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.

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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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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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 

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.

The EU has imposed sanctions on 15 people and an entity over the torture of Ukrainian POWs and detained civilians, the Council of the EU announced. The 13 July listings reach prison officials in occupied Ukraine and inside Russia, and one detention facility. Among the targets are people tied to the Olenivka mass killing and the jail where journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna died.

Olenivka's deputy chief held responsible for mass killing of POWs

Eight Russians and one entity fall under the EU's Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime. The most prominent is Dmitry Neelov, first deputy head of the Olenivka prison in occupied Donetsk Oblast. The Council says he took part in torturing, beating, and humiliating Ukrainian POWs and civilian captives. It blames him directly for the prisoners' mass deaths at the colony on 28–29 July 2022. He deliberately held back evacuating wounded prisoners after a Russian attack on the colony. A number of senior officers and colony employees who degraded prisoners join Neelov on the list.

A UN expert panel confirmed in 2025 that Russia carried out the strike that killed over 50 Ukrainian defenders there. 

Torture as staff entertainment at Penal Colony No 7

Alexei Khavetsky, security chief of Penal Colony No 7 in the village of Pakino in Russia's Vladimir Oblast, ran the systematic abuse of Ukrainian POWs. Under his supervision, prisoners suffered electric shocks, deliberate starvation, sexual abuse, and extreme humiliation "for the entertainment of the colony staff," the Council states.

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FSB officer tortured civilians in three occupied oblasts

The list also includes Yan Zanevsky, an officer of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). He took part in the illegal detention and torture of civilians in occupied parts of Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. He beat, suffocated, and sexually abused detainees.

The Taganrog jail where Roshchyna died becomes a sanctioned entity

The one entity designated is Pre-trial detention center-2 in Taganrog, known as SIZO-2. Russia holds Ukrainian POWs and civilians there, women and journalists among them. Systemic torture there has led to deaths. Journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna spent a year detained there before her death, and her body bore numerous torture marks.

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Whole command chain of Penal Colony No 10 listed

Seven more individuals fall under a separate regime targeting human rights abuses inside Russia. They are Alexander Gnutov, who heads Penal Colony No 10 in Udarny village, his five deputies, and Galina Mokshanova, head of its medical unit. The colony has held hundreds of Ukrainian POWs and civilians captured in occupied territories. Former detainees describe beatings, electric shocks, mock executions, sexual violence, stress positions that caused trophic ulcers, and refusals of medical care. Detained civilians endure the same abuse as the POWs, with no trial and no legal status.

All listed individuals and the entity face an asset freeze, and EU citizens and companies cannot make funds available to them. 

Ukraine's drone blockade of Crimea widened across the Sea of Azov overnight on 12–13 July. The Unmanned Systems Forces said they struck 15 Russian vessels, nine energy nodes, and four air-defense assets.

Commander Robert “Madyar” Brovdi said the maritime targets included seven tankers, five dry-cargo ships, one ferry, and two tugs. Censor reported that the same operation hit the “Crimea” electricity-transfer point on the Kuban-Crimea energy bridge for the second time in 48 hours. Brovdi also claimed the destruction of an S-400 launcher, a Tor system, and two radar complexes. The damage could not be independently confirmed.

RBC-Ukraine reported that NASA FIRMS satellite data showed thermal anomalies in the Sea of Azov and at the Port Kavkaz railway station, a transport hub serving routes to Crimea.

A wider FIRMS screenshot also showed a hotspot south of the occupied city of Mariupol. NASA FIRMS detects heat signatures but cannot determine their cause.

The strikes targeted several parts of the network linking occupied Crimea to Russia. By hitting shipping, power infrastructure, and air defenses together, Ukraine is tightening the noose around occupied Crimea's supply lines. Each strike makes the remaining links harder to use.

Crimea.Realities reported that Russian authorities kept the Kerch Bridge closed for more than 11 hours, from 9:51 p.m. on 12 July until 9:06 a.m. the next morning. Local residents reported drones, air-defense fire, and explosions around Kerch throughout the closure

Citing the Crimean Wind monitoring channel, Ukrinform reported that fires broke out near Cape Fonar, where Russian air defense units are deployed.

How Ukraine tightened the ring around Crimea

The operation followed a week of strikes on the same routes. On 10 July, Ukrainian forces hit vessels, both Azov loading ports, five oil depots, and Crimea’s power grid.

Russia then halted traffic through the Don-Azov shipping channel and stopped accepting requests for passage through the Kerch Strait. By 12 July, the Unmanned Systems Forces said they had struck 90 vessels in seven days. Brovdi put the total for 6–13 July at 105 successful strikes on vessels.

Donald Trump made it sound as though he had just solved Ukraine’s Patriot shortage.

At the NATO summit in Ankara on 8 July 2026, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the United States would grant Kyiv something it had sought for months.

“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots,” Trump told Zelenskyy. “This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving ’em enough.”

But Trump did not actually grant the license in Ankara. CBS News reported that Lockheed Martin and RTX—which help produce the Patriot missile—had not been informed. Defense News said key terms, including which interceptor Ukraine could build, still had to be negotiated with the contractors. 

Zelenskyy left with a promise, not the right to begin producing Patriot missiles.

Even a finalized license would not deliver a single interceptor soon, two defense specialists told Euromaidan Press. 

The Patriot is the Western system that most reliably stops Russia's ballistic missiles, and Ukraine depends on the US almost exclusively for it. Russia, meanwhile, wages its most intense aerial campaign of the war. In the strikes on 6 July, Ukrainian air defenses downed none of nearly 30 ballistic missiles fired at Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian Air Force.

A Ukrainian production line could be up and running by the end of next year at the earliest. Kyiv needs Patriots today.

Worse, the specialists warned Euromaidan Press, Washington could use the license as an excuse to stop or delay deliveries. The summit also offered no strategy to defend Ukraine’s skies until production begins, let alone help Kyiv break the battlefield deadlock.

What Ankara delivered

Beyond the Patriot license, the summit’s headline item was money. Allies committed roughly €140 billion ($160 billion) in military aid to Ukraine across 2026 and 2027. Zelenskyy worked the room in an advocacy blitz and met Trump one-on-one. 

The Ankara summit’s communiqué restated the alliance’s support for Ukraine but set no path to NATO membership and named no strategy for the war.

Ukraine's ambassador to NATO, Alyona Getmanchuk, struck a more upbeat note, welcoming what allies brought to Ankara. She pointed to the two-year aid commitment, the Patriot license, and fresh funding for the Czech ammunition initiative, long-range weapons, and Ukrainian drone and missile production.

On much of the summit's ledger, she has a case. But not one item on it closes the gap the specialists keep returning to—interceptors for the Russian ballistic missiles that Ukraine can no longer reliably stop, especially because the Iran War has drained the supply.

The license might be an alibi, not a fix

Zelenskyy has pushed for a Patriot license for months. In late May he wrote to the White House and Congress asking for both more Patriots and a license to build them, and pressed the same case at the G7 in June. His letter was blunt about the dependence underneath it: on stopping ballistic missiles, "we rely almost exclusively on the United States."

Marc DeVore, a defense-industry scholar at the University of St Andrews, believes Trump’s promised license will matter—eventually. His worry is what it buys Washington now.

"The Americans can check off a box and say, 'We've solved the problem.' They may be willing to do a victory lap without actually having resolved the problem."—DeVore

UK General Richard Shirreff, NATO's former deputy supreme allied commander Europe, now chief foreign military adviser to Ukraine's commander-in-chief, echoed DeVore, saying that the Patriot pledge "lets America off the hook concerning all the complaints about not supporting Ukraine."

Shirreff sees a second motive that runs counter to the pure-alibi reading: Washington may simply not have the interceptors to hand over. 

After the US-Israeli war on Iran drained much of the world's stockpile, Shirreff said, America "doesn't have the means to provide Ukraine with Patriot now"—so the license defers deliveries partly because it can't do otherwise.

Other analysts echo DeVore and Shirreff’s assessment. 

Strategic-studies professor Phillips O'Brien argues that the license substitutes for the deliveries Ukraine needs now, and could hand Trump a reason to withhold Patriots until a Ukrainian line exists—late 2027 or 2028 at the earliest. 

DeVore shares the concern, though he stops short of calling Trump's move deliberate—a calculated deferral or just an announcement to look responsive—the result for Ukraine's skies may be the same: fewer interceptors at the most critical moment.

