From: Transform Ukraine By Douglas Landro / November 19, 2025
While weather shields tactical advances in Siversk and Lyman, blackout predictions darken Ukraine’s winter horizon—and the world diverts ammunition meant for Kyiv to other wars.
The Day’s Reckoning
The fog rolled in again, thick as cotton, swallowing villages and tree lines across Donetsk Oblast until even sound seemed to drift without anchor. In Siversk, Russian soldiers moved through the gray murk in groups of two and three—not battalions, not companies, just small teams of men walking carefully through the mist, waiting for the moment when Ukrainian drones sat grounded and blind. By the time the clouds lifted, they were already inside the southern neighborhoods, planting flags for cameras that would stream the footage to Moscow within hours.
But the fog was only one kind of darkness descending on Ukraine. In Kyiv, Ukrenergo’s head warned the nation to prepare for rolling blackouts “throughout the entire winter”—Russian missiles systematically destroying generation capacity faster than repairs could restore it. In Poland, saboteurs recruited by Russian intelligence blew up railway lines connecting Warsaw to weapons shipments. In Israel, TNT meant for Ukrainian ammunition was being diverted to bombs falling on Gaza. And in Madrid, President Zelensky toured defense manufacturers, seeking the air defense systems that might keep the lights on through the coming months.
This was Russia’s new playbook in motion across multiple dimensions: infiltrate through weather, strangle energy infrastructure, sabotage supply lines, and wait for winter to do what ground forces couldn’t accomplish. Meanwhile, Ukrainian ATACMS missiles struck deep inside Russia, proving Kyiv could reach hundreds of kilometers beyond the front. A seventeen-year-old girl died in Berestyn from a missile that served no military purpose. Former Deputy Prime Minister Chernyshov sat in court on corruption charges. And Defense Minister Umerov carried a list of 2,500 prisoner names to Istanbul, hoping Turkey could broker what Moscow refused to give: humanity.
The fog was tactical. The blackouts were strategic. And November 18 proved that Russia’s war had evolved beyond ground combat into a comprehensive assault on Ukraine’s ability to endure—one that would test not just military resilience, but whether a nation can survive winter without power, ammunition without TNT, and hope without relief.
The Infiltration Template: Siversk and Lyman Under Fog
You’re standing in southern Siversk when the first shapes emerge from the fog. Not tanks—those would be suicide here. Just silhouettes moving low through the mist, Russian infantry from the 123rd Motorized Rifle Brigade, carrying assault rifles and cameras to document their arrival. Ukrainian defenders had seen them coming on thermal scopes earlier, but the fog grounded the drones that would normally tear them apart before they reached the tree line.
This is Russia’s offensive template in its purest form: exploit weather, infiltrate in small groups, accumulate forces covertly, then launch larger assaults once the ground freezes. It worked in Pokrovsk—until Ukrainian forces adjusted and Russian commanders lost focus. Now it’s spreading to Siversk and Lyman, targeting Ukraine’s Fortress Belt from multiple angles.
Russian milbloggers openly discuss the “Pokrovsk scenario” coming to Siversk. The infiltrations continue in ones, twos, threes—patient, methodical, waiting for winter to enable mechanized pushes. Ukrainian military intelligence notes that Russian forces are using fiber-optic sleeper drones now, tethered weapons that lie dormant for hours before detonating when a vehicle’s heat signature crosses their path.
A few kilometers west, Russian forces claimed they’d seized Platonivka using fog cover and concentrated FPV drone strikes—claiming control of the highway that feeds Siversk from Lyman. Ukrainian sources say Russian troops never reached the road. The truth lies somewhere in the gray space between propaganda and geolocated footage.
Russia is applying the same infiltration doctrine across kilometers of front. It’s working, in the sense that Russian soldiers are physically entering Ukrainian-held towns. It’s failing, in the sense that Russia lacks the manpower and logistical depth to sustain operations long enough to break through. Every meter gained costs more than it’s worth. And still Moscow orders the attacks to continue, because stopping would mean admitting the strategy has limits.
Pokrovsk’s Paralyzing Paradox
Inside Pokrovsk, the war has become a study in Russian indecision. Stand at the northeastern edge of town and you’ll see the problem: Russian forces have almost encircled the Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad pocket, wrapping around the north and probing from the south, yet instead of closing the noose, they keep lunging straight into the cities themselves—grinding through rubble block by block when flanking maneuvers would cost less and win more.
