Day 1715 is a useful little inventory of who is bluffing, who is losing ground, and who still thinks saying “negotiations” makes the bill disappear.
Washington and the Kremlin’s story
Start with Washington. Trump and his party took a hammering in the midterms, with Democrats winning control of both chambers of Congress and flipping states that were supposed to be safely Republican. That is a political collapse, not a magic switch that instantly rewrites US policy toward Ukraine. Elections change who has leverage, who controls hearings and budgets, and how much room a president has to sell his preferred version of reality. They do not guarantee that every new majority will do the right thing, or do it quickly. Still, a president who treats every ally, institution, and inconvenient fact as a personal enemy has finally met a rather large group of voters willing to return the favor.
Moscow will try to turn that result into whatever story pays best this week. Trump’s defeat will be blamed on some combination of the deep state, Ukraine, Europe, electoral fraud, and a suspiciously well-organized flock of geese. The Kremlin’s favorite trick is to treat every development as proof of its own genius. If Trump wins, Russia has a friend. If he loses, Russia has exposed the corrupt West. It is a very convenient worldview, like a slot machine that pays out no matter what you feed it.
But for Ukraine, the important question is not whether the Kremlin can manufacture a triumphant headline. It is what actual support follows, and whether the people with power turn speeches into decisions.
The battlefield arithmetic
On the battlefield, the arithmetic is less friendly to the Russian victory department. A pro-Russian monitoring project put Russia’s net territorial gain for October at only about seven square kilometers, the weakest result since autumn 2023 by its own accounting. That is not a triumphant march across Ukraine. That is an enormous army, with an enormous appetite for casualties and equipment, grinding itself into a tiny patch of map and then asking the public to clap. When even a Z-side project is reporting gains this meager, the usual excuse parade has to work overtime: the weather, the terrain, NATO, the Ukrainians refusing to surrender on schedule. The excuses are waved through. The results are not.
The Lyman direction is part of that picture, with Russian forces reportedly losing ground there over the month. A map can be made to look impressive if you count every gray strip as conquered before anyone actually controls it. Russian reporting has spent years turning intentions into ownership, and then acting offended when reality asks to see the receipt. “We advanced” is not the same thing as holding ground, supplying it, and keeping Ukrainian forces from taking it back. A flag on a Telegram map is not a logistics network. It is a colored rectangle with ambitions.
That distinction also matters around Borshchahivka. The useful question is not which dramatic version travels fastest, but what actually happened, what evidence supports it, and what has merely been inflated by people eager to turn a place-name into a panic button. In this war, a location can become a prop before anyone has established the facts. That is how propaganda works: make the claim loud, make the correction late, and hope nobody asks for the boring details. The boring details are usually where the truth lives, so they do not get the same number of fireworks.
Stolen infrastructure and deterrence
There was also a Ukrainian strike in Donetsk against the occupiers’ telecom infrastructure, including Phoenix, a Russian-controlled operator using equipment taken from Kyivstar after the occupation. At least three hits were reported. That is not just a bit of industrial housekeeping. Communications are part of the machinery that lets an occupying force coordinate, control, and present itself as the rightful administrator of stolen territory. Russia seized infrastructure, put its own label on it, and now gets to discover that a stolen network can still be vulnerable. The regime’s idea of sovereignty is apparently taking somebody else’s equipment, changing the name, and hoping nobody can reach the server room.
NATO is also rethinking deterrence. The old assumption that Europe could simply absorb a Russian attack near the border and respond within a neat little regional box is looking increasingly obsolete. The new thinking includes the possibility of striking military targets deep inside Russia, thousands of miles from the front. That is not a promise to hit random civilians, and it is not a magic solution. It is recognition that an army does not operate on slogans. It depends on command systems, supply lines, depots, communications, and the factories that keep the whole ugly machine fed.
If Moscow wants to threaten countries far beyond Ukraine, it cannot be shocked when those countries start thinking about how to reach the machinery behind the threats.
Negotiations and the numbers
Then there are negotiations, that favorite word of people who want the victim to make concessions while the aggressor keeps the knife in hand. Earlier talks involving Ukraine, the US, and European partners were not expected to produce a breakthrough, because Moscow was refusing even a limited ceasefire. It also tried to link an energy truce to sanctions relief. That is not a good-faith path to peace. It is the same old arrangement: Russia keeps attacking, then asks to be paid for briefly considering not attacking.
A negotiation table does not make the parties equally responsible, and sitting down does not turn coercion into compromise. If the Kremlin wants sanctions eased, it can begin by stopping the behavior that brought them.
The claim about donations to Ukraine’s Armed Forces deserves a little care, because an interesting statistic can become a cudgel if people stop asking what it actually measures. The account says that much of the money raised comes from Russians living abroad, with PayPal and crypto used because those channels are more convenient and safer for them. If that is the case, it says something about individuals making choices against the state that claims to speak for them. It does not mean Russia as a country is secretly supporting Ukraine, and it certainly does not wash the regime clean. One person sending money is not absolution for an empire. But neither should someone’s nationality make their actual actions invisible.
What the inventory shows
That is the answer to Maxim Katz, too: do not replace one lazy generalization with another. Russians abroad are not all the same person, and an individual act of support does not cancel out the invasion, the occupation, or the millions who cheer for them. Judge the transfer by where it goes, judge the state by what it does, and stop pretending those are interchangeable categories. The Kremlin has spent years insisting that every Russian is part of one sacred collective whenever it wants to claim credit, then insisting that nobody is responsible whenever the consequences arrive. It does not get to have both stories at once.
Put the pieces together and Day 1715 looks less like a clean turning point than a stress test. Trump’s party loses badly, Russia’s gains shrink to a few square kilometers, occupied communications infrastructure takes hits, NATO plans around the possibility of a deeper fight, and Moscow arrives at negotiations demanding rewards while refusing a basic pause in the violence. None of this means the war is over. None of it means the next headline will be simple. It does mean that the Kremlin’s great machine keeps producing a widening gap between its claims and its results.
The Russian regime can still threaten, steal, mobilize, and send more people to die for a map it keeps coloring in prematurely. Its propagandists can keep shouting “victory” at every camera. But the arithmetic does not care how loud the studio is. Russia wants every excuse admitted through the door as a reason it is winning. The numbers, the failed advances, and the stolen equipment all get stopped at the entrance.