the war hawks you're referring to would prefer if Putin would institute a draft, throw a couple million extra men at Ukraine and crush it quickly, even if it meant higher casualties.

The war hawks /u/ForeignEchoRevival is talking about used to call for a draft, but they have been saying for weeks now that it would be a pointless waste of lives. Several have said that the last chance for a draft to work was mid-2025, but that now, there is no value in it because Ukrainian drone units have become so adept, respon. At least one Russian blogger, Ilya Remeslo, has been involuntarily committed to mental institutions after publicly turning on Putin over the last few months. He's not the only one whose tone has changed.

Public court records show that many of Russia's defense companies are in very bad shape. Bankruptcies are skyrocketing as the Kremlin is deciding on prices that are well below production costs and forcing companies to accept the contracts. JSC Kronstadt, the largest drone maker in Russia, is facing bankruptcy for missing deliveries and payments. The Optron-Stavropol plant reportedly shut down last summer because it couldn't pay its bills. Dozens of smaller companies have stopped operating, declared bankruptcy, or closed completely.

And that doesn't even get into the problems that oblasts are having funding recruitment bonuses while also handling their regular budgets without consistent remuneration from Moscow. While the federal government seems to have caught up on those for the moment, it can only do that so many times.

although what he's done is far more of a light touch than I would have gone with, it does seem to be working by every metric

The Russian advance has slowed to almost a stop in the last couple of months. Even the most optimistic take says that they're taking only a few tens of square kilometers per month in the last three months, and total gains for 2026 are down somewhere between half and two-thirds compared to their gains for the first four months of 2026. Ukraine has repeatedly hit major economic centers recently, focusing on oil, with at least four hits on the oil facilities in Tuapse in about three weeks. While Tuapse isn't the biggest oil terminal, it still accounts for about 4% of Russia's total capacity, and four essentially unanswered attacks looks really, really bad.

Ukraine is repeatedly hitting hundreds of kilometers inside Russia, and while I'm the first to say that air defense is hard, especially in a country the size of Russia, and I don't fault some misses, the fact that Russia doesn't seem to be able to hit much in western Ukraine despite much shorter distances doesn't speak well of Russian capabilities. Russia is also quietly admitting that they're losing the last few combat-capable vessels in the Black Sea, and repeated successful attacks on airbases in Crimea and Rostov have been called out by pro-war bloggers even if the Kremlin won't talk about it.

But in Ukraine, the technical industries that it will need after the war are doing much better, if not thriving. Small businesses are helping with the war, not least with distributed drone production, and Ukraine is signing deals to export its drone interceptors to Europe and the Middle East, and it is working on one with Canada. Recovery is likely to be much easier for Ukraine than for Russia.

It has long been said that amateurs focus on tactics while professionals focus on logistics. Ukraine seems to have a solid strategy to attack Russia's logistics, including defense plants; oil and other economic targets; and gathering points well behind the front lines, making it difficult for Russian units to even come together to set up an attack. Russia, meanwhile, either cannot or is not countering with attacks against Ukraine's logistics. Ukraine may not be able to force Russia off the battlefield at gunpoint, but they're in a better place to simply outlast Russia at this point.

the Russian side should absolutely be able to pull out a definitive win and collapse the Ukrainian state - if they don't manage to do it that's just sheer incompetence.

Russia has been demonstrating this from the start. Their victories have come almost entirely through brute force. Now that their ability to use raw brute force has been greatly reduced, their incompetence is starting to become much more obvious.