Build & Promoted using StoryFunnels
In early August 2026, Ukraine got a new commander-in-chief. General Oleksandr Syrskyi was relieved, and Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi — forty-three years old — took over an army in the fifth year of a full-scale war. It followed the public fight over the firing of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov that we covered in episodes 10 and 11.
Sam Cook sits down in Kyiv with Rob Lee, one of the most widely read analysts of this war, and Dima Putiata, who served four years in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and left as a sergeant in the Unmanned Systems Forces. The question: have we reached a turning point?
The answer is more careful than the headlines. Russia is advancing slower than a year ago — but it still holds the initiative.
Timestamps
0:00 - What this episode is and why it matters
7:18 - Have we reached a turning point? Why Russia is advancing slower
10:19 - Kramatorsk and Sloviansk: the hardest direction
12:51 - Why both sides fight so hard for the Donetsk cities
14:21 - What people get wrong about "turning point"
16:01 - Shahed-4, Shahed-5, the pulse-jet engine, and Banderol
19:39 - Ukraine's gap in pulse-jet deep-strike drones
20:39 - The counteroffensive that never came, and the airborne counterattacks nobody reported
22:53 - "Tanks are not dead" - combined arms maneuver
24:18 - What you never see on Twitter or Telegram, and why the best units stay quiet
27:00 - The biggest lie starts at division level, and Russia's 300 vehicles
29:04 - Artillery is not dead either: weather, counter-battery radar, acoustic sensors
33:29 - Preparing the battlefield for armor
35:01 - The casualty debate: drones vs artillery
37:32 - Ukrainian artillery brigades that fly their own drones
40:16 - North Koreans in Kursk: from company assaults to squads
42:13 - Reestablishing maneuver: the First World War parallel and the Azov Corps assault
44:01 - Lancet, Zala, Orion, and Russia's mesh network
48:42 - Arena-M: twenty FPVs to stop one tank, mine rollers and sixteen mines
51:49 - Rubicon's 150-page doctrine - and Ukraine's silence
53:12 - Eighty percent of armor losses come from UAVs
54:26 - The most sophisticated Russian assault of the war
56:39 - Political demands, the lying problem, and the post-war Russian military
1:00:02 - Russia's daily target list, and why their micro-tactical execution still fails
1:04:44 - Starlink: the game changer of this war
1:06:22 - Middle strike: heavy and light
1:08:39 - Lancet-Zala, interceptors, and Ukraine's middle strike campaign today
1:12:34 - RuzSat: Russia builds its own Starlink, and echelons of electronic warfare
1:18:07 - "Starlink is a bit of a crutch", and Kursk: crossing the border and losing it
1:21:15 - Crimea, Operation Spiderweb, and what adversaries learn
1:25:24 - Ground-launched ballistic missiles, KN-23 and KN-24
1:27:50 - Zelenskyy's ask to Trump and Musk
1:29:50 - The PAC-3 shortage, and why missile defense stays hard
1:33:03 - Deep strike: refineries, Wildberries, Flamingo - and is it working?
1:37:08 - The economic war: the Black Sea, the port of Odesa, and attrition
1:40:54 - The firing of Fedorov, a new commander-in-chief, and Bilecki's three reasons
1:44:05 - Syrskyi built a system that worked for him
1:46:32 - Unity of command and the Unmanned Systems Forces
1:49:11 - What is Ukraine's actual strategy, and the manpower problem
1:53:04 - What Drapatyi will change first
1:57:29 - Why mobilization got harder: Bakhmut, and orders with no purpose
2:00:45 - AWOL, desertion, and criminal liability for withdrawing
2:05:38 - How AWOL should actually be punished
2:07:17 - France 1940: leadership, training, then technology
2:10:50 - Better than a year ago, but not a turning point yet
Produced by the Borderlands Foundation.Support our work: https://theborderlandsfoundation.org
All episodes: https://ukrainemilitaryhistory.org/
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@UkraineMilitaryHistory
Guests:Rob Lee: https://x.com/RALee85Dima Putiata: https://x.com/kriegsforscherD
