Putin-Trump Phone Call Deadend, AFU Brigade Mutinies Surge, & More Updates
Today Putin and Trump held a long-awaited phone call, which ended up lasting over two hours, by all accounts. Despite both sides drumming up the call’s significance as a good step forward toward normalizing relations, it achieved nothing. The reason: Putin again repeated to Trump that “root causes” of the conflict must be addressed, and shortly after, Zelensky declared in a press conference that Ukraine will never demilitarize and never give up its territories; the impasse stands as before.
Trump did decline to order a new round of sanctions on Russia, but Rubio days ago threatened Russia with a kind of ‘involuntary’ sanctions, as if to absolve himself:
Putin’s statement:
Interestingly, NYT’s new article managed to interview nearly a dozen real Russian soldiers on their views of negotiations and a potential ceasefire.
Every single one of the soldiers, according to NYT, expressed disagreement with any ceasefires and wanted Russia to capture more regions of Ukraine so that the future generation of troops “doesn’t have to fight this war again.”
Eleven Russian soldiers who are fighting or have fought in Ukraine expressed deep skepticism in interviews of diplomatic efforts that on Friday produced the first direct peace talks in three years, but were brief and yielded little. Speaking by telephone, the soldiers said they rejected an unconditional cease-fire proposed by Ukraine, adding that Russian forces should keep fighting at least until they conquer all of the four southern and eastern Ukrainian regions claimed, but only partly controlled, by the Kremlin.
“We’re all tired, we want to go home. But we want to take all of the regions, so that we don’t have to struggle for them in the future,” said Sergei, a drafted Russian soldier fighting in the eastern Donetsk region, referring to the annexed territory. “Otherwise, have all the guys died in vain?”
Well, there you have it.
Of course, the NYT would never publish such an angle without having an agenda. It’s clear they’re shining a light on this to mash the same old globalist narrative that Russia doesn’t want peace, so Europe should arm up and increase sanctions and pressure on Russia.
Funnily enough, the article prints a lie about how Russia has “involuntarily extended” all soldiers’ contracts, effectively making them permanent, yet in the same breath lists two of the servicemen interviewed as having only “fought in the war until” December 2023 in one case, and October of last year in another. This proves the troops interviewed finished their contract and have been demobilized, contradicting the NYT’s lie.
Right now the prevailing mode of negotiations theater can be likened to a game of Musical Chairs, where each party plays along so as not to be the one left out without a chair in the end. In this case, everyone is playing along as wanting peace to deter accusations of warmongering, but in reality each party has their own secret motivations for continuing the conflict. In Russia’s case, it needs a decisive victory to keep the conflict from restarting in the future. In Europe’s case, they need a weakened Russia perpetually held in check via the yoke of sanctions and tensions. The US wouldn’t mind seeing all the parties weakened to the benefit of the US itself.
After all, how else would you explain Trump’s claim that US involvement was a ‘mistake’, while still supplying arms 24/7 to Ukraine?
If it was a mistake, why are you still pumping them full of ammo? Clearly, the US would like to have its cake and eat it too: while pretending at peace, it still needs to hold the knife over each party’s throat to retain dominance.
Let’s touch on a developing issue within the AFU—that of increasing rebellion within its ranks against unjustified orders and meat assaults. Just in the past week alone, several major cases were documented.
The most publicized was a commander in the famed and elite 47th Brigade resigned after accusing superiors of ordering ‘stupid’ meat assaults that got his men repeatedly killed, particularly pertaining to the wasteful Kursk operation:
“I have never received more stupid missions than in the current sector (Russia’s Kursk region),” said Maj. Oleksandr Shirshyn in a rare public criticism of Ukraine’s Armed Forces (AFU) senior leadership by a fighting officer.
“The loss of people was stupid, who are terrorized by clueless generalship that leads to nothing but failures. All they (top army leaders) are capable of is reprimands, investigations, imposition of penalties. Everything is going to Hell,” Shirhsyn wrote in comments published on his personal Facebook page.
Keep in mind all of this is pulled from Ukrainian sources, so there is no ‘Russian propaganda’ here.
The Kyiv Post article further notes:
Military reporter Yury Butusov, one of Ukraine’s most widely read war correspondents, said Shirshyn’s description of recent fighting in the Kursk region was accurate, and that 47th Brigade attack columns suffered heavy losses because they were ordered to drive their armored vehicles into the teeth of ready Russian defenses covered by dense drone swarms.
Well, that’s what happens when you launch operations for political and PR, not strategic, reasons.
But that wasn’t even the half of it. Nearly at the same time, Syrsky was forced to abruptly fire the commander of the 59th Brigade for insubordination—or, in other words, refusing to sacrifice his troops pointlessly:
🇺🇦 Ukrainian Commander Dismissed After Refusing to Sacrifice Troops
Ukrainian media report that General Syrsky has abruptly dismissed the commander of the 59th Brigade of Unmanned Systems, which is currently operating in one of the most critical and collapsing sectors near Pokrovsk.
