Frontlines and Strategic Fault Lines - Ukraine's Deeper Strategic Strikes and Intensifying Competition in the Pacific.
The Ukraine War and Strategic Competition in the Pacific during the past week, as well as my Big Five recommended war and national security reads.
As the war in Iran devolves into a near phony war construct, with blockades and diplomatic manoeuvring being the predominant form of action, the war in Ukraine continues.
Diplomatically, stalled negotiations among the United States, Ukraine, and Russia mean little real progress this week in a political solution to the war. The Russian leadership shows no genuine appetite for a just settlement. On the ground, Ukrainian drone developments see them effectively defending their territory and reducing Russian advances compared to previous years while also increasing Russian casualties. Both sides continue their evening aerial strike campaigns.
In the Pacific, military exercises, capability announcements, and grey-zone manoeuvres signal that the contest between China and regional nations is deepening. The shifting posture of Japan, and its growing appetite to deploy highly capable combat units and long-range strike capabilities to regional exercises from Australia to the Philippines, is a step change in the political and military status of western Pacific security.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Big Five!
The War in Ukraine
Prisoner Exchange and the Human Dimension. On 24 April, Ukraine and Russia conducted a prisoner of war exchange, swapping 193 POWs each. These exchanges have become a regular feature of the war, providing one of the few channels of contact between the two sides. The exchanges are worth noting for what they represent beyond their humanitarian significance. They demonstrate that both parties have an interest in limited bilateral engagement, even in the absence of a broader settlement. The question is whether that limited engagement can be expanded into something more substantial to achieve some form of war termination agreement.
The Ground War. In the 1,521 days since Russia’s full-scale invasion began, the pattern of conflict on Ukraine’s front lines has settled into a rhythm of assaults, defence, and attritional exchanges. This is punctuated by occasional local advances that test whether Ukraine or Russia can exploit tactical gains with deeper operational breakthroughs. So far in 2026, neither has.
According to Ukraine’s General Staff, 236 combat engagements were recorded on 24 April alone, with Russian forces pressing hard in the Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka-Druzhkivka directions. Ukrainian forces recorded advances in those same areas. ISW’s 24 April campaign assessment confirmed Ukrainian forces had advanced in the Kostyantynivka-Druzhkivka region and on the Pokrovsk axis of advance.
Of significance is the lack of Russian territorial gains so far in 2026. The Russia Matters War Report Card of 22 April noted that during the four-week period from 24 March to 21 April 2026, Russian forces suffered a net loss of two square miles of Ukrainian territory. This followed the net loss of four square miles in the preceding period.
One interesting technical note emerged with the ground war during the week that I wanted to highlight here. Deception, decoy and camouflage operations have made a big comeback during the war. An interesting topic related to this is the camouflage of tactical aerials. This is covered in the latest edition of the Snake Island Institute’s monthly tech update. As the article notes:
This is part of a growing set of field-expedient masking techniques, highlighting a broader trend: survivability is increasingly tied to the concealment of critical nodes rather than the protection of platforms alone.
Russia’s Aerial Strike Campaign. Russia’s aerial campaign remained intense this week. Russia launched one of its largest aerial strikes on the night of 24-25 April, killing at least seven people and injuring at least 57. Ukraine’s air defence forces neutralised 30 missiles and 580 drones since the evening of 24 April, according to Ukrainian reporting, though ballistic missiles continued to penetrate defences with troubling reliability. In Dnipro, a combined missile-and-drone strike destroyed a residential building and injured civilians; in Kharkiv, an enemy drone struck a multi-storey residential building in the Saltivskyi district; and in Kherson, four people were killed and 17 wounded over the course of the preceding 24 hours.
Russia launched more drones in March 2026 than in any other single month of the war, yet Ukrainian forces intercepted 90 percent of them. That figure represents an improvement on the 82-88 percent interception rates in spring and early summer of 2025 pointing to improvements in Ukrainian air defence integration over the past year.
