Exclusives

Some Ukrainian bomber drones aren’t carrying bombs anymore. They’re carrying robots.. Roads can be treacherous for Ukraine's explosive unmanned ground vehicles. So heavy bomber drones are now airlifting them into action.

Ukraine shut a quarter of Russia’s grain exports—the world’s wheat money now flows to Russia’s competitors. Ukraine’s Azov campaign built a paradox: the world pays more for wheat because Russia cannot ship it—and the windfall flows to Russia’s competitors.

Russia offers farmers boiler fuel for tractors—Ukraine’s strikes wiped out clean diesel. Russia’s Agriculture Ministry is offering farms fuel 90 times dirtier than the diesel they bought last year—fuel that halves an engine’s life.

Ukraine’s army chief broke his silence—an apology, a warning on soldiers’ pay, and one small number. The army chief apologized to Fedorov—and revealed only 2,000 soldiers signed the new contracts.

Ukraine’s protesters set a 24 July deadline as Zelenskyy weighs replacing his army chief. Organizers gave the government four days before nightly rallies begin.

Why Russia is importing gasoline made from its own oil. To keep its pumps supplied, Moscow has written India’s gasoline price into its own tax code.

Military

Breaking: Zelenskyy dismisses Ukraine's commander-in-chief after week of political turmoil Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Mykhailo Drapatyi will become Ukraine's new commander-in-chief, replacing Oleksandr Syrskyi after a week of political turmoil, military consultations, and nationwide protests.

Russian MiG-29 jet and the Pantsir air defense meant to protect it both hit in Ukrainian strike on Kursk airfield Ukraine's General Staff said Ukrainian forces also hit a maritime surveillance radar, logistics and ammunition depots, and several Russian drone control posts across occupied Ukraine and Russia.

Ukraine's most feared kamikaze drone just showed up at UK arms fair—carrying missiles instead of being one The Liutyi flies one way into Russian refineries. This version comes back. Same airframe, opposite mission.

Whatever came down on Lipetsk overnight, it started with a missile warning and ended in flames by the steel mill Local Telegram channels had spread the missile-danger announcement hours before residents began filming blasts over the city.

Occupation official told Putin the Crimea highway is drone-proof—Russia's own milbloggers refuted him within hours One pro-war channel admitted traffic collapsed because drivers fear Ukrainian drones, not because Russian air defenses got better.

Everything that hits target gets used: Ukraine just proved 1940s Swedish weapon can kill modern jet-powered drone Ukraine used Bofors L70 anti-aircraft guns for this operation.

Ukraine's new combat robot is silent, fits in minivan, and carries MK19 grenade launcher Ukraine codified the "Zmii Mini Strike," a recon-strike ground robot with a silent electric motor.

Drones found the FSB where it felt safest—a seaside resort deep in occupied Kherson Oblast The SBU's Alpha unit's strike set off a large blaze at a base ringed by checkpoints, guards and bunkers.

The Ukrainian combat divers who blew up a Russian bomber just built their own sea drone Ukraine's National Guard unveiled a naval drone designed by one of its own frontline units, reflecting a growing trend of soldiers building the weapons they fight with.

Russia keeps hitting Ukraine's couriers—so Ukraine went after Russia's Amazon: oil depot and warehouses hit near Moscow Drones struck logistics sites and an oil depot in Moscow Oblast's Sheremetyevo and Podolsk, days after Russian missiles battered Ukraine's Nova Poshta postal network.

Ten dead as Russia strikes a Turkish-owned bulk carrier off Odesa Rescuers pulled eight of the 18 people aboard from the burning ship overnight; the pilot brought on to steer it out was among the dead.

Ukrainian regiment that raised flag in Kostiantynivka says it's aware of reports that its soldiers were captured there These are the same troops who filmed a flag-raising after clearing the center.

Intelligence and technology

Hidden cameras in trees to guide Russian strikes: suspected FSB agent detained in Kharkiv Oblast Ukraine's Security Service says the suspect allegedly installed concealed cameras near military sites to help Russia monitor Ukrainian positions and direct missile, bomb, and drone attacks.

"Small service can cost life imprisonment": Ukraine warns against Russian Shahed-recording scheme Russia is recruiting Ukrainian traitors through social media to record FM signals broadcast by Shahed drones.

International

Oil exports from Europe's second-largest external supplier thrown into crisis by Black Sea tanker attacks Kazakhstan's primary Black Sea export route has been disrupted by recent tanker attacks, according to Bloomberg, threatening crude supplies from one of Europe's largest external oil suppliers.

Secret German-Russian meeting on Ukraine war took place in Baku without authorities' knowledge, Aliyev says Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev confirmed reports of undisclosed talks in Baku between former German and Russian officials on Russia's war against Ukraine, while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz denied any government involvement, Bloomberg reports.

Britain's new PM Andy Burnham is opening with calls to Trump and Zelenskyy His first foreign calls go to Zelenskyy and Trump, with UK support for Ukraine "unwavering."

60-year-old Pole stood up for Ukrainian teenager on tram in Poznań. Three men beat him for it They turned on him and beat him so badly he suffered memory loss.

Humanitarian and social impact

First the pumps, then the harvest, now the commute—Russia's fuel shortage keeps finding new victims Public transport fares climb in 25 Russian regions. Fuel-sale restrictions officially cover more than 40 regions out of 83.

Russian strike on Kyiv Oblast destroyed $2.6 million in HIV supplies serving 300,000 people This year's needs are covered. Next year's stock is gone.

"Policy of ethnocide": Ukraine says Russia has settled 300,000 Russians in occupied Crimea, replacing Ukrainians driven out Russia is resettling its citizens into occupied Ukraine to replace the population.

Political and legal developments

Russia jails two more of its own warbloggers days apart—one for extortion, one for "justifying terrorism" Both had cheered the invasion for years, and both had recently started blaming Russia's leadership for a war they say is going wrong.

Read our previous daily review here.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced on 21 July that Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi will become Ukraine's next commander-in-chief, replacing Oleksandr Syrskyi in the most significant shake-up of the country's military leadership since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion.

Syrskyi's replacement follows a week of upheaval that began with Zelenskyy's dismissal of the popular reformist Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. The move exposed deep divisions over military reform and battlefield strategy, with Fedorov publicly criticizing Syrskyi's leadership and the decision prompting several days of protests across Ukraine.

Zelenskyy said the decision followed consultations with Drapatyi, SBU special operations commander Yevhen Khmara, and presidential office deputy head Pavlo Palisa on restructuring the General Staff. 

He thanked Syrskyi for leading Ukraine's defense during the Battle of Kyiv, the 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive, and the Kursk operation, adding that he, Syrskyi, and Chief of the General Staff Andrii Hnatov had also discussed the transition and their future roles.

"Tomorrow we will formalize all the decisions," Zelenskyy said in his evening address. "Ukraine must emerge stronger from this situation, and it must become harder for Russia."

Zelenskyy also said he met with Fedorov today and offered him a new role in government focused on bringing together Ukraine’s technological capabilities and supporting their development. The president did not specify the position.

Drapatyi thanks Zelenskyy and Syrskyi

Drapatyi thanked Zelenskyy for his trust and Ukraine’s Defense Minister for their support, saying that serving Ukraine during the war of independence carries “absolute responsibility.”

He also thanked Syrskyi for his work in strengthening the Armed Forces, saying he had grown professionally under Syrskyi’s leadership.

“I will work responsibly, with focus, and with respect for the people who are defending our state today,” Drapatyi wrote on Facebook.

Fedorov welcomes Drapatyi’s appointment

Former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov welcomed Drapatyi’s appointment, calling it “new air and new hope” in Ukraine’s fight for independence and justice.

Fedorov said the new military leadership would need to meet high expectations with a clear vision for ending the war, a strong team, and actions focused on preserving soldiers’ lives, expanding battlefield robotics, carrying out asymmetric strikes, and weakening Russia’s economy.

He also thanked Syrskyi for his role in defending Kyiv Oblast, the Kharkiv counteroffensive, and other major battles, calling them an important part of Ukraine’s history. At the same time, Fedorov said Ukraine needed to move faster and correct past mistakes.

A week of turmoil

Syrskyi's dismissal comes less than a week after Zelenskyy removed Fedorov in the most significant government reshuffle since the start of the full-scale war.

The move quickly evolved into a public confrontation over the future direction of Ukraine's military. Zelenskyy acknowledged that relations between the Defense Ministry and the Armed Forces' leadership had broken down, saying he ultimately had to choose between Fedorov and Syrskyi because the two could no longer work together effectively.

Fedorov accused Syrskyi of blocking reforms

Following his dismissal, Fedorov publicly confirmed he had been in conflict with Syrskyi, accusing the commander-in-chief of obstructing military reform and resisting changes needed to adapt Ukraine's armed forces to modern, drone-centric warfare.

He said initiatives developed by the Defense Ministry were systematically blocked after Zelenskyy decided to keep Syrskyi in command. Fedorov also accused the general of fueling internal divisions rather than focusing on defeating Russia, while stressing that he respected the president's authority as supreme commander.

The former defense minister argued that Ukraine needed fundamental changes to its military leadership to gain an advantage over Russia, framing the dispute as one between reform and the preservation of existing command structures.

At its core, the dispute represented a clash between two visions for Ukraine's military future: a faster transition toward a technology-driven force centered on drones and innovation, and a more traditional command approach focused on established military structures and battlefield experience.

Rare wartime protests spread across Ukraine

Fedorov's dismissal sparked the largest public protests seen in Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion began.

Demonstrations began in Kyiv before spreading to cities including Lviv, Odesa, Dnipro, and others, with protesters demanding Fedorov's reinstatement and Syrskyi's removal. Many argued that replacing the architect of Ukraine's defense technology reforms risked slowing military innovation at a critical stage of the war.

The protests continued across Ukraine on 21 July, with demonstrators again calling for Fedorov's reinstatement and Syrskyi's dismissal. Protesters carried signs reading "Bring Fedorov back" and "Syrskyi out," accusing the military leadership of resisting reform.

Zelenskyy consulted military leaders as pressure mounted

As pressure mounted following Fedorov's dismissal, Zelenskyy launched consultations on the future leadership of Ukraine's Armed Forces.

Over the last several days, the president met with senior military commanders, government officials, and representatives of the defense sector, but did not confirm that the consultations were related to changes in the military's command structure. 

He said the discussions focused on improving coordination, accelerating battlefield innovation, and strengthening Ukraine's ability to respond to Russia's evolving tactics.

The consultations came amid growing public debate over the direction of Ukraine's armed forces, with supporters of Fedorov arguing that the military needed to accelerate reforms and expand its use of emerging technologies, particularly drones and autonomous systems, while others stressed the need for continuity in wartime command.

Just days after landing robots on an enemy shore in the first all-robot amphibious assault, Ukrainian forces flew one into battle. This week, a Russian video circulated depicting a Ukrainian heavy bomber drone airlifting an explosives-laden unmanned ground vehicle into action.

What happened next is unclear. Did the exploding UGV successfully strike its target?

Regardless of the outcome, however, the unmanned air assault is notable. If Ukrainian forces can use an unmanned aerial vehicle to airlift one unmanned ground vehicle, they can do it a second time. And a third. And fourth. So on until these kinds of all-robot operations become routine.

And that's indeed the aim in Kyiv. To make robotic combat operations an everyday occurrence in order to help alleviate a deep and persistent manpower shortage. This spring, recently sacked Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov claimed Ukraine would acquire 25,000 UGVs in just the first six months of 2026.

That's twice as many UGVs as Kyiv bought in all of 2025. The rapid mass acquisition would allow more Ukrainian brigades to shift to robotic resupply missions, removing potentially thousands of precious human logisticians from dangerous roads.

But UGVs perform combat missions, too. Armed with guns, they help counterattack Russian infiltrators and also patrol roads inside the disputed gray zone. In November, one gun-armed UGV belonging to the Ukrainian 5th Assault Brigade, fighting north of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, inadvertently advanced UGV tactics in an accidental encounter with an up-armored Russian MT-LB infantry transport.

The UGV, equipped with thermal night vision and armed with a remotely operated M2 .50-caliber machine gun, was reportedly on a combat trial—crawling around the battlefield at nighttime for testing purposes—when an MT-LB rolled toward it on the same road.

Connected via radio, the UGV operators opened fire, peppering the tracked MT-LB with rounds until the Russian vehicle passed by—and escaped in the opposite direction.

One-way drones

Other Ukrainian UGVs are meant to fight exactly once. They're suicide bombers, hauling payloads of explosives into Russian strongpoints and blowing themselves up. Back in January, the Ukrainian 3rd Assault Brigade's NC-13 robotics unit piled a dozen TM-62 anti-tank mines, each with 7.5 kg of explosives, onto one of its UGVs and carefully steered the robot into a Russian bunker presumably somewhere south of the ruins of Kupiansk in eastern Ukraine's Kharkiv Oblast.

It made a very big boom. As seen in an official video, the NC-13 team broke into cheers when an escorting aerial drone registered the blast. The team had carefully assembled, painted, and deployed the robot apparently over a period of days before maneuvering it 19 km across rough terrain to deliver the explosive payload.

The recent robotic air assault addressed the mobility problem. A 19-km trip is a long trip for a remotely controlled vehicle that's susceptible to enemy radio jamming and prone to getting stuck in potholes. Airlifting a UGV underneath a heavy bomber drone gets the UGV into action faster and with less risk of a loss or accident en route.

A heavy bomber drone could just drop a bomb, of course. But a UGV can do something an aerial bomber can't do: drive straight through the open door of a Russian bunker regardless of how much protection the Russians pile atop the door.

The Ukrainians are finding more and more new ways to get their UGVs into action. On 13 July, the Ukrainian 123rd Territorial Defense Brigade sailed several unmanned surface vessels across the western Black Sea and landed gun-armed unmanned ground vehicles on the Kinburn Spit, at the westernmost edge of the Russian occupation zone in southern Ukraine.

The 123rd Territorial Defense Brigade released a video montage—shot by a USV, a UGV and an escorting UAV—depicting the UGV firing on a Russian installation with its suppressed .50-caliber machine gun.

It was an all-robot amphibious assault. "An impressive feat," RAND analyst Michael Bohnert wrote.

The later robotic airlift was no less impressive.

Explore further

Ukraine put armed robot on Russian-held ground. Naval drone was landing craft

Kazakhstan has been forced to halt crude oil flows to its main Black Sea export terminal after a series of attacks on tankers near Russia's Novorossiysk port disrupted shipping, Bloomberg reported on 21 July, citing people familiar with the matter.

The reported disruption comes as Ukraine has stepped up efforts to target Russia's maritime logistics and energy infrastructure in the Black Sea, while Moscow continues using the region to support its war effort and energy exports.

According to Bloomberg, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) terminal near Novorossiysk stopped accepting pipeline deliveries because tanker operators were unwilling to send vessels to the facility following recent attacks in the Black Sea. It was not immediately clear whether the suspension had already taken effect.

The reported disruption threatens Kazakhstan's oil exports and could force producers to reduce output if pipeline deliveries remain suspended through the end of the week, Bloomberg reported.

Critical export route under pressure

The CPC terminal handles about 80% of Kazakhstan's crude oil exports, making it the country's primary outlet to international markets.

Kazakhstan is Europe's second-largest external oil supplier after Norway, and much of its crude is produced through projects involving international energy companies including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell. 

A prolonged disruption could tighten supplies for European refiners already facing pressure from instability affecting energy shipments through the Persian Gulf, Bloomberg noted.

The CPC press office declined to comment, according to Bloomberg.

Tengizchevroil, Kazakhstan's largest oil producer and a Chevron-led joint venture, said it was monitoring loading operations at the Novorossiysk terminal. In a statement cited by Bloomberg, the company said production and deliveries into the CPC pipeline system "may be adjusted from time to time in response to operational conditions," but declined to comment on specific output levels.