Why a Ukrainian Patriot is years away

But even a signed, finalized license would run into a harder limit. The Patriot is a punishingly complex machine to build, and Ukraine would start close to scratch.

Speaking to Euromaidan Press, DeVore pointed to hold-ups that are physical, not bureaucratic:

"The two big challenges in producing missiles are the engines and the guidance systems."—DeVore

The guidance is a closely-held secret, DeVore said. Even long-licensed foreign producers still rely on US subcontractors for it, so a license can leave dependence on American manufacturing intact. 

Fabian Hoffmann of the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies made the same point to the Irish Times: final assembly of the Patriot is not the bottleneck. Rather, localizing the missile’s supply chain is.

Engines are an even harder obstacle, DeVore said, and Ukraine starts at a serious disadvantage. Russia struck key parts of Ukraine’s missile industry early in the war, he noted, and engine shortages have since constrained efforts to scale Ukrainian missiles such as the Neptune to mass production. Kyiv could convert an existing engine line to Patriot production, in his reading, but only by creating a shortfall in the deep-strike weapons now hitting Russian refineries and Crimea. 

In early July, DeVore asked two outside expert groups he chairs, both of which advise the UK Defence Ministry, whether Ukraine could realistically begin producing Patriots within a year. They reached the same conclusion he had: probably not. 

A year is the optimistic floor, not a timetable anyone should count on.

No strategy and a proposal that went nowhere

The €140 billion in military aid pledged to Ukraine for 2026 and 2027, meanwhile, came without a clear strategy for what it would buy or how it would help Ukraine survive the war.

While speaking with Euromaidan Press, Shirreff noted some gains in Ankara, including the renewed Article 5 pledge and the Patriot license—though the latter would take time Ukraine may not have and would do nothing to strengthen its offensive capabilities.

Yet he was more blunt about what the summit amounted to:

“It was an exercise in papering over the cracks in the increasing chasm between Europe and the United States.”—General Shirreff

The summit, Shirreff said, preserved the appearance of transatlantic unity without resolving Washington’s unreliability or Europe’s failure to develop its own strategy for defeating Russia. The failure, in his telling, is one of political will, not military capability. NATO’s leaders would rather keep Trump on side than tell him plainly what Ukraine needs.

Shirreff has long championed a concrete proposal to ease the interceptor shortage: Sky Shield. Under the plan, European NATO aircraft would patrol western and central Ukraine and shoot down Russian drones and cruise missiles where possible.

DeVore further noted that every target destroyed by a European jet is one fewer threat for Ukraine’s limited air defense systems to intercept. That would allow Kyiv to concentrate more of its scarce Patriot batteries around the capital and closer to the front, while reserving their interceptors for the ballistic missiles they are uniquely equipped to stop.

Shirreff presents Sky Shield as one defensive component of a broader strategy, not a war-winner on its own. However, Ankara, he said, did nothing to advance it. “I just don’t think it’s changed the dial whatsoever.”

The problem the summit didn't touch

Strip away the public announcement, and the missile-interception arithmetic is unforgiving for Ukraine. Only five or six countries can build interceptors capable of stopping ballistic missiles, and all of them are running short. Ukraine’s best salvation might lie in the Freya missile system it is co-developing with Germany—but even that system is not guaranteed to deliver.

Patriots are ordered years in advance. Meanwhile Russia builds ballistic missiles faster than America builds the interceptors to stop them—roughly 800 a year against about 600—and a single Iskander can take two or three Patriot interceptors to bring down.

As Trump spoke in Ankara, another overnight barrage hit Kyiv, and Ukraine again downed none of its five ballistic missiles.

DeVore's answer is broader than ballistics. Since no defense stops every missile, part of the fix is getting more interceptors and part is making Ukraine need fewer of them—and survive the ones that land.

More interceptors could mean moving Ukraine ahead in the US delivery queue, or buying Japanese, South Korean, or European alternatives. European jets patrolling Western Ukraine could take the drones and cruise missiles off Kyiv's plate. Strikes on Russian missile plants could reduce what Ukraine has to stop at all. A hardened electrical grid survives what gets through anyway.

"A good strategy would have to rely on combinations of all of them," DeVore said.

The fastest option is already underway. Ukraine has asked nearly 40 partner countries to loan interceptors from their stockpiles now, in exchange for missiles already scheduled for Ukraine later. Those borrowed interceptors could arrive long before Ukraine begins producing Patriots itself.

At the 8 July NATO summit in Ankara, US President Donald Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that the US will license Ukraine to build its own Patriot interceptors—the only tool Ukraine has to counter Russian ballistic missiles. The US President added that this would end complaints that Washington was not supplying enough of them. The announcement comes at a dire moment: Ukraine has gone several nights without shooting down Russian ballistic missiles, targeting Ukrainian cities.

The shortage is structural

The interceptor crunch is bigger than Ukraine. During its 39-day war with Iran this spring, the US may have burned through over half of its Patriot missile stockpile, by CSIS's estimate—and rebuilding the depleted munitions to pre-war levels will take one to four years.

The US now has to replenish its own magazines, defend against a possible war in the Western Pacific, and supply Ukraine and 18 other Patriot-using countries from the same slow production line.

The ballistic gap is where people die

May 2026 saw the highest civilian killed-and-injured total since April 2022: at least 274 killed and 1,763 injured, a 93% increase over May 2025, the UN human rights mission found, driven primarily by long-range missiles and drones striking cities far from the front. Ukraine shot down roughly 91% of Russian drones in May, but a far lower share of ballistic missiles—Russia's most dangerous strike weapon, which Ukraine's depleted Patriot stocks have been unable to stop consistently. The ballistic ones are the killers, and the Patriot is the only thing Ukraine has that can stop them.

What Ukraine has done—and why it isn't enough

Under that pressure, Ukrainian operators rewrote the Western manual for using the Patriot, the New York Times reported from interviews with air-defense commanders.

• They learned to fire a single interceptor at a ballistic missile instead of the standard two or more.
• They switched systems to manual mode to avoid wasting interceptors on cheap drones, which are better handled by machine guns and interceptor drones.
• They developed "shoot and scoot" tactics, moving batteries the moment they fire, and fielded decoys costing around $30,000 each to draw Russian targeting away from billion-dollar systems, the NYT says. 

That ingenuity now travels. Ukrainian soldiers have deployed to the Gulf to train local forces in cheaper drone-interception tactics, and several countries have asked to buy Ukraine's interceptor drones, according to the NYT. Ukraine's Lima electronic warfare system—which spoofs incoming missiles' navigation systems for a fraction of the cost of a single PAC-3 interceptor—has jammed more than 20,500 Shahed drones over 18 months.

But every one of these innovations stretches a scarce resource further. None of them makes more interceptors. They buy time, they do not fill the gap.

The slow paths out

Zelenskyy has framed the production license as a mutual benefit: Ukraine builds interceptors, and allied partners gain supply when they need it. The US currently shares Patriot production rights only with Germany and Japan, and the most advanced radar seekers are still made only in the United States. So even a licensed Ukrainian line would depend on American components.

Russia has struck or damaged Ukrainian fuel stations at a rapidly accelerating pace since April 2026. According to Radio Liberty, the campaign combines attacks on civilian infrastructure with a propaganda effort aimed at Russian domestic audiences. A fuel market expert warns that Ukrainian licensing law embeds the exact address, ownership, and throughput of every registered station in each license—data that, even from a nominally closed registry, Russia can obtain through leaks.

Russia's campaign against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure has evolved across the full-scale war from power grids and heating systems toward any combustible civilian object that produces visible footage—a pattern where the propaganda value of the strike, not its military effect, increasingly drives the targeting logic.

The targeting campaign

Fuel-industry outlet Naftorynok recorded three to four Russian strikes on Ukrainian fuel stations per week through April 2026. The rate climbed to 13 per week by mid-June, then reached 20 per week by early July. Since April, Russia hit or damaged 186 fuel stations—concentrated in frontline oblasts including Kharkiv, Sumy, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Mykolaiv.

The corridor between Dnipro and Kharkiv now has no intact station, Leonid Kosianchuk, former president of the Association of Petroleum Market Operators, told Radio Liberty.