Ukrainian Deep Strikes Reach the Urals. The most significant operational development of the past week was Ukraine’s long-range drone strike against targets in the Ural Mountains region of Russia. Ukrainian drones reached the Urals for the first time, covering more than 1,800 kilometres from the Ukrainian border and bypassing Russian air defences for over ten hours. The drones struck targets in Yekaterinburg, where Russian electronic warfare diverted one drone into a residential building injuring six civilians, and in Chelyabinsk, where explosions targeted the Chelyabinsk Metallurgical Plant. More significantly, the Ukrainian strikes targeted the Chelyabinsk Higher Military Aviation School of Navigators, a facility that trains crews involved in strikes against Ukrainian cities. Local reports confirmed at least two direct hits on the flight school.
On 22 April, the Tuapse and Novokuibyshevsk oil refineries in Russia were forced to halt operations after coordinated drone attacks. The Tuapse facility, which processes 12 million metric tons annually, had been struck twice in less than a week. Together with earlier strikes, Ukraine’s drone campaign has damaged or destroyed approximately 20 percent of Russia’s refining capacity since early 2024.
Ukraine has maintained this deep-strike posture against Russian oil infrastructure despite reported pressure from some international partners to pause strikes on energy infrastructure because of rising global energy prices. Ukraine’s calculation appears to be that degrading Russian oil revenues, even at some diplomatic cost, is preferable to permitting Moscow to continue funding the invasion.
These strikes also show how Ukraine has degraded Russian air defence capability over the past couple of years. This is resulting in fewer air defence systems available to cover the vast Russian land mass and the wide array of tactical frontline units as well as oil infrastructure, defence industry and other targets of strategic importance to their war effort against Ukraine. As the most recent edition of the Snake Island Institute’s Monthly Tech Update describes:
Despite Russia ‘s layered air defences, at times, Ukraine has led a successful and effective strike campaign. Apart from direct economic pressure from lost oil production and refining capacity, Ukraine has forced Russia to redeploy air defense systems from the front lines and lower-priority objects to protect oil infrastructure. Moreover, Ukraine’s sustained campaign has systematically targeted and destroyed Russian air defense systems, significantly degrading Russia’s capacity to protect its critical infrastructure. Notably, in the period of June 2025 - March 2026, Ukraine struck 27 Pantsir systems, while its production capacity at an estimated rate of only 30–45 units per year.
The Diplomatic Track. After the trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi and Geneva earlier in the year, and after a landmark January summit in Paris at which 35 nations assembled in a Coalition of the Willing framework, the most recent reports suggest the process remains mired in the fundamental incompatibility of Russian and Ukrainian positions on territory.
The House of Commons Library briefing from 23 April provides a useful summary of where things stand. Ukraine has agreed to the core terms of a peace framework developed through U.S.-mediated talks. Russia, however, continues to insist on conditions that Ukraine finds unacceptable, most prominently a demand for the cession of all four oblasts claimed but not fully occupied by Russian forces. Russian officials have described the Istanbul talks of 2025 as aimed not at a compromise peace but at ensuring Ukraine’s defeat. Foreign Minister Lavrov has simultaneously accused the United States of backtracking on understandings reached at the Anchorage summit.
Russia’s Economic Strain and Social Pressure. Russia’s economic position, while not collapsing, is increasingly strained by the cost of the war in Ukraine and Ukrainian deep strikes. The Russian Central Bank lowered its key interest rate for the third time in 2026 and for the eighth time in the last 12 months, a pattern that represents an attempted balancing act between suppressing war-driven inflation and sustaining economic activity. ISW’s assessments note that the Russian economy continues to struggle under the strain of war spending, and polls from both Russian state-owned and independent institutions acknowledge growing societal discontent with President Putin, driven by mounting war sacrifices and an intensified Kremlin censorship campaign.
Ukrainian drone strikes have compounded these pressures on the Russian home front. The strike into the Urals this week demonstrated that no part of Russia’s territory now sits safely beyond Ukrainian reach. Cities in Russia’s western regions, including Belgorod, experienced weeks-long power outages earlier in 2026 caused by Ukrainian strikes. Russia’s leadership has not insulated its population from the physical consequences of a war it launched.
Ukraine Assessment
Earlier this week, I published my latest assessment of the trajectory of the war in Ukraine and what initial trends in 2026 tell us about the direction of the conflict. As I noted in that article, to put it plainly, Russia’s 2026 operations have not been going well. On the other hand, Ukraine is performing well on the frontline, in its deep strike operations and in its diplomatic efforts.
