Russia's cheap Gerbera drones are getting a little more expensive—and a lot more capable. And that's bad news for Ukrainian forces as both sides in Russia's 53-month wider war on Ukraine escalate their attacks on the enemy's logistics.

The upgrade is AI-assisted targeting, and it gives the $10,000 Gerbera the same machine vision Russia put on its far pricier Geran strike drones. In the same way Ukrainian drone units are relentlessly bombarding Russian supply lines with their AI-assisted "middle strike" drones, Russian drone units can now bombard Ukrainian supply lines, potentially weakening Ukrainian units before Russian units even make contact with them.

In recent days, the first Gerberas have appeared with AI-assisted targeting. It's the same "Seeker" modification the Russians recently added to their long-range Geran attack drones—Russia's licensed copy of the Iranian Shahed-136: forward-looking cameras feeding a Raspberry Pi microcomputer that runs machine vision software.

On the Gerans, the operator picks out a target—a truck, a locomotive—from around a kilometer away and locks the drone onto it. From there the machine vision flies the rest of the run, holding the lock through the Ukrainian jamming that would otherwise break the operator's radio link in the final seconds. Russia has standardized the guidance, communications and navigation components across the Gerbera Seeker and the Geran Seeker, the Hudson Institute reported on 29 July, so the 18-kg Gerbera should finish its attacks the same way. The Gerbera Seeker also picks up an inertial navigation unit and a jam-resistant Kometa-M satellite antenna carried over from the Geran-2.

Greater autonomy via the Seeker mod helps the propeller-driven, plywood-and-foam Gerberas strike more widely within their range of up to 600 km—less when they're carrying a warhead. As it happens, 600 km is just enough to hold at risk all the main supply lines for Ukraine's front-line brigades and regiments. Russian crews have already been hunting Ukrainian trains with cruder versions of the same idea.

Ukraine's Defense Intelligence says Russian robotic-warfare formations have been tasked with striking fuel stations and civilian vehicles—trucks, buses and passenger cars—in front-line and border areas, with the Gerbera Seeker among the systems earmarked for the job, according to the same Hudson assessment.

Decoys, scouts and relays

The Gerbera wasn't always an AI attack drone. The Chinese-designed, Russian-manufactured drone—Ukraine's Defense Intelligence names the developer as the Chinese model-aircraft maker Skywalker Technology Co., Ltd., which ships kits and Chinese components to the Alabuga plant for assembly—started out as a decoy for bigger, pricier drones. Where a Geran might cost between $50,000 and $100,000 depending on the exact model and its features, a Gerbera is priced to move at just $10,000 or so.

Before launching Gerans, the Russians would send in Gerberas in order to distract Ukrainian air defenses and force them to expend their limited supply of ammunition. Gerberas can function as simple reconnaissance systems, relaying video back to their operators. It's likely the Gerans also serve as relays in mesh radio networks, passing radio signals back and forth on behalf of a wider wave of drones.

Transforming a basic Gerbera into a Seeker Gerbera adds cost and weight. At tens of dollars per unit, a Raspberry Pi isn't exactly expensive. It's unclear how much the warhead and software cost, however. In any event, a Seeker Gerbera is still much cheaper than a Seeker Geran is. Adding Seeker Gerberas could allow the Russians to focus their Seeker Gerans at the toughest and most distant targets: ships and port infrastructure, for example.

Low cost is a prerequisite for saturation middle strikes across the logistical zone. The targets—trucks, trains, warehouses and depots—are numerous, after all. Ukrainian drone units launch hundreds of middle strike drones every day, many of them with AI targeting. The defense ministry in Kyiv hopes to expand the strikes by procuring 100,000 middle strike drones for 2027.

The Seeker Gerbera could help Russia begin to catch up.

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For first time, Russia merged two separate drone types onto one Mesh network. Ukraine already has answer

If the Russians do indeed scale up Seeker Gerbera raids, the Ukrainians may have to counter the drones the same way the Russians counter Ukraine's own middle strike drones. The Russians spread their supply vehicles along more secondary roads and also attach air defense gun teams to more convoys. The same tactics could blunt Seeker Gerbera attacks.

Exclusives

Europe deepens trade with India while Western parts keep reaching Russia’s weapons. Brussels is drafting its largest-ever corporate blacklist over the war—and expanding trade with the country those parts pass through.

Russia can rebuild Wildberries warehouses more easily than it can replace warehouse workers. The warehouses are replaceable—but at a record 2.1% unemployment, the spooked workers who staff them are not.

Precision missiles hit the coordinates. Investigators ask who was still standing there. A new framework names the pattern in four Russian strikes—and aims at Russia’s standard legal defense.

Europe wants Ukraine’s railway split. The war wants it whole. Ukraine has two years to split its railway on the EU model—and no intention of giving up the wartime control that model is built to remove.

Greece blocked a gas ban, France and Italy softened an entry ban—now Brussels tries 1,600 companies helping Russia’s war. Bloomberg sources says the proposed list covers firms feeding Russia's military industry, and the work stayed out of public view.

Military

Ukraine orders nationwide bomb shelter inspection as more head underground amid rising ballistic missile threat. Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi ordered authorities to inspect every civilian shelter and ensure people can enter as soon as a ballistic missile threat is known.

"There is no sky that is 100% safe": Poland to consider sending more Patriot missiles to Ukraine after Russian missile crashes on its territory. The pledge comes after a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile flew nearly 100 kilometers into Poland during Moscow's latest mass attack on Ukraine, prompting Warsaw to review additional military support.

Warsaw confirms a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile overshot Ukraine and hit a field in Poland. The Kh-101 flew across Ukraine and traveled about 95 km inside a NATO member before it fell.

Russia builds sea drones to hunt Ukraine, Ukraine just torched the base where they sit in occupied Crimea. Operators struck the hangars of a Russian naval uncrewed-boat base at Snizhne, near Yevpatoriia, setting off a large blast. Other targets: radars, a launcher, a Shahed base.

Russia parked a 5,000-kilometer jamming station in Crimea, Ukraine parked a drone on top of it. The hit came near Cape Fiolent overnight, another Russian high-value asset lost on a peninsula Ukraine keeps working to cut off.

Ukraine preparing "asymmetric" response to Russia's ballistic missile campaign, Zelenskyy says. Zelenskyy says Ukraine has approved technological and asymmetric measures to counter Russia's growing use of ballistic missiles, while seeking more air defense interceptors from European partners.

Intelligence and technology

This Ukrainian 344-kg armored capsule keeps wounded soldier in constant contact with operator, with emergency exit he controls himself. Ukraine's Robotized Complexes unveiled the Murakha CaseEvak, a ground robot with an armored medical capsule that remotely evacuates wounded soldiers from zones where enemy drones hunt rescuers.

Ukraine loses another F-16 to onboard emergency. Ukraine lost an F-16 on 29 July during a mission to intercept Russian air targets.

Ukraine's interceptors shot down Russian spy drone at 6,400 meters. It's thousand meters above Everest's base camp. Ukrainian National Guard pilots intercepted a Russian ZALA Z-20 reconnaissance drone at one of the highest altitudes at which Ukraine has downed an enemy drone.

Ukraine's Defense Forces sent FP-1 drones to Ryazan, a refinery and a warehouse burned. Open-source analysts worked through eyewitness frames to place the blaze at the complex the marketplace calls Ryazan: Tyushevskaya. Later in the morning, the drones reached a Perm refinery 1,500 km from Ukraine.

International

EU releases another €3.47 billion for Ukraine's "urgent needs", drones, missiles, air defense, and Gripen jets. The latest EU defense tranche will fund drones, missiles, air defense, and Gripen fighter jets, with Brussels pledging additional military support for Ukraine in the coming weeks.

The Belarusian tunnel to the EU was almost done. Then Lithuania drilled a hole in exactly the wrong place, for the diggers. Polish tunnel-detection equipment narrowed down the location, and a single bore confirmed a passage running from Belarusian soil.

US Senate took first step toward Graham sanctions bill on Russia. It gives Trump power to impose 500% tariffs on Russian oil. The US Senate voted 86-12 to advance the Russia sanctions bill renamed for the late Senator Lindsey Graham, hours after his funeral.

Ukraine hits 201 Russian shadow fleet ships in three weeks. Commander says Crimea's supply route is now blocked indefinitely. The campaign has run alongside strikes on Crimea's power grid and air defenses, part of a broader effort to make holding the peninsula costlier by the week.

Humanitarian and social impact

Russia likely used North Korean missile in strike that killed Ukrainian family. Reuters and President Zelenskyy say preliminary evidence points to a North Korean ballistic missile in the strike that killed five members of the Voronov family during Russia's latest mass attack.

Two children pulled from the rubble alive, three did not survive, one village near Kryvyi Rih after Russian missile attack. Last night, Russian missiles killed eight Ukrainians and injured dozens.

Ukrainian drones destroyed nearly 15.4% of Russian retail giant's storage space in July. Ukrainian drones destroyed eight Wildberries warehouses in July, which is about 860,000 square meters.

Russian soldiers raped Ukrainian woman and shot her in back when she tried to escape in Bucha. Ukraine has now put their names on record. Ukrainian police charged two Russian soldiers from the 76th Air Assault Division.

This Ukrainian border town has served as Russia's testing ground for new weapons of terror since 2023. Then, it turns them on rest of Ukraine.

Russia is bombing Kostiantynivka to rubble while pushing its infantry into it on foot. Artillery and guided glide bombs hit the city as small Russian groups try to dig into whatever buildings they can reach.

Political and legal developments

62 of the 140 foreign parts in this Russian missile were American. Ukraine wants that gap closed. An Iskander missile Russia fired at Kyiv Oblast on 10 July held more than 140 foreign components, Ukraine's sanctions chief says, most made recently.

Investigators descend on Ukraine's recruitment offices in a coordinated nationwide operation. The operation, run with the army's General Staff, reached most regions on 30 July and is expected to produce named suspects.

Ukraine's army has some brigades starved of soldiers and others overstaffed. New commander is now auditing why. Ukraine's General Staff has launched a check on how its brigades, regiments, and corps are manned.

Read our previous daily review here.

Ukraine has ordered an urgent nationwide inspection of all civilian bomb shelters following Russia's latest deadly ballistic missile attack, with Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi instructing authorities to ensure shelters are properly maintained and accessible whenever a ballistic missile threat emerges.

The move comes after Russia's overnight missile and drone barrage killed civilians across Ukraine and as more Ukrainians increasingly rely on bomb shelters amid a growing wave of Russian ballistic missile attacks.

Ballistic missiles leave civilians with little warning

Koretskyi's order follows reports circulating on social media that some people were unable to access shelters before the overnight attack because an official air raid alert had not yet been issued. 

Kyiv authorities denied claims that access to metro stations – the capital's largest public shelters – was restricted after the alert was announced, saying all stations were opened immediately once the warning was declared.

However, Russia's increasing use of ballistic missiles has sharply reduced warning times, often to minutes or less. In some recent attacks, air raid alerts have been issued only after missiles were already approaching or reaching their targets.

Government orders inspection of every shelter

Koretskyi said relevant ministries, government agencies, regional military administrations, including the Kyiv City Military Administration, and local authorities had been instructed to immediately inspect every civilian shelter within their areas of responsibility.

"All of them – without exception," he said.

The inspections will assess both the condition of shelters and whether people can access them without obstruction.

Shelters should open before air raid alerts

Koretskyi said shelters should be accessible when authorities already know a ballistic missile threat exists, even if an official air raid alert has not yet been issued.

"Access to shelters must be available even when the danger is already known but the alarm has not yet been announced," he said.

"Given the constant threat of ballistic missiles, regional authorities and city administrations must act more quickly and based on the real need to protect people."

He said it was unacceptable that, more than four years into Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukrainians could still face problems accessing bomb shelters.

"People must always be able to reach shelters in advance and without obstruction, especially when there is a ballistic missile threat. This is the personal responsibility of every official," Koretskyi said.

Ballistic threat drives more people underground

The order comes as Russia increasingly relies on ballistic missiles, which can reach their targets within minutes and leave civilians with little time to seek shelter.

The growing threat has led more Ukrainians to use bomb shelters during air raids. During the latest overnight attack, more than 56,000 people took refuge in Kyiv's metro stations alone, according to the Kyiv City State Administration.

The renewed focus on shelter access also comes as Ukraine continues to press partners for additional Patriot interceptor missiles, which are among the few systems capable of shooting down Russian ballistic missiles. Russia's latest overnight attack included ballistic missiles that struck multiple regions across the country, killing at least nine civilians and injuring dozens more.

Poland will consider providing Ukraine with additional Patriot interceptor missiles after a Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace during Moscow's latest mass attack on Ukraine, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on 30 July.

Speaking at the site where a suspected Russian Kh-101 cruise missile crashed in Poland's Lublin Voivodeship, Tusk said Warsaw would review further military assistance to Ukraine following the incident, according to Ukrinform.

Poland weighs additional Patriot missiles

"After this incident, together with the defense minister, we will consider as soon as possible the issue of further assistance to Ukraine, including the transfer of additional missiles for Patriot systems, should such a need arise," Tusk said.

The announcement follows Russia's overnight missile and drone barrage against Ukraine, during which a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile flew roughly 95 kilometers into Polish territory before crashing in a field. Polish authorities said they scrambled an F-16 fighter jet and were prepared to shoot the missile down had it continued deeper into the country.

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Warsaw confirms a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile overshot Ukraine and hit a field in Poland

Patriot interceptor missiles are currently Ukraine's most effective defense against Russian ballistic missiles. Ukraine has repeatedly warned it is running short of interceptor missiles, while Russia has intensified its use of ballistic weapons that can only be shot down by a limited number of advanced air defense systems.

Tusk added that no country has completely secure airspace.

"There is no sky – not in the United States, not in Israel, not in Ukraine, and not in Russia – that is 100% safe," the Polish prime minister said.

Tusk: Next 100 days could decide the war

Tusk said he discussed the battlefield situation and prospects for ending the war during talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday.

"After my conversation with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, one thing is quite clear: the next 100 days could determine the outcome of this war. It's fifty-fifty," Tusk said, according to Ukrinform.

Investigation into missile incursion continues

Tusk said there was currently no evidence that Poland itself had been the intended target of the missile.

He added that the United States, European Union member states, and Norway had offered assistance with the investigation. Ukraine has also proposed helping examine the incident, and Polish authorities plan to use the expertise of Ukrainian specialists.

The missile incursion occurred during one of Russia's largest aerial attacks in recent months, which killed at least eight civilians across Ukraine and injured more than 50 others. Officials have said the object that crashed in Lublin Voivodeship was most likely a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile.

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Two children pulled from the rubble alive, three did not survive—one village near Kryvyi Rih after the Russian missile attack

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said preliminary evidence indicates Russia used a North Korean ballistic missile to destroy a family home near Kryvyi Rih, killing five people during Moscow's latest mass attack on Ukraine.

The strike flattened the home of the Voronov family in the village of Radushne. Parents Olena and Artem Voronov were killed along with three of their children – Mark, Azarii Ilai, and Emilia. 

The fate of Zakharii, Dominika, Federika, Viorika, and 18-month-old Artem, the family's grandson, remained unclear as rescuers searched the rubble and forensic experts examined recovered remains to determine which family members had been found.

Preliminary evidence points to North Korean missile

"Russia used a North Korean missile in Radushne for the first time in a long while – these are the preliminary findings," Zelenskyy said in his evening address.

"Of course, there will still be expert examinations and everything will be verified, but as of now, it appears to have been North Korean ballistic weaponry."

He condemned what he called the alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang, saying Russia relies on North Korean missiles and troops "to kill our Ukrainian children."

Reuters, citing two sources familiar with the matter, also reported that Russia likely used a North Korean KN-23 or KN-24 short-range ballistic missile in the attack. One military source told the news agency that Ukrainian radar detected flight paths characteristic of the missiles, though investigators must still examine recovered fragments before reaching a definitive conclusion.

According to Reuters, it would be the first confirmed use of a North Korean missile against Ukraine in nearly a year and could indicate Russia has received a new shipment of such weapons.

Zelenskyy urges partners to send more interceptors

Zelenskyy said international condemnation of the attack and concern over a Russian cruise missile that crossed into Poland during the same overnight barrage were not enough.

"The most important thing is not just condolences and not just condemnation, but air defense missiles and the kind of pressure on Russia that can stop this senseless Russian war, its strikes, and its terror," he said.

He called air defense interceptors, particularly for Patriot systems, Ukraine's highest priority, while also requesting additional missiles for NASAMS, IRIS-T, HAWK, and other Western-supplied systems.

"I very much hope that all our partners, especially our American partners and our friends in Europe, understand that real human lives depend on whether they help us – whether they help Ukraine," Zelenskyy said.

Russia expands ballistic missile campaign

The strike on the Voronov family came during one of Russia's largest recent aerial assaults, in which Moscow launched 74 missiles and 265 drones across Ukraine. The barrage killed at least nine civilians and injured dozens more.

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Two children pulled from the rubble alive, three did not survive—one village near Kryvyi Rih after the Russian missile attack

Russia has increasingly relied on ballistic missiles, which are far more difficult to intercept than cruise missiles and can currently be shot down only by US-made Patriot systems.

During the same overnight attack, a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile flew roughly 95 kilometers into Poland before crashing in a field, prompting Warsaw to scramble an F-16 fighter jet and renewing concerns about the risk posed to NATO territory.

The European Commission has disbursed an additional €3.47 billion to Ukraine under the defense component of its €90 billion Ukraine Support Loan, providing funding for drones, missiles, air defense systems, and Gripen fighter jets.

The latest tranche comes as Ukraine faces intensified Russian missile and drone attacks and seeks to bolster its defense capabilities.

Funding to strengthen Ukraine's defense

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the new funding would help Ukraine defend its skies while deepening defense industrial cooperation between Kyiv and the European Union.

"Today, we are investing an additional €3.47 billion to help protect Ukraine's skies," von der Leyen said.

"With this new disbursement under our €90 billion loan package, we are helping Ukraine defend its people. We are also bringing our defense industries closer together, combining Europe's industrial scale with Ukraine's unmatched innovation. This is our new Drone Deal taking shape."

According to the Commission, the package includes another tranche under its drone procurement program and additional funding for drones, including long-range jet-powered drones, missiles, and Gripen fighter jets to help Ukraine rapidly acquire critical military equipment.

