Ukraine has launched one of the largest counteroffensives of the four-year war.
On June 25th, Zalinski handed his intelligence service, the SBU, a 40-day operation, not a random drone wave, but a declared scheduled campaign.
Its aim, in a single sentence, to force the aggressor to peace.
In other words, to force Putin to back down by using force and make him accept defeat.
And this was a statement of sharp intent.
Whatever gets hit from here on, the message would stay the same.
Change Putin’s mind willingly or by force.
Hours after the declaration on the night of June 26th, 2026, more than a dozen Russian regions were under fire, and both the timing and the targets made clear this was no coincidence.
It was the first act of a declared campaign.
One question remains, where does this 40-day clock stop? And why should that date August 4th unsettle the Kremlin? To read these 40 days correctly, one distinction is essential.
Technically, Zalinsky didn’t issue a strike order.
He built a frame.
Even the name of the directive he gave the SBU gives it away.
An operation to influence the aggressor.
For 4 years, Russia’s talk of peace has always rung hollow.
This time, it’s Ukraine setting the frame from the outset.
Now to that calendar.
June 25th plus 40 days lands on August 4th.
And this window is anything but empty.
Inside it sits the Anchora NATO summit on July 7th to 8th.
Inside it July 4th, America’s 250th anniversary.
And at its end, August 2nd, the day of Russia’s airborne troops.
And there’s that ghost.
In August 1991, Soviet leader Gorbachoff went to his dacer in Crimea on August 4th.
That holiday became the opening of a failed coup and of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Let’s be clear, this is no prophecy, but a resonance.
Yet, landing on such a date is a quiet message for those who know their history.
The targets are shifting, too.
We framed this campaign as oil, hit the refineries, cut the Kremlin’s cash.
True.
But perhaps what matters more is the industrial base.
Days ago, Ukraine struck the semiconductor plant in Vores that makes the electronics for the Pancier, the Escander, and the KH101 and did it with Storm Shadow cruise missiles.
The logic is simple.
Cutting the money is one thing.
Cutting the factory means the weapon never reaches the front at all.
The target isn’t a hungry army.
It’s a disarmed one.
And now to the real question.
Let’s say it up front.
Everything past this point is analysis and possibility, not confirmed Ukrainian intent.
First, a quick look at that visible first move.
On the night of June 26th, Ukraine struck more than a dozen Russian regions.
And that same morning, Crimea’s occupation administration, Putin’s own appointed governors, was forced to declare a state of emergency across the peninsula.
Months of drone blockade had severed the fuel, the power, the railway, and the feries one by one, turning the peninsula from a fortress into a liability.
We covered that night in full in a separate video.
But the summary is plain.
The siege is working.
The pressure is biting.
So what if this visible first move is also a decoy? Consider it.
The pressure on Crimea has already forced Russia to mass its most expensive air defenses along the Moscow Valde Kirch line, pinning Russian attention in one place.
The first possibility, Ukraine holds Crimea at risk as it stands, but shifts the real weight north to Moscow.
It has hundreds of thousands of drones.
With constant trap raids around the capital, it can keep Russian air defenses pinned there in a panic.
A cheap drone can freeze a million-doll battery in place.
Zalinski has confirmed Russia is shifting its air defenses to protect Moscow.
A second possibility, a surprise ground dimension, strike the military buildups in Belgarod, Kursk, Rostov, and Briansk along Ukraine’s border to relieve the pressure on Donbass and Kharkiv.
Then perhaps a ground push from the Kharkiv or Sunumi direction.
Keep the proportion here.
Ukraine has a serious manpower problem of its own.
And its own border guard says there’s no preparation for a new front.
So this is pressure distribution, not conquest.
And a third, perhaps the final plan.
If the real target is Crimea, pound it before it can recover and speed the civilians flight.
Ukraine may not launch a Crimea ground operation before civilians leave.
Which is exactly why it hasn’t fully cut the Kirch Bridge.
Ukrainian analysts said it plainly.
They could destroy the bridge, but they’re not yet.
So, civilians and soldiers can get out.
That 10 km escape queue may be precisely what’s intended.
There’s also the chance of an amphibious landing, drone boats, mother ships.
Highly speculative.
Yet, here’s the trick.
The rumor itself is a weapon.
Even at low odds, merely talking about it sews anxiety among Crimea’s population and Moscow’s planners.
And if you do nothing, you’re the one held responsible when it happens.
All of these can be true at once.
The real weapon is uncertainty itself.
Russia has to defend everything at once, scattering its forces and its air defenses, which is the decoy, which the final plan.
