Ukraine Just HUMILIATED Russia SO BADLY It’s Hard to Watch

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]On the one day of the year that Vladimir Putin lives for, the one day that is supposed to remind the world that Russia is a military superpower that cannot be beaten, cannot be broken, and cannot be stopped, something happened that made the entire performance fall apart. Not gradually, not quietly, all at once.

[00:00:17]While Putin stood watching his stripped down, humiliating hardware-free Victory Day parade shuffle past in what amounted to 45 of the most embarrassing minutes of his presidency, Ukraine was busy doing something elsewhere that left him with egg on his face in front of the entire world. Something that Russia had spent months taking was being reclaimed right there while the parade was happening. And that is just where this story starts. Because when you pull back and look at the full picture of what has happened to Russia's military over the last 6 months, the collapsed communications, the stalled offensives, the record casualties, the territory being handed back to Ukraine, what you see is not just a bad day for Putin.

[00:00:54]What you see is a military machine that is coming apart. Stay with us because the full picture is even worse for Russia than the headlines are letting on. You are watching States News. We give you the full picture, not just the headline. Let us start with the parade itself. Because before we get into the battlefield collapse, you need to understand just how significant this moment was. Not just as a symbol, but as a signal. Victory Day is not just a holiday in Russia. It is the centerpiece of Putin's entire political identity.

[00:01:21]Every year on May 9th, Russia puts on the largest military parade it can assemble. Columns of tanks rolling through Red Square, intercontinental ballistic missiles on their mobile launchers, attack helicopters flying in formation over the Kremlin, rows of soldiers in perfect step, and world leaders sitting in the front row visibly affirming that Russia still commands the kind of global respect that demands a seat at the table. That is what Victory Day is supposed to be, a display of raw, undeniable power. Now, here is what the 2026 Victory Day actually looked like.

[00:01:51]No tanks, no missile launchers, no significant military hardware of any kind. The reason is one that the Kremlin would never say out loud, but everyone in the world understands. Russia cannot afford to parade its equipment through Moscow when Ukraine might strike it, and Russia needs what equipment it is left inside Ukraine, where it is being systematically destroyed by Ukrainian drones. Anyway, the parade was 45 minutes long, among the shortest Russia has ever staged. and the front row of attending world leaders, 10 people, less than half the number who showed up in 2025. China's Xiinping did not come. He did not even send a delegation as a token gesture. The most powerful ally that Putin has in the world looked at victory day 2026 and decided it was not worth the optics of association. And to fill the gap left by the absence of real allies, Russia paraded North Korean soldiers. Soldiers from one of the most isolated, impoverished, and internationally ridiculed regimes on Earth. walking through Red Square as the crown jewel of Putin's grand military showcase. That is what Russian power looks like in May 2026. And Putin had to stand there and watch all 45 minutes of it. But here is the thing that makes it so much worse. While Putin was watching that parade, Ukraine was not watching.

[00:03:02]Ukraine was working. Something that Russia had spent months stealing back was being reclaimed. Ukrainian forces were active, not just holding ground, but taking it. And the moment that Putin had designated as a ceasefire, a brief pause in hostilities to honor the occasion, collapsed almost immediately into the kind of chaos that exposes just how little control Putin actually has over this war. Russia claimed that Ukraine violated the ceasefire 8,970 times. The Institute for the Study of War, the ISW, confirmed that the overall tempo of operations did decrease during the ceasefire period, but fighting continued on both sides. And while Russia was busy pointing fingers at Ukraine, it launched its own air strike against Ukrainian territory at around 6:00 in the evening on May 8th, the day before the ceasefire was even supposed to begin, involving an Escanderm ballistic missile and 43 drones. Whether that strike continued past midnight into the ceasefire window is, according to the ISW, unclear. So to recap, Putin declared a ceasefire to protect the dignity of his parade. Russia violated it before it started. Fighting continued throughout. And Russia's response was to compile a list of nearly 9,000 Ukrainian violations to read to the world's media.

[00:04:14]This is the behavior of a military that is winning. This is the behavior of a leader who is in control. No, this is what desperation looks like dressed up in press release language. And it is the perfect microcosm of where Russia stands right now, trying to control a narrative that the battlefield keeps contradicting in real time in front of the entire world. Now, let us go to the numbers because numbers do not lie and Russia's numbers right now are catastrophic. The ISW, which tracks battlefield movements with some of the most rigorous methodology available to open source analysts, has a summary of Russian military progress that should make every person in Moscow who believed Putin's promises feel deeply, personally betrayed. Over the past 14 months, Russia managed to seize the city of Tourettk after a 14-month campaign. It took the city of Severk after a 41-month campaign. And in January 2026, after a 2-year push, it finally managed to secure Pakrovsk, three cities, over a combined campaign period measured in years with casualties so severe that, as the ISW explicitly states, Russia capitalized on none of these gains, took the cities, paid an enormous price to take them, and then could not exploit the position because there was nothing left to exploit with. 14 months for one city, 41 months for another, two years for a third, and Russia has gained nothing of meaningful operational consequence from any of them. This is what Putin calls his grand military campaign. This is the army that was supposed to take Kiev in 72 hours. And it gets worse because the real prize, the thing that Putin has staked his spring and summer offensives on, is not these three cities. It is the Daetsk fortress belt. And what is happening there right now is perhaps the single most revealing thing about the true state of Russia's military. Putin set his generals a target. According to an April 17th report in the K of Independent, he told them that the entire Donbass region needed to be in Russian hands by September 2026.