“The funding is provided in response to Ukraine's urgent military needs, as it continues to require capability support to defend itself against Russia's war of aggression,” the statement reads.

The Commission said further funding for drones, ammunition, air defense, and missiles would be approved and disbursed in the coming weeks.

Part of broader Ukraine Support Loan

The Ukraine Support Loan consists of €60 billion dedicated to strengthening Ukraine's defense capabilities and industrial capacity, alongside €30 billion in budget support to help keep the Ukrainian state functioning.

The latest payment follows previous disbursements of €3.2 billion under the EU's Macro-Financial Assistance program on 25 June, €3.9 billion under the defense window on 30 June, and €1.1 billion on 15 July.

The Commission said a total of €28.3 billion is expected to be allocated to Ukraine's defense industrial capacity during 2026, with the remaining funding scheduled for disbursement before the end of the year.

Ukraine welcomes latest tranche

Ukrainian Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi confirmed that Ukraine had received the €3.47 billion payment, saying the funds would strengthen the country's defenses and help finance its most urgent needs.

"These funds will strengthen our defense and help finance Ukraine's most urgent needs," Koretskyi wrote on X.

He said Ukraine has secured €11.6 billion under the Ukraine Support Loan so far this year, including €3.2 billion in budget support and €8.4 billion for defense, out of the €45 billion available under the mechanism in 2026.

"I am sincerely grateful to the European Commission and all EU Member States for their consistent and unwavering support," Koretskyi said. "Every euro invested in Ukraine strengthens our resilience, protects our people, and brings us closer to a just and lasting peace."

Since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, the European Union and its member states have provided more than €220 billion in support to Ukraine, including assistance financed through proceeds from immobilized Russian sovereign assets.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine is preparing a series of "asymmetric measures" and technological solutions to strengthen its defenses against Russia's escalating ballistic missile attacks, following a high-level security meeting on 30 July.

The announcement comes hours after Russia launched a large-scale overnight missile and drone attack across Ukraine in which ballistic missiles once again proved the hardest to intercept. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly warned that dwindling stocks of anti-ballistic interceptors leave cities increasingly exposed.

Ukraine preparing asymmetric response

Zelenskyy said he had received reports from Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Mykhailo Drapatyi, Chief of the General Staff Ihor Skybiuk, Defense Minister Yevhen Khmara, and Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Pavlo Palisa.

"We discussed in detail the challenges created by Russia's tactics of ballistic missile strikes and our ability to counter them at both the military and diplomatic levels," Zelenskyy said. "We identified decisions, technological steps, and asymmetric measures that can provide Ukraine with greater protection."

The president did not disclose what those measures would involve.

More air defense missiles sought from Europe

Zelenskyy said he had instructed Commander-in-Chief Mykhailo Drapatyi to strengthen coordination and information-sharing with military leadership in neighboring countries.

He also said teams from Ukraine's Defense Ministry and the Presidential Office would work with European partners that could help supply additional air defense missiles, as Kyiv continues to press allies for more interceptors capable of defeating ballistic threats.

Ballistic missile threat growing

The renewed focus on ballistic missile defense follows one of Russia's biggest recent air attacks. Overnight into 30 July, Russia launched 358 aerial weapons against Ukraine, including nine ballistic missiles. Ukraine's Air Force intercepted only one of them, underscoring the growing challenge posed by Moscow's reliance on ballistic weapons.

The latest strike highlighted the limits of Ukraine's current air defenses against ballistic missiles, reinforcing Kyiv's calls for more Patriot interceptors and other systems from its partners.

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Two children pulled from the rubble alive, three did not survive—one village near Kryvyi Rih after the Russian missile attack

Frontline and long-range strike updates

Beyond air defense, Zelenskyy said the meeting reviewed the battlefield situation, particularly around the Sloviansk and Kostiantynivka sectors in Donetsk Oblast, as well as the operation of Ukraine's Black Sea export corridor.

The president also highlighted Ukraine's ongoing long-range strike campaign against Russian military targets in occupied territories, including Crimea, saying priority targets had been updated.

"Our operation of mid-strikes against Russian forces and positions in the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine, particularly in our Crimea, continues," Zelenskyy said.

General Staff preparing reforms

Separately, Zelenskyy said the General Staff is preparing a package of systemic reforms aimed at improving frontline situational awareness, accelerating operational decision-making, and giving brigades greater flexibility to respond to Russian assault operations.

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Investigators descend on Ukraine’s recruitment offices in a coordinated nationwide operation

He thanked Ukrainian troops defending the front line and preventing Russian forces from achieving the objectives set by the Kremlin.

An Iskander missile that Russia fired at Kyiv Oblast on 10 July was built from more than 140 foreign parts, 62 of them American, and at least 20 were made in 2025—components that cleared every Western control and reached a Russian assembly line within about a year, Euromaidan Press reported.

Without those parts, Ukraine’s presidential sanctions commissioner Vladyslav Vlasiuk said, Russia could not build the weapon.

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62 of the 140 foreign parts in this Russian missile were American. Ukraine wants that gap closed

A paradox runs through Europe’s answer to that problem. The EU is preparing to blacklist more than 1,600 companies for helping Russia’s war industry, its largest single batch of corporate designations, Bloomberg reported, while at the same time deepening trade with India, a country the same Western parts move through on their way to Russia.

And closing that gap will matter even after the war ends: a new study of Russia’s arms makers finds they will keep producing weapons at wartime speed—and keep needing imported parts to do it—whether or not the fighting stops.

Ukraine has been pulling the same finding out of downed Russian drones and missiles for two years—Indian electronics in Shahed drones among them.

The India route grew before the trade deals arrived

A 29 July report by the strategic intelligence company Strider put a number on the wider channel: more than 50,000 sensitive goods, or goods with potential dual-use applications, reached Russian defense companies through Indian supply chains after the full-scale invasion.

The security intelligence firm compared totals from 2019 to 2021 with those from 2022 through the first quarter of 2025. Since the invasion, sensitive exports from India to Russia have multiplied several times over—and the sharpest jumps come from the countries deepening their own trade with India.

Swedish-origin goods rose almost sixfold. British, Swiss, and French exports of the same kind roughly doubled or more. The pattern extends beyond Europe: American-origin goods more than five times over, Australian goods even faster. German trade was the exception, falling by more than a third—though Germany still ships more of these goods through India than anyone.

Without those parts, Ukraine’s presidential sanctions commissioner Vladyslav Vlasiuk said, Russia could not build the weapon.

French carbon fiber—used in aircraft, drones, and missiles—reached Polymer Company LLC in Russia through India in 2025, according to Strider. The Russian government has designated the firm part of its military-industrial complex, and it supplies several restricted entities.

None of this shows that a part in the 10 July Iskander passed through India. It shows Western goods moving through the country where Britain’s trade deal took effect on 15 July and where the EU is targeting entry into force in 2027. Those deals expand legitimate commerce, not evasion.

Strider’s warning concerns what happens after Western goods enter long, opaque supply chains, and the report urged end-use monitoring to be written into the agreements themselves.

Brussels is preparing 1,600 more names

The blacklist Brussels is drafting would target companies rather than whole industries, reaching corners of Russia’s military supply chain that earlier rounds missed.

The firms have a combined annual turnover of more than $20 billion and employ more than a quarter of a million people. If members approve it, the number of EU-sanctioned entities would jump by half. Foreign ministers are expected to take it up in October.

The bloc’s 21st package, adopted on 23 July, had already tightened dual-use export curbs on dozens of firms, some outside the EU. Six days later, the firm published the scale of one route around exactly those curbs.

Russia plans to keep producing

That is why the flow of parts outlasts the war. A 14 July study of five major Russian defense manufacturers found them still dependent on imported components despite sanctions, corruption, labor shortages, and inflated costs—and likely to hold high output in select weapons while slowly rebuilding reserves.

Its sharpest warning is about time: Russia’s arms industry will probably stay on a wartime footing even if the shooting in Ukraine stops, while Western industry is unlikely to mobilize on that scale until a major war is already underway.

The Iskander compresses that long problem into a single year. At least 20 of its foreign parts were made in 2025, fitted into the missile, and fired at Kyiv Oblast on 10 July 2026.

A Russian cruise missile crossed deep into Poland and crashed in a field during Russia's mass overnight strike on Ukraine, Polish and Ukrainian officials said. Warsaw says it scrambled a fighter jet and was ready to shoot the missile down had it flown on. The same barrage killed civilians across Ukraine and sent hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles at its cities.

A Kh-101 crossed nearly 100 km into Poland

In the early hours of 30 July, a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile flew into Poland and came down about 95 km from the Ukrainian border, the Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi reported. 

Poland's Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz called it an extremely difficult night for the country's air defense and said an unidentified object had fallen in a field.

The missile in Poland was one of 74 missiles and 265 drones that Russia fired at Ukraine overnight — 61 Kh-101 and Kalibr cruise missiles, four Zircon and Onyx, and nine ballistic Iskander-M, S-400, and KN-23. 

Ukraine's acting Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha noted that the Kh-101 missile crossed into Poland, called it a violation of NATO airspace, and said Kyiv is informing partners and international organizations about the attack.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk later said everything indicated it was a Kh-101, and that Polish forces were ready to shoot it down had it continued deeper.

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Two children pulled from the rubble alive, three did not survive—one village near Kryvyi Rih after the Russian missile attack

Poland scrambled a jet and tracked the missile

During the attack, Poland's Operational Command set out the sequence. 

• Around 03:29 Polish time, one object came within about 5 km of the border, then turned away. 
• At 3:40, radar caught an unidentified object moving west over Polish territory, and an F-16 went up to identify and intercept it. At 3:46, it vanished from the screens before it could be identified. 
• Sirens sounded for Lublin and much of the voivodeship only around 3:50. 
• A helicopter crew later located the probable crash site in open ground near Tarnawa-Kolonia, in Lublin Voivodeship. 

Ukrainian monitoring channels eRadar and Strategic Aviation placed a cruise missile over Poland at 04:40 Kyiv time, equal to 03:40 in Warsaw. The monitoring channel Strategic Aviation tracked it over Lublin Voivodeship, which borders Ukraine's Volyn Oblast.

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The Belarusian tunnel to the EU was almost done. Then Lithuania drilled a hole in exactly the wrong place—for the diggers

At least eight civilians killed in Ukraine during the same attack

In Ukraine, one of the Russian missiles killed a family — parents and three children — in a direct hit on their home near Kryvyi Rih, while rescuers pulled two more children from the rubble alive. In Lviv, western Ukraine, another missile destroyed apartments, injured dozens including children, and damaged two kindergartens and a school. Russia's strike killed at least eight people across Ukraine and injured dozens, with civilian casualties in Kyiv, Poltava, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Sumy, Vinnytsia, and Cherkasy.

Not the first Russian missile over Poland

This was not the first Russian cruise missile to cross into Poland. In 2023, a Kh-55 flew several hundred kilometers over Polish territory before it fell near Bydgoszcz. Earlier in July, the Polish outlet Onet, citing intelligence and diplomatic sources, warned that Poland could become a target of Russian provocations meant to test NATO's resolve, with strikes on critical infrastructure among the scenarios named.

Another Wildberries warehouse burned overnight, this time in Penza, over 600 kilometers southeast of Moscow—the latest in Ukraine’s two-week drone campaign against Russia’s biggest online retailer. The buildings, it turns out, are the least of it.

The strikes work not by destroying warehouses, which can be replaced, but by breaking what a business this size cannot run without: workers willing to staff it, and sellers willing to stock it.

That campaign has already killed. Whether it can spread into the wider Russian economy is the harder question—and for now, the answer looks like no.

Burning a warehouse barely dents Wildberries

The Penza hub—90,000 square meters, a main sorting node for Russia’s Volga region and only the first stage of a complex built to reach double that—was only the newest. Regional governor Oleg Melnichenko confirmed the fire, and staff had been evacuated before dawn, with the company shifting orders to other warehouses.

The same morning, drones struck a second Wildberries hub in Sarapul, in Udmurtia, where staff were evacuated ahead of the fire and no casualties were reported. Both were part of a campaign that opened in mid-July and has rolled across the country since.

Any single warehouse is close to disposable. Ukraine has knocked out more than a tenth of Wildberries’ storage network, and the network keeps absorbing the losses. Hubs like these run largely independent of one another: merchants ship goods straight to a given warehouse, where the stock waits until a local order pulls it out.

Burn one, and the next does not fall with it. No domino effect. The reading that the strikes therefore break Wildberries’ business model rather than its buildings comes from a Lines on Maps video analysis of the campaign.

On the physical damage alone, Wildberries can take the loss and carry on.

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“When karma works”: Ukraine torched 188,000-square-meter warehouse of Russia’s biggest online retailer after years of strikes on leading logistics company

The real target is who staffs them

So the strikes are aimed at something harder to replace than a building. The campaign has killed at least eight people and injured more than 80, most of them night-shift workers caught in the first strikes. A warehouse job was never a prize, and it now carries a real chance of not surviving a shift.

Russia’s labor market makes the rest easy. Unemployment has reached a record 2.1%, the lowest figure Rosstat has ever logged, as mobilization and emigration drain the workforce, with the state forecasting a shortfall of some 3.1 million workers by 2030.

A worker who no longer wants to gamble on the next wave of drones does not have to. The staff who cleared out of the Penza hub before dawn can be hired somewhere safer by week’s end, and no one is paying them to stand under the flight path.

Sellers who cannot afford to stay

The other half is the sellers. Wildberries had rewritten its seller terms just weeks before the strikes, reclassifying drone attacks as force majeure and shedding its liability for goods lost in them. So a trader whose stock sat inside a burning hub swallows the loss.

For Anastasia, a clothing-store owner, that meant watching a business vanish between one day and the next. “Just yesterday I was an entrepreneur, and today I am bankrupt. My entire clothing collection has burned down,” she wrote in an Instagram post.

And the sellers cannot easily flee the platform. The whole model runs on scale. Wildberries cannot simply put up smaller, less tempting warehouses without wrecking the economics that make it work, and nobody revives brick-and-mortar retail overnight. The smallest sellers needed the scale. The scale is what is burning.

How much of Russia’s economy is at stake

The sums are large enough to explain why Ukraine bothered. Goods sold through Wildberries in 2025 came to about 3% of Russia’s GDP, and the strikes have caused up to $2 billion in direct damage, Estonian military intelligence estimates—turnover moving across the platform, not Wildberries’ own revenue, which is a fraction of it. Much of the coverage has treated the two as the same.

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Ukrainian drones destroyed nearly 15.4% of Russian retail giant’s storage space in July

Russia’s business climate index fell to its lowest reading since the middle of 2022 in July, on the Central Bank’s own numbers. Even so, the hit is easy to overstate: that 3% does not vanish with a warehouse, because a share of it reroutes, slower and costlier, through whatever the vendors improvise.

Wildberries is not a purely civilian target: the platform moves military kit—body armor, uniforms, drone parts—bought through it by Russian units, Estonian military intelligence says.

Why the fire probably won’t spread

Which leaves the biggest question, and the one it is easiest to overstate: could the fires reach the wider Russian economy?

Probably not. The company is heavily indebted and has already breached the terms of its bank loans—the sort of covenant breach that lets creditors call in everything at once. They have not. The Russian government has signaled it may prop the retailer up if it comes to that, with state-controlled VTB, Russia’s second-largest bank, cast in the central role.

On prediction markets, where the calls are backed by money rather than clicks, a bankruptcy this year is priced as unlikely. The damage that lasts is not on any balance sheet—the warehouse worker who will not clock in tomorrow, the trader who will not restock a shelf they have already watched burn once.

Ukraine's drone forces struck a string of Russian targets across occupied Crimea, Russia's Rostov Oblast, and the occupied south, Robert "Madyar" Brovdi, the commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces, said. The hits ran from a naval drone base and radar shelters on the peninsula to air-defense systems and a site Russia uses to launch attack drones. They feed a widening campaign to cut occupied Crimea off from what keeps it supplied.

A naval drone base and radar shelters struck in occupied Crimea

On 30 July, the Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) reported strikes on a Russian base of naval uncrewed boats at Snizhne, near Yevpatoriia in occupied Crimea. Footage showed the hangars catching and a large blast rolling up from the site. The same night, drone crews hit the radio-transparent shelters of a radar station at Okhotnyche, on Ai-Petri above Yalta — the dome-shaped covers, or radomes, that shield a radar from the weather.

Both targets fell to fighters of the 9th battalion "Kairos" of the 414th "Madyar's Birds" Separate Brigade, Brovdi added.

A Buk caught on a trailer, radars from Crimea to Rostov

Further east, drone pilots struck a Russian Buk-M3 air-defense system near Snizhne in Donetsk Oblast while it was moving on a low-loader. That strike and a hit on a site at Donetsk airport, where Russia stores and launches Shahed attack drones, were the work of the "Phoenix" unmanned-aviation grouping within the Luhansk Border Detachment.

The radars came in a run. Crews struck a P-18 station at Ivanivka in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, a target of the 412th Brigade "Nemesis." Deeper in, they struck a Nebo-SVU radar at Russkiy Kolodets and a Sopka-2 complex at Fedorovka, both in Russia's Rostov Oblast. In all, the commander counted five air-defense elements hit that day, part of 30 downed by his units through July.

The sea blockade climbs, and the power squeeze goes on

The maritime side kept moving too. Ukraine's sea-drone campaign, codenamed MoLoChKa — short for "Moscow will fall through Crimea" — has now struck 205 vessels since it opened on 6 July, 130 in the Azov Sea and 75 in the Black Sea, Brovdi said. The fuel tankers that carry gasoline to the peninsula are a standing target of that hunt, and the effort to shred Russia's air cover over Crimea runs alongside it.

Across the whole grouping, SBS said its units struck or destroyed 1,758 enemy targets in a single day, and 50,109 since 1 July, according to its running statistics.

Ukraine's military intelligence has destroyed one of Russia's electronic-warfare stations in temporarily occupied Crimea, the country's Defense Intelligence agency (HUR) said. Fighters caught the coastal complex on the peninsula and published video of the strike, the latest in a run of intelligence operations stripping Russia's sensors off Crimea. The station was built to listen in on and jam communications across a wide area, and none of that reach kept it alive.

