Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse!

Today, which was yesterday’s tomorrow, is, in fact, worse—at least in Ukraine. After three months of near universal military failure, Russian forces have seized the offensive in the Donbas, taking more and more territory in the last week. As of this writing, the Russian army has entered the city of Severodentsk and its troops are fighting the Ukrainian army street by street. If the Russians succeed in taking this city, which they likely will, it would be a strategic victory as well as a symbolic one. Severodonetsk is the administrative capital of the Luhansk region, a distinction it acquired in 2014 when so-called separatists, with Russian aid, seized the capital, Luhansk, and declared it the capital of the Luhansk People’s Republic. Losing the region’s second capital would be a big blow, and it would allow the Russian army to plow through and potentially encircle some of Ukraine’s most experienced fighting forces.

And though we heard a lot about debilitating Russian losses early in the war, we’re now getting a glimpse into the heavy casualties that the Ukrainian military is suffering as well. In recent days, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said that the Ukrainian army is losing 50 to 100 soldiers per day. That’s a lot. Ukrainian soldiers are complainingto reporters that they are outmanned and outgunned. Privately, military analysts are growing more skeptical that high-tech Western weapons will save Ukraine.

This is what many of us were so afraid of during the early, triumphalist phase of the war: Ukrainians are still fighting bravely and cleverly, and taking out a lot of Russian materiel, but Russia still has more men and machinery that it can throw at this. It’s a tried and true Russian military tactic: push meat into the meat grinder until the meat grinder simply breaks. It’s what I thought about when Vladimir Putin celebrated Victory Day earlier this month. The lesson Russia took from World War II was that it can lose for a year and a half—that it can lose millions of soldiers and vast swathes of territory—and, through sheer determination and belief that human life is less important than state glory, eventually triumph militarily.

This is obviously a simplified and skewed narrative of the Soviet victory in World War II, but that is the paradigm that Moscow is obviously leaning on. Already, the Kremlin is salivating at its prospects now that the battle for the Donbas seems to be going Russia’s way. Sources in the Kremlin told Meduza that, once they capture the Donbas, they expect the Russian army to take Kyiv. My sources are skeptical they will be successful but that doesn’t mean they won’t try—and inflict a terrible toll in doing so.

That is not to say that Ukraine will lose and that Russia will win. But if you’re the Ukrainian state, today looks worse than yesterday and, at least for now, victory seems to be receding a little more each day.

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