commanders don’t let anyone out. So, there we are, five half-naked men running to that filthy outdoor toilet, while another group waits their turn.

Many people try to escape from here, even volunteers — they just didn’t expect the kind of hell they were being brought into. If they find a hidden phone, they take it and screw it with a drill to the door of the commander’s office. There are already three phones attached to the door as a ‘lesson’ to others. The commanders live separately, in good rooms, while we’re treated like cattle. The only people who treat us decently are the instructors. No complaints about them — they’re experienced combat veterans. But even they are trying their best to get transferred out of here — the psychological atmosphere in this training center is unbearable. We’re all being trained as assault troops, just regular infantry, so the command treats us like expendable material — cannon fodder. Yet among us there are many specialists of all kinds — translators, engineers, technicians, and radio mechanics — people who could actually serve the Armed Forces in their professional roles. They bring in everyone here without distinction — chronic alcoholics who can’t stop shaking, drug addicts with burnt veins, skinny and toothless people. They even bring in homeless men in terrible condition — covered in sores, eczema, and all kinds of chronic illnesses. Everyone’s psychological state is horrible

More of the same

The shift to the corps system was meant to overcome the old habit of sending hapless ‘meat units’ up and down the front for the caprices of powerful commanders. Units ‘attached’ to larger units are routinely worn down, their infantry carelessly sent to die in pointless missions. The corps reform was intended to make sure that each corps is responsible for a fixed number of units and a fixed section of the front. Thereby, theoretically, commanders would no longer be able to simply burn through their subordinates. The telegram channel ‘Voice of Khortytsia’ usually tries to be optimistic about the reforms that high command recently proclaimed complete. On October 19, however, it gave up:

At least something in the world is stable. How the General Staff is fighting the threat of the enemy’s advance on a specific sector. This is about the Pavlohrad direction, about the fighting on the border between Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts. [EIU - this has been the site of significant Russian advances over the past month. Pictured is a comparison between September 1 and October 22.] There, as many of you know, the enemy is concentrating huge resources. After they realized that Pokrovsk would have to be taken by attrition, they stepped up their logistics. Given that situation, the huge force package they were holding on the Pokrovsk axis simply wasn’t needed. The enemy found a more “useful” employment for it. They threw those forces into Dnipropetrovsk oblast. Meanwhile, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine — and General Syrskyi personally — decided to fight an old problem with old methods that, as it turned out, only make the problems grow exponentially. A decision was made to reinforce the Pavlohrad direction by redeploying brigades from other parts of the front. … Removing these forces from their sectors will not lead to anything fatal or irreversible. It’s just sad to realize that the General Staff, after all this time, is incapable of countering enemy advances by other means. I would also note that this contradicts the very purpose of the corps-level reform, which was supposed to stabilize corps composition and stop these constant brigade “relocations.”

Besides that, the enemy’s strategic intent for the coming year is becoming obvious. But for some reason the General Staff and the country’s senior military leadership are ignoring it. They’ve completely dropped the ball on the Lyman direction, at the junction of two troop groupings. All of that has been left on the shoulders of brigade generals Sirchenko and Biletskyi [the White Fuhrer of the 3rd Azov Corps - EIU]. The Pavlohrad direction, where the enemy is trying to advance, is indeed dangerous, because it lacks the dense built-up area found in much of Donetsk oblast. But, in my view, the actions being taken by the country’s senior military leadership in the zone of the 20th Army Corps defy explanation. Removing commanders, a confusing hodgepodge of units, media “victories,” constant lies, and so on will not give us a real advantage on the battlefield. It’s time to understand that.

Further south, ‘Officer’ reported on October 20 that the situation has been worsening:

Huliaipole direction. Despite the limited media attention on this sector, the situation there is fairly unstable. On the Poltavka–Malynivka–Uspenivka stretch, the removed infantry is carrying out regular assault actions, using mainly convicts and other scum. The logistics situation is more or less the same as everywhere else — the enemy is trying to control all lines of communication, setting up a carousel of FPV drones and using optics as well. In some units there is outright chaos, because for many the Zaporizhzhia direction has become a relaxed posting, and I would advise command to pay attention to this sector, since the road to Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro effectively opens through Huliaipole — an open steppe area with very few settlements. The enemy doesn’t need to attack Zaporizhzhia head-on; it’s enough to go around the impassable lines, as was warned a year ago.

