The BBC takes a look at how Ukraine is using drones to overcome the Russian advantage in numbers as it looks for ways to go on the offensive:

Abdujalil Abdurasulov reports from somewhere in Ukraine where drone operators are preparing for an offensive around Kherson.

For weeks Ukraine's armed forces have been talking of launching a counter-offensive in the south, and now a senior military officer has told the BBC they aim to recapture the city of Kherson within weeks. Instead of a major full-scale attack, they are expected to adopt a different strategy, with a role for small drone units.

….Big guns make a big difference in this conflict.

"This is a war of artillery, high-tech weapons and minds. The soldier still plays an important role but success is mostly dependent on rockets, artillery and air strikes," says Maj Gen Dmytro Marchenko, who successfully organised the defence of the southern city of Mykolaiv from Russian attack last spring. It is not like World War Two, when one big army attacked another, he argues.

While Ukraine has been getting munitions that are making a huge difference, there’s the problem of going up against Russian numbers in entrenched positions.

The precision weapons Ukraine has been getting make a key difference. If they can locate a target they can take it out — so the ability to locate targets makes this non-standard approach feasible. Roughly speaking, it’s like a rapier versus a broadsword — and the guy with the broadsword needs glasses.

They can use targeting information from drones to find gun emplacements, supply points, command posts, etc. and take them out. But, it’s getting harder as Russia appears to be finally realizing what is going on and is trying to take countermeasures.

...But identifying such targets and guiding artillery strikes is a dangerous job. Maverick and his colleagues are closely monitoring an attack on a Russian vehicle that they believe can jam Ukrainian communication signals.

By now the Russians will know a drone team is directing artillery fire and they have started bombarding the area at random.

The drones are still out there and Maverick and his teammate are desperately trying to get them back.

"They've turned REB on!" shouts Maverick, warning of an immediate threat from Russia's electronic signal-jamming warfare system.

A vulnerability for drones is communication. Jam the signals they need for control and navigation, and they are effectively neutralized.

The obvious countermeasure will be munitions that can detect the jamming signals and home in on the transmitters to take them out, but that will take some doing. (It’s analogous to the HARM missiles that take out anti-aircraft targeting radars.) A corollary would be some kind of missile that homes in on signals from drone controllers and the drones themselves. 

Sometimes an arms race is more like a deadly dance…

Meanwhile, Ukraine isn’t just relying on long-distance weapons systems and drones to strike deep into territory Russia holds. They’ve set up guerrilla teams to operate in areas that Russia thought secure. Via Andrew E. Kramer at The NY Times:

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — They sneak down darkened alleys to set explosives. They identify Russian targets for Ukrainian artillery and long-range rockets provided by the United States. They blow up rail lines and assassinate officials they consider collaborators with the Russians.

Slipping back and forth across the front lines, the guerrilla fighters are known in Ukraine as partisans, and in recent weeks they have taken an ever more prominent role in the war, rattling Russian forces by helping deliver humiliating blows in occupied areas they thought were safe.

Increasingly, Ukraine is taking the fight against Russian forces into Russian-controlled areas, whether with elite military units, like the one credited on Tuesday with a huge explosion at a Russian ammunition depot in the occupied Crimean Peninsula, or an underground network of the guerrillas.

Asymmetric warfare is a bitch.

Eric Frank Russell wrote a 1957 science fiction classic called “Wasp”. A war between Terra and the Sirian empire saw the Terran forces outnumbered, so the Wasp strategy was employed to compensate.

A human who could pass for a Sirian was dropped onto an enemy planet with training and equipment to create at much disruption as possible. The idea was that a single individual could still take up enough official attention to significantly degrade Sirian abilities and interfere with their war efforts. The Wasp was equipped with a variety of official IDs, fake identities, pysop tricks, and special sabotage tools. The book offered a couple of scenarios to explain how the Wasp strategy worked.

One was a story about a couple of escaped prisoners. They stole a car and were on the loose for hours before being captured. They didn't accomplish much — but during the entire time they were loose they occupied the attention of police forces, news media, and the public across several states.

Another was a car crash. Although in perfect operating condition with four perfectly healthy humans on board, it suddenly went out of control and crashed,  killing everyone. The driver lingered long enough to explain what had happened: he got distracted trying to deal with a wasp that had gotten into the car…

What is happening in Ukraine is being watched closely by militaries around the world. Between drones, precision weapons systems, and contrasting operating doctrines, there are huge implications for the way militaries will have to adjust their tactics and strategy to deal with what’s now been shown to be possible.

Helene Cooper’s NY Times report on estimated Russian casualties would seem to be a pretty clear indication that Russia has badly miscalculated from the get go — as have those who had been evaluating Russia’s threat potential and expected an easy win.

“I think it’s safe to suggest that the Russians have probably taken 70 or 80,000 casualties in less than six months,” Colin Kahl, the under secretary of defense for policy, told reporters at the Pentagon on Monday, referring to deaths and injuries.

“They have made some incremental gains in the east, although not very much in the last couple of weeks, but that has come at extraordinary cost to the Russian military because of how well the Ukrainian military has performed and all the assistance the Ukrainian military has gotten.”

Two American officials said that estimate of Russia’s losses included about 20,000 deaths. Of that number, 5,000 are believed to be mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a private force with ties to Mr. Putin, and foreign fighters, one of the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss sensitive military assessments.

There still remains the question: what will bring the conflict to a close?

Ukraine can only suffer so many casualties and stress on its economy, and has to wonder how much outside support will come in and for how long. From the Russian side, anything short of the total destruction of the Russian military seems unlikely to force Putin to call the invasion off and withdraw.

Oleg Kashin, a Russian journalist based in London is not optimistic.

...Instead, the factor seriously threatening Mr. Putin’s strength today is the Ukrainian Army. Only losses at the front have a realistic chance of bringing change to the political situation in Russia — as Russian history well attests. After defeat in the Crimean War in the mid-19th century, Czar Alexander II was forced to introduce radical reforms. The same thing happened when Russia lost a war with Japan in 1905, and perestroika in the Soviet Union was driven in large part by the failure of the war in Afghanistan. If Ukraine manages to inflict heavy losses on Russian forces, a similar process could unfold.

Yet for all the damage wrought so far, such a turnaround feels a long way off. For now and the foreseeable future, it’s Mr. Putin — and the fear that without him, things would be worse — that rules Russia.

Given the threat Russia appears to be under Putin, enough to convince Sweden and Finland to join NATO, Ukraine looks to have a bloody future ahead — and the timeline is uncertain.

The joker in the deck is U.S. politics. If Republicans take either or both chambers of Congress in the midterms, there will be some real wild cards, possibly all the way up to impeachment hearings on President Biden, along with every other scandal they can gin up. If they take back the White House, it doesn’t bear thinking about. That could seriously jeopardize the alliance backing Ukraine.

Which is why Putin’s investment in Trump may be the long-shot payoff of all long shots, comparable to the train ride chartered by Germany that took Lenin back to Russia in 1917.

Best if Ukraine can manage to prevail sooner rather than later.