The targeting intelligence problem

Ukraine's licensing law requires each license to state the exact address, ownership, and throughput of the registered facility. The licensee database is nominally closed to public access, but Kosianchuk said he cannot guarantee against data leaks—and called for the register to be sealed for the duration of the war.

"Russians don't even need to strain their intelligence services. "They can clearly understand at which kilometer of which highway a given station is located, who owns it, what volumes it sells" Kosianchuk said.

He is calling for the licensing law to be amended to remove the address requirement from licenses—not just restricting access to the database, but eliminating the data from the license itself.

Why Russia is doing it

The campaign serves two functions, Serhii Bratchuk, spokesman for the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, said. The first is domestic propaganda—producing footage of burning Ukrainian fuel infrastructure to mirror Ukrainian coverage of Russian refinery strikes.

"The pictures of our burning fuel stations are actively being used by the enemy to create the illusion of a fuel collapse in Ukraine," Bratchuk said.

Russia simultaneously circulates fake and outdated footage of queues at Ukrainian stations to trigger panic buying. Mykolaiv Oblast Military Administration Head Vitalii Kim described the targeting logic as producing smoke for television. Ukraine's military, he noted, does not refuel at commercial stations.

The second function is operational. Russia is concentrating strikes in frontline oblasts to complicate fuel access for civilian transport, medical workers, volunteers, and light military vehicles.

"Russia wants to paralyze civilian transport, our medics, volunteers, and complicate refueling of light military vehicles—pickups, buggies, quad bikes that operate along the front line," Bratchuk said.

Consequences and adaptation

Destroying one modern fuel station causes damage of over $1 million, specialists estimate—large national networks can absorb such losses, but regional operators face serious financial risk, Bratchuk noted. On 5 July, Sumy Oblast Military Administration Head Oleh Hryhorov warned residents to avoid fuel stations entirely after Russia signaled further strikes.

The Trostyanets city council in Sumy Oblast launched mobile fuel distribution points on 2 July, announcing vehicles would move locations "to prevent targeting by the aggressor." Zaporizhzhia Oblast has been covering stations with anti-drone nets since June. Mobile fuel distribution currently operates outside Ukrainian law, Kosianchuk noted, and he is calling for two legislative changes: amendments allowing mobile fuel retail, and repeal of the retail fuel tax.

Economy Minister Oleksii Soboliev told parliament on 3 July that there is no fuel deficit for the civilian sector—the market is supplied, and import contracts are being signed on time. The legal framework for distribution, however, has not caught up with the operational reality on the ground.

Ukraine’s central bank reserves rose to $51.3 billion (2.3 trillion hryvnia) in June, reversing a four-month, $12 billion drawdown driven almost entirely by one thing: the cost of oil.

A war between Israel and Iran that shut the Strait of Hormuz forced Ukraine to spend down its financial buffer to defend the hryvnia against rising fuel-import costs. On 8 July, oil prices spiked again—a reminder that the recovery rests on a war Ukraine has no control over.

The National Bank of Ukraine reported the figure on 7 July, up from $45.7 billion (2 trillion hryvnia) at the start of June. It is the first monthly increase since January, when reserves peaked near $57.7 billion (2.5 trillion hryvnia) before four straight months of decline drained a fifth of the buffer.

Oil prices drive the buffer

Ukraine imports nearly all its refined fuel, so global oil prices translate directly into Ukraine’s import bill and, from there, put pressure on the hryvnia. When oil spikes, the National Bank sells dollars from reserves to keep the currency stable; when oil falls, it can sell less.

Brent crude climbed above $110 a barrel (4,800 hryvnia) and stayed there for much of the spring as the Israel-Iran war escalated and the Strait of Hormuz stayed shut to most shipping. Ukraine’s fuel inflation hit 23.4% year-on-year in March, more than twice the headline rate, and the National Bank paused a rate-cutting cycle it had only just begun in January.

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Then, through June, a US-Iran truce began restoring tanker traffic through Hormuz and OPEC+ raised output quotas. Brent fell from $91 a barrel (4,000 hryvnia) at the start of June to $72 (3,100 hryvnia) by month’s end, according to daily price data—a drop of more than 20% in four weeks.

Partner funding in June outpaced what the central bank had to sell defending the hryvnia, according to the same NBU release—enough to push import cover from under five months to just over five.

Drone funding stands apart from reserves

A separate $4.4 billion (192 billion hryvnia) payment is not included in that total. The European Commission disbursed €3.9 billion on 30 June as the first tranche of a €6-billion drone-procurement package under the EU’s wider Ukraine Support Loan—money earmarked for weapons purchases, not counted toward general reserves.

Ukraine also made its routine debt and IMF payments in June.

The relief is already fragile. On 8 July, Brent jumped over 5% in a single day after the US struck Iran again and revoked its oil-export waiver, following attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Oil’s June retreat took a month to build. It may take less than that to unwind, and with it, the conditions that let Ukraine’s reserves recover.

Russian ruler Vladimir Putin claimed in late June that his forces are "just over 10 kilometers" from the city of Sumy in Ukraine. The figure corresponds to nothing on the map, ArmyInform reports.

Ukraine's Defense Forces have held Russian troops more than 20 kilometers from the regional center for over a year, and according to DeepState, Russian advances over that year measured in hundreds of meters, not kilometers. Near one village of Kindrativka, Ukrainian forces even pushed the occupiers back toward the border.

The claim is significant because it illustrates how the Kremlin uses exaggerated battlefield narratives to shape perceptions of the war. 

Sumy city sits about 24 kilometers from the Russian border. The deepest Russian penetration into the oblast — near villages of Hrabovske and Myropilske — reaches roughly three to four kilometers inside it, according to a Ukrainian military personnel representative.

How line got there, and stayed there

Russia's push into Sumy Oblast began in the spring of 2025, after the collapse of Ukraine's Kursk salient freed Russian units to attack across the border. By late June 2025, Ukrainian forces had halted the advance and dug in along the four village line along the border. 

The front runs near those same settlements today. Russia has not attempted a broad offensive push since.

What it has done instead is claim ground it does not hold. On 24 June, after Russian channels announced the capture of the village of Ivolzhanske, Ukraine's Group of Forces "Kursk" refuted the report, calling it the work of Russian staff officers who pick Ukrainian unit names at random and draw offensive arrows across maps. The only territory Russia reliably controls, the statement noted, is "their own news feed."

Putin's Sumy claim fits a pattern the Institute for the Study of War has documented all year: inflated battlefield announcements timed to convince Western audiences the front is collapsing when it is not.

He attempted to use it as useful leverage as talks over how the war ends grind on, and Moscow refuses to freeze the current line.

What Russia is actually doing

Through 2026, Russia has traded broad assault for attrition and infiltration. Small groups of infantry probe routes rather than storm them. Artillery is used less, while FPV and reconnaissance drones are used more. The tactic is expensive. Ukrainian drone crews engage the groups within minutes of their emergence.

"They come out and die in about 10 to 15 minutes," the drone commander said in April.

DeepState and ISW both assess that the activity, while real, amounts to no operational breakthrough.

The wider arithmetic matches. ISW assessed on 1 July that Russian forces seized just 30 square kilometers across all of Ukraine in June 2026, which is sixteen times less than in June 2025, at nineteen times the casualties per kilometer. The spring–summer offensive has produced no operationally significant gains anywhere on the front.

Sumy city remains under regular Russian air attack, with guided bombs and drones striking the regional center and communities across the oblast. But the ground threat Putin described does not exist at the distance he named. In a year, the map moved by meters, and in one place, it moved the other way.

Sport has spent four years quietly letting Russia and Belarus back in, usually through a “neutral athlete” side door that widens until the ban is gone. Chess just did the opposite.

On 11 June 2026, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) suspended the Russian Chess Federation, though individual Russians may still compete under a neutral flag—the first time it has stripped its most powerful member of its membership rights.

And yet a former Russian deputy prime minister still runs world chess. FIDE is led by Arkady Dvorkovich, in office when Russia annexed Crimea, and he stands for re-election at the FIDE General Assembly in Samarkand on 26–27 September.

Malcolm Pein—the English Chess Federation’s delegate, the de facto leader of chess’s anti-Russian camp, and now the candidate for deputy president on Jan Henric Buettner’s ticket—argues the suspension is one win in a much longer fight to break Russia’s grip on the game.