[00:06:05]September. That is the deadline. And to meet it, the Donetsk fortress belt, the heavily fortified Ukrainian defensive line that guards the approaches to the Donbas, has to collapse. It is not collapsing. The only advances Russia has managed against the fortress belt have been in Costantka, where small infiltration units began probing the defenses as far back as October 2025. 7 months of infiltration, and those units have not gained any major ground. They have not broken through. They have not created the conditions for larger offensive operations to follow. They are scratching at the surface of the southern tip of the fortress belt and that is it. We are in midMay. Russia needs to take an entire region by September, and it has not meaningfully cracked the first line of defense. We are going to say this plainly, September will come and go. The Donbass will not fall. Russia's track record against far less heavily defended cities, measured in months and years, not days and weeks, makes that outcome as close to a certainty as anything in this war. The fortress belt was built specifically to stop Russia. Russia is going to keep shattering itself against it, and Putin is going to keep pretending that victory is imminent. But here is what makes this stalemate in the north even more significant. Because while Russia is stuck, Ukraine is not. Let us go back to December 2025 because that is where this momentum shift began. Russia's generals made a claim that Russian forces had finally captured the city of Kupansk in Ukraine's Kharkiv region. If true, that would have been an operationally meaningful gain. A real headline, something Putin could point to. It blew up in their faces within weeks. By mid December, Ukraine launched a counterattack that liberated the vast majority of Kupansk. Putin's forces were pushed out, and the tactics Ukraine used to do it, what military analysts were beginning to call search and destroy doctrine, proved to be an almost perfect counter to Russia's infiltration strategy. Ukraine was not just defending, it was adapting, and it was winning. That set the tone for everything that followed in 2026. While Russia was grinding its way through the fortress belt in the north with almost nothing to show for it, Ukraine was going on the offensive in the south. And the results were staggering. During the winter and early spring of 2026, Ukraine liberated approximately 400 square kilometers of its own territory.

[00:08:17]Territory that Russia had occupied.

[00:08:19]Territory that Russia had spent enormous resources holding. Gone. Reclaimed by Ukrainian forces conducting precise coordinated counterattacks across the Zaparigia region and beyond. The most recent of these liberations, the ISW confirms, occurred in late April in the western Zapperia region. And then came the number that sent shock waves through military analysis circles around the world. April 2026 was the first month since August 2024 that Russia recorded a net territorial loss. Ukraine finished the month with a net gain of 116 km.

[00:08:51]Russia, despite its spring offensive, despite its claimed momentum, despite the tens of thousands of soldiers it threw at Ukrainian positions, ended April with less territory than it started with. The last time something like this happened was during Ukraine's counter invasion of Russia's Kursk region. That operation took Russia months to reverse and according to Ukraine cost the Russian military more than 63,000 soldiers. And even after all of that, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine's armed forces, Alexander Sirski, confirmed on May 8th that Ukrainian soldiers are still operating inside Kursk, still there in Russian territory on the day before Putin's victory day parade. So, let us just stack all of this up together and look at it clearly. Russia spent two years taking Pocrs. Its spring offensive has made almost no progress against the Daetsk fortress belt. Ukraine liberated 400 km in the south. April was a net loss of 116 km for Russia and Ukrainian soldiers are still in Kursk. This is the military situation that Vladimir Putin was contemplating as he watched 45 minutes of soldiers march past with no tanks and no missiles in front of 10 world leaders with North Korean troops filling the gap left by the absence of real allies. If that is not humiliation, the word has no meaning. Stay with us because we need to explain exactly how this happened. Because the collapse in Russia's military performance over the last 6 months is not an accident. It is the result of a cascade of failures, each one feeding the next, that have combined to put Russia in the worst strategic position it has been in since the start of this war. It starts with communications and specifically with a decision made by SpaceX in early 2026 that nobody in the Kremlin saw coming, or if they did, had no plan for. For years, Russian forces had been illegally accessing Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet and communications network through illicit terminals smuggled into the war zone. This gave Russian command posts, forward units, and intelligence operations access to fast, reliable satellite-based communications that Russia's own military systems could not provide. Russia was in effect using Ukraine's primary battlefield communications advantage against Ukraine itself. And then SpaceX shut them out.