No one knows.
Treat anyone who presents this as a certain plan with suspicion.
And this is part of a far wider map than Crimea.
step back.
And what Ukraine is doing isn’t isolated targets.
It’s closing Russia’s doors to the seas one by one.
Four separate waters, one logic.
First, the Black Sea.
With almost no navy of its own, Ukraine has driven the Russian Black Sea fleet out of open waters with drones and missiles.
The ships fled from Seestol to Novarosis in the east.
And the pressure rose so high that on June 14th, 2026, according to the partisan group Atesh, the fleet began moving even its headquarters from Seistoel to Novarosis.
Some officers relocating their families and selling property without waiting for official orders.
Russia can no longer operate safely in the northwestern Black Sea.
The idea of an amphibious assault on Adessa, once a prime objective, is off the table.
once in Seastoel.
While in May, an oil dep depot at Novarasis, the fleet’s new shelter was hit too.
So Ukraine with almost no warships of its own has effectively beaten an entire fleet.
Second, the Sea of Azoff, Russia’s internal lake.
This enclosed basin feeding the southern front through the ports of Marupole and Berdansk is both a supply line and a shelter for part of the fleet.
That night’s drones reached the skies over Azov as well.
So even the water Russia deemed safest is no longer untouchable.
And as Azovv comes under pressure, resupplying Crimea from the south grows harder still.
Every broken link in the southern logistics loads a little more onto the remaining land corridor.
Third, much farther north, the Baltic.
Ukraine has struck Russia’s two largest Baltic oil export terminals, Ust Luga and Primosk, together around 2 million barrels a day, repeatedly backto back within a single week.
The tempo was so intense that observers wrote Kiev was trying to wreck these ports beyond repair.
The result is stark.
In one week alone, March 22nd to 29th, Russian oil exports fell 43% costing roughly a billion dollars in lost revenue.
On top of that came a dangerous side effect.
Some drones drifted off course and came down in the airspace of NATO members Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.
A new vein of tension on the alliance’s eastern flank.
And farthest of all, the fourth, the Caspian.
The vulgar delta at Astraan is Russia’s gateway for Shahed drone parts arriving from Iran.
Port Olia is the logistics hub of that supply.
Ukraine has struck both the Astraan gas processing plant and the cargo ships carrying Iranian components.
So the artery feeding Russia’s drone factory is a target too.
At the end of that artery sits the sprawling plant at Yalabooga where Russia builds thousands of shahed gerans a year.
Severing the Caspian route means trying to starve that factory at its source.
The Black Sea, Azovv, the Baltic, the Caspian.
Four separate seas, one doctrine to seal Russia’s doors of export, resupply, and weapons procurement one by one.
Crimea is merely the most visible corner of that map.
All this pressure runs on a clock, too.
And to see why that clock matters, you have to look inside the window.
At the very middle of the stretch to August 4th stands a diplomatic lever, anchor.
On July 7th to 8th, NATO leaders will put on the table the transformation Washington calls NATO 3.
0, the target of spending 5% of national income on defense and new funding mechanisms for Ukraine.
The defense industry forum on July 7th will take up transatlantic arms production.
For Zalinski, this summit is a chance to extract concrete commitments from the West at the peak of a 40-day pressure campaign.
So the operation may be timed to make Russia look as weak as possible and Ukraine as much the winner as possible right before the parties sit down in anchor a clock and also a spotlight.
The leverage logic is simple too.
40 days impose a decision window on Putin.
Either he moves toward the table within that time in which case the pressure has done its job or he holds out and with every passing day the West’s support for Ukraine hardens further on the back of Russia’s weakness.
Either way, the clock seems to run in Zalinsk’s favor.
For Putin, it’s a vice across 40 days.
Each week brings a fresh strike, a fresh Russia is weak headline.
Coming to the table looks like an admission of weakness.
Staying away binds the West more tightly around Ukraine at Anchora.
So the clock is a mechanism that squeezes the Kremlin whichever way it turns, which is exactly why this is no random wave, but a calculated pressure campaign.
So is all this pressure working on the inside.
Drawing on internal Russian documents obtained by Ukraine’s foreign intelligence, Zalinsky offered striking figures.
Anxiety among Russians has passed 50%, higher than during the Kursk operation.
66% described their finances as difficult.
80% see a major economic crisis as inevitable.
But take them for what they are.
These are Zalinsk’s claim, not independently verified.
The direction may be right, yet they’re a claim, not a fact.
By the same documents, the picture is harsh on the economy as well.
One company alone has had to shut around 400 oil wells.
