Ukraine EXPOSED Russia's Biggest Secret & Putin Has No Answer – Ben Hodges

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Let me be direct with you. Russia's military campaign in Ukraine is failing.

[00:00:05]And the evidence is now undeniable. Not just slowing down, not just struggling, failing. And what happened on May 9th, Russia's most sacred military holiday.

[00:00:17]Expose that failure to every leader, every analyst, and every soldier watching from around the world. What you are about to hear is not commentary.

[00:00:28]It is an operational assessment based on verified reporting and it paints a picture that Vladimir Putin desperately does not want you to see. Stay with me because what unfolds over the next several minutes will fundamentally reshape how you understand this war.

[00:00:44]Victory Day is not just a parade for Russia. It is a statement of power, a projection of national strength, and a ritual affirmation that Russia's military remains a force to be reckoned with. For decades, that parade has rolled through Red Square with columns of tanks, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and tens of thousands of precision drilled soldiers, all designed to send one message to the world. Do not underestimate us. But the 2026 edition sent an entirely different message. The hardware was gone, the allies were absent, and the parade lasted just 45 minutes, the shortest in recent Russian history. That is not a ceremonial choice. That is a reflection of ground truth. Russia could not risk displaying its equipment in Moscow because that equipment is desperately needed on the front lines in Ukraine where it is being destroyed at a rate that staggers the imagination. Think about what that means operationally. When a country cannot safely parade its own military assets through its own capital, you are witnessing a military crisis. And while Putin stood on that reviewing stand watching a parade of soldiers and very little else, something far more consequential was happening elsewhere.

[00:01:57]Ukraine was continuing to do what it has been doing for months, taking ground, inflicting casualties, and systematically dismantling the myth of Russian military supremacy. Over the past six months, the operational picture has shifted in ways that Moscow never anticipated and that Western analysts are only beginning to fully appreciate. Let me walk you through exactly what has happened and why it matters because the details here are critical. Start with the baseline.

[00:02:26]The Institute for the Study of War, one of the most rigorous open-source intelligence organizations in the world, has assessed that Russia has made almost no significant operational progress over the past year. Let me put that in context for you. Russia has the world's largest land army by headcount. It has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this war. It has committed an enormous proportion of its active military capacity to Ukraine. And after all of that investment, after all of those sacrifices, the ISW's conclusion is that Russia is essentially where it was a year ago in any operationally meaningful sense. The towns that Russia has taken, Tourettk after 14 months, Civers after 41 months, Pocross after two full years, represent not a campaign of conquest, but a campaign of attrition that is grinding Russia's own military into dust. 41 months to capture a single city. That is not a military advance.

[00:03:25]That is a slow motion catastrophe dressed up as progress. Now I want to be precise here because precision matters in military analysis. Russia has made incremental gains. Soldiers are moving forward. Ground is being taken. But at what cost and toward what operational objective? The ISW is clear that Russia has capitalized on none of these gains.

[00:03:50]Taking a city after a 14-month siege and then failing to exploit that success is not strategy. It is exhaustion. It tells you that Russia's forces lack the depth, the coordination, and the combat power to convert tactical successes into operational momentum. And that is a fundamental military failure regardless of what the propaganda says. Now, let us talk about what Russia is actually trying to accomplish right now because this is where Putin's strategic delusion becomes most visible. According to reporting from the Kiev independent in April, Putin has set his commanders the objective of capturing the entire Donbass region by September 2026.

[00:04:37]That deadline is four months away. And to achieve it, Russia must break through what Ukraine has constructed in the Donetsk region, a defensive network that military analysts have taken to calling the Donetsk fortress belt. This is not a single defensive line. It is a layered reinforced system of fortifications, obstacles, and integrated fire positions designed specifically to absorb and destroy Russian offensive operations.

[00:05:06]And Russia's spring and summer offensives, the operations that were supposed to shatter this belt and open the road to Donbas, have made almost no progress against it. The only penetrations Russia has managed are in the Costantenevka area where small infiltration units have been probing since October 2025.

[00:05:25]Those units have not set the conditions for a larger offensive. They have not created the breaches that Russian commanders need. They are scratching at the surface of a defensive system built to withstand exactly this kind of pressure. I will tell you this plainly, September will come and go and Russia will not control the Dawnbast. That is not optimism. That is an operational assessment based on the rate of Russian advance, the strength of Ukrainian defenses and the cascading problems that are degrading Russian combat effectiveness every single day. If Russia cannot take moderately defended cities without multi-year campaigns, it has no realistic path to breaking through a purpose-built fortress belt in four months. None. And the men being sent to try are paying for that delusion with their lives. Let me give you the casualty numbers because they are staggering and because they matter strategically, not just humanistically.