Tanker attacks raise pressure on Russian Black Sea exports

The disruption follows a series of recent attacks on tankers in the Black Sea.

Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the specific attacks cited by Bloomberg. Kyiv has, however, acknowledged responsibility for numerous strikes on vessels supporting Russia's maritime logistics in recent months, including attacks on oil tankers in the Black Sea.

Although the CPC terminal is located on Russia's Black Sea coast, the facility primarily exports Kazakh crude and is not subject to Western sanctions.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev confirmed that former senior German and Russian officials held a secret meeting in Baku earlier this month to discuss ending Russia's war against Ukraine, Bloomberg reported, corroborating earlier media reports about the undisclosed talks.

Speaking alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin on 21 July, Aliyev said the meeting took place in the Azerbaijani capital between 12 and 14 July. He said Azerbaijani authorities had not been aware of the gathering at the time but later confirmed it through flight records.

"Our territory was used for such a meeting without our knowledge," Aliyev told reporters. "I cannot comment on the details, as we were not present at the meeting. However, the flight data allows me to state that a secret meeting did take place in Baku."

Former officials reportedly attended

Bloomberg reported that the unofficial German delegation included Ronald Pofalla, former chief of staff to former Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Matthias Platzeck, the former minister-president of Brandenburg.

The Russian delegation reportedly included Valery Fadeyev, head of Russian President Vladimir Putin's Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, and Viktor Zubkov, a former Russian prime minister who now chairs the board of state-owned energy giant Gazprom.

The reported participants were former or unofficial representatives rather than serving government officials.

Merz says Berlin was not involved

Merz said the German government had no role in the reported discussions.

"I'm not aware of any such meeting," the chancellor said when asked about Aliyev's remarks during the joint press conference.

Aliyev said that if the meeting had been intended to help bring an end to Russia's war against Ukraine, "we can only welcome that," but added that he did not know what had been discussed.

It remains unclear who organized the meeting and who was aware of it.

Ukraine's Defense Forces struck a series of Russian military targets across occupied Ukraine and Russia between 20 July and the night of 21 July, including a fighter jet, an air defense system, radar equipment, logistics depots, and drone command posts, Ukraine's General Staff reported.

The reported strikes were part of a broader effort to reduce Russia's military and economic potential, according to the military.

Airfield in Russia's Kursk Oblast targeted

In a statement, the General Staff said Ukraine's 15th "Black Forest" Artillery Reconnaissance Brigade successfully carried out a strike on Khalino airfield in Russia's Kursk Oblast.

According to the military, the operation damaged a Russian MiG-29 fighter jet and a Pantsir-S1 self-propelled air defense missile and gun system. 

The MiG-29 remains one of Russia's standard tactical fighter aircraft despite its Soviet-era origins. Primarily used to patrol airspace, engage hostile aircraft, and support combat operations, the jet continues to play a significant role in Russia's air campaign against Ukraine.

The Pantsir-S1 is a short-range air defense system designed to protect high-value military assets, including airfields such as Khalino, from aircraft, missiles, and drones.

Khalino airfield, near the city of Kursk, has repeatedly been used by Russian tactical aviation operating near Ukraine's northeastern border and has previously been targeted by Ukrainian long-range strikes.

Radar, depots, and drone control posts hit

The General Staff also reported striking a Bussol-S radar station near Horly in occupied Kherson Oblast. According to the military, the radar detects, tracks, and provides targeting data on maritime targets, supporting Russian coastal surveillance operations.

Ukrainian forces also struck a logistics depot near Davydivske in occupied Donetsk Oblast, an ammunition depot near Kundriuche in occupied Luhansk Oblast, and another logistics warehouse near Popovo-Lezhachi in Russia's Kursk Oblast, the statement said.

In addition, Ukraine reported hitting Russian drone control posts near Komar and the village of Zaporizhzhia in Donetsk Oblast, as well as near Kamianske in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

Ukraine has increasingly targeted Russian airfields, logistics hubs, air defense systems, and drone infrastructure in an effort to disrupt Moscow's ability to sustain operations along the front and launch long-range attacks on Ukrainian cities.

Wheat in Chicago is at a two-year high, and southern Russia is bringing in its best harvest in years—yet Russian farmers are heading into the season earning less, not more.

Ukraine’s drone campaign in the Sea of Azov closed the Kerch Strait to shipping on 10 July, trapping the route that carries a quarter of Russia’s grain and sunflower-oil exports. Export duties and soaring logistics skim what still moves, and the grain piling up in full elevators is crushing prices at home while the world price climbs out of reach.

Russia is now heading for its weakest July wheat exports in nine years.

“Farmers should be receiving payment for half or all of their wheat harvest and putting that money back into circulation. But there is no one to sell to.”

Ural-Don agricultural holding president Alexander Yaroshenko

The weakest July in nine years

Russia may export 1.5 million tons of wheat this July—half its five-year average for the month and the lowest July volume since 2017, the SovEcon analytical center forecast on 20 July, its second cut in a week after analysts had already reduced July estimates by 13–20%, Kommersant reported.

The IKAR agricultural institute expects under two million tons. Both name the same main cause: navigation limits through the Kerch Strait, beyond which a quarter of Russia’s grain and sunflower-oil exports ship, according to SovEcon, with weak demand from Egypt and Türkiye adding pressure.

Russia shut the strait on 10 July after Ukrainian drones struck vessels across the Sea of Azov, including tankers—a closure Moscow imposed on itself because the water had become too dangerous to cross.

Explore further

Russia halts Don-Azov Channel shipping, closes Kerch Strait after Ukrainian tanker strikes

The backlog is already physical: grain exports down the Don River—27% of Russia’s grain exports last season—have stopped entirely, elevators at the Don ports are full, and agreed export contracts are collapsing because cargo cannot ship, industry figures told the Rostov business outlet Gorod N.

“Active trading should be picking up right now. Farmers should be receiving payment for half or all of their wheat harvest and putting that money back into circulation. But there is no one to sell to,” Ural-Don agricultural holding president Alexander Yaroshenko told the outlet.

The price rally Russia cannot collect

September wheat in Chicago gained more than 10% in a week, touching two-year highs, while Paris wheat hit a 17-month high, SovEcon director Andrei Sizov noted. “The market is starting to understand this is not the typical short-lived Black Sea rally,” the Financial Times quoted him as saying—this time, export estimates for both Russia and Ukraine may be cut substantially.

The Ukrainian half of that warning is already happening. Russia struck back at Ukraine’s grain gateways the same week: massed attacks on Chornomorsk on 10–12 July forced Kernel, Ukraine’s largest grain exporter, to halt terminal operations, with about 45,000 tons of wheat and 9,000 tons of sunflower oil lost or damaged—leaving Ukraine’s deep-water grain exports with almost nowhere to go.

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Russia’s port strikes leave Ukraine’s grain with almost nowhere else to go

Both of the Black Sea’s grain suppliers are choked at once—the reason, in Sizov’s reading, is that the market has stopped treating this as a passing rally.

The tension raises world prices, and the money goes to Russia’s competitors. Russian farmers are fenced off from their own rally twice—a floating export duty skims the price above them, and logistics costs climb as grain hunts for other routes. Ruble prices will stay under strong pressure, Sizov wrote on Telegram.

Why rerouting does not save the season

Russia’s deep-water ports beyond the strait can ship 4–4.5 million tons of grain a month—enough for July, but at the season’s peak in August through October, Russia normally ships 5–6.5 million tons a month, Sizov calculates on Telegram.

The industry agrees from the ground: the Black Sea ports cannot physically handle southern Russia’s seasonal volumes, and the railways to them were not built for it, Yaroshenko told Gorod N—while a grain trader told the same outlet that rerouting would jam rail approaches to Novorossiysk for months. The shallow Azov ports are not a convenience; they are the margin between Russia’s export capacity and its harvest.

And this year, the domestic market has more grain than usual to absorb. SovEcon expects the southern crop—grown in exactly the regions that ship through Azov—to rise 17.2% from last year. The best harvest is arriving in the provinces with the most blocked ports.

The long clock

The squeeze works through margins. Falling farm profitability is already cutting sowing—wheat area this year is the lowest since 2014, Forbes reported—and Sizov expects the trend to worsen in 2027.

The market is pricing the decay in real time: Rodnye Polya, once Russia’s largest grain exporter, was sold this month for 11.7 billion rubles ($150 million) to a little-known holding company, and terminal incomes will decline as the grain market’s export potential shrinks, Sizov told Kommersant.

Put together, the mechanism runs in one direction. Blocked ports overfill the domestic market; the surplus crushes the prices farmers live on; falling margins cut next year’s sowing; smaller harvests shrink the exports that made Russia the world’s top wheat supplier. The world, meanwhile, is already paying two-year-high prices to buy its wheat elsewhere—and the longer this runs, the more of Russia’s market share moves to the competitors the rally is enriching.

Russia's fuel crisis has reached the bus stop, with carriers in at least 25 regions raising public transport fares, The Moscow Times reported. Ten more regions have cut routes or reshuffled schedules as Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries starve the market of gasoline and diesel. The squeeze is hitting small carriers on suburban routes hardest.

Intercity fares outrun inflation by 30 points

Russian investigative outlet Vazhnye Istorii counted the fare hikes and route cuts from media reports across 35 regions. Fuel shortages have sent diesel and gasoline prices sharply higher, and spare parts have grown more expensive alongside, driving up carriers' costs.

Explore further

Why Russia is importing gasoline made from its own oil

Across Siberia, the hikes are concrete

In Irkutsk, Siberia, the municipal carrier Irkutskavtotrans raised fares 20% from 1 July, from 37 to 45 rubles ($0.57), while private operators added almost a quarter. The 50-km ride between Irkutsk and Angarsk jumped more than 30%. 

In Altai Krai, the private company Transmagistral lifted its Barnaul–Novoaltaisk fare from 85 to 90 rubles ($1.15). At the current rate, the gasoline prices reached $1.15 a liter, or about $4.35 a gallon, and diesel at $1.17 a liter, roughly $4.45 a gallon.

In Buryatia, rides to Ulan-Ude from remote villages 250–350 km away rose more than 10%. A trip from the village of Isingi now costs 1,700 rubles ($22) instead of 1,500 ($19). 

Explore further

Fires erupt at three Russian oil depots after Ukraine targets fuel supply chain overnight in Stavropol Krai

Half of Russia's refining sits idle

The Moscow Times noted that the crisis now covers practically the whole country. Sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out about 40% of Russia's refining capacity. In the second week of July, gasoline output fell 35% to 75,000–80,000 tons a day, against summer demand of 115,000–120,000 tons.

EA Analytics put July's crude processing at 3.91 million barrels a day, the lowest since 2005. Energy Intelligence gives an even lower estimate of 3.58 million barrels, potentially the weakest figure since 2002, with about half of Russia's refining capacity standing idle. 

Ukraine's An-196 "Liutyi"—the long-range drone behind hundreds of strikes on Russian oil refineries—appeared at the Farnborough International Airshow in the United Kingdom armed with four small air-to-surface missiles, Oboronka reported. The configuration marks a departure from the drone's defining role. Until now, the Liutyi has been a one-way weapon: it flies into its target and is destroyed on impact. Armed with launchable munitions, the same airframe becomes something else—a platform that launches weapons and returns.

What changed on the airframe

The Liutyi is a propeller-driven, satellite-guided drone with a claimed range of about 2,000 km, carrying a 50-to-75 kg warhead and using inertial navigation with satellite correction. In its standard form, it is a flying bomb—Ukraine has used it to hit refineries as deep as 1,700 km inside Russia, near the Urals, and Germany is financing 500 more at roughly $100 million.

Explore further

Liutyi drones strike deep into Russia, hitting Izhevsk military plant about 1,400 km away (video)

The Farnborough version carries four compact air-to-surface missiles under its wings. That transforms the payload logic entirely: instead of delivering a single warhead to a single target and ceasing to exist, the drone can engage multiple targets at a distance and preserve its airframe. For a weapon Ukraine builds in volume, reusability multiplies the value of every unit produced.

Why show it at Farnborough

Farnborough is one of the two largest arms and aerospace trade fairs in the world, alongside the Paris Air Show. Displaying an armed, reusable Liutyi is a commercial statement as much as a military one.

Ukraine's defense industry has spent 2026 moving from wartime improvisation toward export positioning —presenting naval drones, interceptors, and strike systems at international expos in Paris, Kyiv, and now the UK. A drone with a combat record measured in hundreds of deep strikes on Russian territory is, for a foreign buyer, a rare thing: a system proven in the most demanding air-defense environment on earth.

Explosions under an hours-long missile alert ended in a large industrial fire in the Russian city of Lipetsk overnight on 21 July, monitoring channels and Russian officials reported. The blaze rose beside facilities central to Russia's steel output and heat supply, and what exactly came down on the city remains unconfirmed. Lipetsk is about 300 km from Ukraine's northeastern border.

Fire erupts between power plant and steel giant

Lipetsk Oblast had declared missile and drone danger from the previous evening. Residents then reported explosions over the city, followed by a spreading fire. The Russian news Telegram channel Astra wrote that locals described blasts and flames through the night. Later eyewitness footage, published by the channel, showed the aftermath of what residents called a missile attack.

Videos posted by the Ukrainian monitoring Telegram channel Exilenova+ and Astra's OSINT analysis captured a thick smoke column and flashes of explosions. Astra's geolocation work placed the fire between the city's CHPP-2 heat-and-power plant and the Novolipetsk Metallurgical Combine (NLMK). Which facility took the hit remains unknown.

Lipetsk Oblast Governor Igor Artamonov confirmed the fire, putting its area at about 2,500 square meters. He said the blaze broke out at an open site among production facilities on Peredelcheskaya Street. The governor named no weapon behind the fire, and Astra noted the causes were "being established." Artamonov claimed no one died or suffered injuries.

OSINT analysts of the Falcon insight map channel concluded from available footage that a logistics warehouse was burning. The Ukrainian monitoring channel Supernova+ located the fire at a warehouse on Almaznaya Street holding NLMK facilities, near Peredelcheskaya. Other, unconfirmed reports suggested the Indesit appliance plant near CHPP-2 might have caught fire.

Lipetsk CHPP-2 is one of the largest thermal power plants in Russia's Chernozem region. It supplies heat to Lipetsk and several industrial enterprises around the city.

Belgorod loses water, Volgograd hears blasts

• Belgorod—a city between Lipetsk and Ukraine—and its surrounding settlements also came under attack the same night. Monitoring channels said a rain of debris from downed missiles fell over the city and the Belgorod agglomeration. Parts of the city lost water supply, with probable hits on energy infrastructure. 
• In Volgograd, residents reported explosions and sirens under a declared missile danger. No information about any aftermath had emerged by morning.
• A powerful fire broke out the same night in the Vsevolozhsk district of Leningrad Oblast. Regional authorities said a polymer production facility caught fire at the Ladoga industrial park, covering 5,900 square meters. Open data lists the companies Terra-Plast, Miksplast, and the Center of Radiation Technologies at the site.

Russia's Defense Ministry claimed its air defenses and electronic warfare intercepted 209 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions overnight.

Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) said it detained an alleged Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agent accused of installing concealed cameras near military sites in Kharkiv Oblast to help Russia coordinate attacks on Ukrainian positions.

Bordering Russia, Kharkiv Oblast has remained one of Ukraine's most dangerous regions throughout the full-scale war. Communities across the oblast continue to face regular missile, drone, and guided bomb attacks.

According to the SBU, the suspect, an unemployed resident of Chuhuiv district, was recruited by Russia's FSB to identify operational airfields and Ukrainian artillery positions, including multiple-launch rocket systems, in frontline areas of the eastern region.