Pein is standing against Dvorkovich’s machine and makes no secret of wanting it gone. Euromaidan Press sought him out precisely because that investment makes him one of the sharpest readers of how the capture works—and where it is vulnerable.

Peeter Helme: Chess has often presented itself as a world apart—a game of ideas, concentration and personal talent, something supposedly above day-to-day politics. Has Russia’s war against Ukraine made that view impossible?

Malcolm Pein: Your question is framed in a historically inaccurate way, because chess has always been extremely important—to the old Soviet Union above all—and it has always been a metaphor for geopolitics.

Go back to Reykjavik in 1972, or to Kasparov playing Karpov, the new Soviet Union against the old, and you see that the West, too, has always treated chess as a bellwether. The difference now is that instead of being a metaphor, it is actually a political weapon. It has never before been used that directly—in sporting boycotts of Russian teams, or anything else. That is the new situation.

Helme: Seen from Ukraine, this is far from abstract. Some Ukrainian players have lost relatives, homes, careers.

Pein: Some have been killed—there are Ukrainian chess players who have been killed. And there are others heavily involved on the front line. Grandmaster Igor Kovalenko has done his full military service, and Grandmaster Oleksandr Sulypa, the captain of the Ukrainian team, has volunteered in the armed forces. And there are countless others.

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Helme: Has international chess really listened to what Ukrainian players have to say?

Pein: Not everybody. There is a strong constituency of Western nations that have fought the good fight and continue to do so. But chess is no different from many other sports.

In Latin America, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not really a news story—it does not resonate, people do not care. And, most unfortunately, that is true for most of Africa and most of Asia. Which makes it all the more important that those of us in Western Europe, with a worldview that seeks democracy and a rules-based order, fight this fight as hard as we can.

Helme: There is an argument that athletes should not pay for the actions of their governments. What is your view?

Pein: Wherever possible, individual athletes should not be sanctioned—I would not punish people simply for being Russian, because you do not know what they feel about the war. But where someone has spoken out in favor of the war, or taken part in propaganda—and here I would point to the Grandmasters Sergey Karjakin or Denis Khismatullin—then those people I would certainly sanction.

The average Russian player just trying to make a living has seen his opportunities seriously limited, and rightly so. But I would not go out of my way to make their lives harder. If anything, those people have my sympathy.

Helme: Why is the pressure to bring Russian and Belarusian players back growing now? The war and the occupation are still going on—nothing has changed.

Pein: There is a certain fatigue—it is hard to keep something at the top of the agenda when there is no radical development, a kind of stalemate. And Russia is trying nonstop, devoting considerable diplomatic resources to getting these bans reversed.

But despite the best efforts of Dvorkovich, we recently scored a very big win at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, and got the Russian Chess Federation suspended. That is an absolutely fantastic and unprecedented success. In some sports, things have gone backwards, and Russia has regained influence—fencing is one, boxing another. In chess, we have held the line.

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Helme: Distinctions are often drawn between individual players and national teams—so-called neutral players under a neutral flag. What do you make of that?

Pein: I am not in favor of banning Russian players for being Russian. I am in favor of banning Russian teams for being Russia—that is the distinction.

In fact, in the Russian press this morning (2 July 2026—EP), there was an article claiming that, if elected, I would ban all Russian players. That is absolutely not true. I would not change the status quo unless the IOC took further action against Russia.

Helme: Why should the return of Russian teams be seen as politically significant, rather than a niche sporting question?

Pein: First, chess is no longer niche—it is a hugely popular global sport. But the real reason it matters is that it matters to Russia. The unwritten arrangement between the Russian state and its citizens was: life is hard, we are not as wealthy as the West, but we are a great country, we compete, and we win.

Chess is one of those achievements—embedded in the culture and history of the Soviet Union and Russia. Taking it away is significant, and the regime knows it. Arguably, it matters to them more than the success of their football or volleyball team.

Helme: You would not punish players for being Russian, but you would bar Russian teams. What would a fair, principled policy look like?

Pein: The policy we fought for—with a great deal of help from Oleksandr Kamyshin—was the one we defended in September 2024, when the FIDE General Assembly voted to keep sanctions on Russian teams.

No flags, no anthems, no officials, no teams, and any players competing under a neutral flag. That, to me, is the policy. I campaigned very hard to maintain it, and we succeeded.

Helme: Is there, in your eyes, a difference between the Russian and Belarusian teams and athletes?

Pein: No—Lukashenka cooperates with Putin. I know the IOC has removed its recommendation to restrict Belarusian athletes and teams.

I would prefer to keep Belarusian teams out for the moment. But generally, I would like FIDE to be aligned with the IOC as far as possible, so it may be something I would eventually comply with.

Helme: Should there be safeguards when the president of an international federation presides over decisions that affect his own country’s national federation?

Pein: It is a colossal conflict of interest. Russia has basically hijacked FIDE—just go to the FIDE website and look at where the employees come from: Russian head of PR, Russian head of legal, and so on.

Helme: Beyond Ukraine—what argument travels in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where the war does not resonate?

Pein: You campaign on other issues. The main one is that when Dvorkovich came in, he said the most important thing he wanted people to know was that presidents would no longer serve unlimited terms—there would be term limits.

And then he had that overturned. So there is plenty to campaign against him on that resonates more widely than something Ukraine- or Russia-specific.

Helme: You are standing for deputy president on Jan Henric Buettner’s ticket. Who else is in the race, and what concerns you about the field?

Pein: There are three tickets in this election so far. Dvorkovich is running with Timur Turlov, who heads a Nasdaq-listed finance company and the Kazakhstan federation, and who was formerly Russian before becoming Kazakh, which itself raises a question.

Another ticket is headed by Wadim Rosenstein, who has sponsored a great deal of chess recently but is hard to pin down—much of his business history has been erased. He was born in Ukraine and seems to have extensive connections in Russia. Our concern is that he is really the Kremlin’s plan B—or plan A, if the EU sanctions Dvorkovich.

We are setting up our ticket as an alternative to 30 years of Russian domination of FIDE—one that would bring in money from wider sources than Russian or Russian-linked oligarchs.

This interview is part of Euromaidan Press’s series on how international sport is negotiating sanctions and Russia’s war on Ukraine.

The zone of mutual attrition along Ukraine's eastern front now extends 20–25 kilometers on both sides of the contact line — an area where neither side can move freely without drone exposure and the commander of the 7th Airborne Assault Corps expects it to reach 30 kilometers by the end of 2026, Brigadier General Yevhen Lasiichuk told RBC-Ukraine. His corps holds the northern approaches to the Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad agglomeration in Donetsk Oblast against Russia's Center Group of Forces, operating with its 41st and 51st armies.

Ukraine's drone campaign has reshaped the geometry of the eastern front, turning a defined contact line into an expansive zone where neither side can move without aerial exposure. The 7th Corps has described the character of the war in its sector as a slow war of drones, FPV systems, and reconnaissance.

What the corps commander said

Drones now account for 70-80% of the damage on both sides in the sector; artillery, under 30% — a ratio Lasiichuk says has inverted since 2022.

About 20,000 Russian troops have been destroyed in the 7th Corps sector. Across the entire front, Lasiichuk said. Russian losses now exceed 30,000 per month, more than Russia mobilizes, in his assessment — though Russian pressure continues on multiple axes.

Russian forces abandoned vehicle-borne assaults because the vehicles became easy targets.

"On an infantry fighting vehicle, 20–30 enemy troops could move as close as possible to our positions," Lasiichuk said.

Now that's unrealistic — it's a fairly easy target for the unit. The result is infiltration in groups of two or three, moving through terrain features and exploiting weather that suppresses Ukrainian drones.

Euromaidan Press has tracked this shift since January: a May analysis found 60–70% of Russian infiltrators die before reaching Ukrainian lines. Even so, Lasiichuk said, Russia has not stopped pressing — it has simply made the pressing more expensive for itself.

Ukraine's middle-strike campaign now reaches 100 kilometers from the contact line, hitting Russian logistics nodes, command posts, and approach routes toward Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad.

The Pokrovsk axis

Russia's Center Group of Forces has concentrated its largest eastern grouping on the Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad axis. The 7th Corps also faces the Rubiсon drone unit — Russia's dedicated drone assault formation that has used the Pokrovsk sector as a testing ground for new systems.

