Alexandru Ionescu

jack of many trades, master of design @eaudeweb

🐘 @[email protected]

[George Barros @georgewbarros]

We’re calling it: The war in Ukraine has entered a new phase.

@KatStepanenko and I have authored a new special report studying how Ukraine is actively challenging the positional character of the war that has dominated the battlefield since 2023.

Data on Russia’s battlefield performance indicates that the character of the war is shifting in favor of Ukrainian forces – at least for now. Russian forces rates of advances are stagnating while Ukrainian forces are employing novel tactics and operational concepts in efforts to break out of positional warfare. Neither Russia nor Ukraine can conduct operational maneuvers yet, however.

The bottom line is that the war in Ukraine is competitive and far from stalemated. Ukrainian forces are out-innovating Russian forces in both military technologies and in applying these new technologies in effective operational concepts that can help Ukrainian forces break out of positional warfare. Ukraine is employing mechanized equipment in tactical maneuvers in ways that were impossible 12 months ago. Russia’s ability to conduct infiltration missions will likely continue to degrade as Ukraine’s intermediate-range strike campaign pushes Russia’s logistics and forward operating bases further away from the frontlines, reducing resourcing to sustain infantry tasked with infiltration missions. Ukraine may be able to scale these effects if they resourced properly by international partners.

Ukraine’s advantage in intermediate range strikes is notably not permanent, and Russia will very likely eventually develop countermeasures to mitigate Ukraine’s advantages. Ukraine’s international partners thus have a rare and temporary opportunity to help Ukraine exploit favorable battlefield dynamics while Ukraine has the upper hand.

Key Points of the report:

• Russia’s rate of advance is plummeting during the Russian Spring-Summer 2026 offensive.

• Russia is losing more soldiers to make fewer gains, with monthly Russian casualty rates reportedly outpacing monthly recruitment since December 2025.

• Ukraine is starting to regain more ground than it is losing for the first time since 2023.

• Ukraine’ recent counterattacks feature unique characteristics and deviate from key trends that defined the positional character of the war since 2023.

• Ukraine is conducting a pattern of more frequent mechanized counterattacks at the tactical level for the first time since 2023.

• The Ukrainian command’s operational planning is maturing.

• Ukraine’s early 2026 counterattacks in the south were successful likely due to better planning and preparation of the battlefield.

• Ukraine has been conducting a coherent campaign to suppress and destroy Russian air defenses since late 2025, in order to shape the battlefield as part of more sophisticated campaign planning.

• Ukraine significantly intensified its intermediate-range strike campaign against dynamic targets in Spring 2026 in order to degrade Russian logistics at operational depths ahead of planned Ukrainian maneuver.

• Ukrainian forces started actively disrupting Russian railway logistics in occupied Ukraine and Russian western regions in Spring 2026.

• Ukrainian intermediate-range strikes are already achieving notable operational effects, including degrading Russia's ability to use the key Russian highway connecting Russia to occupied Crimea and GLOCs around Donetsk City.

• Ukrainian forces decisively seized the initiative in intermediate-range strikes by fielding new technologies such as the US-made Hornet strike UAV, among other systems.

• Ukrainian forces are achieving temporary tactical drone overmatch in some frontline sectors, which is slowing Russian offensive operations by degrading the effectiveness of Russian shaping operations.

• Ukrainian forces likely achieved tactical drone overmatch in certain frontline sectors after degrading Russia’s drone capabilities in late 2025 to early 2026 - primarily by suppressing drone launch positions and increasingly intercepting Russian tactical UAVs.

• Ukraine’s degradation of Russian forces at operational depth combined with tactical-level drone overmatch likely is creating vulnerabilities in the Russian lines.

• Ukraine’s intermediate-range strike campaign is likely far from its zenith, assuming continued support from Ukraine’s partners, and will likely intensify over 2026 as Ukraine fields new weapons capable of striking Russian’s operational rear.

Link to full report: https://t.co/rCeWbYJNiB

[Eric Basmajian @EPBResearch]

Since 2018:

Total US corporate profits: +81%
10 S&P mega-caps: +356%

Profits of the big monopoly S&P companies have risen from 8% to 20% of total US corporate profits in just 7 years.*

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

The U.S. is lobbying against SAFE because it mandates contractors from the EU/EFTA/Ukraine. One reason why Tusk is speaking candidly about how shaky the U.S. is as an ally: Washington says it wants Europe to arm itself and take its security into its own hands, but then it demands Europe rely on American hardware. You can't have it both ways. https://t.co/Z3tFW1gMuv

[Tenobrus @tenobrus]

at google this was known as "buying the gnome". there's like a billion tweets about this already but basically the story goes back in like 2005 or something they were building out their shopping search system, and it was working pretty well. except for the fact that if you searched for sneakers, the top result was a garden gnome. engineers were going crazy trying to fix the ranking bug, but eventually someone noticed that the gnome listing was on ebay, and there was only one of them, and it cost like $50. so they just bought the gnome and suddenly the listing was gone, problem solved. why bother fixing software issues when you can just change the world to fit your software instead?