A jamming station that could not save itself

In the night of 26 to 27 July 2026, fighters from HUR's Department of Unmanned Systems found and destroyed the Russian Murmansk-BN electronic-warfare station near Cape Fiolent in occupied Crimea, HUR reported on Telegram, sharing footage of the hit.

The Murmansk-BN is a coastal complex that Russian forces use for radio reconnaissance, intercepting signals, and jamming shortwave communications, HUR said. Its range can reach up to 5,000 kilometers. A station meant to jam and silence an enemy's communications across that distance did nothing to detect the drone closing on it.

What the Murmansk-BN does

The Murmansk-BN is a strategic, long-range electronic-warfare system. Made by the Russian concern KRET, it entered service in 2014 and was first fielded in occupied Crimea, south of Sevastopol. It works in the high-frequency band, the shortwave range armies use for long-distance radio when other links fail.

Western analysts have documented the same system type suppressing high-frequency traffic over great distances. That is what makes each one Ukraine removes a hole in Russia's electronic cover rather than a small loss.

Days after an S-400, another Crimea kill

The jammer is the second high-value Russian system this unit has taken off the peninsula in days. Days ago, HUR's drone operators burned an S-400 Triumf launcher and its 96L6 radar in occupied Crimea, the long-range battery Russia leans on to shoot down aircraft and missiles.

Both hits fit a wider pattern. Ukraine's drone crews have struck close to 200 Russian air-defense assets in the first half of 2026, and over the unit's life have struck 76 radars and 31 electronic-warfare systems among a larger tally, thinning the cover Russia depends on over occupied territory.

Ukrainian investigators launched a coordinated sweep of the country's draft offices in a single morning, the State Bureau of Investigation announced. The operation goes after two things at once: money paid to escape mobilization, and the mistreatment of the men those offices process. Ukraine's military command has publicly backed the raids.

More than 100 draft offices, searched in one morning

On the morning of 30 July, the State Bureau of Investigation began searches at more than 100 "territorial recruitment and social support centers" — the draft offices Ukrainians call TCKs — across most regions, the bureau set out. It runs the operation, codenamed "Honest Draft," together with the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

"For many at the TCKs, a 'Clean Thursday' has truly come today," the Bureau wrote, invoking the pre-Easter day of ritual cleaning.

The Bureau named two targets. First, schemes that let men liable for service buy their way out of mobilization. Second, draft-office staff exceeding their powers, including the beating and torture of those liable for service. Officials stressed that the operation is systematic cleanup work across the whole system, and not a reaction to one high-profile case. Detentions and notices of suspicion are expected across various regions.

The army says it is backing the raids

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said it is giving full assistance to law enforcement in investigations aimed at exposing corruption and abuses, including at the recruitment centers. If wrongdoing is confirmed, those responsible must answer under Ukrainian law, it added.

"The Armed Forces of Ukraine maintain a policy of zero tolerance for corruption and ensure a comprehensive, objective and impartial investigation of every report of a possible offense," the General Staff wrote. 

At the same time, it cautioned that isolated cases should not devalue the service of recruitment-center staff who do their jobs properly and keep mobilization running.

The sweep arrives as Ukraine reorders its whole defense apparatus. The army's new leadership is running a force-wide manning audit to find soldiers kept away from the fight. That drive followed the ousted defense minister's public fight over arms procurement and the audit that exposed billions in overspending. 

Russia struck cities across Ukraine with a mass wave of missiles and drones overnight into 30 July 2026, killing civilians, including children, and injuring dozens, according to Ukraine's Air Force, State Emergency Service, and local authorities. Rescuers dug through collapsed homes in Lviv, in the capital, and in a village near Kryvyi Rih, and one Russian cruise missile crossed the border into Poland. It was the first mass strike on Ukraine's western oblasts since March.

The scale of the attack

Ukraine's Air Force tracked 358 incoming weapons — 74 missiles and 284 drones of various types. Air defenses shot down or suppressed 320 of them, 55 missiles and 265 drones. The missiles included Tsirkon and Oniks anti-ship missiles, Iskander-M, S-400, and North Korea's KN-23 ballistics, and Kh-101 and Kalibr cruise missiles, alongside Shahed, Gerbera, Italmas, and decoy drones launched from four Russian regions.

The ballistic missiles remain the biggest problem for Ukraine. Of the nine Russia fired, air defenses stopped only one. Impacts landed at 20 locations, with debris falling on 13 more.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy put the current nationwide toll at eight dead and dozens wounded in the capital and across ten oblasts. He tied the losses directly to the missing air defenses. 

"Protection from the Russian missile threat is the most important task for saving our people's lives," he wrote. "Untimely help, delays in supplying anti-ballistic missiles — that is exactly this destruction, exactly these casualties that, unfortunately, we have today."

A family of six killed near Kryvyi Rih

The heaviest loss of life came in Radushne, a village in Kryvyi Rih district of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. An Iskander-M ballistic missile hit a house where a large family lived. Six people died, three of them children, and eight were wounded, the head of the Kryvyi Rih Defense Council, Oleksandr Vilkul, reported.

The head of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Oleksandr Hanzha, named the children killed as a six-year-old girl and boys of 11 and 17. An 84-year-old woman was hospitalized in serious condition, and a 49-year-old woman and boys of 6 and 15 were taken to hospital in moderate condition. Two houses were destroyed and five damaged. Rescuers pulled two children from the rubble alive.

Lviv: homes, a school, two kindergartens

Lviv neighborhoods took some of the worst damage. The number of wounded recently rose to 26, with 15 hospitalized, children among them, the head of Lviv Oblast, Maksym Kozytskyi, reported. One child was in the hospital.

Two residential buildings on Patona and Vyhovskoho streets were hit, and more than 20 apartment buildings were damaged, along with lyceum school No. 15 — where 140 windows and four doors were blown out — and two kindergartens. Mayor Andrii Sadovyi described a direct hit and no military target anywhere near it. 

"Here on Patona we see a direct missile hit. The floors have essentially been sheared off," he said. "They simply attack residential buildings, kill people directly. There are no military targets here, nothing at all."

Rescuers freed a woman, a man, and his six-year-old son from a collapsed building, the Lviv Oblast prosecutor's office said. A crane was used to lift people from a damaged five-story block through a blocked stairwell.

One killed in Kyiv

In the capital, one person died and two were hurt, the Kyiv Military Administration and the Emergency Service reported. Fires broke out in two districts: market pavilions in Obolon and a garage cooperative in Sviatoshyn, where firefighters found a body while putting out the flames and hospitalized an injured man, the emergency service said.

In Skybyn, in Brovary district of Kyiv Oblast, a strike partly destroyed a two-story house and wounded five people, including a 16-year-old boy, the emergency service confirmed.

Poltava, Zhytomyr, Mykolaiv, and the coast

In Poltava district, warehouses caught fire from the strikes and one person died, the head of Poltava Oblast, Vitalii Diakivnych, said. A Nova Poshta parcel terminal was also hit, with no casualties there.

Mykolaiv Oblast came under a night of drone attacks that damaged port infrastructure, warehouses, homes, an ambulance, and an administrative building, but wounded no one, the oblast administration reported. 

In Kharkiv, a jet-powered Shahed hit an industrial zone, Mayor Ihor Terekhov reported. 

The Russian strikes injured three children and two adults in Zhytomyr Oblast, local authorities said.

Air defenses also worked over Kirovohrad Oblast, where a private yard was damaged in Svitlovodsk and no one was hurt, the oblast administration said.

Explore further

Moscow struggles to stockpile all the missiles it needs—so it fires them straight off the line, Ukraine says

A cruise missile in Poland

One Russian cruise missile crossed into Poland during the attack and came down in Lublin voivodeship, near the village of Targowisko, where a blast woke residents and rescuers found a crater in a field, the outlet lublin112 reported. Polish forces had put military aircraft into the air hours earlier because of Russia's long-range strikes on Ukraine, the country's Operational Command said, with fighters and an early-warning plane airborne and ground air defenses at readiness.

It was not the first such incursion. In 2023 a Russian Kh-55 flew several hundred kilometers over Polish territory before it fell near the city of Bydgoszcz. Earlier in July, the Polish outlet Onet, citing intelligence and diplomatic sources, warned that Poland could become a target of Russian provocations meant to test NATO's resolve.

The missile Russia used to strike Kyiv Oblast on 10 July contained more than 140 foreign components. Without such parts, Russia could not build its weapons, presidential sanctions commissioner Vladyslav Vlasiuk said, according to Ukrinform.

The breakdown of one missile is a map of how sanctions leak. Examining the wreckage of the Iskander, a cluster munition, investigators identified its entire component base: more than 140 foreign components, made in the US (62), Switzerland (8), Germany (5), Taiwan (4), China (2), and Japan (1), alongside 36 Russian components and 11 Belarusian.

At least 20 of its parts were made in 2025, dating the missile's production to 2025 as well, meaning the foreign components reached Russia and were incorporated into a fired weapon within roughly a year, despite the sanctions meant to stop exactly that.

Vlasiuk's sharpest point is about the European parts

The commissioner drew a specific conclusion about which components are the real chokepoints. In Ukraine's view, without access to foreign components, Russia could not produce such missiles at all, Vlasiuk said.

He singled out Western Europe. Chinese components are a separate topic, he said, but removing only the Western European components would effectively make the production of this missile impossible, which is why the question is not only for China but also for other countries whose manufacturers' products Ukraine still finds in Russian weapons.

Among the identified parts were products from the Swiss companies STMicroelectronics and Traco Power, from Japan's Panasonic Semiconductor, and 62 US-made components from various manufacturers. STMicroelectronics is a recurring name: Ukraine has repeatedly found its parts in Russian weapons and called on the producer to control where its products are sold.

The American share is the largest, and Vlasiuk noted the irony

A significant number of components originate from the US, Vlasiuk said, calling it, in a sense, a compliment to the quality of American microelectronics, while adding that it would obviously be better if that quality were unavailable to Russia.

American components account for 72% of the foreign parts found in Russian precision weapons, and in a single large-scale attack in October 2025, Ukraine identified over 100,000 foreign-made components inside the drones and missiles launched at its cities. The parts reach Russia not through elaborate smuggling but through ordinary commercial channels routed via intermediaries in third countries, which is the enforcement gap Ukraine keeps pressing its partners to close.

Exclusives

Precision missiles hit the coordinates. Investigators ask who was still standing there. A new framework names the pattern in four Russian strikes—and aims at Russia's standard legal defense.

Europe wants Ukraine's railway split. The war wants it whole. Ukraine has two years to split its railway on the EU model—and no intention of giving up the wartime control that model is built to remove.

Russia and Ukraine justify their strikes the same way. Only one justification holds up. Ukraine is now hitting Russia's power grid, ports, shipping and warehouses — the same categories Russia hits in Ukraine. Both call the targets military. The facts decide who is right.

Ukraine's newest mine-clearing vehicle is a 1960s-design APC with nobody inside. Allies have shipped Ukraine more than 1,700 M113s. Khartia's engineers just showed what one looks like with nobody inside.

A couple beaten for being Ukrainian—the latest case in Poland's rising anti-Ukrainian violence. The video, filmed by a Ukrainian living nearby, spread online, and police detained two suspects the next day.

How tight is Russia's fuel crisis? Altai now caps each car at one fill a day. Drivers had gamed the midnight reset to take two rations. This week, the Siberian republic shut the window.

Russia's strikes stopped Ukraine's grain ships. Its farmers are the ones paying. World wheat price is climbing on the supply scare—yet the grain stuck in Ukraine's ports fetches less by the week.

Military

Ukrainian drones destroyed nearly 15.4% of Russian retail giant's storage space in July. Ukrainian drones destroyed eight Wildberries warehouses in July, which is about 860,000 square meters.

Ukraine loses another F-16 to onboard emergency. Ukraine lost an F-16 on 29 July during a mission to intercept Russian air targets.

Ukraine's army has some brigades starved of soldiers and others overstaffed. New commander is now auditing why. Ukraine's General Staff has launched a check on how its brigades, regiments, and corps are manned.

Russia is bombing Kostiantynivka to rubble while pushing its infantry into it on foot. Artillery and guided glide bombs hit the city as small Russian groups try to dig into whatever buildings they can reach.

Ukraine's Defense Forces sent FP-1 drones to Ryazan—a refinery and a warehouse burned. Open-source analysts worked through eyewitness frames to place the blaze at the complex the marketplace calls Ryazan: Tyushevskaya. Later in the morning, the drones reached a Perm refinery 1,500 km from Ukraine.

Ukraine's interceptors shot down Russian spy drone at 6,400 meters. It's thousand meters above Everest's base camp. Ukrainian National Guard pilots intercepted a Russian ZALA Z-20 reconnaissance drone at one of the highest altitudes at which Ukraine has downed an enemy drone.

Ukraine hits 201 Russian shadow fleet ships in three weeks. Commander says Crimea's supply route is now blocked indefinitely. The campaign has run alongside strikes on Crimea's power grid and air defenses, part of a broader effort to make holding the peninsula costlier by the week.

Intelligence and technology

This Ukrainian 344-kg armored capsule keeps wounded soldier in constant contact with operator, with emergency exit he controls himself. Ukraine's Robotized Complexes unveiled the Murakha CaseEvak, a ground robot with an armored medical capsule that remotely evacuates wounded soldiers from zones where enemy drones hunt rescuers.

This Ukrainian border town has served as Russia's testing ground for new weapons of terror since 2023. Then, it turns them on rest of Ukraine.

Humanitarian and social impact

Russian soldiers raped Ukrainian woman and shot her in back when she tried to escape in Bucha. Ukraine has now put their names on record. Ukrainian police charged two Russian soldiers from the 76th Air Assault Division.

Political and legal developments

Greece blocked a gas ban, France and Italy softened an entry ban—now Brussels tries 1,600 companies helping Russia's war. Bloomberg sources says the proposed list covers firms feeding Russia's military industry, and the work stayed out of public view.

US Senate took first step toward Graham sanctions bill on Russia. It gives Trump power to impose 500% tariffs on Russian oil. The US Senate voted 86-12 to advance the Russia sanctions bill renamed for the late Senator Lindsey Graham, hours after his funeral.

New developments

The Belarusian tunnel to the EU was almost done. Then Lithuania drilled a hole in exactly the wrong place—for the diggers. Polish tunnel-detection equipment narrowed down the location, and a single bore confirmed a passage running from Belarusian soil.

Read our earlier daily review here.

Ukraine has built a robot to carry wounded soldiers out of the kill zones. Evacuation is a fight for the life of the wounded soldier, as well as for the lives of those who set out to help them, the manufacturer Robotized Complexes said, unveiling the "Murakha CaseEvak", a robotic evacuation complex that removes a soldier from a danger zone remotely, minimizing the risk to personnel.

Casualty evacuation on a front saturated with Russian drones is one of the deadliest tasks in the war, with wounded soldiers sometimes waiting days for extraction.

Troops told Euromaidan Press in May 2026 that there were essentially zero purpose-built casevac robots on the market, with evacuation handled by logistics robots not designed to handle the wounded. The Murakha CaseEvak is built specifically for that job: an armored medical capsule on a ground robot, controlled remotely so no rescuer has to enter the drone-hunted zone. It is the specialized casevac machine that the gap called for.

The capsule is armored to survive the trip

The core of the system is a medical capsule built to protect the wounded soldier from the threats that make evacuation lethal. The armored capsule is made of Armox 500T armor-piercing-resistant steel, protecting the person inside from shrapnel and other external threats and creating conditions for safe transport even in zones where enemy drones are actively operating, per Robotized Complexes.

Folding side and rear covers allow a wounded soldier to be loaded quickly, and inside the capsule is a life-support system, ventilation, heating, interior lighting, video surveillance, two-way audio communication, and an emergency door-opening function from inside. A wounded soldier sealed in the capsule can be monitored and spoken to by the operator throughout the drive, and can get himself out if something goes wrong.

The armored approach has already proven itself. In December 2025, a Ukrainian robotic evacuation capsule took a direct hit from a Russian FPV drone mid-evacuation, and the wounded soldier inside survived, a demonstration of exactly why putting armor around the casualty matters when drones hunt the rescue.

The robot was rebuilt to carry the weight

Carrying an armored capsule required upgrading the robot underneath it. The evacuation capsule weighs 344 kilograms, and the complete complex weighs 1,031 kilograms, so Robotized Complexes modernized the Murakha platform itself, increasing motor power to 8 kilowatts and substantially expanding battery capacity.

The connectivity is built to survive Russian jamming, the problem that grounds so many ground robots. The complex carries day, night, and thermal cameras and supports several control channels, including ELRS, LTE, Starlink, and fiber-optic, allowing it to operate even in environments where the enemy is actively using electronic warfare.

Ukraine burned down a seventh of Russia's largest online retailer in a month. Over July, Ukrainian drones destroyed eight Wildberries warehouses with a total area of about 860,000 square meters, the independent Russian outlet Verstka calculated.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has explained the strikes on the "Russian AliExpress" by saying that Moscow uses the platform to bring in sanctioned drone and navigation components. Ukraine's military command lists Wildberries among its long-range targets as a retailer that also moves non-lethal military gear.

The single largest loss for the company was the warehouse in Elektrostal near Moscow, where a 250,000-square-meter facility burned after the 18 July attack, and one marketplace employee was killed.

The strikes are Ukraine's answer to a Russian campaign that has spent months hitting the sorting centers and branches of Ukraine's own delivery companies, Nova Poshta and Ukrposhta.

The tally, warehouse by warehouse

Overall, Ukraine destroyed roughly 15.4% of the marketplace's storage space, totaling 5.6 million square meters, Verstka says.

The outlet has built its figure from the individual strikes across the month. Another roughly 170,000 square meters of the company's premises came under drone attack on 29 July in Ryazan, where, judging by photos and video from the scene, the warehouse was completely engulfed in flames.

Not every strike was successful

Four more warehouses of 100,000 to 108,000 square meters burned after drone attacks: in Kotovsk in Tambov Oblast, in Krasnodar, in Nevinnomyssk in Stavropol Krai, and in the Shushary district of St. Petersburg. Fires also broke out at Wildberries warehouses after drone strikes in St. Petersburg's Utkina Zavod district, about 16,900 square meters, and in temporarily occupied Simferopol, about 6,000 square meters.