[00:06:19]In March 2026, Ukraine verified approximately 35,000 Russian casualties killed and wounded, confirmed through drone footage and battlefield observation. April 2026 produced similar numbers. Russia's average daily casualty rate is now consistently above 1,000 soldiers per day. On May 9th alone, victory day, the day Putin was watching his parade, Russia lost 180 soldiers that single day. Combined with equipment losses that included 82 artillery systems, a tank, three armored vehicles, and over 370 vehicles and fuel trucks, May 9th was, according to all available data, a completely typical day for the Russian military in Ukraine. Not an outlier, not an exceptional day of fighting, just another day. When losing over a thousand men and dozens of systems per day becomes routine, you are not fighting a war of attrition that you are winning. You are in a death spiral.

[00:07:19]And the numbers bear that out. Russia's total casualties since the invasion began have now surpassed 1.34 million.

[00:07:27]That figure represents the near total destruction of what was once considered one of the most powerful land armies in the world. Ukraine's president Zalinski has stated that to actually break through the Daetsk fortress belt, Russia would need approximately 1 million soldiers. That is more active duty military personnel than almost any nation on Earth fields in its entire armed forces. Putin has already expended multiple armies worth of men and equipment to achieve what amounts to a strategic stalemate. The idea that he can conjure another million soldiers, equip them, train them, and deploy them in a coherent operational formation is a fantasy and a dangerous one because the pursuit of that fantasy is costing Russia an entire generation of its young men. So, how is Ukraine achieving this?

[00:08:18]What has changed on the battlefield to create a situation where Russia, despite its numerical advantages and its willingness to absorb punishment, finds itself losing ground, losing momentum and losing the operational narrative, there are several interlocking factors and understanding them together is essential because they do not operate in isolation. They feed into one another and compound each other's effects in ways that are accelerating Russia's deterioration. And what comes next in this analysis may be the most important piece of the picture because it starts with a decision made not in Kay or Moscow, but in California. In early 2026, SpaceX made the decision to shut down Russia's illicit access to the Starlink satellite communications network. For years, Russian forces had been using unauthorized terminals to tap into Starlink's infrastructure, gaining access to reliable, high bandwidth communications that their own military systems could not match. That access gave Russian commanders a significant advantage in coordinating operations across a vast front. When SpaceX implemented a white list that restricted service to verified Ukrainian terminals only, that advantage disappeared. Not gradually, but almost overnight. Within hours of the cutoff, Russian communications across the front collapsed. Command posts lost contact with forward units. Coordination between artillery, infantry, and armor broke down. Defensive positions in the south became isolated and unable to respond coherently to Ukrainian pressure. The effect was immediate, visible, and devastating. What happened next made it worse. Putin, in what can only be described as a catastrophic failure of strategic judgment, chose that same period to crack down on Telegram, the social media platform that had become an unofficial but essential communications tool for thousands of Russian soldiers on the front lines.

[00:10:22]Whatever his domestic political motivations, the operational consequences were severe. At the exact moment when Russian forces were losing their primary reliable communications infrastructure, Putin stripped them of a secondary system that had been filling the gap. The result was an information blackout at the tactical level that Ukraine recognized and immediately exploited. Russian soldiers were operating on outdated maps showing territory that Russia did not actually control. Unit commanders could not share real-time intelligence about Ukrainian movements. Coordination collapsed and into that collapse, Ukraine launched the southern counter offensive that has now liberated approximately 400 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory with the most recent gains coming in the Zaparisia region in late April 2026. The strategic significance of that April figure cannot be overstated. April 2026 was the first month since August 2024 in which Russia suffered a net territorial loss. Ukraine finished the month with a net gain of 116 square kilometers. To put that in historical context, the last time Ukraine achieved that kind of territorial momentum was during the Korsk crossborder operation, an operation that Russia claims to have reversed, but which as of May 8th, Ukraine's commander-in-chief Cerski confirmed is still ongoing. Ukrainian soldiers remain active inside Russian territory in the Kar region. Russia has not regained full control of its own soil. That is not a minor detail. That is a strategic humiliation with no modern precedent. If you think the communications collapse and the southern counter offensive represent the full scope of Russia's problems, what comes next will show you how deep this crisis actually runs and why the trajectory is accelerating in Ukraine's favor rather than stabilizing.

