Piston-powered drones fly ahead of cruise missiles It took a lot of chutzpah for Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to issue an ultimatum to Ukraine late Monday: “The point is simple: fulfil [Russian demands] for your own good. Otherwise, the issue will be decided by the Russian army.” That’s rich, especially considering The Washington Post’s lead story this morning, headlined, Inside the Ukrainian counteroffensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the war. It is not that Russia does not still maintain the capacity to inflict damage on Ukraine, the way stinging insects raise painful welts. But Lavrov’s boast about the Russian army appears to be just that. The Kremlin’s troops are badly depleted. Conscripts are fleeing the country. So much so that a Kazakh chocolate company created a pointed ad about it. When Moscow diverted troops south to defend the Russian-held regional capital of Kherson, Ukraine advanced toward and retook Kharkiv: In early September, Ukrainian forces would steamroll across hundreds of square miles, routing the Russians and surprising themselves. The Kharkiv offensive revealed the inability of an undermanned and underequipped Russian force to hold territory across a vast front. It shocked the Kremlin, and it proved to Ukraine’s supporters that they were not wasting billions in weapons and economic aid. Putin was forced to conscript hundreds of thousands of men, making the costs of war clear to a Russian population that had isolated itself from its leader’s “special military operation.” The mobilization set off unrest but was too late to stop…