Not every strike succeeded. Attacks on facilities in Koledino near Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Voronezh, and Zelenodolsk in Tatarstan did not cause fires. In Voronezh, the drones damaged a warehouse roof, and in Yekaterinburg, they fell in a parking lot.

Ukraine has lost another F-16. During a combat mission on one sector of the front, an F-16 fighter of the Ukrainian Air Force experienced an onboard emergency, forcing the pilot to eject, the Air Force reported on Telegram.

Every F-16 lost matters more than the airframe, because Ukraine has so few and needs them so badly. The fighters are instrumental as a line of air defense against the missiles and drones Russia launches in massed nightly attacks.

On 29 July 2026, contact was lost with the F-16, which was flying a combat mission to intercept enemy aerial targets on one sector of the front, and preliminary data indicate an onboard emergency forced the pilot to eject, according to the Air Force.

The pilot is now completely safe, was successfully evacuated, and was taken to a medical facility for examination. Experts and law enforcement are working at the crash site, and no civilian casualties or destruction were recorded.

The pilot's survival sets this loss apart

That the pilot survived is the most important fact, because Ukraine's F-16 losses have more often taken the pilot with them.

Ukraine has paid a heavy price for these aircraft and their pilots. Since receiving its first F-16s in mid-2024, Ukraine had lost four of them by August 2025, with three pilots killed and one ejecting safely, per Euromaidan Press.

Oleksii "Moonfish" Mes was killed in the first loss on 26 August 2024.

Captain Pavlo Ivanov, 26, died on 12 April 2025 when his jet was likely shot down over Sumy Oblast.

A third F-16 was destroyed on 16 May 2025 in an onboard emergency from which the pilot ejected.

Lieutenant Colonel Maksym Ustymenko was killed on 29 June 2025 defending against a large-scale Russian assault, per Euromaidan Press.

The jets are scarce and hard to replace

Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway committed a total of 80 aircraft, but they arrived in batches, and the pool of trained pilots is limited, so each loss subtracts from a capability that Ukraine cannot quickly regenerate.

Ukraine's National Police has reported that it has served notices of suspicion on Russian soldiers involved in crimes in Bucha. On 23 or 24 March 2022, around 13:00, during the temporary occupation of Kyiv Oblast, the invaders brought a 34-year-old civilian woman to Vokzalna Street, where five Russian soldiers were based at the time, and raped her.

Their actions grossly violated the Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians in wartime and Additional Protocol I. Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, rape or any other form of sexual violence in conditions of international armed conflict is a war crime.

What the investigation established

The investigation identified two of the men as the direct perpetrators of the sexual violence. One of them is Radii Zaburin, and the other is Radii Zaburin. They took the woman into a bathhouse, where, using physical force against her, they raped her in turn, the investigation established.

When the woman tried to escape, Monakhov opened fire at her, and she died of her wounds, per the police. An indictment on the fact of the murder is already before the court. Both men are suspected of cruel treatment of the civilian population under Part 1 of Article 438 of Ukraine's Criminal Code, on the violation of the laws and customs of war.

Who the two soldiers are

Both of the Russian soldiers served in the 234th Air Assault Regiment of the 76th Air Assault Division of the Airborne Forces of the Russian Armed Forces, military unit No. 74268, according to the dossiers published by the Book of Executioners of the Ukrainian People, a Ukrainian registry documenting Russian war crimes.

Radii Zaburin, born 2 October 1995 in Usolye-Sibirskoye, Irkutsk Oblast, Russia, held the position of senior mechanic-driver in the artillery unit at the time of the crime, with the rank of junior sergeant, per the registry.

Denis Monakhov, born 11 November 1997 in the village of Palkino, Pskov Oblast, Russia, was deputy commander of a self-propelled artillery platoon and commander of a 2S9 "Nona-S" self-propelled gun, with the rank of sergeant. During the investigation, the two were identified as the direct perpetrators of the sexual violence.

The case is one of hundreds Ukraine is documenting

The Bucha charges are part of a vast accounting Ukraine is building for conflict-related sexual violence. Ukraine's Office of the Prosecutor General has verified 365 cases of conflict-related sexual violence since 2022, involving survivors aged four to 80, and 19 Russian soldiers have been convicted in absentia for such crimes. UN monitors estimate that for each reported case, 10 to 20 go unreported.

Bucha holds a specific place in that record. The town became the emblem of Russian atrocities before Ukrainian forces retook it in early April 2022, revealing executed civilians in the streets and numerous cases of sexual violence. Naming Zaburin and Monakhov adds two documented perpetrators to a case file Ukraine is assembling for the day these charges can be brought in a courtroom rather than in absentia. The indictment for the murder is already before a court; the two men are reportedly in Russia, beyond Ukraine's reach for now, but the record of what they did in a bathhouse on Vokzalna Street in March 2022 is now on the books under their names.

Ukraine's army is checking whether it spreads its soldiers fairly. The General Staff announced on 29 July that it had begun a review of how military units are manned and whether people are distributed fairly among them.

The review is part of the changes brought in by new Commander-in-Chief Mykhailo Drapatyi, though its results are not yet known. This personnel audit is one of his first substantive moves, and it targets a long-standing problem in the Ukrainian army: some units are hollowed out while others are overstaffed.

According to the General Staff, the key goal of the review is to assess the actual manning levels of brigades, regiments, and corps, analyze how effectively soldiers are distributed among units, and identify directions for improving personnel provision. It specifically evaluates the effectiveness and fairness of personnel distribution, taking into account the needs of units conducting combat tasks across different sectors of the front.

The problem is real and long-documented

The audit addresses an imbalance that soldiers and analysts have described throughout the war. Ukraine's infantry shortage is acute on the front line, yet manpower is unevenly spread, with some assault brigades chronically undermanned while rear and support structures hold people who could be redeployed.

Drapatyi has moved on exactly this before. As Land Forces commander, he oversaw a 60% reduction in the size of the General Staff, with released personnel redeployed to combat units. In the same logic, this audit applies force-wide: find where people are sitting away from the fight and move them toward it.

The reform sits inside a larger manpower overhaul

The distribution audit is one piece of the largest restructuring of Ukraine's wartime force. It follows the contract system Fedorov intended to launch before his dismissal, which, for the first time, could allow soldiers to sign for a fixed term, 10 to 14 months in infantry-assault roles, with a guaranteed deferral from mobilization when the contract ends, replacing open-ended service.

The framing points at the reform's stated philosophy

The General Staff wrapped the announcement in the language of Drapatyi's approach.

"Any systemic changes in the army begin with a change in attitude toward the person," the General Staff said.

Ukrainian investigators have published a framework that challenges Russia’s standard justification for missile strikes on civilian places: that a precision weapon hit a legitimate military target. Precision settles nothing, they argue, when the missile takes 10 minutes or more to arrive, and the target is a gathering of people who can leave, disperse, or be warned before it lands.

The report, titled “Out of Control” and published on 28 July by the documentation group Truth Hounds and Project Expedite Justice, builds the argument on four strikes and calls the pattern a “moving target attack.”

The report reaches a war crime conclusion for only one of the four—the 2023 strike on a Kramatorsk cafe. The other three are offered as variations on the same problem, not as verdicts. The framework itself is new: a test the authors want courts and investigators to apply to a kind of attack that existing law, they say, has addressed without enough rigor.

A missile can hit its programmed coordinates exactly and still land where no military objective remains.

The two hours before the pizzeria

The diagnostic case is the strike on the Ria Lounge cafe in central Kramatorsk on 27 June 2023, which killed 13 people and injured 60. A Russian informant last watched the site at around 17:00. The missile arrived at 19:29, after a flight of nine to 15 minutes. In the interval, no one on the Russian side could see who was inside, and once the missile was launched, no one could call it back.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had destroyed a temporary command post of the 56th Motorized Infantry Brigade, killing two generals, up to 50 officers, and up to 20 foreign mercenaries.

The evidence describes an ordinary pizza restaurant instead: 40 to 50 customers, around half civilians and half off-duty soldiers in mixed dress, unarmed, out with friends and family. A basement room had been booked a month ahead for an officer’s birthday. No one outside could tell the place was military.

The missile struck the public level. The basement that Russia said it was aiming at came through essentially intact. Of the 13 killed, two were serving soldiers. Among the dead was Victoria Amelina, a novelist who had retrained as a war crimes documenter and worked with Truth Hounds itself. The organization concluded in 2023 that the strike was a war crime in the form of an indiscriminate attack under the Rome Statute.

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The gap the weapon leaves open

The framework turns that single case into a test. A moving target attack, as the authors define it, combines three features: a military rationale resting on a temporary presence of personnel, a location of civilian character where civilians are foreseeably present, and a weapon whose flight time is long enough that the situation on the ground can change before impact.

A missile can hit its programmed coordinates exactly and still land where no military objective remains.

The authors selected three further strikes that met the same criteria and examined them through open sources.

In Vinnytsia on 14 July 2022, the report finds, three Kalibr missiles killed 29 people, including three children and five servicemen, and wounded at least 154. Russia said the target was a scheduled Air Force command meeting. The air raid alert sounded at 10:12; the missiles hit at 10:41, about 40 to 50 minutes after launch.

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In Zlatopil on 4 July 2023, the report documents, a missile landed 800 meters from a serviceman’s funeral, in a residential area, wounding 42 civilians including 12 children. Organizers had asked mourners to shelter from the heat about 10 minutes earlier, leaving the square nearly empty.

In Chernihiv on 19 August 2023, a missile fitted with a proximity fuse detonated in the air above the Drama Theatre, where NGOs were running a defense-tech exhibition inside. All seven people killed were outside the building.

For these three, the report states that the evidence does not support conclusions equivalent to Kramatorsk.

What the report asks investigators to do

The recommendations run to the International Criminal Court, the ICRC, the UN human rights office, and prosecutors working under universal jurisdiction.

They ask that the launch-to-impact interval be treated as a working indicator, that technical precision no longer be read as evidence that a strike was lawful, and that the presence of soldiers in a civilian place not be taken to strip it of protection.

One question the report raises and declines to settle is whether the four strikes are a run of targeting failures or a method. Answering it needs orders and targeting packages that only investigators with coercive powers can reach—at a moment when Truth Hounds is working on a budget cut by a third after the US withdrew funding, Reuters reported in May.

Russia is treating Ukrainian border towns as its testing ground, regardless of the civilians who live there. The occupiers have for several years used the Bilopillia community in Sumy Oblast to test new types of weapons, first deploying the KAB glide bomb there and later fiber-optic drones that now also strike Sumy, said Nataliia Kalinichenko, a deputy of the Bilopillia city council, according to Espreso.

The pattern Kalinichenko describes is a border community used to debut weapons before they spread deeper into Ukraine. Bilopillia sits close to the Russian border in Sumy Oblast, and it was there that the first KAB glide bomb in the oblast fell on 23 March 2023, killing two people and damaging more than 40 residential and non-residential buildings, a school, and the district police department.

A year ago, residents of the community encountered fiber-optic drones when almost no one knew such a weapon existed, and today, she said, both weapons reach Sumy city, roughly 40 kilometers from the border.

The town saw the KAB and the fiber-optic drone first

Kalinichenko's account traces two weapons from their first appearance in Bilopillia to their spread across the oblast. The first was the glide bomb, in March 2023.

"The first KAB in Sumy Oblast fell precisely on Bilopillia on 23 March 2023. At that time, we did not even understand the enormous destructive power this weapon has," she said.

The strike killed two people and damaged more than 40 residential and non-residential buildings, a school, and the district police department.

"We learned what a KAB is," she recalled.

The glide bomb, a Soviet-era aerial bomb fitted with a guidance kit and wings that lets Russian jets release it from tens of kilometers away, has since become one of the deadliest weapons of the war, with Russia dropping thousands a month and using them to systematically level Sumy border villages into "buffer zones."

The second weapon was the fiber-optic drone.

"We already saw this fiber-optic web lying across Bilopillia. Today, unfortunately, all these types of weapons are already used against Sumy too. They reach the regional center," Kalinichenko said.

The tangled cables the drones left behind became a visible marker of the town's role as the place where the weapon first appeared.

The fiber-optic drone is dangerous because it cannot be jammed

Kalinichenko explained why the fiber-optic drone is so hard to stop, and it matches what Ukraine's specialists have documented. The drones are especially dangerous because they are practically impossible to suppress with electronic warfare, and the optics mounted on them let operators make out the smallest details, including license plates or elements of clothing, she said.

The weapon's design is what makes it immune to jamming. A fiber-optic drone is guided by a thin glass fiber that unwinds during flight rather than by radio signal, so it emits nothing for Ukraine's electronic warfare to detect or disrupt. When the first such drone reached Kharkiv in February 2026, Defense Ministry adviser Serhii Beskrestnov called it a serious technological challenge, because radio-electronic reconnaissance is useless against a drone that broadcasts no signal.

That the same weapon appeared in Bilopillia even earlier fits the town's role as the leading edge of Russia's deadly experiments.

The border communities are the war's early-warning system

Bilopillia's experience is a preview of what the rest of Ukraine faces next. Weapons that debut against the border communities migrate inward as Russia scales them and extends their range, so what a Bilopillia council deputy describes today is often what a larger city reports months later.

A law now in force gives Ukraine two years to split the tracks from the trains, on the EU model that lets rival carriers share one network. It is doing so without giving up anything the model is meant to strip away: a single hand deciding which train moves first.

European operators come to study exactly that. They watch how a network under constant drone attack keeps its trains running, and their advice sometimes carries a warning: do not repeat the mistakes Europe made reforming its own railways. That is the account of Ukrzaliznytsia’s chairman, Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, in a July interview with the Center for Economic Strategy (CES).

The reform comes now because the old arithmetic collapsed, Pertsovskyi told CES. For decades, one internal transfer kept the railway solvent: profitable freight paid for loss-making passenger trains. The war broke that.

The $1 billion a year Ukraine earned carrying Russian and Belarusian transit is gone, the freight heartland of the Donbas is lost, and in 2026, freight itself slipped into the red. The transfer that funded the whole railway no longer exists.

Ukraine has two years

The new safety and interoperability law aligns Ukrainian rules with EU standards and, Ekonomichna Pravda reported, gives the government two years from publication to separate the roles of infrastructure operator and railway carrier within Ukrzaliznytsia.

The future infrastructure operator must stay fully state-owned. It runs the public network—the tracks and the power that feed them—while licensed carriers run the trains on top. The law does not force the state to privatize Ukrzaliznytsia or open the tracks to private locomotives. Yet it builds the ground for a market where more than one carrier could someday use the same rails.

Inside the company, much of the split has already happened. Passenger and suburban trains have their own divisions. A single infrastructure arm, UZ Infra, is being built out of the six regional railways, and a freight arm, UZ Cargo, is due by 2027.

The split shows what each business really costs, Pertsovskyi says, and ends the old habit of burying losses in a single balance sheet. What Pertsovskyi opposes is giving up overall operational coordination.

One track can carry a market—or a war

“We have one line of track. A private carrier hauls fuel because that cargo pays more, while you need to evacuate millions,” Pertsovskyi told CES. Without one authority able to set wartime priorities, he said, you get chaos.

Russia damaged or destroyed more than 200 Ukrainian locomotives in the first half of 2026—as many in six months as in the previous 15. Ukrzaliznytsia has bolted more than 800 mobile shelters onto junctions and depots so crews can duck for cover without leaving the network.

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This is the system European operators come to examine. That resilience is more than shelters and spare engines—it is the ability to move any train or crew wherever the day demands, under a single chain of command.

None of this is abstract for a railway that, after February 2022, turned into part transport company, part evacuation service, part arms conduit. A private operator could not have run the 2022 evacuations and the military traffic at the same scale, Serhii Vovk, director of Ukraine’s Center for Transport Strategies, argued to Ekonomichna Pravda. State control, he said, will outlast the war.

The rulebook allows one holding

The EU does not require Ukraine to break Ukrzaliznytsia into unrelated firms or sell it. Under the bloc’s single railway area rules, an infrastructure manager and train operators can be part of a single integrated holding, as Deutsche Bahn does in Germany.

What the rules demand is narrower. The infrastructure manager must be a legally distinct body with transparent finances and independent control over its core decisions, according to the European Commission summary. Chief among those decisions is who gets each train path.

Path allocation is the pressure point. Deciding who gets each slot is what the EU calls an essential function, one it insists be kept neutral, so that no operator is favored. An operator who is refused a slot can appeal to a regulator.

War asks for the reverse: one hand that can override the queue on the spot and put the evacuation train ahead of the cargo that pays more, with no appeal. Reform does not by itself sell paths to the highest bidder—the infrastructure manager still runs the traffic.

But the collision does not go away when Ukraine keeps the holding intact, or keeps a single chain of command. The neutral, contestable allocation the market needs is the same one a war needs to suspend.

So the line is not simply European competition against Ukrainian unity. The same law is meant to open the tracks to rival carriers, and tight central control runs counter to that: the more the state controls the queue, the more a rejected competitor can suspect it was kept off for the wrong reason.

Ukraine has to loosen its grip enough to make access credible, without loosening it so far that the network cannot act as one in a crisis.

Look to Germany, then look closer

Deputy Finance Minister Oleksandr Kava, who sits on Ukrzaliznytsia’s supervisory board, has cited Deutsche Bahn’s chronic delays as a warning about European rail reform, contrasting Germany with Switzerland, whose trains run on time and whose railway remains a single integrated company.

Each half of that contrast frays on inspection. Switzerland, though outside the EU, adopted the same reform: SBB’s own rules run a separate infrastructure manager that lets rival operators onto the tracks on equal terms. Being one integrated company didn’t stop it from walling off the tracks from the trains—the split Kava warns against is already there.

Switzerland's famous punctuality is based on a stricter standard than most railways use: a train counts as late after 3 minutes, not 5. And Germany’s delays trace less to reform than to money—even Ukraine’s railway chief notes Deutsche Bahn blames a network starved of investment for years.

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The bill lands on the state either way

Even wealthy Germany cannot make the European model pay for itself. Berlin puts in far more than Deutsche Bahn does, and the trains still run late. The reform was never the costly part—the upkeep is.

Ukraine cannot fund its version at that level. Keeping the network up would eventually cost the budget 350–400 billion hryvnias (roughly $8 billion) a year, Kava told Ekonomichna Pravda. This year, the government has put up 28.5 billion ($630 million), under a tenth of that.