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Tervell [he/him]@hexbear.net · edit-2 52 minutes ago

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That same day, ‘Voice of Khortytsia’ wrote about the situation reigning in the 20th corps, the grouping responsible for the south:

The 20th Army Corps… or rather its sector. Again. This concerns the situation northeast of Huliaipole. A Battalion Tactical Group (BTG) from the 142nd Separate Mechanized Brigade recently arrived there; previously it was operating under the command of the “South” troop grouping. Before that the unit had spent more than three months in recovery. The BTG was sent into the sector of the 20th Army Corps to reinforce the positions of the 102nd Territorial Defense Brigade. Units of the 142nd were supposed to be held in the second echelon to extinguish any potential flare-ups in time. On the first day the BTG suffered significant losses because neither the battalion-group command nor the 20th Army Corps provided the soldiers with proper preparation before moving to combat positions. Afterwards an order was received to withdraw to Poltavka, where the BTG was expected to organize a defense. Moreover, one of the companies from the 142nd BTG was taken away and subordinated to the 110th OMBR. Again — all of this was overseen by the 20th Army Corps. I remind you that the BTG, together with part of the 102nd Territorial Defense Brigade, was responsible for the defense along the Uspenivka–Poltavka line. The BTG commander is an incompetent rogue and, according to some reports, arrives at the command post EXCLUSIVELY while intoxicated. That’s what people who work with this BTG on the front say. In addition, the commander of the 142nd BTG lies to his superiors about the situation in his area of responsibility. It was, in part, because of his lies that the 74th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion, sent to assist, suffered losses when moving into position.

It’s important to note that the new leadership of the 20th Army Corps, represented by Lieutenant Colonel Korsukov, is unable to manage its assigned troops and attached units. The BTG’s losses are already more than considerable, even though it hasn’t been operating on this sector long. And it’s frightening to think how many casualties among personnel of other units have resulted from the 142nd BTG commander’s lies. Until just a few days ago the BTG commander continued to send assault groups in an attempt to retake Poltavka, but the results were uniformly negative. The outcome — the enemy is already digging in in the groves west of Poltavka and is creating a serious threat to the rear positions of all the battalions stationed there. There is also a high likelihood of losing control of the road from Malynivka to Huliaipole, which would allow the enemy to put pressure on that important settlement from the east. The BTG in question was formed on the basis of the 2nd Mechanized Battalion of the 142nd Separate Mechanized Brigade. It is commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Artyom Bibik. Bibik is a close associate of the 142nd brigade commander, Colonel Dzhus, which is why such incidents are apparently overlooked. It’s worth adding that these commanders had previously effectively annihilated the brigade on the Pokrovsk axis. In some companies fewer than ten people remained. Dear authors of Telegram channels who read me — please do not remain indifferent and share this information. The fate of the subordinates of the commander of the 2nd Mechanized Battalion of the 142nd OMBR, Lieutenant Colonel Bibik, depends on us.

Mannerheims Son, a military telegram which is often friendly with ‘Voice of Khortytsia’, wrote on October 20 about the chaos reigning in the army:

they… named themselves “Mannerheim’s son”? beyond fucking parody (also pretty funny to name yourself after a guy who led a defense that, you know, lost against the Soviets, but I guess if you live in Western-propaganda-world you think that the Finns actually won because of their positive K/D ratio or something)

As of 2025, the Ukrainian military is a bizarre mutant in which the most talented and the most inept people coexist side by side. The brigades, battalions, staffs, tables, and positions are identical — but some cosplay the U.S. Army during the “Desert Storm,” while others resemble Iraqis.

