That would be Eric Schmidt’s opinion in the WSJ: Ukraine’s way of fighting war can’t match what’s coming. Excerpts:

I have traveled to Ukraine throughout its long war with Russia, helping the Ukrainian military develop cutting-edge battlefield technologies. But I came away from this most recent trip more worried than at any time since the earliest days of the invasion.

Russia is getting much better at waging this conflict, and Washington needs to recognize that it is moving toward a strategy of total war, mobilizing its factories and manpower to bombard Ukraine into submission. Defeating Russia now requires more than the transfer of weapons. Ukraine will need the West to marshal its collective resources on a scale sufficient to outproduce and outlast its enemy.

For much of the conflict, Ukraine’s great advantage was its ability to adapt and innovate. Russia had more soldiers, more money and a far larger industrial base, but creative Ukrainian engineers could develop a new weapon or system, test it on the front line and modify it within weeks. Its decentralized networks of soldiers, engineers and defense tech companies iterated faster than Russia’s lumbering military bureaucracy could keep up.

That advantage is rapidly diminishing. When Ukraine developed interceptors that could destroy Russia’s swarms of Shahed drones, Russia adapted, deploying faster jet-powered Shaheds that are much harder to intercept. Russia is in the process of deploying a satellite constellation to rival Starlink, which Ukrainian drone units use to strike Russian forces in occupied Ukraine. For years the Kremlin’s strategy consisted of throwing industrial mass at Ukrainian innovation, but it is now combining that mass with its own innovations.

In Ukraine I saw a battlefield that would have been unimaginable when this war began. Commanders sit deep underground monitoring video sensor feeds while thousands of unmanned vehicles conduct surveillance, deliver supplies and hunt soldiers and vehicles. Movement above ground has become almost suicidal. Fully 80 percent of Ukraine’s casualties occur when troops are moving between positions. Once they reach the front line, some remain underground for months because exposure is so dangerous.

Yet this war is anything but static. It involves the fastest-moving technological competition we have ever witnessed. A drone can be highly effective when introduced and become useless within months. The enemy can change the radio frequencies he uses, build a jammer or a faster interceptor, or otherwise modify tactics. And then the adaptation cycle starts again.

Ukraine is excellent at this process, but innovation alone cannot solve the problem of scaling production to meet the voracious demands of all-out high-intensity warfare. I spoke with commanders who know what they must do to stop the Russians but lack the systems to do it. One told me that his unit had stopped looking for targets because they did not have enough drones to strike all the ones they had already identified. This is a central feature of the war today. A brilliant drone produced in the hundreds is interesting, but a good drone produced in the hundreds of thousands is what will change the tide of war.

…

Ukraine has the engineers, the resolve and the spirit of innovation to fight this total war. What it lacks is the industrial scale that only its Western partners can provide. Ukraine urgently needs interceptors, ammunition and long-range strike weapons, alongside investment to expand its own manufacturing capacity. The West should treat Ukraine’s defense industry as an extension of its own, co-producing weapons, eliminating supply bottlenecks and ensuring Ukrainian commanders never have to ration their targets.

Ukraine’s battle-hardened and incredibly lethal military is forging the future of warfare on the front line every day. By integrating more closely with them, Western militaries can help secure Ukraine’s victory, absorb the critical hard-won lessons of modern warfare and strengthen the international order against the threats that will define the decades ahead.

…

Ukraine has bought the West four years with the blood of its soldiers and the ingenuity of its engineers. We cannot let it face another winter alone under Russian bombardment.

🚀

First, this plea is useless because Trump will never do anything other than what he’s already doing, which is to send emissaries to kiss Putin’s ass.

Then, let’s see the main ideas that Eric Schmidt conveys without even realizing it.

Ukraine has engineers, resolve, and plenty of innovative spirit. The West has neither.

Four and a half years into a total war, Ukraine has evolved. The war has evolved. This war is like no other. (Although, of course, the concept of a swarm of drones is an Iranian invention.)

