The Duran Podcast - Ukraine frontline, the horns of a dilemma w/ Stanislav Krapivnik

Episode Date: October 5, 2025

Ukraine frontline, the horns of a dilemma w/ Stanislav Krapivnik

We are here once again with Stanislav. Stanaslav, welcome to the Duran. Again, how are you doing? Where can people follow your work? Always a pleasure, Alex. Okay, so X under Stas Krippivnik, YouTube under Mr. Slavic man, Slavic with a K, not a C.

And then on Telegram, the Russian channel is Stasthudai Abratna, and the English-Ladengu's channel is Stasl's there. All right, I will have those as a pinned comment. And you can also find those links in the description box down below. So Stadislav, let's do a frontline update as to what is going on in Ukraine. So what direction do you believe on the front line is the most important? what should people be looking at? Well, me personally, I just got back from Rilsk, Kursk, where we took medical aid down.

And while that's thankfully no longer a direction for the Ukrainian forces, though I think they're still going to launch a hellmary offensive somewhere, and more likely toward Bryansk, because that's the least defended out of the areas, and try to cut the border between Russia and Belarus go up that side. Though, like I said, it will be a hell Mary, it will be a disaster, but it will be headlines for a couple of weeks, and that seems to be the number one thing. But in Rilsku, we took down medical equipment for the 810th Marine Brigade

to one of the medical points. They take no military and civilians. And, you know, if you look on the map where Rilkes, I mean, it's not directly on the border. border, or closer border. The first casualty we found me and my friend, I dig, who's driving, we were driving down there. This was about 6.30 in the morning was a burning semi, a civilian semi that was on a country road at an intersection. So I guess the guy drove up to the intersection and make a turn and got hit in the cabin by a drone. The cabin already burned out. The trailer

We're still smoking and burning. So after that, you start going really fast. And this is 30 kilometers north of Reelsk. We're supposed to have actually gone south of Reelsk, but we got warned off and went loaded in Reelsk itself. Because the drone and the enemy drone coverage is too much. And they go after civilian cars. You know, we're in this big white Ford minivan.

Or I guess it's not a minivan. It's a full van. You know, not exactly the most Not exactly the most camouflaged vehicle in the world So that's a second time something like that happened The first time saved our lives in December 24th of 2022 Was that the polls were actually on the front lines against our guys And we were driving through a very bad area

With a direct line of sight deep into enemy territory so any tank could have taken a pot shot at us, and we were on a ledge with a very broken road. And even though it was 24th of December, you know, white truck was just standing out against all the green because there was no snow, all the green and on the mud. Yeah, that's when the polls first came in back then. As far as the front line goes right now,

now going north to south, so we've got coupons up north, and that area is continuing to be, degraded step by step. There's about 600 buildings left or so to take in coupons. So it's basically fallen

out like about 3.5,000 buildings. I think it's a little more than that. And as you go down the line, there's movement up and down the line and new small cultures being formed. You get down to north

into Constantinia. And that gets a little hard to say who's doing what. Because what the Ukrainians start to do, which really muddies the water, is before they leave an area, they take drones videos of themselves with flags, Ukrainian flags, that they then post claiming that they've re-staken the areas, or they're still holding the areas, well afterwards. Unfortunately, no daytime stamps or they scratch the metadata, so there's no daytime stamps to figure out when this was taken. the best you can do is by the foliage on the trees.

So they muddy the water with that. But it looks like Constantinovka, the fighting, is in eastern, northeastern Constantinvka, at least on the edges are moving in, and in southern Constantinvka, southwestern Constantinvka. And that's going to be the first to fall. Now, once Kubens falls, there's going to be a big rush toward Krasn and Limon, and you're going to see a cutoff from the north. towards Slaviansk Krematoos, Konstantinovka. By that point, of course,

Konstantinovka may no longer be an issue. It probably will still be to some degree. Then as you go down further, you make it down to Pokrovsk or across the Armeysk. Now, the island, the peninsula that was broken through in the northwest of it, And the job there was the reason that the Russian military didn't continue to expand was to draw enemy attention to itself, bring in the reserves. Now the situation there is very hard to tell what's going on.