None of this is about copying an EU org chart. Ukraine has to open its railway to competitors and keep it able to act as one under fire, out of the same law and the same holding.

The test comes on the day when two trains want the one open track, and only one can go first.

The European Union is preparing to blacklist more than 1,600 companies that it accuses of feeding Russia's war against Ukraine, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources. It would be the largest batch of firms named in a single European sanctions round, and it needs unanimous approval to take effect. Officials are aiming for adoption in the fall.

A blacklist built company by company

Together the listed firms turn over more than $20 billion a year and keep over 265,000 workers on their payrolls, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Approval would lift the number of entities the EU has sanctioned during the war by 50%, the same people said. The bloc's foreign policy arm, the European External Action Service (EEAS), has spent months on the draft, hunting for parts of Russia's military-industrial complex that earlier measures never touched. The draft skips category-wide bans and lists firms one at a time instead.

Bloomberg says the package would likely still fall short of the economic weight of earlier rounds aimed at Russian oil and banking. The EU adopted its 21st package on 23 July, with 218 new designations.

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Carve-outs keep blunting the packages

Adopting sanctions has grown harder as governments demand exemptions to limit damage at home, Bloomberg noted. Greece's objections shrank a proposed ban on moving Russian liquefied natural gas to third countries. France and Italy pushed to weaken a proposed entry ban on former Russian combatants, and other states killed proposed import bans on Russian fish. That same round also let raw Russian sable pelts back into the market.

Officials plan to send the draft to national capitals within weeks, leaving governments room to study it, with adoption planned for the October meeting of foreign ministers. The bloc is separately preparing restrictions tied to Russia's forced deportation of Ukrainian children, which could also land in the fall, the same people told Bloomberg. Nearly two dozen Russians have already been sanctioned over the abduction of Ukrainian children.

Russian troops are working deeper into Ukraine's last fortified cities in Donetsk Oblast, pushing infantry into Kostiantynivka while wrecking the towns behind it, the Ukrainian monitoring and analytical project DeepState reported. The US-based think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW) recorded fresh Russian movement inside the city over the same days.

Kostiantynivka: Russian infantry keeps slipping in

Russian forces keep up constant infiltration attempts on Kostiantynivka, DeepState said. Their aim is to entrench inside the city, mass infantry there and take control of the ground. One of their main tasks is to take control of the part of the city between the settlements of Illinivka and Novodmytrivka. If Russian troops take Novodmytrivka, the entire Ukrainian grouping defending Chasiv Yar faces encirclement, DeepState noted. Supply into Chasiv Yar has been difficult for a long time, because Russian drone numbers hand Moscow the advantage in the air. Alongside the infantry, Russian forces use artillery and guided glide bombs to destroy the city.

ISW assessed on 28 July that Russian forces recently advanced in Kostiantynivka and kept up infiltration missions inside it. Geolocated footage from 27 July points to a Russian advance in the city's west, ISW said. Video published a day later shows Ukrainian troops hitting Russian positions in the north and center of Kostiantynivka, after what ISW assesses were infiltration missions.

Unnamed soldiers from units defending the city told Hromadske that the situation there is getting worse. Ukraine's General Staff counted 31 Russian attacks on the Kostiantynivka axis over the past day.

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Druzhkivka and the towns behind the front are turning to ruins

The whole agglomeration around Kostiantynivka is suffering. DeepState said Druzhkivka and neighboring Oleksiievo-Druzhkivka are gradually turning into ruins under constant shelling, and staying there is extremely dangerous. Russian forces fired 1,243 times at the front line and residential areas of Donetsk Oblast on 28 July, Ukraine's National Police recorded.

Russian pressure is rising on the stretch running roughly from Yampil to Minkivka further north, which may become the next main axis after Kostiantynivka, DeepState said. Russian artillery is already destroying mine barriers along the routes it would use, and Russian drones are working against Ukrainian logistics there.

Sloviansk and Kramatorsk under fire 40 km deep

Russian forces are leveling Sloviansk and Kramatorsk—the northern anchors of the Fortress Belt—with guided glide bombs, rocket artillery, Shahed attack drones and small first-person-view drones that hunt people and cars in the streets. DeepState noted that Russian fire control runs about 40 km deep from the contact line. The agglomeration is gradually becoming an isolated place, where travel will soon be possible only out of critical necessity, in order to fight.

ISW noted that Ukrainian troops have recently advanced farther south, toward Huliaipole in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. A Russian milblogger acknowledged the Ukrainian gains near the town on 28 July.

Ukrainian drones hit two sites in the Russian city of Ryazan on the morning of 29 July, Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported, sharing footage of the drones and fires. An oil refinery and a warehouse of Russia's biggest online marketplace both caught fire, and the retailer closed the site and moved its people out. Ukrainian forces also struck the southern city of Taganrog overnight, and another refinery fire surfaced hours later in the Urals.

Drones over the city from before dawn

An air-raid alert went off in Ryazan at 04:30, and drones kept appearing over the city afterward. Ryazan lies about 460 km from Ukraine's border, southeast of Moscow. Eyewitness videos showed drones and the fires that started after the impacts. Open-source channels then narrowed the targets down to a marketplace sorting complex and the local refinery. Exilenova+ shared videos a large fire at the complex with thick smoke above it. 

Governor Pavel Malkov confirmed the attack. His first message stated that a fire had broken out at one of the enterprises, without naming it. He wrote later that "as a result of falling UAV debris there is a fire in industrial areas." The same post repeated the ban on publishing photos and video of strike aftermath.

Russian news Telegram channel Astra confirmed the hit on the Wildberries logistics center. The complex stands in the Ryazansky industrial park near the village of Tyushevo, in Ryazan municipal district. Wildberries also lists the site as Ryazan: Tyushevskaya. Astra's open-source analysts placed the fire there after examining frames filmed by witnesses.

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Sources put the facility's area at about 74,800 m² and call the site one of the marketplace's largest logistics complexes in central Russia. Militarnyi noted Ukraine's Defense Forces flew FP-1 drones made by the company Fire Point.

Rosneft's plant took another hit

Exilenova+ also noted a blaze at Rosneft's Ryazan refinery, which paused crude processing in mid-May after an earlier drone attack. Reports of explosions on the grounds came first, and confirmation of a fire followed. The consequences were still being clarified. The plant belongs to Rosneft and ranks among Russia's largest oil-processing enterprises, with capacity near 17 million tons of crude a year. 

Taganrog and Perm

Ukrainian forces struck Taganrog in Rostov Oblast overnight, and residents there wrote about it on social media. Governor Yuri Slyusar claimed a missile strike. He stated that "as a result of missile debris falling on a residential apartment building, a woman was killed and a man was injured." 

At 10:00 that same morning, Exilenova+ posted about a fire in Perm, at the Lukoil-Permnefteorgsintez refinery more than 1,500 km from Ukraine, showing black smoke rising over the facility.

Deep-strike campaign

Ukrainian forces have struck every large Russian refinery since the start of the year, and gasoline output in early July dropped to 65% of average summer consumption.

Strikes on Wildberries logistics centers began on 18 July. Drones have since burned warehouses in Moscow Oblast, Tambov Oblast, Krasnodar, Stavropol Krai, Leningrad Oblast, St. Petersburg, Voronezh, and occupied Crimea. On the morning of 20 July, FP-1s struck two logistics sites in Moscow Oblast, the Wildberries distribution center in the village of Koledino and the Yuzhnye Vrata logistics park near Domodedovo, and both went up in flames. Drones returned to the Koledino area on 28 July, where monitors judged that air-defense fire probably pushed the hit onto a third-party warehouse next door.

One reason drones keep coming for the marketplace is what its warehouses hold. It sells and stores goods for military use, among them helmets, body armor, and fiber-optic cable for drones. The company had built a section called "Everything for the SVO," the Kremlin's shorthand for its war against Ukraine, and removed it from the site and the app days ago.

Lithuanian border guards have found an unfinished underground passage dug from Belarus toward their territory, Lithuania's public broadcaster LRT reported. The shaft never broke through to the surface on the Lithuanian side, so nobody used it. Lithuania's border service reads the dig was probably meant to move migrants across the frontier.

Vibrations in the soil gave the diggers away

Officers working in the Varėna district, in Lithuania's southeast, registered vibrations in the ground last Wednesday, LRT reported, citing the country's border service. The tremors suggested that someone was cutting an underground passage from the Belarusian side. Polish specialists joined the search and brought equipment built to locate tunnels. The crews drilled a control hole and found the passage underneath.

The State Border Guard Service (VSAT) put the tunnel's diameter at about one meter and its depth at about 1.5 meters. It had no exit onto Lithuanian soil. VSAT said the dig was probably intended for illegal border crossings by migrants.

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Lithuania's border chief points at the guards on the other side

The find was not an isolated one, according to VSAT head Rustamas Liubajevas. Migrants have changed tactics and increasingly use tunnels or caves, he told the Lithuanian news portal 15min. Border guards have identified tens of places where digging is almost certainly under way, he added.

"Without logistical support from the Belarusian border guards, this would not be possible," he said, pointing to the timber that reinforces the shaft, needed for work going on right next to the border line.

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Poland has pulled the same passages out of its own frontier

VSAT recalled that border services had found similar tunnels before, in Lithuania and in Poland, used to smuggle goods and to move people out of Belarus. In December 2025, Polish border guards uncovered a passage that more than 180 foreigners had already used to enter the country. Border Guard spokesman Andrzej Juźwiak said the dig was professionally prepared, tall enough for people to move through freely and several dozen meters long.

Another tunnel turned up in Poland's Podlaskie Voivodeship in October 2025, under the barrier on the Belarusian border. That one started on Belarusian territory and stopped about 20 meters short of the line.

The pressure on this border goes back to 2021

Migration became a tool on this frontier in 2021, after Western sanctions hit Belarus over the falsified presidential election and the crackdown on the opposition and on protests. A flow of migrants from Middle Eastern countries then surged toward the borders of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. European governments hold that Alyaksandr Lukashenka's regime engineered that crisis on purpose, adding flights from the Middle East as revenge. Lithuania answered by turning people back toward Minsk and by building a wall along the Belarusian border.

The methods have multiplied since then. Smuggling balloons launched from Belarus have grounded flights and cost Lithuanian airports hundreds of thousands of euros, and Polish crews have collected them out of fields carrying cigarettes and, in one Christmas Eve wave, GPS trackers. Latvia went further and put Belarusian military documents on the record, taken off a detained migrant. 

The US Senate turned a Russia sanctions vote into a memorial for the senator who wrote it. The Senate voted by an overwhelming margin to advance a package of sanctions on Russia inspired by the late Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, hours after his funeral service in Washington, which Ukraine's president attended, USA Today reported.

The legislation passed the procedural vote, the first of several steps before it can become law, 86 to 12, with 11 Democrats and one Republican, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, voting against it.

Graham, who died on 11 July of an aortic rupture at 71 and was among Ukraine's most forceful allies in the US Congress, had secured President Donald Trump's support for a version of the bill before his sudden death. His sister, Darline Graham, appointed to his Senate seat, is the lead author of the legislation, now renamed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Washington for the funeral, watched the vote from the Senate floor.

"There is no greater way to honor Senator Graham's legacy than to move forward with this bipartisan agreement," Darline Graham and the bipartisan group of senators backing the bill said in a joint statement before the vote.

What the bill would do

The legislation is built to attack Russia's war revenue at its source. It gives the president new authority to sanction Russian officials, foreign nationals, and financial institutions tied to the country's war machine, and it requires Trump to impose a 500% tariff on all Russian imports, including Moscow's oil, petroleum, and natural gas.

The bill gives the president more power to punish ships that try to evade the energy sanctions imposed by the US and Ukraine's other partners, targeting the shadow fleet Russia uses to move oil around Western restrictions.

"This legislation is designed to cut off Vladimir Putin's most important resource in his war against Ukraine: his money," said Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, a co-author of the bill, on the Senate floor.

The measure also extends sanctions on Iran.

The vote was symbolic, and the path ahead is long

The vote was mainly symbolic, and the Senate was set to leave Washington on 7 August for a month. The Senate must still vote several more times to formally pass the bill.

The legislation would then also have to clear the House of Representatives, which is away until 31 August, before it can be sent to Trump. In June, the House passed its own version of a sanctions-and-Ukraine-aid package over Republican leadership, so a version exists in both chambers, but reconciling them and getting the result to the president's desk will not take place until the fall at the earliest.

Democrats objected to handing Trump tariff power

The 12 votes against the bill were accompanied by a specific complaint about whom the legislation empowers. Democrats who opposed the package said they were concerned about the tariff provisions, which would delegate too much authority to Trump.

"Essentially, this would be a wholesale delegation of Congress's tariff authority to the executive," Senator Peter Welch of Vermont said on the Senate floor.

The objection is notable because it splits the pro-Ukraine coalition not over whether to pressure Russia, but over how much unilateral power to give a president who has spent months pursuing a negotiated settlement with Moscow rather than escalating economic pressure.

Zelenskyy threaded the day between mourning and lobbying

Ukraine's president spent the day moving between the funeral, the White House, and the Senate. After a closed-door meeting with Trump at the White House, Zelenskyy went to Capitol Hill for a bipartisan meeting with senators, then watched them cast their votes, seated at one point between Senator John Barrasso, the majority whip, and Senator Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He was one of three world leaders who came to the United States for Graham's funeral at the Washington National Cathedral. Zelenskyy called Graham a "true friend" of Ukraine in a social media post thanking the US for its firm support during more than four years of war against Russia's full-scale war.

Ukraine chased a Russian spy drone to 6,400 meters and shot it down. Pilots of the National Guard's Lasar's Group interceptor unit spotted and struck a Russian reconnaissance drone at an unimaginable altitude, the unit reported, publishing video of the engagement on 28 July.

The target was a Russian ZALA Z-20 reconnaissance drone, a platform designed to detect targets at distances up to 100 kilometers, which Ukraine's interceptor crews brought down over southern Ukraine in late July.

The Russian drone climbed to this height trying to avoid being shot down, but the Ukrainian pilot caught and hit it, the unit said, calling it one of the record altitudes at which Ukrainian troops have downed an enemy drone.

It is a direct answer to a Russian tactic: Russian reconnaissance drones increasingly fly high-altitude missions specifically to climb above Ukraine's interceptor engagement zones, a move Ukraine has documented as Russia's response to mounting drone losses.

Altitude is the recon drone's last refuge, and Ukraine is closing it

Downing one at 6,400 meters is Ukraine following the target into its refuge. Russian recon drones like the ZALA and Orlan are the eyes that spot for Russian artillery and missile strikes, so each one destroyed blinds a piece of the Russian targeting system, and doing it at altitude means the high-flying evasion no longer guarantees safety. Ukraine has been pushing its interceptors steadily higher: a Ukrainian team demonstrated an interceptor reaching 11 kilometers in 2025, higher than Everest and into the band where airliners cruise.

High-altitude interception is the next frontier

High-flying recon drones were, until recently, a relatively safe Russian asset. Ukraine's interceptor makers have been racing to close exactly that gap.

New systems like the Tsyklop are built specifically to climb above Russia's strike and reconnaissance drones and strike them from higher up, and the 6,400-meter kill is a field demonstration of that capability working. As Ukraine's interceptors reach higher altitudes, the altitude Russia's reconnaissance drones fled to stops being a refuge, and the spotters who guide Russian strikes lose the last piece of sky they were safe in.

Ukraine says its drones have hit 201 Russian ships in three weeks. Robert "Madiar" Brovdi, commander of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS), reported that Ukrainian drones have struck the vessels of Russia's shadow fleet in three weeks of the SBS operation "MoLoChKa," which began on 6 July.

The tally splits between the two seas: 129 vessels in the Sea of Azov from 6 to 28 July, and 72 in the Black Sea from 15 to 28 July, per Brovdi, figures that do not include ships hunted in the same period by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and other Defense Forces.

Euromaidan Press cannot independently verify the count, which is the SBS commander's own running tally, though it is consistent with the day-by-day progression EP has tracked since the operation began, from 21 ships by 8 July to 159 by 17 July.

Brovdi said Russia's fleet in the area is essentially gone.

"They'll have to strain themselves, because there's simply nothing left there except cripples turned into non-self-propelled barges. The Kerch Strait is blocked for an indefinite period," he said.

The campaign burns the small ships that feed the big ones

The operation, codenamed MoLoChKa, a Ukrainian word for dairy products, targets the courier fleet that keeps Russian oil moving under sanctions. Ukraine's drones strike the small tankers and support vessels that ferry crude to the large export tankers and haul fuel to occupied Crimea, rather than the export giants themselves.

One big export tanker needs 12 to 15 small courier vessels to fill it, Brovdi has said, so burning the small ones paralyzes the whole chain.

His operators strike the ships without sinking them, turning them into what he called ghosts drifting across the sea, damaged hulks that can no longer carry cargo.

"The shadow fleet is wasting away, but it must disappear as a species," Brovdi wrote earlier in the campaign.

The blockade is choking Russia's oil revenue and Crimea's supply

The ship-hunting is one half of a squeeze on two things Russia needs: oil money and a supplied Crimea. Oil exports are the biggest source of cash for Russia's war, and Ukraine has spent 2026 attacking that revenue, where Western sanctions left the money moving, hitting both the refineries that produce the fuel and the tankers that carry it.

The blockage of the Kerch Strait is the sharp end. The strait is the gateway between the Azov and Black seas and the supply artery for occupied Crimea, and, if it holds, Brovdi's claim that it is blocked indefinitely means Russia's fuel run to the peninsula and its Azov oil exports both run through waters that Ukraine now controls with drones.

Ukraine has for years absorbed a persistent and rising volume of Russian missile, drone, and guided glide-bomb strikes. Across reporting from the UN, the World Health Organization, the World Bank and conflict-monitoring groups, the infrastructure struck most consistently falls into three categories:

• residential buildings, the leading source of civilian casualties;
• the energy system, the principal target of Russia's strategic long-range campaign;
• and critical civilian services—healthcare, education, transport, water, ports and agriculture—degraded to undermine Ukraine's economy and civilian resilience.

The cost is a state being hollowed out. Public debt has risen from 49% of GDP in 2021 to a projected 123% in 2026, on the back of unprecedented wartime borrowing and a GDP that contracted sharply in 2022, according to the IMF. More than half of Ukraine's electricity generation capacity has been destroyed, damaged, or is under Russian occupation.

