The Writing is on the (Kremlin) Wall for Putin and Choking the Crimea Land Bridge. The Big Five, 7 June edition.
This week, Zelenskyy's open letter, Putin closes the door on peace, Russia continues to lose ground, and China's narrative war against Japan, as well as my Big 5 recommended reads.
Unfortunately, the Russian side once again chooses war – everyone heard the response today. Weak response. He simply does not want to end the war. I think many around the world were disappointed by that response. He does not want to change anything, and he does not want to admit that this war appeals only to him – and to those who are making money off him. They were all smiling very broadly today. That means Russia must have less money, and there must be more pressure on Russia. President Zelenskyy, 6 June 2026
This week, President Zelenskyy wrote an open letter to Vladimir Putin, publishing it a day after Ukrainian drones lit up an oil terminal in Putin’s home city during his showcase economic forum. Moscow answered with one of the heaviest combined strikes of the year and with the studied indifference of a Russian leader who believes time is on his side.
In the Indo-Pacific, defence chiefs gathered in Singapore for the Shangri-La Dialogue while China’s defence minister stayed home for a second year, and China continued its intensive propaganda campaign against Japan.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Big Five.
The War in Ukraine
An open letter from Zelenskyy. On 4 June, Zelenskyy did something he had not done since 2022. He addressed Putin directly, in an open letter published by the Office of the President and circulated widely in the Ukrainian and international press. The document was striking less for its proposal than for its tone, which was that of a man cataloguing his enemy’s decline. Zelenskyy wrote that:
Almost half of your 26 years of power in Russia you have spent in the war against Ukraine…Whatever you say about NATO, geopolitics and the Russian language, this war is your personal choice, a war without a real reason. This is how history will remember it.
Zelenskyy framed the letter around Ukraine’s strength and Russia’s exhaustion. Russian losses in May, he claimed, again exceeded thirty thousand killed and seriously wounded, with sixty-three per cent of frontline losses killed rather than wounded, a ratio he called unsustainable for any twenty-first-century army. He reminded Putin that Ukraine’s long-range drones had “visited the opening of your forum in St. Petersburg, having overcome a distance of more than 1,000 kilometres” and that this distance “is not the limit of our capabilities.” He noted also that Russia now leans on North Korea for troops and is “completely dependent on China,” the first time in Russian history, he argued, that a Russian ruler has been so reliant on Beijing.
The substance was familiar. Ukraine, Zelenskyy wrote, is “ready to cease fire completely” for the duration of negotiations, ready for an “all for all” prisoner exchange, and ready to meet on neutral ground in Switzerland, Turkey or an Arab capital. “The front line now is the line from which diplomacy should begin.” He invited Putin to set “a clear date” and ruled out Moscow or Kyiv as venues. The closing lines abandoned diplomatic register entirely: “Do not be afraid to get out of the war. Enough of the war. Ukraine offers to end this war.”
As Ukrainian commentators noted, the letter was not really written for Putin. Its audience was Putin’s inner circle, the Russian elite, and the wider world watching Washington’s attention drift toward Iran. By placing responsibility for the war on Putin personally, and by offering a concrete path out, Zelenskyy was constructing a record of who refused peace.
Of course, another audience was the Trump administration in Washington DC. While Zelenskyy and his advisors no longer hope for Trump to say anything against Putin, they can at least ensure he has no reason to doubt Ukraine’s willingness to engage in the peace process. Thus, the open letter also had President Trump as a key audience.
Putin Closes the Door. But Putin was having none of this. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Zelensky could “come at any time to Moscow,” a venue the Ukrainian leader had pre-emptively rejected. Putin, who said he read the letter on the morning of 5 June, was dismissive at the St. Petersburg forum, telling editors that the West and Kyiv “are simply not willing to talk to Russia as an equal partner,” before adding, “We are in no hurry.”
Zelenskyy responded by inviting Putin to Kyiv. US President Donald Trump, asked about the exchange, offered only that it would be “great” if the two met and that talks were close to being settled, leaving the parties to “deal” between themselves. The door to a ceasefire and a war termination agreement, in other words, remains firmly closed, and both sides know it.
