Vitamin R: Harm Over Time Dictates Power—It Alone Informs Actual Calculations of Warfighting Momentum
- john raymond
- Aug 15
- 3 min read
The only meaningful question is not who “has momentum” in the abstract, but whether Ukraine’s actions are increasing harm to the Russian war machine per unit time.
Define power in war as p = h/t: the rate at which one side imposes durable harm on the other. On this ledger, Ukraine’s momentum is rising while Russia’s is feigned—generated by map-artifacts and media theater rather than compounding effects. The proof is where the damage accumulates fastest: in Russia’s fuel and logistics ecosystem under Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign, not in Russia’s narrow salients on the front.
Consider the period bookended by Russia’s refinery outages in early August and the latest strikes on August 15. A Ukrainian drone attack forced Rosneft’s Ryazan refinery to halt roughly half of its capacity beginning August 2, with two primary units stopped—an interruption that extended beyond a news cycle and directly touches aviation fuel and trucking supply.
In the same window, the Novokuibyshevsk refinery halted primary operations after a Ukrainian strike damaged its main CDU-11 unit. Days later, Ukraine hit the Syzran refinery in Samara and a Caspian port hub, damaging energy throughput and a cargo vessel—actions timed to coincide with President Trump’s Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin and aimed squarely at Russian sustainment. These are not symbolic pinpricks; they compress the time between large disruptions and increase the average severity of each disruption—precisely how h/t grows. Precisely how power grows. And if power is growing, that is how momentum is gained.
Now contrast that harm-rate with Russia’s front-line “momentum.” The salient advances Russia advertises—probing toward Pokrovsk, nibbling around Chasiv Yar—rely on small infiltration groups, incur heavy losses, and frequently fail to translate into operational collapse or even sustained positional advantage.
ISW’s recent assessments describe exactly this pattern: attacks continuing without advance around Chasiv Yar, limited fireteam infiltrations northeast of Pokrovsk that do not equate to area control, and a broader push calibrated to shape perception ahead of August 15 rather than to unlock depth breakthroughs. These penetrations plant flags; they do not fracture Ukrainian logistics, degrade Ukrainian strike capacity, or force a Ukrainian re-architecture of the theater. In p = h/t terms, they neither increase Russian-inflicted harm nor meaningfully shorten the interval between consequential Ukrainian setbacks.
The structural asymmetry is straightforward. A refinery outage removes tens to hundreds of thousands of barrels per day of processing capacity from Russia’s military-industrial bloodstream; restoring that throughput takes weeks, sometimes months, and the repair cycle invites follow-on strikes.
Each successful hit therefore multiplies forward: inventories are drawn down faster, transport chains re-route over longer distances, and unit-level fuel discipline tightens, which in turn slows Russian operational tempo and amplifies attrition. This is compounding harm. By contrast, a Russian tactical protrusion that fails to collapse a Ukrainian node creates no comparable compounding. It burns men and materiel to hang a narrative banner over a contested tree line, then resets to the same logistics reality it started with.
When we trace time explicitly, the divergence sharpens. In the first half of August alone, Russia suffered a halving of capacity at Ryazan, a halt at Novokuibyshevsk, and new strikes at Syzran and the Caspian port corridor. The intervals between these system-level disruptions are contracting; the restoration times are long; and the cumulative effect is visible in downstream product flows.
Even Russian-friendly analyses concede that refinery strikes have become a persistent feature rather than an anomaly. In short, Ukraine’s deep-strike cadence is accelerating relative to Russian repair cycles, so t is shrinking while h per event remains large. That is increasing power. That is how momentum must be understood
Meanwhile, Russia’s battlefield theatrics reveal their true purpose: informational leverage. ISW explicitly links certain advances to shaping conditions before the Alaska summit—an admission that the operational vector serves narrative needs. Theater can sway headlines; it does not refill tanks, replace refinery columns, or harden depots against the next wave of drones. It therefore fails the power test. And as such, Russia isn’t gaining, nor does it “have momentum.”
The implication is unambiguous. If Western support continues to privilege Ukraine’s deep-strike complex—long-range drones, guidance, EW resilience, target acquisition, and the industrial base that feeds it—Ukraine’s warfighting power will keep rising because both terms in the numerator/denominator ratio move in its favor: harm per strike remains strategically significant, and the time between strikes continues to compress.
Russia’s salients, however visually dramatic on a daily map, do not alter that calculus. They are expensive pageantry designed to distract from a losing energy and logistics position that is being ground down on a clock Ukraine currently controls.
Under a correct definition of momentum—harm over time, not colored arrows on a map—Ukraine is gaining it. The front line can wobble without changing the power equation.
What decides the war is not a trench captured today and lost tomorrow, but the accelerating rate at which Ukraine can make Russia’s economy of war stumble, stall, and then fail.
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