Innovation took place in Ukraine and in Russia, whereas NATO remained an antiquated dinosaur. NATO has aircraft, tanks, and some interceptors. This is highly inadequate. When a drone violates the airspace of a NATO country, what do we do? We use fighter jets or expensive interceptors to shoot down a cheap drone! Look at how the stock of Patriot interceptors has been depleted in the war with Iran! Such interceptors are meant for missiles, not for drones!

The Shahed/Geran class of drones changed the war, but FPV quadcopters and surveillance drones came next. This is why “movement above ground has become almost suicidal.” Ukraine and Russia adapted to the new weapons of war that they themselves have created in the last four years. What did NATO do to acquire the same expertise? Wanking, I guess.

Ukraine needs money and specific components and ammunition, not expertise.

Interceptors aside, Ukraine has nothing to learn from the West; it’s the other way around.

It’s not the West that should treat Ukraine’s defense industry as an extension of its own, but vice versa.

In a hypothetical scenario where Ukraine attacks Europe, Europe has no chance whatsoever!

🚀

But Eric Schmidt is completely wrong when he repeats this nonsense:

Ukraine has bought the West four years.

This usually goes hand in hand with another mantra:

Ukraine is the shield that prevents Russia from invading Europe.

🚀

Nope!

We wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for this war.

Putin started eating shit in 2007, and we know that he started to dismantle Ukraine in 2014. Still, only after his Blitzkrieg didn’t work out in 2022, he started to fully re-Stalinize Russian society, to rewrite history, to hallucinate, and to pretend that the collective West is trying to destroy Russia.

The longer the war in Ukraine dragged on, the more he became a mix of Genghis Khan and Stalin.

No matter how much we try to believe that not so many Russians believe the official narrative, the brainwashing in Russia has reached unprecedented levels. School textbooks distort reality even more than they did in Stalin’s time. Watch Steve Rosenberg’s videos here and here.

It’s still the West’s fault!

If the West hadn’t mostly provided lip service between 2014 and 2022, and if it had offered effective military support to help Ukraine regain control over the rebellious separatist Eastern regions, and, obviously, if the West hadn’t accepted the annexation of Crimea, this war wouldn’t have existed!

But the West only pretended to protest when Crimea was annexed, and Putin thought he could later annex the entirety of Donbas, which is what eventually will happen!

Now Russia cannot reverse course

Even if Putin dies, Russia cannot reverse course. It’s way beyond the point of no return. In many respects, the Russian Federation is very much like the Third Reich.

Russians have an official enemy who’s guilty of everything that’s going wrong in Russia. (Of course, that one culprit isn’t the Führer Vladimir Vladimirovich.)

Russians have been fascized en masse.

Russia has an objective.

Russia conducts a “Special Military Operation” that everyone perceives as an existential war.

Russians have been brainwashed to believe that either Russia wins this war, or it will cease to exist.

Now we’re literally fucked up.

It’s impossible to predict the outcome of this war, but a few facts do not forecast anything positive.

What with all those Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia, things aren’t going that well for Ukraine.

Russia has new jet-powered drones that are outpacing Ukraine’s air defences. The WSJ even claims that Russia Is Churning Out Smart, Cheap New Weapons Faster Than Ukraine or the U.S.

A train carrying Boris Johnson and the former CIA chief David Petraeus was hit by a Russian drone near the Poland-Ukraine border.

On September 13, Dmitry Peskov admitted that Moscow is now striking targets indiscriminately across Ukraine in response to Kyiv’s intensified attacks on Russian territory:

Peskov claimed Russia had previously avoided indiscriminate strikes but changed its approach after Ukraine began targeting Russian economic and strategic infrastructure.

“The Russian Federation did not strike everything and anything,” Peskov told reporters. “It started doing so after the Ukrainians themselves opened Pandora’s box.”

This is not exactly true. But expect things to be much, much worse.

As for the Americans…

Jared Kushner stated at the YES 2026 conference in Kyiv that territorial disputes remain the chief obstacle preventing a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. That’s a way of saying that, in the opinion of the US Administration, Ukraine should just give Russia all territories that Russia wants.