Russian Terror from the sky. The diplomacy unfolded against a backdrop of sustained bombardment. Overnight on 2 June, Russia launched what officials called one of the largest aerial attacks of the war, firing 73 missiles and 656 drones at cities across the country. Ukraine’s air force reported intercepting or suppressing the great majority, but enough broke through to kill at least twenty-three people and injured more than one hundred and thirty. Kyiv and Dnipro bore the worst of it, with sixteen killed in Dnipro, several when a residential block collapsed, and six in the capital.
The pattern continued into the following days, with further waves striking Kyiv, Dnipro and Kamianske and the partial collapse of a nine-storey building in the capital’s Podilskyi district. Ukraine requested an emergency session of the UN Security Council, to convene on Monday, with Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha arguing that “Moscow continues to choose escalation over peace, and terror over diplomacy.”
There has been a slow but noticeable increase in the Russian use of Shahed drones. As the May update from Shahed Tracker shows, May 2026 hit an all time high for Russian Shahed attacks against Ukraine with 7476 Shahed detected attacking Ukraine. Against this, Ukraine achieved a 92% interception rate. But even with this high rate, just under 600 made it to their targets.
Putin this week also confirmed the obvious about Russia’s use of its Oreshnik intermediate-range missile, telling the forum that the May strike on Kyiv Oblast had been a test rather than a true combat use: “We simply struck where it was convenient to observe the results.” The nuclear-capable Oreshnik can carry up to thirty-six submunitions across six independently targetable warheads at speeds around Mach ten. Putin’s casual description of Ukrainian cities as a proving ground is its own kind of message.
Of course, it is not all one-way traffic with strategic strikes. Ukraine continues its deep strike operations including several strikes this week against St. Petersburg. And there were useful strikes on the Russian missile corvette, Boikiy, Russia’s 15th Naval Arsenal, the Antipinsky Oil Refinery and more Russian air defence locations.
The Frontline. For all the action in the skies and behind the frontlines, there was minimal exchange of territory in the past week. From Russia Matters, Russian forces surrendered a net 93 square miles of Ukrainian territory over the four weeks to 3 June, roughly double their losses in the preceding month, while Ukraine’s own DeepState monitors recorded a near-static line, a net Russian gain of about three square miles. Over the year to early June, Russia’s net territorial gain is 1,427 square miles, around six tenths of one per cent of Ukraine.
The decisive ground remains the Donbas, where Russia’s summer campaign is once again organised around the Pokrovsk, Kostiantynivka and Sloviansk axis and the fortress belt that anchors the roughly one fifth of Donetsk Oblast still in Ukrainian hands. The clearest Russian progress this week lay in the Kostiantynivka to Druzhkivka tactical area, with the Russians seeking progress against the fortress belt on several axes concurrently.
While it is true that drones cannot seize and hold ground, they still play a crucial role. Ukraine’s 7th Rapid Reaction Corps reported that its drone strikes in the Pokrovsk direction destroyed more than 105 Russian artillery systems in May, twice April’s tally, and a Kremlin-affiliated milblogger conceded that Ukrainian drones are preventing Russian forces from rotating troops into their forward infiltration positions, blunting the advance before it begins.
Strangling the Road to Crimea. If Russia’s focus this week was terror raining down from the skies, Ukraine’s was Russian operational logistics. The most important development on the Ukrainian side is the maturation of what Ukrainian planners now call the “middle strike,” the systematic destruction of Russian supply lines in the operational depth between roughly fifty and two hundred and fifty kilometres behind the front. On 27 May, Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced a “logistics lockdown,” allocating an additional five billion hryvnia, around 112 million US dollars, directly to brigades to buy mid-range strike drones through a points-based system that rewards the most effective units.
The campaign’s effects are now visible along the land bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea. Ukrainian drones have taken aerial control of the R-280, M-14 and N-20 highways running through Berdiansk and Melitopol, turning the corridor into what one analysis described as a road of burning fuel trucks. In May alone, observers counted at least seventeen destroyed fuel and military trucks on the Melitopol to Crimea stretch, and occupation authorities in Sevastopol and across Crimea imposed fuel rationing.
