France's promise to hand Ukraine its first Rafale fighters will leave Kyiv operating one of the most mixed combat-jet fleets in the world—eight types built in four countries—according to RFE/RL. Analysts say Ukraine is taking on that complexity by choice—a wartime bridge it means to dismantle once its Soviet jets are gone.

Ukraine entered the full-scale war with a Soviet-built air force and has spent years remaking it under fire, leaning on whatever hardware allies will part with. Every jet it adds now folds into an air campaign reaching ever deeper into Russian-held skies.

The Rafale pledge, and the fleet it caps

Paris announced on 14 July that Ukraine will receive an initial four Rafales from a batch of 16, once Ukrainian pilots and ground crews have completed conversion to the type. That training could start in 2026, France and Ukraine said in a joint statement, with the jets expected over Ukraine around 2028-2029.

By RFE/RL's count, the deliveries will leave Ukraine flying eight combat-jet types from four countries: the Soviet MiG-29s and Su-27s it inherited, older Su-24 and Su-25 strike aircraft, and four Western fighters— American F-16s, French Mirage 2000s and Rafales, and Swedish Gripens. Almost no air force runs a lineup that wide.

Why does everyone else standardize

Militaries converge on one or two jet types for hard economic reasons. Each type needs its own supply chain, its own trained mechanics, its own spare parts, its own pilot pipeline. Germany and France, both large and well-funded, field just two fighter types each. Several NATO members fly only one.

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Christoph Bergs, an air power analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, told RFE/RL the fragmentation is a passing cost, not a fixed design. Kyiv wants to swap out its Soviet fleet entirely, he said, and the small batches of Gripens and Rafales arriving this decade will first cover "a transitionary, likely accelerated period of training and tactical integration."

Why Ukraine has no choice

The Soviet jets still at the core of Ukraine's fighting fleet became a liability after Russia seized Crimea in 2014 and cut off the flow of spare parts. Each year they keep flying, they grow harder to maintain and riskier to keep aloft. Kyiv cannot wait for one Western type to arrive in bulk while Russia attacks now, so it takes whatever allies will send, whenever they send it.

That is how the fleet became a patchwork—by wartime arithmetic, not design. F-16s came first because the US and its European operators had them in numbers and the parts to keep them airworthy. Mirages came because France had a few to spare. Gripens are coming because Sweden signed on for as many as 150, Rafales because Kyiv wants 100. Each deal made sense on its own, together, they hand Ukraine a training and maintenance load no peacetime planner would ever take on.

What the complexity buys

The mix pays Ukraine back in two ways. It builds combat air power faster because Kyiv accepts whatever airframe is available instead of waiting for a single standardized type. And it spreads the risk, so no lone supply cutoff or political reversal grounds the whole force. When Washington wavered over F-16 munitions and rules of engagement, the other jets kept flying.

A reported overnight drone attack targeted Russia's Engels-2 strategic airbase in Saratov Oblast on 16 July, with open-source analysts identifying a fire on the installation that hosts bombers used in missile attacks against Ukraine.

The monitoring Telegram channel Exilenova+ reported that multiple drones targeted the airbase overnight. Videos published by the channel appeared to show a fire burning on or near the military installation.

Independent Russian outlet Astra reported, based on open-source analysis, that a fire broke out on the airbase following the strike.

Shahed-like drone design draws attention

Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi noted that footage recorded by local residents appeared to show drones visually resembling Iranian-designed Shahed loitering munitions, which Russia has used extensively to strike Ukrainian cities and infrastructure throughout its full-scale invasion.

The outlet noted that visually similar drones have been observed during previous Ukrainian long-range strikes inside Russia.

Base used for missile attacks on Ukraine

Engels-2 is one of Russia's principal strategic aviation bases and hosts Tu-95MS and Tu-160 strategic bombers, which Russia regularly uses to launch Kh-101 cruise missiles against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure.

The base also stores munitions, fuel, and maintenance equipment supporting Russia's long-range bomber fleet. Militarnyi noted that Russia expanded the airbase last year by constructing additional aircraft parking areas to accommodate more strategic bombers.

The airbase has been targeted repeatedly since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, reflecting Ukraine's campaign to degrade Russia's long-range strike capabilities deep behind the front line.

Explosions reported across Engels

Residents of the Russian cities of Saratov and Engels reported hearing multiple explosions beginning around 2:30 a.m. local time, according to monitoring channels.

Saratov Oblast Governor Roman Busargin acknowledged a drone attack on the region, saying civilian infrastructure in Engels had been damaged but reporting no casualties. He did not confirm any strike on the military airfield.

According to Astra, one drone also struck a residential apartment building about two kilometers from the airbase. Militarnyi reported that local residents also described power outages following the explosions, with social media users suggesting a substation may have been hit. 

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the crowds demanding the return of dismissed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov that they were right to protest even during the war—then pressed ahead anyway, naming his special operations chief Yevhenii Khmara acting defense minister and passing over both Fedorov and Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, the reported frontrunner.

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It was the second time in a year that street protests have thrown one of Zelenskyy’s decisions into doubt. Last July, a week of rallies forced him to reverse a law stripping Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies of their independence. He called his own answer an ellipsis rather than a full stop and said Fedorov would remain on his team in a role to be named later, he told a briefing reported by Ukrainska Pravda.

The president tied the incoming minister’s first task to ending “busification”—recruitment officers seizing men in public and bundling them into minibuses bound for enlistment offices. At the briefing, he floated Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko as the man who could stop it. By evening, he had chosen Khmara instead.

The rallies he answered had filled nearly 20 cities that morning, most of the crowds young, and they stayed peaceful.

The man he fired blames the army

Fedorov, in his own farewell briefing hours earlier, argued that no minister can fix mobilization without deeper change within the army, since Ukraine’s recruitment centers answer to the military command rather than the Defense Ministry, as reported by LIGA.net.

Where leadership and supply already work, he said, the problem disappears—pointing to the National Guard’s 13th “Khartia” brigade, which he said has a waiting list of at least 2,000 foreign volunteers. The state, he added, is selling its recruits lies and chaos.

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That runs counter to the reason given for his removal. Zelenskyy told his party’s faction that Fedorov had botched the recruitment-center reform and that he could not choose between the minister and Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, lawmakers said afterward, as Censor.net reported.

Zelenskyy turns to his special operations chief

Khmara, whom Zelenskyy had made acting head of the Security Service in January, was told to run the ministry. The president praised his experience directing Ukraine’s long-range strike operations against Russia and said he would ask parliament to confirm him once the legal formalities were done, the president wrote on his official channel.

Parliament has already confirmed a new prime minister, Naftogaz chief Serhii Koretskyi. Khmara’s confirmation is the vote still to come.

The United Kingdom has signed contracts with several defense companies to develop its first domestically produced ballistic missile in more than 50 years, with a "pared-down" design intended to accelerate deliveries to Ukraine by late 2027, Bloomberg reported on 16 July, citing people familiar with the program.

According to Bloomberg, the accelerated effort, known as Project Nightfall, is designed to both bolster Ukraine's long-range strike capabilities and reduce Europe's dependence on American-made weapons.

Fast-tracked development

Bloomberg reported that the UK Ministry of Defence relaxed some of the missile's original requirements after receiving feedback from industry in an effort to speed up development.

The revised specifications reportedly reduce the missile's range from more than 600 kilometers to 500 kilometers and its warhead from 300 kilograms to 200 kilograms, while raising the target unit cost from under £500,000 to a maximum of £800,000.

According to Bloomberg's sources, test launches are expected to begin within the next 12 months, with the first deliveries planned for late 2027. The publication noted that ballistic missile programs typically take more than a decade to develop and field.

Supporting Ukraine and Europe's rearmament

The project is intended to achieve two strategic goals: supplying Ukraine with long-range strike capabilities and expanding Europe's indigenous defense industrial base as European governments seek to lessen reliance on US military support, Bloomberg reported.

The missile is expected to be capable of launching from multiple vehicle platforms, firing salvos in quick succession, operating in electronically contested environments, and being manufactured at a rate of up to 10 systems per month.

A UK Ministry of Defence spokesperson told Bloomberg that Britain is "applying the lessons of Ukraine to deliver military capability faster, using rapid prototyping, innovation and close collaboration with British industry."

Broader UK weapons effort

Project Nightfall is one of several British initiatives aimed at strengthening Ukraine's long-range strike capabilities.

Britain is also developing a low-cost, long-range cruise missile for Ukraine under Project Brakestop, with testing already underway in the UK, Bloomberg reported.

The report comes as European governments continue expanding joint defense projects and increasing investments in domestic weapons production amid Russia's ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Between 92% and 95% of Ukraine’s export grain reaches the ports by rail. The deepwater terminals that once stockpiled up to seven million tons a month can now hold four to five—a gap of about 2.5 million tons a month that the Danube barges, the trucks, and the western rail crossings together cannot come close to filling, wrote Bohdan Kostetskyi, operating partner at the trade and analysis firm Barva Invest.

The country’s main farmers’ union now estimates Ukraine has lost about a third of its capacity to export grain by sea, as reported by Reuters. More than 90% of its farm exports move through three ports in Odesa Oblast, and the country had forecast around 43 million tons for the 2026/27 season, which began in July, compared with 37 million last year.

The squeeze is set to tighten on schedule: Türkiye raised its transit fee by about 15% on 1 July, and Ukrzaliznytsia has proposed a 30% rail increase from 1 August that would add $5 to $6 per ton.

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The shock reaches world markets

World wheat markets reacted immediately. Euronext wheat jumped 7% on 15 July to €231.75 ($265) a ton, its highest since February 2025. The move ran both ways: Ukraine has been hitting Russia’s own Black Sea shipping, striking more than 100 vessels in the Sea of Azov and choking a route that carries roughly a quarter of Russian grain exports.

Major traders have now suspended purchases for delivery to deepwater terminals, and shipowners have begun refusing to enter Ukrainian ports, citing force majeure, Barva Invest’s Kostetskyi said. Four of Ukraine’s 13 large export terminals had stopped buying, industry sources told Reuters.

Kernel, the country’s largest grain exporter, halted operations at its Chornomorsk terminals after strikes on 10–12 July, with around 45,000 tons of wheat and 9,000 tons of sunflower oil lost or damaged, the company reported. Deputy Economy Minister Taras Vysotskyi said the state will do what it can to keep exports at or above last year’s level.

No way around the rail line

By Kostetskyi’s figures, the land alternatives cannot take up the slack. River exports through the Danube ports run about 100,000 tons a month, truck exports roughly the same, and rail to the western border crossings tops out at 300,000 to 400,000 tons—set against the 2.5 million tons of monthly capacity the ports have lost, a trickle.

They are also getting harder to feed: the zone where trucking can compete with rail has narrowed to about 200 km from the ports, so even a rail tariff rise that might, in theory, widen the delivery radius runs into trucking costs too high to close the gap.

Falling prices hit farmers

The damage travels straight to the farm gate. With deepwater buyers gone, purchase prices have fallen within days—rapeseed bids at crushing plants dropped about 1,000 hryvnia per ton (about $24) over the week, and Kernel cut its terminal bids about 200 hryvnia per ton (about $5) in a single day, trade outlet Latifundist reported.

Every hryvnia off the price lands on producers who, the All-Ukrainian Agrarian Council warns, are being pushed toward running out of working capital for the next sowing campaign. The council, which represents more than 1,400 small and mid-sized producers, has backed port operators in asking the government and foreign partners to widen war-risk insurance and compensation.

War-risk premiums are already built into the sea leg—freight from Constanța to Alexandria runs about $5 per ton cheaper than from Odesa, and the share of the big bulk carriers that haul grain to Asia has fallen to about 20%, down from 40% to 45% in earlier years. Türkiye’s higher transit fee and the proposed rail hike would pile several more dollars per ton onto grain that is already struggling to reach a ship.

Kostetskyi does not expect a full, prolonged shutdown of maritime exports, reading the current strikes as a fixed campaign window rather than a permanent blockade. But the constraint he describes does not lift when the strikes pause. The rail line still carries almost everything, the ports still handle less than they did, and the routes meant as a fallback were never built for this.

Ukraine has repatriated the bodies of 501 people whom Russia says may be Ukrainian service members, the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War announced on 16 July.

The transfer is one of the latest in a series of wartime repatriation operations between Ukraine and Russia, allowing Ukrainian authorities to begin the process of identifying the dead and eventually return them to their families.

Identification process begins

The Coordination Headquarters said the remains will undergo forensic examination by Ukrainian investigators and experts to establish their identities.

The headquarters noted that Russia identified the bodies as potentially belonging to Ukrainian military personnel. 

Ukrainian authorities will independently verify each identity through forensic procedures. The process can take weeks or months, particularly when remains are fragmented or degraded, and often relies on DNA analysis and other forensic methods.

Coordinated repatriation effort

According to the headquarters, the operation involved the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, the Security Service of Ukraine's Joint Center, the Armed Forces, the Interior Ministry, the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights, the Commissioner for Persons Missing Under Special Circumstances, the State Emergency Service, and other security agencies.

The headquarters also thanked the International Committee of the Red Cross for assisting with the repatriation.

Part of ongoing humanitarian exchanges

Since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine and Russia have periodically exchanged the bodies of fallen soldiers alongside prisoner-of-war swaps.

Once repatriated, the remains are transferred to specialized state institutions, where forensic experts work to identify the deceased before they can be returned to their families for burial.

Outgoing Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov used a briefing on 16 July to say Ukraine's top military command blocked his reforms and that Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi handed him an ultimatum, Militarnyi reported. He said he had pushed to replace both Syrskyi and General Staff chief Andrii Hnatov, and that the General Staff spent months refusing to sign off on his changes. He spoke a day after confirming he was leaving the post.

Zelenskyy's decision drew a rare wartime backlash: protests broke out in Kyiv and more than a dozen cities, and deputy Air Force commander Pavlo Yelizarov resigned the same day, warning that the firing and the blocking of Fedorov's reforms would "cause numerous casualties and destruction of Ukraine." 

Fedorov, credited with building the drone force that reshaped the war, is being replaced mid-reform. 

The ultimatum

Fedorov said that once Zelenskyy told him he did not plan to dismiss Syrskyi, he accepted it and agreed to work with the general, "because our client is the Ukrainian people." But his ministry's initiatives began to be blocked, he said, and Syrskyi was "not ready to talk about problems personally, to his face."

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Instead, the commander preferred to "weave intrigues" and assume someone had ordered a media campaign against him. That is what led Syrskyi to effectively deliver an ultimatum, Fedorov said.

"Instead of figuring out how to defeat Russia asymmetrically, which is the commander-in-chief's task, he figured out how to split the country," he said. 

Fedorov stressed he had not set an "either me or Syrskyi" condition and was ready to keep working, and credited Syrskyi with saving the country in 2022. But the war had fully changed since, he argued: 

"The drone changes the architecture. The management system has changed, we must change."

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Why he wanted the command replaced

Fedorov said he had proposed "radical personnel decisions" — removing both Syrskyi and Hnatov — to fix systemic problems in the army, Liga reported. Ukraine has no other option, he argued, if it wants to beat the enemy asymmetrically and with minimal losses, "where strong leader-commanders will develop, will not be suppressed and written off." He tied the demand to ending abuses in the army, including in the Skelia assault regiment, hit weeks earlier by reports of non-combat deaths in its training centers.

The blocking

The obstruction was concrete, Fedorov said. For six months the General Staff refused to sign the documents needed to change the ministry's structure and create a competence center, citing formal objections and a reluctance to bring in new people.

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The ministry kept improvising around the blocks: 

"We always hacked this with some non-standard solutions and continue to do it, but overall it doesn't work if we're talking about a serious system." 

Even routine reforms stalled — approving a basic plan to supply brigades with drones took four months, and distribution still ran on loyalty rather than need, he said at the same briefing.

Fedorov also rejected the blame directed at his ministry over mobilization, noting the recruitment centers answer to the commander-in-chief and the General Staff, not to him, Liga reported. There is no fixing mobilization "without a new social contract and without real changes in the army," he said.

Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) struck two sanctioned Russian oil tankers with naval drones in the Black Sea, the SBU said. The vessels belong to the shadow fleet Moscow uses to sell crude around Western sanctions, and Russian aircraft tried and failed to stop the attack.

Two tankers, one sanctions-busting job

The SBU, working with the Navy, hit the ocean-going tankers Louise 1 and Banda — both under Ukrainian sanctions — with Mamai naval drones. 

Louise 1 had moved Russian crude through the G7 and EU embargo, loading at Baltic and Black Sea ports with its transponder switched off. In 2026 alone, it carried nearly 3 million tons of Russian Urals crude, the SBU said.

Banda had run Russian crude out of four ports: Ust-Luga, Kerch, Novorossiysk, and Nakhodka.

As the drones closed in, Russian aircraft fired machine guns and dropped bombs at them, without success, the SBU said. 

The service calls each shadow-fleet tanker a legitimate target and a working part of Russia's war machine. Every strike, it says, cuts the oil money paying for the invasion.

A week earlier, the SBU's Sea Baby drone hit the sanctioned tanker Blue in Ukraine's waters off occupied Yalta. Ukraine has spent 2026 turning cheap drones into kinetic sanctions on Russia's tanker fleet. Sea Baby drones have wrecked shadow-fleet tankers across the Black Sea since late 2025.

The air campaign running alongside it

The naval strikes run in parallel with an aerial-drone campaign by the Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS). On 16 July, SBS operators struck 11 more shadow-fleet vessels — five oil tankers, a gas carrier, three dry-cargo ships, and two tugs.

That brought the 6–16 July total to 147 vessels: 117 in the Sea of Azov and 30 in the Black Sea.

"The goal: paralysis of the logistics of oil, fuel, and cargo that bypasses sanctions," commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi wrote. 

On 15 July, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed Mykhailo Fedorov, his fourth defense minister since the start of the full-scale war, after just six months in office.

Neither Zelenskyy nor the Presidential Office has attributed the decision to poor performance or misconduct, and there is no evidence of incompetence, corruption, or scandal. The evidence points the other way. Fedorov was removed at the peak of Ukraine's best months of the war—and if performance is not the reason, the question is what is.

Under Fedorov, Ukraine has at times liberated more ground than it lost and driven up the cost of every meter Russia takes: ISW assessed that in June 2026 Russian forces suffered over 19 times as many casualties per square kilometer seized as a year earlier.

The clearest results are at sea. What the Financial Times has called the largest naval warfare in half a century has, by Ukraine's own count, put at least 136 Russian and Russia-linked vessels under drone attack between 6 and 15 July—oil tankers, shadow-fleet tankers, cargo ships, ferries, even the tugs sent to rescue them.

The first round, in the Sea of Azov, is over; the campaign has now moved into the Black Sea. Ukrainian forces are striking the ships that fuel and supply occupied Crimea, at an intensity analysts compare to the Iran–Iraq "Tanker War" of the 1980s. The campaign is effectively turning Crimea into an island, setting the stage for its future liberation.

On land, the same logic runs 200 kilometers deep. Rather than seizing terrain, Ukrainian forces contest the airspace above it—a sustained interdiction campaign against the M-14 and H-20 highways that sustain Russian forces in the occupied south, striking convoys, fuel and ammunition depots, command posts, and the recovery vehicles sent after earlier losses.

In June 2026 they temporarily severed every land route between occupied Kherson Oblast and Crimea. The potential prize is large: the isolation of Crimea, and with it the recovery of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the farmland, and the port of Kherson.

Then the deep strikes on Russian oil. Ukraine's long-range campaign has knocked out a large share of Russia's refining capacity—by Kyiv's estimate more than 40%, by independent analysts closer to a quarter—enough to force gasoline rationing across dozens of Russian regions, hours-long queues, a fuel emergency in Crimea, and imports from India and Belarus. It has not stopped Russia's offensives, but it has degraded logistics, stretched air defenses, slowed the tempo, and made the war more expensive to keep fighting.

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Not all of this is Fedorov's, and he never claimed it was: these are the work of the Armed Forces, Defence Intelligence (DIU), and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). But the ministry he ran made them possible. By his own accounting—a farewell list of 22 points—his team shut down Starlink for Russian forces, rebuilt procurement so that Ukraine bought more drones in four months than in all of 2025, funded the Drone Line, and pushed interception rates sharply upward through mandatory after-action review. Western partners and Ukrainian civil society rated him one of the most effective and incorruptible ministers in the government.

So why was he sacked?

The official reason is the one Zelenskyy gave: unity. He wanted the army and the Defense Ministry aligned, and made clear he would not let the two fight each other while the war continued. That much is true—but it explains the friction, not the choice: why the friction was resolved by removing the reformer and keeping the general. The real reason is harder. Reporting from multiple outlets points not to one cause but to several, reinforcing each other.

The first is a real and deepening conflict with Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi—over priorities, procurement, and command—described by well-connected Ukrainian journalists as a generational clash between a young reformer with a startup background and a traditional military general. Zelenskyy reportedly told his own faction that ideally both should go, but that he could not remove both now. Choosing between the past and the future, he chose the past. He chose Syrskyi.

The second is resistance to reform. Fedorov tried to restructure the ministry along NATO lines, digitize procurement and logistics, and close off the corruption an unreformed defense sector runs on—threatening entrenched interests inside the ministry and the defense industry, and generating significant institutional resistance.

The third is political. Fedorov had become one of the country's most popular figures, trusted by the military, civil society, and Western partners. A minister that successful, that independent, and that popular is exactly the kind a presidential office prefers to keep on a shorter leash.

No single one of these explains the decision. Together they do—and the shape is familiar. In February 2024, Zelenskyy removed General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, then Ukraine's most trusted and popular commander—also amid a real clash with Syrskyi, whom Zelenskyy then installed in his place, and also against a growing political rivalry. Success, popularity, a Syrskyi conflict, a potential future opponent: the same configuration, the same choice.

The dismissal drew rare wartime protests in Kyiv and open criticism from Western allies. "It is a pity our country today is significantly further from victory," wrote Serhii Sternenko, a former aide to Fedorov, on the day it was announced. "Real reforms have not even been allowed to begin, although we have still managed to bring about a great deal of change."

That is the cost, and it will be part of Zelenskyy's legacy: he removes the innovators and the reformers, and the potential rivals along with them—while the war is still on, and Ukraine still needs them.

Hans Petter Midttun

Hans Petter Midttun, independent analyst on hybrid warfare, Non-Resident Fellow at the Centre for Defense Strategies, board member of the Ukrainian Institute for Security and Law of the Sea, former Defense Attaché of Norway to Ukraine, and officer (R) of the Norwegian Armed Forces. 

Editor's note. The opinions expressed in our Opinion section belong to their authors. Euromaidan Press' editorial team may or may not share them.

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1,500 British and French troops will deploy to Poland in September for the first joint exercises of the Coalition of the Willing, Poland's Deputy Defense Minister Paweł Bejda said on TVP Info. The maneuvers will focus on moving troops and equipment at scale—transport and logistics, not combat.

"We are preparing for operations connected with the transfer and transport of forces. We want to show that we know how to do this," Bejda said.

The Coalition of the Willing was formed in March 2025 as a European-led framework to guarantee Ukraine's security after any ceasefire, and it has spent more than a year turning pledges into forces it can actually send. By April 2025, only six of 30 member countries had committed troops. British military planners floated a 64,000-strong force. European ministers doubted they could muster even 25,000. The September exercise puts the coalition's central promise—that Britain and France can lead a credible multinational force—to its first test with troops on the ground rather than in a communiqué.

Why logistics is the real test

Since Russia's full-scale war, Poland has handled 95% of allied military aid transiting to Ukraine, Bejda noted. The September drills rehearse that same task: moving forces and equipment through the corridor a security-guarantee force would rely on.

Poland's Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said the country is becoming the site of Europe's most important military exercises. Prime Minister of Poland Donald Tusk said the maneuvers would prepare the coalition for "real security guarantees for Ukraine, but also for the region."

What still isn't resolved

In February 2026, British and French paratroopers rehearsed rapid Ukraine deployment in Exercise Orion. Days earlier, a growing number of coalition members had privately conceded their troop contributions depended on Moscow's approval—effectively handing President of Russia Vladimir Putin a veto over the force meant to deter him.

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President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has removed the defense minister who built Ukraine’s drone war and pushed Elon Musk to cut Russia off from Starlink—Mykhailo Fedorov, a minister whom Ukrainians, in the last national poll, trust more than the president himself. Analysts and anti-corruption campaigners say the entire government was dissolved to make his removal possible without a scandalous vote.

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The move has set off a sharp public backlash, which commentators are comparing to last summer’s anti-corruption protests. A senior air force commander resigned, and cardboard-sign crowds returned to the streets of Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, and other cities on the morning of 16 July, hours after Russian ballistic missiles killed two people in Kyiv overnight. Parliament is expected to vote on Zelenskyy’s nominee, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, later in the day.

The crowds gathered at the same Kyiv square, beside the Ivan Franko Theatre and in sight of the Office of the President, where they massed a year ago to defend the country’s anti-corruption agencies. This standoff forced Zelenskyy to reverse course within nine days. By mid-morning, the protests had spread to more cities—Ivano-Frankivsk, Kremenchuk, Poltava, Mykolaiv—with crowds in Kyiv chanting “Shame.”

A resignation from inside the air force

Pavlo Yelizarov, a deputy commander of the air force, announced his resignation in protest, saying he had joined the armed forces in 2022 to win the war, not to imitate activity, and warning that stalling Fedorov’s air-defense reforms would let more Russian missiles and drones through. He called the dismissal grave harm to the country’s defense but said he would stay in uniform.

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Serhii Sternenko, who advised the ministry on drones, also stepped down.

By the figures Fedorov published in his farewell message, the air force’s interception rate for attack drones rose from 83% to 91% during his six months, and for cruise missiles from 47% to 87%—gains he tied to after-action reviews of each mass Russian strike. His team also ran the Logistics Lockdown program, which is choking Russian resupply to occupied Crimea.

The minister who outpolled the president

Zelenskyy has cast the decision as a management problem. At a Servant of the People faction meeting on 15 July, he pointed to a running conflict between Fedorov and Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. He said Fedorov had failed to deliver mobilization reform, according to lawmakers who were there.

Olexiy Haran, professor of comparative politics at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and research director at the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation, offered Euromaidan Press a different read.

The stated reason for dismissing Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko—the need for an energy specialist before winter—was unpersuasive, he said, since outgoing first deputy prime minister and energy minister Denys Shmyhal was already a high-level specialist in the field.

The more convincing explanation lay in Fedorov: dissolving the whole cabinet let Zelenskyy drop him without a targeted dismissal vote that would have drawn a scandal. Anti-corruption campaigner Daria Kaleniuk reached the same conclusion, telling the Kyiv Independent the entire government resignation was conceived to remove Fedorov.

The trigger, Haran said, may be Fedorov’s popularity. In a recent KIIS poll from May and early June, more Ukrainians trusted Fedorov than distrusted him by a margin of 29 points—wider than Zelenskyy’s 27, and beaten only by the Kharkiv mayor and the war’s most-trusted commanders, among them former army chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi.

Zelenskyy, Haran said, may have come to see his defense minister as a rival, and he predicted the removal would only lift Fedorov’s standing.

A former minister’s harsher read

Former infrastructure minister Volodymyr Omelyan told Euromaidan Press that the reshuffle could be an attempt to strengthen the government before a hard winter—but only if real professionals are appointed and left to work free of the Office of the President, which he doubted would happen.

Zelenskyy’s overriding aim, Omelyan argued, is to consolidate the security services and sideline the opposition to hold power indefinitely, with the war effort, arming the military, and EU integration all ranked behind the private interests of a few people around him.

He dismissed a theory foreign analysts had raised with Euromaidan Press—that the change is meant to reset relations with Poland—as nonsense, saying it would take new presidents in both countries.

Doubts about the successor

Klymenko, tapped to replace him, brings his own controversy. Non-affiliated MP Liudmyla Buimister warned that handing him defense would endanger a key wartime ministry, saying he had failed outright as interior minister.

She blamed him for the chaotic “busification” mobilization drives—in which men are seized off the street into vans—that police, she said, first stood back from and then made worse, in remarks on Telegram.

Incoming prime minister Serhii Koretskyi defended the nominee, calling him a results-driven minister. The objection lands on the exact ground Zelenskyy used to justify the swap: he faulted Fedorov for failing on mobilization, and mobilization is the brief on which Buimister says Klymenko has already failed.

Whether the protests move Zelenskyy is the open question. Last summer, mass protests and a freeze on EU aid reversed a similar move in nine days. Haran expects it to be harder this time: a reversal would mean Zelenskyy openly readmitting Fedorov, and the president, he said, is stubborn in such moments.

The Ukrainian partisan movement Atesh says Russia is responding by pulling scarce military units—including operators from its elite Rubicon (also spelled Rubikon) drone center—off other duties to guard the tankers. This comes as Ukraine struck 147 vessels of Russia's sanctions-dodging shadow fleet between 6 and 16 July, collapsing maritime traffic in the Sea of Azov and pushing the campaign into the Black Sea.

Oil is Russia's largest export earner and the financial foundation of its war. The shadow fleet is how Moscow keeps that revenue flowing despite sanctions—and, increasingly, how it moves fuel to Russian forces in occupied Ukraine, including Crimea, amid the fuel crisis Ukrainian strikes have created.

Through 2026, Ukraine has turned cheap drones into a blockade of that revenue at both ends—the refineries that turn oil into cash, and the tankers that move it. Between 6 and 15 July, Ukrainian drones struck 136 vessels of the shadow fleet across the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, according to Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi. The past 24 hours added 11 more ships to the tally, according to the SBS' scoreboard.

Ship movements in the Sea of Azov dropped from 132 vessels on 6 July to 43 by 12 July, synthetic-aperture-radar imagery cited by the open-source channel Oko Gora showed.

The partisans inside Russia's own ranks

Atesh—"fire" in Crimean Tatar and Turkish—is a partisan movement of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars operating inside Russia and Russian-occupied territory. It gathers intelligence on Russian military movements, recruits agents within Russian ranks, and passes targeting data to Ukraine's Defense Forces.

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Crimea occupation officials pack up as some reportedly flee to Russia on state fuel as Ukrainian strikes intensify, ATESH claims

Russia's best drone unit, reportedly set to guard tankers

An Atesh agent embedded at the Black Sea Fleet headquarters reportedly said Russia plans to redeploy scarce, high-value military units to protect its tankers in the Black and Azov seas. Among the units named are the operators from the Rubicon drone center, the 51st Air Defense Division, and the 1096th Anti-Aircraft Missile Regiment of the Black Sea Fleet.

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Atesh partisans: Russia mines Novorossiysk harbor amid Ukraine’s maritime drone threats

According to the report, Russia plans to assign up to three service members to each tanker, armed with twin machine guns, man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS), and anti-aircraft drones to repel Ukrainian drone attacks. Atesh framed the reported redeployment as evidence of the Russian command's alarm at the pace of losses:

"The reason for the command's panic is obvious," the group wrote, citing more than the 136 vessels struck in just over a week.

If accurate, the redeployment would carry a cost for Russia beyond the ships themselves. Rubicon— Russia's Center for Advanced Unmanned Technologies—is one of Moscow's most effective drone formations, built to disrupt Ukrainian logistics and hunt down drone operator teams. It has been a central element of Russia's pressure on the Pokrovsk axis. Pulling Rubicon operators to guard tankers would divert a scarce, specialized capability from the front line to defensive maritime duty—a reallocation Ukraine's campaign would have forced.

Ukraine built a sea denial with no navy

Ukraine has no conventional navy in the Black Sea. It has instead built sea denial from nothing, using unmanned systems alone—first driving the Russian Black Sea Fleet out of Sevastopol, now hunting the commercial fleet that funds the war. The shadow-fleet campaign extends that logic from warships to the economic infrastructure behind them.