Russian glide bombs fall daily on Ukrainian positions throughout the pocket, destroying logistics nodes and shelters in a sustained battlefield air interdiction campaign. But on the ground, tactical coherence collapses. The 51st Combined Arms Army, operating on the northern shoulder, should be pushing west to seal the encirclement. Instead, it’s trying to attack southward into Myrnohrad from Krasnyi Lyman—a head-on assault into prepared defenses.
Geolocated footage from November 16 shows Russian soldiers advancing within northeastern Pokrovsk—proof they’re making progress, yes, but progress toward what? Seizing the town building by building, or trapping the defenders by cutting their escape routes? Russian commanders appear unable to choose, so they pursue both simultaneously, achieving neither efficiently.
The reason for the paralysis sits northeast of Pokrovsk in the Dobropillya area, where the 51st Army’s opportunistic push in August created a vulnerable salient that Ukrainian forces now threaten. Russian units that should be completing the encirclement are instead defending their own rear.
The pocket tightens, but it doesn’t close. Pokrovsk burns, but it doesn’t fall. And Russian forces keep attacking because their commanders cannot distinguish between motion and momentum.
ATACMS Reaches Deep Into Russia
The Ukrainian General Staff’s announcement came without fanfare—just a brief statement on November 18 that Ukrainian forces had conducted precision strikes using ATACMS missiles against unspecified military targets deep inside Russian territory. No dramatic footage, no coordinates, no casualty estimates. Just the simple fact that Ukraine could reach hundreds of kilometers beyond the front line and strike with American-made missiles that Moscow had spent months insisting would never be used on Russian soil.
The targets remained classified, but the strategic message was unmistakable: Russia’s rear areas are no longer safe. Ammunition depots, command centers, airfields, logistics hubs—anything within ATACMS range now lives under the shadow of Ukrainian fire. Hundreds of known military objects in Russia sit within that deadly radius, and Moscow’s military has exploited sanctuary space along the Ukrainian-Russian border for years, positioning forces just beyond the reach of Ukrainian artillery.
Not anymore.
ATACMS doesn’t just extend Ukraine’s reach—it changes the calculation for every Russian commander who assumed distance equaled security. Troops massing for an assault, fuel depots feeding the war machine, headquarters coordinating operations—all now vulnerable to strikes that arrive faster than air defense systems can respond.
Moscow will denounce the attacks as escalation, as terrorism, as NATO aggression. But the missiles keep flying, and Russian military infrastructure keeps burning, and the strategic equation keeps shifting in ways that ground combat alone could never achieve. Ukraine can’t match Russia’s artillery production or manpower reserves, but it can make the Russian rear as dangerous as the front.
War Crimes as Standard Orders
In northeastern Pokrovsk on November 10, Russian soldiers from the 1st Motorized Battalion received an order over their radio transceiver. The order was simple, direct, and illegal under international law: use two adults and one child as human shields during your assault. They complied.
Ukrainian Security Service intercepts captured the transmission, preserving evidence that Russia’s military commanders don’t just tolerate war crimes—they order them explicitly, over open communications, without apparent concern for accountability. Article 28 of the Geneva Convention prohibits using civilians as human shields. Russia violated it as casually as a tactical radio call, treating international law as irrelevant to the mechanics of an assault.
This wasn’t an isolated incident born of battlefield chaos. This was premeditated, command-directed criminality—an order given, acknowledged, and executed while the world watched from a distance too great to intervene in real time.
The incident aligns perfectly with patterns documented throughout the war: systematic targeting of civilians, torture of prisoners, mass graves in liberated territories, filtration camps, deportations. Russia’s military doesn’t commit war crimes despite its command structure—it commits them because of it. Commanders order violations. Subordinates obey.
A child was used as a shield. Not metaphorically, not as collateral damage, but as a living barrier placed between Russian soldiers and Ukrainian fire. The child’s name hasn’t been released. The outcome of the assault hasn’t been detailed. What remains is the radio intercept, the evidence, and the knowledge that Russia’s military views human shields as just another tactical tool to deploy when closing with the enemy.
Winter’s Dark Warning: Blackouts Throughout the Season
Voice of Ukraine 