About five months after capturing the ruins of Pokrovsk, Russian forces are attempting to break out toward Dobropillia a gateway to Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, 50 km to the north.The natural geography of the area favors Russian infiltration: riverbeds, road networks, and green zones provide covered approach routes.

Russia is recruiting civilians to commit arson, sabotage, and terrorist acts across Ukraine and Europe—and in Ukraine, its operatives have refined the playbook: they now forge official Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) summonses, complete with the signatures of senior SBU officials, to coerce targets who believe they are complying with their own government. The SBU and National Police warned on 3 July that dozens of such attempts have been uncovered in 2026 alone.

This isn't a new tactic—similar cases have been documented over the past few years. The warning arrives as Russia's civilian-recruitment campaign has spread across NATO territory on an industrial scale.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies counted 34 sabotage attacks in Europe in 2024, nearly triple the 2023 figure. A senior NATO official has described "a steady and growing pattern of hybrid attacks" against member states.

The targets are ordinary people—financially vulnerable, legally exposed, or simply contactable through commercial data obtained from online shops—manipulated into carrying out operations whose Russian origin they may never discover. Poland's Internal Security Agency (ABW) has described Russia as deploying "low-cost agents"—individuals recruited online quickly and cheaply, some unaware they are acting in Russia's interests.

Ukraine's SBU is now documenting a distinct variant of that model—one that manufactures state authority rather than merely offering money.

How the scheme works

Russian operatives contact targets by phone or messaging app, presenting themselves as SBU investigators, National Police officers, or other law enforcement. The entry point is a fake official summons sent by messenger—printed with forged signatures of senior SBU officials, directing the target to appear over a fabricated criminal case. A common invented charge: alleged purchase of pharmaceutical products on Russian websites.

Handlers then offer to close the invented proceedings in exchange for tasks. The escalation is structured:

• surveillance of a named individual;
• carrying packages between addresses or purchasing chemical components;
• building an improvised explosive device;
• burning a Defense Forces vehicle or administrative building;
• preparing a terrorist act or sabotage of critical infrastructure.

Russian handlers sometimes also demand payment—transfers to Russian-controlled accounts or cash handed to a courier under the guise of "authenticity verification"—as an alternative to, or alongside, task assignments.

To find targets, Russian services use customer databases from online shops—turning leaked commercial data into a recruitment pipeline, the SBU notes.

What Ukraine's cases document

Elsewhere in Europe, the campaign usually runs on money and leverage—recruitment through Telegram, or pressure on people already compromised. In several Baltic cases, Estonian smugglers were blackmailed into spying after being caught at the border.

What Ukraine's cases document is a different lever: the forged summons manufactures state authority itself. The targets do not believe they are being recruited by Russia. They believe they are being contacted by their own government.

The SBU stated that it operates exclusively under Ukrainian law, does not issue tasks of the kind described, and does not send official documents via messaging applications. Citizens who receive suspicious contacts can report them via the SBU chatbot at t.me/spaly_fsb_bot or by calling the hotline at 1516.

Two of Russia's most senior economic figures publicly linked the country's mounting economic pressures to the war in Ukraine last week — an unusual departure from the official silence that has surrounded Kremlin war costs since 2022. German Gref, chief executive of Sberbank, and central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina both spoke in separate settings as Ukraine's drone strike campaign against Russian oil infrastructure compounds the fiscal strain from record military spending.

Russia's military and classified spending reached 46% of all budget expenditure in the first quarter of 2026 — a surge of roughly 30% over the same period in 2025 — while the National Wealth Fund buffer has fallen from about 7% of GDP before the war to 1.7% as of April 2026, Russia's Finance Ministry confirmed.

What each of them said

Gref told Sberbank's annual shareholders meeting that investments had already fallen over 14% and could drop a further 3% this year. He then addressed the war directly.

"I don't believe there is anyone in this country whose primary concern is anything other than an end to military hostilities as soon as possible," Gref said.

For the chief executive of Russia's largest state-controlled bank to frame the war as the country's overriding problem — not "the special military operation," not a security challenge to be managed — marks a notable break from the language Kremlin officials have enforced since February 2022.

Nabiullina's public position is more constrained, but the Bank of Russia's own press release on her June rate decision said fiscal policy had become more accommodative than previously expected and that pro-inflationary risks had worsened — the same dynamic that Kluge's analysis traces directly to the gap between military outlays and tax revenues.

The fiscal picture behind the exchange

The 46% military spending figure comes from analyst Janis Kluge of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, drawn from Finance Ministry data and cited by ISW. Russia is now covering an increasing share of the deficit through borrowing, with liquid National Wealth Fund assets depleted to a fraction of their pre-war level and no longer functioning as a meaningful cushion.

Ukraine's strike campaign is compressing the revenue side simultaneously. Bloomberg counted 38 Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries from January through May 2026, with 16 in May alone — the highest monthly figure of the war. Two strikes on 16 and 18 June disabled both primary processing units at the Kapotnya refinery in Moscow — the capital's main fuel source — leaving it unable to process crude until at least early 2027.

Russia has responded by banning gasoline and jet fuel exports, drawing down strategic reserves, allowing lower-grade fuel blends, and importing gasoline from India and Belarus, while negotiations with Kazakhstan are complicated by the fact that a Ukrainian strike disrupted the feedstock supply to one potential Kazakh supplier.

Russian President Valdimir Putin publicly admitted queues at filling stations while summoning top officials to manage the crisis. Parliament passed legislation subsidizing gasoline imports from abroad.

Ukrainian helicopter pilots have, for the first time, described new details of the high-risk mission that helped pave the way for retaking Zmiinyi (Snake) Island in May 2022. The accounts came from pilots of the 11th Separate Army Aviation Brigade "Kherson", according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

This operation marked a turning point in Ukraine's campaign to challenge Russian control of the Black Sea. Zmiinyi (Snake) Island had become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance after Russia's full-scale war, while its liberation helped restore access to key shipping routes and significantly constrained Russia's ability to project military power along Ukraine's southern coast.

Three attempts, one mission

The first landing attempt came in late April 2022. Helicopter crews split into two groups, one to strike the island's defenses, the other to land troops under their cover, but Ukrainian fighter aircraft providing top cover spotted Russian jets approaching, and the operation was called off mid-approach.

"We had certain protocols, certain agreements, for when the operation ends," said Oleksandr, a Mi-24 pilot who flew top cover that day. 

The second attempt followed in early May. Strike aircraft hit the island first, but Russian forces opened fire on the helicopters as they moved to land, and the troops never touched down.

"Landing special forces is one of our usual tasks, but doing it under these conditions was an audacious operation. I'd call it close to impossible," said Oleksii, a Mi-8 pilot who flew on all three attempts.

The Ukrainian military was counting on the element of surprise. But after they had tried once, the Russians knew they were out there, waiting for them. 

The third attempt, on 7 May, succeeded. As the soldiers approached the island, it became visible from about 15 kilometers away. 

"Since it sits on a rise — somewhere around 42 meters above sea level, they could see us better than we could see them. What worked in our favor was sheer nerve," recalled Leonid, another Mi-8 pilot involved in the operation.

40 kilometers of open water

To reach the island, the helicopters had to cross open sea with no coastline in sight, a setting that disoriented even experienced crews, especially at the near-zero altitudes they flew to avoid detection.

Artem, an Mi-8 pilot who ferried troops to the island, explained that flying over water is considered particularly challenging because the lack of coastal reference points makes navigation difficult, while a calm sea further increases the risk of spatial disorientation.

He recalled that the shortest distance from the mainland to Zmiinyi (Snake) Island was about 40 kilometers and joked with the senior navigator that it seemed a long way, only to be told there was no way to bring the island any closer.

Dark humor helped ease the tension among the crews before the mission. Oleksandr recalled that one of the pilots from Poltava, Maksym, was known for his dark sense of humor, which helped lighten the mood as the crews prepared for the high-risk operation. 

"So, Sanya, ready to go for a swim in the Black Sea?" asked Maksym. 

The water below them was no warmer than four degrees Celsius at the time of the operation. While some crews had previously trained for low-altitude flights over land during combat operations, flying at such low altitude over open water was an entirely new experience.

Leonid recalled that one of the lead pilots said he could feel a rhythmic tapping, which turned out to be the helicopter's front landing gear striking the sea surface. The helicopters were flying so low that the operation was both physically uncomfortable and highly demanding, requiring high speed and constant maneuvering.