The strategic effect is already visible in Russia's export data: roughly 135 million barrels of Russian oil are now sitting in floating storage, loaded but undelivered, as buyers slow their liftings and tankers idle for weeks. Whether or not Russia specifically redirects Rubicon, the campaign has forced Moscow into a defensive posture over a maritime supply chain it previously treated as low-risk—assigning armed crews, escorts, and air defense to civilian tankers that were never built to be defended.

 "The shadow fleet will go to the bottom, following the Black Sea [Fleet]." Atesh closed its report 

Peaceful "cardboard protests" against the dismissal of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov broke out in Kyiv and at least 16 other Ukrainian cities on the morning of 16 July. The "cardboard" refers to handmade signs the protesters hold. The rallies were timed to the parliament session set to weigh a wider government reshuffle, and echoed last year's protests over Ukraine's anti-corruption bodies. Their message was to keep Fedorov in the job.

Kyiv fills the square that hosted last year's protests

In Kyiv, participants gathered from early morning in the square beside the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater.

Suspilne says the action was called by veteran and former combat medic Dmytro Koziatynskyi, one of the organizers of the 2025 protests defending the independence of Ukraine's anti-corruption agencies, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAP). He asked people to bring cardboard placards and stressed that the action must stay peaceful.

Protesters oppose the constant reshuffling of officials and the removal of people whose work they consider effective, Koziatynskyi said. Hundreds gathered on the square, most of them young people and students, chanting "Fedorov is defense minister!"

From Lviv to Odesa, the same message

Similar rallies ran the same morning in Ivano-Frankivsk, Vinnytsia, Lutsk, Khmelnytskyi, Lviv, Uzhhorod, Dnipro, Ternopil, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Cherkasy, Rivne, Zaporizhzhia, Zhytomyr, Chernivtsi, and Poltava.

Crowd sizes ranged from a few dozen to around a hundred per city. Several began with a minute of silence for those killed in the Russo-Ukrainian war.

The signs spelled out the anger. In Vinnytsia, people held signs reading "Don't destroy what works," "Bring back Fedorov," and "Don't take away hope." In Lutsk, slogans included "Ukraine needs results, not personnel games." In Lviv, protesters on Svobody Avenue by the Taras Shevchenko monument carried placards asking why one man's ego mattered more than the state's defense, and one that read "The audit showed 300 billion in theft. They removed the auditor, not the thieves."

In Mykolaiv, 26 people gathered by the city council with signs reading "Moscow is glad about your decision" and "Swap prisoners, not Fedorov." 

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Ukraine’s deputy Air Force commander resigns the moment Fedorov loses the ministry

Cherkasy protesters chanted "Klymenko — no" and "Give back prisoners, not Fedorov." Lviv participant Sofia Boiko said she came out for democracy and a free country, calling it wrong to remove someone who had finally started making decisions that worked, and describing Fedorov as the most effective defense minister of the full-scale invasion.

The Ukrainian government–run United24 media platform joined today's protests:

"Today, the UNITED24 Media is pausing all publications to join protests over the dismissal of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. See you there," the project's X wrote.

What led to the protests

The rallies followed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's decision not to renominate Fedorov as defense minister. Deputies from the Servant of the People party told Suspilne, after a faction meeting with the President, that he would instead put forward Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko for the post — a figure associated in public perception with a Soviet-style mindset.

Commanders of two National Guard corps, however, supported the nomination of Klymenko. Notably, the National Guard is subordinate to the Interior Ministry, not the Armed Forces.

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Ukraine’s reformist defense Minister is out after six months. Earlier, his audit exposed $7.2 billion in defense overspending

On 15 July, Fedorov confirmed he was leaving and summed up his tenure, listing among his results cutting Russian forces off from Starlink, expanding drone-procurement programs, a procurement reform, weapons contracts, and the testing of Ukrainian ballistic missiles.

Mykhailo Fedorov summarized his tenure as Defense Minister, citing the cutoff of Russian forces from Starlink, the launch of the Logistics Lockdown campaign to isolate occupied Crimea, increased funding for the Drone Line, and larger drone purchases than last year.

Fedorov led the Defense Ministry from January 2026, having replaced Denys Shmyhal. Klymenko took over the Interior Ministry in February 2023 after Denys Monastyrskyi died in a helicopter crash in Brovary. The defense minister is appointed by parliament on the President's nomination, as the post falls under the presidential quota.

Greece is blocking the European Union's newest round of sanctions on Russian gas to shield a single shipping company, the Financial Times reported. The objection has stalled the bloc's 21st sanctions package for a week and forced an emergency extension of the cap on Russian oil prices. At the center sits one Greek tycoon and a fleet of tankers built for Russia's Arctic.

The company at the center

Athens is protecting Dynagas after its ambassador warned the sanctions would "ruin" the company owned by Greek shipowner George Prokopiou. Greece's ambassador to the EU told fellow envoys on Wednesday that the planned measures, which would ban transporting Russian LNG to third countries, would "ruin" the firm, two people briefed on his remarks said. Two others confirmed he had named Dynagas as the reason Greece could not back the package.

Dynagas has moved more than 10 million tons of Russian LNG since the start of 2025, the FT calculated using data from analytics firm Kpler, identifying 11 of its ships that completed 144 voyages in that time.

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Europe can legally quit Russian LNG today. It keeps choosing not to.

A veto that freezes the whole package

The EU's 21st sanctions package needs unanimous support, so one refusal is enough to hold it. Greece's objection has left the rest of the package stalled, freezing planned measures against additional Russian banks, crypto platforms, and defense-industry firms. The package also carries a mechanism to lower the ceiling above which companies may legally buy and transport Russian crude. 

The bloc's previous round added 46 shadow-fleet tankers to its blacklist, bringing the total past 630 ships.

Prokopiou controls Dynagas alongside Dynacom, whose Russian-crude trade has brought in $915 million over three years — the biggest such haul of any Greek shipowner. When the US-Israel war with Iran erupted, Dynacom was among the earliest operators willing to run tankers through the Strait of Hormuz.

A senior Ukrainian Air Force commander has quit over Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov's removal, public broadcaster Suspilne reported. Pavlo Yelizarov tied his resignation to the reshuffle, and warned about the reforms it leaves hanging.

A resignation report tied to one firing

Yelizarov posted his resignation report in the stories on his Facebook page. He gave a single reason: Fedorov's dismissal.

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Ukraine’s reformist defense Minister is out after six months. Earlier, his audit exposed $7.2 billion in defense overspending

Yelizarov joined Ukraine's Armed Forces on 24 February 2022, the first day of Russia's full-scale invasion. He took the deputy Air Force command on 19 January 2026.

The reshuffle behind the exit

His departure comes during a wider Cabinet shake-up. Ukraine's parliament confirmed Fedorov as defense minister on 14 January, replacing Denys Shmyhal, in Yulia Svyrydenko's government.

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“Our state became further from victory”: Ukraine’s top volunteer, whose fund bought 286,000 FPV Drones, just lost his defense post

On 15 July, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signaled he would propose Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko for the post in the new Cabinet — a criticized pick.

The dismissal also brought people onto the streets. Ukrainians rallied against it in Kyiv, Lviv, Dnipro, Vinnytsia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Khmelnytskyi, Uzhhorod, Lutsk, Kropyvnytskyi, and other cities.

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“Cardboard” protests against Zelenskyy’s firing of Fedorov erupt across Ukraine

Ukrainian Defense Minister Fedorov wrote in the same post confirming his departure that Ukraine had conducted a successful ballistic missile test on 14 July, developed within the Defense Ministry's zone of responsibility. "Symbolically," the same day the government fell, he said.

"Symbolically, on the day the government resigned, we conducted a successful test of ballistics developed in the MoD's zone of responsibility," he wrote.

Two ballistic tracks, and the clue points to Sapsan

Ukraine is running its ballistic missile development on more than one track. The reference points to a program that Ukraine has been careful to name for months.

Defense outlet Militarnyi noted that the phrasing suggests it is not the FP-7 or FP-9 ballistic missiles from the private firm Fire Point, and that Fedorov may have meant the Sapsan operational-tactical system, whose serial production reportedly began in 2025.

The Sapsan (also known as Hrim-2) was developed by the state design bureau KB Pivdenne and traces back to a pre-war export program for Saudi Arabia. Zelenskyy confirmed on 9 December 2025 that Ukraine had begun using domestically produced Sapsan missiles in combat.

It carries a 480-kg warhead, more than double the payload of US-supplied ATACMS, and reportedly reached 5.2 Mach in testing. Zelenskyy said Russians often mistake Sapsan strikes for Neptune cruise-missile attacks: "And let them keep thinking that."

The other track is Fire Point, the private firm behind the Flamingo cruise missile, which is developing the FP-7 and FP-9 ballistic missiles as a cheaper analog to ATACMS.

Fire Point's chief designer has put the FP-9 at 855 km range with an 800-kg warhead, priced at half what ATACMS costs. However, Fire Point is a private developer.

Program is already operating in combat conditions

Whatever Fedorov meant, Ukraine's ballistic missiles are past the stage of pure experiment. Russia's Defense Ministry announced on 30 June that it had shot down a Ukrainian long-range ballistic missile.

A successful test on 14 July is a data point on a curve that is already bending toward accuracy, not a lab result waiting years for deployment.

Ukraine burned the machine that lays minefields from kilometers away. Fighters of the Asgard battalion within the 412th Nemesis brigade struck a rare Russian Zemledeliye system on the Zaporizhzhia front, the brigade said.

The machine is built on a heavy KamAZ chassis with computerized controls that automatically map the minefields it lays, so losing one is a real blow to the occupation's engineering and logistics capacity.

The mines it scatters are the reason the machine matters. Remote mining is what makes Ukrainian supply routes too dangerous to drive.

Zemledeliye lays mines that keep killing Ukrainian robots

Ukraine has spent 2026 moving its frontline logistics onto ground robots specifically because approaches are mined and drone-hunted. Units near Novopavlivka use ground robots to resupply FPV teams because Russian drone activity and remote mining have made traditional supply routes too dangerous for soldiers. The 5th Assault Brigade lost one of two ground robots crossing mined and debris-strewn ground to reach a Russian position in June.

The Zemledeliye is one of the systems used to seed the ground. Killing it does not clear the mines already laid, but it stops the machine from laying more, and it is far harder for Russia to replace than the mines themselves.

Nemesis has been hunting Russian high-value systems all year

The 412th Nemesis brigade is one of the Unmanned Systems Forces units running Ukraine's deep- and mid-strike campaign against Russian air defense, logistics, and now engineering assets. A single week of Nemesis strikes in January destroyed an estimated $300 million worth of Russian air defense equipment. In April, a Nemesis mid-range drone struck the 9S32M1, a key component of Russia's S-300V air defense system.

The brigade was also among six Ukrainian drone units that hit Russian oil tankers, gas carriers, and a tug in the Black Sea on 15 July, part of the operation isolating occupied Crimea.

Exclusives

Russia bet 50 vehicles that the drones would miss. The drones did not miss.. Russian commanders had banned their own vehicles from these roads, knowing what the drones do to them. Then they lined up 50 and sent them anyway.

Russia’s fuel crisis has moved from the pump to the harvest.

How Ukraine came to build more weapons than it can fund. Its top defense-industry chief just resigned after a deadly blast at one of his company’s depots.

Russia plans to build 120 Banderol missiles in month. Analyst who found it in 2025 says weapon is “nothing outstanding”. Russia plans to build 120 Banderol cruise missiles a month, but the factory hasn't hit the target, says Ukrainian military adviser Serhii Beskrestnov.

Military

Russia built Crimea’s power grid on sanctioned Siemens turbines. Ukraine has struck cooling system of one in Balaklava. Ukraine's Special Operations Forces struck Sevastopol's Balaklava power plant, damaging the cooling system of a Siemens turbine that sanctions leave unrepairable.

The Azov Sea wasn’t enough—Ukraine’s drones followed Russia’s oil fleet into the Black Sea. Six drone units opened the new phase together, from Magyar's Birds to the Raid regiment that has been burning ships for days.

This Ukrainian female soldier flies one of war’s heaviest drones. She turns down promotion twice to keep doing it. "Tsyhancha" went from FPV operator to heavy bomber pilot in the 125th Brigade.

Intelligence and technology

You can’t jam what you can’t identify: Ukraine just fielded its first portable drone detector. Ukraine has gone the whole war without a portable, mass-produced drone-signature detector, while nearly every Russian soldier carries a Chinese "Bulat".

20,000 confirmed hits make General Cherry Ukraine’s top FPV drone maker. Ukraine's combat-driven drone market crowned General Cherry its top FPV manufacturer in June after more than 20,000 verified target hits.

Ukraine’s Navy just showed the Barracuda sea drone leading a three-drone strike—no crew in the fight. Ukraine's Navy has demonstrated what increasingly looks like the next stage of naval drone warfare: multiple uncrewed platforms carrying out different combat roles within a single coordinated strike, without exposing sailors to enemy fire.

Russia’s Arctic bases sit near-naked as air defenses vanish to guard Moscow and refineries burning inland. Satellite images show S-300 and S-400 batteries gone from long-held sites near Rogachevo and the nuclear-submarine city of Severodvinsk, RFE/RL says.

International

Brussels let Ukraine spend EU defense funds on Chinese drone components. The bloc does not turn out these parts in the volumes a front-line drone war burns through, so Kyiv looked east.

Latvia logs 111 straight days of migrants pushed across from Belarus—and blames its support for Ukraine. Lithuania and Poland together absorbed barely a tenth of the roughly 9,100 attempts recorded across the bloc's Belarus frontier since January.

Ukraine opened its captured Russian arsenal to allies. Hundreds of applications came in within month.

Humanitarian and social impact

From Russia’s contract to death in about month: Cameroon student and 23-year-old were found dead in Ukraine. Ukrainian intelligence identified two Cameroonians killed on the front weeks after signing Russian army contracts. HUR puts Cameroon's war dead at 106.

Russian drone tracked moving car on Kharkiv road and killed man driving it. A Molniya drone hit a Peugeot on the Zolochiv-Maksymivka road in Bohodukhiv raion. Prosecutors opened a war crimes investigation.

Political and legal developments

“Our state became further from victory”: Ukraine’s top volunteer, whose fund bought 286,000 FPV Drones, just lost his defense post. Serhii Sternenko, whose foundation delivered 118,000 FPV drones to the front, is out as defense adviser after Fedorov's exit.

Ukraine’s reformist defense Minister is out after six months. Earlier, his audit exposed $7.2 billion in defense overspending. Mykhailo Fedorov, the drone-warfare architect who became Ukraine's youngest defense minister, is leaving after six months, having opened his tenure with an audit that found $7.2 billion in overspending.

Russia fired its missile at ammo that was stored next to civilian homes. Now Ukraine’s top defense-industry chief is out. Herman Smetanin left Ukroboronprom days after a Russian strike on one of its ammo depots — stored next to homes in breach of the law — destroyed five streets in Vyshneve.

New developments

A nationwide bomb-shelter overhaul is underway in Belarus as Moscow pushes Minsk toward its war against Ukraine. Belpol documented shelter modernization at government offices, telecom sites, factories, utilities, and the National Bank, framing it as another stage of Minsk's war readiness.

A month’s worth of Russia’s oil exports is stuck at sea—135 million barrels loaded but not delivered. Bloomberg's vessel-tracking and price data put the four-week value of Russia's seaborne crude exports back near $1.7 billion, down from a weekly spike near $2.5 billion on the chart earlier this year.

Read our earlier daily review here.

The Russian force in Ukraine has mostly parked its armored vehicles and shifted to infantry-led assaults across the drone-patrolled gray zone.

Which is why what happened on or just before 8 July is so bewildering. Despite Russian commanders concluding that vehicles are too easy for Ukraine's tiny first-person-view drones to find and strike, and despite a reported ban on Russian vehicular traffic on eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Ring Road, the Russian Center Group of Forces massed no fewer than 50 vehicles 12 km south of the gray zone stretching between Kostiantynivka and Toretske in Donetsk Oblast.