[00:12:25]There is a principle in military operations that experienced commanders understand instinctively. When your enemy controls the tempo of battle, you have already lost the initiative. Tempo is not just about speed. It is about who is forcing decisions on whom. It is about which side is reacting and which side is acting. And right now in the spring of 2026, Ukraine controls the tempo across virtually every axis of this conflict. Russia is not executing a coherent operational plan. It is responding frantically, expensively and ineffectively to conditions that Ukraine is creating. That shift in initiative is the single most important development on this battlefield and it is driving every other problem that Russia now faces.

[00:13:12]Consider the position Putin's generals are in right now. For months leading into the spring offensive, Russia had been massing reserves in the Donetsk region. These were forces specifically allocated to support the push against the fortress belt to provide the depth and follow-on capability that Russia's assault units would need to convert initial penetrations into sustained advances. That was the plan. It was a coherent plan, at least on paper. But then Ukraine launched its southern counter offensive and suddenly those reserves faced a different mission. Does Russia send them north to reinforce the assault on the fortress belt, the strategic priority that Putin has publicly committed to? Or does it send them south to slow Ukraine's territorial gains and prevent further liberation of occupied land? There is no good answer to that question. Reinforcing the north means Ukraine continues to gain ground in the south, which tightens the operational noose around Russian positions in Donetsk from a new direction. Reinforcing the south means the fortress belt assault weakens further, making September's deadline even more of a fantasy than it already is. This is a genuine strategic dilemma, and it is one that Ukraine engineered deliberately. That is not an accident.

[00:14:31]That is masterful operational design.

[00:14:33]And while Russia struggles with that dilemma at the operational level, Ukraine has been systematically destroying the infrastructure that Russian forces depend on at the tactical level. The drone campaign, specifically Ukraine's medium range strike operations beyond 20 kilometers, has intensified dramatically in 2026. The ISW has assessed that this campaign is directly degrading Russia's ability to conduct offensive operations across the entire theater. In April alone, Ukraine doubled the number of medium-range drone strikes compared to March. These strikes are not hitting frontline positions. They are hitting the near rear, the command posts, the logistics hubs, the ammunition depots, the fuel storage facilities, and the air defense systems that are supposed to protect all of the above. When you destroy a command post, you are not just killing the people inside it. You are severing the nerve connections that allow a military organization to function as a coherent whole. You are forcing commanders to improvise, to communicate through degraded channels, to make decisions with incomplete information. Combined with the Starlink shutdown, the effect on Russian command and control has been devastating and cumulative. The long range component of Ukraine's drone campaign deserves equal attention because it is striking at something even more fundamental to Russia's war making capacity, its energy infrastructure.

[00:15:59]Ukraine has escalated from approximately 1,000 drone strikes into Russian territory in August 2024 to around 7,000 in March 2026. That is a seven-fold increase in less than two years. The primary targets have been oil refineries and export terminals, the facilities that convert Russia's most valuable natural resource into the revenue that funds this war and into the fuel that powers Russia's military vehicles, tanks, and aircraft. Repeated successful strikes against these facilities are doing two things simultaneously. They are reducing the income flowing into Russia's war chest at precisely the moment when Russia needs maximum financial resources to sustain its recruiting, its equipment replacement, and its logistics. And they are disrupting the fuel supply chains that get petroleum products to Russian forces in Ukraine, meaning that even the units that survive Ukraine's frontline drone strikes may find themselves immobilized by fuel shortages in the weeks ahead.

[00:16:59]This is not a peripheral campaign. This is an attack on the foundations of Russian military power and it is working. Now step back and look at what all of these factors produce together.

[00:17:10]You have a Russian military that has lost reliable communications at both the strategic and tactical levels. You have a force that is being forced to split its attention and its reserves between competing operational priorities that it cannot simultaneously address. You have a logistics and support infrastructure that is being methodically destroyed by a drone campaign of increasing sophistication and scale. You have casualty rates that are outpacing recruitment, creating manpower shortfalls that are forcing Russia to lower its standards, shorten its training cycles, and deploy soldiers who are not adequately prepared for the conditions they will face. and you have a Ukrainian military that has internalized the lessons of three years of war and is applying them with a precision and effectiveness that its adversary cannot match. Each of these factors would be serious on its own.

[00:18:04]Together, they are producing a compounding crisis that is accelerating faster than Russia can respond to it.

[00:18:11]The figure that General Pelisa, Ukraine's deputy head of the presidential office, cited in early April, should be burned into the memory of anyone trying to understand this war.

[00:18:23]Russia is losing 316 soldiers for every square kilometer it gains in the Daetsk region. 316 soldiers per square kilometer. In military terms, that exchange rate is not just unsustainable.

