https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/04/europe/trump-ukraine-war-nuclear-threat-latam-intl Ukraine is now Trump’s war
More concerning, drones do stand for a greater proportion of kills than artillery does since a while back, AND Russia and Ukraine are the only ones really mass producing them (from what's publicly known anyway). So Ukraine uses more drones in a day than e.g. Sweden probably has obsolete ones in storage. Retiring artillery hasn't yet been seriously considered I assume, since a) existing platforms are already on the frontlines, in storage, and in production, b) artillery has had capability to perform tasks that drones can't. Notably there are now extended range FPV drones that operate as far as 40-50 km, which is challenges the range of traditional artillery. We will see what happens in the nearest years. Of course different Western armies are in different levels of adaption to the type of modern war fought in UA. Protypes are plenty, but then there's the matter of scaling up prototype production of e.g. drones to millions of drones/year. Again, as is just my local perception, the Swedish army is trailing on both drone offense and defense (recent prototype reveals notwithstanding) or we would have sent way more of that stuff to Ukraine, and I suspect that's also the case practically all Western nations. Obviously the battlefield progression remains that of Russia very slowly creeping closer trading lives for (by them) burnt land. Ukraine continues to try to get Russia to overstretch, and you are starting to see very interesting things happen to Russia's economy, although extrapolating is a bitch since there are dynamical factors here: most importantly "what is China doing"? Most analysis I've read indicates some version of China wanting to keep the war going for cynical geopolitical gains. Just had a few minutes over, hardly a full coverage of your points.