The picture that you see up top, is one that I took myself, while walking along the beachfront area of Sochi, not far away from the city centre and the marina building. You are looking at a radar station mounted above the heads of the beachgoers, on the hillside overlooking the beach itself. This is plainly visible to literally any civilian walking down the beach – I am not revealing anything secret at all. The point of that installation, is of course to act as an early-warning and targeting station for the coastal air defence batteries positioned all around Sochi and the southern Russian coast.

It is important to keep that last point in mind, because during the week that I spent in Sochi, we heard the results of repeated attacks by Ukrainian drones at night. It happened EVERY night. There was one particularly unsettling episode during the second-to-last night, I think, that we spent in Sochi, where air raid sirens went off for a couple of minutes across the part of the city closest to the beach.

I actually remember sitting down at a cafe during a very pleasant evening – and while drinking a raf kofe (a uniquely Russian, and quite tasty, concoction using coffee and light cream), I heard the coastal defence guns going off. It sounded like the old AA batteries from WWII movies – followed by a big boom or two, as the drones themselves ASSPLODED.

Throughout all of it, the native Russians around me never even so much as twitched. They simply went on doing their own thing, enjoying the warm summer evenings along the beach area, and carrying on with their evenings.

Incidentally, as Longtime Readers know quite well, Russian women enjoy the reputation of being the most beautiful and elegant in the entire world. (They happen to come with a GIGANTIC collection of baggage, as well, without exception, but that is another story.) I can personally confirm from long and quite enjoyable experience that this reputation is fully deserved, both in good and bad ways.

Now, I thought girls in Moscow and especially SPb were good-looking and well put together, but their cousins in the south put them all to shame.

I can personally assure you that any red-blooded young man who visits southern Russia, whether Sochi, or Krasnodar, or Rostov-on-Don, or even Voronezh, will be doing the full Linda Blair as he walks around during the summer season.

Keep in mind, I visited Sochi at precisely the time when the Ukrainian drone offensive was ramping up and gaining strength. I arrived in Moscow shortly after the Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries damaged a significant part of Russia’s domestic petroleum production capacity – though not, it must be remembered, to a critical degree.

As I pointed out in my previous poast in this series, that did result in real shortages of fuel, though not a genuine crisis, at least not in western Russia. You will find videos from the Far East indicating really serious shortages of petrol, but the population of the entire eastern third of Russia is something like 15 million people in a land area about the size of the Lower 48 in the US – the city of Moscow, by itself, has more people in it than that.

And yet… in spite of all of that, life in Sochi, and in southern Russia in general, was almost shockingly normal.

There were no shortages whatsoever of basic foodstuffs. Queues for petrol did exist, but they appeared to do nothing to stop the daily (somewhat slower) pace of life. The beaches were packed – and the beaches of the Black Sea coast are generally not sandy, at least not in southern Russia. They are actually rocky. People were out and about, genuinely enjoying the hot weather – it was a glorious summer while I was there.

You could easily buy and pay for whatever you wanted, using a set of payment methods that are, in many ways, more advanced than what you find in western Europe. In Russia, for instance, you can pay by phone transfer to someone’s bank account directly – even in the UK, which has one of the most advanced payment infrastructures in the world, you cannot do this. You can pay using biometric information, simply by looking at a camera at the Point-of-Sale payment terminal and smiling at it. You can pay by phone, or by card, or by smartwatch.

This speaks well of the efforts by the Russian government to keep the general population insulated from the worst effects of the war. That policy has worked quite well. Whether in Moscow or Sochi, the effects of the war are distant and remote for most of the population. I am sure the situation is a bit different in Belgorod, which is under almost constant Ukrainian attack, Kursk, Voronezh (which I have visited twice), Volgograd, or Rostov-on-Don, but even in those relatively “front-line” cities, life seems to be quite normal.

None of this should be taken to mean that the Russian people, themselves, are indifferent about the war. Quite the contrary. The Russian people are FURIOUS about the attacks on their homeland. They recognise full well that they are at war with the entire collective West. And they are out for blood.

If anything, the Russian government faces a serious problem of managing the bloodlust and rage of its people. In most Western countries, the situation is the exact opposite – the governments are insane and stupid enough to want outright war with Russia, but the people want nothing to do with such a batshit crazy scheme. In Russia, by contrast, the people are indeed war-weary – this war has dragged on far longer than any of them would have liked, and they have paid a terrible price for it. But they want a Russian victory.

In my view, we can split the sentiments in Russia itself, into two broad camps.

The majority of people seem to sit in the camp of, “we want peace – but ONLY with a Russian victory, and that means all four regions, plus Odessa (and the areas in the Ukrainian south), and probably Kharkov, becoming Russian again”.

The hardline camp says, “we need to take ALL of Ukraine, and then we need to flatten Paris, Berlin, Brussels, and London, and make sure that the Western vampire-paedophiles who launched this war, stay in the Stone Age, so they never threaten Russia again”.

The scary thing, for any outside observer, is that there is effectively NO liberal/opposition view. The choices for the Russian government are effectively between “stay the course” and “escalate to all-out war” – because that is what the Russian people want.