To confirm (or reject) this hypothesis, I broke down the Ukrainian war effort into eight separate dimensions for analysis. Those dimensions - diplomacy, information operations, alliance management, new supporters, ground operations, long-range strike, technological innovation, and defence industry - collectively encapsulate the war’s character: a multi-domain contest of will, attrition, national resilience, diplomacy and adaptation.
Overall, the picture that emerges is one of emerging Ukrainian strategic advantage. Five of the eight measures of success are substantially or fully achieved. That said, Russian manpower resilience remains a strategic risk to Ukraine’s 2026 war strategy. Russia still occupies significant Ukrainian territory, is still hitting Ukrainian cities from the air every night and is slowly advancing in parts of Donetsk. Its theory of victory - outlasting Western will - is yet to be disproven.
The Pacific
My Taiwan Visit. I have just arrived home after conducting a research visit to Taiwan. I had the opportunity to speak with a range of different interlocutors at think tanks and in the Ministry of National Defence.
Three interlocking themes were apparent from the visit: first, the trajectory of relationship with America, the larger U.S. alliance framework and the U.S.-China relationship; second, China political, strategic and military developments and their lessons from recent wars; and third, Taiwanese military transformation – its strengths and weaknesses.
I will be writing more about this visit in the coming week.
Exercise Balikatan 2026. The start of Exercise Balikatan 2026 on 20 April marked the largest iteration of this annual exercise since it began in 1991. Canada, France, New Zealand, and Japan are deploying units as full participants for the first time.
Japan has dispatched over 1,400 personnel, its largest contingent ever. The Japanese Self-Defense Force units will fire Type 88 anti-ship cruise missiles to sink a target vessel off the coast of northern Luzon. The U.S. Army’s Typhon ground-based missile system, which has been forward-deployed in the Philippines since 2024, will also feature in the exercises, alongside simulated firing of BrahMos cruise missiles recently acquired by Manila from India.
The geographic scope of this year’s exercises is worth noting. The exercise training areas face both the South China Sea and Taiwan, concentrated in Luzon and including a counter-landing live-fire exercise in Zambales province, approximately 230 kilometres from the disputed Scarborough Shoal. Philippine Armed Forces Chief General Romeo Brawner described the exercise in plain language: the exercises send a clear and unambiguous message that the Philippines and its partners are prepared to defend the rules-based international order against coercion, intimidation, and unlawful claims.
China obviously views the exercise differently. Beijing’s response was more forceful than the diplomatic complaints it has issued every year since 1991. The PLA Southern Theatre Command announced that a naval fleet led by the Type 055 guided-missile destroyer Zunyi had conducted drills in waters east of Luzon, calling the deployment “a necessary action taken in response to the current regional situation.” China also deployed a naval destroyer group to waters near Japan’s southwestern Amami Oshima island. Relations between Beijing and Tokyo, already in the doghouse following Prime Minister Takaichi’s statement last year that an attack on Taiwan could represent an existential threat to Japan, deteriorated further.
At the disputed Scarborough Shoal, China erected a floating barrier to block access to Philippine fishing boats in the days leading up to Balikatan’s start. This is consistent with China’s grey-zone playbook: incremental physical measures that are individually deniable but cumulatively alter facts on the water.
This pattern of action and Chinese counter action is now well established: every allied exercise draws a proportionate Chinese military response, ratcheting up the tension in the region.
The Liaoning Transit. Taiwan’s defence ministry reported on 21 April that China’s aircraft carrier Liaoning transited the Taiwan Strait, the first such transit by an aircraft carrier in 2026. Taiwan reports near-daily Chinese military activity around the island, which Taipei characterises as a sustained pressure campaign against its democratically elected government.
Taiwanese contingency planning. Taiwan has been responding to Chinese pressure with new contingency planning. Bloomberg and CSIS both reported in mid-April that Taiwan has activated drills to break a potential Chinese energy blockade, a scenario that the ongoing Strait of Hormuz crisis has made more salient in the minds of Taiwanese planners. Taiwan is heavily dependent on imported energy, and a blockade scenario that cuts off oil and gas supplies without an outright invasion represents a particularly challenging grey-zone contingency. The Hormuz crisis has delivered a Taiwan Strait wake-up call.