Look, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner just kissed Putin’s ass (watch the first minute of this video). And Trump—guess what?—asked Zelensky to stop striking Russian diesel infrastructure:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Sept. 13 called on President Volodymyr Zelensky to halt Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s diesel fuel infrastructure, claiming the attacks were contributing to a global diesel shortage as his war against Iran disrupts fuel supplies worldwide.
…
“Mr. Zelensky has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia,” Trump said. “Let him go after targets, but not diesel fuel, because he’s causing a shortage of diesel.”

“We spoke to Mr. Zelensky about it… This isn’t done by the Middle East.”

Fareed Zakaria believes that Trump dangerously misunderstands Putin. His take (also here) includes this:

President Trump’s negotiators for everything, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, seem genuinely awestruck by their latest tête-à-tête with Vladimir Putin. Witkoff gushed that these meetings rank “at the top” of his life’s experiences. Both men talk of Russia as a potential partner and approach the country as businessmen who, like Donald Trump, seek “win-win” solutions with Putin.

So it’s worth recalling a lesson about Putin learned by another businessman-turned-government official, Hank Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs.

As Treasury Secretary, Paulson visited Beijing for the Olympics in August 2008, just as the global financial crisis was gathering force and markets were increasingly worried about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant institutions that guarantee the most mortgages in the United States.

In Beijing, Paulson received news that, he said, “took my breath away.” Russian officials had approached China and proposed that the two countries jointly dump large quantities of Fannie and Freddie securities. The aim was to intensify the pressure on the already teetering American economy, probably pushing it off the edge.

China declined.

Think about what this says. At a moment when the American financial system was approaching its worst crisis since the Great Depression, Vladimir Putin was searching for ways to hit America when it was down — even though a deeper American crash would inevitably have damaged the rest of the world, including Russia.

Putin appeared to be willing to risk a lose-lose outcome as long as America lost badly.

That’s close to the opposite of how a businessman thinks. But Putin has never claimed to be a businessman searching for deals. He is a Russian nationalist seeking to restore the power and territory lost with the collapse of the Russian and soviet empires, even as his country recedes economically, demographically, and politically on the world stage.

One wonders what it would take for the administration to recognize that Putin has spent years pursuing a foreign policy aimed at weakening America and its influence.

This is actually much worse than that.

We all know that Trump is a retarded, senile, narcissistic psychopath with an understanding of the world less perceptive than a fifth grader’s, if not worse.

His envoys are not only immensely incompetent but also slightly oligophrenic.

Trump, his completely moronic administration and aides, and the Technomafia that kisses his ass have moral standards similar to Putin’s. They are self-centered and completely ignorant. They don’t care about anyone and, what’s worse, they don’t understand absolutely anything about anything!

There is no way America is a part of the solution. America is part of the problem.

Ukraine didn’t buy the West any time!

By resisting that long without winning, Ukraine has exacerbated Putin’s furious nationalism and imperialism.

These four and a half years transformed the mildly civilized Putin into the most brutish beast.

We now have to face a full-time Mr. Hyde — no more Dr. Jekyll, not even for a split second.

Then, what we noticed in these years was that both Ukraine and Russia have adapted to the modern, post-2022 war. NATO and the West have not.

What is preventing Russia from invading Europe?

Russia didn’t want to invade Europe.

Putin wanted and wants to rebuild the former “Russian world” (русский мир), the former Russian Empire, the former USSR.

But he didn’t invade even Moldova before occupying Crimea and attacking Ukraine.

Once this is over, or even before, Putin might find a pretext to invade one of the Baltic States (the oppression of the Russian minority). Other than that, I don’t think he would attack NATO.

But if Ukraine still resists, and Putin’s brainwashed subjects “know” that the West wants to destroy Russia, then there’s only one possible countermeasure: Russia should destroy the West!

Without ever having this desire, Ukraine’s staunchness and resilience made Russia more aggressive than ever towards Europe and the West.

Ukraine wasn’t of any help to us.

When Ukraine loses, we will be forced to admit that we’re in deep shit. And there won’t be any way to get out if it.

After the West did “too little, too late,” it’s time we realized it’s too late to do anything. Alea iacta est.

This is realism and nothing else.