The other key point to keep in mind for any Western thinker, is the way in which Russian society has adapted to Ukrainian drone attacks – and what that means for the West.

Keep in mind that, over the past few weeks, the Ukrainians have launched something approaching 500-800 drones every single day at Russia. They did manage to penetrate Russian air defences at the beginning of that offensive – at the rate of around 10% effectiveness. When they launched the big strikes that temporarily took out several Russian petroleum refineries, the Ukies shot something around 300+ drones at Russia, per day. Of those, barely ten got through – but that was enough to severely damage parts of the refineries.

Things have escalated now to the point where the Russian Ministry of Defence claimed they shot down 1,060 drones just last night. Yet, almost nothing got through.

There will always be leakers of some kind – Ukrainian drones can and do inflict damage and casualties on the Russian side every day.

But the statistics are very clear: the effectiveness of the Russian air defence umbrella is somewhere in the region of 95-98%. And that is against a wide range of targets – FPV drones, medium-range attack drones, long-range aircraft-style drones, rockets, missiles, and aircraft.

This is an effectiveness level unmatched anywhere else in the world.

Just to put things in perspective, the PATRIOT PAC-3 system, which Lockheed and Raytheon tout (with zero justification) as the best A2AD system in the world, has an effectiveness rate of between 1% and 30%, depending on the target type.

It is useless against hypersonic weapons – whereas the Russian S-400 system has missiles that fly at Mach 14, which makes them fully capable (in theory) of intercepting the American “Dark Eagle” weapon, which is still under development.

Against drones and even subsonic missiles, the PAC-3 has a very poor track record. Ukrainians themselves, who are, shall we say, economical with the truth when it comes to their ability to shoot things down, admit that the effectiveness of the PATRIOT systems has degraded rapidly over the past few years from 30% to 6%. It is almost surely much worse than that.

More than that, one needs to consider the sheer cost of the Ukrainian drone offensive.

It is well known at this point that Ukraine basically has no real industry. Its ability to manufacture drones comes down to a cottage industry of small workshops scattered throughout the country, which assemble drones using components that they acquire, paid for by Western money, from Chinese manufacturers, via various third-party distributors.

In reality, the “Ukrainian” drones are actually Western drones. And the West boasts about its ability to acquire, build, and transfer to Ukraine several hundred to a few thousand drones per day.

The problem is, of course, that this is hugely expensive for the West. All of those intermediate steps add considerable cost and complexity to the entire operation of manufacturing even relatively simple FPV drones.

Firepoint, the Ukrainian grift operation masquerading as a weapons manufacturer, claims it is now at the point where it can manufacture 100,000 drones a year, and plans to hit that target in 2026. And that sounds genuinely very impressive…

… until you realise that Russia, on its own, can now manufacture 15,000 FPV drones – JUST FPV DRONES, mind you – every single day.

Do a little MAFF, and you very quickly realise that Russia can build, on its own, 5.5 MILLION FPV drones every single year. And they still have not hit maximum production capacity.

That does not count the other types of drones it can make. The Russians are now probably at the point where they can make 1,000 Geran’ flying-wing drones every day, of various different models. Their latest drones in the Geran’ family are jet-powered, very quiet, very stealthy, and highly lethal.

They can manufacture hundreds of their “X-wing” drones, the Lancets, every week. They can manufacture drones across the entire spectrum of capability, size, power, range, and so on, to a degree that no other nation on Earth, aside from China, can do.

Put simply, the military MAFF ain’t MAFFin’ for Ukraine – or for the collective West.

Not only can Russia outproduce all of the West, by at least a full order of magnitude, when it coems to drones – it outproduces the combined West by multiple orders of magnitude when it comes to air defence missiles.

The US is the West’s largest air defence missile manufacturer. And it can barely manage to produce 500 PATRIOT missiles A YEAR. The Russians go through that many A2AD missiles every couple of weeks.

This means they are themselves manufacturing at least 25,000 AD missiles, of all various types, every year – and probably significantly more than that. Keep in mind, the Russian approach to air defence does not rely on a single killer platform or weapon – it relies instead on a system of systems, creating a multi-layered web that has proven to be astonishingly effective.

That is the secret to their success – well, that, and the fact that the Russians have colossal amounts of data on air defence, going all the way back to WWII, that they can leverage to test their algorithms and capabilities.

When you put all of that together, you come up with a picture of a society that has effectively insulated itself from the threat of Western attack.

That is not to say that the West cannot hurt Russia. It assuredly can. But the amount of pain the Russians can inflict in response, is devastating. They have the ability to shut down the entire Western world using nothing more than their drones and missiles – they no longer need vast conquering armies.

In summary, Russia is winning the war, on every front. The publicity shots that the Western whore-media jizzes over, show only small parts of the gigantic Russian economy being hit and hurt. The colossus behind it is mostly unbothered – but it is also out for blood.

We in the West continue to poke and provoke the bear at our own great peril. We need to back the hell off, seek peace and accommodation, and leave Ukraine to hang. Not one Western city deserves to burn for the sake of 404 – Country Not Found.