[Khoa Vu @KhoaVuUmn]

Before AI, I can only have about 5 unfinished papers and 1 polished paper. AI boosted my productivity so much that I now have 136 unfinished papers and 1 polished paper.

[Decker Eveleth @dex_eve]

A brief thread on the Diego Garcia strike, in response to some of the more...creative interpretations going around:

[David Frum @davidfrum]

If you wonder why Europeans flinch from helping US in Gulf - in January, NATO allies were seriously preparing for a US sneak attack on Greenland, planning to blow up runways to prevent a Trump re-enactment of Putin's failed strike on Kyiv.

[vx-underground @vxunderground]

Yeah, so basically it turns out Meta has been heavily lobbying online age verification laws. They've lobbied over $2,000,000,000 to politicians in form of grants and donations.

https://t.co/uNiv8BiIWO

[Yaroslav Trofimov @yarotrof]

OMG

[Daniel Szeligowski @dszeligowski]

Four years into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and some are only now discovering the arithmetic of drones. It was comfortable to live in a bubble

["Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @BretDevereaux]

Seems like a good moment to re-up my primer on the endless empty promises that strategic airpower can win wars entirely from the air: https://t.co/TFfe8bAMkn

[Is EU Concerned? @ISEUConcerned]

Greatly

[Ivan Fioravanti ᯅ @ivanfioravanti]

We extract nearly all (95.8%) of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone from Claude Sonnet 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I'm dispatching LIVE from India's AI Impact Summit, here are the key takeaways:

$100B pledged.

70,000 attendees.

The topic: the future.

Gates pulled (Epstein). Huang cancelled (illness). A university presented a $1,600 Chinese robot dog as its own invention and named it Orion. They also faked a Korean drone soccer arena. The university blamed a professor caught up in 'the enthusiasm of being on camera.' The IT Minister had already tweeted congratulations.

An exhibitor's AI wearables were stolen from the floor on Day 1.

Exhibitors were locked out of their own stalls. Some described feeling jailed. They had no water. The Wi-Fi did not work. Digital payments crashed. Food vendors accepted cash only.

The Prime Minister asked the CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic to hold hands for a photograph. He grabbed Altman's hand and raised it. Altman and Amodei raised their fists without making contact. Days earlier, Anthropic had run Super Bowl ads headlined 'Deception,' 'Betrayal,' and 'Treachery.' Altman's explanation: 'I thought it was the open clock.'

Altman promised superintelligence by 2028. Attendees walked miles to leave.

The venue had no buses.

This is the future.

[Randy Olson @randal_olson]

Ask ChatGPT a complex question and you'll get a confident, well-reasoned answer. Then type, "Are you sure?" Watch it completely reverse its position.

Ask again. It flips back. By the third round, it usually acknowledges you're testing it, which is somehow worse. It knows what's happening and still can't hold its ground.

This isn't a quirky bug. A 2025 study found GPT, Claude, and Gemini flip their answers ~60% of the time when users push back. Not even with evidence, just doubt.

We trained AI this way. RLHF rewards agreement over accuracy. Human evaluators consistently rate agreeable answers higher than correct ones. So the models learned a simple lesson: telling you what you want to hear gets rewarded. And now 1/3 of companies are using these systems for complex tasks like risk forecasting and scenario planning.

We built the world's most expensive yes-men and deployed them where we need pushback the most.

I wrote up why this happens and what actually fixes it: https://t.co/CDKq8xdgbW

[thaddeus e. grugq @thegrugq]

The systems bible, John gall.

[Evan A. Feigenbaum @EvanFeigenbaum]

For those keeping score at home, the word "Taiwan" does not appear anywhere in this document.

[Sławomir Dębski @SlawomirDebski]

So this is where we are: a would-be Democratic presidential contender mocks European leaders for trying to endure the reign of “a mad king” - a king to whom Americans entrusted power thanks to the Democrats’ own failures.

Europe’s leaders accept humiliation not out of servility, but out of calculation. They are buying time, betting that Americans will not make the same mistake twice in a row.

And yet the very man they are quietly hoping for does not say the one thing that would actually matter: that he would not recognize the seizure of Greenland, that America would again bind itself to international law, that it would stop placing itself above the rules it once wrote.

If this is the future of American leadership, it may signal something more lasting: that America has drifted away from what it once was, regardless of who is in charge.

[Yaroslav Trofimov @yarotrof]

One fascinating aspect of the Trump-induced transatlantic rupture is that most of MAGA’s “civilizational partners” on the European populist right are forced into a vociferous defense of Greenland and demands for European retaliation.
Jordan Bardella, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally party: “Facing Trump’s blackmail, we either react with all the necessary firmness, or we disappear behind the logic of empire.”
In the U.K., key Brexit architect and longtime Trump supporter Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform Party that is currently leading the polls, described Trump’s threat of using economic, let alone physical, force against allies as “a very hostile act” and as “the biggest fracture in our relationship, between our two countries” since the Suez Canal crisis in 1956.

https://t.co/avXB3idtAg

[Tom Warren @tomwarren]

"I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model," - Sam Altman, October 2024