The outcome was predictable. Drones from the Ukrainian State Security Service's Ivan Franko Group detected and attacked the column of trucks, vans, cars, all-terrain vehicles, and motorcycles just south of the ring road near the village of Malynivka, an important base for Russian forces fighting in Donetsk Oblast. When the smoke and dust cleared, more than 50 vehicles had been hit and immobilized if not destroyed.

"Despite the ban on movement of cargo and military transport on the Donetsk Ring Road, IFG with a firm hand and drones that you donated 'detained' several violators," the Ivan Franko Group quipped.

It's unclear how many Russians were killed or wounded. But the Center Group of Forces clearly failed at whatever it was trying to achieve—and the assembly of the column, in daylight, within drone reach, is the puzzle. Russian commanders knew what the sky over the gray zone does to vehicles. They sent the column anyway.

It's possible the column was trying to reach the Donetsk Ring Road in order to turn west toward Toretske or east toward Kostiantynivka. Russian forces are attacking in both directions, aiming to break through Ukrainian defenses to open a path, any path, toward the twin free cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, 22 km north of Kostiantynivka.

Left or right?

Whether the Russians planned on investing those vehicles in a direct assault in either direction is anyone's guess. It's possible the column was merely transporting infantry closer to the gray zone, sparing them a long foot march ahead of a dangerous foot assault.

But it's also possible that, yes, the Russians meant to send the trucks, vans, cars, all-terrain vehicles, and motorcycles across the gray zone. Vehicular assaults are rare these days, but they still happen from time to time. They almost never succeed. There are just too many drones over and behind the gray zone.

Indeed, the vehicular kill zone is getting wider by the day as Ukraine deploys more and more drones for strikes on Russian supply lines at depths up to 200 km. The Ukrainian counterlogistics campaign that kicked off this spring has struck potentially thousands of Russian trucks as well as trains, bridges, and, more recently, cargo ships plying the Sea of Azov and Black Sea hauling critical war supplies.

The Russians are now adding anti-drone cages to some trucks and guarding the most important convoys and supply routes with gun-armed air defense teams. More convoys are taking back roads, hoping to escape the attention of the ever-present drones.

But these measures aren't working as more Ukrainian drones take flight, including $6,000 AI-assisted fixed-wing models and $500 first-person-view quadcopters with detachable wings for greater range. Scrutinizing official videos for evidence of drone strikes, mapper Clément Molin tallied 600 destroyed or damaged Russian cargo trucks in June and another 240 in just the first week of July.

Importantly, Molin only counted confirmed strikes. There are surely many others that don't leave behind clear, public video evidence.

The pace of strikes is increasing even as the Russians add anti-drone protections. There were 20 hits on Russian trucks every day in June, on average, and 34 hits every day in July. The strike near the Donetsk Ring Road occurred too late to be included in Molin's count. When he adds it, the daily average will be higher still.

All that is to say, more of occupied Ukraine is becoming steadily more hostile to Russian vehicles. Knowing that, why would the Russians line up 50 vehicles so close to the gray zone? On the evidence near Malynivka, they no longer have a good answer.

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Ukraine’s $500 Vyriy FPV drone just flew 110 km to hit Russian logistics. That used to cost $5,000.

One of Ukraine's biggest drone-fund volunteers is no longer a defense adviser. Serhii Sternenko said he is out as an adviser to the defense minister, which reduces his ability to improve the army's drone situation.

His departure follows the exit of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, whom Sternenko called "the best defense minister in our entire history."

As of 15 July, the foundation has purchased 286,566 FPV drones and helped bring down more than 12,675 aerial targets.

He was appointed a Defense Ministry adviser on 22 January 2026, days after Fedorov took over, specializing in drone combat strategy. He has survived four assassination attempts since 2014, the most recent a shooting in May 2025 that Ukraine's Security Service tied to Russian intelligence.

"It's a shame that today our state became significantly further from victory," Sternenko wrote. "It's a shame that they weren't even allowed to begin real reforms, though a lot was still changed."

Sternenko blames "artificial delays"

Sternenko listed what was in progress when the door closed. New tender requirements for FPV drone procurement were near completion, he said — rules that would let the army get the best equipment and build infrastructure for deeper strikes.

"I hope they are ultimately approved," he wrote.

He named what stopped the rest.

"A lot did not work out, including because of bureaucratic obstacles and artificial delays by those who cause army reform inconveniences," Sternenko said.

Among what he did achieve, Sternenko listed helping unify ground control stations for fiber-optic drones and lifting several individual brigades to much higher positions in the overall rankings.

Among his regrets: not managing to help his country more in a full-scale war.

His foundation will keep supplying troops with top equipment, he said, "but, of course, on a smaller scale."

Three departures, one direction

Sternenko's exit completes a cluster. In two days, Ukraine has lost Ukroboronprom chief Herman Smetanin, Defense Minister Fedorov, and now Fedorov's drone adviser. All come from the part of the state that runs weapons and procurement, and all during a Cabinet reshuffle that is replacing Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal's government.

The anger online has been directed at the loss of Fedorov above all. Many Ukrainians also call him the best minister and say he gave them hope despite an imperfect record.

Meanwhile, Russia's Telegram channels call Fedorov's resignation a good thing for Russia. They recalled Fedorov's cutting off Starlink terminals, which slowed its logistics on the front, and the expansion of drone use.

Ukraine's youngest-ever defense minister is leaving after six months. Mykhailo Fedorov confirmed his departure on social media on 15 July, publishing a summary of what his team managed to do and what it did not.

The decision angered many Ukrainians, who are criticizing it widely.

"It was a great honor to serve the Ukrainian people as Minister of Defense," he wrote.

Fedorov is not a minor figure. He built Ukraine's "Army of Drones" program from volunteer workshops into production of roughly 200,000 drones a month, created the Brave1 defense-tech cluster, and secured Starlink for Ukraine days after the full-scale war by tweeting at Elon Musk.

He became the defense minister on 14 January 2026 at 34, with a mandate to turn the army into a machine-first, manpower-light force.

Earlier, he began with an audit that uncovered about $7.2 billion in overspending and put ministry officials through a lie detector tests, The Economist reported. His departure is the second at the top of Ukraine's defense-industrial structure in two days, following the exit of Ukroboronprom chief Herman Smetanin.

The warning sign came a week earlier. When Zelenskyy flew to the NATO summit in Ankara on 7 July — the biggest defense event of the month, where Trump promised Ukraine a Patriot license — Fedorov was not in Ukraine's delegation.

Reformer under fire

Among the results the outlet credits to him: moving part of procurement onto open tenders, which cut the price of 155mm artillery shells by 16% almost immediately.

Reforms that size make enemies. An official who exposes billions in overspending, subjects a ministry to polygraphs, and strips margins out of arms contracts by opening them to competition is removing money from people who were used to receiving it.

Fedorov's own scorecard

The summary Fedorov published is his own account of his tenure, a list of claimed results rather than an independent audit. By his telling, the Defense Ministry team:

Cut off Russian access to Starlink, sharply reducing Russia's ability to wage effective drone warfare. Took over a ministry with no budget, moved money forward from year-end allowances, and invested it in mid-strike, fiber-optic FPV, cheap reconnaissance, ground robots, interceptor drones, and deep-strike drones — buying more drones in four months than in all of the previous year.

Launched "Logistics Lockdown" as a separately funded program that, Fedorov says, cut Russian supply lines and began the isolation of Crimea, and continued the Drone Line financing that underwrites drone buys for the Unmanned Systems Forces.

Introduced 70% prepayment for purchases through the eBaly system on the Brave1 Market. Ran the first tenders for long-range artillery and hundreds of thousands of drones, which he says saves the state budget billions of dollars. Bought thousands of pickups, buggies, and ATVs for the army through a tender for the first time.

Integrated Pavlo Lazar into the Air Force and introduced an after-action review of every massed attack. Over that period, Fedorov says, drone interception rose from 83% to 91% and cruise-missile interception from 47% to 87%. Contracted PAC-2 GEM-T missiles for Patriot for the first time and applied for PAC-3 European loan.

Started a baseline drone-supply system so that, from July, every combat brigade and corps receives predictable drone deliveries without manual intervention, and launched grant programs for explosives and missile producers.

Began an unpopular transformation of military service: fixed-term contracts for all with defined service periods and deferrals, one of the world's highest infantry pay scales, an open foreign-recruitment market, and new tools to bring back soldiers who went AWOL.

Exit without stated reason

Fedorov did not say why he is leaving, and Zelenskyy had not announced a replacement or a new post for him at the time of publication. His confirmation followed reports that a wider Cabinet reshuffle is underway, with Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal's government facing replacement.

His tenure had results independent of his own account. Ukraine's Defense Ministry codified 1,000 weapons samples in the first half of 2026, with the domestically made share rising to nearly 90% from 69.6% a year earlier. Ground robots ran 16,676 logistics and evacuation missions in June, up 122% since January. The counter-logistics campaign against Crimea that he funded is still running nightly.

Meanwhile, Ukraine's defense-industrial machine is scaling faster than at any point in the war. It is doing so while losing, in two days, both the head of its state arms conglomerate and the minister who ran its procurement.

Ukraine's Special Forces said they hit the turbine equipment that keeps the lights on in occupied Crimea for the Russian armed forces. Also, resistance took part in the mission which struck the Balaklava thermal power plant in Sevastopol overnight on 14 July.

Balaklava is one of two plants that together supply about 90% of Crimea's electricity, and the damage sticks because of the turbines' origin.

Balaklava and the Tavrida plant in Simferopol were opened by Putin in 2019 to end Crimea's dependence on mainland power, and both were built around Siemens turbines transferred to Crimea and installed in breach of EU sanctions.

Illegal Siemens turbines 

Those Siemens units remain under sanctions and out of proper service, so Russia cannot simply replace a damaged turbine — each hit compounds the last.

The turbines reached Crimea in 2017 through the Russian firm Technopromexport, and German prosecutors charged five Siemens staff over the deal in 2024.

Crimea's grid is occupation's weak point

Occupied Crimea is a military-logistical hub for the Russian army, and stable electricity is what keeps it running. Communications nodes, command centers, radar stations, electronic warfare, air defense, repair plants, the Black Sea Fleet, and military airfields all depend on the grid.

Hitting the generation on the peninsula degrades both the offensive and defensive capacity of Russian forces there and slows the tempo of their rear supply.

Ukraine has spent the past three weeks proving the point.

This was not Balaklava's first hit. A Ukrainian drone strike on 24 June blacked out all of occupied Sevastopol, with the plant as its primary target. The 14 July operation names a more specific wound: the cooling system of a single turbine, the component Russia can least afford to lose.

A sustained campaign has hit Balaklava and Tavrida repeatedly, blacked out Sevastopol and Yalta, and pushed the occupation to declare a peninsula-wide state of emergency on 26 June.

Russia is already cannibalizing itself to keep power on

The strikes are landing on a grid that cannot be quickly rebuilt, and Russia's workarounds show it. The partisan movement ATESH reported that occupation authorities have begun stripping transformers from idle Northern Crimean Canal pumping stations to patch substations destroyed by Ukrainian strikes.

Before Russia's 2014 annexation, Crimea drew more than 80% of its electricity from mainland Ukraine. The grid Moscow built to replace that link is the one Ukraine is now taking apart, one turbine at a time.

Two men from Cameroon signed Russian army contracts and died within about a month. Ukraine's Defense Intelligence (HUR) published the identities of both, saying their bodies were found on the Lyman and Zaporizhzhia sectors of the front.

The two are recent entries in a recruitment pipeline that has pulled at least 27,000 foreign nationals from more than 130 countries into Russia's army, a pipeline the European Parliament voted 479 to 17 in March 2026 to classify as human trafficking.

By the count of HUR's "I Want to Live" project, Russia has cost the lives of at least 106 Cameroonian citizens since the full-scale war began.

One was student. One had been in Russia two months

Both men were from Douala, Cameroon's largest city. Both signed as infantry soldiers. Both were sent to a training center briefly and then to the front. Both were killed in what HUR calls "meat assaults", the frontal infantry attacks Russia uses to find Ukrainian firing positions with human bodies.

Ngouloure Ibrahim Nkite, born 10 March 2003, arrived in Russia on 9 February 2026. He signed a one-year rifleman's contract in the city of Oryol on 4 April. After a few weeks at a training center, he was sent to occupied Luhansk Oblast. He was killed around 12 May near Lyman in Donetsk Oblast. He was 23, and he had been in Russia for three months.

Tapindjeu Namekong Loique, born 15 April 2001, was a student at Michurinsk State Agrarian University in Tambov Oblast when he was recruited. He signed his rifleman's contract in Vologda on 25 March 2026. Like Nkite, he spent little time in training. He was killed around 23 April near Huliaipole in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. He was 25.

From contract to death, each man lived roughly a month.

Pattern HUR is documenting

Meanwhile, Ukraine says Russia plans to open eight new cultural centers in Africa to funnel young people toward the war, part of what it calls "a war for the minds of Africans." Ukraine counts more than 1,780 Africans from 36 countries fighting for Moscow.

HUR published the two men's names alongside its standard message: that the only way for a foreign national in the Russian army to survive is voluntary surrender, through the "I Want to Live" project.

Belarus has spent 2026 repairing and upgrading its civil-defense shelters nationwide, the Belarusian opposition project Belpol reported. The investigators frame the drive as another stage of the regime's militarization, tied to its alignment with Russia. They caution, though, that shelter work alone is no proof of preparing for war.

Inspections, fines, and a jump in "unfit" shelters

Belpol shared scans of the underlying documents. For example, Mahilyow Oblast had 276 civil-defense structures as of 2 June. Officials deemed 204 ready, 72 unsatisfactory, and earmarked 38 for restoration and 34 for write-off.

February–April checks produced 66 orders to fix violations and held 11 officials liable. Belpol says the rise in shelters marked unfit most likely reflects a more thorough audit, not shelters decaying in a few months.

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The work spans the whole country

The regional report is only part of the picture. Belpol points to state procurement orders for the same work across Belarus. The state telecom Beltelecom ordered design work to modernize a civil-defense space in Minsk. The National Bank of Belarus is reconstructing protective rooms in its headquarters on Independence Avenue. Brest is upgrading a bomb shelter inside a wastewater treatment complex, while Mahilyow repairs a shelter at the Strommashina plant and inspects others, including the Stroygaz enterprise. The tenders reach government offices, telecoms, industry, utilities, and banks — a centralized program, Belpol says, not scattered repairs.

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Why this fits a pattern

Belpol is careful: modernizing shelters is not by itself evidence of war planning, and many states do it for resilience. Yet since 2022, Minsk has deepened military ties with Russia, hosted joint exercises, militarized its economy, expanded territorial-defense units, and tightened its mobilization system.

Previously, France's Emmanuel Macron warned Alyaksandr Lukashenka against being dragged into the war in a May call, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy has demanded that Minsk dismantle the Russian relay stations on its soil used to guide attack drones.

Russian soldiers for many years have carried a device Ukrainian soldiers have not. Ukraine has lacked a portable, mass-produced, relatively cheap device capable of recognizing drone signatures, Ukrainian Defense Ministry adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov said.

"I haven't tested the range yet, but it recognizes signatures well. Even MESH," he wrote.

It can also control electronic warfare and see analog video. The one thing that disappointed him was the upper frequency band, because the front is already saturated with video transmitters up to 8 GHz.

"I'll say right away: this solution is intended for mobile equipment or stationary points," Beskrestnov said.

You cannot jam what you cannot identify. A detector that reads a drone's signature is the first step in the chain that ends in bringing it down.

Detection is now harder half of drone war

Knowing a drone is there has become the difficult part. Russia has pushed toward drones that are hard to detect and impossible to jam, such as low-flying Molniyas with small radar signatures, fiber-optic drones that emit no radio signal at all, and now AI-guided variants with no operator link.

Ukraine shot down an AI-equipped Molniya over Zaporizhzhia for the first time on 9 July with no antenna, no operator, and no emissions for a detector to catch. Against that class of threat, the answer has shifted from electronic warfare to kinetic interception: a bullet or an interceptor drone rather than a jamming signal.