[00:18:38]It is the signature of a force that has lost the ability to conduct effective combined arms operations and is instead relying on mass, sheer human mass to generate forward movement. That is not modern warfare. That is a return to the worst attrition dynamics of the first world war. And it reflects a fundamental breakdown in Russian military effectiveness at every level from tactics to strategy. What does Russia's response to all of this look like?

[00:19:05]Makeshift. The Atlantic Council has assessed that it will likely take Russia several years to rebuild the kind of communications efficiency it had when it was piggybacking on Starlink. In the interim, Russian forces are attempting to compensate with relay drones and improvised satellite links, solutions that are partial, vulnerable, and nowhere near adequate for coordinating largecale offensive operations. On the manpower front, Russia continues to rely on financial incentives to attract volunteers. But the pool of willing recruits is shrinking as casualty figures become impossible to hide from the Russian public. The North Korean soldiers paraded through Red Square on May 9th were not a display of alliance strength. They were a visible admission that Russia cannot generate sufficient military manpower from its own population to sustain this war at its current intensity. That is an extraordinary strategic vulnerability for a country that began this invasion claiming it would subdue Ukraine within days. Let me address something that often gets lost in the tactical details of this conflict because it matters enormously for how this war ends.

[00:20:16]Putin's September deadline for the Donbus is not just a military objective.

[00:20:21]It is a political commitment made in public in front of a domestic audience that has been told repeatedly that Russia is winning, that Ukraine is collapsing, and that the special military operation is proceeding according to plan. When September arrives, and it will arrive regardless of what happens on the battlefield, and the Daetsk fortress belt is still standing, and Ukrainian forces are still operating inside Korsk, and Ukraine is still recording net territorial gains, Putin will face a moment of reckoning that no amount of state media manipulation will fully conceal. The gap between what he has promised and what his military has delivered is now so wide that it is becoming visible even to Russians who have been insulated from accurate information about this war.

[00:21:12]That gap has political consequences. It has social consequences and it has strategic consequences because a leader who cannot acknowledge failure cannot correct course. and Putin has shown no indication that he is capable of the kind of honest self assessment that strategic correction requires. Ukraine's commander-in-chief Sirki's confirmation on May 8th that Ukrainian forces remain active in the course region is worth dwelling on for a moment. Russia announced weeks ago that it had fully cleared Ukrainian forces from its territory. That announcement was premature, deliberately so almost certainly because the domestic political value of claiming victory in Kursk outweighed the operational accuracy of the claim. But you cannot sustain a false narrative indefinitely when the enemy is physically present on your soil and your own soldiers know it. The credibility cost of that kind of overreach accumulates. It erodess trust between the military and civilian leadership. It degrades the confidence of soldiers who are told they are winning while experiencing something very different and it makes it harder for Russia to communicate accurately about the battlefield situation when accurate communication becomes operationally necessary. Ukraine controls the operational tempo. Ukraine is recording net territorial gains.

[00:22:34]Ukraine has forced Russia into an impossible strategic dilemma between its northern and southern objectives.

[00:22:40]Ukraine's drone campaign is systematically degrading Russian logistics, command and control, and energy revenue simultaneously. And Ukraine is doing all of this while Russia bleeds at a rate that no modern military can sustain indefinitely. Putin stood on that reviewing stand on May 9th and watched 45 minutes of marching soldiers go by. No tanks, no missiles, no hardware while 10 world leaders looked on. And Xiinping stayed home without even sending a delegation. That image will endure not because of its symbolic value, though that is significant, but because it accurately reflects the operational reality of a military campaign that has consumed an entire generation of Russian soldiers and produced almost nothing of strategic consequence in return. The fortress belt stands. Ukrainian forces operate inside Russia. Ukraine is in the black on net territorial gains and Russia's spring offensive, the operation that was supposed to settle this war in Moscow's favor, is stalling against defenses it cannot break. What comes next on this battlefield will be shaped by Ukraine's continued ability to maintain pressure across multiple axes simultaneously, denying Russia the ability to concentrate, to recover, and to rebuild the operational coherence it has lost.

[00:24:08]Ukraine has developed the strategic, operational, and tactical frameworks to do exactly that. The active defense doctrine that Ukraine is now executing in the Donbass is the intellectual and operational foundation for everything we have discussed today.

[00:24:24]Understanding it is essential to understanding where this war goes from here. Stay informed, stay analytical, and never mistake a parade for a demonstration of power. Because sometimes the most revealing thing a military can show you is what it chooses not to put on