Hidden cameras in trees allegedly used to guide strikes

Investigators allege the man searched for military locations on foot and, once identifying potential targets, installed hidden cameras in nearby trees. The devices allegedly provided Russian intelligence with remote, real-time video feeds intended to help adjust missile, guided bomb, and drone strikes.

The SBU said its counterintelligence officers uncovered the operation after documenting the suspect installing what the agency described as "video traps" near sites he believed could be used by Ukraine's Defense Forces. He was detained as he prepared for another reconnaissance mission.

During searches, officers seized four smartphones that the SBU says the suspect regularly rotated to maintain covert communications with his alleged FSB handlers and transmit intelligence.

The suspect has been charged with high treason committed under martial law, an offense punishable by life imprisonment with confiscation of property under Ukrainian law. He remains in custody pending trial.

Kharkiv Oblast remains under constant Russian attack

Kharkiv Oblast, which borders Russia, has been a key battleground since the start of Moscow's full-scale invasion. Although Ukrainian forces repelled Russia's attempt to seize Kharkiv city in 2022 and pushed Russian troops back from much of the region, frontline civilian communities continue to face frequent missile, drone, and guided bomb attacks.

Ukraine's security services have repeatedly reported uncovering alleged Russian spy networks tasked with gathering targeting data on military facilities and critical infrastructure. 

The operation was conducted by the SBU's Kharkiv regional office under the procedural supervision of the Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor's Office.

Russia’s Agriculture Ministry has asked every region whether its farms will buy furnace oil—fuel made for boilers and industrial ovens—and diesel up to 90 times dirtier than the standard farms fueled with last year, an official downgrade the ministry turned to as attacks on refineries cut the country’s fuel supply, the Russian business daily Kommersant reported, citing a 17 July letter it obtained.

What 90 times more sulfur does

Euro-5 diesel, the standard Russian farms bought last season, caps sulfur at 0.01%, while the ministry’s letter asks about fuel with up to 0.9% sulfur. The difference is made by hydrotreating units at refineries—the equipment that strips sulfur out of fuel—and Ukraine’s drone campaign has been destroying exactly that.

The ministry is most likely mapping demand for straight-run diesel from mini-refineries or from large plants whose hydrotreating sections have been damaged, one Kommersant source said—statistics no one in Russia had ever collected before.

Furnace oil can run only Soviet-era tractors—for modern imported machines, it is forbidden.

The letter, signed by the ministry’s crop farming department director Andrei Artikulov, gave regional agriculture bodies three days to report which farms want the degraded fuel and in what monthly volumes, according to Kommersant. The Energy Ministry has confirmed the fuel can be produced, the letter says.

The government had already legalized the circulation of Euro-3 gasoline and diesel through the end of 2026—and considered going back to Euro-2, a standard Russia abandoned years ago, the paper’s sources said.

Fine for a Soviet tractor, forbidden for a modern one

What the downgrade does to a machine is not in dispute. Raising sulfur content fivefold cuts an engine’s service life in half, and repairing a modern combine or tractor costs many times more than the fuel savings, Lazarevskoye farm director Kristina Romanovskaya told Kommersant.

Furnace oil, she said, can run only Soviet-era or early-Russian tractors and trucks—for modern imported machines, it is forbidden. The problems are soot and clogged filters, fuel pumps, and injectors, another industry source told the paper, adding that farms that service their own aging fleets “will cope.”

Farmers had already been doing this out of desperation—now it is policy. A week earlier, Rostov Oblast farmer Aleksei Zhdanov described pouring low-grade Euro-3 into his imported tractors—wrecking them at double last year’s price, 130 rubles ($1.66) a liter—because nothing else reached his farm.

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

The shortage behind the letter

Russian refining fell in June to its lowest level in years, according to Kpler data cited by Kommersant, after Ukrainian drones reached all 10 of Russia’s largest refineries in two months.

The stakes run past Russia’s borders: Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter, and analysts have cut its July export forecast by 13–20%, naming diesel restrictions among the causes alongside a late harvest start and shipping limits at the Azov port.

By 20 July, the SovEcon center had cut its estimate again, to the lowest July export volume since 2017, mainly due to navigation restrictions through the Kerch Strait. Russian media describe the cause of the shortage as “unscheduled repairs” at refineries; the repairs follow the strikes.

The rest of the fuel system is improvising too. The government restricted diesel exports from 8 July to keep fuel inside the country, and Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on 15 July that the effect was already visible, Kommersant reported.

Krasnodar Krai’s governor asked Moscow to raise his region’s monthly fuel quota, Rostov Oblast negotiated extra deliveries, and Stavropol appointed a regional fuel operator for small farms.

In occupied Crimea, 86 stations resumed open gasoline sales—rationed by QR codes issued a day in advance, 20 to 40 liters per car, Vechernyaya Moskva reported. In Tyumen, businesspeople are being pitched private mini-filling stations built around single storage tanks, the same outlet said.

Agriculture Minister Oksana Lut acknowledged on 17 July that fuel supply for farmers has “roughnesses on the ground,” Kommersant reported. The ministry’s letter went out the same day.

A Russian strike burned the supplies that keep Ukraine's HIV epidemic under control. The attack on the night of 19 July completely destroyed a contractor warehouse of the Alliance for Public Health in Kyiv Oblast, where medical goods and HIV-prevention supplies were stored, the nongovernmental organization said on Facebook.

The warehouse held syringes, needles, alcohol wipes, condoms, lubricants, and other medical products purchased by the Alliance for more than $2.6 million that serve over 300,000 people a year.

"Russia continues to destroy not only Ukraine's civilian and medical infrastructure, but also the resources on which people's health directly depends," the Alliance said.

June decision saved this year's services

The Alliance's risk-management system is the reason no one has lost services this year. Back in June, the organization carried out an early distribution of stocks across Ukraine's regions, moving supplies out of central storage and into the field ahead of need.

Because of that, all partners of the Alliance and of the Public Health Center are fully supplied with prevention materials through the end of 2026, and there will be no interruption in prevention services, the organization said.

What burned in the warehouse was the reserve intended to cover 2027. Those stocks were completely destroyed, and the Alliance has already informed its international donors of the losses and of the urgent need to restock HIV-prevention supplies for Ukraine's needs next year.

Why supplies matter

Ukraine has one of the largest HIV epidemics in Europe, and its control depends on exactly the unglamorous items the warehouse holds. Sterile syringes and needles are the backbone of harm-reduction programs that stop transmission among people who inject drugs.

In 2025, HIV-positive patients across Ukraine faced a crisis when US-funded treatment programs remained in political limbo. A report published on 13 May highlighted that medication supplies, including for children, are only guaranteed until November, following a funding freeze by the US President Donald Trump administration in January.

Russia's own pro-war military bloggers have rejected official assurance that the main land route to occupied Crimea is protected from Ukrainian drones, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). The pushback followed a Kremlin meeting where the occupation head of a region in southern Ukraine reported the road as fully secured. The dispute concerns an artery Ukraine has spent months hammering.

"Complete control" claimed at Putin's desk

Russian leader Vladimir Putin met Yevgeny Balitsky, the Russian-installed head of occupied Zaporizhzhia Oblast, on 20 July. Balitsky told Putin his forces now held "complete control" of the M-14 road linking Rostov to Crimea, which occupation officials label the R-280. ISW noted the claim likely referred to security against Ukrainian drone strikes. Balitsky also claimed Russian defenses had sharply blunted Ukrainian drone activity over the road and shielded every energy facility from attack.

Russia's war cheerleaders refused to play along

The statements provoked backlash across Russia's ultranationalist information space. One Russian milblogger called Balitsky's claims "incorrect," pointing out that Ukrainian forces regularly strike the M-14. Those strikes keep pushing up what insurers charge to cover the fuel runs into the occupied peninsula, he added. Ukrainian drones also routinely cross the road's airspace while hunting Russian naval assets in the Azov Sea, part of Kyiv's widened middle-range campaign.

A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger conceded that strikes on vehicles along the route have grown rarer recently. His explanation cut against Balitsky's: traffic has collapsed under the constant drone threat, not because Russian air defenses work better.

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Ukraine doubles deep strikes beyond 50 km as “Logistics Lockdown” shifts priority deeper into Russia’s transport nodes and rear logistics chains

ISW observed evidence of at least four Ukrainian strikes along the M-14 between 1 and 20 July. TThey followed weeks of heavy pressure on the same route through May and June. Freight traffic on the route had already fallen by 71% by early June, and Russian authorities closed the road to civilian traffic in May. 

The campaign has forced Russian commanders to divert troops and hardware — drone operators and interceptor drones among them — to keeping the route usable, ISW noted. 

"It is notable that the strike campaign has prompted continued responses from Putin and other Kremlin officials, and that Russian ultranationalists are challenging the official fictitious narrative about the success of Russian efforts to defend against Ukrainian strikes," ISW wrote.

On the fifth straight day of protests demanding his removal, Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi ended his silence—with a rare column apologizing to dismissed defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov and insisting he is fighting Russia, not the ministry—three days before the protesters’ 24 July deadline expires.

The column carries hard facts along with the apology: a month after new military contracts were unveiled, about 2,000 servicemen in a million-strong army have signed them, Syrskyi wrote, and money for soldiers’ pay was redirected to drone purchases, putting second-half salaries in question.

Since Fedorov’s dismissal in last week’s government reshuffle, protesters in more than a dozen cities have set the government an ultimatum: reinstate the minister and remove Syrskyi by 24 July, or rallies go nightly.

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Ukraine’s protesters set a 24 July deadline as Zelenskyy weighs replacing his army chief

Syrskyi is the last of the principals to speak. Fedorov thanked his supporters on 18 July, writing that changes will come and that “dialogue exists.” Presidential Office head Kyrylo Budanov urged calm on 20 July, saying the position of society “has been heard” and warning that the enemy watches every internal dispute, waiting for Ukrainians to fight each other. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has promised decisions. The commander-in-chief’s column is the first point-by-point answer to the accusations.

“Mykhailo Albertovych, forgive me. I can be harsh.”

Oleksandr Syrskyi

An apology, and a defense

Syrskyi wrote in Militarnyi that media work does not interest him and that it came as a surprise to learn he and the minister had a “conflict,” having seen their relations as working ones—hard questions, different positions. Then he addressed the former minister directly: “Mykhailo Albertovych, forgive me. I can be harsh.”

He asked both Fedorov and the public to focus on victory rather than personalities, warning that splitting into a “Fedorov camp” and a “Syrskyi camp” reduces questions of life and death to slogans—the greatest favor Ukrainians could do the enemy.

He also answered the charge he called the strangest: that he does not want to fight with drones. The Unmanned Systems Forces were created as a separate branch under his command, he wrote, and he personally proposed Robert Brovdi, the officer known as Madiar, to lead them. “It was an unpopular decision, and I took full responsibility for it,” Syrskyi wrote.

But drones alone do not prepare a battlefield, he argued: the army also needs artillery, mortars, air defense, and electronic warfare, and the ministry must buy everything, not only what is in fashion. As for the demand that he publish a war strategy, he wrote that whoever asks the commander to present his strategy publicly is asking him to present it to the enemy.

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New chief of Ukraine’s drone corps sets 100-day plan to reshape the sky

The numbers he chose to publish

Beyond the apology, Syrskyi turned to the reform the protesters credit Fedorov with—and published a number: a month after the new military contracts were presented, about 2,000 servicemen had signed them. At the same time, he had received a stream of demotivated soldiers who expected one set of terms and got another.

Those contracts are the centerpiece of the army reform Fedorov launched a month before his dismissal: for the first time, soldiers can sign for a fixed term—10 to 14 months in infantry-assault roles, 24 months in other combat and support positions—with a guaranteed deferral from mobilization when the contract ends, replacing service without an end date, Fedorov explained in June. Signing opened on 15 June.

The government resolution behind the contract “experiment” raises serious legal questions, Syrskyi added, contrasting it with pay rises in the Interior Ministry system, which went through budget amendments and a parliamentary vote.

An acting minister, a running clock

While the general wrote, the government moved. From 20 July, deputy defense minister Yevhenii Khmara—who previously led the Security Service’s Alpha special operations center and served as the agency’s acting head—officially took over as acting defense minister under a Cabinet order signed by new Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi, the Ukrainian outlet NV reported.

A permanent minister still requires a parliamentary vote, and MPs closed their July sittings, leaving both ministries vacant until the next scheduled plenary on 18 August, unless Parliament is recalled early.

Meanwhile, ZN.UA reported that the President’s Office is considering offering Fedorov a new role as coordinator of military technology development—a “miltech czar”—while discussions continue on a possible replacement for Syrskyi, citing its sources in Washington. Neither has been confirmed.

In Lviv, a crossed-out cheese

The streets did not wait for the column. Protesters came out for a fifth straight day in cities across Ukraine, including Lviv, where two of them—Yarema, 20, and Khrystyna, 21—answered Euromaidan Press’s question about why they were there by pointing at their cardboard sign: a wedge of cheese, crossed out. Syr—cheese—is the first syllable of the commander-in-chief’s surname.

“We are here because we see the possibility, the opportunity, and the desire to fight for our future, the future of our country,” Yarema told Euromaidan Press. “We have seen the changes that were happening. And we want these changes to continue happening, because these were good changes, first and foremost, for our military.”

“This is not the first rally,” he added. “But I hope it’s the last.”

Ukraine is knocking down Russia's newest cruise missiles with a gun designed in the 1940s. Soldiers of Ukraine's 121st Separate Territorial Defense Brigade shot down Russian S8000 "Banderol" and Kh-59 missiles using old Swedish 40mm Bofors L70 anti-aircraft guns, the brigade said.

The "Chaklun" (Sorcerer) crew downed one of the missiles near Odesa. The next day, the "Hunter" crew intercepted another near a different southern city.

When Ukrainian expert Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov first analyzed the Banderol, he warned it was too fast for Ukraine's mobile fire teams to hit with standard ground-based machine guns, and that countering it would require systems like the Gepard that can track fast-moving targets.

Old gun, new missile, and old gun won

The Banderol is a jet-powered cruise missile that flies at 400 to 500 km/h.

The Bofors L70 that just downed one was developed in the late 1940s and has been in service with armies worldwide since the 1950s. 

Defense Express calls the intercepts vivid proof of the L70's usefulness.

Analysts noted that the 121st Brigade's L70S carries no substantial modifications beyond new sighting equipment, so aiming at air targets is most likely still done manually.

Hand-aimed 1940s gun did what machine guns could not

That matters because of the economics Ukraine fights for. A cannon shell costs a tiny fraction of an interceptor missile, and every Banderol or Kh-59 knocked down by a Bofors round is one not engaged with a scarce guided interceptor.

Ukraine has built its whole air-defense survival strategy on driving down the cost-per-intercept by scaling cheap interceptor drones, standing up private and community fire groups, and now, it turns out, getting decades-old donated cannons to kill modern missiles. The cheapest shot that works is the right shot.

Guns came from Lithuania and the Netherlands

The Bofors L70S in Ukrainian service arrived as Western military aid. Lithuania sent L70 guns to Ukraine as part of a package announced in 2023, and the weapons were also provided to Ukraine by the Netherlands.

The through-line of Ukraine's air war is that no single system solves the problem, so everything that can hit a target gets used, including a Swedish cannon older than most of the armies that still field it.

Exclusives

Ukraine's protesters set a 24 July deadline as Zelenskyy weighs replacing his army chief. Organizers gave the government four days before nightly rallies begin.

Why Russia is importing gasoline made from its own oil. To keep its pumps supplied, Moscow has written India's gasoline price into its own tax code.

Military

Ukrainian regiment that raised flag in Kostiantynivka says it's aware of reports that its soldiers were captured there. These are the same troops who filmed a flag-raising after clearing the center.

Drones found the FSB where it felt safest—a seaside resort deep in occupied Kherson Oblast. The SBU's Alpha unit's strike set off a large blaze at a base ringed by checkpoints, guards and bunkers.