What greeted them on island

By the time helicopters carrying special forces approached on 7 May, Ukrainian Bayraktar TB2 drones and tactical aircraft had already struck the island's defenses.

"Everything was already wrecked," Leonid said.

As the helicopters approached the island, they encountered smoke, ongoing small-arms fire, and heavy resistance. Leonid recalled that the crews were unable to land on their first approach because they came under Russian fire.

Guided by Mi-24 attack helicopters providing cover, they made a second attempt and successfully landed the special forces despite continued Russian fire and nearby explosions. He said the landing took only moments and noted that the crew was fortunate a fragmentation grenade did not detonate above the helicopter's rotor blades.

The landing zones had been mined in advance.

Artem explained that the crews first fired rockets at the designated landing areas in an attempt to detonate or disable the mines before the helicopters touched down.

One crew, however, was forced to land on a site that had not been cleared after another helicopter occupied the planned landing zone. He described it as remarkable that none of the mines exploded, adding that combat engineers later confirmed the entire area had indeed been mined.

Human cost

The lead crew during the 7 May assault, pilot Andrii Horetskyi and navigator Yevhen Halytskyi, was the first to join the group of helicopters that struck the island and provided cover for the landing operation. Both men were later killed while defending Ukraine.

Artem, who had known Horetskyi for more than two decades, recalled that they had trained together and eventually served in the same unit. He described Horetskyi as an intelligent and highly professional officer who was deeply committed to improving both his unit and Ukraine's Army Aviation.

Crewmates remembered Halytskyi as the person who helped maintain morale during preparations, reassuring others that everything would be fine and encouraging them despite the risks they faced.

A separate rescue crew, flying an Mi-14 on standby near the coast in case of an emergency, was shot down by a Russian fighter while in a holding pattern during the operation.

The crew included Mykhailo Zaremba, a pilot who had refused to defect during Russia's 2014 occupation of Crimea and continued serving Ukraine afterward. Only one rescuer aboard survived; Ukrainian border guards found him near the crash site, and comrades from the 11th Brigade evacuated him.

What island's liberation opened

Russian forces abandoned Zmiinyi (Snake) Island on 30 June 2022 after sustained Ukrainian missile and artillery strikes, ending a 126-day occupation. The withdrawal reopened the Bystre channel shipping route linking the Black Sea to the Danube, unblocking Ukrainian river ports and restoring maritime trade, including agricultural exports.

It also curtailed Russian naval dominance in the northwestern Black Sea and reduced the threat of an amphibious landing against Odesa and Mykolaiv oblasts.

The numbers are impressive. But two days in Gdańsk—25 and 26 June—revealed developments that matter more than any single agreement. The conference showed how European thinking about Ukraine is changing from postwar reconstruction to wartime resilience, from humanitarian support to strategic investment. 

It also exposed the distance that still separates political declarations from the scale of action Ukraine needs.

With Russia showing no sign of halting its invasion, the speed at which Ukraine rebuilds its economy, energy grid, and arms industry has become inseparable from its ability to keep fighting.

Recovery during war

The most important shift from previous Ukraine Recovery Conferences is not in the numbers but in the logic. Partners have stopped talking about recovery as something that begins after. Alongside the first €3.2 billion tranche, the President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced a separate €6 billion tranche specifically for drone production.

That is no longer humanitarian support, or even "reconstruction" in the classical sense — it is wartime capability funding, operating under the banner of a recovery conference.

At the closing press conference, Ukraine's Economy Minister Oleksii Soboliev called the conference "the most practical in history." Not the most generous — the most practical. That is effectively an acknowledgment that since Lugano 2022, the format has traveled from a declarative forum to a transactional platform.

But "practical" has its limits. One topic quietly circulating in the margins was a certain fatigue around forums about Ukraine's future reconstruction. Investors show up. Agreements get signed.

Actual projects on the ground move considerably slower than signing ceremonies.

One example of success: a factory in the Bila Tserkva Industrial Park, built by an Italian investor within a year of the Rome conference. One factory in a year is not the scale Ukraine needs.

Defense joins the agenda

Von der Leyen announced in Gdańsk the expansion of defense cooperation between the EU and Ukraine in the field of drones. Defense technology has formally entered the reconstruction discourse. Defense Day, running in parallel, focused on concrete mechanisms — joint ventures, investment pipelines, and legal frameworks for integrating Ukrainian defense tech into allied supply chains.

But a gap remains between what was discussed at Defense Day and what filled the main panels. The defense sector was more prominently represented this year, yet prominence is not the same as priority. Of the roughly €10 billion in signed agreements, the bulk falls on energy, infrastructure, and financial instruments. The defense industry got its own side event, but not its own line in the final communiqué.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Ukraine produced around 4 million drones in 2025 and is on track for 5 to 6 million in 2026 — Kyiv's own Defense Ministry targets 7 million. The obstacle to scaling is not engineers or ideas; it is capital, certification, and the absence of integration into EU and NATO procurement ecosystems. Gdańsk mapped those obstacles. It did not remove them.

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Europe opens the door — slightly

On 15 June, ten days before the conference opened, the EU and Ukraine opened negotiations on the first "Fundamentals" cluster, covering the rule of law, fundamental rights, and democratic institutions.

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said that the process is only the first step on a long journey: to join, Ukraine must meet a string of criteria on the rule of law, anti-corruption, and the alignment of its legislation with European standards.

He noted the process grows more complex every year as the EU's legislative framework expands, and cited Poland — which spent about seven years in technical accession talks before becoming a full member. That was unlikely to surprise anyone. But it matters that it was said out loud, and not only in the corridors.

That slots in directly under the "Europe opens the door — slightly" subhead, ahead of the Polish-Ukrainian agreements paragraph. Nothing else in the report changes.

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The diplomatic crisis between Poland and Ukraine had no significant effect on concrete outcomes: 15 of the 160 agreements were Ukrainian-Polish government-to-government deals, including cooperation between state-owned companies and credit agencies. Business separated itself from the presidential scandal. That is good news.

But Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko was not invited to the EU-member Eastern Flank summit, which took place in parallel with the conference. It is hard to imagine such a pointed exclusion had President Zelenskyy come to Gdańsk in person. The list of confirmed bilateral meetings she held over two days was limited to counterparts from the Czech Republic, Finland, Estonia, and the host, Donald Tusk. The president of Romania and the prime minister of Sweden flew into Gdańsk the same day — for the Eastern Flank summit, not for URC.

Diplomacy matters

Partners showed respect, but made clear that the level of representation affects the depth of discussions. That is not a footnote. At a conference where the weight of a voice is measured by who stands behind it, Ukraine arrived with its second-in-command.

Yulia Svyrydenko described the conference as a success that produced tangible results for Ukraine. But Zelenskyy framed Nawrocki's decision as domestic electoral maneuvering and said the Polish president had sought to derail the conference. If so, Nawrocki partly succeeded.

He did not cancel Gdańsk — but he changed its weight.

Without Zelenskyy, the conference remained a prime ministers' forum at a moment when Ukraine needed its head of state present not for protocol, but to sit at the tables where decisions on security guarantees and the pace of EU integration are actually made.

Two things are beyond dispute. First, European support for Ukraine is holding and, despite everything, growing. The conversation has shifted from humanitarian aid to strategic investment in a country at war. That shift is real.

Second, the distance between what was declared and what is sufficient remains large. Ukraine's external financing needs for 2026 stand at around $52 billion. Gdańsk closed part of that gap, not all of it. The defense industry received recognition, but not systematic integration into allied supply chains. EU accession moved, but the first cluster is not membership. And the largest continental donor's call to "freeze the front" sits uneasily at a conference dedicated to rebuilding a country where roughly 200 combat engagements occur every day.

Ukraine has brought home 160 military personnel from Russian captivity in a new prisoner exchange coordinated by the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War.

The swap, carried out on orders from the President of Ukraine, is the 76th exchange since the start of the full-scale invasion. All those released had been held in Russian captivity since 2022.

“We remember everyone who is in captivity. We check every name. We must bring everyone back – both military and civilians.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, stressing that Ukraine continues systematic efforts to secure the release of all detainees.

Released service members from across Ukraine’s armed formations

Officials said the freed Ukrainians include members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the National Guard, the State Border Guard Service, the State Special Transport Service, and other formations. They fought across key frontlines, including Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Zaporizhzhia, Sumy, and Kyiv regions.

