Ukraine Military History Institute
A turning point for Ukraine is smaller than most people imagine
Dmytro Putiata starts by taking apart the phrase itself. When people hear "turning point", he says, they expect too much from it: that one side should collapse quickly and declare victory.
He agrees with Rob Lee on a more modest definition. For Ukraine, a turning point would be to stop or minimise the Russian advance and minimise Ukrainian losses. Nothing more dramatic than that.
His verdict on whether Ukraine has got there is careful. So far, he says, Ukraine has only partly done it.
Pressure on Crimea is painful, but it is not isolation
The clearest example of the gap is Crimea. Putiata accepts that missile strikes and the effort to isolate the peninsula are very painful for Russia, and that life there is very harsh for civilians and soldiers alike.
But he says plainly that Crimea was not fully isolated. And he warns against expecting it to break under the strain.
His reasoning comes from Ukraine's own experience. Ukrainians went without electricity for 14 hours across the country and did not collapse as a society or as a state. Western support mattered, he grants, but still. Expecting the people living in Crimea to give way under constant pressure may be, in his word, a little delusional.
It is a useful discipline. A side that has absorbed that kind of punishment itself should be slow to assume the other side cannot.
Why both armies fight so hard for the cities of Donetsk
Putiata also explains why the fighting concentrates on urban areas, and the reason is not only operational.
The Donetsk area is heavily urbanised, with many small and larger cities. Russia can spend a year, or a year and a half, taking one of them, losing a lot of men and equipment in the process. But behind those cities, he says, are literally empty fields. Once the cities fall, manoeuvre becomes much easier and Russia could advance much faster.
So both sides understand the stakes. The cities are, in his phrase, castles behind the line where soldiers can live through the winter.
He speaks from experience. In Avdiivka, he recalls, conditions were not pleasant, but there were plenty of basements and it was possible to stay warm. Holding a position in an open field at minus 20 degrees Celsius is a different matter, and that was when the main threats were artillery and drops from small drones. Today, he says, it is much harder.
Russia's turning point may have arrived first
Here Putiata turns the question around. The turning point that is happening, he argues, is on Russia's side, and that is unfortunate for Ukraine.
He names two reasons. First, Russia succeeded in jamming Starlink. Second, Russia is much faster in fielding jet-powered kamikaze drones, and Ukraine definitely needs its own.
Putiata adds that thermal imaging shapes how Russia uses its variants. In winter, a jet-powered engine shows up far better on a thermal camera than a regular Geran does, and he says Russia is managing which types it uses now and which it holds for the cold months accordingly.
The Geran-3 failed, and Russia fixed it rather than stopping
The detail on Russian development is a picture of an industry that iterates through failure.
Putiata says Russia tried to fit a jet engine onto the existing Geran platform. It was supposed to become the Geran-3, and it failed. Rob Lee fills in why: they put a Chinese jet engine on it, but the structural integrity was not right, so they had to change the airframe itself. The result is the Geran-4, which Lee describes as a drone, but a jet-powered one. It is loud and it is fast, as the host notes for anyone living in Kyiv.
Lee identifies two big developments this year in Russia's deep strike campaign: the jet-powered Geran, now a priority, and seeker versions. Putiata adds that the seeker variants can be remotely operated by a pilot.
On scale, Lee recalls the initial state defence order plan as roughly 12,000 Geran-4 plus another 12,000 of a second Geran variant, entering serial production around April. He hedges each figure with "I think". Putiata is more sceptical of the near-term numbers, but expects Russia to scale in the end.
Missile or drone is now the wrong question
Russia's other growing weapon is the Banderol. The host describes it as a jet-powered missile flying about 450 kilometres an hour with roughly a 100 kilogram payload. Putiata says it can be launched from the ground and from helicopters, and he expects aircraft launch in future, including from the Orion UAV.
Lee resists the label. Is it a missile or a drone? It sits in between: jet-powered, but cheaply so. He points out that the same category is appearing on Ukraine's side, from the ERAM cheap cruise missile supplied by the United States to jet-powered designs from Destinus and the Bars.
The deciding factors, Lee says, are quantities and speed. And on Banderol the quantity has arrived. It has been talked about for a couple of years, and now it is being used in large numbers, with many of the strikes on Odesa and Chernihiv coming from it.
Russia adapts after it is punched
Lee's broader point ties his argument together. In the May to June period, the situation was quite good for Ukraine relative to recent years: Russian advances were slower and Ukraine's strike campaign had progressed.
But Russia does not stand still. It has to get punched in the face a couple of times, Lee says, and then it adapts. That adaptation was always expected, both in defending against Ukrainian strikes and in improving its own. The jet Geran, the seekers and the Banderol are what it looks like.
What to watch
- Banderol volume. Lee says it is now used in large numbers against Odesa and Chernihiv. Whether that spreads to other regions shows whether production has really scaled.
- Jet Geran output against the state order. Lee recalls a plan in the tens of thousands and Putiata doubts Russia can produce that much soon. Launch numbers through the winter will show which is closer.
- A Ukrainian jet-powered strike drone at scale. Putiata calls the absence a very big problem. Whether one appears in meaningful numbers is the test of whether Ukraine closes the adaptation gap.