[00:11:00]The company created a whitelist, a system that ensured only legitimate verified Ukrainian terminals could access the Starlink network. Within hours of the cut over, Russian communications across the front line fell into chaos. Command posts lost contact with forward units. Coordination collapsed. Soldiers were being deployed to positions with no real-time intelligence, using outdated maps that showed territorial information that was no longer accurate because nobody could update them fast enough to keep pace with the situation on the ground. Now add to that what Putin did next because rather than find a solution to the communications crisis, he made it worse.

[00:11:35]At almost the same moment that the Starlink shutdown was taking effect, Putin's government moved to block Telegram inside Russia. Telegram, the messaging application that tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were using for real-time communication, intelligence sharing, and coordination at the unit level. Putin blocked it domestically because he was terrified of what Russian citizens were saying to each other about the war. He was so focused on controlling the narrative at home that he was willing to his own military's communications in the field to do it. The result was what the Atlantic Council has described as a state of information degradation on the Russian front lines. Russian forces could not receive orders reliably. They could not share intelligence about Ukrainian movements. They could not coordinate responses to Ukrainian attacks. And into that communications vacuum, Ukraine drove its southern counter offensives with devastating effect. The Atlantic Council's assessment is that it will likely take Russia several years to rebuild the kind of communications efficiency it had when it was illegally riding on Ukraine's Starlink network. Several years. While this war is still being fought, the communications collapse fed directly into the next crisis, which is one of resource allocation, and it is a trap that Putin walked into with almost no recognition of what was happening. For months leading into the spring offensive, Russia had been assembling reserves in the Daetsk region. These were the troops that were supposed to power the assault on the fortress belt, the manpower that would finally crack the defenses and allow Russia to make the kind of operationally significant advance that Putin had been promising.

[00:13:02]The plan was sequential. Use those reserves to push toward Povsk, then cycle them forward for the main fortress belt assault. And then Ukraine started taking back the south. Suddenly Putin faced a choice that he never planned for and never wanted to make. Send those Det reserves north to the fortress belt as planned and watch Ukraine continue to reclaim territory in the south unchecked or divert them south to stop Ukraine's counteroffensives and watch the fortress belt assault stall before it ever really started. It is a classic strategic dilemma and Ukraine forced it on Russia deliberately. Ukraine's military planners understood that if they could create pressure in the south, they could pull Russian reserves away from the north. They could split Russia's focus.

[00:13:41]They could force Putin's commanders to choose between two bad options and watch them be consumed by both. It worked.

[00:13:47]Russia is now stretched in both directions. The fortress belt assault is stalled. The southern territorial losses are continuing and the reserves that were supposed to solve one problem are now being divided across two theaters and solving neither. Ukraine is not just fighting Russia. Ukraine is dictating to Russia where and how the war is fought.

[00:14:06]That is the definition of controlling the tempo of battle. And Russia, the supposed military superpower with the larger army, the larger economy, and the longer history of waging war, has lost tempo control to a country it invaded and expected to conquer in 72 hours.

[00:14:20]Now, let us talk about the casualties because the numbers are extraordinary and they deserve to be stated clearly and without softening. In March 2026, Ukraine recorded approximately 35,000 Russian casualties, killed or wounded, verified by Ukraine's drone operators.

[00:14:35]In April 2026, the number was virtually identical, over 35,000. Again, Ukraine's president, Vladimir Zalinski, confirmed the April figures. Russia's average daily casualty rate has now crossed 1,000 soldiers per day, every single day. Since the start of the invasion, total Russian casualties have now surpassed 1.34 million. On May 9th alone, victory day, the parade day, Russia lost 1,080 soldiers. On the same day, 82 artillery systems were destroyed along with a tank, three armored vehicles, and more than 370 vehicles and fuel trucks. That was a standard day, not a particularly bad one for Russia.