Russia keeps hitting Ukraine's couriers—so Ukraine went after Russia's Amazon: oil depot and warehouses hit near Moscow. Drones struck logistics sites and an oil depot in Moscow Oblast's Sheremetyevo and Podolsk, days after Russian missiles battered Ukraine's Nova Poshta postal network.

Intelligence and technology

Ukraine's new combat robot is silent, fits in minivan, and carries MK19 grenade launcher. Ukraine codified the "Zmii Mini Strike," a recon-strike ground robot with a silent electric motor.

The Ukrainian combat divers who blew up a Russian bomber just built their own sea drone. Ukraine's National Guard unveiled a naval drone designed by one of its own frontline units, reflecting a growing trend of soldiers building the weapons they fight with.

International

Britain's new PM Andy Burnham is opening with calls to Trump and Zelenskyy. His first foreign calls go to Zelenskyy and Trump, with UK support for Ukraine "unwavering."

Botswana warns its people about Russian job scams that end in the trenches against Ukraine. Officials say they keep getting distress calls from citizens already at the front, describing dangerous conditions they never signed up for.

Humanitarian and social impact

60-year-old Pole stood up for Ukrainian teenager on tram in Poznań. Three men beat him for it. They turned on him and beat him so badly he suffered memory loss.

"Policy of ethnocide": Ukraine says Russia has settled 300,000 Russians in occupied Crimea, replacing Ukrainians driven out. Russia is resettling its citizens into occupied Ukraine to replace the population.

Ten dead as Russia strikes a Turkish-owned bulk carrier off Odesa. Rescuers pulled eight of the 18 people aboard from the burning ship overnight; the pilot brought on to steer it out was among the dead.

Political and legal developments

"Small service can cost life imprisonment": Ukraine warns against Russian Shahed-recording scheme. Russia is recruiting Ukrainian traitors through social media to record FM signals broadcast by Shahed drones.

Russia jails two more of its own warbloggers days apart—one for extortion, one for "justifying terrorism". Both had cheered the invasion for years, and both had recently started blaming Russia's leadership for a war they say is going wrong.

Read our earlier daily review here.

Britain's new prime minister is opening with a call to Kyiv. Andy Burnham became UK prime minister on 20 July after King Charles III accepted Keir Starmer's resignation and tasked the new Labour leader with forming a government.

Burnham announced that his first foreign calls, on 20 July, would go to US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported.

Burnham planned to assure Zelenskyy that nothing has changed, and that Britain, one of Ukraine's key Western allies, and its new prime minister personally, remain on Ukraine's side.

Zelenskyy has already spoken with him

"I was glad to talk with Andy Burnham and congratulate him on becoming Prime Minister of the UK. I greatly appreciate that support for Ukraine, and our people will continue to be strong," Zelenskyy wrote.

Also, he thanked Burnham for the words of respect toward Ukrainians and condolences for those killed in recent Russian attacks.

Burnham is Britain's seventh leader in just over a decade. He was, until recently, the mayor of Greater Manchester, and returned to Parliament in a special election weeks ago before winning the Labour leadership on 17 July.

Burnham's Ukraine record predates his premiership

Unlike in domestic policy, no substantial change in foreign policy is expected. Burnham has a documented pro-Ukraine record stretching back over a decade.

He has recalled that he opposed "Russia's invasion of Crimea" in 2014. Four years later, he called on FIFA to strip Russia of the right to host the football World Cup. After the full-scale invasion, he continued supporting Ukraine: corresponding with the heads of Ukrainian cities, helping with the rehabilitation of victims and the resettlement of refugees, and calling for the harshest possible sanctions against Russia. He has stressed that the security of the UK is directly tied to the security of Ukraine. The same said outgoing Starmer in his farewell remarks.

Partnership runs through Anti-Ballistic Coalition

Zelenskyy framed the relationship as the strongest in the two countries' history and pointed to a specific near-term agenda.

The Ukrainian leader said that Ukraine and Britain have managed to build the strongest partnership "in the history of relations between our states, and we will certainly continue working to expand it."

"We agreed to discuss our further cooperation, including work within the framework of the Anti-Ballistic Coalition, at a meeting in the near future. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Britain," he summarized.

Britain has been among Ukraine's most consistent military backers since 2022, providing Storm Shadow cruise missiles, training tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops, and helping lead the Coalition of the Willing.

A Polish man stood up for a Ukrainian teenager, and three men beat him for it. The 60-year-old intervened when three men shouted abuse at a Ukrainian teenager on a tram in Poznań, and they turned their aggression on him, beating him so badly that he suffered a memory blackout, Polish outlet Rzeczpospolita reported.

The attack fits a documented and worsening pattern of anti-Ukrainian violence in Poland. Hate crimes rose more than 30% between 2024 and 2025, Poland's Deputy Interior Minister Czesław Mroczek said.

It is the second such assault to surface in days: on 11 July, a man in Łódź beat a passerby he had mistaken for a Ukrainian.

Incident escalated at tram stop 

According to Poznań police spokesman Andrzej Borowiak, the beating happened on Friday, and the man came to the police on Saturday evening, accompanied by his wife, who had been caring for him after the incident.

It began on the tram, where he witnessed three men hurling insults at a Ukrainian teenager and stepped in. The attackers redirected their aggression onto him. At a stop on Kurpiński Street, a confrontation broke out and escalated into a beating.

Police are working from tram and stop cameras

Police questioned witnesses and seized footage from the surveillance cameras at the tram stop, with recordings from inside the tram due to be released on Monday. Identifying the attackers is ongoing.

That the aggressors turned so readily from the Ukrainian teenager to the Pole defending him is its own signal about how the hostility works: once "defender of Ukrainians" becomes a category worth attacking, the violence no longer needs a Ukrainian target to find one.

The hostility is measured, and it is rising

Earlier, Poland's own General Staff has reported large-scale Russian operations aimed at fracturing Polish-Ukrainian ties, and anti-Ukrainian messaging in Poland's information space doubled between August and November 2025 compared with a year earlier. In June 2026, Poland arrested eleven people over Russian-funded paid protests staged among Ukrainian refugees.

Polish public support for taking in Ukrainian refugees has fallen from 94% in March 2022 to 48% by early 2026.

Poland remains the main hub for weapons reaching Ukraine, and breaking the two nations apart has been a Russian objective since 2022.

Russia is fitting Shaheds with FM transmitters and paying Ukrainians to record them. Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, the Ukrainian president's adviser on technological directions of defense, said that a Shahed with an unexplained antenna has been spotted again, this time over Chernihiv Oblast, and that he is waiting for one to be recovered as a trophy to confirm his theory about what it does.

According to Beskrestnov, Russia uses social media to recruit traitors. A recruit is told to buy a radio receiver and a voice recorder, tune the receiver to a designated empty frequency, such as 85.5 MHz, at a set time, place the recorder next to it in record mode, and send the recording to a specified Telegram account.

Meanwhile, the Shahed carries an FM transmitter continuously broadcasting coded information about its flight. Euromaidan Press cannot independently confirm the scheme. It is Beskrestnov's interpretation of an antenna he has photographed but not yet examined on a recovered drone.

Flash is mocking method, not danger

"Behind this technologically idiotic operation, there is clearly some GRU colonel over 60 who considers himself a genius and probably even got an award for it. Just imagine — inflating such a spy 'movement' for the sake of some crap," Beskrestnov wrote.

The scorn is aimed at how clumsy the scheme is, not at the idea that Russia would try it. He closed with a warning to anyone tempted.

"For all lovers of easy money, I remind you that a small service can cost life imprisonment," Beskrestnov wrote.

Antenna fits Russia's wider Shahed-guidance experimentation

Whatever the specific antenna does, it fits a pattern of Russia constantly re-engineering how its Shaheds navigate and report. Beskrestnov and Ukrainian intelligence have documented one adaptation after another.

Russia has fitted Shaheds with SIM cards to exploit Ukrainian and European mobile networks for guidance, ordering the cards from a Rostelecom subsidiary and having drones switch to neighboring countries' networks when Ukraine blocks them.

It built a web of Shahed relay towers in Belarus, some on residential rooftops, to extend control over drones striking western Ukraine. It has flown jet-powered Gerans, AI machine-vision variants, and manually piloted low-altitude Shaheds.

The same soldiers who raised a Ukrainian flag in Kostiantynivka, where fierce battles between Ukrainian and Russian soldiers are taking place, were likely captured there. Ukraine's 425th "Skala" (Rock) Separate Assault Regiment has acknowledged it is aware of information spread by Russian resources about the capture of its soldiers in the Donetsk Oblast city, and said it is working to establish all the circumstances.

Days ago, the 425th Regiment posted footage of its soldiers raising a flag in Kostiantynivka and told President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the city was "again under the blue-and-yellow flag."

Russian media then reported that Ukrainian troops had been captured during the fighting for the city, and the Regiment has now confirmed that it knows about it.

Just one episode

The Regiment frames the capture as one episode in an ongoing battle, not the collapse of its operation.

"Combat for the city continues, and individual successes or losses by the sides do not change the overall picture of the battle," it said.

The two claims can both be true. A unit can clear a sector, raise a flag, and lose soldiers to a counterattack in the same contested city.

Regiment says Russia is weaponizing prisoners

The 425th's statement is largely about information warfare. It argues that Russia is using the captured soldiers to misrepresent the state of the battle.

"We cannot disclose the details of the operation in the city. Russian propaganda is trying to present a single episode of the battle as a refutation of the results of the entire operation in Kostiantynivka. This is manipulation," the Regiment said.

It added that the display of Ukrainian prisoners proves neither the capture of Kostiantynivka nor the defeat of the Regiment, and that Russia traditionally uses POWs as a tool of information war to demoralize Ukrainian society and discredit the military command.

The Regiment also said its soldiers captured two Russian occupiers during the same fighting.

Euromaidan Press cannot independently verify the number of captured soldiers or the circumstances of their capture.

Ukraine's intelligence says Russia is engineering ethnocide in Ukraine. As of July 2026, 200,000 to 300,000 ethnic Russians are in occupied Crimea and Sevastopol, and the occupiers plan to resettle another 130,000 Russians to Sevastopol alone by 2042.

The colonization and Russification policy Russia is conducting on temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories bears the hallmarks of the war crime defined under Article 8, paragraph b, subparagraph viii of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. This means the transfer by an occupying power of parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory.

"The aggressor state Russia continues a targeted policy of ethnocide, whose goal is to erase Ukrainian identity and replace the local population with Russians and migrants from Central Asia, the North Caucasus, and other regions," HUR said.

Demographic collapse Russia caused

HUR says Russia has driven the situation of the Ukrainian population in the occupied territories to catastrophe. Birth rates are extremely low and death rates extremely high, both far exceeding even Russia's own averages.
In 2025, the natural population change in the occupied part of Donetsk Oblast was -9.9 per thousand, 2.4 times worse than Russia's overall figure. Over ten years, according to HUR, the population of Donbas has shrunk by nearly a third: from about 7.37 million in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts combined in 2001 to roughly 3.75 million by the start of 2024.

The collapse has causes beyond death rates. Ukrainians keep leaving occupied territory, driven out by active fighting, the sharp fall in medical and social services, repression, forced Russification, mobilization into the Russian occupation army, and the absence of property-rights protection.

How Russia moves its own people in

Russia brings its citizens into occupied Ukraine through special programs, benefits, and financial and career incentives, HUR says. As of 2024, the occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts held 200,000 ethnic Russians plus about 100,000 labor migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Since the start of 2026 alone, some 10,000 such "labor migrants" have been registered in occupied Donetsk Oblast.

Most of the ethnic Russians moved in are people seconded from Russia to staff the occupation administrations, repressive apparatus, and budget institutions. Moscow sends medical workers, teachers, and builders; it has settled large numbers of so-called military pensioners and residents of remote Russian regions into occupied Crimea.

The incentives are substantial. Russians seconded to occupied Ukraine are paid double salary plus housing compensation. A month's posting can bring a Russian "official" more than $5,000, more than eight times Russia's average wage, per HUR. Programs modeled on Russia's "rural doctor" and "rural teacher" schemes require at least five years' service on occupied Ukrainian land.

Stolen homes handed to settlers

One incentive is the property of the Ukrainians who were driven out. Russia hands imported Russians ownership of land plots and stolen Ukrainian housing, HUR says. Stolen homes are sold through preferential mortgage programs, and land for participants in the war against Ukraine is given away free.

In 2025, Russia distributed 4,000 plots in Crimea to soldiers of its occupation army from various Russian regions. This is the mechanism EP has documented in Mariupol, where Russian authorities destroyed roughly 460 residential buildings and built about 50, marketing the new housing to Russian settlers through mortgage schemes rather than restoring homes for displaced Ukrainians.

Colonization is written into Russian planning documents

The scale of intent is set out in Russia's own "development plans." A document on target population figures for the Mariupol and Kalmius districts of occupied Donetsk Oblast projects the population rising from the current 228,000 to 518,000 by 2035, partly through the import of Russian citizens.

The colonization plans for occupied Crimea run to 2036 and 2042, with one key component being more "attractive conditions" to draw Russians to the peninsula.

Ukraine put a grenade launcher on a robot that fits in the back of a minivan. Ukraine's Defense Ministry has codified the new "Zmii Mini Strike" reconnaissance-strike ground robotic complex for fire support and destroying enemy personnel and armor.

It runs on a silent electric motor, carries day and thermal cameras, and is compact enough to fit in a minivan's luggage compartment, a pickup bed, or a standard car trailer without special transport equipment.

Ukraine develops more and more robots every month 

Its design draws on more than four years of full-scale war and analysis of how ground robots actually perform in combat, and its engineers worked with one of Ukraine's most effective combat brigades during development.

The Zmii line is not new. Earlier models are already running missions with Ukraine's Defense Forces, but this armed-strike variant is the newest entry.

The Zmii Mini Strike joins a ground-robot inventory that Ukraine is expanding almost weekly.

Silent and small is how robot survives to shoot

The silent electric motor and the compact size of the drone are survival traits rather than combat ones. A quiet robot is harder to detect by sound, and a small one is harder to spot and hit. At the same time, a platform that deploys and packs up fast spends less time exposed.

However, the connectivity can be the catch. Defense Ministry adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov has warned that ground robots operate in a far more challenging communication environment than aerial drones, because terrain, tree lines, and cover can break the control signal, and a robot that loses its link drops out of the fight. A silent, well-armed gunner is only as useful as the link that keeps it firing.

Protesters demanding the return of dismissed defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov have set the government a deadline: reinstate him and remove Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi by 24 July, or they will begin open-ended nightly rallies. The demand came on the fourth straight day of protests that have spread across more than a dozen Ukrainian cities since his dismissal last week.

It is the second time in a year that Ukraine’s streets have set terms on one of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s wartime decisions. Last summer, a week of rallies forced him to reverse a law that curbed the independence of the country’s anti-corruption agencies. This time, the target is the military command, and the movement has put a clock on a decision the president says he will not rush.

Protesters set a deadline

The movement’s coordinators set the ultimatum after gathering over the weekend. They called 20 July the decisive day to press their case, said they would wait until 24 July for the president and parliament to act, and warned that an indefinite protest—nightly rallies until the demands are met—would follow if they went unheard. The two conditions are unchanged: dismiss Syrskyi, and renominate Fedorov as defense minister.

Thousands returned for a fourth straight day on 19 July, filling squares in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipro, and at least ten other cities, Ukrainian outlet NV reported. Some of the loudest chants were aimed at lawmakers on summer recess—“MPs, back to work,” “Recess is not the time.”

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Reinstating Fedorov is not the president’s decision alone. The defense minister is appointed by parliament on the president’s submission, and MPs closed their July sittings without filling the post, leaving both the defense and foreign ministries vacant until the next scheduled plenary on 18 August.