The French open-source analyst Clément Molin has logged more than a thousand geolocated Ukrainian strikes deep in the Russian rear since the start of 2026, with around thirty-five per cent hitting ammunition, fuel and equipment depots, twenty per cent hitting transport and seven per cent striking air defence. Western analysts count more than 125 destroyed trucks on the key route, and the Washington-based CEPA aptly titled its assessment “Russia’s Land Bridge is Becoming a Highway to Hell” which noted that:
With no single point of failure, the Kremlin believed its logistics network was more secure. But certainties don’t last long in the Ukraine war. Hornet drones were initially used selectively and in limited numbers. Their widening use by more brigades now suggests production is increasing and access is spreading.That advantage may not last forever. Russia will almost certainly develop countermeasures over time, making the current period especially important.
Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate announced fire control over the Crimea to Donetsk corridor on 29 May, and the 3rd Army Corps reported strikes in Luhansk Oblast as far as 205 kilometres from the front on 31 May. The Institute for the Study of War has geolocated drone flights along highways in Donetsk Oblast roughly a hundred kilometres deep, assessing that the strikes complicate Russia’s use of the Rostov to Crimea route. Its analyst George Barros argues that these mid-range strikes degrade Russia’s ability to mass forces and sustain the front, with Ukraine holding a slight but meaningful advantage in drone innovation.
In a 4 June article, military expert Viktor Kevliuk estimates that Ukrainian drones have already destroyed something on the order of seventy-five thousand general-purpose vehicles in the Russian rear, achieved by AI-guided systems which acquire and home on targets autonomously in the terminal phase even under electronic-warfare suppression.
This mid-range strike campaign is not just focused on military vehicles. It is also hitting Russian ships carrying cargo into occupied ports in southern Ukraine. On the evening of 6 June, the Ukrainians hit five Russian vessels in the Sea of Azov, as part of this campaign.
This is operational art. And it is integrated with tactical ground operations and long-range strategic strike to form a unified military strategy.
As reported by Fortune, long-range strikes reduce the volume of fuel Russia can refine, while mid-range strikes degrade its ability to move what remains. Gasoline shortages in occupied Ukraine are, for now, having only a limited effect on Russian forces, but the analysts noted that “more militarily consequential diesel shortages are beginning to materialise.”
The week also brought a strike that Ukraine called the first of its kind in modern history, the destruction of a Russian drone base at the occupied Donetsk airport.
The Technology Race: Closing the Interceptor Gap. A decisive contest in this war is industrial. The Snake Island Institute’s latest Defence Tech Monthly lays out the structural problem. Ukraine deploys around eight Patriot batteries against an assessed requirement of twenty to twenty-five and has received only a little over six hundred PAC-3 interceptors across four years of war. Russia produces around a thousand ballistic missiles a year, including some sixty Iskander missiles each month. The arithmetic has forced Ukrainian crews to abandon the doctrinally sound practice of firing two to four interceptors per target and to engage with a single missile, accepting lower kill probability because the magazine is too shallow for anything else.
The war in Iran has made this worse. By the Institute’s count, the United States military and its partners expended an estimated 1,060 to 1,430 Patriot interceptors out of a pre-war stock of 2,330, and Washington has since withdrawn Patriot batteries from South Korea, delayed deliveries to Switzerland, and asked Poland to transfer its interceptors to the Middle East. The most important sentence in the report points directly across to the Pacific: the interceptors consumed against Iran are the same ones required for deterrence against China. A single global magazine now serves three theatres, and it is running dry.
Ukraine’s partial answer is to build its own interceptors. President Zelenskyy has set a target of intercepting a ballistic missile with a domestically produced system by the end of 2027, at an engagement cost of between 500,000 and one million dollars, more than four times cheaper than a PAC-3 engagement. The most concrete expression of that ambition surfaced this week. On 3 June, the Ukrainian manufacturer Fire Point published a test flight of its FP-7.X ballistic-missile interceptor, the core of a programme the analyst Fabian Hoffmann examined in detail.
Known as Project Freya, the system is derived from the Soviet-era 48N6 used in the S-400 and assembled from off-the-shelf European hardware, with radars from Hensoldt, Thales and Leonardo, command and control from Kongsberg, and a seeker likely drawn from Germany’s Diehl Defence, all integrated through NATO’s Link 16. The economic case is crucial. As Hoffman describes in his article, even with a modest intercept probability, a salvo of one-million-dollar Ukrainian rounds could cost a fraction of an equivalent Patriot engagement. Hoffmann’s caution is worth heeding, however. The history of the Patriot and the SAMP/T shows that ballistic-missile defence performance is not instant but instead hard-won through many years of operational iteration, and reaching even a thirty per cent intercept rate quickly will be difficult.
