Maps and stuff

WB Koledino Probably the largest fire recorded. The entire warehouse burned down in about three hours (it took three hours for the smoke plume to cross Ozyory).

WB Update

Saratov Stonehange should consider a 3rd row of stones as 2nd one is already booked.

Recent geography updates

129x 40kV+ Crimean substations and those few that still need a visit

The Fortress Belt created a problem Ukraine was never capable of resolving. A huge urban area where nobody has the authority, funds or power to properly prepare it. Thousands of civilians prevent proper transformation but keep the area alive. There will be neither an area nor people at the end. Once this drag disappears, Ukraine should finally accept a scorched-earth defense, without convenient settlements for russian infiltrators to rely on. Treelines should be removed, and settlements prepared: some homes removed, others converted into traps, with defenders scattered across the area in foxholes. The new line should look vulnerable enough to invite the enemy in, but every possible hideout should be faked. Obstacle lines should provide some gaps to exploit, leading the enemy into a fire trap. Windbreaks should be cut to create a manageable gap that defenders can keep an eye on, while still providing areas for defenders to hide and the enemy to accumulate. Obstacles should look possible to break through, but impossible to hold — a time and resource consuming riddle. AFU has already defined a grid that creates independent defense zones. That should be enhanced further — split by wire into smaller, company-managed sections. Smaller seeds should allow them to maintain a randomly oriented pattern that the enemy won’t be able to exploit by moving along the original line. All of that requires coordination and careful planning, but doesn't cost too much. The grid is already defined and just needs some improvements. Drones will represent an active layer of an already robust defense, increasing its capacity even more. Russia isn't going to stop on its own and Ukraine can't expect them to negotiate anything acceptable before they will be forced to stop.

Ru are +24km² in 3 months so far.

DS update to revert entire russian summer offensive

Zelenskyi From January through August of this year, our warriors of the Airborne Assault Forces and other units carried out an effective offensive operation in the Oleksandrivskyi sector. Thanks to the active operations of our troops, significant losses were inflicted on the occupation contingent. Russian losses amounted to at least 9,550 killed and more than 6,600 wounded. Ukraine’s “exchange fund” was also replenished. Over the course of the operation, 745 square kilometers of territory were liberated. Twenty-six villages in the Dnipro, Donetsk, and Zaporizhzhia regions were returned to Ukrainian control. This offensive operation of ours was carried out with precision – exactly as planned. Today, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Mykhailo Drapatyi, Chief of the General Staff Ihor Skybiuk, and Commander of the Airborne Assault Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleh Apostol reported on the results of these active operations and the next steps. I am proud of the courage of Ukrainian warriors! Glory to Ukraine!

GSUA and Russian MoD reported settlements. The overlap is roughly where the contested zone "used" to be - it's grey now, while the divergence define the kill zone - no grey there.

All the Owl registered events compared to GSUA reported attacks by direction Reporting coverage May 12, 2026 → Aug 12, 2026 (overall 0.23 events/attack): Kharkiv: 0.17 (176 events / 1065 attacks) — typical Kupiansk: 0.36 (114 events / 315 attacks) — well covered Lyman: 0.13 (171 events / 1353 attacks) — under-reported Siversk: 0.07 (97 events / 1488 attacks) — under-reported Kramatorsk: 1.16 (222 events / 192 attacks) — well covered Toretsk: 0.36 (682 events / 1889 attacks) — well covered Pokrovsk: 0.15 (513 events / 3341 attacks) — typical Novopavlivka: 0.63 (178 events / 282 attacks) — well covered Gulyaipole: 0.11 (235 events / 2186 attacks) — under-reported Orikhiv: 0.92 (239 events / 260 attacks) — well covered Prydniprovske: 2.22 (100 events / 45 attacks) — well covered Kursk: 0.52 (155 events / 296 attacks) — well covered

The Silence Dividend A few weeks into Drapatyi's command, I see two changes worth tracking. Neither is dramatic on its own, but together they look like an attempt to address the constraint of Russia being able to exploit gaps faster than Ukraine can reliably close them. The first is informational. General Staff updates used to run heavy on detail — engagement counts, strike tallies, sector-by-sector breakdowns that read like data spam. Now much of that may have disappeared, alongside an operational security directive restricting front-line reporting to the General Staff itself and official spokespersons. I wouldn't call this an innovation; it was already how a handful of units — special operations, mostly — ran their public posture. What's new is the scale. Applied army-wide, it denies Russia the incidental situational picture that comes from aggregating hundreds of small, individually harmless disclosures. Take that away broadly, and the enemy has to reconstruct more of the picture from its own collection rather than having Ukrainian units inadvertently fill in the gaps for it. The second is structural. The General Staff opened an audit of unit staffing and personnel distribution, and the assault regiments — formations that had become a major target of criticism under the previous command over abuse, waste, and disposable tactics — had their reinforcement suspended pending the review. They won't disappear; the underlying manning problem that produced them hasn't been solved by an audit. My expectation is that they'll be reshaped and rebalanced rather than expanded, with scarce replacements increasingly likely to be directed toward line units. That's a direct answer to how Russia is actually attacking right now — the two- and three-man infiltration teams need a defense with enough personnel distributed along the line to detect and stop small groups before they consolidate, not more one-way firefighter units. The first buys uncertainty. The second tries to buy combat power where it matters. Put the two together and the near-term picture is this: some frontline retraction is plausible as manning gets redistributed, but the bigger shift is who controls the information environment. Russia is likely to fill the vacuum Ukraine is leaving — claiming ground it doesn't hold, waving flags across contested sectors, presenting the grey zone as settled territory — while the General Staff says less than it used to, not more. Don't expect any of this to show up clearly on the OSINT maps. Maybe a bit more Russian-claimed paint than usual, but that's not a new pattern. It's the same one, just louder because one side went quiet.

Added Ukraine Control Map events