Under martial law, the Verkhovna Rada can convene at any time, so recalling it early is a political choice, not a legal hurdle—and the push for that runs inside parliament too, with the opposition European Solidarity faction of Petro Poroshenko demanding an extraordinary session to fill the vacant ministries.

It would not be the first recall of the summer. A year ago, with parliament likewise on recess, Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk convened an extraordinary session on 31 July that pushed that reversal through, 331 votes to none, under the same street protest and Western pressure.

The leverage is thinner now, though: last year, the anti-corruption agencies’ independence was a non-negotiable condition of the European Union’s 90-billion-euro ($97 billion) support package, giving Brussels a direct stake, while the command of the army carries no such external lever.

Zelenskyy consults commanders

The president has answered with consultations, not decisions. On 18 July, he said he had spoken at length with both Fedorov and Syrskyi, and that decisions on the army would be worked out.

The next day, he reported having met senior officers—Joint Forces commander Mykhailo Drapatyi, deputy General Staff chief Volodymyr Horbatiuk, and Air Assault Forces commander Oleh Apostol—for a review of the front and the country’s supply needs, naming air defense and the full delivery of drone-production contracts as the priorities. More talks with commanders were promised.

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No successor to Syrskyi has been named—the gap the president cites as his reason to wait, and the reason no dismissal has come despite reports he is weighing one, conditional on finding a commander who can hold the 1,200-kilometer front.

A change at the top would meet the street’s most concrete demand. Whether that fixes the command dispute that pushed Fedorov out, or lets the president bank a win while the same problems remain, is what the 24 July deadline brings to a head.

Ukrainian special forces struck a Russian intelligence command post deep in occupied southern Ukraine and set off a major fire, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) reported on 20 July. The service said its drones hit a hub coordinating Russia's security apparatus, where a large number of officers of the Federal Security Service (FSB) may have gathered. 

Drones hit the FSB coordination hub

Special operators of the SBU's "Alpha" Center for Special Operations struck the coordination center and basing point of FSB staff, which sat in one of the recreational retreats in occupied Kherson Oblast. 

The SBU did not specify when the attack occurred. Footage it released shows drones striking buildings as other drones record the resulting explosions and fires.

By the SBU's early assessment, around 100 servicemen may have been at the site. 13 SBU drones hit the location where the FSB staff were based. The strike touched off a large fire. 

The SBU's reconnaissance results confirmed the compound was heavily guarded. More than 70 vehicles stood on the grounds, an armed guard operated on site, and checkpoints controlled access, and engineering barriers and underground shelters ringed the base, the agency said.

The FSB is central to Russia's war effort. It handles counterintelligence, internal control, the fight against sabotage, and the running of the security apparatus aimed at waging the war. The hostile service also recruits Ukrainians for terror attacks, killings of servicemen in the rear, and other crimes.

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Part of a daily strike campaign

The SBU said such operations inflict tangible losses on the enemy in occupied territories, disrupt its command and coordination, and force Russia to pull additional forces to guard its own sites, complicating logistics and supply for FSB units.

The SBU strikes occupier targets in Russia and on occupied territory every day. Earlier this month, Ukrainian sea drones struck shadow-fleet tankers in the Black Sea, and drones set three oil depots ablaze in Russia's Stavropol Krai.

Days earlier, the SBU destroyed a Tu-95 strategic bomber at the Engels airbase inside Russia.

Russia has locked up two of its own pro-war bloggers within days of each other, both after they turned their criticism on the Kremlin, The Moscow Times reported. One is a former military pilot now bound for a penal colony, the other is a self-styled mercenary chief sent to pre-trial detention. Their cases add to a growing list of hawkish commentators punished for questioning how Russia runs its war.

Russian war bloggers provide unofficial coverage of the invasion from the Russian side, praising Russia, justifying its war crimes, and often exaggerating its battlefield successes. Over time, some of them turn on the leadership, become entangled in schemes over money raised for the troops, or drift into other crimes—and end up in prison.

The pilot who bombed Ukraine, now headed to a penal colony

A garrison military court in Rostov-on-Don sentenced Alexei Zemtsov, a former Ka-52 attack-helicopter pilot who ran the pro-war Telegram channel Voevoda Veshchaet, to three years in a general-regime colony. The court found him guilty of making death threats, deliberately destroying property, and extortion. His own channel's administrators announced the verdict. A source told TASS that the sentence took "a number of mitigating circumstances" into account.

According to Zemtsov's associates, he intends to sign a military contract and deploy to the war against Ukraine. For that, the Defense Ministry would first have to discharge him and let him re-enlist, which they estimate could take 15 to 45 days.

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The case reached court in February 2026. In April, Zemtsov recorded a video saying he intended to take his own life over pressure from senior military figures, naming a deputy commander-in-chief of Russia's Aerospace Forces, Vladimir Kravchenko, his unit commander Colonel Avramenko, and a military investigator, Kantemirov.

Zemtsov was detained in autumn 2025, released, and rearrested in May 2026 after a conflict with his ex-wife and her lover—he accused her of cheating and beat the man—brought the charges against him. His former wife appeared in the case as a witness. 

Until 2023, he co-ran a pro-war channel before founding his own, and he was later grounded after publishing criticism of the military command.

A "private army" chief and the Kremlin he came to hate

A day earlier, the Zamoskvoretsky District Court in Moscow placed Georgy Zakrevsky, 55, the founder of a group he called the Paladin military union, in detention on a charge of publicly "justifying terrorism," which carries up to seven years. The Russian Telegram channel Ostorozhno Novosti reported that the case stems from his Telegram posts.

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Zakrevsky had supported the invasion, but after Ukraine's incursion into Russia's Kursk Oblast he began sharply attacking Putin, declaring that "the main enemy of Russia sits in the Kremlin." In his posts he said the country was "in big trouble": Ukrainian drones were striking central Russian regions, the Black Sea Fleet was being destroyed, and the army stood in the same positions it held more than two years earlier.

A month before his arrest, he released a video complaining of pressure on his organization, which he presented as a private military company of 250 people guarding sites in various countries without "cooperating with the regime." He stated he had fought in the Donbas in 2014, then in Syria and Lebanon.

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A widening crackdown on the war's loudest cheerleaders

The two are not alone. Milblogger Ilya Remeslo, who called Putin a war criminal, is in custody accused of spreading "fakes" about the Russian army, a charge carrying up to ten years. Yegor Guzenko, who runs the Telegram channel Trinadtsaty ("Thirteenth"), was detained on 10 July on an incitement-of-hatred charge that threatens up to six years. Guzenko fought against Ukraine and had called Putin crude names, accusing him of lying about internet shutdowns.

Russia is buying back gasoline refined from its own crude oil in India, shipping it 14,000 kilometers home and paying a premium for it, because Ukrainian strikes have knocked out more of its refineries than it can repair. An oil superpower is importing fuel made from its own oil.

The trade loses money, so the Russian state is now covering the gap. Since 1 June, a signed law has paid importers a subsidy tied to the price of gasoline on the Indian market.

The strikes have driven Russian refining to a 21-year low, and the shortage is no longer confined to a few regions. Rationing now covers more than 55 of Russia’s regions, with odd-and-even-day sales, purchase caps, and price spikes reaching areas far from any front line.

In the southern grain belt, farmers have been pushed onto engine-wrecking lower-grade fuel and told to stockpile diesel. By early July, the harvest was running three times behind last year’s pace.

Importing Indian fuel refined from Russian crude makes almost no economic sense, KSE Institute sanctions lead Yuliia Pavytska told Ekonomichna Pravda; she called it a costly forced measure to prevent bigger losses.

A sanctioned Russian refinery—in India

The plant at the center of it, Nayara Energy’s refinery at Vadinar, is Indian on paper only. Rosneft and a Russian investment consortium own more than 98% of the operator between them.

EU sanctions in July 2025 drove away non-Russian crude suppliers, so Nayara switched to Russian oil and now buys and sells through traders—which is how its gasoline reaches Russia without an official India-to-Russia sale.

India’s oil minister Hardeep Singh Puri said Indian firms do not sell fuel to Russia directly, while conceding that buyers could route Indian-origin fuel through traders.

The first cargo moved like shadow-fleet oil in reverse. The tanker Agni loaded at Vadinar on 20 June under a manifest for Fujairah, UAE, then bypassed the port and transited the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.

Once in the Mediterranean, it handed the cargo to a second tanker, with both vessels’ transponders switched off. Ship-trackers expect the fuel at Russia’s Vitino port around 26 July.

Selling the fuel breaks no sanction—nothing bars India-Russia petroleum trade—yet the sanctioned tankers still sailing point to an enforcement gap more than a gap in the rules, Pavytska told Ekonomichna Pravda; the pressure, she argued, should reach the shipowners, managers, and insurers behind the vessels, not the vessels alone.

The budget pays the difference

Russian gasoline is cheaper at home than abroad—domestic wholesale runs about a third below what the fuel is worth on the export market, so imported fuel lands well above what drivers pay at the pump. The reworked “damper”—the subsidy Russia uses to hold pump prices down—now reimburses importers for that gap.

Ukraine’s Ekonomichna Pravda estimates that the first cargo alone will cost Russia 5.4–6.1 billion rubles ($69–78 million), with the budget covering more than half of that.

The first cargo covers little more than a day of Russia’s shortfall, and even the full plan—up to 400,000 tonnes a month from India, Belarus, and Kazakhstan combined—would meet only about a third of the monthly gap. Rosneft, Gazprom Neft, and Lukoil have asked Indian refiners for more, but have been refused by three state-owned firms.

The Russian market is not built for world prices, Serhii Kuyun, director of the consulting group A-95, told Ekonomichna Pravda: the state must either keep draining the budget with subsidies or let prices rise and take the political hit.

Moscow has also banned exports of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, allowed producers to sell lower-grade fuel, and floated the idea of reviving Euro-2 gasoline, a grade banned more than a decade ago. Whether any of it holds depends on the drones.

Serhii Vakulenko of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center has cast Russia’s available refining capacity as the product of a running race between Ukrainian strikes and Russian repair crews—one now tilting toward Kyiv. If the plants come back and the tankers keep arriving, Russia buys itself calm by late summer. If the strikes keep landing, the time bought with Indian gasoline runs out fast.

Engineers from the diving detachment of the National Guard's "Omega" Special Purpose Center have developed their own uncrewed surface vessel in partnership with a Ukrainian IT company, Ukraine's Interior Ministry announced on 19 July. The drone is built for combat missions in southern Ukraine and serves as a platform for First-person view (FPV) drones, carrying them closer to targets before they strike. The developers plan to adapt it for intercepting aerial targets to strengthen coastal defense.

A frontline fighting unit designing and building a naval drone with a Ukrainian tech partner rather than through a centralized procurement process is the pattern that increasingly defines Ukraine's war: the people using the weapons are now making them.

Carrying the drones, then killing them

The Omega commander, call sign "Krava," said the vessel works as a delivery platform: it brings FPV drones close to the target, and the drones destroy the enemy. Photos released by the Interior Ministry show the drone equipped with a Japanese Suzuki engine and a satellite communication terminal.

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The unit's stated next step—adapting the platform to intercept aerial targets—would place it inside the fastest-growing category of Ukrainian naval innovation. 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. Pushing air-defense capability offshore onto unmanned platforms means Russian drones launched from occupied Crimea face a threat layer over open water, before they reach Odesa and the coast.

Ukrainian drones struck logistics warehouses and an oil depot deep in Russia's Moscow Oblast overnight, setting off a wave of fires, monitoring channels reported. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy later confirmed the strikes. Russian authorities acknowledged the attack while claiming their air defenses had beaten back most of it.

Monitors tracked the strike and at least five fires

The Ukrainian monitoring Telegram channel Exilenova+ reported the attack and the first fires from around 3 a.m. on 20 July, sharing photos and video through the night. Ukrainian Defense Forces drones hit an oil depot and four logistics warehouses near Moscow, Militarnyi reported, adding that local residents recorded at least five separate fire sites.

The oil depot sat in Podolsk, roughly 46 km south of Moscow, holding 10 tanks with a combined 19,400 cubic meters. NASA's FIRMS satellite system flagged an abnormal heat spike there at 04:05. 

A warehouse fire also broke out at the Yuzhnye Vrata logistics park near Domodedovo, a complex used by Wildberries, Yandex Market, Alibaba Group, Decathlon and other firms. The Russian news Telegram channel Astra placed that blaze from eyewitness footage, and Domodedovo authorities later acknowledged it.

Drones also struck the Gryvno logistics park in the Podolsk district, a site used by Ozon. 

Astra put a fifth fire in Podolsk's Klimovsk area, about 200 meters from a Russian small-arms research institute.

Drones hit a Wildberries hub, the company denied it

Militarnyi said drones hit the Wildberries sorting center in Koledino, one of the company's largest, partially destroying two warehouses. Monitoring channels identified the drones as FP-1s. Wildberries — Russia's largest online retailer and its answer to Amazon — denied any damage in a statement carried by the pro-war Russian Telegram channel Two Majors, saying it had evacuated staff as a precaution and the complex was working normally. Astra said it could not confirm a fire at the site.

A drone struck the top floor of a residential building in Domodedovo, damaging the facade without starting a fire, local authorities claimed. The Domodedovo hospital reported six people brought in with blast injuries, while Moscow Oblast Governor Andrei Vorobyov said at least 10 were wounded across the region.

Vorobyov claimed the attack had been repelled, citing damage in Odintsovo, Podolsk, and Domodedovo. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin stated more than 400 drones flew toward the region between 20:30 Sunday and 5:00 Monday, and that 85 were downed near the Russian capital. 

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Ukraine casts the strike as an answer to Russia

Zelenskyy confirmed that the Unmanned Systems Forces, intelligence, missile and artillery troops, and Special Operations Forces had struck logistics facilities and an oil depot more than 400 kilometers from the border. Ukrainian forces also hit two shadow-fleet tankers and four dry-cargo ships in the Black Sea the same night, he said.

"We fairly respond to every Russian strike on our cities and communities," Zelenskyy said. "This war must be ended, and that is only possible by increasing pressure on the sole cause of this war — Russia."

The attack was the second on Russian logistics terminals in days, following fires at a Wildberries center in Elektrostal and an oil depot in Noginsk on 18 July. Ukraine's drones have reached the capital region repeatedly throughout the summer.

After the 18 July attack, a Wildberries founder offered sellers loans rather than compensation, saying the marketplace was not obligated to pay for goods lost in the fires.

Russia struck a foreign-flagged civilian bulk carrier with cruise missiles as it left Odesa loaded with grain, killing much of its crew, Ukraine's Navy said. Fire broke out aboard the ship, and a search-and-rescue operation ran through the night to reach survivors. Ukrainian officials condemned the strike as another deliberate attack on unarmed civilian shipping.

Three cruise missiles hit the ship as it sailed out

Russian forces fired three Kh-59/Kh-69 cruise missiles at the GOLDEN LEO, a Guinea-Bissau-flagged bulk carrier owned by a Turkish company, as it moved out of the combat zone with a cargo of corn on 19 July, Ukraine's Navy reported. The strike hit the starboard side of the superstructure, and a fire broke out on board.

The missiles came in from the sea. Ukraine's Air Force warned of Russian missiles approaching Odesa and Chornomorsk from the Black Sea in the late afternoon, minutes before explosions were heard in the city. The ship took serious damage but did not sink, the Odesa outlet Dumska showed in photos from the scene, as tugs and rescue crews fought to keep it afloat.

The toll climbed to 10 overnight, including a Ukrainian sea pilot

The death toll rose through the night. The Ukrainian Sea Ports Authority (USPA) said 10 people were killed, among them a Ukrainian sea pilot from its Delta-Pilot branch, and that eight crew members were rescued and brought ashore. A sea pilot boards a vessel to guide it safely in and out of port through difficult or dangerous waters.