Among those released are 115 defenders of Mariupol, including personnel who took part in the defense of the city and Azovstal. The group includes both soldiers and sergeants, as well as 58 officers.

The youngest freed serviceman is 26 years old, while the oldest is 66. All released personnel will undergo medical examinations, receive treatment, financial and documentary support, and rehabilitation after prolonged captivity.

Ongoing exchange efforts with international mediation

Ukrainian officials said a total of 9,606 Ukrainian military personnel and civilians have now been returned through prisoner exchanges since the start of the coordination effort.

The Coordination Headquarters thanked the United States and the United Arab Emirates for their mediation role, as well as all Ukrainian institutions involved in securing the exchange.

Work continues to secure the release of all Ukrainians still held in Russian captivity.

Signal relays in Belarus that helped Russia steer Shahed drones into Ukraine have stopped working. The equipment went dark on 22 June, days after Kyiv gave Belarusian ruler Aliaksandr Lukashenka a week to remove it, though it is unclear whether it was dismantled or simply switched off, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told journalists, per UNIAN. 

The relays extend Russia's reach. Repeaters placed on Belarusian towers and rooftops boosted the control signal for Shaheds flying the northern route, letting them hit targets across Kyiv, Rivne, and Volyn oblasts that Russia struggles to reach from its own soil.

Some strikes on Ukrainian energy and railway sites would not have been possible without that help, Zelenskyy has said. Ukraine exposed and dismantled one such network in February, yet Russia kept adapting.

Relays went dark on 22 June

Zelenskyy said the equipment fell silent this week.

"Whether they dismantled them or not, I honestly do not know yet. But we are working on it, I am watching closely, and getting daily reports. The fact is the relays are not working today," he said.

He stopped short of claiming credit or naming a cause.

Kyiv set deadline first

The silence followed an ultimatum. On 19 June, Zelenskyy gave Lukashenka one week to strip the Russian repeaters from Belarusian border towers and warned that Ukraine would act if Belarus did not.

The relays went quiet on 22 June, before the week was up. Lukashenka had apologized to Zelenskyy earlier in June and pledged Belarus would stay out of the war, though Kyiv treats the country-level threat as unresolved.

Russia keeps shifting tactics

Even without the towers, Russia has other ways to guide its drones along the border. It has drifted signal-relay balloons from Belarus into Ukrainian airspace and fitted Shaheds with SIM cards that latch onto Belarusian, Polish, and Romanian networks when Ukraine blocks its own.

Russian forces are storming Ukrainian border-guard positions in the northeast almost every day, and Ukraine's border guards keep throwing them back, according to Ukraine's State Border Guard Service. The push centers on the Kharkiv frontier, where Russia leans on drones, artillery, and warplanes but cannot move the line. Its infantry is taking heavy losses for nothing.

Russia attacks one Kharkiv village almost daily

The near-daily assaults run toward Vovchanski Khutory, a settlement in northeastern Ukraine near the Russian border. Russian infantry tries to seize the positions there nearly every day, said Andrii Demchenko, spokesman for the State Border Guard Service. The border units hold, and the attackers gain nothing. Demchenko laid it out in a national TV broadcast, Ukrinform reported.

"If we talk about attempts to advance with infantry groups, then recently I can point to the Kharkiv Oblast direction, in particular toward the settlement of Vovchanski Khutory. Practically every day in recent days the enemy keeps trying to storm the positions held by border units, but, fortunately, the enemy cannot succeed and instead suffers heavy losses, including occupiers taken prisoner," Demchenko said.

Ukrainian defenders have repelled these waves before. Russia switched to small infantry groups around Vovchansk after drones turned its armor into easy targets.

The shelling of Ukraine's border areas in Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv oblasts does not stop, Demchenko said. Russia relies mostly on drones, and also uses artillery and aviation. 

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Ukraine built the ground drone playbook. Russia copied it. Now Ukraine is destroying the copies near Vovchansk

The push spreads to Kupiansk and Pokrovsk

Russia has also stepped up its infantry assaults on the Kupiansk direction, Demchenko said. Russian assault groups keep hitting Ukrainian defensive lines on the Pokrovsk direction as well.

Earlier, Russia scaled back the activity of its sabotage-and-reconnaissance groups along the Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv border, the same service reported.

DeepState assesses that Russia would need about two years to seize the entire Donetsk Oblast. OSINT project's co-founder Roman Pohorilyi estimates that Russian forces would suffer "a colossal number of losses" to achieve it at the current pace of advance, in a comment to LIGA.net. 

The assessment quantifies the gap between Russia's diplomatic demands and its military capacity. Moscow has used US-mediated talks to push for territorial concessions it cannot win on the battlefield, while Pohorilyi's two-year estimate roughly aligns with NATO's February 2026 view that Ukraine's Donbas front would not collapse for at least 18 months.

"At the current pace, we estimate that capturing the Kramatorsk-Sloviansk agglomeration and the rest of Donetsk Oblast would take Russia approximately two years, with a colossal number of losses," Pohorilyi believes. 

Russia demands what it cannot militarily take

Russia regularly demands that Ukraine cede Donbas as part of negotiations to end the Russo-Ukrainian war. The DeepState assessment puts the actual military cost of fulfilling that demand at roughly two more years of attritional warfare.

The figure is itself "an answer to the question of whether we should give up our territory just like that," Pohorilyi said. 

The Institute for the Study of War concluded in May 2026 that Russia's "exaggerated territorial ambitions and aggressive territorial demands run completely counter to battlefield reality," and that the experts could no longer forecast when Russia might seize the rest of Donetsk Oblast, or whether it can at all.

Russian forces first infiltrated Kostiantynivka, the southernmost city of Ukraine's Fortress Belt, in October 2025 and produced no meaningful battlefield progress in the six months that followed.

NATO and DeepState assessments converge

A NATO official told LIGA.net in February 2026 that the alliance does not expect a collapse of the Ukrainian Donbas front for at least the following 18 months. 

Pohorilyi told LIGA.net he agrees that "Russians won't have it so easily," adding that the timeline may take perhaps a bit more time than NATO said. 

ISW assessed on 10 June 2026 that Russian forces remain unlikely to seize Ukraine's Fortress Belt, the 50-kilometer chain of fortified cities from Sloviansk through Kramatorsk to Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka, reinforced since 2014 — in 2026, though they will likely make tactical gains at high cost. 

Sport keeps quietly letting Russia and Belarus back in, and the officials who take those decisions seldom explain why out loud. Janek Mäggi is an exception. The president of the World Draughts Federation (FMJD)—whose board has just cleared Belarusian players to return from 1 July—lays out the case plainly: the sport has lost half of its elite, the standard has dropped sharply, and a federation this small cannot run a foreign policy of its own.

His federation is one of many. Four years into Russia’s full-scale war, international bodies are easing Russian and Belarusian athletes back through a now-familiar route.

It is not a public reversal of sanctions but a “neutral athlete” pathway—competing without flag or anthem—that widens by degrees until the exclusion has all but ended. Tennis never removed them at all. Judo, aquatics, gymnastics, equestrian sport, several winter sports, and ice hockey have settled into versions of the same arrangement.

The argument has narrowed as it has spread. In 2022, the question was whether Russian athletes belonged in world sport while their state invaded a neighbor. By 2026, many governing bodies have swapped it for a smaller one: on what terms should they be allowed back?

Euromaidan Press has reported the athletes’ side of that argument—Ukrainian players who refuse the handshake, who read out overnight casualty counts before walking on court, who say that playing as though nothing is happening is itself a political act. This interview is the other chair at the table.

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Euromaidan Press spoke with Mäggi on 8 June 2026—days before the FMJD board voted unanimously to readmit Belarusian players, both youth and adults, from 1 July under neutral status, without flag or anthem. That was the cautious route Mäggi forecasts below: short of the full return the IOC recommended on 7 May, and with no decision on Russia.

Peeter Helme: Various world sports federations have started letting Russia, and Belarus too, back into their ranks to compete under their own flag. Can you describe what the reasons are—and, if it isn’t a secret, whether you in the Draughts Federation are discussing this, and what the arguments are?

Janek Mäggi: It is actually very simple. The overwhelming share of top athletes are Russian and Belarusian—and not only in draughts, which has some 200 million players worldwide, or chess, with around 600 million. Both rank among the world’s ten largest sports by participation, and the same pattern is taken for granted almost everywhere.