The same Snake Island update mentioned above also catalogues the breadth of Ukraine’s indigenous military developments. These include:
An An-28 turboprop has been converted into an airborne interceptor carrier, launching cheap P1-SUN and Merops drones to kill Shaheds and having already downed 222 with its guns alone.
The 412th Nemesis Brigade conducted the world’s first interception of a Shahed by an interceptor launched from an unmanned surface vessel, opening a maritime air-defence layer over the Black Sea.
Ukraine is contracting some 25,000 ground robotic vehicles in the first half of 2026, double the entire 2025 total, with the number of units operating them rising from 67 to 167 and the goal of taking over all frontline logistics.
A new fast-track procurement model lets the defence ministry buy and battlefield-test innovations before they meet full standards, with combat validation replacing committee approval.
The common theme here is a deliberate shift from dependence on scarce, expensive Western systems toward cheap, scalable, domestically produced mass.
Ukraine Assessment
Zelenskyy’s letter was published as an instrument of strategy rather than a genuine expectation of talks. By documenting Russia’s dependence on Pyongyang and Beijing, its mounting losses and its domestic fatigue, and by offering a concrete and reasonable path to a ceasefire, Kyiv is building the diplomatic record it will need when negotiations eventually recommence, while shifting the burden of refusal onto Putin. The Kremlin’s dismissive reply, demanding capitulation dressed as an invitation to Moscow, confirms that no settlement is near. Putin still believes strategic patience favours him.
On the frontline and in rear areas, Ukraine is executing an increasingly industrialised strike complex that pairs deep strikes on refineries with a middle-strike campaign now choking the land bridge to Crimea. Neither will be decisive alone, but both play an important role in ensuring that, as Zelenskyy noted this week “Russia must have less money, and there must be more pressure on Russia.”
The key Ukrainian vulnerability remains air defence. With the global interceptor magazine drained by Iran and a standing requirement for holding war stocks for deterrence in the Pacific, Ukraine’s race to field a sovereign anti-ballistic capability may matter more to the war’s outcome than any single offensive. The side that solves mass first, in interceptors and in strike, will have a big say in whatever peace eventuates.
In the coming week, I will be publishing a special assessment about Russia’s prospects for success (if there are any) for 2026.
The Pacific
China’s Monthly Air and Sea Operations Around Taiwan. The monthly update on Chinese military operations around Taiwan was released by Secure Taiwan Associate Corporation this week. This was accompanied by analysis from K. Tristan Tang, who wrote that:
Although routine PLA activity around Taiwan does not appear to be escalating, the overall force posture increasingly resembles that seen during the Strait Thunder-2025A and Justice Mission 2025. Joint Combat Readiness Patrols follow recurring patterns, while PLA Navy carrier and amphibious task groups operated in the Philippine Sea. Meanwhile, Taiwan National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu disclosed on May 23 that China had deployed more than 100 PLA Navy and China Coast Guard vessels around the First Island Chain. Together, these developments suggest that even without publicly announcing large-scale exercises, Beijing can increasingly achieve many of the same training and rehearsal effects through routine and dispersed operations.
The full update is shown below.
China’s New Operation Against Taiwan. China’s Ministry of Transport announced a “special maritime traffic law enforcement operation” in waters east of Taiwan on June 6. The operation will involve the Fujian and Guangdong Maritime Safety Administrations, East China Sea Navigation Service Center, and East China Sea Rescue Bureau. The Chinese are using the new operation to exercise maritime administrative jurisdiction, strengthen distant-sea patrols, and protect “national rights and interests.” This is a classic example of Chinese application of its Three Warfare’s concept(media, psychological and legal) to shape international perceptions about Chinese legitimacy in claiming Taiwan as one of its provinces.
Beijing’s Narrative War Against Japan. 2026 marks the eightieth anniversary of the Tokyo Trials, and China is building a sustained narrative casting Japan’s rearmament as the revival of wartime militarism. At his 1 June press conference, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian argued that Japan’s defence orders had tripled in five years and that Tokyo, by deploying longer-range missiles, easing its ban on lethal-weapons exports and revising its Constitution and three core security documents, sought to “breach the postwar international order” and conceal “military expansionist ambitions,” dismissing Japan’s professed interest in dialogue as “performative.” State media, in the Global Times, accused Japanese right-wingers of waging “cognitive warfare to whitewash war crimes,” and the Defence Ministry’s spokesman charging Tokyo with “instigating bloc confrontation and building small circles.”