Eighteen people were on board: crew members from Syria and India, along with the Ukrainian pilot. Eight of the rescued were taken to an Odesa hospital, two of them injured. By Monday, the USPA said the fire aboard the ship had been contained.

Ukraine calls it terror against civilian shipping

The Navy says the strike was an act of terror and a violation of the laws of war. 

"This is another deliberate Russian strike on an unarmed civilian vessel under a foreign flag that posed no military threat," it said. "The attack is an act of terror against peaceful shipping and a gross violation of international humanitarian law."

Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi instructed the Foreign Ministry to immediately inform the states whose citizens were affected and Ukraine's international partners. The government and military command are separately preparing measures meant to strengthen the safety of shipping and shield civilian vessels and sailors from Russian attacks.

The strike lands in a month when Russia has been hammering the Odesa ports that carry the overwhelming share of Ukraine's farm exports. Russian forces have repeatedly gone after foreign-flagged ships moving through the maritime corridor, and used Geran-4 drones against grain carriers at Chornomorsk earlier in July.

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Botswana has become the latest African country to accuse Russia of tricking its citizens into fighting against Ukraine, luring them abroad with fake job offers and then forcing them into combat, Bloomberg reported. The government told its people to treat foreign work offers with suspicion, warning that the scheme is spreading fast. The move echoes alarms raised across the continent as Russia scours Africa for soldiers to feed its war.

Botswana sounds the alarm on a recruitment trap

Botswana's Ministry of International Relations issued the warning in a statement on 18 July. It said a growing number of its nationals are being coerced into Russian military service, and urged everyone to confirm that any overseas job offer is real before accepting it.

The ministry described people drawn out of the country under false pretenses, only to be pushed onto the battlefield once they arrive.

"The number of Batswana being misled into such arrangements is rising at an alarming rate," the ministry said, using the term for Botswana's citizens. It added that it "continues to receive heartbreaking calls from Batswana already on the front line, describing the perilous conditions they face."

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Botswana joins Kenya and South Africa

The warning places Botswana alongside other African states that have traced the same pipeline. In  Kenya and South Africa, prosecutors have already detained and charged suspects accused of funneling recruits into Moscow's ranks.

The European Parliament went further in March, condemning the practice as human trafficking and describing recruits who were deceived, stripped of their documents, and treated as expendable.

The toll is already counted in the dead

The recruitment has a body count. Inpact, the nonprofit behind the All Eyes On Wagner project, reported in February that Russia's war has already claimed at least 316 African lives, with most of the dead sent to the front barely trained.

Kenya, on its own, has put at 1,000 the number of its nationals swept into Moscow's military.

Exclusives

Ukraine is trying to wreck Russia’s oil fleet without spilling its oil—the Black Sea can’t take another slick. Ukraine's countershipping campaign risks polluting the fragile Black Sea. Drone operators are trying to spill less oil.

Russian troops inch toward Lyman. Drones keep delaying the plan.. Fedorov's middle-strike drones are throttling the supply lines behind the Russian push. Whether they keep doing it without him is the question hanging over Sloviansk.

International monitors confirm Russia’s blockade of occupied Oleshky, where the living starve and the dead go unburied. Four months after Euromaidan Press first reported the siege, the UN, Human Rights Watch, ISW, and the OSCE have all confirmed it. An exiled official says 100 bodies lie unburied in the town's hospital basement.

“They removed the auditor, not the thieves”: why Ukrainians are protesting Zelenskyy’s reshuffle. The entire government has been swapped, yet protests hit Kyiv and 16 more cities only in support of ex-Defense Minister Fedorov

Ukraine’s government reshuffle followed the letter of the Constitution. But did it follow its spirit?. The official paper trail shows who decided first.

Military

Fires erupt at three Russian oil depots after Ukraine targets fuel supply chain overnight in Stavropol Krai. Ukraine confirmed strikes on Russian fuel infrastructure after drone attacks caused fires at oil depots in Russia's Stavropol Krai.

Ukrainian drones slash Kerch ferry crossing capacity by 75%, as daily strikes continue on Russian vessels and occupation energy infrastructure. Ukraine's drone forces reported strikes against Russian logistics and energy infrastructure, including the Kerch ferry crossing, Black Sea vessels, and power substations in occupied Crimea and eastern and southern Ukraine.

Russia launches record ballistic missile barrage on Kyiv, firing over 40 missiles in under an hour. Russia's overnight assault on Kyiv killed at least one person and injured at least 16.

Ukraine's Skelia Regiment says it pushed Russia out of Kostiantynivka — city Moscow claimed to have taken on 3 July. Ukraine's 425th Skelia Assault Regiment says it cleared Kostiantynivka and the city is under Ukrainian control.

Ukraine has netted over 1,000 kilometers of road. That's how completely drones reshaped front. Ukraine has built 1,066 km of anti-drone defenses along front lines.

"When karma works": Ukraine torched 188,000-square-meter warehouse of Russia's biggest online retailer after years of strikes on leading logistics company. A separate strike hit an oil depot at Noginsk.

Ukraine can now service its Polish Rosomak APCs without sending them out of country. Ukrainian repair troops completed Rosomak maintenance training in Poland.

Ukraine says it struck Russia's Svetlyak-class warship in Kerch. Ukraine's General Staff says its forces hit a Svetlyak-class patrol ship at Kerch, two tankers, and the Slavneft-YANOS refinery in Yaroslavl over 16-17 July.

Intelligence and technology

Ukraine says Russia may mobilize half million people this fall. Some of the mobilized may be thrown into battle within the first weeks.

Russia may have built flying jammer to hunt Ukraine's long-range drones, OSINT analysts say. Russia has built a new complex on an Mi-8 helicopter probably meant to jam the satellite navigation of Ukraine's long-range strike drones, Militarnyi says.

Ukraine's newest drone hunter doesn't chase its prey. It climbs above it. Ukraine codified the Tsyklop interceptor drone, which can climb higher than Russia's strike and reconnaissance UAVs. One variant has downed over 100 air targets.

When you can't get swarm through, you send one drone low and hand-flown. That's Russia's newest Shahed tactic. Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov says Russia is shifting from mass Shahed attacks to single, complex, manually-controlled strikes.

Ukraine gives its heavy bombers precision without single Western guidance kit. Ukraine codified FireFly, a domestic terminal-guidance module that lets heavy bomber drones drop munitions with 0.5-to-2-meter accuracy.

Ukraine contracted $8 billion in drones this year. In-stock ones reach units in nine days. It is twice the same period last year, with FPVs the largest share.

International

After France, Ukrainian troops will join parade in Brussels, home of NATO and EU, for first time. Ukrainian soldiers will take part in Belgium's National Day military parade in Brussels on 21 July, a week after marching in France's Bastille Day parade.

Vatican's top diplomat visits Russian strike site in Kyiv. Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Holy See's foreign minister, visited the site of a Russian missile strike in Kyiv that destroyed homes and killed civilians.

Pickup that can be replaced when lost is what hunted Ukrainian border regions need. Germany just sent 12. Kharkiv Oblast received 12 pickup trucks and two road rollers from Germany's Federal Agency for Technical Relief for emergency response, evacuation, and road repair.

Humanitarian and social impact

Russian missile kills 16-year-old boy at Odesa recreation park. Two-year-old is among wounded. Russia struck Odesa Oblast on the evening of 18 July, killing a 16-year-old boy and wounding at least seven others.

"Hardest summer yet": Russia double-tapped Zaporizhzhia passenger train. Rail workers evacuated everyone in time, and no one was hurt.

Political and legal developments

As rumors swirl over Syrskyi's future, Zelenskyy meets commanders and top general warns against political infighting. Zelenskyy held another round of talks with senior commanders as speculation over Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi continued, while Air Assault Forces Commander Oleh Apostol urged the military to stay out of politics.

ZN: Zelenskyy may bring former defense minister back as "miltech czar" amid nationwide protests. Meanwhile, Zelenskyy reportedly reconsiders replacing army chief Syrskyi.

Russia leveled 13 hectares of homes in Vyshneve. It fired missiles, but Ukraine says depot shouldn't have been there, and made its first arrest. A Kyiv court is deciding pre-trial detention for Ruslan Kuchynskyi, an enterprise head suspected over the improper ammunition storage that killed people in Vyshneve.

Read our previous daily review here.

Ukrainian long-range strikes targeted Russian fuel infrastructure in Stavropol Krai overnight on July 19, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) hit three oil depots and the Armed Forces struck another fuel facility in the region.

Ukraine has increasingly targeted Russian oil refineries, fuel depots, logistics hubs, and other infrastructure linked to Russia’s war effort as part of its campaign to disrupt the supply chains supporting Moscow’s military operations.

Russian authorities reported multiple fires in the Stavropol area following the drone attack. The Russian regional governor said there were no casualties, but a local state of emergency was introduced.

Fires reported at Russian fuel facilities

Russian Governor Vladimir Vladimirov said two fires broke out in industrial areas of Stavropol Krai – one near the village of Vyazniki in the Shpakovsky district and another in northern Stavropol near the district border.

Videos shared online showed large fires in the area. Russian independent outlet Astra reported that three oil depots may have been affected, based on footage showing a fire near one of several nearby fuel storage facilities.

According to monitoring channel Supernova+, fires were recorded at two oil facilities in the evening of 19 July: the LUKOIL-Yugnefteprodukt oil depot and the Stavropol oil depot operated by Promkhim.

Zelenskyy confirms strikes on Russian energy targets

Later on July 19, Zelenskyy confirmed that Ukrainian forces had targeted Russian fuel infrastructure in the region.

“Ukraine’s long-range sanctions” had reached facilities that “provide and finance Russian aggression,” Zelenskyy said, adding that SBU units struck three oil depots in Stavropol Krai while Ukrainian military units hit another fuel-related facility there.

Zelenskyy also said Ukrainian forces hit three Russian “shadow fleet” tankers in the Black Sea.

He thanked the Ukrainian units carrying out the strikes, saying the operations were intended to increase pressure on Russia and demonstrate the cost of continuing the war.

Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces claimed they struck 13 power substations in occupied Crimea and other Russian-held territory overnight while further degrading Russia's Kerch ferry crossing, with drone forces commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi saying the operation has now reduced the crossing's transport capacity by about 75%.

Brovdi said that Ukraine’s drone operations in July so far have hit 176 Russian “shadow fleet” vessels and 96 energy infrastructure sites.

Operation "Crimean Switch Off" targets occupied energy infrastructure

In a statement on 19 July, Brovdi said Ukrainian drone units carried out overnight strikes as part of Operation "Crimean Switch Off," an ongoing campaign targeting electricity infrastructure supporting Russia's occupation authorities.

According to Brovdi, Ukrainian drones struck 13 electrical substations and energy hubs overnight, including eight in occupied Crimea and five elsewhere in Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts.

He said the targets included substations in Kerch, Yalta, Sudak, Staryi Krym, Koktebel, Berdiansk, and other occupied settlements, disrupting electricity infrastructure across occupied territory.

According to Brovdi, Ukrainian drone units struck 59 targets deep behind Russian lines during the night.

Kerch ferry crossing capacity cut by 75%

In a separate statement, Brovdi said Operation "MoLoCHKa" had further degraded Russia's Kerch ferry crossing, one of the country's main logistics links between mainland Russia and occupied Crimea.

He also claimed Ukrainian drones struck four vessels supporting Russian maritime logistics in the Black Sea overnight, including two tankers, a cargo ship, and a floating crane.

Brovdi said the ferry crossing had been served by five ferries before the campaign. According to his assessment, two have been destroyed, two others have been damaged so severely they can no longer operate under their own power, and only one remains fully operational.

Based on that assessment, he estimated the crossing now retains only 25% of its previous transport capacity, significantly reducing Russia's ability to move vehicles and cargo across the Kerch Strait.

He also claimed a replacement vessel is being prepared in Russia's Astrakhan region to reinforce the crossing.

Part of Ukraine's campaign against Russian logistics

The Kerch ferry crossing is one of Russia's major logistics links between mainland Russia and occupied Crimea, transporting vehicles, cargo, and military supplies across the Kerch Strait. Disrupting the crossing could complicate Russia's ability to move equipment and sustain forces based in occupied Crimea and southern Ukraine.

Brovdi said operations against both the ferry crossing and occupied Crimea's energy infrastructure would continue indefinitely.

Ukraine has increasingly targeted Russian military logistics far behind the front lines, including ports, rail infrastructure, fuel depots, airfields, and energy facilities that support Moscow's war effort. Kyiv says the strikes are intended to reduce Russia's ability to sustain combat operations and force it to divert resources to defending critical infrastructure.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he held another round of meetings with senior Ukrainian military commanders on 19 July, as reports continue to swirl that he is considering replacing Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi.

The meetings come amid growing speculation over the future of Ukraine's military leadership after former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov publicly revealed disagreements with Syrskyi and said he had urged Zelensky to replace him. The reports have emerged alongside political tensions and protests across the country, intensifying scrutiny of the government's wartime leadership.

The discussions come after the Financial Times, citing a source in the Presidential Office, reported that Zelenskyy planned to meet military commanders over the weekend to hear battlefield assessments and interview potential successors to Syrskyi. 

Zelenskyy meets three senior commanders

In a statement, Zelenskyy said he spoke with Joint Forces Commander Mykhailo Drapatyi, Deputy Chief of the General Staff Volodymyr Horbatiuk, and Air Assault Forces Commander Oleh Apostol.

"Each of them is well known in the army," Zelenskyy said. "They reported on the situation in the relevant sectors, and we also discussed the overall course of the war."

According to the president, the commanders briefed him on the situation in Sumy, Kharkiv, Luhansk, and Donetsk oblasts. They also discussed strengthening Ukraine's air defenses, fulfilling contracts for the production of all types of drones, and operations on the Oleksandrivsk direction involving the Air Assault Forces.

"It is important to assess our strategy going forward and Ukraine's proactive steps – how to force Russia to end this war with a dignified peace for Ukraine and guaranteed security," Zelenskyy said. "There are various components to this, and I want to hear how commanders at different levels across Ukraine's Defense and Security Forces see it."

He added that he would hold further "key talks" on 20 July.

Consultations follow reports of possible leadership changes

The latest meetings follow several days of consultations with commanders across Ukraine's military.

On 18 July, Zelenskyy said he spoke with the commanders of six army and Air Assault Forces corps fighting on some of the most active sectors of the front. Earlier, he also held discussions with Unmanned Systems Forces Commander Robert Brovdi, National Guard Azov Corps Commander Denys Prokopenko, National Guard Khartiia Corps Commander Ihor Obolenskyi, Air Assault Forces Deputy Commander Andrii Tkachuk, acting 19th Army Corps Commander Valerii Skred, and Third Army Corps Commander Andrii Biletskyi.

The broad consultations have attracted attention after recent reports suggested Zelenskyy was reviewing Ukraine's senior military leadership.

Former Defense Minister Minister Mykhailo Fedorov recently said he had clashed with Syrskyi over military leadership, claiming he had proposed replacing both the commander-in-chief and Chief of the General Staff Andrii Hnatov.

Ukrainska Pravda, however, cited sources who said the 18 July discussions with frontline commanders did not involve Syrskyi or his possible dismissal.

Neither Zelensky nor the Presidential Office has publicly confirmed that Syrskyi's position is under review.

Air Assault commander defends military leadership

The same day, Air Assault Forces Commander Oleh Apostol, one general with whom Zelenskyy met, published a lengthy statement defending the military chain of command and urging soldiers to stay out of political disputes.

Apostol, a career officer who has fought since 2014, said Ukraine's armed forces "were, are, and will remain outside politics" and stressed that commanders bear personal responsibility for the lives of their troops and the decisions they make on the battlefield.

"Where discipline ends, chaos begins. And chaos always works in the enemy's favor," he wrote.

Without naming anyone directly, Apostol criticized sweeping public attacks on Ukraine's senior military leadership by people who have never commanded troops in combat.

