War Notes [Ukraine]
Francis Farrell
Both the setting and the battlefield situation have changed since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, but Putin's vision of the war appears largely unchanged. ...
 | War Notes by Francis Farrell |
Friday, June 12
Hello, dear readers, this is Francis Farrell with this week's War Notes coming to you from a Kyiv where summer just simply refuses to properly arrive.
Small talk about the weather out of the way, I want to get straight into it and bring you the good news that this week was a week of two very, very good developments in Ukraine's struggle to survive and maybe even win this brutal war.
Yes, there will be the traditional caveats and warnings against getting carried away with emotion and narrative, but this time, the developments have been pretty black and white.
Over the last week, we've seen Ukraine's grip on Russian logistics in occupied southern and eastern Ukraine continue to tighten with regular hits on the main highways and railways used to transfer personnel, equipment, and supplies around occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts, and of course, Crimea.
This is something that began a few years ago, sorry, this is something that began in earnest over spring and has been made possible by the widespread use of so-called middle-strike drones, those that operate between the range of normal first-person view, or FPV drones, at around 30 kilometers, and the longer-range deep-strike drones beyond 200 kilometers or so.
Most impactful has been the Hornet, a cheap loitering munition full of U.S.-built tech created by the secretive company of ex-Google founder Eric Schmidt, who has gone all in on advancing Ukraine's technology-powered victory.
I remember what I felt when I first saw videos of drones from Ukraine's 1st Azov Corps returning to occupied Mariupol, the same city where Azov led its heroic last stand at the onset of the full-scale invasion.
Now, strikes in this area and at that distance have become everyday occurrences.
More symbolic than anything, though, have been the week's recent strikes against logistical routes, both road, rail, and bridge, in and out of the occupied Crimean Peninsula. [...]
This began with the damaging of the Chonhar Bridge east of the land isthmus between Crimea and occupied parts of Kherson Oblast, a strike mission that was actually carried out by Ukraine's assault forces in what can only be described as a democratization of middle-strike capability.
Over the past week, we've seen more strikes on the land bridge on the isthmus itself, followed by a timely announcement from Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Magyar" Brovdi that Ukraine aims to complete the final military and logistical isolation of the Crimean Peninsula.
It's interesting at this time to think back to summer 2022, in fact, to only my second ever story for the Kyiv Independent.
I hadn't done any front-line field trips, didn't have any high-level contacts, but Ukraine had just struck a major military airfield near the resort town of Yevpatoria in Crimea.
The images of Russian tourists fleeing from explosions and plumes of smoke came at a time when the excited pro-Ukraine memes about a Crimean beach party coming soon were still all the rage.
I wrote about Crimean Tatars gaining new hope that they might soon return home.
Since then, the frenzied hype of the war of 2022 has faded, and after the failure of the great Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023, talk of liberating Crimea through military means seemed to slowly retreat into the fantastical, as Russia took and destroyed more and more of Ukraine every month.
But now, almost four years later, we see a new approach: mature, methodical, upscaled, and absolutely unrelenting.
Putin repeats maximalist war claims as battlefield reality shifts
Yes, a Ukrainian D-Day on the shores of Sevastopol remains out of the question for now, but with each new strike on the peninsula and its key logistics routes, the price of Russia's war, and with it, of holding on to the pearl of Vladimir Putin's imperial dream, continues to rise and might at some point become untenable.
One interesting side effect, both in Crimea and the occupied territories, is the liberation of these regions from those Russian civilians who saw occupied Ukraine as a chance for some cheap and attractive seaside real estate.
We're only hearing whispers of this now, but here at the Kyiv Independent, we'll be following the story closely, as we do the middle-strike campaign and all the developments on the front line.
As you may have heard already, we're in the middle of a super important drive to bring 4,000 new members into our community, those same readers and viewers who make everything that we do here possible.
Every day, we try to provide you with the deepest, most meaningful, and most honest coverage of Ukraine and this war.
And if you appreciate that, please join us.
The other big news is just a few hours old.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has announced sweeping new reforms for military service, changes that, first and foremost, have the mark of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov and his team all over them.
Starting as soon as this summer, Ukrainian infantrymen, those whom I've written about before as fighting in by far the most brutal and dangerous conditions of anyone else in this war, are now going to become the highest-paid infantrymen in the world, according to Fedorov, earning around $7,000 per month spent on the front line.
Meanwhile, in changes that Ukraine's military and society have been crying out for for years now, fixed, clearly communicated terms of service will be introduced not only for infantrymen, but also for anyone else in a combat role, from drone pilots to artillerymen and medics.
Such contracts can be signed by new volunteers as well as by already serving soldiers and, upon completion, allow for a six-month exemption from any further mobilization.
The new changes also make transferring units easier, and to further minimize the loss of Ukraine's very limited pool of manpower, Fedorov has also announced a new recruitment drive for foreign fighters with the aim of filling 30 to 50 percent of the ranks of the infantry and assault forces with foreigners.
You can get up to speed with all the details of the new changes in the quick spot summary I wrote up here.
These changes might not be as flashy as a drone strike on St. Petersburg or hitting a bridge to Crimea, but if you ask me, they are as, if not more, important and consequential for the outcome of this war.
Ukraine's chronic manpower crisis, in many ways exacerbated by systemic problems within the military, has always been the Achilles heel of the country's ability not only to stay in the fight against Russia long term, but also to be ready if hostilities resume after a ceasefire.
A lot can be achieved with technology to reduce the burden on human beings, but ultimately, even drones need to be set up and launched by soldiers, and on the very front line, we have not quite reached a place where robots fight instead of infantrymen.
The road forward will still be difficult and painful, and no decisions from the top will be able to solve Ukraine's manpower problems quickly or completely.
But if implemented properly, these changes are exactly what Ukraine needs to prepare itself for what still could be a very long war.
On that note, as always, I just wanted to thank you all for being here with us through the bad news and the good.
Francis Farrell is a reporter at the Kyiv Independent. He is the co-author of War Notes, the Kyiv Independent's weekly newsletter about the war. For the second year in a row, the Kyiv Independent received a grant from the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust to support his front-line reporting for the year 2025-2026. Francis won the Prix Bayeux Calvados-Normandy for war correspondents in the young reporter category in 2023, and was nominated for the European Press Prize in 2024. Francis speaks Ukrainian and Hungarian and is an alumnus of Leiden University in The Hague and University College London. He has previously worked as a managing editor at the online media project Lossi 36, as a freelance journalist and documentary photographer, and at the OSCE and Council of Europe field missions in Albania and Ukraine.
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