From: Transform Ukraine By Douglas Landro / November 11, 2025
A day when the Kremlin’s largest bank acknowledged what months of denial had concealed, while 97 combat engagements raged in a single direction and mysterious drones probed European critical infrastructure.
The Day’s Reckoning
You’re standing in the operations center when the reports start flooding in from Pokrovsk. Day 1,356, and the maps on the wall have become meaningless—blue and red symbols overlapping in ways that defy traditional military logic. Your intelligence officer points to Rodynske on the screen: Ukrainian forces cleared it this morning, he says. Then another analyst interrupts with geolocated footage showing both Ukrainian and Russian troops advancing through the same town simultaneously, sometimes within blocks of each other.
You lean closer to the display, trying to make sense of the tactical geometry. The pocket around Pokrovsk has become a three-dimensional chess game where “front lines” mean nothing anymore. Your forces are counterattacking inside Pokrovsk itself while Russian assault waves press from the east and south. Fire control over your supply routes makes every convoy a deadly gamble.
The day’s statistics scroll across another screen: 265 combat engagements across the entire front. Your eyes catch on one number—97 concentrated in this single direction. More than a third of the entire war focused on this one collapsing pocket.
Then the strategic reports arrive from Moscow. Peskov reiterating Russia’s maximalist demands—complete capitulation or nothing. Sberbank’s CEO admitting in a closed meeting what everyone suspected: the economy is faltering, consumer loans shrinking. And from Belgium, drone footage over critical infrastructure, part of Russia’s Phase Zero campaign to destabilize Europe while you fight here.
You study the maps again, calculating time, resources, casualties. The question hangs unspoken in the room: can Russian manpower outlast your capacity to resist before their economy collapses? The arithmetic is grinding forward, but the answer remains hidden in the smoke.
No Compromise: The Kremlin’s Ultimatum
You’re reading Peskov’s statement when the words stop you cold: Russia will only end the war when it achieves “the goals that it set initially.” You’ve heard this phrasing before, but now—on day 1,356—the deliberate vagueness feels like a blade sliding between your ribs.
You know what those “initial goals” mean. You were there in February 2022 when they announced them: removal of your government, installation of a Kremlin puppet, Ukraine’s promise never to join NATO, and NATO’s renunciation of its Open Door Policy. These aren’t negotiating positions. They’re demands for your complete surrender.
The Kremlin still frames it as defensive—eliminating the “root causes” of conflict, they call it. NATO expansion. Discrimination against Russian speakers. In Moscow’s narrative, they’re not the aggressor. You are. And any settlement leaving Ukraine independent and Western-oriented is, by their definition, unacceptable.
Voice of Ukraine 