But most Russian drones still emit something. A soldier who can read a signature knows what is overhead, which frequency it uses, and whether the jammer in his kit can touch it. That is what the Bulat gave Russian troops, and what Ukrainian troops have been improvising without.

Detector is one piece of wider Ukrainian catch-up

Ukraine has been building the detection layer quickly, mostly through private firms. Ukrainian company Kara Dag pioneered acoustic and infrared systems to spot fiber-optic drones that jamming cannot stop. Another Ukrainian detector-maker's technology is now drawing interest abroad as drone warfare spreads beyond Ukraine.

The European Union has given Ukraine permission to spend part of its defense loan on Chinese-made drone components, the Financial Times reported. The waiver covers the first money released under the loan, and it lays bare how far the EU still depends on Beijing for parts it cannot supply itself.

The carve-out

Kyiv requested and secured an exemption for the first defense tranche, worth €5.9 billion and set aside entirely for drones. It lets Ukraine buy certain Chinese components that the bloc does not make in sufficient quantity, two people familiar with the decision told the FT. That tranche is the opening slice of a wider support loan that reserves €60 billion for weapons purchases.

Rules built to keep the money inside the bloc

Under the loan's terms, weapons bought with EU funds must come mainly from the single market, Ukraine, or approved partners such as Canada. Other countries can qualify by signing a security partnership with the union, contributing to the scheme, and backing Ukraine substantially. The UK joined on 13 July.

For suppliers outside those groups, foreign components may not exceed 35% of a contract, and purchases must not undercut the EU's own security and defense interests. But the rules leave a door open. When eligible countries cannot deliver comparable goods fast enough, or in the volumes Ukraine needs, Kyiv can ask Brussels to let it buy elsewhere. That is the door Ukraine walked through for its drone money.

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China supplies both sides

The waiver throws light on Beijing's role at both ends of the war. Brussels has branded China "the key enabler of Russia's war" as a major supplier to Moscow's military-industrial complex, even as it concedes that Ukraine's own arms makers lean on Chinese parts too.

Ukraine has built one of the continent's most inventive defense sectors under bombardment, outrunning the continent's established arms makers in several fields. Even so, its appetite for drones outpaces what Kyiv and its allies can produce of certain components. Ukrainian officials put drones at roughly 80% of Russian battlefield casualties.

As the fuel crisis deepens, Russia’s regional governors are improvising.

Ukrainian drones have driven the country’s oil refining to its lowest level in more than two decades. Rationing has spread to more than 55 of Russia’s regions—forcing one southern region to order its officials onto bicycles, pushing farmers onto engine-wrecking fuel, and, with harvest season open, threatening Russia’s ability to bring in its own crops.

This is the domestic price of what Kyiv calls its “long-range sanctions”: a campaign that struck Russian refineries at least 194 times in the first half of 2026, 11 times the pace of a year earlier. For the first time, the crisis is no longer only queues at the pump—it is reshaping how Russia governs and feeds itself.

Officials on bikes, Cossacks at the pumps

In Stavropol Krai, Governor Vladimir Vladimirov has told his own administration to leave the cars in the garage. From 14 July, ministers and department heads may drive only within the regional capital, and any trip beyond it requires his personal sign-off; in town, Vladimirov told them to walk or cycle. The limit should free up about 3,000 tons of fuel a month for other users, he said.

Stavropol is not improvising alone. In the Leningrad region, Governor Alexander Drozdenko placed his officials under the same fuel limits as ordinary residents, arguing they should share the burden being asked of the public.

In Rostov, Governor Yuri Slyusar, who said drivers were growing aggressive in the queues, ordered Cossacks to keep watch at filling stations. A Sverdlovsk station raffled off a Lada; a Krasnodar pump charged 159 rubles ($2.03) a liter for AI-92 and 269 rubles ($3.44) for AI-100; in occupied Yevpatoria, grocery stores closed because owners could not fuel their generators; and in Kursk Oblast’s Kurchatov, filling stations began shutting for hours at a stretch, Echo FM reported.

Local outlets now print survival guidance. Auto instructor Viktoria Zameshaeva coached drivers to coast toward red lights and strip the roof rack, in a fuel-saving column carried across the Stavropol regional press.

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The crunch reaches the farms

The squeeze is now reaching the fields, in the middle of harvest season. To keep tractors running, on 2 July Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed a decree allowing dirtier Euro-3 fuel back onto the domestic market—and Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service says it is already damaging newer engines.

Aleksei Zhdanov, a farmer in Rostov Oblast, is pouring that low-grade Euro-3 diesel into his imported tractors and wrecking them, at 130 rubles ($1.66) a liter—double last year’s price, Zhdanov told 26.ru. “No prospects in sight,” he said. “We’re eating through old reserves, and no one knows what comes next.”

Smaller farms were cut off first, when refineries stopped releasing diesel to the traders they buy through. Drivers, meanwhile, are converting cars to run on gas: kits have jumped 30% in price and gone scarce, auto-center chief Ilya Nikolin told 26.ru.

Further east, the shortage becomes a food-security problem. In Novosibirsk Oblast, one of Siberia’s main livestock regions, farmers say the autumn feed harvest is at risk; if the feed cannot be cut in time, they will have nothing to carry dairy herds through winter and will send the animals to slaughter in the fall.

“Rapeseed can wait until spring, sunflower until winter. But if we don’t lay in feed now, it’s a catastrophe. We won’t buy it anywhere. This is our food security,” said Grigory Vlasov, a dairy farmer and deputy head of Soyuzmoloko’s Siberian branch, quoted by 26.ru.

How the refining ran short

Behind the queues is a refining system Ukraine has been dismantling plant by plant. Three facilities alone—the Omsk, Moscow, and Kirishi refineries—account for a quarter of Russia’s refining, and drones have hit all three, as 26.ru reported.

The deepest blow came on 6 July, when long-range drones struck Russia’s largest oil refinery at Omsk, roughly 2,500 km from Ukraine—the last of Russia’s 11 biggest gasoline producers to be hit, and its only maker of the catalysts other refineries depend on.

By early July, only one major Russian refinery, Angarsk in Irkutsk Oblast, remained undamaged, the Kyiv Independent reported.

The shortages have reached the front line, too: even before the summer, Ukrainian “middle-strikes” had forced some Russian units to cut diesel use by up to 20%, former drone operator Dmytro Putiata told the same outlet.

The ceiling

Moscow has now banned gasoline and jet fuel exports, is weighing a diesel export ban, and—at a government meeting on 8 July—floated the idea of building small refineries. Energy analyst Igor Yushkov told 26.ru the mini-refinery idea was sound but slow, and that Russia’s deeper problem is a rigid system in which the oil majors pump, refine, and sell with no room for competition.

This summer’s crunch is still milder than the shortage of late 2025, and supply now turns on a race between Ukrainian drones and Russian repair crews. If the strikes hold their pace and each bites harder, the advantage swings to Kyiv, Carnegie analyst Sergey Vakulenko wrote in a commentary.

Zhdanov, the Rostov farmer, was blunter about what comes next: whether he plows his land this year or abandons it, he said, only God knows.

Ukraine's strikes on Russian refineries are pushing Moscow to export crude it can no longer process at home, Bloomberg reported. Buyers are not taking it fast enough, so Russian oil is piling up on tankers at sea. The value of those exports keeps sliding, and tanker loadings dipped in the week to 12 July.

Ukraine's refinery strikes are forcing crude onto the water

Ukraine has stepped up its strikes on Russia's refineries. Yesterday, it hit the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat plant far inside Russia, and the Afipsky facility near the Black Sea. The wave of attacks has driven Russian refining runs to their lowest in more than 21 years this month. That deepens a domestic fuel crunch and squeezes the global market. With less crude to process at home, Moscow is likely diverting more into exports as its own production falls. Russia pumped 8.93 million barrels a day in June — about 830,000 below the level it promised the OPEC+ producer group.

The Azov Sea wasn’t enough—Ukraine’s drones followed Russia’s oil fleet into the Black Sea

The oil is piling up faster than buyers take it

Soaring exports are not being matched by deliveries. So Russian crude is stacking up on tankers, loaded but not yet discharged, Bloomberg wrote. The total has climbed back near its start-of-2026 highs — about 135 million barrels by Sunday.

Cargoes are building up near Egypt in the Mediterranean and east of Singapore. Five Urals tankers are anchored off Egypt, and another five have halted near Singapore, a gathering point for shadow-fleet ships hauling sanctioned oil. A growing share of the oil at sea is on vessels that seem to be sitting idle rather than sailing.

Fewer tankers, and less money for the same oil

Russia shipped 3.98 million barrels of crude a day in the week to 12 July, down from 4.08 million. Year-to-date volumes remain above every annual average since 2022, yet the four-week export value fell $200 million to $1.68 billion a week. Urals prices have nearly halved since mid-April.

Russia sent 4 million barrels of oil a day toward Asia. Only about half was openly bound for India and China, while 1.9 million barrels a day remained undeclared, likely until tankers crossed the Arabian Sea. Türkiye took 160,000 barrels a day, and Syria 40,000.

Drones made by Ukrainian company General Cherry recorded more than 20,000 confirmed target hits in June, topping Ukraine's effectiveness ranking for FPV strike systems, the company told Militarnyi. It was the company's third consecutive month at the top, with confirmed hits across the spring exceeding 40,000. General Cherry led in two categories: total "e-points" earned across all strike systems and FPV drone effectiveness.

The ranking matters because of what it feeds. Ukraine runs a combat-into-currency procurement system: frontline units earn "e-points" for verified battlefield results, then spend those points on the Brave1 Market, choosing hardware directly from manufacturers. More than 400 units have ordered over 500,000 systems this way.

The scoring is based on confirmed combat results uploaded and verified through Ukraine's battlefield systems, which means a manufacturer's ranking is not a marketing claim but a running tally of which drones actually convert to kills. A company at the top of that ranking is one whose drone units will keep choosing. 

The company behind the number

General Cherry said its June result rose more than 5,000 confirmed hits over May—the largest month-on-month gain of any manufacturer in the ranking—and attributed the improvement to iteration based on operator feedback from combat units.

The same company builds the General Cherry AIR and Bullet interceptor drones that Ukrainian forces used to shoot down Russia's AI-modified Molniya strike drone on the Zaporizhzhia front—meaning the manufacturer topping the strike-effectiveness ranking is also producing the interceptors defeating Russia's autonomous drones. General Cherry recently developed a reconnaissance drone, Sweetheart, with a range of up to 150 km.

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Why is the manufacturer ranking different?

Ukraine's points system has two visible faces. On the demand side, units compete on a public leaderboard—"Birds of Madyar" topped the unit rankings for 2025, the year Ukrainian drones hit some 820,000 Russian targets in total—and the best-performing units get access to the best hardware first. On the supply side, which the General Cherry result illustrates, manufacturers are ranked by how effectively their systems perform in combat.

The two are linked: units buy what works, verified performance determines what's available, and the manufacturers whose drones score highest get ordered most. It is a feedback loop in which battlefield data, not procurement lobbying, determines market allocation.

That loop is why the West is studying it. The US launched a near-identical marketplace in March 2026, copying Brave1 Market and DOT-Chain Defense. Ukraine produced roughly 4 million drones in 2025, more than all NATO members combined, and aims to reach 7 million in 2026—an output distributed across competing manufacturers whose survival depends on frontline performance.

Ukraine's aerial attack drones opened a new front against Russia's sanctions-dodging shadow fleet, striking 20 vessels in the Black Sea in a single night, the Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) reported. The raid launched the Black Sea phase of a campaign that had until now played out in the Sea of Azov, and it pushed the 10-day tally well past a hundred ships.

The Black Sea cluster opens

Overnight on 15 July, SBS operators struck 17 oil tankers, two gas carriers, and one tug in Black Sea waters. Six drone units ran the raid together: the 9th "Kairos" Battalion of the 414th "Magyar's Birds" Brigade, the 1st Separate Center, the 20th "K-2" Brigade, the 412th "Nemesis" Brigade, the 427th "Rarog" Brigade, and the 413th "Raid" Regiment.

The two gas carriers fell to Nemesis and Raid operators. The 1st Separate Center took the tug.

The timing was deliberate. SBS commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi wrote that the Black Sea cluster of operation MoLoChKa ("Dairy") opened on 15 July, the Day of Ukrainian Statehood. He framed the night as a scoreline: 20 to nil.

136 ships in 10 days

The Black Sea haul adds to a running total that has climbed fast. From 6 to 15 July, Ukraine's drones struck 136 vessels of Russia's shadow fleet across both seas.

Of those, 116 went down in the Sea of Azov between 6 and 14 July, as an earlier daily count tracked. The 20 Black Sea kills on 15 July carried the campaign west into deeper, wider water.

Bigger tankers, a different aim point

The Black Sea vessels seen in the SBS video are ocean-going ships, far larger than the flat-bottomed river couriers Ukraine has been burning along the Azov feeder route. The footage from the FP-1 or FP-2 attack drones shows the operators aiming mostly for the deck structures rather than the bridges, with follow-up drones filming the fires that spread after the first strikes.

The operation's stated goal is steady disruption of Russian logistics and the money behind them. Disabling tankers, cargo ships, and support vessels complicates oil exports and limits Russia's ability to fuel its troops and the occupation force in Crimea.

Ukraine's Navy released footage on 14 July showing three types of unmanned systems working through a single strike sequence. A Barracuda kamikaze sea drone opened by striking an abandoned vessel that Russian forces were using as an observation post. An uncrewed boat armed with an unguided rocket module then hit the shoreline where Ukrainian forces said Russian shelters were located. Finally, a naval drone acting as a UAV carrier launched reconnaissance and FPV drones that located and struck camouflaged Russian positions.

"Look how the Barracuda's multi-tier strike system works," the Navy said.

The pattern this fits

The demonstration lands inside a year of rapid Ukrainian naval-drone evolution that has moved well beyond the kamikaze-boat attacks that first drove Russia's Black Sea Fleet out of Sevastopol. In April 2026, an uncrewed Ukrainian boat shot down a Russian Shahed drone with an interceptor launched from its deck—what Ukraine called a world first.

In May, Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) showed the Katran sea drone carrying 27 AI-guided interceptors built to kill Shaheds that follow rivers toward Kyiv. On 14 July—the same day as the Barracuda footage—a Ukrainian unit used a naval drone as a landing craft to put an armed ground robot onto the Russian-held Kinburn Spit.

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The common thread is the removal of the human from the point of contact. Ukraine is assembling naval operations in which surface drones strike, carry, launch, and defend—and the sailor stays ashore.

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What comes next

Ukraine's Defense Intelligence has said it is developing a new system for naval drones that would go beyond destroying targets to intercepting sanctioned vessels in the Black Sea and escorting them to port for confiscation. According to HUR unit commander with the callsign "Ninth," the concept centers on the upgraded multipurpose Katran drone.

That doctrine would sit alongside a campaign already underway: Ukraine's drone operators had struck 116 Russian vessels supplying occupied Crimea in nine days by 14 July—the destructive arm of the same push to seal off the peninsula by sea.

This week, Herman Smetanin stepped down as head of Ukroboronprom—the state group of roughly 100 enterprises making missiles, drones, armored vehicles, and ammunition—days after a Russian strike detonated one of its ammunition depots, sited next to homes in breach of the law.

At least nine people were killed in Vyshneve, in what Ukraine’s prime minister at the time called the war’s worst destruction of a residential area.

Production has multiplied 35 times

Ukraine’s defense production capacity has grown from about $1 billion at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion to $35 billion a year, and the National Security and Defense Council projects $55 billion in 2026.

Yet domestic contracts covered only a third of that last year, leaving factories idling below capacity. Even after a €90 billion ($106 billion) EU loan, Kyiv still faces a funding gap of roughly $23 billion for its 2026 defense needs.

Two moves aim to close it. Kyiv will allow controlled exports of surplus weapons—Zelenskyy says some categories already run up to 50 percent beyond what Ukraine can use or finance—and plow the revenue back into production.