By the end of 2025 the World Bank estimated reconstruction and recovery needs at €500 billion—close to three times Ukraine's nominal GDP for the year.

The demographic damage may prove the hardest to reverse. Ukraine's pre-war population is usually put at 41 to 42 million, excluding Crimea; current estimates suggest only 28 to 32 million now live in government-controlled territory, and UN projections see it falling to 25 to 29 million.

On that trajectory, the Washington Post notes, Ukraine will have effectively halved its 2001 population of 48.5 million—driven by refugee flight and a death rate roughly three times the number of live births. There is broad agreement among demographers that this is one of the most severe population crises a European country has faced since the Second World War.

These are only a few indicators of the destructive nature of Russia's war of attrition, whose aim is to destroy the basis for Ukrainian statehood. As I have previously argued, Russia's war is getting cheaper, which extends its ability to sustain that destruction for years.

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2026 has been the most brutal year yet. Based on Ukrainian General Staff daily reports, long-range drone strikes are up 160% on last year. The use of tactical and operational drones—surveillance, reconnaissance and strike—is up a staggering 756%. First-person-view drone launches have risen 304% as Russia expands its "human safari" strikes on civilians. Guided glide bombs are up 214% as their range and destructive scale grow.

From a Ukrainian perspective, the attrition war is unsustainable. If the present trajectory holds, the country's future existence is in question.

Russia is losing the war it planned to fight—and potentially winning the one it is fighting instead. Ukraine forced Russia to abandon maneuver warfare. Having chosen attrition, Russia is now forcing Ukraine to adapt in turn. That is why Ukraine is bringing the war to Russia and its population.

On 10 May, Zelenskyy said Ukraine would respond in kind. "If the Russians decide to return to full-scale warfare, our 'sanctions' [meaning missile and drone strikes] for this will be immediate and tangible," he said.

On 14 May, the President instructed Ukraine's defense forces and special services to identify "possible formats for our response to this Russian attack." The phrasing signalled a possible shift: Ukraine adopting Russia's playbook and bringing the war home by striking civilian infrastructure—residential buildings, power, heating and water plants, railways, airports and ports.

The shift is no longer hypothetical. On 25 June, Zelenskyy publicly announced a 40-day campaign. In a statement published on Facebook, Telegram and X, he wrote: "I approved a 40-day operation by the [Ukrainian Security] Service to influence the aggressor state in order to press for an end to the war."

Analysts described the campaign as combining military, economic, and psychological effects rather than seeking a battlefield breakthrough.

The announcement opened weeks of increasingly intensive Ukrainian long- and medium-range strikes on clearly military targets inside Russia: oil refineries, fuel depots, military airfields, ammunition depots, logistics hubs and military-industrial plants. But the campaign also reached targets that fall outside the traditional category of purely military objectives—energy, ports, civilian vessels and warehouses—and whose legality turns not on the category but on the dual-use test. That is where the legal question begins.

Two weeks in, on 10 July, Zelenskyy signed a decree establishing a special command within the Armed Forces for long-range—effectively global—impact on Russia, concentrating available resources on degrading Russia's warfighting potential. The move turned the campaign into a permanent institution rather than a time-limited operation.

Energy facilities

In July, Ukraine sharply increased its targeting of the energy sector in Russia and on occupied territory. ISW identified and geolocated 62 substations, power plants, transformer stations and transfer nodes struck one or more times over 1 to 24 July—necessarily a partial count, since targets are not always named. Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces claimed a far higher figure, reporting on 25 July that it had struck 136 substations across the month.

The situation on occupied territory—especially Crimea, but increasingly parts of occupied Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts—deteriorated sharply through July. The strikes caused recurring blackouts, degraded grid resilience and reduced redundancy.

The intent is to degrade Russia's military logistics rather than inflict civilian hardship. By repeatedly hitting substations, plants, transformers and transfer nodes, Ukraine cut power to the railways, ports, air bases and logistics hubs sustaining Russia's war of aggression. The campaign has forced Russia to divert scarce air-defense systems and personnel to protect an expanding number of rear-area assets, complicating sustainment, reducing operational resilience and raising the economic cost of the occupation.

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Maritime shipping

Ukraine has also sharply increased its attacks on shipping in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea under Operation MoLoChKa—an acronym for Moskva liazhe cherez Krym, "Moscow will fall through Crimea." Launched by the Unmanned Systems Forces, it is a large-scale aerial and sea-drone campaign against Russia's "shadow fleet" of oil tankers, gas carriers and cargo ships, aimed at isolating Crimea by severing its logistics.

Between 6 and 22 July, the USF reportedly struck more than 196 vessels—oil and gas tankers, bulk carriers, ferries, tugboats and cargo vessels supporting Russian military sustainment. The strikes disrupted fuel and supply movements, forced Russia to impose shipping restrictions, and pushed logistics onto more vulnerable road and rail. In occupied Crimea the campaign degraded basic living conditions, prompting panic and an exodus, as strikes on the peninsula's fuel routes and power grid converged through July.

Russia was also forced to pull 200 crews from its Rubicon drone unit off the front line to protect shipping, according to the USF.

"Russia's Amazon"

Wildberries, often called "Russia's Amazon," is the country's largest online retailer—a marketplace that accounts for more than 2% of Russia's GDP, handles over 20 million orders a day, and is used by an estimated 85% to 90% of the economically active population, making it a fixture of daily life in remote regions.

The Kremlin calls it a strictly civilian retailer. Human-rights watchdogs, independent media and Ukrainian intelligence note that the platform openly serves the war effort, listing military gear, body armor, tactical radios and drone-assembly components—often tagged "SVO fighters' choice," a reference to the "special military operation." Kyiv is now targeting the logistics hubs Russian forces use to source equipment, striking at least 12 Wildberries warehouses in Russia and occupied Ukraine since 17 July.

The stated rationale is that the network functions as a decentralized supply chain for the armed forces. Zelenskyy confirmed the strikes, saying the hubs are used "to supply the Russian army with drone components, navigation equipment and gear." Serhii Kuzan, chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, noted that while the primary goal is choking the supply of critical components, the disruption reaches deep into the wider Russian economy.

The strikes generate military, economic and political pressure inside Russia. They force Moscow to divert scarce air defense to protect commercial infrastructure far in the rear. They disrupt one of Russia's largest retail networks, bringing the war closer to urban populations the Kremlin has tried to shield. And they reportedly inflicted around RUB 170 billion in damage, raising financial pressure on elites tied to Wildberries and potentially widening tensions inside Putin's circle.

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The Ukrainian justification

The stated objective of the 40-day campaign was to "pressure" or "influence" Russia into ending the war by raising the cost of continuing it. Ukraine has adopted the term "military-economic" targets for civilian or dual-use assets that enable Russia's ability to wage war:

• Energy infrastructure supporting military bases, railways, ports and the defense industry.
  
• Oil and gas infrastructure—refineries, depots, terminals and pipelines that fuel the military and generate export revenue.
  
• Military-industrial plants producing drones, missiles, electronics, bearings and explosives.
  
• Transport and logistics—railway hubs, ports, ferries and logistics centers moving military cargo.
  
• Commercial logistics firms supporting military supply chains, such as the Wildberries warehouses Ukraine alleges distribute equipment to Russian forces.
  
• Merchant shipping carrying fuel, ammunition, equipment or sanctioned dual-use goods.
  

To a degree, the strategy is working. Russia is straining under unsustainable war spending, rising inflation, labor shortages and a shrinking sovereign wealth fund.

The war has reached the citizens the Kremlin tried to shield. Independent tracking by the Levada Center—Russia's most reputable non-governmental pollster—recorded a shift months before Ukraine's July campaign: in a survey conducted 18 to 25 February, a record 67% of Russians said it was time to move to peace negotiations, while 24% wanted military operations to continue—the lowest figure recorded since the full-scale invasion began.

Support for the armed forces themselves held at 72%, and 57% still called Russia's strikes on Ukraine's energy grid justified. Russians increasingly want the war over; they have not turned against it. The same paradox ran through the December poll.

The Russian justification

Ironically, Russia's justification for its strikes on Ukraine's energy sector, maritime trade and warehouses is identical to Ukraine's: that the strikes are directed at military and dual-use infrastructure, not at civilians. Russian officials call the targets legitimate military objectives because they support Ukraine's military-industrial complex and its ability to wage war.

Russia's Defense Ministry has stated that all ships bound for Ukrainian ports will be treated as potentially carrying military cargo, and it classifies Ukrainian storage sites and warehouses as covert logistics hubs, ammunition depots or drone-manufacturing nodes. Damaging Ukraine's energy system, ports and trade, Moscow argues, weakens Ukraine's economy and its ability to sustain operations.

The two justifications are word-for-word the same. The legal verdict is not.

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The verdict

From a military point of view, Ukraine's strikes are fully justified: they create strategic effects that may help end the war. The harder question is whether they are justifiable in law.

Western governments, the UN and many legal experts reject Russia's justification. They argue that Russia's campaign has repeatedly caused widespread civilian harm—prolonged blackouts, disrupted water, heating and healthcare—and that many strikes have likely violated the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution under international humanitarian law.

Because Ukraine strikes similar categories, one might assume the same verdict applies to its campaign.

It does not, and the reason is that legality never rested on the category. From a legal perspective, none of these categories—energy, merchant shipping, commercial warehouses—is automatically protected or automatically targetable. Their legality depends on evidence that the target makes an effective contribution to military action, and that the attack satisfies distinction, proportionality and precaution.

That is where the comparison ends.

Ukraine's strikes appear to meet the three principles:

• Distinction—attack only military objectives, defined in Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol I as objects that "by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action" and whose destruction "offers a definite military advantage."
• Proportionality—expected civilian harm must not be excessive relative to the anticipated military advantage.
• Precaution—feasible measures must be taken to minimize civilian harm.
  

The war began with Crimea and, in Zelenskyy's repeatedly stated position, must end with Crimea's liberation—a loss that would likely bring Putin's political downfall.

Ukraine's methods may in part be drawn from Russia's playbook. They will never be assessed as equal. One side is the aggressor, the other the victim. One wages war because it can. The other, because it has no other choice.

Hans Petter Midttun

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

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

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Exclusives

Ukraine takes a Cold War-era American APC—and turns it into mine-blasting robot. Allies have shipped Ukraine more than 1,700 M113s. Khartia's engineers just showed what one looks like with nobody inside.

A couple beaten for being Ukrainian—the latest case in Poland's rising anti-Ukrainian violence. The video, filmed by a Ukrainian living nearby, spread online, and police detained two suspects the next day.

How tight is Russia's fuel crisis? Altai now caps each car at one fill a day. Drivers had gamed the midnight reset to take two rations. This week, the Siberian republic shut the window.

Russia's strikes stopped Ukraine's grain ships. Its farmers are the ones paying. World wheat price is climbing on the supply scare—yet the grain stuck in Ukraine's ports fetches less by the week.

Russia's ship strikes stall Ukraine's grain corridor. The damage is moving inland. Not one ship passed through the corridor on 22 July, at the height of harvest. The choke is now reaching Ukraine's farmers and its railways.

Ukraine's strikes left Crimea's prepaid fuel coupons worthless—and the biggest chain won't refund them. It is invoking a 14-day return law a Russian lawyer says doesn't apply—he calls it unjust enrichment.

Military

After Ukraine's Caspian strike, Iran warns of retaliation. Ukraine faces that threat without defenses its allies gave Israel. Monitoring channels raised the prospect of a ballistic strike, but Ukrainian officials say no such intent is confirmed.

A Siberian fuel plant 2,000 km from the war zone goes offline—drones struck it days ago. The refinery near Tyumen normally turns out roughly half a million tons of gasoline and millions of tons of diesel a year — for now it makes neither, per Reuters sources.

Ukraine went for Russia's "AliExpress" again—its next-door warehouse was ablaze. The Koledino 3PL depot, which serves Fix Price, Perekrestok and Detsky Mir, burned while Wildberries said its hub kept running.

Intelligence and technology

New ground launcher means Russia no longer needs rare drone to fire its Banderol missile. Photos show a Russian ground launcher for the S8000 Banderol cruise missile, previously fired only from rare Orion drones.

West of Ukraine is still out of reach of Russia's guided drones for reason. What is one thing that would close this gap?. Russia cannot yet steer guided Shaheds against Lviv and Volyn because its control network is out of range, but relays in Belarus would extend the threat west, Serhii Beskrestnov says.

Ukraine and NATO are funding joint teams to turn battlefield prototypes into weapons — each pairing Ukrainian firm with allied one. Brave1 and NATO began accepting applications for UNITE - Brave NATO, a joint grant program to scale drone and air-defense technology.

International

Russia increases ballistic missile strikes: Zelenskyy meets second Patriot interceptor maker within week in Washington to push back. On a Washington visit for Lindsey Graham's funeral, Zelenskyy met Lockheed Martin on joint weapons production and Trump at the White House, as the Senate moved a Russia sanctions bill renamed for Graham.

Lithuania proposes to implement special test for Russian and Belarusian artists and academics who enter state. Those who don't pass will be banned. Lithuania's Foreign Ministry proposed barring Russian and Belarusian cultural, scientific, and sports figures who performed in occupied Ukraine or backed the war from entering the country.

Romania hits cost trap Ukraine spent years escaping: $400,000 missiles against $20,000 drones. Romania spent about €1.5 million downing three Russian drones over three days, mostly on F-16 missiles.

Humanitarian and social impact

Plant can't mine because it can't ship: Russia's attacks on merchant vessels idle 4,480 workers at Ukrainian iron ore giant. Pivdennyi GZK, one of Ukraine's largest iron ore producers, is suspending mining because Russian strikes on merchant ships have effectively halted shipping to Black Sea ports.

Political and legal developments

Kyiv police detain journalist investigating corruption over draft violation, which his newsroom says doesn't exist. He was targeted the same way in 2024.

New developments

Behind a blue check, someone spoke for Ukraine's commander—then X shut the whole operation out. For days, statements attributed to Ukraine's newly appointed commander circulated from a profile he had never controlled.

Read our earlier daily review here.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has spent an entire day in Washington amid a shortage of Patriot interceptors. The Ukrainian president met representatives of the American defense company Lockheed Martin, which makes ATACMS missiles, HIMARS rocket systems, and Patriot air-defense interceptors, during his 28 July visit to the US, he wrote on Telegram.

Zelenskyy's Washington trip layered defense-industry diplomacy over a funeral. He came for the memorial of Senator Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly on 11 July at 71 and was among Kyiv's most influential and outspoken allies in the US Congress.

On the same day, the Senate moved to advance a Russia sanctions bill, renamed the "Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026" in his honor, with a procedural vote set for Tuesday evening, at which Zelenskyy was to address senators beforehand, according to Bloomberg. Zelenskyy also met with US President Donald Trump at the White House.

The Lockheed talks are about building weapons together

Zelenskyy framed the Lockheed Martin meeting as the same joint-production effort he has been pressing across the US defense industry. He discussed further developing cooperation through joint production and technology exchange, he said.

"Ukraine has something to share with those who help us protect lives. We talked about our joint capabilities regarding Patriot and other systems," Zelenskyy wrote.

Teams are already working on concrete solutions to move to joint production as quickly as possible and increase Ukraine's ability to protect lives, he added.

The meeting pairs with several days earlier. On 22 July, Zelenskyy met a team from Raytheon, the Patriot's other manufacturer, and said Ukraine was negotiating joint production of Patriot interceptors. Meeting both Patriot makers within a week, Ukraine is pressing the companies on production, after Trump pledged at the Ankara NATO summit on 8 July to grant Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriots, a promise the manufacturers said this month they had barely begun to act on.

The sanctions bill is the day's larger stakes

Shortly after midnight Kyiv time, Zelenskyy is expected to address US senators ahead of a procedural vote on a bipartisan bill imposing sanctions on Russia.

The legislation advancing in Graham's name is among the most consequential Russia measures the US Congress has produced. A bipartisan group of senators announced on 28 July that they had finalized the bill's language, and Senate leaders scheduled a procedural vote for that evening.

It would allow the president to impose tariffs of up to 500% on goods imported directly from Russia and up to 100% on imports from the largest buyers of Russian oil and gas, as well as from countries that help Russia evade sanctions. It also targets Russian officials, oligarchs, banks, and the shadow fleet, bars Russian uranium imports, and extends Iran sanctions. With more than 60 cosponsors, it is expected to pass the Senate, though the House is in recess until 31 August, so it will not reach Trump's desk until after that.

However, the bill carries a real geopolitical cost of its own. The secondary tariffs would fall hardest on China and India, the biggest buyers of Russian energy, and the measure could strain already-unstable US trade relations with both. That is the tension built into the tribute to Graham: the bill that bears his name would squeeze Russia's war revenue by pressuring the countries that keep it flowing, at the cost of a confrontation with two of the world's largest economies.

The Ukrainian National Guard has found a new way to speed armored robots to the front line. Instead of building all its 'bots from scratch, the 2nd National Guard Corps "Khartiia" has converted at least one old American-designed M113 armored personnel carrier into a big, capacious unmanned vehicle.

If it works, and there's no reason to think it won't, the robotic M113 could become common in Ukrainian service. After all, allies have shipped Ukraine at least 1,729 M113s and vehicles built on the same chassis over the course of the war, making it one of the most numerous Western armored types in Ukrainian service.

The Khartiia Corps took one of its 12-ton M113s, added external cameras, control servos, and a radio-based command system and fitted it with anti-drone armor and a front-mounted mine flail. "Re-equipped by the engineers of Khartiia, it performs missions involving remote de-mining and logistics, allowing the operator to control the armored personnel carrier from a remote control unit," the corps stated.

Ukrainian forces use thousands of small unmanned ground vehicles. Some carry guns into battle. Others haul supplies or speed injured troops from the gray zone to field hospitals. Most of these UGVs are purpose-made models with wheeled or tracked chassis and remote control systems based on line-of-sight, mesh or satellite radio, or fiber-optic cable.

The purpose-made UGVs tend to be small, lightweight, and limited in range. They might weigh a couple hundred kilograms, range a few tens of kilometers and cost $10,000. The small size, light weight, and limited range might not be a major constraint on a UGV whose main mission is, say, speeding a single wounded infantryman away from his front-line fighting position along a road or path.