The campaign’s origin lies in November 2025, when Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could amount to a survival-threatening situation justifying a Japanese military response. Foreign Minister Wang Yi called the remark a line “that must not be touched” and demanded its retraction. Seven months on, Japan has refused to withdraw the statement, and Beijing has refused to let it go, folding each subsequent Japanese move, from defence-export liberalisation to the foreign-investment screening law passed on 29 May to joint exercises with partners, into a single story of a nation sliding back toward militarism. What began as a reaction to one sentence has hardened into a standing information front.
This week the campaign incorporated the Japan-Philippines partnership. After Takaichi and Marcos agreed on 28 May to negotiate the delimitation of their overlapping exclusive economic zones, spokeswoman Mao Ning insisted the waters in question lay “east of China’s Taiwan island,” and a CGTN commentary branded the talks a “geopolitical farce” and the Philippines a “strategic pawn” of resurgent Japanese imperialism. More strikingly, Chinese outlets again questioned Japan’s sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands and even the Ryukyus, the chain that includes Okinawa.
Tokyo is playing a different game. At the Shangri-La Dialogue, Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi rejected the label directly: “There is a country that has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and strategic bombers. Japan has neither of such weapons, and yet Japan is labelled new militarism. Isn’t it strange?” This rebuttal exposes the purpose of Beijing’s narrative, which is less about the past than the present. By branding Japanese rearmament as illegitimate, China seeks to split Tokyo from Washington and from its new partners in Manila and Canberra, to delegitimise the defence build-up that Takaichi’s government treats as deterrence, and to assemble an international coalition around the analogy to Imperial Japan.
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It’s time to explore this week’s recommended readings.
In this week’s Big Five, I have included articles on the collaboration between Russia and China, initial lessons from the war in Iran, and how the Chinese Communist Party controls the narrative about the massacre in Tiananmen Square. There are also articles on American endurance in war and on the global AI competition between America and China.
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. The China-Russia Strategic Nexus
China and Russia continue to develop their relationship across the economic, diplomatic and military spheres. In this article, the authors propose that “policymakers and other observers in the democratic world suffered from a failure of imagination over the past decade, dramatically underestimating the danger and destructive potential of strategic alignment among authoritarian powers, and particularly between Moscow and Beijing.” The report doesn’t just identify the problem, but also concludes with useful policy recommendations. You can read the full report here.
2. The AI Races and Global Security
In this article, the author argues that the rapid development of artificial intelligence has produced two barely controlled AI races. One is underway between a handful of companies, and the other race is between two superpowers. Neither race is in any meaningful sense regulated, so that the only constraints are financial and physical. The author explores the implications of this, and what might be done to address the situation. You can read the full article at this link.
3. America’s Military Marathon
In this excellent piece published by Foreign Affairs, the author argues that “modern wars are seldom swift affairs. Instead, they are generally long, and they rarely end decisively…The past year has also illustrated that the American military remains highly capable of carrying out complex, targeted operations. But the Iran war shows that the U.S. military needs to be ready for marathons, not just sprints.” The full piece is available to read at this link.
4. Initial Lessons from Iran
A useful initial set of lessons from the war in Ukraine. While time will tell whether these insights are enduring, it is never too early to start learning in war. You can read the article at this link.
5. China’s New Tiananmen Narrative
This week on 4 June was the 37th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) brutal suppression and massacre of unarmed pro-democracy protestors in what is remembered internationally as the Tiananmen Massacre. As this article explores, China has recently evolved its narrative about this event. The author describes how “the CCP’s efforts to rewrite Tiananmen history have apparently recently entered a new phase. Instead of suppressing memory through censorship, it has now undertaken an effort to reimagine the events altogether. In 2022, CCP propaganda images began portraying the PLA soldiers as the real heroes of Tiananmen.” The full piece is available here.
I do wonder if the US military is ossified and unable to learn lessons from its failures. I go back to Vietnam when the U.S. depended on overwhelming force and didn’t learn the lessons from the British and Commonwealth lessons from Malaysia and Borneo.
Excellent summary, thanks!