Page A3From§Eachthe early evening edition — 26 September 2026
As it ran on the front
On June 25, at the height of a run of long-range strikes, Volodymyr Zelensky announced a 40-day plan to force Moscow to end the war through intensified pressure on the Russian population. One of the two new targets named that day was Wildberries.
The campaign clock started ticking. On September 13, a Ukrainian drone strike killed two civilians in Russia's Tatarstan region, the same day Vladimir Putin warned that European troops entering Ukraine would trigger direct conflict with his country. A week later, on September 20, Ukraine launched more than 1,000 drones at Russia in its largest single-day barrage of the campaign, timed to the final day of Duma elections, after months in which the capital's air defenses had not been breached. The Washington Examiner called it a rare success. It came through sheer numbers, not through anything that looked like the 40 days ending the war.…
…(cont) The 40th day came and went sometime around early August. Moscow did not end the war. That was the record the summer campaign was measured against, and the summer campaign did not break it in the direction anyone announced on June 25.
Then, on September 26, the New York Post reported that Ukraine had airdropped ground robots behind Russian lines, wiping out 3,000 Russian troops and retaking 48 square miles of Donetsk in what it called a historic moment. The same day, Fox News reported that Donald Trump had told reporters 25,000 people died in the war last month, and that he had personally pushed Zelensky to settle with Putin.
Do the arithmetic on that pair. The White House repeated its own number to reporters. That is the entire verification process behind both.
Two governments announced two body counts in the same week, from opposite ends of a war that already missed its own 40-day deadline to end, and each number arrived exactly big enough to make the other side's argument for them.
“You had one summer, one deadline, and a country's entire population as the pressure point, and forty days later the war's still running and nobody's writing the check for Wildberries. Now Kyiv says three thousand men died in an afternoon and Trump says twenty-five thousand died in a month, and the only people who counted either number are the two guys who announced it. That's not intelligence, that's a bar bet with tanks.”
“Look, the 40-day campaign was always about pressure, not a hard deadline, and if the timeline slipped that's — okay, it was explicitly a 40-day plan, I said that, forget I said that. As for the 25,000, the President's just relaying what he's been told, he's not the Pentagon's casualty office, he's — why would he say a number if he didn't believe it, that's not how any of this works.”
The receipts
"I'll meet with Putin. I'll meet with Zelensky... And within 24 hours, that war will be settled" - Trump, 10 May 2023. CNN counted 53 separate occasions he made this promise. CNN fact check, 25 April 2025 (all 53 instances)
Trump claims stunning casualty numbers in Russia-Ukraine warTrump claims 25,000 people died last month in the Ukraine-Russia war and reveals he pushed Volodomyr Zelenskyy to settle with Vladimir Putin.
Ukraine launched over 1,000 drones at Russia in its largest drone attack of the war, coinciding with the final day of the Russian Duma elections. The onslaught amounted to a rare success for Ukraine’s summer drone campaign against Moscow, which had failed to breach any of the city’s air defenses for months. Through sheer numbers, […]
Ukraine's army airdropped ground robots behind the frontline to take out 3,000 Russian soldiers and reclaim 48 square miles of occupied territory in Donetsk.
On June 25, at the height of Ukraine’s long-range drone success, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that he had approved a 40-day plan to compel Moscow to end the war through an intensified strike campaign. As part of the surge, Ukraine chose two new strategic targets to ramp up pressure on the Russian populace: Wildberries…
· Ukrainian drone kills two civilians in Russia after Putin warns against deployment of European troops from the morgue, 13 Sep 2026
· Ukrainian drones kill two in Russia as Moscow hits main port hub in Black Sea from the morgue, 13 Sep 2026
· Massive Russian attacks are launched on cities across Ukraine, killing at least seven people. Ukrainian officials call it the largest Russian attack on Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian invas from the morgue, 26 Aug 2024
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.