From the one side, on the Russian side, we're being told everything is fine. The Ukrainian counter-offensives, localized counter-offensives have all failed. The Ukrainian side, they basically won and they've cut off the Russian force. Now, the Russian forces are not cut off, that's obvious. So there's at least some routes still open. How wide that area is, it's pretty hard to tell because truth is the first thing that always goes in times of war. And the Ukrainians lie a lot too, so they mostly lie about everything

when it comes to this war. So to tell where exactly who's at, where it's difficult. But what that has done is it's continuing. to draw whatever few reserves. And in this case, it's also drawn what's left of the fire brigades, and even directly what's left of the units that are on the line. Now, for those that don't understand what a fire brigade is, military summary called them rescue units, which is ridiculous. That's what civilians call. But they don't know what to call it in the military. A fire brigade is a unit that is designated

to plug in holes in a defensive line when an enemy punches through. It could be any size. I mean, you're dealing, normally you deal with a front line of that size. You're dealing with brigade-level units, and then will subdivide into battalions and maybe even in the companies, depending on how big of a hole it breaks through. Remember, even the biggest defeat and route starts with one soldier. One soldier executes his duty, destroys the enemy,

a squad takes its position. The squad position grows into a company position, into a platoon position, into a company position, and suddenly you have battalions or brigades breaking through the front lines. So anytime somebody's breaking through, you know, obviously you want to get there as fast as possible to plug the hole as fast as possible

with the right amount of troops. So throwing in too many, you might not have enough for some other breakthrough somewhere else. Throwing in too few, obviously, it's not going to plug the hole. So that's the art of war, is being able to tell, being able to summarize and being able to send the proper amount of troops in the proper amount of time. Now, these brigades, they don't stay on the line. Their job is to counterattack the enemy as they're breaking through, stop their advancement, maybe in roll them back, hold the line until line troops move in, or lower, basically, the usual lower quality troops move in and then stabilize the line.

or stabilize a new line, depending on how that counterattacks have gone. Now, a lot of those units were destroyed and cursed because they were pulled off the lines and thrown into Kursk. And the ones that were pulled back out, like the 42nd mechanized, Ukrainian mechanized, they were pretty beat up. I mean, they're down to about a third of the compliments that they need. So they would be considered combat ineffective.

But then again, by NATO standard, anything down around 70% is combat. it's still combat effective. You can still use them, but, you know, it all depends on what kind of situation you're in. So, these units have all been getting pulled in north of

Pakrovsk, and basically even front line units have been stripped. You know, it's the robbing Peter to pay Paul and then you're robbing Paul to pay Peter and so on, but every time some of those some of those coins,

are falling through your fingers. So the amount that you have left is getting smaller and smaller. Plus, you're losing units when you're on the march. Because you're breaking contact, you're losing units as they're getting on the march. They're getting discovered and getting an attack. Equipment just breaks down naturally on the march. People get tired. So you start losing attrition.

And when you're planning, and when you notice, you go down south of Pukorosk, so you start having three really effective. going into eastern Zaporajia. Now the two northern ones have bogged down, the southern one is moving. But what you notice is really this is all one strategy. Because what normally, normally the way you develop a course of action, you want to put your enemy on what's called the horns of a dilemma. That's when they don't know where to defend.