But clearing mines or other obstacles is a whole other matter. Mine-clearing plows, rollers, or flails might weigh tons. The vehicle carrying the mine-clearing gear must be able to withstand the blasts from any mines it triggers. Clearing mined roads and fields leading to and across the disputed gray zone is tedious work requiring greater endurance and cross-country mobility than a small, under-torqued UGV can manage under battery power.

It's not for no reason that most existing Ukrainian mine-clearing vehicles are big, heavily armored, and powerful. They include American-made Assault Breachers, German-made Wisents and an array of ex-Soviet engineering vehicles. The problem, of course, is that these vehicles are manned. And their crews are exposed to extreme danger while inching along mined roads and fields within range of Russian drones and artillery.

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Attritable vehicles

In fitting a diesel-powered, aluminum-armored M113 for remote operation, the Khartia Corps has removed the most vulnerable component of the best mine-clearing systems: the people. Now the corps can clear mines without worrying about losing precious manpower. If the M113 gets blown up, just add servos and radios to another one of the M113s still in the Ukrainian inventory.

It's such a good idea that more than one army has tried it. The US Army, which still owns tens of thousands of the 1960s-vintage M113s, has experimented with several types of unmanned M113. One essayist, writing for an official US Army blog, urged the American ground combat branch to convert M113s into unmanned "breaching" vehicles.

"Obsolete M113s can be repurposed to deliver massed unmanned assaults to reduce the enemy’s strongest defenses," Jason Flores Rutledge wrote. "Turning obsolete vehicles into remotely-operated machines can save money and lives."

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Best of all, the basic equipment that transforms a manned M113 into an unmanned M113 is platform agnostic. That is, it should work just fine on almost any vehicle, as Rutledge noted. "As the Army runs out of M113s, subsequent generations of Armored Fighting Vehicles could be automated as they approach obsolescence."

With refinement and scaling, Ukrainian forces could produce reliable, inexpensive kits for converting an array of wheeled and tracked vehicles into robots. Tanks and infantry fighting vehicles with manually loaded main guns and complex fire control systems might not be eligible for conversion. But engineering vehicles, supply vehicles, and ambulances should be first in line.

Think of manned-to-unmanned vehicle conversions as an expedient. In a bid to reduce risk to their most precious resource, their soldiers, Ukrainian forces have already contracted more than 22,000 domestically built UGVs so far this year—nearly double the total for all of 2025—with more contracts still coming, the Defense Ministry reported. They could add thousands of vehicles to that total by converting M113s and other (currently) manned vehicles.

Russia may be about to fire its Banderol cruise missiles from the ground, and that could change the warning Ukraine has. Photos of a new Russian ground launcher for the S8000 "Banderol" cruise missile have appeared online, and Russia reportedly presented the launcher to Russian ruler Vladimir Putin at a closed exhibition in 2025, the Ukrainian defense outlet Defense Express reported.

Until now, the only confirmed launch platform for the Banderol was the Orion strike-and-reconnaissance drone, and no ground launcher for the missile had appeared online. That mattered for Ukraine's defense: the Orion is rare, with only nine confirmed losses throughout the war, and it has to be flown in first, where Ukraine can spot it in advance.

A ground launcher removes that warning. The Banderol is a fast, cheap jet-powered cruise missile that flies up to 500 km at 500 to 560 km/h with a 114.3-kg warhead, and Russia has used it in its largest combined strikes on Kyiv. The threat is that ground launchers let Russia fire Banderols without the Orion's telltale takeoff, and can be assembled in large numbers for mass attacks.

The launcher strips away the time Ukraine had to react

The second danger is volume. A single Orion can carry only one Banderol, but ground launchers can be built in dozens and used for mass attacks. That turns a missile previously limited by its scarce drone carrier into one Russia could salvo, the same shift from trickle to swarm that has made Shaheds so hard to stop.

The launcher may still be in testing, the analysts cautioned, and Russia may be trying to conceal its use. But the fact that Russia has ground launchers at all is the threat, because it changes how and how many Banderols can reach Ukraine.

The tradeoff is the range for surprise

Ground launch is not free for Russia either. Fired from a launcher on the ground, the Banderol will have a shorter range than when dropped from an Orion already at altitude and speed. Even with a booster, the missile has to accelerate and climb to its cruising height on its own, spending the energy an air launch provides for free.

The launcher's design reflects that. Judging by its construction, the missile rail can be lowered to a horizontal position, and, given its small size, the launcher could theoretically be mounted on trailers or other mobile platforms. A small solid-fuel booster is probably used to get the missile off the ground. That mobility is its own threat: a trailer-mounted launcher can hide, move, and fire from unexpected locations, trading the Banderol's maximum range for the surprise of a ground launch close to the border.

Ukrainian intelligence has mapped its 30-company foreign component supply chain, down to a Chinese jet engine available on AliExpress, and President's adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, who first identified the missile, has called it "nothing outstanding, a budget cruise missile with a small warhead."

Russia cannot yet use guided kamikaze drones against the regions in the west of Ukraine because of technical limits on its remote-control system. But activating relays in Belarus could change that and put Lviv, Volyn, and other oblasts at risk, presidential adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov said on the national telethon, Telegraf reports.

Russia's online control system currently works only within a limited range of the border, and the front line, Beskrestnov said, so the "red zone" where drones can be steered in real time does not yet reach the west. If relays in Belarus come online, that zone would expand toward the Belarusian border and cover them.

The warning is concrete because Russia has done exactly this before: it built a network of signal repeaters on Belarusian towers and rooftops that boosted Shahed control signals to reach Kyiv, Rivne, and Volyn oblasts, until Ukraine dismantled it in February 2026.

The Belarus threat is a switch Russia can flip back on

The relay question is not hypothetical. Repeaters in Belarus let Shaheds flying the northern route hit targets across Kyiv, Rivne, and Volyn that Russia struggles to reach from its own soil, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said some strikes on Ukrainian energy and railway sites would not have been possible without that help.

Ukraine has fought to keep it off. After Ukraine tore down the network in February, Kyiv gave Belarusian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka a week to pull Russia's drone relays in June, and they went silent in three days. ISW has assessed that operating Shaheds and cheaper Molniyas from Belarusian territory would put the highway and rail line carrying Polish supplies from the border within precision range, and allow Russian operators to hit moving convoys and trains.

The camera-lock tactic is how a guided Shahed hits a moving train

The reason online control matters so much is a new tactic Russia uses to defeat Ukrainian electronic warfare. Russian guided drones now carry powerful cameras with target-capture capability, Beskrestnov said, allowing them to hit specific moving targets rather than fixed coordinates.

He described how it works. From three kilometers out, the pilot sees a locomotive with his own eyes through the drone's camera, switches on a capture box around it, and a Shahed then automatically controls its own flight and attacks the locomotive, Beskrestnov said. Locking onto the target visually and letting the drone fly itself in for the final approach means the operator no longer needs a continuous control link at the moment of impact, which is part of how the drone gets past jamming. Russia understands that mass attacks are ineffective, Beskrestnov said, and is trying to strike important targets with this new tactic.

Ukraine and NATO are funding joint teams to turn battlefield prototypes into weapons. Ukraine's Brave1 defense cluster and its allies have begun accepting applications for their first joint grant program, UNITE - Brave NATO, Ukraine's Defense Ministry announced.

The program helps bring successful defense-technology prototypes to serial production and battlefield use, pairing a Ukrainian company with a company from a NATO country in joint teams.

The competition focuses on developing Ukraine's drone capabilities, protection against enemy drones, and strengthening air defense. Depending on the type of technology, winners can receive up to $293,000 or about $585,000 per side of the joint team.

Applications for the first stage are accepted until 3 August 2026. It is the working phase of a program EP has tracked since NATO and Ukraine launched UNITE - Brave NATO in November 2025, with a €10 million pilot budget split equally between NATO and Ukraine.

The program routes Ukraine's combat experience into the NATO industry

The pairing requirement is the point. By requiring a Ukrainian company and a NATO-country company on each team, UNITE - Brave NATO connects the world's most combat-tested defense innovators with allied industry and channels the real-time battlefield lessons Ukraine generates back into the Alliance.

NATO wants that experience deliberately. NATO's Communications and Information Agency manages the competition on the Alliance side, while Brave1 coordinates it in Ukraine. The first round targets the very technologies Ukraine faces daily: countering unmanned aerial systems, strengthening air defenses, and securing frontline communications.

Brave1 is the hub that the whole system runs through

The grant program is one node in the innovation network Ukraine has built at the center of its war effort. Brave1 has become the central hub of Ukraine's wartime defense innovation, and as of June 2026, the cluster had processed over $235 million in procurement orders, registered more than 3,600 developments, secured 300 NATO-codified items, and disbursed $50 million in defense innovation grants.

UNITE - Brave NATO sits alongside a widening set of bilateral partnerships that Brave1 runs with individual NATO members, including Brave Germany, launched with Berlin in May 2026, and Brave France, a €20 million drone-development program launched with Paris in June. The common thread is the Test in Ukraine framework, which allows foreign manufacturers to trial new technologies under conditions close to actual combat and to obtain performance data that no peacetime range can produce.

Russia's strikes on cargo ships have now shut down an iron ore giant. Pivdennyi Mining and Processing Plant (Pivdennyi GZK) has announced it has begun suspending mining and temporarily curtailing operations due to ongoing Russian attacks on civilian merchant ships bound for Ukraine's Black Sea ports.

The plant cannot mine because it cannot ship. Russia's strikes on merchant vessels have effectively blocked the ports through which Pivdennyi GZK exports, leaving several shiploads of iron ore piled up at the ports and in the plant's warehouses with nowhere to go, so the company was forced to stop digging more, per its statement.

The plant is owned by Ukraine's richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, and Smart Holding, which employs 4,480 people, and earned about $463 million in revenue in 2024, according to Forbes Ukraine. It plans to resume mining in August 2026, security permitting, and will keep staff on repair and maintenance work in the meantime. It is the major industrial casualty of a Black Sea shipping blockade that Russia has tightened to a chokehold in late July.

The sea trade has effectively stopped

The plant's shutdown is one consequence of a campaign that has emptied Ukraine's main export corridor. Since Russia began deliberately striking civilian merchant ships, war-risk insurance rates for calling at a Ukrainian port have jumped roughly fivefold, making the voyage economically unviable, and crews have begun demanding double or triple hazard pay, according to UA.News. As of 24 July, the waters around the Greater Odesa ports sat empty for days, with no ship daring to enter Ukrainian territorial waters to load or unload.

The scale of the strikes is what stopped the ships. Russia has hit at least 12 civilian vessels heading to Ukrainian ports, according to Pivdennyi GZK, including ships carrying Ukrainian metallurgical products.

The plant survived everything until the sea closed

Pivdennyi GZK's shutdown is notable because the plant held on through years of conditions that would have closed a weaker operation. The suspension was a forced measure; it was delayed as long as possible, the company said.

Since the start of the full-scale war, the plant operated under constant critical pressures: Russian shelling, power outages, sharply rising logistics costs, the European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), and tightened EU quotas on Ukrainian metallurgical products.

The plant produces high-grade iron ore concentrate with iron content above 65% and up to 67.8%, which is supplied to Ukrainian metallurgical plants and exported. Without functioning ports, that export has nowhere to go. The pattern echoes 2022, when Russia's blockade of the seaports halted operations at the plant from 1 July that year, with operations only partly resuming in November.

The plant is appealing to the state to reopen the sea

Pivdennyi GZK turned its shutdown into a direct appeal to allies and the Ukrainian government. The plant's collective addressed President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the government, and parliamentarians, calling the unblocking of logistics routes for Ukraine's Black Sea ports a vital task not only for the mining and metallurgical sector but for the entire Ukrainian economy.

"Restoring access to logistics routes serving Ukraine's Black Sea ports is essential for ensuring the long-term viability of not only the mining and metals sector, but the Ukrainian economy as a whole," the company said.

Iran is threatening to hit back after Ukraine struck its ships. Meanwhile, Ukrainian monitoring channels that help the Ukrainians track Russian drones and missiles carried information that soon Iran might attack Ukraine with ballistic missiles.

The threat is real, but a ballistic strike on Ukraine is not confirmed. It follows Ukrainian long-range strikes on 25 and 26 July against vessels in the Caspian Sea, which President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy publicly confirmed, saying Ukraine hit ships used in military cargo shipments involving Iran, as well as a warship, according to Al Jazeera.

Iran's Foreign Ministry accused Ukraine of attacking what it called a commercial vessel, said the strike killed one sailor and wounded others, called it an "act of aggression," and warned of "expanding the fire of war."

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the attack "cannot go unanswered." But Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation, said there is no official data on any Iranian intent to strike Ukraine with ballistic missiles, while noting Tehran potentially has the weapons to do so.

The threat comes from a strike Ukraine confirmed carrying out

The Caspian route is a documented artery of the Iran-Russia weapons trade. It links Iran's northern ports to the Russian port of Astrakhan, and Ukraine has struck it before: in August 2025, a cargo ship reportedly loaded with Shahed drone components and Iranian munitions was destroyed there, CNN reports. Iran has supplied Russia with thousands of Shahed drones used against Ukrainian cities since 2022, which is why Ukraine treats the shipping between the two countries as a military target.

Iran's Foreign Ministry summoned Ukraine's chargé d'affaires in Tehran over the strike, and Araghchi said he raised a response in calls with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, accusing Israel of provoking the attack to draw Europe into its war.

Iran has missiles that could reach Ukraine, according to Defense Express

On the question of capability, the Ukrainian defense outlet Defense Express assessed what Iran could theoretically use. Iran does have an arsenal of medium-range ballistic missiles able to reach Ukrainian territory, of which the most threatening is the Khorramshahr, which has demonstrated a range of about 4,000 kilometers.

The technical profile is Defense Express's analysis, not evidence of intent. First shown in 2017 and believed to be based on the North Korean BM-25 Musudan, itself derived from the Soviet R-27 submarine-launched missile, the Khorramshahr is a liquid-fuel single-stage missile with several variants. A 2,000-kilometer version carries a warhead of up to 1,500 kilograms, and Iran has developed and used against Israel a submunition warhead closer to a cluster type, dispersing up to 20 separate warheads within a radius of about 8 kilometers, designed to strike cities and defeat missile defense.

To intercept such missiles, Israel used Arrow-2 and Arrow-3, and the US used THAAD and SM-3 to defend its ally. Ukraine has none of these systems. That is a genuine vulnerability, but it describes what could happen if Iran chose to strike, not a decision Tehran has made.

Polish police have detained two of the three men suspected of beating a young Ukrainian couple in the city of Wrocław, Suspilne reported. Investigators are treating the assault as a hate crime driven by the victims' nationality, and the two detainees now face criminal charges and possible prison time. Officers are still searching for the third attacker as Kyiv presses for a full investigation.

Two suspects detained, one still sought

Wrocław police detained the two men on 27 July, and both had prior records. Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński announced the arrests on X, writing that brutal violence would never go unpunished. Counter-terrorism officers stopped one suspect as he tried to leave Wrocław. The third man remains at large.

The two detainees were to be questioned and charged at the Wrocław-Psie Pole district prosecutor's office. They face up to five years in prison, prosecution spokesman Jakub Dłubacz told Ukrinform. The charges combine battery with violence motivated by national intolerance under Poland's criminal code.

"Are you Ukrainian?" — three Polish men beat the couple 

The attack happened around 18:30 on 26 July in Wrocław's Zakrzów district. The victim's mother, Karina Kitsai, recounted the events to Radio Svoboda. Her daughter Nastia had stopped at a supermarket to buy coffee and food while her boyfriend Maksym waited in the car. At the checkout, one man set a beer in front of Nastia. When she pointed to the queue, he asked whether she was Ukrainian and began insulting her.

The men waited outside. As Nastia reached the car, they ran up and started beating Maksym. She screamed for them to stop, and one attacker turned on her.

"One of them ran up to her and started hitting her in the face. She fell on her back," Kitsai said. The men briefly stepped back, then attacked again as the couple tried to stand.

Nastia suffered a cut neck that needed stitches, a torn ear, and a badly bruised face. Her mother believes one attacker may have used a knife. The men beat Maksym's head and shocked him with the stun gun he had tried to use to defend himself. Both Nastia and Maksym were treated for suspected concussion. 

A neighbor heard the cries and filmed the assault from his balcony, and the family later published the video.

"We are compelled to note that cases of violence and aggression whose victims are Ukrainian citizens have recently become more frequent in Poland," Ukraine's Consulate General in Wrocław wrote, sharing the video.

Kyiv presses for justice as attacks climb

Ukraine's acting Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha thanked Polish authorities, law enforcement, and Wrocław's mayor for their swift response. He wrote that Kyiv expects a full and impartial investigation and fair punishment for everyone involved. 

Sybiha again urged "certain Polish politicians" to stop fueling hostility that turns into street violence. 

"We need dialogue and mutual respect, not looking for reasons to hate," he wrote.

Drivers in Russia’s Altai Republic had found a way around fuel rationing: fill up just before midnight, then again just after, and pocket two days’ gasoline in one stop.

This week, the Siberian republic—bordering Kazakhstan, China, and Mongolia—closed that window, ordering fuel stations to allow each car only one fill every 24 hours. The fix is local and granular. The cause is not: Ukraine’s drone war on Russian refineries has reached Siberia’s gas pumps.

Ukraine has spent months striking the plants that turn Russian crude into gasoline and diesel, driving the country’s refining to a two-decade low and sending its drones as far as the giant Omsk refinery, roughly 2,500 kilometers away, hit on 6 July.

Kyiv calls the campaign its long-range sanctions and says Siberia is within reach. The result is now showing up at pumps far from any front line.

Explore further

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

The Altai Republic’s government set out the rule on its official Telegram channel: stations scan each car’s registration into a regional system and refuse a second sale until 24 hours have passed, with fuel sold only to drivers who show a vehicle registration.

The old daily limit reset at midnight, letting drivers take one ration late in the evening and another once the clock turned. “There is fuel, but the flows need regulating to supply everyone—both essential services and citizens,” Alexander Prokopyev, the head of the republic’s government, said. Farmers, alongside emergency crews, get the one exception: a second fill between 05:00 and 07:00.

Fill up just before midnight, then again just after, and pocket two days' gasoline in one stop.