Refining has dropped at least 10% in a few months, and the federal deficit neared $80 billion by the fifth month.
Again, unverifiable data, Zalinski relayed.
There’s an independent note, too.
Bloomberg estimates that high oil prices notwithstanding, Russia’s economy may have contracted in the first quarter of the year.
There’s verified ground as well.
Russia’s defense ministry said it downed 8,849 drones in May, far above January’s 3,676.
And roughly a third of 2026’s successful Ukrainian strikes came in June alone.
So the volume of the pressure is real.
What’s contested is how deep a mark it leaves inside.
And the street runs both ways.
Last week, Russia’s missile and drone volume was relatively low.
And low volume is often a sign that a large attack is being stockpiled.
In the same stretch, the Kremanchuk power plant was hit.
Six people were wounded in Zaparisia.
And the grind continued at Costantinovka.
So this is no one-sided victory.
So where could all these moves lead? The calculus isn’t one directional.
At least four different outcomes are on the table at once.
First, an economic spiral.
The Baltic strikes alone cut Russian oil exports sharply within a week.
Refining is falling.
The deficit is widening.
If this tempo holds, the revenue tap that funds the war narrows.
Beyond that, this isn’t only Russia’s problem.
Luga alone supplied about 8% of global Napa exports, and these strikes ripple out to the world by moving oil prices.
Even so, this is a slow strangulation, not a sudden collapse.
Russia’s crude keeps flowing through its shadow fleet.
Second, and most dangerous, the risk of spillover into NATO.
In the Baltic strikes, some drones came down in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.
A drone over Adessa set off an alert and scrambled jets in neighboring Romania.
The unease that began a month ago when a building was struck in Romania edges NATO’s Article 5 reflex a little further onto the agenda with each new incident.
Every stray drone raises the chance of the alliance being drawn deeper into the war.
For Ukraine, at once a lever and a danger.
Third, Russian retaliation.
The flip side of the coin may be a massive attack wave Moscow is stockpiling.
Low volume weeks are usually the harbinger of a one, two, or three night mass strike.
And the second front infrastructure taking shape on the Bellarus border is a reminder that pressure always runs both ways.
And fourth, the real aim, a diplomatic outcome.
The whole point of this pressure is to force Putin to the table.
But it’s a gamble.
If Russia chooses escalation over retreat, the 40-day frame meant to force peace could turn into a campaign that widens the war.
So, the result of this move is multi-layered.
A wager that weakens Russia, puts NATO at risk, and could invite a massive reprisal.
And beneath this entire picture lies a single asymmetry.
A $50,000 drone can threaten a million dollar air defense battery or an entire oil terminal.
Russia has to defend four seas, two capitals, and a peninsula all at once.
Ukraine, with a cheap, homegrown, and inexhaustible tool, can shift the pressure wherever it likes.
Over the long run, it’s the expensive side of this lopsided equation that wears down.
To understand how this strategic maritime blockade is causing physical devastation on the ground, let’s now look at the southern front, Zaparicia.
Putin had actually planned everything.
The southeastern corner of Zaparisia oblast the orivo kamyanska line was the bloodiest offensive zone on the southern front throughout 2025.
Russia had committed its heaviest units here.
The 58th combined arms army, the 7th airborne division, the 104th airborne division and elements of the 42nd motor rifle division.
The plan was a two-pronged maneuver pushing east from Julipole and west from Orikiv to squeeze Zaparisia city.
Stepppno and its surroundings had been partially captured for this purpose and the E5 highway, the main north south artery leading to Zaparisia had come under threat.
The advance was slow and costly.
Every meter paid for in blood, but Russia was gaining ground and the Kremlin was reporting that the southern offensive was proceeding.
In the spring of 2026, this picture began to change.
When Ukrainian forces increased drone pressure on the southern front, a threshold formed that fundamentally altered the operational environment for Russian troops.
Changing positions became risky.
Movement in open terrain grew increasingly difficult and resupply convoys became targets every time.
In 2025, a Russian position experienced an average of 3 to 5 FPV contact per day.
By May 2026, that number had risen to 10 to 15 per hour.
This wasn’t just a quantitative increase.
It was a threshold that fundamentally altered the operational environment for Russian forces.
Changing positions became risky.
Movement in open terrain grew increasingly difficult and resupply convoys became targets every time.
Hornet type medium-range drones deepened this pressure.
AI powered autonomous targeting, night vision capability, electronic warfare resistance, and a range exceeding 150 km.
Russia’s existing electronic warfare systems are not achieving the desired results against these drones.