There are 125 sports federations recognized by the International Olympic Committee, and in many of them, the very best players have come from these two countries.

In draughts this is completely the case—essentially half the world has been removed. The sport has two, really three, core disciplines: checkers, played by about 100 million people; international draughts, about 40 million; and Russian draughts, around 50 million. Add Brazilian draughts and a few smaller variants, perhaps 10 million more.

Take last year’s World Championship in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Nine of the 12 finalists were Dutch, three-quarters of the final. That is completely abnormal; it looked like a Dutch national championship.

With the Russians and Belarusians gone, a great many strong players were simply not there, and chance had more room. So, point one: over these four years, the level of tournaments has dropped sharply. That is a very big problem.

The second thing that has happened is alarming: the standard among young players has fallen. The Russians, of course, immediately poured their energy into their own international body—the International Draughts Federation (IDF)—and many countries are in it. The Western draughts world we imagine as the whole universe is, in fact, very small.

Compare it with Africa: the European Union fits into the continent more than seven times over, the population is far larger, and the standard of play is high there too. Their young players keep developing in their own environment, undisturbed.

And the Russian grandmasters? They all work in China now—every one of them, because the Chinese pay enormous salaries. China alone has 542,000 draughts players competing in title events, and those are only the ones in title tournaments.

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Sport is letting Russia back in. This Ukrainian tennis player says no.

Helme: The Ukrainian athletes make a different argument—that this is not about the standard of play, but about competing alongside people representing a state that is waging war on Ukraine. What do you say to that?

Mäggi: On the players themselves: they are certainly not warmongers—at least in draughts; I do not know other sports as closely. In chess, it is the same story, and I sit on the International Mind Sports Association too. They really are not.

Most of them are close friends of mine—friends of 30 years. They are exactly like you: they sit down, we play, we talk. Some views differ, and there is the odd madman, but a great many genuinely good players have now been shut out.

On 7 May, the International Olympic Committee decided that Belarus, for one, should be readmitted. The underlying reason is the one I described, but the important part was the wording: Belarus has met all of the IOC’s requirements, and Russia has not. So between the two, there is, by now, quite a large difference.

There is also a contradiction that the sports world cannot resolve. Some countries argue that the United States should be barred from every competition for attacking Iran, and that any tournament with Israeli participants should be banned outright—and that, measured against them, Belarus is a very peaceful country.

Helme: You see a clear difference between Russia and Belarus. But why does that judgment fall to the IOC—why shouldn’t, for example, the draughts federation set its own line?

Mäggi: What guides a world federation? Firm principles. We want to be part of the international sports community, and that is the key point: we do not run an independent foreign policy. We cannot.

We are about 10 middle-aged people—some Black, some women, everyone represented—who decide what line to take. Setting our own geopolitics is simply out of the question; we follow the directions that come from the IOC.

Unfortunately, the IOC’s core policy is decided by the big powers. So I cannot say that everything they agree on is black-and-white good. I cannot say that at all.

Helme: So, where does that leave draughts right now?

Mäggi: In draughts, the position now is this: we have Belarus’s application to return—fully and immediately, as the IOC put it—and the Russians’ application for their juniors to play at once. We discuss it next Friday [12 June, when the board voted to readmit Belarus—EP]. I can guess the outcome, but I will not speculate before it is decided.

I will say this much: some easing toward Belarus will certainly come, though I am not sure it will be as fast as the IOC recommends. And there is a further problem—whether federations should weigh states’ decisions at all.

Take the European Championships in Tallinn in August. We may clear young Belarusians to play, but whether Estonia gives them visas and they actually turn up is a separate question.

We cannot factor in national politics—that is their problem to solve, not ours, because there are about 200 countries in the world. As for the Russians, while the war continues, I do not see all 125 federations cheerfully letting them back. But I think the end of the war is near, and if it comes, the Russians will also have a fast, wide-open path to return to most sports, for the reasons I have given.

This interview is part of Euromaidan Press’s series on how international sport is negotiating sanctions and Russia’s war on Ukraine.

A French factory that builds drones for Ukraine became the target of a sabotage attempt and a suspected spying operation in early June, according to Le Parisien. French investigators treat foreign interference, possibly Russian, as their leading explanation. The case lengthens a list of European states where plants arming Kyiv have come under attack.

Since Russia's all-out invasion in 2022, France has supplied Ukraine with SCALP cruise missiles, Caesar howitzers, AMX-10has RC armored vehicles, and AASM guided bombs. In 2024, Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced new kamikaze drones for Kyiv. In 2025, Franceinfo reported that carmaker Renault would open drone production inside Ukraine, planned tens to hundreds of kilometers from the front.

A firebombing that fizzled

Le Parisien reported that in early June, attackers hurled Molotov cocktails at the Delair plant in Labège, near Toulouse in southwestern France. The incendiary mixture never caught fire, so the site escaped almost any damage. Surveillance cameras still captured several people taking part. Prosecutors in Toulouse opened a criminal case for destroying property by means dangerous to people.

A Belarusian arrested filming a prototype

Three days later, police detained a Belarusian national near the same plant. He was filming a drone prototype, prosecutors said, and officers found "advanced equipment" on him. He had been spotted near the site several times before. He allegedly sent the footage to a contact in Russia, and France arrested him on suspicion of espionage. Whether the firebombing and the arrest are connected stays unclear. The arrested man is 48 and has been living in Spain.

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French security services see an outside operation, possibly Russian, as the leading theory. Only Moscow gains from choking off the weapons reaching Ukraine. Le Parisien has tracked how Russian interference, from jammed satellite signals to disrupted aircraft, keeps straining Europe.

A pattern across Europe

Espionage and sabotage are rising across EU countries that support Ukraine. Among the latest cases were these:

• In March 2026, arsonists struck a Czech plant in Pardubice that made drones and thermal sights for Ukraine, and Czech intelligence asked whether Russia hid behind a pro-Palestinian front-linked attackers.
• In January, Lithuania charged six people over a GRU-directed attempted arson on a factory supplying Ukraine's forces.
• Last autumn, Latvia caught a Russian-linked group filming sensitive sites and sending the images to Russia.

Moldova’s Information and Security Service (SIS) says Russian special services are mass-collecting personal data of Moldovan citizens for use in cross-border fraud operations, according to a statement cited by Noi.md.

The agency warned the activity is coordinated and part of broader hybrid pressure tactics that Moldova has repeatedly linked to Russian influence operations in recent years, particularly since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Moldova has regularly reported exposure to hybrid threats including disinformation campaigns, cyber activity, and attempts to destabilise domestic politics. Authorities have previously accused Moscow-linked networks of exploiting political divisions and using criminal channels to exert influence inside the country.

Large-scale personal data pools used in fraud networks

SIS said the data collection involves multiple sources, including illegally traded databases on the dark web and unauthorized access to private servers. It also referenced data linked to the “Șor” criminal network, which allegedly contains information on around 145,000 citizens.

According to the agency, the datasets include names, phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, and copies of identity documents.

SIS said this information is later passed to transnational organized crime groups, which use it in financial fraud schemes, including bank card theft and other online scams.

Officials described the system as a structured pipeline from data collection to exploitation rather than isolated incidents.

Hybrid pressure and long-running fraud risks

The agency said the activity should be viewed in the context of sustained hybrid pressure on Moldova, where cybersecurity incidents, political influence operations, and financial scams often overlap.

Moldova’s security institutions have previously warned that criminal fraud networks and influence operations can intersect, using the same datasets, communication channels, and recruitment pools.

SIS said the goal of these coordinated actions is to undermine public trust and create a sense of insecurity in society.

Rising fraud cases and public warnings

Authorities urged citizens not to share personal data with unknown callers or unverified companies offering fast investment returns, and not to disclose passwords or security codes over the phone.

Moldovan police continue to report daily cases of phone and online fraud, with victims losing significant sums of money. On 15 June alone, authorities registered 22 cases, with total losses exceeding one million lei ($57,000 USD), according to figures cited by Noi.md.

One of the most serious recent cases involved a 63-year-old woman in Ribnita who reportedly lost more than 500,000 lei ($28,600 USD) in a scam.

Officials say investigations and public warnings are ongoing as fraud networks continue to evolve.