Russia: Weekly Summary (January 05-11, 2026)

A quick note before you dive in

I would describe this week's blog pile as noisy and anxious. To me, it feels like a neighbourhood where half the houses are on fire and the others are arguing about whose fence was pushed over first. There's a strong thread about the war in Ukraine, of course, but it spreads out — tech and toys of war, long-term geopolitics, energy and sanctions, and even infrastructure ties you might not expect. I’d say there are two big moods running through these posts: one is tactical, immediate, and gritty; the other is strategic, slow-burning, and kind of resigned. They overlap. They step on each other.

Where the conversation clusters (themes you’ll keep seeing)

• Military hardware and tactics: drones, missiles, tanks, infantry changes. These keep showing up in very specific ways. Think of it like watching different mechanics try to fix the same car with different tools.
• Strategy and geopolitics: long-term effects on Russia's place in the world, NATO, and shifting alliances toward Asia. This is the accountant’s ledger of the conflict — not glamorous, but it tells you where the bills go.
• Politics and diplomacy: internal Ukrainian decisions, U.S. and NATO diplomacy, and weird side-plays like Venezuela and Greenland. Like gossip in a small town where everyone’s business matters to everyone else.
• Cyber and infrastructure: cables, energy grids, internet routes. These are the plumbing you only notice when something clogs.
• Civilian costs: blackouts, evacuations, the human side that sits behind the military headlines.

If you want the cliff notes: military innovation and escalation sit next to slow, ugly geopolitical shifts. Then there’s the human fallout. Read on if you want the flavour.

The big-picture takes on Russia's long game

Start with Branko Milanovic. His post feels like someone taking stock at year-end, counting scars. He lays out the long-term political consequences of Mr. Putin and the war. I’d say his tone is tired but precise. He walks through the diplomatic break with Europe, the economic pivot toward Asia, NATO expansion, and the deep, likely enduring cultural ruptures between Russia and Ukraine. He’s not dramatic about revenge or sudden rebirth. Instead he argues the damage is slow and compounding. To me, it reads like someone saying: this is not a bruise you slap on and forget. It changes the face.

That idea — that Russia’s geopolitical standing has worsened and realignment is happening — echoes elsewhere. A lot of the more tactical posts still land against this background. The weapons, the strikes, the seizures all feel like chess moves, but the board itself is tilting.

Military hardware: drones, Oreshniks, MANPADS and hedgehog armor

The gear pieces are plentiful and oddly human. You get the sense of the front trying out new toys and old tricks.

• David Cenciotti flagged a nearly intact Geran-2 drone with a 9K333 Verba MANPADS bolted on. That picture — literally a shoulder-fired missile strapped to a drone — is the kind of improvisation that makes you wince. I’d say it feels like duct-taping urgency onto existing platforms. Dangerous. Ingenious. Also embarrassing for traditional air defense thinking.

• David Axe keeps returning with practical battlefield notes: the shift to infantry-heavy tactics in 2025 that yielded faster ground gains at the cost of huge casualties; the idea that Russia has learned to hide from drones by relying on human legs where machines can’t see. He calls it a grim trade-off. To me, it reads like a farmer choosing a risky crop because it yields more, even though it makes the fields vulnerable to pests.

• On armor tech, David Axe also points to Russian ‘‘hedgehog’’ anti-drone armor — metal wires designed to pop incoming cheap drones. And Ukraine copies it. It’s small, iterative. It’s also proof that the front isn’t a single narrative. It’s more like a two-way mirror. Each side watches, steals, tweaks.

• Then there’s the big, scary stuff. Multiple writers discuss the Oreshnik missile: massive, non-nuclear ICBM-like weapons used as a terror and demolition tool. David Axe describes both the successful Ukrainian strike on a fabrication site and subsequent launches against cities. Another thread links a strike on a MiG-29 repair plant to one of these missiles. The missile is like a sledgehammer being used to crack walnuts.

• One small but telling item: Russia testing its Okhotnik stealth drone again, but keeping flights over Russian soil. David Axe points out that the program’s earlier loss in Ukraine exposed design flaws and reliance on Western tech. To me, that reads like a company testing a prototype in a lab instead of the field after a public failure. It’s cautious, embarrassed, defensive.