"Criticism can be substantive, professional, and well-founded. But humiliation, baseless accusations, and public insults against the honor and dignity of the highest military command are unacceptable," he wrote, warning that such attacks undermine trust in the armed forces and benefit Russia.

While Apostol did not mention Syrskyi by name, his statement appeared to respond to the growing public debate over the commander-in-chief's future.

Zelensky has publicly framed the meetings as part of broader consultations on battlefield conditions, military strategy, force requirements, and strengthening Ukraine's defense capabilities, rather than discussions about changes in military leadership.

Russia launched the largest ballistic missile attack on Kyiv since the start of its full-scale invasion overnight on 19 July, firing more than 40 missiles at the capital in less than an hour. 

At least one person was killed and 16 others were injured as explosions and falling debris damaged residential neighborhoods and civilian infrastructure across the city.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia launched more than 40 missiles of various types overnight, most of them targeting Kyiv, alongside 120 attack drones across Ukraine. He described the assault as "one of the most massive ballistic attacks" on the capital.

Nearly 600 emergency workers were deployed across multiple impact sites as rescuers spent the morning extinguishing fires, searching damaged buildings, and clearing debris.

The attack featured some of Russia's most difficult weapons for Ukraine to intercept. Unlike drones or cruise missiles, ballistic missiles travel at extremely high speeds and require specialized anti-ballistic systems such as the US-made Patriot, which Ukraine has repeatedly said remain in limited supply.

The missiles' extreme speed also sharply reduces warning time for civilians. While drone attacks can often be tracked for hours, ballistic missiles can reach Kyiv within minutes of launch, leaving residents with only a short time to seek shelter after air raid sirens sound.

Kyiv was the main target

The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia launched a total of 166 aerial weapons overnight, including 41 missiles and 125 drones, with Kyiv identified as the primary target.

The missile barrage included 25 Iskander-M and S-400 ballistic missiles, 10 Zircon hypersonic missiles, three Oniks anti-ship missiles, and three Kh-59/69 guided air-launched missiles. Russia also launched 125 Shahed attack drones and other unmanned aerial vehicles, including decoys and loitering munitions.

Ukraine's air defenses intercepted or suppressed 126 incoming targets, including 18 missiles and 108 drones. According to the Air Force, 23 missiles and 10 attack drones nevertheless struck targets at 20 locations, while debris from intercepted drones fell at another 18 sites.

Civilian neighborhoods damaged across Kyiv

The main part of the ballistic assault unfolded in less than an hour, with successive missile launches striking the capital before emergency responders could fully assess the initial impacts.

The attack damaged residential buildings, offices, warehouses, vehicles, and other civilian infrastructure across at least five districts of Kyiv, including Solomianskyi, Shevchenkivskyi, Dniprovskyi, Desnianskyi, and Sviatoshynskyi, according to Ukraine's State Emergency Service (DSNS).

One of the hardest-hit locations was the area around Lukianivska metro station in Kyiv's Shevchenkivskyi district, where explosions damaged civilian buildings and sparked multiple fires. The neighborhood was also heavily struck during a Russian missile attack in May, when widespread destruction was recorded around the station.

In Solomianskyi district, firefighters battled blazes in an office building, residential buildings, and other structures. A five-story apartment building sustained significant damage, and later in the day rescuers removed unstable facade sections and balconies to protect residents.

In Shevchenkivskyi district, emergency crews extinguished fires in a three-story building, non-residential facilities, and more than 10 parked vehicles. The attack's only confirmed fatality was recovered there during rescue operations.

Elsewhere, fires broke out in a dormitory, private homes, industrial buildings, and vehicles across the city. By late morning, the DSNS said all fires caused by the attack in Kyiv had been extinguished, although recovery operations continued.

The assault also caused major destruction in Kyiv Oblast. In Bucha district, Russian strikes ignited a massive fire covering about 100,000 square meters across two warehouse buildings. More than 200 firefighters, 73 vehicles, and three helicopters were deployed to contain the blaze.

Zelenskyy urges more air defense support

Zelenskyy said Russia launched around 1,450 attack drones, more than 1,640 guided aerial bombs, and 99 missiles against Ukraine over the past week alone, causing casualties and destruction across numerous regions.

Calling protection against ballistic missiles Ukraine's "constant and highest priority," the president urged partners to accelerate deliveries of Patriot interceptors and other anti-ballistic capabilities, saying each new air defense package "literally saves lives" during Russia's increasingly frequent mass missile attacks.

He also called for continued sanctions pressure on Moscow, warning that delays in new measures give Russia time to prepare further strikes and adapt to existing restrictions.

A Ukrainian assault regiment says it has cleared Kostiantynivka from Russian invaders. Soldiers of the 425th "Skelia" (Rock) Separate Assault Regiment reported that they conducted a clearing operation in a city in Donetsk Oblast and that the city is under the control of the Ukrainian army.

The claim is a Ukrainian counter to a Russian one. On 3 July, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov asserted that the city had been fully taken, providing no proof, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 

The unit posted footage of strikes on Russian concentration points and of Ukrainian soldiers with a Ukrainian flag, and addressed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a statement that the task was accomplished and the city is "again under the blue-and-yellow flag."

Kostiantynivka is southern gate of Ukraine's "fortress belt"

The city matters because of where it sits. Kostiantynivka lies at the southern end of the chain of cities forming Ukraine's "fortress belt" — its main defensive backbone in Donetsk Oblast, with Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk, and Sloviansk standing farther north.

Capturing that urban belt is central to Putin's goal of occupying all of the Donbas. A Russian victory at Kostiantynivka would let Moscow claim it had forced open the southern gate to the remaining Ukrainian-held cities.

Costly advance

The battle has been grinding and costly. Russia advanced on Kostiantynivka at an average of about 50 meters per day in the period before its capture, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies cited by RFE/RL, one of the slowest advance rates recorded in modern war.

Ukraine's 19th Army Corps commander reported that Russian groups had infiltrated various parts of the city but controlled none of it, while ISW assessed Russia had concentrated around 11,000 troops in the Kostiantynivka-Druzhkivka area.

While Ukraine keeps repelling Russian attacks on the Donetsk front, Russia may be planning to call up half a million people this fall, Andrii Kovalenko, head of the Center for Countering Disinformation under Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, says. 

Kovalenko adds that some of the mobilized would be thrown into battle within the first two weeks to "plug holes in the East," as others would be trained for at least a month in case a new front opens.

Ukraine has now covered more than a thousand kilometers of road against drones. The State Special Transport Service has built 1,066 km of anti-drone protection along key logistics routes since the start of 2026, on assignment from Ukraine's Defense Ministry, the ministry said.

The netting is what lets anything move near the front at all. Russian FPV and reconnaissance drones hunting vehicles within 15 to 30 kilometers of the front have forced Ukraine to shield its roads with overhead netting.

Since the start of June alone, crews in frontline regions built 325 km of new anti-drone protection, restored more than 31 km, and repaired nearly 233 km of roads.

Roads are priority target, so protecting them is priority task

In modern war, logistics routes are one of the enemy's priority targets, the Defense Ministry said, which is why drone protection directly affects how reliably units stay supplied. Protected road sections allow Ukraine to move resources faster and more safely, helping maintain the tempo of combat operations.

The scale of the effort reflects how completely drones have reshaped the ground behind the front. Ukraine has been building this network at a pace that reached 9.2 kilometers a day by June, more than double the 2025 rate, and is targeting 4,000 km of covered road by the end of 2026. Kherson Oblast alone accounted for 207 km of it.

Netting is one half of two-part answer

Road protection works alongside the vehicles and robots that use it. The nets catch the FPV before it reaches the target. The trucks, ground robots, and evacuation vehicles move along the stretch protected by the nets.

Ukraine has been pushing the moving half onto machines wherever it can. Ground robots ran more than 66,000 logistics and evacuation missions in the first half of 2026, taking over the most dangerous supply and casualty-evacuation runs so soldiers do not have to make them.

Together, the netting and the robots are Ukraine's structural answer to a front where, as the Defense Ministry put it, the safety of logistics is one of the key factors in the Defense Forces' resilience.

Repair runs alongside protection. Since restoration work began in April, crews have carried out current repairs and maintenance on more than 369.6 km of roads, with work underway on 16 sections and 27 already fully complete.

A Russian missile killed a 16-year-old boy in Odesa. Russian forces struck civilian infrastructure in Odesa Oblast on the evening of 18 July, wounding at least seven other residents, the Odesa Oblast Prosecutor's Office said.

Prosecutors opened a war crimes investigation under Part 2 of Article 438 of Ukraine's Criminal Code.

The evening attack damaged two private houses, buildings at a sports-and-entertainment complex, and eight cars, according to prosecutors.

Russia hit recreation park with families

Beyond the 16-year-old killed, the wounded included a two-year-old child, four women aged 22 to 28, and two men aged 27 and 40, all hospitalized.

Oblast administration head Oleh Kiper reported that a missile hit a recreation park, destroying fishermen's houses, and that people might still be under the rubble as a search-and-rescue operation continued. The casualty figures were still being clarified late on 18 July.

Eyewitnesses posted video of people digging through sand and debris by hand, apparently in the moments right after the missile struck, searching for anyone trapped.

Toll was still being counted late on 18 July

The information from the scene shifted through the evening, as it typically does in the hours after a strike.

Kiper initially reported two people killed and four wounded, including a child, at the recreation park, with people possibly still trapped under the rubble. He said a second location in another settlement saw a residential building and two cars damaged, with one person hurt.

The Security Service of Ukraine's Odesa directorate is conducting the pre-trial investigation and documenting the strikes as war crimes.

Odesa has been under sustained fire for over week

The 18 July strike is the latest in a campaign that has hammered Odesa and its ports throughout July. From 11 to 15 July, Russian strikes hit three Greater Odesa ports and the merchant ships anchored there, cutting the region's grain-export capacity by roughly a third, per Reuters.

The civilian toll has run alongside the economic one. On 16 July, a Russian strike on Odesa killed Olena Arkhipova, a Red Cross first-aid instructor and single mother of three, as she hurried to shelter with her children; the children survived.

Exclusive

Russia's war is killing the Black Sea—so Ukraine is crippling its shadow fleet without spilling the oil. Ukraine's countershipping campaign risks polluting the fragile Black Sea. Drone operators are trying to spill less oil.

Russian troops inch toward Lyman. Drones keep delaying the plan.. Fedorov's middle-strike drones are throttling the supply lines behind the Russian push. Whether they keep doing it without him is the question hanging over Sloviansk.

International monitors confirm Russia's blockade of occupied Oleshky, where the living starve and the dead go unburied. Four months after Euromaidan Press first reported the siege, the UN, Human Rights Watch, ISW, and the OSCE have all confirmed it. An exiled official says 100 bodies lie unburied in the town's hospital basement.

"They removed the auditor, not the thieves": why Ukrainians are protesting Zelenskyy's reshuffle. The entire government has been swapped, yet protests hit Kyiv and 16 more cities only in support of ex-Defense Minister Fedorov

Ukraine's government reshuffle followed the letter of the Constitution. But did it follow its spirit?. The official paper trail shows who decided first.

Military

Ukraine says Russia may mobilize half million people this fall. Some of the mobilized may be thrown into battle within the first weeks.

"When karma works": Ukraine torched 188,000-square-meter warehouse of Russia's biggest online retailer after years of strikes on leading logistics company. A separate strike hit an oil depot at Noginsk.

Intelligence and technology

Russia may have built flying jammer to hunt Ukraine's long-range drones, OSINT analysts say. Russia has built a new complex on an Mi-8 helicopter probably meant to jam the satellite navigation of Ukraine's long-range strike drones, Militarnyi says.

Pickup that can be replaced when lost is what hunted Ukrainian border regions need. Germany just sent 12. Kharkiv Oblast received 12 pickup trucks and two road rollers from Germany's Federal Agency for Technical Relief for emergency response, evacuation, and road repair.

Ukraine's newest drone hunter doesn't chase its prey. It climbs above it. Ukraine codified the Tsyklop interceptor drone, which can climb higher than Russia's strike and reconnaissance UAVs. One variant has downed over 100 air targets.

When you can't get swarm through, you send one drone low and hand-flown. That's Russia's newest Shahed tactic. Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov says Russia is shifting from mass Shahed attacks to single, complex, manually-controlled strikes.

International

Vatican's top diplomat visits Russian strike site in Kyiv. Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Holy See's foreign minister, visited the site of a Russian missile strike in Kyiv that destroyed homes and killed civilians.

Humanitarian and social impact

"Hardest summer yet": Russia double-tapped Zaporizhzhia passenger train. Rail workers evacuated everyone in time, and no one was hurt.

Political and legal developments

ZN: Zelenskyy may bring former defense minister back as "miltech czar" amid nationwide protests. Meanwhile, Zelenskyy reportedly reconsiders replacing army chief Syrskyi.

Read our earlier daily review here.

Ukraine says Russia may be preparing a new wave of mobilization. This fall, Russia is planning to call up half a million people, Andrii Kovalenko, head of the Center for Countering Disinformation under Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, said.

He warned that fall and winter will be intense, requiring Ukraine to hold in "very difficult infantry battles, where people, drones, KABs, and other instruments of death converge."

Russia's first deputy chief of staff Sergei Kiriyenko and General Staff chief Valery Gerasimov have assured Russian leader Vladimir Putin the mobilization would help defeat Ukraine, Kovalenko said, adding: "I know for certain that they are mistaken. Right now, we all need unity and effectiveness."

Recruitment numbers are the reason the forecast is plausible

Russia has been failing to sign enough contract soldiers to cover its losses. Its 2026 losses have outrun its recruitment.

Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service reported in mid-July that Russia signed only 195,000 military contracts against a target of 204,500, while losing 196,700 troops so far in 2026, and roughly 115,300 of them irretrievable and 80,400 injured.

Ukraine's Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said in early 2026 that Russia planned to recruit around 409,000 troops and form at least 11 new divisions, drawing on a mobilization pool he estimated at more than 20 million.

The Kremlin's unwritten deal with its society since has been that the war would not touch those who did not volunteer, and Moscow has filled its ranks instead with high-paid contract soldiers, prisoners, and foreign recruits precisely to avoid repeating that political shock.

Even Ukraine's own official says it would not turn the war

Three weeks before this latest post, Kovalenko said that even if Russia announced a fall mobilization, it would only partially offset heavy losses.

"Even if such a decision is made in the fall, Russia will only be plugging gaps at the front caused by heavy losses and recruitment levels that remain below the rate of casualties," he said then.

He concluded that the only real fix for Russia's manpower problem is to end the war.

Russia has likely turned a helicopter into a flying drone-jammer. Moscow has built a new complex on an Mi-8 helicopter, likely intended to counter drones, according to Militarnyi. The whole assessment of what it does and how is Militarnyi's analysis of photographs, not a confirmed Russian capability.

According to Militarnyi, the helicopter carries several panel antennas mounted at different angles to cover a 180-degree sector, with a likely mirror set on the other side of the aircraft for full coverage.

Each panel has only two cables running to it, which the reviewers suggest means the system operates in two channels simultaneously.

Militarnyi thinks it jams navigation, not control

The reviewers' central argument is about what the complex is not. It is unlikely to be aimed at radio-controlled drones near the front line, Militarnyi says, because it can only cover too narrow a band of frequencies for that.

Instead, their version is that it suppresses the satellite navigation of Ukraine's long-range strike drones, which fly on fixed frequencies.

If the navigation-jamming theory is right, each of the two cables might handle a separate antenna polarization, allowing the system to radiate interference in different polarizations and depend less on how a drone's navigation antenna is oriented in flight.

The cables might alternatively be split by frequency — one covering the L1 band (1.5 to 1.6 GHz), the other L2 or L5 (around 1.2 GHz) — so each panel could jam both main signals that multi-band drone receivers rely on.