Rationing tightens as the government grounds itself

The caps are tight. In the districts where most of the republic’s 210,000 people live, drivers may buy 30 liters of gasoline a day—about half a tank—or 50 liters of diesel. Elsewhere, the ceilings are 50 and 100.

The government has reined in its own officials too, cutting work trips, banning out-of-region travel on state vehicles, and moving meetings online to save fuel. The limits are set to run until 1 September.

Altai is not alone. Rationing now stretches across dozens of Russian regions, and the strain is spilling past the pump: about 25 regions have raised transit fares or cut routes to conserve fuel, from Stavropol in the south to Irkutsk and Buryatia in the east.

The federal government is steering supply by hand—Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on 25 July that officials were weighing extra shipments to the Altai Republic, neighboring Altai Krai, Yakutia, Irkutsk Oblast, and Trans-Baikal.

Next door in the Kuzbass coal region, the shortage is being counted in days of jet fuel. Governor Ilya Seredyuk said this week that 213 rail tankers were en route and that reserves stood at 16 days of jet fuel for Kemerovo’s airport and seven for Novokuznetsk’s—figures from a single official’s briefing, not independently confirmed.

Moscow has conceded the point: Putin acknowledged the strikes are causing fuel problems. The Altai Republic’s own announcements name a different culprit—speculation and panic-buying among its drivers.

Someone impersonated Ukraine's newly appointed top general on X, posting false statements in his name until the platform removed the account, according to Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation. The fake carried a verified badge—which on X currently signals a paid X subscription, not identity verification—and pushed fabricated announcements before officials exposed it. The watchdog says a wider effort to discredit the country's military leadership now reaches other senior commanders.

A fake page speaks for the new commander

The Center for Countering Disinformation (CPD), a body under Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, reported on 28 July that X had blocked a page impersonating the official account of the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief, Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi. The account had earlier spread fakes in his name. The watchdog thanked X for acting on the complaint.

The counterfeit profile, created in July 2026, carried a verified badge and gathered more than 5,500 followers before its exposure. It had published around 30 posts issuing statements in the commander's voice.

Explore further

From “flying BMP” to commander-in-chief: Ukraine’s new army leader stopped Russia at Kryvyi Rih and held Vovchansk

A fabricated "army audit" that reached the media

On 26 July, the fake page posted that an "audit of the Armed Forces" was starting, claiming there would be "no untouchables" and that anyone tied to alleged violations would answer for it. Ukrainska Pravda—a popular Ukrainian publication—ran a story sourced to the account, then annulled the report and apologized to readers.

The General Staff confirmed the X page did not belong to Drapatyi.

The CPD said the operation reaches beyond one general. Posts also try to discredit acting Defense Minister Major General Yevhenii Khmara, Ground Forces Commander Major General Hennadii Shapovalov, and other senior figures in the Defense Forces. The aim, the watchdog said, is to sow division and distrust among the public and troops by spreading fake biographies and building artificially inflated expectations through counterfeit pages.

Russia's Tyumen oil refinery has fully halted crude processing and fuel output since a late-July Ukrainian drone strike, two industry sources told Reuters on 28 July. The plant sits more than 2,000 kilometers from Ukraine, deep in western Siberia. How long the damaged gasoline production will take to repair remains unclear.

The plant stopped making fuel

RI-Invest, which owns the Tyumen refinery, shut down crude processing and all product output on 25 July, when the Ukrainian drones hit the facility, according to the two sources in a Reuters report carried by The Moscow Times. The drone strike that day damaged the plant's secondary units and set them on fire. 

The blaze hit a diesel hydrotreating unit rated at 2.6 million tons a year. It also struck the combined high-octane gasoline complex, which pairs a catalytic reformer with an isomerization unit. Neither source could estimate how long the gasoline repairs would run, according to Reuters.

Explore further

Oil sites 1,300 km east, a port terminal near the front—Russia’s deep rear had one loud night

A plant already patching an older fire

The same diesel hydrotreating unit spent last month under repair after a 6 June fire from internal causes. The gasoline complex was built under a license from the US firm UOP and started operating in 2018. The refinery's full capacity reaches 9 million tons a year, the sources said. In 2024 it processed 5.7 million tons of crude, turning out 0.5 million tons of gasoline and 2.8 million tons of diesel.

Drones over Siberia, far from any front

On 25 July, Tyumen Oblast Governor Alexander Moor confirmed the drone attack on the region and reported no casualties. 

Ukrainian drones had already reached the same plant on 20 June. The lost output tightens a home fuel market that has run short since spring, as Kyiv escalated its campaign against oil-processing plants.

Tyumen Oblast is currently also bracing for major flooding as the Tura River rises.

Russian strikes on Black Sea shipping have brought Ukraine’s grain corridor to its first full stop since it opened in August 2023, Ag Bull Trading reported. The freeze is splitting the price of wheat in two, pushing it down on Ukrainian farms even as it climbs abroad, Latifundist’s analysis found.

Rapeseed now sells for about $70 a ton less than it did a week earlier, and wheat at the farm is fetching roughly a fifth less than last autumn. Some buyers are cutting their offers overnight, market participants reported.

With ships no longer calling, traders have stopped buying, and grain that would have sailed has nowhere to go; the near-total halt of seaport trade has pushed prices down at the ports. More than 90% of Ukraine’s farm exports move through three deepwater Odesa ports.

Explore further

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

Carriers pull out as world prices climb

Maersk suspended service at a terminal in Chornomorsk’s fishing port and rerouted cargo to Romania’s Constanta, while the main ports and the corridor itself stayed open, as ThePublic reported; Hapag-Lloyd also paused its Chornomorsk calls.

On world exchanges, the same grain is moving the other way: Chicago wheat has jumped about 16% in July as attacks on Black Sea shipping stoke supply fears. Egypt, Algeria, and Indonesia together buy about 60% of Ukraine’s wheat, USDA figures show.

The freeze is splitting the price of wheat in two, pushing it down on Ukrainian farms even as it climbs abroad.

Grain piles up with nowhere to go

Seaborne farm exports have all but stopped, and with about 10 million metric tons of grain unsold from last season already competing for storage with the new crop, prices for growers keep sliding. The strain on the farm sector could turn critical within two to three months, the All-Ukrainian Agrarian Council’s deputy head Denys Marchuk warned.

The state has imposed no restrictions—shipowners paused their own calls after a run of Russian strikes on civilian cargo ships, Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi told Latifundist.

He urged growers who can afford it to hold off selling, and said Ukraine may need to store an extra 10 to 12 million metric tons of grain it cannot ship, appealing to international partners for temporary storage capacity. The strikes went to the UN Security Council on 27 July, a session convened at Kyiv’s request.

Explore further

Russia’s ship strikes stall Ukraine’s grain corridor. The damage is moving inland

Growers face rising costs of their own—fuel, fertilizer, and equipment—and some are buying diesel on credit at about 87 hryvnias ($1.93) a liter, leaving little room to hold grain off a falling market.

Yet nothing has been formally closed. The deadliest strike came on 19 July, when Russian missiles hit the Golden Leo, a Turkish-owned bulk carrier, as it left Odesa loaded with grain, a strike killing 10. The corridor remains officially open. The harvest has fewer ways out.

Ukrainian drones struck logistics and industrial sites across Russia's Moscow Oblast on the morning of 28 July, according to monitoring channels and local authorities. Fires broke out near Podolsk and in Chekhov, while Russia's biggest online marketplace said its own warehouse kept running. Russian officials claimed air defenses downed hundreds of drones.

Aimed at Russia's Amazon, the hit landed next door

Early on 28 July, Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ started reporting drone activity over Moscow Oblast. Over the next hours it posted photos, video, and its own read of the target. The channel judged the strike as a likely attempt on the large Wildberries logistics center in Koledino, south of Podolsk. Air-defense fire, it said, probably pushed the hit onto the third-party warehouse right beside it.

Russian news Telegram channel Astra identified the burning building as that 3PL site. Residents of nearby Podolsk reported explosions and a fire that same morning. Supernova+ backed the account of a hit on the 3PL warehouse.

The operator's own site lists the warehouse at about 10,000 m². It stores goods, packs orders, labels and ships for clients that include Auchan, Magnit, Lenta, Pyaterochka, Fix Price and Detsky Mir. Next to it sits what one industry listing calls the marketplace's largest distribution center, over 200,000 m². Wildberries' press service said the complex was working normally. Monitoring channels still believe the intended target was the Wildberries hub. 

Podolsk district head Grigory Artamonov played it down, reporting only a damaged fence at a private house and a fire in a wooded area.

A rubber plant on fire in Chekhov

Video published by Exilenova+ also showed drones hitting an enterprise in Chekhov. More footage captured a fire after a drone reportedly struck a smokestack on a plant's grounds. Astra's analysis placed the blaze at the Chekhov Regeneration Plant. Residents had reported explosions overnight.

The plant recycles worn car tires into regenerate, rubber crumb and powder, and makes more than 600 rubber goods. By its own account, it is one of Russia's biggest producers in the field. Chekhov municipal head Mikhail Sobakin confirmed the attack, saying rubber had caught fire at the plant and crews were putting it out, with several buildings in the city damaged.

Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin first claimed 12 drones downed near the capital around 5 a.m. He later put more than 390 aircraft over the region between 20:30 and 6:30, saying air defenses hit most "on distant approaches" and 81 near Moscow. Russia's Defense Ministry claimed its air defenses downed 356 Ukrainian drones overnight, across a dozen regions plus the Moscow area, occupied Crimea and the Azov Sea. None of the figures could be independently checked.

Explore further

Ukraine went for Russia’s “AliExpress” again—its next-door warehouse was ablaze

Deep-strike campaign continues

Since 18 July, Ukrainian drones have hit at least ten of the marketplace's centers, in Elektrostal, Kotovsk, Krasnodar, Nevinnomyssk, Voronezh and Yekaterinburg. The previous successful strike came on 24 July, at complexes near St. Petersburg, in Leningrad Oblast and in occupied Simferopol. On 20 July, drones struck the Wildberries center in Podolsk and an oil depot in nearby Lvovsky, both catching fire, as the effort widened from oil refineries to retail and industry.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has earlier explained the strikes on the "Russian AliExpress" by saying Moscow uses the platform to bring in sanctioned drone and navigation parts.

Ukrainian police handcuffed an investigative journalist over a draft violation, which his newsroom says does not exist. On 27 July in Kyiv, police detained hromadske journalist Yevhen Shulhat, stopping the taxi he was riding in. At hromadske, Shulhat investigated corruption, including alleged cases involving members of Ukraine's law enforcement agencies.

The officers said the stop was based on an alleged violation of military registration rules, but according to documents in the newsroom's possession, the journalist had no such violation.

The detention echoes a case that two years ago cost a senior security official his job. Shulhat is the investigative journalist who, in 2024, while at Slidstvo.info, exposed the elite real estate of Illia Vitiuk, head of the Security Service of Ukraine's (SBU) cybersecurity department, and was then targeted with a draft summons that surveillance footage showed had been arranged by Vitiuk's subordinate. The resulting public outcry led President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to fire Vitiuk in May 2024.

The newsroom says the detention was targeted

Shulhat said the police used physical force against him. His editors questioned how the officers could have known anything about his military-registration status in the first place.

"How police officers could have known about a taxi passenger's military-registration violation is unclear. At the same time, the driver's documents did not interest the police, which gives grounds to assume the detention was targeted," said Yaroslava Volvach, head of hromadske's investigations desk.

The detail she points to, that the officers checked only the passenger and not the driver, is what makes an ordinary document check look like something aimed at a specific person.

The police account shifted through the evening

The official version arrived in pieces and changed. Kyiv police first said they had stopped the car to check documents and that Shulhat refused, then offered to take him to a territorial recruitment center to clarify his military-registration data.

Later updates complicated that account. Police said they had delivered Shulhat to a district recruitment center because, by their preliminary information, he had not passed a military medical commission in the established order, while the newsroom's documents showed no registration violation before the two officers detained him. Then, the police told hromadske they did not know Shulhat's current whereabouts and were checking the claim that he had not passed the medical commission. The journalist was out of contact. Kyiv's city recruitment center eventually confirmed he had been delivered to a district center and said he had been sent to undergo the medical commission.

The draft has been used against critics before

Shulhat's case may become the sharpest example of how Ukrainian authorities have been accused of turning conscription into a tool against inconvenient people.

Euromaidan Press could not independently verify Shulhat's military-registration status. What is established is that hromadske says its documents show no violation and that the officers checked only the journalist, not the driver.

Lithuania wants Russians who performed in occupied Ukraine to sign a declaration condemning the war or stay out. Lithuania's Foreign Ministry has proposed amending the national sanctions law with new restrictions on Russians and Belarusians who support the war against Ukraine, including barring them from entering the country, the Baltic News Service (BNS) reported.

The proposal targets Russians and Belarusians in culture, science, art, or sport who performed in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories or directly or indirectly supported the war, who would be denied entry to Lithuania.

To be allowed in for educational or cultural events, citizens of those countries would have to sign and publicly release a declaration condemning Russian aggression and supporting Ukraine's territorial integrity. The refusal to sign would mean an automatic entry ban.

The Foreign Ministry also proposed suspending the right of Russians and Belarusians with residence permits to buy real estate near national security sites and military training grounds.

If the Seimas adopts the amendments, they would take effect on 1 January next year.

"This is part of the state's efforts to strengthen resilience to the influence of hostile regimes and to protect Lithuania's national security interests," the ministry said.

The proposal extends a steady Lithuanian tightening

The measure is the latest in a progression Lithuania has been building for years. In May 2025, Lithuania stripped residence permits from Russians and Belarusians who frequently visited their home countries, a measure affecting more than 14,000 Russian permit holders, and already bans Russians without residence permits from buying Lithuanian real estate.

The new proposal adds a cultural-and-scientific dimension and a novel requirement: a public loyalty declaration as the price of entry for artists and academics.

The real-estate provision fits a separate security logic. Restricting Russian and Belarusian nationals from buying property near military sites addresses sabotage concerns that Baltic states have repeatedly raised, part of hardening NATO's eastern flank against the hostile regimes on Lithuania's borders.

Romania is learning what an expensive way this is to shoot down a cheap drone. The Romanian military spent approximately €1.5 million downing three drones that violated the country's airspace over three days, the Romanian outlet Digi24 reported.

The cost is almost all in the missiles. Most of the spending was on AIM-9X missiles fired from F-16 fighters, which cost about $400,000 each.

Three drones were downed with three missiles, for roughly $1.2 million, and adding the flight hours and aircraft maintenance brings the total for the three operations to about $1.75 million.

Those three shootdowns are the ones Romania carried out on 24, 25, and 26 July, when, for the first time, Romanian jets fired on drones violating its airspace rather than merely escorting them. Romania's Defense Ministry is now searching for more economical solutions.

This is the cost problem Ukraine already solved

Romania is meeting the exact economic trap that has defined air defense in the war next door. A Russian Shahed or Geran drone costs on the order of $10,000 to $50,000. A Western air-to-air missile that downs one costs many times that, and Romania has just spent an F-16 missile worth $400,000 on each of three drones.

Ukraine spent two years fighting its way out of that trap. It drove the cost-per-intercept down by scaling interceptor drones that kill Shaheds for a few thousand dollars each, standing up machine-gun fire groups, and reviving cheap guns, precisely because using a million-dollar missile against a $20,000 drone is a trade that bankrupts the defender long before it bankrupts the attacker.

Digi24 suggested Romania could intercept drones more cheaply with helicopters, using their onboard machine guns instead of missiles, one of the same low-cost methods Ukraine reached for.

The drones keep coming because the war is next door

The three-day run of incursions is not an anomaly but the spillover of Russia's air war on Ukraine. Romania shares a 650-kilometer border with Ukraine, and Russian strike drones aimed at Ukrainian ports on the Danube regularly stray or push into Romanian airspace, having crossed into NATO territory dozens of times during the war.

On 29 May, a Russian Geran-2 hit a residential building in Galați on 29 May, injuring people inside a NATO and EU member state, which is part of why Romania shifted from escorting strays to shooting them down.

Exclusives

Russia's ship strikes stall Ukraine's grain corridor. The damage is moving inland. Not one ship passed through the corridor on 22 July, at the height of harvest. The choke is now reaching Ukraine's farmers and its railways.

Ukraine's strikes left Crimea's prepaid fuel coupons worthless—and the biggest chain won't refund them. It is invoking a 14-day return law, a Russian lawyer says doesn't apply—he calls it unjust enrichment.

Military

Oil sites 1,300 km east, a port terminal near the front—Russia's deep rear had one loud night. The strikes ran from about 250 kilometers behind the front line to targets some 1,300 kilometers inside Russia, in the Udmurt Republic — one of the country's farthest interior regions.

Russia spent a fortune on this air-defense system—watch a drone undo it in seconds. New footage shows the moment a Ukrainian strike drone reaches a parked S-400 launcher and a radar in occupied Crimea.

Intelligence and technology

Look at this huge airport fire truck that Ukraine's Emergency Service just received from Luxembourg. Ukraine's State Emergency Service received a Rosenbauer Panther 8×8 airport firefighting vehicle, donated with support from Luxembourg's Defense Ministry and partner organizations.

Ukraine's new remote turret trades heavy machine gun for twin AK-74s and relies on Starlink when signal drops. Ukraine's Roboneers codified the "ShaBlya K-2," a remote-controlled turret pairing two AK-74 rifles in one mount to double fire density for covering infantry at close range.

Saving Western aid: Ukraine's new armored recovery tractor can haul 30-ton MRAP off battlefield. Ukraine codified the INGUAR-4, a 6×6 armored recovery vehicle that hauls damaged MRAPs up to 30 tons off the battlefield faster and cheaper than tracked recovery vehicles.

Moscow struggles to stockpile all the missiles it needs—so it fires them straight off the line, Ukraine says. Ukraine's Air Force reads the factory stamps on downed rockets as a sign the Kremlin has lost its cushion of stockpiled firepower.

Political and legal developments

Euractiv: Italy and Greece win a fur pass for Russia inside the EU's newest sanctions round. The two nations buy more Russian sable than anyone else in the bloc, and they lobbied to keep the pelts flowing while finished coats stay off-limits.

Caught before the strike—the student mapping Poltava's grid for Russian missiles. Ukrainian counterintelligence says it exposed her in advance, seizing the devices she used to work for the enemy.

Read our earlier daily review