How Medvedev Blew a Hole in Putin’s War Plan

GOP Donors Have One Shot to Save Putin. Pass the Sanctions.

Ridiculously stupid.

For a brief moment, I considered making that the title of this story — because that’s how bad, how flat-out idiotic, Dmitry Medvedev’s move was yesterday.

Medvedev — former President of Russia, current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council, and widely known as Putin’s favorite sidekick — told the world that Russia wants the Istanbul negotiations to end not with peace, but with a “swift victory and the complete destruction” of the Ukrainian government.

Not a compromised peace, he said, but a rejection of “someone else’s delusional terms.”

That message got picked up by every major news outlet on the planet and blasted into every possible corner. And no — the stupid part wasn’t what he said. Most of us, the entire European continent, and a solid majority of Americans already know that’s what Russia wants. The stupidity was in the timing of Medvedev’s announcement.

It looks like the Russians had a grand plan for the Istanbul negotiations, which were set to begin on June 2. Codenamed Operation Zeus, they were preparing a massive, coordinated airstrike on Ukrainian infrastructure, transport hubs, and — in true Russian style — as many apartment windows as possible. The idea was simple: devastate Ukraine from the sky, let European media flood their feeds with the destruction, then walk into the negotiation room and say, “We’re not interested in peace.”

And then, Ukraine happened.

Operation Spiderweb kicked in.

Forty-one Russian aircraft were wiped out. The Russian plan was turned to mincemeat before it even took off. But Medvedev? He didn’t get the memo. Or maybe he did — but was too stupid, too obedient, or too stuck on autopilot to realize the operation had already failed. Maybe the Kremlin was still too shell-shocked to update the script — and Medvedev just read from it like nothing had happened.

But Ukraine had anticipated Russia’s operation Zeus before it even hit the board.

They saw it coming — because Russian war planning runs on habit. Every time a high-level foreign delegation visits Kyiv, Russia bombs the city. Every time peace talks are scheduled, they strike. It's not strategy anymore — it's muscle memory. So when Istanbul hit the calendar, Ukrainian intelligence didn’t wait. They connected the dots, read the satellites, and moved first.

And it wasn’t just guesswork. Reports suggest there was major activity on the Russian side in the run-up to June 2. The strike package they were assembling was enormous.

If it’s huge, it’s complex. If it’s complex, it requires preparation. And if you’re preparing, you can’t hide it from satellites. Not when a major diplomatic event is imminent. So, as the Russian Air Force began lining up its bombers, Ukraine activated Operation Spiderweb — and shredded Russia’s offensive. They forced the Russian delegation to show up in Istanbul without their usual smugness and without their aerial muscle.

But Medvedev’s comments didn’t just undermine Russia’s Istanbul negotiation plan. They detonated a political one too.

The pro-Putin MAGA faction in the U.S. was scrambling to spin Ukraine’s preemptive strike as a bad move. First, they tried “Trump was humiliated” — didn’t stick. Then they tried “Russia will retaliate” — Zelensky shrugged that one off. Now they’re trying to settle on “this will lead to NATO vs. Russia, so the U.S. must back off.” Medvedev just torched that fallback by openly saying Russia wants total victory, not peace.

He punctured whatever fragile momentum the pro-Putin MAGA crowd was trying to build — and handed a big gift to the anti-Putin, pro-defense industry bloc inside the GOP.

You can already see the shift.

There’s now a coordinated push by key GOP senators to bring the Russia sanctions bill to the floor. This effort, long in the works, has been led by Senator Lindsey Graham (R) and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D). The bill already has filibuster-proof support — 81 votes.

And now Graham is using Medvedev’s statement as fuel.

He said, “Congratulations to Mr. Medvedev for a rare moment of honesty coming from the Russian propaganda machine. I appreciate you making it clear to the world that Putin and Russia are not remotely interested in peace.”

He added he’ll try to bring the bill to the Senate floor next week.

The next week part, I’m not so sure about. But House Speaker Mike Johnson has told the press he’s ready to support Graham’s sanctions bill.

Yes, I have no doubt Medvedev completely punctured the pro-Putin MAGA faction. But they were never the ones with real power to sabotage this. The real threat comes from the GOP megadonors.

Some of them don’t want Putin to lose. They see him as their last battering ram against the European Union — the final blunt tool to shatter the regulatory wall that keeps them from exploiting a 430-million-strong consumer market. A broken EU means fewer rules, more access, and profits without friction.

So far, I haven’t seen any movement from these people. None of them are coming out to attack Ukraine — which is a little unusual. But that silence doesn’t mean surrender. I still have doubts about whether the sanctions bill will actually make it to the floor. Because if it does — and if it passes — and if the sanctions hit the Russian regime hard, this war could start wrapping up much faster than expected.

It would be a bonus. Not a must-have, but a game-changer.

Back on January 24th, when I first mapped out what Ukraine would need to win this war, I put together the following timetable:

Link

We’re now at day 135. The sanctions are still holding. And if they hold through day 180 — let alone get expanded — the Russian war machine is going to bleed out.

Even without new sanctions, the current regime is slowly choking Russia’s ability to sustain this war. Putin is already struggling to pay, feed, and rotate his 630,000 troops. New recruitment is drying up. Supplies are thinning. And the second half of 2025 won’t get any easier — unless someone bails him out. So far, no one has.

But what’s coming next may matter even more than financial pressure: airpower.

We now know that during the June 1 raid, Ukraine successfully took out two Russian A-50 surveillance aircraft — the crown jewels of Russia’s airborne command and control. That’s not just a tactical win — that’s a spinal fracture.

Add to that the delivery of 24 F-16s from the Netherlands, already confirmed, and we are watching a historic inflection point: Ukraine is entering the second half of 2025 with its most powerful air force ever — while Russia is heading into it with its weakest.

This war is starting to shift — from the mud to the sky.

And this is where it gets dangerous for Russia. Their ground forces are only holding because of their air cover. Take that away, and the entire Russian front line becomes soft, exposed, and unsustainable. Logistics collapse. Artillery loses range. Armor becomes sitting ducks.

If Europe has the clarity to see this window — and floods Ukraine with even more jets — Russia will start losing its last pillar of battlefield leverage. And once their air superiority is gone, defeat — a clear, total, unambiguous defeat — enters the frame.

And here’s my suggestion for the GOP megadonors who still want to save Putin:

Pass the sanctions bill. Let it sail to Trump’s desk. That’s your only move left.

If you block the bill — if you try to stall, dilute, or kill it — Ukraine will keep going anyway. The F-16s are already flying. The Russian Air Force is already bleeding. One strike at a time, one radar system at a time, one bomber at a time — they will dismantle what’s left of Russia’s aerial superiority.

And when that happens, the entire Russian ground force — the whole rotten, conscript-heavy mess of it — will be exposed. Without air cover, it will collapse faster than you can lobby another tax cut.

This won’t just be a defeat for Putin. It’ll be a collapse of the entire vertical power structure that holds the Russian state together. The oligarchs won’t save it. The generals won’t save it. Even China won’t want to catch a falling regime that’s crashing in real time.

So if you still want Putin to remain somewhat viable — not victorious, just breathing — sanctions are your best friend now. Not your enemy. You either let this bill pass and try to negotiate from a position of managed damage.

Or Ukraine will do what it’s getting dangerously close to doing: force Russia into a military defeat so total, so fast, that there won’t be a state left to negotiate with.

Your choice.

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