These posts together make you feel the war as a laboratory. Some experiments succeed. Some fail spectacularly. Either way, both sides keep taking notes.

Ukraine: politics, personnel, and the trouble of doing more with less

Tom Cooper’s two pieces from 01/05 read like someone with a clear-eyed annoyance at the political theater in Kyiv. In Part 1 and Part 2, Tom Cooper focuses on Ukraine’s leadership choices, internal reshuffles, and broader strategy to undermine Russia’s energy position. He’s skeptical of personnel moves and worries that new faces won’t change much because deeper problems remain.

To me, Cooper’s criticism smells familiar — it’s like watching a team swap coaches mid-season and hoping for a miracle. The roster matters, sure, but so does training, supplies, and whether anyone is willing to change the playbook. He’s also blunt about military aid hiccups and political churn. That combination is dangerous in wartime.

David Axe’s pieces push the same point from the hardware side: the F-16s are doing great air-defense work, shooting down cruise missiles, but are under-used offensively because of a lack of precision munitions. His note about shooting down 34 of 35 cruise missiles is almost cheerleading. But he follows that with a practical complaint: these jets could be more useful if they had the right bombs and more pilots and the strategic reach to hurt Russia where it counts. It’s like having a rowboat when you need a tug.

So the political and military threads converge: leadership choices, funding and logistics, and the tricky gap between capability and use. The posts imply that fixing personnel on paper won’t help if the supply chain and strategy aren’t fixed too.

Diplomacy, NATO, and oddball geopolitics

There are a few posts that pull beyond the battlefield. Olga Lautman warns that rhetoric around Greenland by some U.S. figures could trigger an unprecedented NATO crisis. She suggests that threatening Denmark’s territory weakens the alliance and opens room for Russian influence. I’d say that her tone is sharp, like someone saying: don’t chop at the table you sit at.

Then there’s the tanker seizure story by Sam Cooper. U.S. forces intercepting a Russian-flagged oil tanker near the North Atlantic is more than a headline. It’s a signal. The post ties the operation to efforts to pressure Venezuelan and Iranian oil exports and to curb Russia and China’s economic influence in the region. To me, it looks like a tightrope walk. You pull one ship aside today and you’ve nudged the chessboard another square tomorrow.

And while it’s less obvious at first glance, these moves tie back to Branko’s long-term picture: Russia drifting economically and politically away from Europe and toward other partners. The seizure is one example of that global tug-of-war.

Nuclear anxieties — New START goes dark

Juan Cole’s post on the pending expiry of New START stands out because it’s slow-burn scary. Juan Cole argues that when the treaty runs out on February 5, 2026, the U.S. and Russia will be free to expand arsenals, increasing the risk of a renewed arms race. Add China’s growing arsenal and you’ve got a triangular problem.

The tone here is historical and legalistic, but the effect is emotional. It’s like watching two elderly neighbors with big dogs set their fences on fire. Nobody wants the dogs loose. The treaty’s expiry is not explosive on its own, but it removes guardrails. The blogs here frame it as a key inflection point, one that intersects with the other themes: missiles, nuclear-capable delivery systems like the Oreshnik, and geopolitical brinkmanship.

Cyber, cables, and the invisible routes of influence

A quieter thread comes from Davi Ottenheimer. His piece traces internet and cable links that tie North Korea and Russia across years, linking back to incidents like the 2014 Sony hack and a more recent Berlin power outage. The key argument is methodical: follow the physical wires and you find the routes of cyber operations.

This is the plumbing note of the week. It’s not flashy, but it matters. In my mind it’s like tracking who owns the telephone poles in town if you want to know who can listen in. These posts gently remind readers that not all influence is loud; some of it is a quiet, steady stream carried on cables under the sea.

Civilian life: blackouts, evacuations, and winter

Tim Mak’s urgent piece about Kyiv residents being urged to evacuate after attacks is a reminder of what all the strategic talk underpins: people trying to keep lights on in winter. Tim Mak describes power and heating systems strained to the point of failure as missiles and drones hit infrastructure.

The imagery is stark and immediate. I’d say it feels like watching a city try to ration its blankets as the heater breaks. It’s human. It’s boring in the real way — pipes, wires, crews, and cold. And it’s the part of the story that makes the technical chatter matter.