And while Russia is working on counter measures, the Hornets entered mass deployment at the start of May and Russia couldn’t keep pace.
The three-layered drone architecture, FPVs at close range, Hornets at 150 km depth, reconnaissance drones providing 24-hour surveillance, continues to shrink Russian forces room to maneuver.
Local telegram groups report drone swarms over Kmen Nepovska Vaan and Enahoda every 20 to 30 minutes.
Russian resupply convoys were being hit with increasing frequency.
Every truck on the E105 and side roads was at risk.
This technological pressure began producing concrete results on the ground.
As the supply link between units weakened, frontline resistance also started to erode.
Moreover, while Russia was losing resources in the south, reinforcements weren’t arriving from other fronts either.
The Belgarod dam operation had already disrupted the Vauvchansk supply artery.
The February Starlink shutdown had rattled the command network, and the fall of Kupansk had diverted the eastern Zapad group’s attention.
With simultaneous pressure building on every front, Russia’s operational depth narrowed.
Reserves available for the south steadily diminished.
This variable did not exist in Putin’s plan equation, and Ukraine’s general staff had been patiently waiting for these conditions to form.
When the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade and Hur’s Artan Special Unit launched their counterattack, Russian lines couldn’t withstand the accumulated pressure.
The wind in the south had begun turning against Russia.
May 18th, 2026.
HR’s Artan Special Unit cleared the main positions in Stepppen Nohisk from Russian forces in a night operation.
Assault actions were carried out in a coordinated manner with aerial reconnaissance and precision strikes.
Geollocated footage showed Ukrainian armored vehicles operating at the E105 junction, an area marked as confirmed Russian control on the deep state map just days earlier.
Why does Steenhurk matter so much? The town sits 30 km south of Zaparisia on the E105.
Russia had been using its control of this position to plan bringing Zaparisia within artillery range.
Combined with advances toward Primorska, it created the possibility of squeezing the city from two directions.
Steppnersk changing hands seriously weakened the western prong of this plan.
Finland-based analyst Pari Paroan of the Blackbird Group assessed that Ukraine had launched a series of counterattacks in the Steenhursk direction and that the situation could be stabilized in the near term.
By late May, Steenhurk was confirmed fully under Ukrainian control.
Hur’s Artan Special Unit completed the operation that began on May 18th.
As the administrative center of the Vasilivka district, the town had been under occupation since early 2022.
Its liberation carries both symbolic and operational weight.
The losses didn’t stop at Steenhusk.
Ukraine expanded its counterattack.
ISW’s May 16th to 22nd reports document simultaneous Ukrainian advances in four different directions around Oriciv.
Northwest of Steppnhersk, west of Steppov, southwest of Patikatki, and southeast of Malatkmachka.
Ukraine’s 128th Mountain Assault Brigade advanced south of Blohiraia and Novodan Lithfka.
A Kremlin aligned mill bloggger acknowledged that no Russian positions remained in Novodanka and Malattom Machka, the village Russia had kept under pressure for over 4 years, more than 1,500 days, is now under Ukrainian control.
Thousands of soldiers, tons of equipment, years of energy spent on a single village.
Now that village has been recaptured in a single operation.
This picture suggests that Russia’s attrition approach in the south has not delivered the expected results.
Russia aimed to wear down its opponent but increasingly became the one being worn down.
Plavy’s status remains unclear.
Reebar says almost completely lost but deep state’s map still shows a small Russian pocket.
Plavni sits southeast of Steenhursk at the transition point toward Kaman Skoya.
If it falls completely, it opens the possibility of direct pressure on the Cameo line, a threshold with potentially much wider consequences.
Reebar summarizes the picture.
Stepppnagorsk and Plavy have been almost completely lost along with nearly all territorial gains made during the offensive that began in early 2025.
A year’s worth of hard one progress lost in a short time and the ones acknowledging this are Russia’s own military analysts.
The scale of Russian casualties is also notable.
According to Ukrainian commanders, the average mobilized soldier survives 12 minutes in the Stepnersk sector.
This figure cannot be independently verified, but is consistent with the drone density on the ground and points to how heavy the pressure on Russian units in this area has become.
The seventh VDV division and elements of the 42nd Motor Rifle Division have taken serious damage.
According to Transform Ukraine’s analysis, the 58th Combined Arms Army has lost its offensive capacity.
It is trying to repel Ukrainian counterattacks and hold fragile lines.
The two-pronged advance plan toward Orikiv has effectively stopped working.
The 58th Army has shifted from offense to defense.