They don't know where the main thrust is. They don't know what's the main objective. And they're on the horns of dilemma. Do I defend here? I defend here? Do I defend there? Do I strip them from here? Do I run over there? What am I going to do? And if you're really good, and if it really goes well, you can really paralyze the enemy when they really have no idea what to do and they're not doing anything particularly. They're too afraid to react. And that's when you start shaping that battlefield the way you wanted, not the way the enemy wants

to shape. Now, what we've seen here, again, as you notice, everybody's guessing, where's the main thrust, right? Is it Pakrovsk? Is it Konstantinovka? Is it Kupens? Is it Zaporosia? Is it towards Zaporosia city, which by the way is also moving right up to Napa? Or maybe

something else? And that's the whole point. What you normally would do, at a very minimum, if you're not very talented, you'll have one major thrust and you have two or three secondary thrusts. And they may all start off at the same time, but the secondary thrust, they don't have a

enough weight behind and really push through, and they'll balk down sooner than later. But they're meant to draw attention to themselves, and then you have the main thrust pushing through. That's like a mid-level commander's level of action. On a high-level commander's level of action, you may have one main thrust and multiple secondary thrust, but you're so agile that if that main thrust isn't developing the way you want it. You can move those units, like for example, division level artillery, support aviation, maybe additional infantry, fast enough to flux them to some other secondary thrust, and that

becomes your main thrust. And you do this, especially you can do this by orders. So you may start off with what we saw in Pakrovs. You know, they start moving in Pakrovsk while there's slow thrust going into coupons, which are keeping the Ukrainian units tied up. They can't break, loose and charge down south because if they do, they're already in combat. They're in combat in contact with the, uh, with the enemies. So they can't break loose and they can't just run away. Otherwise, the whole area falls because the enemy is moving, but they're moving slowly. But the moment they feel weakness, they start accelerating. Uh, or they may be on a time schedule. Okay, so the third of a September, these guys go. The 12th of September, these guys go.

The 15th September, these guys go. And you start having attack after attack after attack. So the enemy starts in the middle of a march to stop one attack, all of a sudden a major breakthrough starts going through somewhere else. And they're confused. What do we do? Once they've committed to one major thrust, for example, Pakrovsk in the north, they start stripping down and aren't able to react somewhere else. That's part of that attrition warfare. You're constantly hitting, you're not making big, huge breakthroughs, but you're constantly fatiguing the enemy and you're wearing them down because they're running back and forth. They're losing troops that stayed, and they don't know what to do.

The leadership becomes bogged down with indecision, and that's what you want. So that's what we're seeing right now. And what is going to be the main thrust? That becomes really at this point something to guess at. It all depends what breaks first. There's three possible main thrusts. At the moment, I would say, Pachrovsk is obviously one of them. Konstantinovka-Kupensk direction is number two.

Number three is, I'm sorry, not Kupinsk, Kseninovka, Kramatorz, direction number two. Kupensk, Krasn Leman, is number three. Which one of those goes? Hard to say. But at the same time, we've got movement towards Zaporosia, which would require Ukrainian troops to do a huge road march to the west. And then Gullay Poela is getting surrounded from the north. So it's a lot of secondary thrust.

it becomes kind of death by 1,000 cuts, parallel with somebody trying to stick a saber straight in the heart of the beast, or maybe chop the head off. So what we're seeing is the Ukrainians are basically just running out of resources. They can keep this up for a while, obviously, because, number one, because Russia is trying to conserve its own strength and trying to minimize its own losses. If there was less care for losses,

there might have been a bigger thrust somewhere. where it may have already broken through, it all depends. But then again, you know, what we saw, for example, yesterday, or not yesterday, two days ago, Americans firing because they were American High Mars, and there's our American boots on the ground in those High Mars, shooting high Mars missiles and blowing up the electric power plant in Belgrade. And they were shooting out of the middle of Khadikov,

which, by the way, for one reason or another, their electric power plant has been allowed to become back online, which is drawing a lot of criticism on the Russian circles, why they have power again. Because the videos that were coming out was just from the middle of the city. All the lights are on. People are walking in the parks. And they were firing directly on the Belgrade.

