If you get your picture of the war in Ukraine from the Institute for the Study of War, you could be forgiven for thinking Russia has spent 2026 standing still. According to reporting on ISW’s latest assessments, Russia’s actual territorial gains this year come to roughly 100 square kilometers, about 40 square miles, or a patch of ground smaller than the city of Washington, D.C. ISW’s admirers in the Ukrainian and Western press have turned that number into a headline: Putin, they say, has exaggerated his gains by a factor of 45.

I don’t buy it, and the numbers presented to Putin last week show why.

What Gerasimov told Putin

On October 16, Putin received a briefing from the Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov. The headline figure: since January 1, about 6,500 square kilometers, roughly 2,500 square miles, and 310 settlements have come under Russian control. Since September 1 alone, Gerasimov reported more than 1,800 square kilometers and 92 settlements. In the Donetsk People’s Republic, about 500 square kilometers and 23 settlements changed hands in September and the first half of October. The Vostok group took 10 settlements and more than 180 square kilometers in eastern Zaporozhye. Luhansk is now entirely under Russian control. Ukraine holds just over 10 percent of the DPR and 16.5 percent of Zaporozhye oblast.

The briefing also described a security zone along the border with Sumy and Kharkov oblasts. Of a 660-kilometer strip, 465 kilometers, three-quarters of it, is now under Russian control. Building that zone alone accounted for more than 3,000 square kilometers.

These are not abstractions. The Defense Ministry’s weekly reports name the villages one by one. In the week of October 10 to 16: Lukashovo, Lobanovka, Reznikovo, Kupino, Nefedovka, Chernoye, Varvarovka and Nikolayevka in Kharkov oblast; Novotroitskoye, Petrovskoye and Lidino in the DPR; Nikolskoye in Zaporozhye. In the week of September 26 to October 2, ten more in Kharkov oblast alone. Add Dobropolye, Sergeyevka, Pervomaiskoye and Alekseyevo-Druzhkovka in the DPR, and in July the city of Konstantinovka.

The arithmetic does not work

Now try to fit that into ISW’s 100 square kilometers. Three hundred and ten settlements in 100 square kilometers works out to about a third of a square kilometer each, roughly 80 acres. That is not a village with its fields, roads and tree lines. That is a farmyard. A single town the size of Konstantinovka would swallow a large share of ISW’s entire annual total by itself.

You don’t have to take Moscow’s word for it, either. DeepState, the Ukrainian mapping project that no one has ever accused of being a Kremlin mouthpiece, counts about 1,300 square kilometers taken by Russia between January and mid-October. That is thirteen times ISW’s figure.

So how does ISW arrive at 100? Its number is a net figure. It subtracts ground that Ukraine claims it has retaken in its counteroffensives this year from ground Russia has captured, but there is no evidence to substantiate that claim. ISW also counts only advances it can confirm from geolocated imagery, which means its maps lag the front and systematically miss gains in areas where little footage escapes. The security zone in Sumy and Kharkov oblasts, much of it fields and forest with few cameras, is exactly the kind of ground that falls through that net.

Putin said Russia took 1,301 square kilometers in September; the Defense Ministry’s own mid-month figure was 670, and other Russian outlets reported 858. Some of the 6,500 is surely generous rounding, and some of it is the gray zone the Russian army controls but has not yet occupied. The truth is likely somewhere between DeepState’s 1,300 and Gerasimov’s 6,500. What it is not is 100. A figure that small is not analysis. It is reassurance for Western governments that would rather not ask what their policy has produced.

The drone that crossed Poland

The second story of the week matters more, because it could widen the war.

On the night of October 18, Ukraine launched what the Russian Defense Ministry called more than 1,000 drones at Russia, the largest such attack of the war. St. Petersburg and Leningrad oblast took the brunt. The Petersburg oil terminal and the Ruchyi depot burned, a VK data center was hit, Pulkovo airport closed for eight hours, and at least one person was killed. One of those drones did not reach its target. It exploded in Lithuania’s Pasvalys district, hitting a moving car.

Lithuania’s defense minister, Robertas Kaunas, says the drone entered Lithuania from Polish airspace. Lithuania’s prime minister says there is “no doubt” it came from the Polish side, and Vilnius says it has credible evidence the drone crossed the Polish border. Ukraine has admitted the drone was Ukrainian and apologized, blaming Russian electronic warfare for pushing it off course. Warsaw, for its part, says its radars show no confirmation of a crossing, has denied leaked reports that the drone was launched inside Lithuania, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk has demanded an explanation from Kyiv. The two NATO allies have now set up a joint team to investigate.

Warsaw’s denials do not square with what I have learned, and the stray drone in Lithuania is the smaller part of the story. An independent source tells me that the drone that struck St. Petersburg was itself launched from a site inside Poland. This was not a Ukrainian weapon that wandered through Polish airspace by accident. The attack on Russia’s second city began on Polish soil. That is the difference between an embarrassing incident and an act of war. A strike on St. Petersburg flown from the territory of a NATO member makes Poland a participant in that strike, whatever its government says in public.

It also explains a lot. Russian media have taken to calling it the “Baltic route”: Ukrainian long-range drones flying up the NATO side of the border, through Polish and Baltic airspace that Russian air defenses cannot touch, and then turning east into Russia. Ukrainian drones bound for Russia have strayed into Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland several times this year. A launch point in Poland shortens the flight to St. Petersburg, keeps the drones out of Belarusian and Russian air defenses for most of the trip, and puts the operation under NATO’s air-defense umbrella. Lithuania’s officials, who have been more candid than Warsaw, have already said the drone that came down in their country crossed from the Polish side, which fits the same picture. Moscow is not going to treat the country that launched the strike on St. Petersburg as a bystander.

Will Russia retaliate against Poland?

I expect it will. In public, the Kremlin has so far kept its powder dry. Peskov’s answer to the St. Petersburg strikes was that Russia is already hitting Ukraine “constantly,” and on October 20 the Defense Ministry reported strikes on the launch sites of Ukraine’s long-range drones. There has been no public threat against Poland yet. But Moscow rarely announces its responses in advance, and it has drawn a clear line before: a state that lets its territory be used to strike Russia becomes a party to the conflict.

Russia has options well short of open war and every incentive to use them: hitting the launch infrastructure itself, electronic warfare that spills across the border, drones and missiles probing Polish airspace as they did in September 2025, sabotage against the logistics hubs that feed Ukraine, and pressure on the Suwalki corridor between Belarus and Kaliningrad. Any of those could come quickly. Each carries a risk of escalation that nobody in Warsaw, Vilnius or Brussels has been asked to vote on, and NATO’s Article 5 was never meant to protect a member that launches attacks on Russia’s cities and then cries foul when Russia answers.

The lesson connects to the first half of this column. Western policy toward this war rests on a set of comforting numbers: Russia is barely advancing, Russia is running out of men, Russia will not dare respond. When the numbers are wrong, the policy built on them is wrong too. ISW’s 100 square kilometers tells Western leaders they can keep raising the stakes at no cost. A strike on St. Petersburg launched from Poland, with a stray drone exploding in a Lithuanian field, is a reminder that the cost is real, and that it is coming closer to home.

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Jelena and Ryan are out today, so I spent the hour with Moby:

Enjoyable chat with Glenn Diesen on a horrific topic:

Nima and I discussed General Munir’s visit to Tehran:

Brandon Weichart does his usual great job of conducting an interview:

Sulaiman has the wrong headline… Iran and Pakistan talks did not breakdown:

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