But the next step of this retreat, the Kamco Skoya Shabbachi line points to a threshold with potentially much broader consequences.
Reebar’s clearest warning is about this line.
There is a risk that the enemy will not just restore the status quo, but launch an offensive along the Kaminskoa Shabbachi line.
Kaminskoa sits on the western bank of the Nepa north of Enahuar, a strategic node.
Shabbachi lies to the south at the key junction of the Vasilivka route.
The roughly 25 km line between these two points is one of the most important links in Russia’s southern defense.
After Steenhurk fell, the northern end of this link has already weakened.
And if Plavy falls completely, pressure shifts directly onto this line.
Can Russia hold it? The answer depends on many variables.
reinforcement capacity, air defense effectiveness, whether Ukraine can sustain the tempo of its attack.
But Reebar himself is openly discussing the possibility of this line breaking and describes the chain reaction that would follow step by step.
In the first phase, Russia would need to send reinforcements toward Vasilivka.
Vasilivka is the junction where southern supply routes converge, but the roads leading there are already roots frequently targeted by Ukrainian drone strikes.
A vicious cycle emerges here.
You want to send reinforcements, but what you send risks being hit on the road.
If you don’t send reinforcements, the line weakens, and as the line weakens, a larger area opens up.
If Vasilivka can’t be held, the second phase may come into play.
The retreat extends to Tokmac.
Tokmac is Russia’s last major defensive node in the south.
But between Tokmack and Zaparisia stretches 70 km of open step and between Tokmack and Berdansk 80 km.
This flat terrain offers no natural defensive features.
No river, no mountains, no forest.
There’s no evidence that Russia built new fortifications in this area during 2025.
All resources were spent on the offensive.
When the offense stopped, what remained was open terrain with weak defensive infrastructure.
Rybar’s worst case scenario emerges here.
Stabilizing the situation will require deploying additional forces toward Tokmac and further toward Berdansk and Marupole.
Civilian cargo deliveries on these routes are already severely disrupted.
Russia’s southern logistical backbone is already under pressure.
Gasoline in Crimea is being rationed with coupons and resupply convoys heading south are being hit by drone fire.
Under these conditions, deploying additional forces southward is possible on paper, but very difficult in practice.
If this scenario materializes, Russia’s southern defense structure would be seriously weakened, and Crimea’s land connection would come under direct threat.
The 25 to 30,000 strong garrison in Crimea, remnants of the Black Sea fleet, FSB units, air defense elements could face the risk of isolation.
Of course, Russia still has options for holding this line.
New unit deployments, air defense reinforcements, tactical adjustments, but the one describing this scenario is not Ukraine.
It’s Rybar, a pro-Russian source close to the Kremlin.
If he is openly discussing these risks, the situation on the ground may be different from official statements.
And right next to the Kaminskoy line, a different kind of threat awaits.
a zone where even Russia’s most powerful weapons are ineffective.
At the table too, the sides are drawing their lines.
Putin still says he’ll talk only on the basis of what he calls the Alaska formula.
Yet, US Secretary of State Rubio has stated that no such agreement ever existed, that Alaska produced only a proposal.
By the Kremlin’s reading, at last year’s summit, Trump had been open to handing Donbass to Russia and freezing the front line.
Moscow calls this the spirit of Anchorage.
Rubio rejected it, telling Congress they are no neutral mediator, that they arm only Ukraine.
Macron, for his part, said Europe had adopted a pro- Ukraine declaration at the G7.
As this external pressure mounts, a much older question gains weight inside.
What comes after Putin? Since 1917, five of Russia’s nine leaders died in office.
The two who left alive, Gorbachof and Yeltzin, were pushed out by a coup or its aftermath.
The names floated today include Prime Minister Mishustin, Alexe Dumin from the Security Council, Patrav, and Moscow Mayor Soanin, but nothing is certain.
It’s a reminder that the regime’s fragility is as real a dimension as the pressure on the battlefield.
So 40 days is more than a clock.
It’s a wager, a narrative, and a pressure campaign.
The visible first move is Crimea, but beneath it may lie a decoy, a faint, or a final plan.
And this is only one piece of a far wider encirclement stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian, forcing Russia to defend four seas at once.
That’s the real weapon, uncertainty itself.
Still, it’s worth remembering.
Running an encirclement this broad all at once is a gamble that stretches Ukraine’s own resources to the limit.
But the end of that clock, August 4th, falls on the very week a Kremlin leader last went to Crimea and came back to a coup.
This is no prophecy.
Yet, Zalinski knows his history.
So does Putin.
The countdown has begun.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