Colonel Oleksandr Sak, formerly head of the 53rd Brigade, has replaced Lieutenant Colonel Bohdan Shevchuk. Notably, the decision bypassed the brigade’s direct superior, Commander of Ukraine’s Drone Forces Vadym Sukharevskyi, and was made personally by Syrsky.
Shevchuk was reportedly removed after ordering a withdrawal to avoid encirclement—a move he claims saved his men but displeased Syrsky and Zelensky.
“There was a real risk of my men being surrounded. I took the initiative to pull them back from positions to save lives,” Shevchuk told the press.
“Apparently, that didn’t sit well with the Commander-in-Chief or the President. So I was dismissed.”
As Kiev’s leadership continues to push for symbolic victories at the cost of lives, commanders on the ground are increasingly caught between political optics and battlefield reality.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Ukrainska Pravda also reports that the AFU’s 155th Mechanized Brigade—not to be confused with the indomitable Russian 155th Marines—has had such severe issues of late that it has recorded more than 1,200 AWOL cases just since the start of 2025:
Ukrainska Pravda reports that, amidst ongoing command issues and corruption allegations, the 155th Mechanized Brigade has recorded more than 1,200 cases of AWOL/desertion since the beginning of 2025. The main causes are transferring soldiers from different MOS' to the infantry and a lack of support, including supply of UAVs. Their sources also allege that other kickbacks were occurring in other battalions in the brigade. After the article was published, Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi ordered an additional investigation into the allegations.
The ‘SZCh-niki’ in question refers to Самовільне Залишення Частини, which translates to ‘Unauthorized Leaving of a Unit’.
Even worse, the article notes the desertions were spurred on by the mass corruption in the brigade, as evidenced by the arrest of the brigade’s drone battalion commander just a week ago on May 11 for stealing pay of his subordinates:
Ukraine's SBU and State Bureau of Investigation detained the commander of the 155th Mechanized Brigade's strike drone battalion last week for demanding kickbacks from his subordinates. They received extra pay for being on the front line for the entire month but were only there for part of the time.
By the way, a brigade is supposed to have 2,500 - 5,000 people, with Ukrainian brigades tending toward the lowest end of that. So 1,200 desertions in a single brigade just since the start of this year is nearly incomprehensible in scale; nearly the entire brigade is being churned out just to AWOLs, and that’s not even counting the combat losses.
Morale is a precious commodity in Ukraine—just take a look at the latest in Zelensky’s mobilizations from the past day or two alone:
Rezident_UA rumor-mill channel believes the situation is even worse:
#Inside
Our source in the OP said that on Bankova [they’re] afraid of officer rebellion, [that’s] why they are already looking for a replacement for Syrsky, against whom all field commanders are opposed. Andrey Ermak realizes toxicity of [Syrsky], but wants to choose a technical a figure without political ambitions, so as not to repeat the track with the Zaluzhny.
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More problems for Ukraine, as People’s Deputy Egor Firsov reports Russian UAV use is starting to go to new heights beyond what anyone could have imagined. He states plainly that Ukraine was once in the lead in drone tech, but the ‘pendulum has swung’ to Russia:
At the same time Ukraine’s top radioelectronics expert was amazed at finally seeing one of Russia’s new Geran drones sporting 16x Comet satellite transceivers:
Thanks to Alexander for the photos. I see it in its entirety for the first time. And in principle I didn't think that I would ever see something like this. 16-element CRPA antenna from Shahed. 16 elements... that's crazy, of course.
It all started with 4, then 6, then 8, then 12—rising each time as the electronic jamming environment had gotten more sophisticated; now Russia is up to 16 modules to make the Geran drones virtually jam-proof.
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A new Russian anti-drone interceptor called Elka has been increasingly making appearances on the front:
The Yolka (Elka) air defense drone performs kinetic interception of a Ukrainian Air Force reconnaissance UAV in the SVO zone.
Despite active maneuvering, the enemy drone was overtaken by our interceptor and deprived of its tail.
The AI algorithms embedded in the Yolka air defense drone guidance system allow it to hit the most vulnerable structural elements of enemy UAVs, increasing the probability of target destruction as a result of kinetic interception.
As can be seen, it’s a cheap quadcopter drone which auto-locks onto other drones like a manpad missile, then chases after them.
Here’s footage of the Russian 155th Marines utilizing it in real combat:
What’s most interesting is that Russian authorities appear to already trust this system so much that it was even spotted being utilized by Russian FSO (Federal Security Services) during the May 9th Victory Day parade, to protect Putin and co. from potential Ukrainian UAV threats:
This of course is likely the future of anti-drone tech: cheap, intelligent UAVs that can find and take out other UAVs.