Small innovations with outsized effects

A recurring micro-theme is small, cheap innovations having big impacts. MANPADS on drones. Hedgehog wire armor on tanks. Using an ICBM body for non-nuclear strikes. Repurposed tech. Improvised solutions.

Those items are fascinating because they show resourcefulness and also the moral and tactical weirdness of modern conflict. They’re also contagious. When one side finds something that works, the other side copies it fast. That’s why you see Ukrainian forces adopting hedgehog armor. It’s like catching a cold at school — the fix spreads fast.

Points of agreement, and where writers argue with each other

Agreement shows up in small ways. Most writers assume the war will keep shaping Russia’s relations with Europe and the West. Most also assume military change is iterative and ugly. But there are differences in tone and emphasis:

• Some are forensic and tactical (Axe, Cenciotti). They want to catalog devices, failures, and small wins.
• Some are political and systemic (Branko, Juan Cole, Olga Lautman). They want to map alliances and long-term fallout.
• Some are practical and civic-focused (Tim Mak, Davi Ottenheimer). They care about infrastructure and people.

There’s less direct disagreement than you might expect. It’s more like different people looking at the same room from different corners. They agree the room is in bad shape. They disagree on which repair to start first.

Little tangents that matter — Greenland, Venezuela, and the global ripple

A couple of pieces nudge the conversation into odd corners. Olga Lautman ties rhetoric about Greenland to risks for NATO. Sam Cooper links tanker seizures to the bigger fight over Venezuelan and Iranian oil. These items show how the Russia-Ukraine war isn’t a single thread but a knot where many strings meet.

I’d say these tangents matter because they’re where strategy shows its seams. If you pull on oil exports, you tug at alliances and domestic economies. If you threaten a NATO member, you don’t just make a political splash. You change calculations.

Where the writing nudges you to read more

Most posts here are hints more than full maps. The tactical pieces make you want diagrams. The geopolitical pieces make you want timelines. The civilian pieces make you want first-person accounts. If you like detail, David Axe and David Cenciotti will scratch the itch for hardware and tactics. For diplomacy and long-term shifts, Branko Milanovic and Juan Cole are the places to start. For the oddball, geopolitically consequential stories, check Olga Lautman and Sam Cooper. And for the plumbing and cyber follow-the-wire detective work, read Davi Ottenheimer.

These posts read like people leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Follow enough and you’ll get to a bigger loaf.

Things that feel underrated this week

A few things didn’t get shouted about but keep showing up.

• Tactical adaptation. The slow copying of cheap fixes changes battlefield dynamics faster than big-ticket items.
• Logistics and munitions. The F-16s’ success on defense but lack of precision bombs is a shoe that keeps dropping. You can’t win with birds and no bullets.
• The legal and diplomatic scaffolding. Treaties like New START are invisible until they’re gone. Once they’re not there, every launch and test looks different.

These are the quiet screws holding the whole machine together. If they come loose, things get messy fast.

A couple of small analogies to walk away with

• The front is like a workshop where both sides keep inventing tools mid-job. Some tools fix something. Some make things worse.
• Politics is like changing a captain on a ship in a storm. You can change the captain, but if the engine is breaking and the sails are shredded, the change doesn’t fix much.
• Cyber and cables are the town’s sewers. You don’t notice them until something backs up and then, surprise, everyone smells it.

Final observations (and a gentle nudge)

There’s a tactile quality to these posts. They don’t just argue. They show. They point to parts of machines, to broken pipelines, to a squad’s improvisation. That makes the picture harder to ignore but also messier. The long-term geopolitical reads give a shape to the mess: Russia isn’t only striking; it’s being reshaped by strikes, sanctions, and diplomacy. The immediate tech details show how the fighting keeps inventing the next headline.

If you want details, the authors named throughout are where to go. I’d say read them. Pick the tactical posts for a close-up and the political posts for the skyline view. Or do both and let the small and the big talk to each other. The threads here don’t knit neatly, but they do tell a story if you follow them.

There are bad days ahead and small victories too. You can see both in these posts — the raw fixes and the slow rearrangements. It’s messy. It’s stubborn. It keeps moving.

Dive into the linked pieces if you want to follow a particular wire or weapon. You’ll get more grit there, and probably more questions than answers. That’s the point, I guess. Read them and then come back to the map.