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And under the “Danish model” and its German and Baltic cousins, allies now pay to build Ukrainian-designed systems in their own factories, moving output beyond the reach of Russian missiles and into NATO supply chains.

Ukraine has now gone further, signing agreements that open the EU’s defense-research and production funding to its firms—including a €300 million ($350 million) instrument for its defense industry—though the deals still need parliament’s ratification.

The drones come from startups, not state plants

The real growth has moved off the state’s books. Private firms now turn out more than 4 million drones a year—the weapons the war runs on—while Ukroboronprom’s supervisory board has named an acting chief, Deputy Defense Minister Serhii Boiev, and opened a competition for Smetanin’s job.

That private surge carries its own risk: Fire Point, the munitions maker racing to build a homemade replacement for scarce Patriot interceptors, is under anti-corruption investigation over inflated prices and reported ties to a major graft case.

Which returns to Vyshneve. A depot beside homes is what happens when a defense base grows faster than the state can keep track of. Smetanin’s departure answers for that at the top—but it does nothing about the money, and the gap between what Ukraine can build and what it can fund only widens from here.

Russia wants to build four Banderol, a hybrid of a kamikaze drone and a cruise missile, a day. The production plan for this year is 120 Banderol a month, Ukrainian Defense Ministry adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov said on social media. By his estimate, the factory has not yet reached that rate.

The Banderol is generating an alarm disproportionate to its nature, according to the assessment of the man who flagged it in 2025.

"Lately a lot has been written about the Banderol missile, though I talked about it more than a year ago," Beskrestnov wrote.

His verdict is that the missile is "nothing outstanding." A budget cruise missile with a small warhead."

It is made by the sanctioned Russian firm Kronshtadt, which was reported to be facing imminent bankruptcy in August 2025, with 40 lawsuits totaling $7.76 million filed against it in three months.

Banderol flies off drone that Ukraine keeps shooting down

The Banderol launches from air platforms. Right now, it is launched from the Orion drone, and launches from an Mi-8 helicopter have also been worked out, Beskrestnov said.

That launch method is a vulnerability. Big drones are too easy a target over the front, and in the enemy rear, whether it is an Orion or a Bayraktar, Beskrestnov said.

What missile actually does

The Banderol carries an OFBCh-150 warhead with 50 kg of explosive. Beskrestnov loosely compared its destructive capability to a Shahed.

It can fly up to 500 km, though Ukraine's Defense Forces have recorded strikes at a maximum of 300 km. It usually cruises at 400 to 2,000 meters and drops to 200 meters before impact. It maneuvers actively and needs just 2.5 km of space to turn around. It is guided by satellite navigation and is vulnerable to electronic warfare, but has a backup autonomous navigation system.

Russia's strike arsenal has been expanding as the Kremlin finds ways around sanctions, with the Banderol joining Kh-101, Kh-555, KAB glide bombs, and Shaheds in its combined attacks on Ukrainian cities.

Russia has stripped much of the air defense from its far-north bases, satellite imagery sourced by RFE/RL shows. Some units appear to have shifted toward areas Ukraine's drones can now reach. One analyst ties the shift to a war that forces Moscow to guard more ground with fewer launchers and crews.

Russia's Arctic missile sites emptied out

Around the Rogachevo air base on Russia's Novaya Zemlya islands, most air-defense equipment has disappeared from a missile site operating there since at least August 2015. A 6 July image records the change. Launchers and radars stood there in September 2019. By this July, the site read close to bare.

The submarine city lost much of its shield

In Severodvinsk, on the White Sea, Russia builds and repairs its nuclear submarines. Several decades-old air-defense positions around the city now appear vacant. Satellite images show roughly 24 S-300 and S-400 launchers gone from specialized positions around the city.

At least some of the missing launchers appear to have been redeployed. New batteries have appeared beside likelier targets. 

By the Saratov refinery in Russia's southwest, an empty field filled with launch vehicles, their tubes raised. Drones have struck that refinery repeatedly since early 2025. In Moscow, crews have seized park land in the capital to host S-400 batteries these past weeks.

Open-source investigations estimate that about 60% of Russia's S-300 and S-400 systems have left their pre-2022 positions. Air defense has mostly stayed around the country's nuclear silos and its long-range bomber bases.

A professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, Katarzyna Zysk, reads the far-north drawdown as "a growing mismatch between the targets Russia must protect and its available launchers, interceptors, and trained personnel." The pullback suggests Moscow sees no big strike coming against the far north, and judges it can cut protection there without unacceptable risk.

Latvia's frontier with Belarus has not gone a single day without an attempted illegal crossing since late March, according to Radio Svaboda, RFE/RL's Belarusian service. The country's border service ties the sustained pressure to a state-run hybrid campaign, and its chief has named Latvia's support for Ukraine among the reasons the country has become the primary target.

An unbroken run since March

Latvia's State Border Guard has logged migrant crossing attempts from Belarus for 111 consecutive days, a Pozirk analysis of the agency's operational data found. Radio Svaboda reported the tally on 15 July.

Between 25 March and 13 July, officers recorded 7,791 attempts — an average of 70 a day. In winter the traffic was a fraction of that. From 1 January to 24 March, a span of 83 days, the agency counted just 141 attempts, or 1.7 a day. Pozirk calculated a year-to-date total of 7,932, or about 41 daily, while Latvia's State Border Guard listed 7,933.

On 13 July, the entire EU-Belarus frontier saw 42 attempts, 41 of them on the Latvian line and one on the Polish. The day before brought 41, then 87 on 11 July and 103 on 10 July, with Latvia taking the bulk each time. Lithuania has seen no crossing activity for five days.

Across the bloc's Belarus border, neighboring states logged 9,116 attempts since January. Latvia absorbed 87% of them. Lithuania took 9.9%, or 904, and Poland 3.1%, or 280.

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Riga's border chief points to its stance on Ukraine

Latvia is the number-one target in a hybrid war unleashed by the Belarusian authorities, State Border Guard head Guntis Pujāts told Delfi. The situation at the border, he said, presents serious challenges.

Pujāts said the migrant smugglers have grown more aggressive, pushing officers toward harsher detention methods and a need for wider support from the National Armed Forces. Border guards stopped roughly 7,600 people from crossing illegally this year, far more than in the same period of 2025.He said one of the causes of such pressure is Latvia's consistent support for Ukraine and its condemnation of Russian aggression. 

A campaign running since 2021

Neighboring EU states treat the flow as a hybrid attack organized by the regimes in Minsk and Moscow. Lukashenka has repeatedly said Belarusian guards will not stop migrants heading for the bloc through his country.

The crisis began in 2021, when thousands of people from Asian and African countries started crossing from Belarus into Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland in an organized way. It has continued at varying intensity since, and dozens of migrants have died along these borders.

Russia wants to build four Banderol, a hybrid of a kamikaze drone and a cruise missile, a day. The production plan for this year is 120 Banderol a month, Ukrainian Defense Ministry adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov said on social media. By his estimate, the factory has not yet reached that rate.

The Banderol is generating an alarm disproportionate to its nature, according to the assessment of the man who flagged it in 2025. 

"Lately a lot has been written about the Banderol missile, though I talked about it more than a year ago," Beskrestnov wrote.

His verdict is that the missile is "nothing outstanding." A budget cruise missile with a small warhead."

It is made by the sanctioned Russian firm Kronshtadt, which was reported to be facing imminent bankruptcy in August 2025, with 40 lawsuits totaling $7.76 million filed against it in three months.

Banderol flies off drone that Ukraine keeps shooting down

The Banderol launches from air platforms. Right now, it is launched from the Orion drone, and launches from an Mi-8 helicopter have also been worked out, Beskrestnov said.

That launch method is a vulnerability. Big drones are too easy a target over the front, and in the enemy rear, whether it is an Orion or a Bayraktar, Beskrestnov said.

What missile actually does

The Banderol carries an OFBCh-150 warhead with 50 kg of explosive. Beskrestnov loosely compared its destructive capability to a Shahed.

It can fly up to 500 km, though Ukraine's Defense Forces have recorded strikes at a maximum of 300 km. It usually cruises at 400 to 2,000 meters and drops to 200 meters before impact. It maneuvers actively and needs just 2.5 km of space to turn around. It is guided by satellite navigation and is vulnerable to electronic warfare, but has a backup autonomous navigation system.

Russia's strike arsenal has been expanding as the Kremlin finds ways around sanctions, with the Banderol joining Kh-101, Kh-555, KAB glide bombs, and Shaheds in its combined attacks on Ukrainian cities.

A Ukrainian female soldier flies one of the war's heaviest drones and has twice turned down a promotion to keep doing it. "Tsyhancha" went from FPV operator to piloting the Heavy Shot bomber in the 125th Separate Heavy Mechanized Brigade, which told her story on social media.

She decided to enlist, watching friends and acquaintances who were already defending Ukraine. At the recruitment center, they offered her drones, and that is where the path began. She flew FPVs first, then moved to strike wings, but she always wanted the heavy bomber.

"First I learned to fly FPV. Then we got onto strike wings. But I always wanted to be a 'bomber.' Now I work on Heavy Shot," she says.

Heavy bombers are the reusable half of Ukraine's drone war. Where an FPV explodes once, a heavy bomber drops its payload and flies back for more, and the crews use them to hit Russian positions at night and to run supplies into the front. Ukraine's most famous heavy bomber, the Vampire, topped the battlefield kill rankings in 2025 with 2.5 million combat missions.

Intuition matters more than theory

Technical skill can be learned, she says. What carries a mission is the ability to decide fast.

"You can learn all the theory, but if you can't instantly find a way out of a non-standard situation, it will be very hard. Intuition plays the biggest role," she says. 

She has not chased rank. She reveals she has repeatedly refused a sergeant's post, even when it came bundled with training in Britain.

"I didn't come here to be a boss. I came here to do the job," she explains. 

Olivier that didn't make it

Heavy drone crews do more than strike. They regularly run water, ammunition, and other necessities to forward positions. One run is stuck in the whole unit's memory.

Before a holiday, the soldiers decided to deliver Olivier salad to the infantry. Mid-flight, they had to drop the cargo as an emergency measure. 

"We ran after the package, and it was already flattened on the road. We gathered it all up, laughing, and said: 'Now send us your Olivier too,'" she recalls.

On serving in a men's unit, she says she has never felt any discomfort over it.

"I like my unit and my colleagues. I'm always sure of my people," she says. 

She is one of a growing cohort

Tsyhancha is part of a shift that is tracked throughout the war. More than 70,000 women serve in Ukraine's military, roughly 5,500 in combat roles. 

Women now fly Ukraine's heaviest drones in units across the front. In March 2026, a pilot with the callsign "Harley Quinn" flew the Vampire into Russian lines at night for the 77th Airmobile Brigade. Ukraine's National Guard stood up its first all-female FPV strike crew in the Zaporizhzhia sector, building its own munitions and running its own attack missions.

Kateryna "Meow" Troian flew over a thousand combat missions for the 82nd Air Assault Brigade before Russian forces killed her near Pokrovsk in June 2025. 

The head of Ukraine's state defense conglomerate is out. Herman Smetanin announced on social media that he is leaving the post of director general of Ukroboronprom, the state joint-stock company that groups roughly 100 enterprises producing missiles, drones, armored vehicles, and ammunition. The resignation follows the Vyshneve tragedy.

The depot belonged to one of Ukroboronprom's enterprises. Russia fired the missile, but the depot should not have been where it was.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 11 July that the directors of two state enterprises had stored weapons and ammunition next to residential buildings in defiance of both the law and a decision of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief's Staff.

"There was a direct ban on this — both under the law and under the Staff's decision — and all of it was violated," Zelenskyy stressed.

Ukroboronprom fired two enterprise directors before its chief left

After the tragedy, Ukroboronprom dismissed the heads of two state enterprises, along with other officials whose action or inaction may have caused the grave consequences, according to UNIAN. The company said all those responsible would bear criminal liability under Ukrainian law. The SBU has identified the officials who allowed the storage to take place.

Zelenskyy signaled the accountability would not stop at the enterprise level.

"It is a large structure, it includes dozens of enterprises, one of which is situated at that depot in Vyshneve," he said.

Days later, the person at the top of that structure was gone.

Smetanin led Ukroboronprom twice

Smetanin had headed Ukroboronprom on two separate occasions. He was first appointed director general of the joint-stock company on 28 June 2023. From 5 September 2024 to 17 July 2025, he served as Ukraine's Minister for Strategic Industries. In July 2025, he returned to Ukroboronprom as acting head, and in August 2025, he took charge of the defense-industrial group for the second time.

His exit leaves Ukroboronprom without a director general at a moment when Ukraine's defense industry is scaling faster than at any point in the war.

Vyshneve strike was part of Russia's largest attack on Kyiv in months

The depot detonation did not happen in isolation. Russia struck Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast with a massive combined barrage overnight on 6 July, firing 68 missiles and 351 drones, including 23 Iskander-M and S-400 ballistic missiles and six Zircon or Oniks missiles. Air defenses downed 363 of 419 targets, but not one ballistic or Zircon missile was intercepted. The attack killed 11 people in Kyiv.

Foreign defense companies want to look inside Russia's weapons. More than 300 applications have been submitted to TrophyLab, Ukraine's portal for research on captured enemy equipment, Ukraine's Defense Ministry said. Ukrainian arms manufacturers and military units have also applied.

Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said every seized missile, drone, and vehicle is now known to the free world. Within a month, the applications are in the hundreds.

Registered researchers can request an actual sample or a fragment of captured equipment for their own analysis. Fedorov said that the step significantly shortens the development cycle for countermeasures.

Ukraine's intelligence services fill database

The database is populated by units of Ukraine's Defense Forces, the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and specialized scientific institutions.

The platform gives engineers, scientists, and defense technology manufacturers from Ukraine and partner countries access to drawings, technical documentation, and analytical materials on Russian weapons.

Every applicant is vetted before access.

They are screened for possible links to Russia, whether they fall under Ukrainian or international sanctions, and for compliance with other requirements. Registration runs through trophylab.mod.gov.ua.

West is buying what Ukraine learned hard way

TrophyLab is one instrument in a wider transfer of Ukrainian battlefield knowledge into the allied defense industry.

Earlier, the Pentagon started talks to purchase Ukrainian interceptor drones, having concluded that no American manufacturer can match their price, delivery timelines, and battlefield-proven reliability.

Ukraine's Cabinet set new rules in May 2026 for handling captured Russian equipment, allowing state customers to export trophy weapons under Ukraine's international treaties without additional authorization.

Russia's weapons are being taken apart in Ukraine, and the blueprints are being handed to the people building the systems that will have to stop them next.

A Russian drone killed a man driving his car in Kharkiv Oblast. The strike hit a Peugeot on the Zolochiv-Maksymivka road near the village of Berezivka in Bohodukhiv raion on the evening of 14 July, killing the 61-year-old driver, the Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor's Office said on Telegram. The drone was preliminarily identified as a Molniya.

The precise hit on the moving car suggests that the Molniya was piloted in real-time.

In October 2025, a Russian Molniya drone hit a car in the Kupiansk district, wounding a 37-year-old volunteer, and an FPV drone killed two men in another car in the same raion two hours later. Both were classified as war crimes.

Molniya is cheap, common, and now flies itself

The Molniya is among the cheapest weapons in Russia's arsenal. It is a low-cost kamikaze drone built close to the front, reliable and ubiquitous. Russia launches up to ten a day on the Zaporizhzhia axis alone.

Ukraine shot down an AI-equipped Molniya over Zaporizhzhia for the first time on 9 July. The AI variant has no antenna, no operator link, and no emissions for a detector to catch, making electronic warfare useless against it. Ukraine's answer is kinetic interception. Defense Ministry adviser Serhii Beskrestnov has warned that a fiber-optic Molniya is already in testing, which would emit no radio signal at all.

Russia's terror documented

Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office has documented over 11,000 Russian FPV attacks on civilians since 2024, with 2,010 recorded in the first four months of 2026 alone.

The road between Zolochiv and Maksymivka is a public road in a Ukrainian oblast. A man was driving home on it. 

