Beker & Co.

24/09/2026

Vivaldi 🇺🇦 was not a raid. It was a method.

Two reads belong together: Col. Rodion Kudryashov’s column in Ukraininska Pravda, and “An Overture to Victory” at West Point’s Modern War Institute (24 Sept 2026).

For twenty months ruzzia’s 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies ground toward Lyman. In May, Ukraine’s 3rd Corps launched Operation Vivaldi. In weeks the salient collapsed.

Elements of the 2nd and 14th Motorized R***e Divisions were boxed. Up to ~250 km² came back. Rubicon — ruzzia’s elite drone unit — lost logistics, depots, launch sites and operators hard enough that moscow pulled it off the axis.

How, in bullets:
• Infantry still takes the dirt. The conditions are built months before the first step — staff, training, logistics, intel, unmanned systems.
• You cannot plan a strike if you do not know where the line sits tomorrow. First job in sector: stop the rot, freeze the map.
• Drone dominance at depth first. Two Unmanned Systems Forces brigades saturated the rear. Hornet-class systems (150+ km) hit crossings, froze reinforcements, starved the other side’s own drones of fuel, parts and crews.
• Fedorov’s “middle strike” (roughly 30–200 km) is the missing layer between FPV tactics and strategic deep strike: depots, C2, routes, air defense, drone control.
Jan–Jun 2026: successful strikes beyond 50 km up 44x.
Mar–May: 81 air-defense systems reported destroyed. Then “logistics lockdown.”
• Long-range 155 mm over short-range stock.

The contested belt is too wide for yesterday’s tubes.
• C2 tempo beats extra airframes. Hours up and down the chain lose to minutes. Flexibility = time from problem to kill.
• Ten thousand drones without a command system are inventory. Competence over seniority. NCOs. Staffs that plan, not relay. Logistics inside the battle, not behind it.
• Attrition is a shaping tool, not a theory of victory. Strategic strikes only count if they cut the military system, not a warehouse for the clip.

Kudryashov: the Corps learned to buy time — detect to decide to act. MWI: only an operational breakthrough changes ruzzia’s calculus; Vivaldi is the overture, not the finale. Four seasons. Only part of the score is public.

MWI: https://mwi.westpoint.edu/an-overture-to-victory-operation-vivaldi-and-ukraines-path-to-battlefield-decision/

Pravda: https://lnkd.in/eCKu7zzK

For twenty months, Russia’s 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies ground toward Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine that sits on a critical road and railway juncture. By seizing […]

21/09/2026

🇺🇦 The "Luch" Design Bureau Unveiled a Whole Lineup of Ukrainian Missiles

The state-owned "Luch" Design Bureau presented several developments at once—ranging from anti-aircraft missiles to long-range weapons.

From left to right: the RK-2P3 for the “Rif” system, the RK-19 for the “Osa” air defense system, a missile for the future “Koral” system, the 300-mm R624 missile for the “Vilha” multiple launch rocket system, the UAV-290 “Palyanytsia,” and the RK-360L missile for the “Neptune-D” system.

It is particularly interesting that capabilities for various domains —ranging from air defense to missile systems and cruise missiles—are all featured in a single exhibition.

🇺🇦 The Ukrainian missile program is evolving from individual projects into a full line of systems of various classes.

The “Luch” Design Bureau demonstrates that Ukrainian missile engineering is no longer just a single project, but an entire family of developments. 🚀🇺🇦

❗️B-Tech website https://building-tech.org/

07/09/2026

After the moscow meeting — where putin sat stony-faced while being courted — the same envoys came to Kyiv (1st time), then on to European counterparts.

putin’s line was simple: if ruzzia does not get what it wants, the war continues.

The gaps are still structural:
• Enerhodar NPP: ruzzia wants it. Ukraine is prepared to share it if it must.
• Donetsk: putin wants the whole oblast while controlling only about 25% of it, including the fortress belt Ukraine will not hand over. Analysts put an 18-month-plus fight on that ground.
• Force size: ruzzia wants Ukraine without a real army. Ukraine will not accept less than 800,000.
• A demilitarised economic zone in the Donbas has not been ruled out.
• For Kyiv, Western security guarantees have to be real — not symbolic.
• The hardest procedural point: Ukraine wants a three-month ceasefire to run a referendum on any deal. ruzzia rejects that.

The itinerary changed. The substance did not.

05/09/2026

"Kyiv will be gone in three days, but as for the Baltic states..." — Madyar on NATO's lack of preparedness for drone warfare

Robert Brovdi (Madyar), commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ Unmanned Systems Forces, outlined three points for Europe in an interview with Swedish public television SVT on August 22, asking to be heard without any illusions.

(1) First: ruzzian will never again be able to repeat a blitzkrieg on Kyiv, but he offers no such certainty regarding the Baltic states.

(2) Second: Drones are the plague of the third millennium—and that’s not a metaphor, but a matter of mathematics.

(3) Third: NATO countries are not prepared for drone warfare.

Madyar’s logic is based on numbers. According to his data, as of August, ruzzian is launching an average of 300 “shahids” per day against Ukraine, and no army in the world is prepared to withstand such a barrage of loitering mu*****ns; moreover, no economy can sustain the cost of intercepting them with conventional air defense systems.

putin, according to the commander, has not for a single moment halted the ramp-up of the military machine—drones, missiles, air defense, and preparations for mobilization—while clearly recognizing NATO’s lack of a clear position.

Reports from the region confirm these concerns: in May, the Latvian defense minister resigned after the military failed to safely shoot down drones that had flown in from the ruzzian side, which ultimately brought down the Silini government; and in late August, a Baltic official admitted in a conversation with Radio Free Europe that no one has a “drone wall” yet—it’s easier to talk about it than to build it.