[00:15:13]Just a regular Tuesday in what has become a regular, grinding, catastrophic rate of loss. And Ukraine's deputy head of the presidential office, Pavlo Pisa, put the most damning number of all into public record in early April. Russia is now losing 316 soldiers for every single square kilometer of territory it gains in the Daetsk region. 316 men per square kilmter. At that rate, for Russia to take the Daetsk fortress belt, which spans hundreds of square kilm of fortified terrain, the casualty math becomes so staggering it barely seems real. But it is real. And Putin is doing it anyway because the alternative, stopping, admitting failure, negotiating from a position of obvious weakness, is politically unthinkable for a man who told his country this would be easy. So instead, the grinding continues, the casualties mount, and Russia edges toward what military analysts are increasingly describing as a genuine manpower crisis. A point at which battlefield losses are outpacing the rate at which volunteers and conscripts can be recruited, trained, and deployed to replace them. Feeding into all of this, and this is the part of Ukraine's strategy that deserves far more attention than it gets, is Ukraine's drone campaign. Not just the defensive interception of Russian drones, but Ukraine's offensive drone strikes deep inside Russian- held territory and inside Russia itself. The ISW reports that Ukraine doubled the number of medium-range drone strikes in April compared to March. These are strikes at targets beyond 20 km, command posts, logistics hubs, ammunition depots, fuel supplies, air defense batteries. all of the infrastructure that Russia's frontline forces depend on to keep fighting. When those supply lines are hit, the soldiers at the front run low on ammunition. When command posts are struck, the orders stop flowing. When air defense systems are taken out, more Ukrainian drones get through to hit more targets. It is a layered compounding strategy, and it is working. On the long range front, Ukraine has gone from launching roughly 1,000 drones into Russian territory per month back in August 2024 to approximately 7,000 per month in March 2026, 7 times the volume in 18 months. The targets are deliberate and strategic. Oil refineries, fuel storage facilities, and export hubs that feed money into Russia's war chest and fuel into Russia's military vehicles.

[00:17:25]Every oil refinery that burns is a reduction in the revenue that funds Russian missile production. Every fuel shipment that is destroyed is a convoy of Russian military vehicles that runs dry before reaching the front. Every export hub that is struck is a blow to the economic engine that Putin has bet everything on sustaining this war.

[00:17:42]Ukraine is not just fighting Russia on the battlefield. It is dismantling the infrastructure of Russia's ability to fight at all. And it is doing it while simultaneously liberating territory in the south, holding the fortress belt in the north, and keeping soldiers active inside Russia's own Kursk region. So bring all of this together and ask yourself, what does Vladimir Putin's position actually look like right now?

[00:18:03]His spring offensive has stalled against defenses it was supposed to shatter. His target of taking the Donbass by September is so far from achievable that Zilinsky publicly stated Russia would need up to a million soldiers to crack the fortress belt. More soldiers than are active in almost any military on Earth, barring a handful. His communications infrastructure has been crippled and will take years to rebuild.

[00:18:24]His reserves are being split between two fronts and failing on both. His casualty rate has crossed 1,000 per day. His ally list has shrunk to Bellarus, Laos, Kazakhstan, South Oitia, and North Korean troops walking through Red Square. His most important global partner, Xiinping, did not bother to show up. And Ukraine, the country that was supposed to have been conquered four years ago, is in the black onn net territorial gains. And Putin's response to all of this is to stand in front of a 45minute parade with no tanks and declare that Russia is strong. Silinski has already said it plainly. Russia would need another million soldiers just to attempt what Putin is promising.

[00:19:00]Putin has already spent multiple armies worth of men and equipment to get as far as he has, which is not very far at all.

[00:19:07]Adding another million on top of 1.34 million casualties already would not be a military campaign. It would be a catastrophe of historic proportions and it still would not guarantee victory.

[00:19:18]Here is the question that everything comes back to and it is the one that Putin cannot answer. Does he see it?

[00:19:24]Does Putin genuinely understand what is happening or is he so insulated by a system of generals and advisers who tell him what he wants to hear rather than what is true that the reality of his military's collapse has not fully penetrated. Because if he sees it and he is choosing to continue anyway, that is one kind of horror. sending men to die in their hundreds of thousands for a cause he privately knows is failing because stopping is politically more dangerous than continuing. But if he does not see it, if the delusion is that complete, then that is a different kind of horror entirely. A leader so wrapped in his own mythology that he cannot register the evidence of his own failure even when it is marching past him for 45 minutes in a parade with no tanks.

[00:20:03]Either way, the parade has become a monument, not to Russian power, to Russian failure. and the images captured on May 9th, 2026. Putin stone-faced watching a hollow procession shuffle past in front of 10 world leaders and a contingent of North Korean soldiers while Ukraine was reclaiming territory and his troops were dying at a rate of more than 1,000 per day. Those images may end up being what history remembers most about this moment in the war.

[00:20:28]Russia is not winning. Russia is not advancing. Russia is absorbing losses that no healthy military could sustain indefinitely. And Ukraine, four years into a war it was never supposed to survive, is dictating the terms of the battlefield, controlling the tempo and building momentum that Russia has no credible plan to reverse. Putin's worst day yet happened in front of the whole world. And the days that follow are not looking any better. You are watching States News. We give you the full picture every single week in the kind of depth that actually makes sense of what you are seeing in the headlines. If this is your first time here, subscribe right now. Share this video because someone you know needs to understand what is really happening in this war.