Earlier, a Russian FPV drone killed a 57-year-old hospital worker walking along a road in the same oblast — the last resident of the border village of Tokarivka Druha.

Exclusives

Ukraine's premier listed a record year to the parliament that dismissed her. No one in Kyiv has said why. Her own farewell leaves out the name that would explain it.

Hungary swapped its pro-Russian prime minister. Yet it is still slowing Ukraine's path to the EU.. Hungary has allowed two stages of Ukraine's EU talks to open while holding up the other four. Péter Magyar is no Viktor Orbán, but years of anti-Ukraine politics might still make blocking Kyiv safer than helping it.

The US Army's former commander in Europe is "withholding applause" for Trump's Patriot pledge—and expects no interceptors before winter.. Ben Hodges is pretty certain Ukraine will build no Patriot interceptors for three to six months. Until then, Ukraine will remain dependent on allied supplies—amid a global interceptor shortage.

A $50 computer just flew Russia's newest jet drone into a Ukrainian grain ship—and jamming couldn't stop it. Russia's fast, highly autonomous Geran-4 one-way attack drone is the weapon of choice for strikes on Ukrainian grain ships.

Russia has the oil. It no longer has the gasoline—so Russians are learning to make their own. Ukraine's drone campaign has cut Russian refining to its lowest level since March 2005—and the diesel Russia can no longer sell is driving world fuel prices to multiyear highs.

Russia stalled bankruptcy reform for six years—then passed it in two days. Russian companies owe more than the country produces in a year, and a reform frozen since 2020 was cleared by parliament in two days.

Military

Ukraine sank Russian ship that shot at its sailors in 2018 with Sargan-3000 naval drone. The satellite image confirms the destruction of the Russian border patrol ship Izumrud at the mooring wall.

Consequences of own destruction: Russia is stripping canal it killed to fix Crimean substations Ukraine keeps hitting. ATESH says Russia has begun removing 10-40 MVA transformers from Northern Crimean Canal pumping stations, idle since Moscow destroyed the Kakhovka dam.

116 Russian ships in nine days: One big export tanker needs 12–15 small ones to fill it. Ukraine is burning the small ones. Three drone units carried out the latest overnight strikes under operation MoLoChKa, whose name reads like Ukrainian slang for dairy products.

A plant making 150 products from gasoline to polyethylene caught fire 1,300 km from the war zone—Ukraine hits two refineries overnight. Fires broke out at the Afipsky refinery's tank farm area, the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat complex, and, likely, the Rosneft-Opt depot next door, monitoring channels and Astra report.

Ukraine put armed robot on Russian-held ground. Naval drone was landing craft. Ukraine's 123rd Brigade delivered a ground robot to the Russian-held Kinburn Spit aboard an unmanned surface vessel and landed it to fight.

Intelligence and technology

Ukraine kills Russian radars with drones, then strikes through gap. France flew both in one package on jet Ukraine gets in 2028. Dassault and Harmattan AI say a Rafale F4 controlled a drone carrying the new NAMIB system, which found a simulated enemy radar dozens of kilometers away.

Denmark sent Ukraine something essential that keeps F-16 parts airworthy.

Ukraine is building a flight school under fire—and the simulator delivery shows how fast. Scarce jets, contested skies, no fixed base that can stay hidden. Ukraine's answer: train pilots on Ukrainian soil, in equipment that moves.

Europe's answer to the Patriot costs $700,000 a shot—and no foreign government can switch it off. Ten nations joined the coalition. Ukraine has the missile. Germany has the seeker Ukraine still needs to sign for. Nobody has an intercept yet — and the clock says 12 months

Russia's ex-space chief calls for "systematic zeroing out" of the Starlink satellite constellation. Senator Dmitry Rogozin claims cutting Ukraine off from SpaceX's network would end the war within two to three weeks — and that Russia knows several ways to do it.

International

Ukrainian pilots opened the Bastille Day flypast from French fighter jets. Macron's last parade as president had no American aircraft and one deliberate message. Ukraine flew it

Hungary votes to remove Orbán-loyal president as Magyar dismantles Fidesz system. The constitutional amendment targets Tamás Sulyok and caps lawmakers' tenure at 12 years. Magyar's break with Orbán remains sharper at home than on Ukraine.

Two months in office, three blows to Ukraine: Bulgaria's premier stacks Coalition of the Willing exit on aid freeze and sanctions blocks. Since May, Radev has stopped state military aid, defended two prominent Russians from EU blacklists, and now removed Bulgaria from the group backing Kyiv against Russian aggression.

Warsaw refuses to lift its embargo on Ukrainian agricultural products. The new EU-Ukraine trade agreement should erase all unilateral restrictions from November, yet Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary hold on to their own bans.

Humanitarian and social impact

Polish man approached passerby in Łódź and hit him twice in head. Police say he took him for Ukrainian. Police in Łódź are searching for a man who fractured a passerby's nose and jaw after mistaking him for a Ukrainian.

Political and legal developments

Ukrainian new state award's second criterion contributes to security of all Europe. 271 MPs backed a new state award for services to Ukraine's EU accession, a day before the EU is due to open Ukraine's sixth negotiating cluster.

Ukraine votes to dismiss its PM. She hasn't accepted the exit job offered. Three sources say the outgoing premier is not considering the Washington posting used to justify her removal.

Olenivka officials and Taganrog jail land on EU sanctions list for abuse of Ukrainian prisoners. Brussels adopted the listings under two human-rights regimes, targeting the command chains of detention facilities in occupied Ukraine and inside Russia.

"Incredible legacy for him": Days after Graham's death, Trump says he's ready to move on his Russia sanctions bill. Trump supports the sanctions package the late Senator Lindsey Graham spent two years trying to pass. The Senate needs a new lead sponsor.

Ukraine's Supreme Court refused to lift Zelenskyy's sanctions on opposition leader. The Supreme Court rejected Poroshenko's challenge to sanctions that freeze his assets and strip his state awards. He says the judges were pressured.

Read our earlier daily review here.

Ukraine sank a Russian ship that shot at its sailors. The Ukrainian Navy said it destroyed the Russian second-rank border patrol ship Izumrud or "Emerald" with a Sargan-3000 naval drone.

What did Izumrud do in 2018? 

On 25 November 2018, Izumrud opened fire on Ukrainian Navy vessels in the Kerch Strait, wounding Ukrainian sailors. Ukraine's General Staff published intercepted radio communications from the attack showing that Izumrud, hull number 354, was the ship that fired.

The Berdiansk's captain radioed that he was undertaking no illegal action and was leaving for open sea. The answer was a salvo from Izumrud's 30mm gun, followed by lethal fire.

The captain and two crew members were wounded by shrapnel. Russia seized the tugboat Yany Kapu and the armored boats Berdiansk and Nikopol and took 24 Ukrainian sailors prisoner.

"The satellite image confirms the destruction of the Russian border patrol ship Izumrud at the mooring wall. We continue to reduce the Russian aggressor's potential at sea," the Navy said.

What Izumrud did in 2018

In 2018, the Ukrainian ships were sailing from Odesa to Mariupol. Russia closed the Kerch Strait without lawful notice, blocked the passage under the bridge with a cargo vessel, and moved it aside to let its own ships through.

The FSB border guard ship Don rammed the tugboat, Yany Kapu.

Bellingcat later found the tug was intentionally rammed at least four times over the course of an hour. Russian intercepts captured the crews discussing how to do it. When the Ukrainian boats turned back and crossed into neutral waters, Izumrud opened fire.

Year after annexation 

Russian special forces boarded the vessels. The 24 captured sailors were paraded on Russian state television, making forced confessions.

They were held for nearly a year. Russia returned the ships in November 2019, with the ramming damage on Yany Kapu clearly visible and the bullet holes on Berdiansk painted over with black rectangles.

Izumrud was launched in 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea. Project 22460, 62.5 meters long, 630 to 750 tons, up to 27 knots, with a helicopter pad. It served in the FSB's coast guard.

Russia has started removing the transformers from the Northern Crimean Canal, which historically supplied up to 85% of the Crimean Peninsula's fresh water. ATESH partisans say occupation authorities have begun hauling them to electrical substations damaged by Ukrainian strikes. The claim has not been independently verified.

So the occupation is cannibalizing its own infrastructure — pulling equipment off one facility to plug the hole in another. The units being taken are not junk: 10- to 40-MVA transformers that once fed large pumping stations, including NS-355 on the Connecting Canal. That class of equipment fits almost any substation.

The pumping stations are available for stripping because the canal has not worked since June 2023. Russia blew up the Kakhovka dam, and the Dnipro level at the intake fell below critical levels, and the flow of Dnipro water into Crimea stopped. The pumps have sat idle ever since.

Russia is dismantling the consequences of its own destruction to repair the damage from Ukrainian strikes.

Transformers are going where war needs them

Russian command now prioritizes facilities that feed the defense industry, rail junctions, air defenses, radars, and command posts, per ATESH.

Moving transformers from dead pumping stations to those substations is an attempt to restore power fast, without waiting for foreign deliveries or long production runs.

ATESH calls it a dead end. The stock of equipment that can be pulled from other sites keeps shrinking, and every new Ukrainian strike opens a new hole with nothing left to fill it.

Ukraine has been burning Crimean substations for three weeks

The claim lands in the middle of a sustained campaign. Ukrainian drones have hit Crimean power infrastructure night after night since late June.

Ukraine struck 37 energy facilities across occupied southern Ukraine between 1 and 5 July, targeting electrical substations and transformers in Crimea and parts of Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, according to Unmanned Systems Forces Commander Robert Brovdi.

Occupation authorities declared a peninsula-wide state of emergency on 26 June. They have shut children's camps, halted civilian fuel sales, and imposed rolling blackouts.

A Polish man in Łódź beat a passerby he thought was Ukrainian. The victim was Polish. Police are now searching for the attacker, who approached a local resident talking on the phone near the city center on 11 July, struck him, and told him his place was not in Poland, Polish broadcaster RMF24 reports.

Polish support for taking in Ukrainian refugees has fallen from 94% in March 2022 to 48% by early 2026, with 46% opposed — the highest opposition since the invasion began, per Euromaidan Press reporting.

Victim was hospitalized

The victim's account indicates the attacker took him for a Ukrainian, Łódź police spokesperson Maksymilian Jasiak said.

The man was hit at least twice in the head and hospitalized with a broken nose and jaw injuries. He filed a police report the next day. Officers have seized CCTV footage. The legal classification of the crime and the attacker's motive will be determined after his arrest.

Beating happened on Volyn anniversary

The assault took place on 11 July, the anniversary of the 1943 Volhynia massacres, and the date Ukrainian intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov had named days earlier as the trigger for the hardest phase of the Poland-Ukraine rupture.

The rupture began on 26 May, when Zelenskyy signed a decree naming a special operations unit "Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army" (UPA)

UPA is a contested figure in Polish-Ukrainian historical memory. Ukrainian historiography presents UPA as anti-Soviet and anti-Nazi independence fighters. Polish historiography emphasizes UPA's association with the 1943-44 Volhynia massacres.

Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honor, amid the clash. Zelenskyy returned it by post, and former Ukrainian presidents renounced theirs. 

Poland and Ukraine’s memory war has spilled into the streets. Its consequences might be disastrous.

Polish sentiment has turned violent before

Earlier, on a Warsaw bridge in May 2026, a 16-year-old Ukrainian refugee, Artem, had his skull fractured. He had fled Russian missiles in Zaporizhzhia. Weeks later, Lublin's city hall took down the Ukrainian flag.

Poland's General Staff has reported large-scale Russian operations aimed at undermining Polish-Ukrainian ties, creating an atmosphere of fear and anxiety about Ukrainian claims in Poland. Anti-Ukrainian messaging in Poland's information space doubled between August and November 2025 compared with the same period a year earlier.

Poland is the main hub for weapons reaching Ukraine. Breaking the two countries apart has been a Russian objective since 2022.

Ukraine's Parliament has reported that it has established a new state award for European integration. 271 MPs voted for bill No. 15359 establishing the Order of Europe.

The order can go to Ukrainian citizens and foreigners for outstanding personal service in supporting Ukraine's strategic course toward full EU membership, for significant contributions to helping Ukraine strengthen its resilience in defending its independence and the security of all Europe, and for strengthening international cooperation in the interests of democracy, peace, good neighborliness, and friendly relations between peoples.

Ukraine scored 9 out of 100 on reform plan it signed with Brussels

Ukraine has completed 9 of 100 possible points in the first three months of the 10-priority reform plan it agreed with the European Commission in December 2025, according to an assessment by Transparency International Ukraine and the New Europe Center.

Monitors found zero progress on prosecutor reform.

In July 2025, Zelenskyy signed legislation subordinating Ukraine's main anti-corruption agencies to political control in the same week that Brussels had quietly scheduled the opening of Ukraine's first negotiating cluster. The law was reversed after mass protests.

Award's second criterion is one that Europe is actually watching

The order's three criteria include contributions to Ukraine's resilience in defending its independence and the security of all of Europe. That is the argument Ukraine now makes in Brussels and Paris: that its army, its drones, and its defense industry are a European asset, not a European charity.

Italy's defense minister called this week for a continental defense architecture including Ukraine. France agreed this week to license a continental defense architecture to help Ukraine build Aster missiles. Ten countries have also joined Ukraine's anti-ballistic coalition.

A French Rafale flew a drone that went hunting for an air-defense radar. Dassault Aviation and Harmattan AI said in a 13 July press release that a Rafale F4 conducted its first joint operation with a drone carrying NAMIB, a new electronic reconnaissance system built to find enemy air defenses, according to Defense Express.

There is an unresolved question underneath. Which Rafale variant Ukraine gets is not settled, and the aircraft may be secondhand F3Rs that would need upgrading to the F4 standard. NAMIB was demonstrated on an F4.

During the trials, the drone located a simulated hostile radar station several dozen kilometers away, passed the coordinates to the Rafale pilot, and the pilot ran a simulated strike.

Six and half months from start to first flight

NAMIB is a joint development by Dassault and Harmattan AI. Its specifications have not been disclosed. It can be integrated on different types of drones, such as quadcopters, long-range fixed-wing platforms, and others.

Development started in January 2026. The first joint operation flew on 13 July. That is roughly six and a half months.

The project sits inside a strategic partnership the two companies announced in the same month, under which Dassault integrates Harmattan AI's combat artificial intelligence into the Rafale with an eye toward the F5 standard.

The drone-control demonstration is arguably the more significant half of the announcement: a fighter pilot directing an unmanned aircraft as part of a strike package is the architecture every major air force is now building toward.

Ukraine has been killing Russian radars hard way

Ukraine has been dismantling Russian air defense with drones, one radar at a time.

Ukraine's General Staff reported 24 radar systems damaged in Crimea alone between March and May 2026, and 25 air defense systems hit in April, including components of the Tor, Buk, Osa, Pantsir, S-300, and S-400 systems.

A company commander with the 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment told Euromaidan Press that in some sectors the Russians are "losing the concept" of layered air defense as the layers get picked off, opening blind spots.

That campaign is working, but it is slow. The Lasar's Group operation earlier this month killed a Buk-M3 with strike drones first, and only then did the Air Force fly into the corridor that opened.

Two French Mirage 2000B fighters opened the Bastille Day flypast over Paris on 14 July, each with a Ukrainian co-pilot in the cockpit, Militarnyi reported. It was the first time Ukrainian pilots had taken part in France's national parade. French pilots flew the aircraft; the Ukrainians served as second pilots.

The Mirage 2000-5F that France sends to Ukraine is a single-seat aircraft, so there is no room for a passenger. The two-seat 2000B was flown instead—the trainer version. Ukrainian pilots and aircraft technicians are still training on the type at Luxeuil air base in eastern France, ahead of further Mirage deliveries.

What France put in the air

The flypast began at 10:21 a.m. in Paris, ahead of the ground columns. Ninety-five aircraft crossed the sky over Paris—84 French and 11 from other European countries, along with 32 helicopters.