If you’re wondering how it’s possible Ukraine could have potentially gotten UAVs into the Red Square, or even Moscow in general—well, recently there’s been new confirmation of something I’ve been explaining for over two years now. It was reported a mobile drone command center was seized in the Moscow region last week, which is essentially a van that launches and controls drones from inside Russian territory:
The Ukranian drones that attack within Russia are started within Russia, through mobile command point. They’re likely produced in Russia too. A mobile drone control center was stopped by Russian cops in Moscow.
Some of the fantasies about Ukraine’s drones “bypassing Russian air defenses for thousands of miles” are just that; in fact, they’ve been operating from within Russia via sabotage groups since the beginning. Since drones are easy to assemble with civilian off-the-shelf parts, it’s not hard to do this undetected.
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Speaking of drones and electronic warfare, a report about a new system Russia has been operating on the Kherson front:
Enemy channels write a review of the captured new Russian electronic warfare system "CRAB". Recently, it began to be used in the 49th army in the Kherson direction. This is not just a jammer, but a whole complex that provides detection, interception, reconnaissance and coordination of the fight against UAVs. Each Russian battalion received such a system, along with antennas, thermal imaging cameras and HackRF digital radios for listening to radio frequencies and intercepting analog video from FPV drone cameras at a distance of up to 25 km. Similar systems, but in a more amateur version, were deployed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces a year ago on the right bank of the Dnieper.
In combination with the CRAB, the Silok-02 electronic warfare system can work, which can jam all known video and control frequencies of FPV drones. Also, the " CRAB "can be integrated into work with UAVs Orlan-10, Orlan-30, Supercam. In addition to the jamming function, the system must track friendly drones so that they are not jammed.
More and more Ukrainian sources are reporting troubling developments within the Russian drone field. For instance, yesterday they began to bewail the fact that Russian drones are now fire-controlling the significant Dobropillya-Kramatorsk supply road roughly 30km behind the LoC:
For those interested, here’s a new video interview of a Russian drone developer and his critiques of American drone systems:
I also recommend the above channel for their other non-biased videos on Russia, which I’ve posted before.
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Speaking of Kherson, here’s a video showing a Russian soldier named Maloy from the 61st Marine brigade who stormed one of the islands on the Dnieper near Kherson with a small group. Apparently his squad mates were killed by Ukrainian drones, but he survived, took out several AFU and captured one by himself after defeating him in hand-to-hand combat:
A 20-year-old machine gunner with the call sign Maloy single-handedly cleared an island on the Dnieper. He also eliminated one VSU soldier in hand-to-hand combat and captured another.
👉Kherson loading...
Here’s the captured Ukrainian admitting “the kid got the better of me” in their tussle:
Hand-to-hand combat on the Dnieper: "The kid got the better of me."
Another episode of the confrontation on the islands. A wounded marine of the 61st brigade gained the upper hand in a fight with the enemy and captured a Ukrainian. He managed to cut our guy's hands and stab him in the thigh. But he hit a phone in a strong case. If you saw "Maly" you would be even more surprised. He lives up to his call sign. But he has plenty of fighting spirit! Hand-to-hand combat as described by a defeated enemy.
The story is interesting for the fact that it shows us the first video confirmation of all the ‘rumored’ actions Russia has been taking on the contested islands on the Dnieper. Unfortunately, you can see these actions aren’t without costs.
It goes with a new report:
Various reports that Russian forces have crossed the Dnieper in Kherson in several places, not huge numbers, but small specialist units, it goes hand in hand with the general uptick in destroying Ukrainian positions in Kherson.
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A few last items:
Madcap Kellogg calls for NATO forces to control the west of the Dnieper river:
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Last week Putin held an interview with Zarubin wherein he made some very interesting admissions. The biggest was in answer to the question of why Russia never solved the Donbass crisis earlier. Putin confirmed longstanding notions that Russia was not strong enough back then to confront the entire unified West, and much work had to first be done to bring Russian industries up to speed:
And to the natural question that follows—was Putin ‘led by the nose’ in the Minsk agreements?
Lastly, Putin affirms that Russia has enough strength and resources to bring the SMO to its ‘logical conclusion’ if necessary:
Putin is ever the Libran equivocator—he leaves the more ‘direct’ interpretations to be voiced by his surrogates, as in the case of the negotiating team in Istanbul which conveyed that Russia is ready ‘to fight forever’.
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Lastly, a timely new Russian ad foretelling the ‘final season’ of Zelensky’s ‘Servant of the People’ charade, which contrasts the clown-puppet-in-chief’s campaign promises against the harsh present reality:
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