Pétain rejected the idea of creating assault units. He believed that the Stosstruppen (assault troops) were “a sign of the German high command’s declining trust in its infantry.” In his view, implementing this elitist idea would lead to the creation of two armies — one rich and one poor.

a twitter thread I posted some time ago talking about a similar conundrum of focusing on elite troops causing a deterioration of the quality of the regular army - interesting that this debate goes all the way back to WW1!

That quotation prompted this post — I’ll try to develop Pétain’s idea. Indeed, the Ukrainian army as a single organism met the full-scale invasion, lost its best soldiers and officers, carried out the successful Kharkiv offensive, and fought to the death in the steppes of Kherson.

Also very interesting - I’ve seen an argument pop up that those early Ukrainian counter-offensives really weren’t the great victories they’re claimed as - certainly they were embarrassing for Russia in a publicity sense, but the actual reality on the ground was that the Russians retreated in good order and preserved their forces, while the Ukrainians got pummeled in the process of actually taking that territory. But usually this comes from the other side, where Western commentators can easily dismiss it as “well, we didn’t suffer a defeat!” cope (while engaging in the same kind of cope about their countries’ misadventures in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where strategic failures are papered over with “well, we killed a lot more of them than they killed us!”) - this is from the Ukrainian side

Then came regression and decline: the same classical army that fought like a beast later spawned stillborn brigades and isolated rifle battalions, endlessly reshuffled brigade commanders, botched training, and conducted the Zaporizhzhia counteroffensive, at which — roughly between July 26 and 28, when columns of BMP-1s of the 116th and 117th brigades burned east of Robotyne — the final nail was hammered into the coffin of the monolithic classical army. Today the classical army is a pure meme: everything works poorly except the paperwork. On paper you have a combat-ready battalion — (not) respectable (fuck) members of the commission signed off — but in reality there are 300 mobilized men: 150 of whom are fucked in the head, an incompetent commander, dreadful training, no commanders at most levels or NCOs, and a lack of supplies needed for modern war. On paper you have 100 trained soldiers, but in reality they literally know nothing, and every brigade asks that people be sent to complete basic combat training immediately within the units. On paper — a defensive line; only it’s not in the right place, not the way it should be, and nobody can hold it. On paper — the corps-level reform; in reality — just redrawn operational groups (TGRs and OTUs) [the structures the corps were meant to replace - EIU], and now other people command brigades that aren’t theirs. On paper we have hundreds of battalions (at 30% manning), where everyone stands in command and support posts and can put five infantrymen and one drone operator on the battlefield. Our “classical” army has become an army on paper — an army of stillborn brigades, untrained personnel, and incompetent staffs. In this army people worry more about overpayments of additional pay and nonwritten-off equipment than about losing personnel.

Yes, we still have pre-war powerful mechanized brigades and the Air Assault Forces along with the Marines, which form the backbone of defense in their sectors. But they partly retain combat capability not thanks to the system, but despite it. They are the first army within the army. The second army within the army is the “volunteer” units, whose backbone is formed by officers and NCOs from outside the system. Different vision and approach, businesslike methods, faster adaptation. Despite significant combat experience, colonels from the Operational Command “Severo-Yugo-Zapad” tell these people: “It’s immediately obvious that you’re not military.” The third army is the unmanned component. Not only as strike-by-remote systems, but as the whole concept of this new war that is developing at breakneck speed and affecting the entire battlefield, where we are about to create kill-zones to slaughter everyone (until the first rain and enemy infiltration). A fourth army has appeared recently and is essentially an admission of some people’s disappointment in the classical army. With harsh and utterly loyal commanders, with tough tasks and the belief that the best fighting soldier is the one who fears his own men more than the enemy. It fights differently, at different levels of logistics than classical infantry, and faces different challenges. This is a generalization; many other examples could be given. But the Ukrainian army is a front not only against the enemy, but also between different ways of thinking inside it. Our ability to normalize the best and get rid of the worst determines our capacity to fight effectively. Or we can continue to hope that our force will hold together through these four small components while the classical army continues to “sink into darkness” and ceases to exist as a combat-capable unit.

Well, onto the future. Surely things can’t get any worse?

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