Why a flying jammer, and why it might work

The one part of Militarnyi's reasoning that rests on a general principle rather than photo-reading concerns why Russia would put this in the air at all.

Long-range strike drones usually carry an inertial navigation system alongside their satellite receiver, Militarnyi notes.

But an inertial system is built to correct for drift only while a drone crosses a relatively small jamming zone, because the inertial unit accumulates its own error over time.

A jammer that can move — loitering in a helicopter along a drone's expected path — could hold a drone inside a suppression zone for longer than a fixed ground station could, forcing the inertial system to coast further and drift more.

On that logic, Militarnyi suggests Russia probably plans to use these helicopters much like the light-aircraft electronic-warfare platforms it already flies.

Russia hit a passenger train, then hit it again. Russian forces carried out a double strike on a locomotive and passenger carriages of a train in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukrainian Minister for Restoration, Infrastructure and Transport Mykola Kalashnyk said.

Thanks to a monitoring group, the professional actions of railway workers, and a timely response, all passengers and staff were moved to safety in time. No one was hurt.

The no-casualties outcome is the system Ukraine built for exactly this. Russia has turned Ukraine's trains into targets, striking the railway about 1,200 times in 2025 and killing roughly 40 railway workers since 2022.

People have minutes to hind

To keep crews alive, Ukrzaliznytsia now runs monitoring groups that detect incoming drones and has installed more than 800 mobile blast shelters at junctions and depots so people can take cover within seconds of an alert. On this train, the warning came in time. In others in the same oblast, it has not.

"Russia deliberately continues to strike civilian infrastructure, trying to intimidate people and disrupt the transport system," Kalashnyk said.

Double-tap is the tactic that makes these strikes war crimes

The two-strike pattern is not incidental. Russia has repeatedly used the "double-tap" tactic when a first strike is followed by a second on the same target that maximizes harm to the people who respond to the first hit. Ukrainian prosecutors have documented this tactic across thousands of attacks on civilians.

Against a train, the double-tap is aimed at the moment of evacuation: the first strike to stop the train and force people out, the second to catch them in the open or the responders as they arrive.

Zaporizhzhia Oblast has already paid the other price. In June 2026, a Russian strike on three Ukrzaliznytsia locomotives killed an assistant driver who could not get clear of his rear cab in time. Crews there have had minutes, sometimes less.

Railway keeps running because breaking it is point

Kalashnyk framed the strike as part of a deliberate campaign, and the archive supports him. Russia has stepped up attacks on civilian rail specifically because the network carries both civilian passengers and wartime logistics, and because keeping it running is essential to Ukraine's economy, its evacuations, and its supply lines.

The cost is mounting faster than repairs. Russia damaged more than 200 Ukrainian locomotives in the first half of 2026 alone, roughly matching the entire prior 15-month toll, along with hundreds of passenger and freight carriages. Ukrzaliznytsia has warned that the summer of 2026 will be its hardest yet because strikes are depleting its carriages faster than the company can replace them.

"Ukrainian railways continue to work, ensuring uninterrupted connection and carrying out their critically important mission even under constant attacks," Kalashnyk said.

The Ministry, together with the Defense Ministry and Ukrzaliznytsia, is working to strengthen the resilience of rail transport even under such conditions, he added.

Ukraine's president may bring back the defense minister he just fired, in a new job. The Presidential Office is considering offering former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov a new role as a "miltech czar" amid mass protests across Ukraine against the decision, ZN.UA reported, citing its own sources in Washington.

Fedorov may be proposed to become a coordinator of military technology development, while Zelenskyy is separately weighing whether to replace Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. Partners expect Fedorov to accept the new post.

The two moves, taken together, would reverse the terms of Fedorov's dismissal. Fedorov was fired on 15 July after a feud with Syrskyi. 

Position is power without ministry

Fedorov may become a senior official given broad authority to coordinate a particular area of work across different government structures.

In Fedorov's case, that likely means coordinating the development of military technology, weapons production, and unmanned systems, as well as the interaction among the state, the military, and the defense industry.

That is, in substance, much of what Fedorov already did as defense minister and as the architect of Ukraine's "Army of Drones" program, but stripped of the ministry and its chain of command.

Zelenskyy reportedly reconsiders Syrskyi question

The possible replacement of Syrskyi is the larger story, and it is now in the open. The Financial Times reported that Zelenskyy is weighing the move following days of turmoil in the military leadership, and that any change would happen only if the president finds a commander who can ensure a smooth handover while holding the 1,200-kilometer front.

Fedorov himself said about the top commander: "Syrskyi saved our country in 2022, carried out several successful operations, and we cannot underestimate him. But the war has changed," he said.

Zelenskyy and Fedorov both signal more change is coming

As protests entered a third consecutive day, both men addressed the crowds on the evening of 18 July, and both pointed to decisions still being worked out.

"Yesterday and today, there were many consultations. Of course, I hear what people are saying. I spoke at length today with Mykhailo Fedorov. I also spoke today with Oleksandr Syrskyi. Decisions on the army will be worked out," Zelenskyy said.

Fedorov echoed the promise of change.

"Changes will definitely happen. For my part, thank you for the hope. I did not feel such responsibility even in government posts. Thank you to the veterans and the military for holding the front and holding honor," he said.

The Vatican's foreign minister stood in the rubble of a Russian strike in Kyiv. Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Holy See's Secretary for Relations with States and International Organizations, visited the site of a Russian missile strike that destroyed residential buildings and killed civilians, Ukraine's State Emergency Service (SES) said on Facebook.

Ukraine's rescuers work those sites under the threat of the double-tap, which is a Russian tactic of striking a location a second time after emergency crews arrive, which Ukraine's prosecutors have documented repeatedly.

Visit is one thread of Vatican's humanitarian engagement in Ukraine

It came days after Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the pope's peace envoy, met Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha in Kyiv on 16 July, where Sybiha pressed for a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians from Russian-occupied Oleshky, where UN and Human Rights Watch monitors say thousands are trapped without food or medical care.

The SES thanked the Holy See for its humanitarian aid to the Ukrainian people and for its solidarity, and said such visits are important evidence of international attention to the consequences of Russian aggression.

Vatican works humanitarian channels, not mediating role

The Holy See's engagement has focused on humanitarian work rather than mediation. Zuppi has run the Vatican's efforts on prisoner exchanges between Ukraine and Russia and on the return of Ukrainian children abducted to Russia, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has said plainly that the Vatican performs no mediating mission.

Pope Leo XIV, elected in 2025, has taken a sharper line on the war than his predecessor. Meeting Zelenskyy in December 2025, Leo appealed to Russia to make a gesture toward peace and warned that excluding Europe from peace talks on Ukraine was unrealistic.

Zelenskyy has invited him to visit Ukraine, which the pontiff said he hoped to do without committing to a date.

Kharkiv Oblast got 12 pickup trucks and two road rollers from Germany. The vehicles came from Germany's Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW), Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration head Oleh Synehubov said on Facebook, secured with help from the regional administration and a charitable organization.

The pickups are going where the state has to keep functioning under fire. They will be split among seven frontline and near-frontline communities — Kurylivka, Vilkhuvatka, Zolochiv, Prolisne, Lozova, Oskil, and Barvinkove — plus the Kupiansk district military administration and the regional branch of the State Emergency Service.

Why does Kharkiv Oblast need more trucks? 

They will be used for rapid emergency response, delivering humanitarian aid, evacuating residents, and surveying territory. The two road rollers will be deployed for emergency recovery and to repair damaged road infrastructure.

In Kharkiv Oblast, those are combat tasks as much as civilian ones. The roads these vehicles will drive are hunted. Russian drones routinely strike civilian cars on the oblast's roads — a Molniya drone killed a 61-year-old man driving near Zolochiv, one of the communities receiving a pickup, on 14 July.

A pickup that can move fast, carry aid or evacuees, and be replaced when lost is exactly the kind of unglamorous vehicle a border region needs to keep people alive.

The delivery is a small piece of a large German commitment. Germany is Ukraine's second-largest military and humanitarian backer after the US, and has earmarked €11.6 billion ($13.5 billion) for Ukraine in its 2027 budget.

Ukraine has a new drone hunter that outclimbs its prey. Ukraine's Defense Ministry codified the Tsyklop interceptor drone, which can rise above the maximum flight altitude of Russian strike and reconnaissance UAVs and destroy them from there.

It has a wingspan of a little over a meter, stays airborne for nearly 1.5 hours, and comes in two variants: a cheaper, simpler model for slow, low-flying air and ground targets, and a higher-performance version built to catch fast Shaheds at altitude.

The Ministry says the system's range is enough to cover any Ukrainian regional center against drone attacks, and that its V2 variant has already destroyed more than 100 air targets, and was the first to down a Russian Shahed over Kursk Oblast.

The interceptor was developed by a Ukrainian enterprise experienced in building weapons specifically for high-intensity modern warfare, and various Tsyklop modifications have been at the front for several years already, per the Defense Ministry.

Tsyklop already kills full Russian drone catalog

The V2's more than 100 kills span the range of Russian drones Ukraine faces daily: the Gerbera decoy-and-strike drone, the Zala and Supercam and Orlan reconnaissance UAVs, the Lancet loitering munition, and the Molniya. That target list is the point — it means one interceptor is bringing down both the cheap reconnaissance drones that spot for Russian artillery and the Lancets that follow, as well as Shaheds.

Different Tsyklop modifications have been at the front for several years, the Ministry said, so codification formalizes a system already proven in combat rather than introducing an untested one. The cheaper variant handles slow, low targets; the high-performance variant is built for fast Shaheds at altitude.

Tsyklop joins fast-filling interceptor lineup

Tsyklop enters a market that Ukraine has built at speed. The Defense Ministry codified 413 unmanned aerial systems in the first half of 2026, and interceptors are one of the fastest-growing categories.

The competitors each solve the Shahed problem differently. Ukraine's Defense Ministry is procuring 8,000 Octopus interceptors with automatic terminal guidance. Germany funded 15,000 units of the STRILA, which hits 355 km/h and needs no GPS. Wild Hornets' Sting has destroyed more than 600 aerial targets and became the first Ukrainian drone control system approved to NATO standards.

Tsyklop's contribution to that mix is the vertical dimension: a drone that gets above the target rather than chasing it down.

Altitude answers the jet-Shahed problem

The high-flying variant matters because Russia's drones have been getting faster and higher. Russia has fielded jet-powered Geran-4 Shaheds that cruise at 300 to 350 km/h and can burst to 500 to 600, outrunning much of Ukraine's cheaper interceptor fleet.

Ukraine's drone force is walking a fine line as it escalates its attacks on Russia's unregistered commercial "shadow fleet" in the Sea of Azov and eastern Black Sea. The drone operators are trying to immobilize the ships without breaching their hulls and spilling fuel or crude oil into the water.

That fleet is a big piece of how Moscow keeps its war funded—the aging tankers move Russian oil around Western sanctions—which is why Ukraine's drones have spent the past two weeks hunting it across the Azov and Black seas at better than a dozen ships a day.

"The goal is not to pollute the sea with oil spills; therefore, there must be no hull breaches," wrote Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine's independent Unmanned Systems Forces.

Instead, Brovdi stressed, the objective is "irreversible paralysis of oil, fuel and cargo logistics operating around sanctions. Turn every self-propelled vessel into a drifting barge, blind and deaf."

To immobilize a ship without breaching its hull requires accuracy: the drone must strike the ship's superstructure or screws, and only its superstructure or screws. Hitting a ship, but hitting it along its biggest part—its hull—risks polluting the already fragile Black Sea ecosystem.

The Black Sea is home to many unique species. But the pollution and stress resulting from more than four years of naval warfare threatens to drive many of these species toward extinction. Scientists estimate tens of thousands of dolphins have died; others have fled to the Black Sea's southwestern edge in the hope of escaping the poison and noise.

Ukrainian commanders aim to throttle Russia's sea trade across the Sea of Azov and Black Sea and through the Bosporus Strait into the Mediterranean. But they hope to do it without further harming the ecosystem.

Balancing act

It's a difficult balancing act. Post-strike imagery from some of the 159 ships Ukrainian drones have struck, by Brovdi's count, since the countershipping campaign commenced on 6 July shows scorched or burning ships, but no oil slicks. Other imagery depicts oil in the water, however.

The clean hits point to skilled operators. Videos from the 12-day countershipping campaign depict remote-controlled Fire Point FP-1/2 drones maneuvering to strike the bulky sterns of dry-cargo ships and tankers, where crew and vital above-the-waterline systems are concentrated.

The targeting parameters have narrowed since the strikes commenced. "Initially, they fired at the crew in the wheelhouse—the vessel would be blinded, but the engine would still work, and the crews learned to steer from the wheelhouse using a compass and telephone," Russian political analyst Igor Dimitriev explained.

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"Then they started firing at the stern: after this, the vessel is left drifting or being towed, and the tugs are also knocked out. The crews usually survive. But a disabled stern is no less unusable, and it also takes up ship repair capacity, which is otherwise almost nonexistent."

There's a new complication in this fight for clean anti-ship strikes, however. Some recent videos of FP-1/2 strikes feature the telltale symbology of AI-assisted targeting. More and more Ukrainian deep-strike drones have on-board AI systems for automatically spotting pre-programmed target types—trucks, air defenses, ships, helicopters, whatever—and autonomously maneuvering for an accurate hit.

The main benefit of AI targeting is that it works even when Russian radio jamming scrambles a drone's connection to its remote human operator. The main downside is that AI is only as good as its training. And the AI targeting seems to be struggling when it comes to ships. A video of recent shipping strikes shows one AI guiding a drone to a strike on a tanker's hold, where the oil is.

The AI may be able to tell a ship from the surrounding water, but it may not be able to tell the best part of a ship to strike for a spill-free hit.

Yet. AI improves as its data set expands. More anti-ship strikes mean more data and better AI.

And, hopefully, more clean hits.

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Russia is now flying its Shaheds lower. Ukrainian drone and electronic warfare expert Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov said that Russia's Shaheds are increasingly shifting from mass attacks to single, complex strikes flown under manual control.

The shift in tactics is a Russian answer to how good Ukraine's interceptors have become.

Every step Russia takes demands fast adaptation of Ukraine

"Shaheds are increasingly moving away from the tactic of mass attacks toward single but complex strikes in manual-control mode," Beskrestnov wrote.

Commenting on a video he posted, he said that one Shahed dropped to an altitude of 22 meters to attack its target, aiming to slip beneath the radar and interceptors' view.

"But our guys managed," he wrote.

Every step Russia takes demands fast adaptation of Ukrainian countermeasures, he stressed.

The tactic extends a trend Beskrestnov and others have tracked for weeks.

As Ukraine's interception rate against gasoline-powered Shaheds climbed to 92-96% in the deep rear, Russia shifted from mass strikes toward selective targeting, picking important targets, running multi-phase reconnaissance, and probing Ukraine's radar coverage and interceptor engagement zones before striking.

Low and hand-flown is how you beat a 95% intercept rate

The 22-meter altitude and the manual control are two solutions to the same problem for Russia. A drone that flies low enough hides in radar clutter and ground return. A drone flown by hand in real time can jink around interceptors rather than following a fixed, predictable route.

Ukraine's interceptor success was behind the innovation. Russia's three-part response has been jet-powered Geran variants that outrun cheap interceptors, electronic-warfare additions on the drones themselves, and border-area targeting where mesh-radio control works and Ukrainian satellite jamming does not.

The single low-altitude manual strike is the fourth adaptation: when you cannot get a swarm through, you send one drone flown carefully enough to matter.

Beskrestnov knows firsthand how deadly the manual-control threat could be. In April, Russia tried to kill him with four jet-powered, manually-controlled Shaheds that destroyed his home and wounded him — the first time, he said, that Russia had used Shaheds to try to assassinate a specific person.