Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, pushed out as Ukraine’s commander-in-chief this summer, has given the BBC his first interview since, and the line that travels is that Russia’s ability to advance is “broken.” Moscow’s total losses, he says, run six times Ukraine’s, or up to eleven times if you count only the dead.

Consider who’s talking. He was dismissed as too old school for a drone-heavy army, and soldiers who served under him say they were ordered to hold positions while nearly surrounded. Now he says the front is stable because Russia bled itself dry, which happens to be the best possible verdict on his tenure. That doesn’t make it false. Ukraine has been reported clawing back ground in Donetsk this week, which points his way. But the loss ratios are numbers neither side publishes, and the person who most needs them to be true is the one quoting them.

The same morning, Bulgaria summoned Russia’s ambassador after a merchant ship went down in the Black Sea with eleven crew missing. Last week it was buses in Kramatorsk, bridges in Kyiv, an apartment block in Zaporizhzhia. An army that can’t move forward on the ground doesn’t go quiet. It hits whatever it can reach. So the general’s claim and the strikes may be the same fact seen from two ends.

What I keep turning over is the diesel. Washington has agreed to take Russian fuel on the theory that Moscow is a supplier worth keeping calm. If Syrskyi is right, fuel is where Russia is still strong, and that’s the thing we agreed to buy.

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