Japan’s Transforming Defence Posture. Japan’s fiscal year 2026 began on 1 April, bringing with it a record defence budget of 9.04 trillion yen ($58 billion), up 9.4 percent from 2025 and the fourth year of a five-year program designed to bring annual defence spending to 2 percent of GDP. This is not simply a budget story. Japan’s Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi described it as “the minimum needed as Japan faces the severest and most complex security environment in the postwar era.”
The 2026 budget allocates more than 970 billion yen for Japan’s standoff missile capability, including a 177-billion-yen purchase of domestically developed Type-12 surface-to-ship missiles with a range of approximately 1,000 kilometres. Japan is also co-developing a next-generation fighter jet with Britain and Italy, with 160 billion yen allocated for that program in 2026 ahead of a planned 2035 deployment.
A new Pacific Defense Planning Office has been created within the Defence Ministry to study PLA activity in the Pacific and develop appropriate force posture responses. The Japanese 15th Brigade based in Okinawa is also being upgraded to a division-sized formation to reinforce defences across the Nansei Islands. New surveillance infrastructure is being deployed to Japanese islands including Kita Daito, chosen specifically for its proximity to Taiwan.
The degree of Japan’s participation in Balikatan 2026 is also an expression of Japan’s new posture. For Prime Minister Takaichi’s government, this is a strategic rather than symbolic choice. Her statement last year that an attack on Taiwan could represent an existential threat to Japan requiring potential Japanese military involvement was the clearest Japanese articulation yet of a red line that Tokyo’s previous governments had carefully avoided drawing.
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It’s time to explore this week’s recommended readings.
In this week’s Big Five, I have included an article on the potential for conflict over the South China Sea, a description of a recent U.S. Army experiment with using AI tools in a brigade-level training exercise, an analysis of positional warfare, an analysis of a NATO-like alliance framework in the Pacific and an assessment of munitions use in the Iran War.
As always, if you only have the time available to read one of my recommendations, the first is my pick of the week.
Happy reading!
1. No Pacific NATO
For some time, analysts have pondered the question of whether a NATO-type security architecture is necessary or even possible in the Pacific region. In this article, published by War on the Rocks, the author examines both the ‘pros’ and the ‘cons’ of such a proposition. As the article notes, “a treaty that Beijing reads as permanently foreclosing its strategic options could compress the timeline for conflict rather than extend it. Quietly and steadily building the command structures, interoperability standards, and operational habits that would make allied resistance genuinely overwhelming is the path toward the credible deterrence aspired by the Pacific Defense Pact, and the one that leads away from Pearl Harbor rather than toward it.” The full piece can be read at this link.
2. The AI Military Staff
This article from the Modern War Institute explores the integration of AI into the staff planning process of a U.S. Army brigade headquarters during an exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana. It elicited multiple lessons, and as the authors describe, “the broader conclusion is not that AI can replace the military decision-making process. It is that AI can make that process more executable under modern conditions by reducing friction in the parts of staff work that consume time without adding proportional conceptual value.” You can read the full article at this link.
3. The Other China Flashpoint
In this article published by Foreign Affairs, the author looks beyond Taiwan to review a different potential flash point in the western Pacific: the South China Sea. As the author writes, “if conflict does break out in the Western Pacific, it is more likely to erupt southwest of Taiwan, in the South China Sea, where numerous countries jostle over competing maritime claims and divergent visions of sovereignty, regional order, and international law.” The full article is available to read at this link.
4. On Positional Warfare
This is a fascinating article published by the Military Strategy Magazine. The author explores positional warfare and proposes that it exists as a distinct form of strategy. As he writes in the article, “warfare of position reveals that the most decisive contests in modern conflict occur not on physical terrain but within the sociocultural environment that gives meaning to power. Long before hostilities begin, adversaries shape the narratives, identities, and expectations through which communities interpret authority and coercion. Once established, these frameworks determine whether military action will achieve its political aims or undermine them.” The full article is available here.
5. Magazine Depths Post Iran
The Center for Strategic and International Studies conducts a wide array of military and national security analyses (full disclosure: I am a non-resident fellow there). In this piece, the authors, examine the use of munitions in the Iran War (so far), as well as the costs and timelines for the replacement of these stocks. It is an interesting and useful study, underpinning the need for expanded military production across western nations. You can read the full article at this link.
Thank you for your summary.