Madyar doesn’t stop at just diagnosing the problem. Back in early August, he provided the Baltic states with five priority steps for the next 3–12 months, including the creation of a 2–5-kilometer buffer zone along the border with Russia to counter intensive drone activity, and publicly urged them to stop dragging their feet.

At the same time, he warns: Ukraine will be able to supply its allies with drones if the war reaches their territory, but it will not be able to supply soldiers—we don’t have enough for everyone.

In Washington, judging by RFE/RL reports that CIA Director Ratcliffe flew to moscow with a warning not to escalate tensions against Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the threat is also being taken seriously.

#україна

28/07/2026

Petraeus: The death zone in Ukraine extends 35 kilometers on either side of the front lines — defined by drone battery life. Tanks can't survive. Armored vehicles can't survive. Nothing can.

Neither side even drives vehicles anymore. Russians keep trying and keep proving it.

Petraeus: No trenches — drones fly through. Soldiers in survivability positions hundreds of meters apart, not mutually supporting. Resupplied by ground robots.

Commanders can't visit the front line. Soldiers stay 60+ days. In urban areas, some couldn't be extracted for months.

Petraeus: Russian advances mean individual soldiers running forward trying to dig in. Drone units pick them up immediately, cycle surveillance drones, then FPV attack drones arrive.

You see them hitting around the soldier in the woods until one connects. It doesn't end well.

Petraeus: Ukraine is about to isolate Crimea. Gasoline so short they won't sell it to civilians. Tourists who came for beaches are trying to get home any way they can.

Kerch Bridge rail no longer works. Ferries knocked out. Land bridges destroyed. Pontoon bridges now targeted.

Petraeus: Ukraine took down Russia's air defenses steadily. Russia pulls them to Moscow — vulnerabilities open everywhere else. Moscow refinery hit three nights running, out at least six months.

They're going after fuel storage, refineries, gas lines from Siberia to the west.

Petraeus: Real prospect now that Putin might need a cessation of hostilities himself. Oil sanctions reimposed, national welfare fund running out of money.

Crimea isolated, front lines cut off, economy crushed — all of this could force Putin to recognize he should end this war.

Source: text of Tymofiy Milovanov

12/06/2026

Most Ukrainians know about the pyramids of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, or Rome.

Far fewer realize that 6,000 years ago, on the territory of present-day Ukraine, one of the most remarkable social experiments in human history was already underway.

Long before many of the great civilizations we learn about in school reached their peak, the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture had created enormous settlements across what is now central Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania. Some covered hundreds of hectares and contained thousands of structures arranged in sophisticated concentric patterns that are still visible through modern archaeological surveys.

Sites such as Talianky, Maidanetske, Dobrovody, and Nebelivka continue to challenge our understanding of what early human societies were capable of achieving.

What makes these settlements particularly fascinating is not only their scale, but their apparent social organization.

Archaeologists have found little evidence of palaces, royal compounds, massive fortifications, or the kinds of elite burials that typically accompany highly stratified societies. Instead, the picture that emerges is one of large communities capable of coordinating agriculture, construction, trade, and ritual life without leaving behind obvious signs of centralized power.

They built multi-room, often two-story homes. They produced highly sophisticated ceramics. They developed advanced agricultural practices. They maintained settlements that, for their time, were among the largest concentrations of population anywhere in Europe.

And then, periodically, they burned them.

Whether driven by ecology, ritual renewal, sanitation, or some combination of factors, entire settlements were intentionally destroyed and rebuilt elsewhere — a practice that remains one of the great mysteries of prehistoric Europe.

The significance of Trypillia is not that it proves modern Ukrainians are somehow “special.”

It is that the lands we inhabit today have never been a historical periphery.

For millennia, they have been a place where people experimented, organized, innovated, traded, built, and adapted.

Understanding that history matters.

Not because it gives us reasons for pride alone, but because it reminds us that creativity, resilience, and the ability to build at scale are not foreign imports to this region.

They are part of a much longer story.

A story that deserves to be better known.

&a

06/06/2026

A few days ago, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine had begun work on its own anti-ballistic missile system, similar in concept to THAAD.

What is really happening behind the scenes of the Ramstein meetings?

The growing attention around Ukraine’s missile development programs has been met with criticism not only from Russia, but also from some voices in the United States and Europe. The concern is understandable: for decades, the global security architecture was shaped by the INF Treaty, which restricted the development and deployment of ground-launched intermediate-range missiles.

After the collapse of that treaty in 2019, following years of disputes and mutual accusations of violations, the strategic landscape changed. Today, Russia actively uses ballistic missiles against Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure, while Ukraine remains heavily dependent on foreign air defense systems and missile interceptors.

This is why Ukraine’s current efforts should be viewed through the lens of self-defense, not aggression.

Ukraine has the industrial and engineering heritage to develop advanced missile technologies. The country was deeply involved in missile and aerospace production during the Soviet era and retains significant expertise in propulsion systems, guidance technologies, and aerospace engineering.

The goal is straightforward: to create the capability to intercept ballistic threats before they reach their targets. Effective anti-ballistic defense requires interceptors capable of reaching high altitudes and extreme speeds to destroy incoming missiles during the most vulnerable phase of their flight.

Ukraine is not seeking offensive superiority. Ukraine is seeking the ability to protect its cities, energy infrastructure, and civilians from the daily reality of missile attacks.

For years, Ukrainians have lived under the threat of ballistic strikes. Developing indigenous defensive technologies is a natural response to that reality.

If the world supports Ukraine’s right to defend itself, then it should also support Ukraine’s right to build the tools necessary for that defense.