For the first time at a Bastille Day parade, French fighters flew with weapons mock-ups fixed under their wings, among them the Scalp cruise missile France supplies to Ukraine for strikes on Russian targets, France 24 reported. The Élysée called it an unprecedented demonstration of how France's land and air forces now work together.

It was the largest parade France has staged: 6,686 troops on foot and 315 vehicles, with 98 aircraft and 31 helicopters listed in the official program the day before—a handful fewer flew on the day. Around 500 soldiers from 35 Coalition of the Willing countries opened the march. Twenty-five Ukrainian soldiers followed them.

What leaders said

The parade was French President Emmanuel Macron's tenth and last as commander-in-chief, as he leaves office in 2027. The Élysée gave it a theme: the strategic awakening of Europe.

"The message we send to the world is this: Yes, peace is our goal. Yes, we cherish freedom and the rule of law. And yes, we stand ready to fight to defend them. Always, and at the cost of blood if necessary," Macron said in his address to the armed forces on the eve of the parade.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy echoed that message and told the French news channel BFMTV that this parade, this idea of inviting Ukraine, of bringing together the coalition of the willing, of staging this demonstration—all of it is a very good signal. 

Then he added that people only realize the war is close, he said, when it comes within 50 km of their border. He thanked the French for understanding—and noted that the problem is not France's alone: if the war is not in your country, not on your land, not in your house, you cannot feel it.

What Bastille Day is

France's national holiday marks 14 July 1789, when Parisians stormed the Bastille fortress and prison— the event that started the French Revolution and brought down the monarchy. The military parade on the Champs-Élysées is its centerpiece, and the guest list is always a statement.

The symbolism extended beyond the parade itself. It came a day after Macron hosted the Coalition of the Willing summit in Paris, where European governments discussed a new air-defense initiative built around a Ukrainian interceptor.

Ukraine’s parliament dismissed Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko on 14 July, 258 votes to one, three days short of her first year in office. No official reason has been given—not by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and not by Svyrydenko, who used her last hour as premier to read parliament a list of what her government had achieved.

On 1 July, her Cabinet approved the rules that let partner countries buy Ukrainian weapons directly from the firms that make them. The first permit sent combat drones to the US military. Thirteen days later, parliament voted her out.

Explore further

Ukraine clears its first-ever export of finished combat drones — and they went to the US

The ledger

“You also know that I love concrete results,” Svyrydenko said in her address to the parliament, and listed them: record defense funding, an electricity grid that survived the war’s hardest winter, $19.2 billion in international financing, negotiations opened on two European Union accession clusters, and the export mechanism. She thanked the president for his trust.

The defense number is not her arithmetic alone. Parliament raised security and defense spending by 1.56 trillion hryvnias ($35 billion) in June, lifting the 2026 total to a record 4.4 trillion hryvnias ($98 billion), of which 2.3 trillion ($51 billion) buys weapons and equipment. Most of that money rests on the €90 billion ($104.4 billion) EU loan her government negotiated.

Zelenskyy is satisfied with her work and has no complaints, government officials say.

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Ukraine votes to dismiss its PM. She hasn’t accepted the exit job offered

The name that is not in the ledger

Svyrydenko took office days before the largest corruption scandal of Zelenskyy’s presidency broke. The Midas case—a $100 million kickback scheme at state nuclear operator Energoatom—cost her two ministers and, in November, brought down Andrii Yermak, the head of the President’s Office, who resigned after investigators searched his home. He denies wrongdoing.

Svyrydenko had been Yermak’s deputy at the President’s Office in 2020–21 and was widely seen as his protégée when parliament made her premier. Her farewell does not mention Yermak, the scandal, or the two ministers she lost to it.

Orysia Lutsevych of Chatham House told RFE/RL that replacing her shows Ukrainians the president is “cleaning up the executive of Yermak’s influence.” Yevhen Mahda of the Institute of World Policy called the decision abrupt: a premier with no public complaints against her went to a meeting with the president and was told to resign.

Political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told the Kyiv Independent that Svyrydenko cut herself loose from Yermak the moment he fell—but that the public needs to see “de-Yermakization” continue, including through the replacement of the prime minister.

Twice in one war, without a vote

Ukraine has now replaced its government twice during the full-scale invasion, and no election has been held for either. Elections are suspended under martial law, and martial law also prohibits dismissing the Cabinet, a rule Kyiv treated as a gray area when Svyrydenko arrived, and treats the same way now.

The Cabinet now works in acting capacity, likely under First Vice Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal—the man Svyrydenko replaced a year ago. Parliament votes on a new premier on 16 July, with Naftogaz chief Serhii Koretskyi the front-runner.

Sources say Zelenskyy wants an energy figure in place before the next heating season. The Washington ambassadorship offered as her exit remains unaccepted. She says she will announce her plans now that the government has been dismissed.

For four hours on 18 June, Péter Magyar, Hungary’s new prime minister, sat with EU leaders and refused to budge. They wanted to advance Ukraine’s membership talks. Magyar held out until they struck that language from the summit text. He got what he came for.

EU accession is a prize Ukraine has pursued since the 2013–14 Euromaidan, when Ukrainians bled for the right to choose Europe: a say in the continent’s decisions, access to EU markets and funds, and a European path away from Russia. 

Yet any member state can stall that process. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s pro-Russian former prime minister, repeatedly did—and Magyar’s government is still holding up Ukraine’s accession. 

Magyar is not Orbán. After Russia struck Zakarpattia Oblast—Ukraine’s westernmost Oblast, home to many ethnic Hungarians—Magyar condemned the attack. His pro-Western foreign minister, Anita Orbán (no relation), summoned Moscow’s ambassador and asked when Russia would end the war. 

For Magyar, however, helping Kyiv could cost votes: more than half of Hungarians oppose restarting talks, and even supporters of Magyar’s own Tisza party—which ended 16 years of pro-Russian Fidesz rule—are split down the middle. 

What Orbán left behind also influences Hungary’s hesitation: a Fidesz propaganda apparatus that has shrunk but whose narratives endure, a minority issue opponents can still weaponize against Magyar, and an energy system tied to Moscow.

Magyar’s caution may be less about what he believes than what Hungarian politics rewards: helping Kyiv still carries more risk than reward at home.

Hungary is not alone: an EU-wide poll found that 41% were opposed to Ukraine joining the EU, even if it met all accession conditions. 

The 18 June confrontation came three days after a brief breakthrough. On 15 June, Hungary helped Ukraine open the first of six negotiating clusters—parts of the EU rulebook Kyiv must work through before joining. Each requires unanimous approval from the EU’s 27 governments. 

On 23 June, Budapest blocked the other five from opening. Hungary later cleared Cluster 6, covering foreign policy. The EU and Ukraine formally opened Cluster 6 on 14 July, leaving four clusters unopened. 

What Hungary is actually blocking

Magyar has repeatedly argued that accelerating Ukraine’s EU talks would be unfair to Western Balkan countries that have waited years to join.

In a recent Substack analysis, Dániel Hegedűs, deputy director of the Institute for European Politics, rejects Magyar's suggestion that opening several clusters quickly would give Ukraine special treatment. 

Other candidate countries have advanced at a similar pace, he said, making Ukraine's request unusual mainly because of the war, not because it breaks EU precedent: Albania opened all six clusters in just over a year, between October 2024 and late 2025. 

For Kyiv, Magyar is harder to read than Orbán. With the latter, Ukraine knew it would not get anywhere with EU accession, as the Fidesz leader would veto every attempt.

As Vitalii Diachuk, an analyst at Ukraine’s Institute for Central European Strategy, stated, Orbán’s veto was “predictable and targeted.” Brussels could counter it with diplomatic pressure, blocking funds, and isolating Hungary’s vote. 

Unlike Orbán, Magyar did not come to office with a long record of hostility toward Ukraine. But with little track record on Ukraine—Tisza’s manifesto offered few details beyond opposing accelerated accession—his future course is harder to predict.

Soon after taking office, he said Hungary would hold a referendum on Ukraine’s eventual EU membership. Diachuk warned that this would leave Kyiv dependent on Hungarian politics and public opinion years from now: 

“It is unclear what the Hungarian government will look like, how public opinion will be shaped, or whether the referendum will be genuinely democratic rather than another Orbán-style ‘national consultation’ [government mail-in questionnaires criticized for their leading language].” —Vitalii Diachuk

Speaking with Euromaidan Press, Hegedűs argued that Magyar’s Ukraine policy will remain subordinate to domestic political calculations. 

“He will pursue closer rapprochement with Kyiv only if it either brings him a tangible political benefit or does not expose him to vulnerabilities in the domestic political arena,” Hegedűs noted.

Not just a Hungary issue: Europe’s wider doubts on Ukraine’s accession

Hungary is the most visible obstacle to faster talks, but Magyar is not alone: most EU governments also oppose speeding up Ukraine’s accession.

Few want to reject Ukraine outright, Hegedűs said. Yet EU member states favor moving negotiations forward under existing rules while keeping pressure on Kyiv to complete difficult legal, democratic, and economic reforms.

France and Germany have resisted shortening the process, while only the Nordic and Baltic states have pushed to open all six negotiating clusters quickly. Most member states support continued negotiations but do not waive accession requirements or promise membership before Ukraine has met them.

Beyond the halls of power, many EU citizens remain wary of Ukraine’s accession, largely over economic concerns. French farmers pressed Paris to curb Ukrainian food imports, while France’s agricultural minister warned that market disruption could erode public support for Kyiv.

Farther east, a June poll found nearly six in ten Poles opposed Ukraine joining the EU. From 2023 to 2025, Polish farmers repeatedly blocked crossings with Ukraine, claiming that Ukrainian grain meant for global markets was depressing local prices.

Polish farmers’ fears were disproportionate to the broader trade picture: the EU matters far more to Ukraine than Ukraine does to the EU. Still, Brussels struck a temporary compromise, leaving unresolved how accession would reshape farm subsidies and competition.

Concern extends beyond agriculture. András Simonyi—the former Hungarian ambassador to NATO and the US—noted some Europeans fear a war-hardened Ukraine whose defense firms are already “way ahead” in some technologies. Their cheaper, combat-tested systems could undercut established manufacturers and win export contracts.

Le Monde reported unease among French manufacturers, while French experts warned that Ukrainian drone makers could become “formidable competitors.” Simonyi argued that Europe should treat that competition as a catalyst, not a threat.

Janitorial duties: Fidesz’s shadow over Magyar

Domestic priorities have dominated Magyar’s first months in office as his government has focused on restoring the rule of law and securing the release of billions of euros in EU funds frozen under Orbán.

Hegedűs said the “absolute primacy” of domestic affairs would keep the government focused on constitutional reform, removing Fidesz loyalists from state institutions, and pursuing accountability for corruption. 

Simonyi put it more simply:

“Magyar’s focus for now is cleaning up after Orbán.” —András Simonyi

As part of his domestic agenda, Magyar has begun dismantling Fidesz’s propaganda apparatus. After his April victory, he appeared on M1, the state-funded broadcaster aligned with Viktor Orbán, and vowed to shut down its “factory of lies.”  

M1 had echoed Kremlin claims that Russia was defending “the Russian-majority population in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts” from “Ukrainian fascism” and that Ukraine persecuted minorities. On 7 July, it suspended news broadcasts for an overhaul intended to restore public-media independence. 

That overhaul could weaken one major source of anti-Ukrainian messaging. But analysts warned that Orbán’s defeat had not erased the wider media ecosystem—or the audience it cultivated. 

“The government’s production line of content and narratives has currently stalled, but public demand and the opposition’s infrastructure remain on standby.” —Vitalii Diachuk

Polling backs Diachuk up. In a post-election ECFR survey, Tisza voters split almost evenly on restarting Ukraine's accession talks—41% for, 43% against. 

On arming Ukraine, though, they were not torn: just 12%—one in eight—backed it. Nationally the mood was colder still—54% opposed reopening the talks at all, and majorities rejected sending Kyiv either money or weapons.

Magyar might therefore be trying not to hand Fidesz political ammunition. As Hegedűs noted, a too-visible rapprochement with Kyiv could expose Tisza to attack and alienate voters beyond its base. 

Magyar’s hesitation may reflect electoral caution more than distrust of Ukraine. The danger is that a temporary tactic becomes lasting policy whenever supporting Kyiv carries a domestic cost. 

The threat of Russian influence also lingers. The Carnegie Center notes that Fidesz remains embedded in transnational illiberal networks that carried Kremlin talking points and could survive Orbán’s loss of power. 

“He cannot appear less sensitive than Orbán”: The minority question

The Hungarian minority in Zakarpattia remains a potential flashpoint for bilateral relations—and Ukraine’s EU bid. Ukraine’s westernmost region is home to roughly 150,000 ethnic Hungarians, before war and emigration substantially reduced the community. Under Orbán, Budapest deployed intelligence agents there, stoked interethnic tensions, and amplified claims of persecution through state media. 

Magyar has taken a different approach. Within three weeks of taking office, his government struck a deal to restore Hungarian-language schools and expand language rights in education and public services. Ukraine also agreed to write those commitments into law and its EU-required minority-rights action plan. 

Diachuk said the contrast between Magyar and Orbán was night-and-day: 

“Orbán and Szijjártó [Orbán’s foreign minister] used demands [connected to the Hungarian minority] to block Ukraine’s EU path, regardless of Kyiv’s progress, because an agreement would have cost them leverage. Péter Magyar, by contrast, sought and reached an agreement.” —Vitalii Diachuk

There is a catch. Magyar has prioritized disputes he can resolve quickly and present to voters as proof he can fix what Orbán left behind, as Hegedűs noted. 

Future disputes over the Hungarian minority in Zakarpattia Oblast could still become politically combustible. Diachuk noted that “demand for narratives about protecting Zakarpattia's Hungarians is genuine and exists independently of Fidesz narratives.”

Recent events show why Hungarian politicians continue to treat the issue so carefully. Magyar framed the June agreement as restoring “fundamental rights” to 100,000 Hungarians. 

His deeper concern is domestic: Magyar wants to avoid criticism from Fidesz and the far-right Mi Hazánk party for looking “too soft on Ukraine,” Hegedűs told Euronews. 

New disputes could therefore become a test of whether Magyar is defending ethnic Hungarians abroad—and hand his opponents an opening to accuse him of yielding to Kyiv. 

“Magyar cannot appear to be less sensitive to the minority question than Orbán. But he can take the initiative, get it out of the way and not allow others to hide behind Hungary,” Simonyi noted.

The harder break with Moscow lies in energy

In the April election, VSquare reported that Russian operatives campaigned hard for Orbán and cast Magyar as a Brussels puppet. It failed, and "Russians go home" became a prominent slogan of the opposition. 

“Russia failed in Hungary. Hungarians, and especially the Magyar government, will be vigilant and unmask any Russian effort to interfere in Hungarian politics.” —András Simonyi

Magyar’s subsequent actions support that assessment. On 4 May, his government expelled SVR agent Artur Sushkov, whom Orbán had shielded months earlier. In June, Budapest dismissed every Orbán-era intelligence chief and appointed Péter Buda—a critic of Orbán’s pro-Russian course—to overhaul the security services.

Nevertheless, Russia’s presence remains pronounced in Hungary’s energy sector. Russian crude accounted for 93% of Hungary’s oil imports in 2025, while Magyar has pledged to end dependence on Russian energy only by 2035—eight years after the EU’s planned phaseout. 

Diachuk noted Magyar inherited an energy system deeply tied to Russia—long-term contracts, infrastructure built around Russian fuel, the Russian-built Paks II project—dependencies no single decision can undo.

The difference is visible in how each leader uses the same vulnerability. Orbán held up a €90 billion EU loan for Ukraine until Russian oil resumed through the Druzhba pipeline; Magyar has instead sought French nuclear cooperation to diversify Hungary’s supply. 

“Magyar treats energy dependence not as leverage over Brussels, but as a problem Hungary must gradually resolve,” Diachuk said.

That difference matters, but it does not settle how Magyar will act when supporting Ukraine becomes costly at home. 

Diachuk said the coming weeks would determine whether the opening becomes durable. “This is a real window of opportunity, but it’s quite small.”