So, you know, there's that area. So, again, you know, the Ukrainians are countering with missiles. that they can do by Haimars and drones. That's basically terror attacks because they're all targeted specifically at civilians. You know, I was on evening of Ladimir Salavio of yesterday. Radioan Ranov was on there who works for the Department of State or Foreign Ministry for Russia.

And he was talking about, you know, nobody talks about over 150 civilians that were injured, heavily injured over just the last two weeks or the couple dozen that were killed by directly targeting civilians. It may be even more, because that's what they're going after right now. They can't beat on the battlefield,

so they go after trying to make this as bloody as possible to try to get a reaction on Russia to escalate with. Sorry if I overloaded you on that. So you said in the beginning that you're seeing Polish true presence. Did I get that correct? Polish true presence have been on the ground. You said in the beginning of the video? Yes, yes. They have been on the ground since 22. Right, right. Okay. So as you're giving your analysis, you're talking about Polish true presence.

You're talking about American true presence. Why would the Russians believe that they're going to be able to win this war of attrition when it looks like the West is pouring in their own troops? Well, because in the end, it's still going to be a war of attrition. Look, Russia can escalate incredibly compared to the West on this. When Russia had demobilization, it wasn't a draft. It was a mobilization of reserve units or reserve reservists. and they only took one and a half, two percent of the reservists, and first order were reservists. They were mostly fresh off service,

and first order was those that had combat experience. Now, just to understand, the Russian reserve, that is people with military experience, is 32 million people. No, I mean, I get that, but I guess my question is, the addition of Polish, NATO, U.S. troops means that they'll be able to extend this war out

well beyond one, two, maybe even three years further out. Yes, I know. The polls of Polish losses, at least what I've been getting from various high-end sources here in Russia, since the beginning of this conflict, have been over 10,000 KIA.

I think that's why Nowvoroski, when he came to power, he went and he's trying to pull back while Tusk, who's an animal of Vanderlion, is doing whatever his mistress tells him to do. And Doudou was all for creating Rich Pospalita, and I was told by several Polish sources, you know, the man

is a fanatic, and he was quite happy to put down half of Poland into the grave if he was going to rebuild the Polish Empire. So when you're dealing with people like that, that's, you know, you're dealing with people like that. So if you figure there's 10,000 dead poles, you've got to figure there's about 20,000 invalids that's left behind. Now, how many Americans have died, whether they were actually Merks or, quote, Merks, as I say, shit-dipped Merks, that's pretty hard to tell. But those Haimars are Americans from the start to end.

And I've been saying this for two years, and thankfully, I had the New York Times back me up on everything I was saying. You know, there's American generals that demanding the attack them. There's American generals to plan every single high-mars fire mission. That includes killing civilians, where they're targeting directly into civilian sectors for no military presence. So, yeah, there's that. And there's a big question, even they have 16th. How many of those pilots are actually Ukrainian? How many of those pilots are American or European?

Because retraining pilots is an extremely difficult and frustrating concept. This isn't just about, you know, today you're driving a BMW, tomorrow you're driving a Matsirotti, and then that day after that you're driving a pickup truck. It doesn't work that way. It's a very difficult process, and it's basically a process that doesn't work very well. As the U.S. itself was found out when it was trying to retrain Polish and Bulgarian, Romanian pilots onto F-16s. And what they did finally was, you know, screw it. Give us the fresh guys. I don't know how to fly yet. That's the easiest way to do it. So more likely, even the pilots being destroyed along with the equipment with the F-16s.

Could Chonka-oam, maybe American former F-16 pilots, are back in the saddle and getting blown up with it. All right, we will end the video there. Stanislav, where can people follow your work? X. Stas K. K. Pervynik. YouTube, Mr. Slavic man, Slavic with a K. Narsi. The Russian telegram channel, Stasuday Abratna, and the English Telegram channel, English-language telegram channel, Stas was there.

All right, those links are in the description box down below and as a pin comment. Thank you, Stanislav. Take care. Thank you.