Ukraine opened a nationwide investigation into soldiers' payments five days ago. The State Bureau of Investigation has now charged a deputy commander of a separate security and servicing battalion in Odesa Oblast with issuing travel orders that sent his subordinates to fake combat groupings on paper, the bureau reported on 25 August.

Combat pay in Ukraine runs on paperwork. Assault and zonal payments depend on time spent on each mission and require documentary confirmation, with the highest rates going to troops on the line of contact.

The travel orders carried the scheme

The soldiers collected the additional payment known as the Defender's Bonus for combat participation that did not happen, taking about $15,600, without grounds, according to the agency.

"In fact, soldiers remained in Odesa. Despite this, they were paid an additional bonus," officers said.

Part of that money went back to the officer who arranged it. He was detained and charged under Part Five of Article 426-1 of the Criminal Code, which covers a military official exceeding authority and carries a sentence of up to 12 years.

The case sits inside a national sweep

The bureau launched the operation, called Justice for Soldiers, on 20 August together with the General Staff, conducting 72 searches and preparing suspicions against 22 people.

Most of the cases concerned money wrongly paid to soldiers. Twelve proceedings were related to the illegal calculation and receipt of payments by soldiers, with 58 searches conducted and suspicions planned against 20 people.

Twelve of those proceedings deal with the illegal calculation and receipt of payments by soldiers. A separate strand covers commanders using troops for private labor.

A separate strand targeted the misuse of soldiers themselves. Five searches were conducted in a case involving the illegal use of military labor, in which subordinates, instead of performing military duties, were used for construction, household, and other work in the commanders' private interests.

Ukrainian officers have marched in one of Canada's oldest military parades for three consecutive years, Ukraine's Consul General in Toronto, Oleh Nikolenko, said. They took part in the 105th Warriors' Day Parade in Toronto, an event honoring former and serving military personnel that draws veterans, active-duty soldiers, and their families.

The parade rests on a working military relationship. Canadian forces have trained more than 50,000 Ukrainian security forces personnel since 2015 under Operation UNIFIER, roughly 16,000 of them across Europe since the full-scale invasion, with about 300 Canadian personnel currently deployed on the mission, Canada's Department of National Defense said.

The parade has opened the CNE since 1921

The Warriors' Day Parade has opened the Canadian National Exhibition every year since 1921, marching from the Princes' Gates along Princes' Boulevard to the Stanley Barracks, and organizers call it the longest-running veterans' parade in the free world, according to the CNE.

The consul general framed it as a signal

Nikolenko said Ukrainian soldiers standing among those Toronto honors carried weight beyond the occasion.

"It was very important to see Ukrainian defenders among those to whom Torontonians paid tribute. Their presence is a powerful symbol of the strength of Ukrainian-Canadian friendship, solidarity, and shared support," he stated.

European capitals opened their parades this summer

During the summer of 2026, Ukrainian defenders took part in different parades of their allies. In July, twenty-five Ukrainian soldiers marched down the Champs-Élysées at France's Bastille Day parade on 14 July, behind around 500 troops from 35 Coalition of the Willing countries, while two French Mirage 2000B fighters opened the flypast with a Ukrainian co-pilot in each cockpit.

A week later, the same soldiers led the foreign component of Belgium's National Day parade in Brussels, their first appearance in the city that hosts NATO and EU headquarters.

However, Ukraine was not invited to Poland's Armed Forces Day parade in Warsaw on 15 August, the largest in Polish history, while contingents from the US, Canada, Australia, Lithuania, and other allies did take part, Militarnyi reported.

Exclusive

Ukraine fires state bank chair after alleged $3.3 million bail-laundering scheme. The government and central bank also moved against Sense Bank's CEO and financial monitoring chief while reviewing the bank's entire supervisory board.

Ukraine's secret counteroffensive takes the pressure off Sloviansk. Under strict operational security, the Ukrainian 3rd Army Corps has been counterattacking north of Lyman. For months now.

Russia turns failed drone defenses into grounds for state control of company assets. Russia can now take control of a company's property and shares if it fails to protect key infrastructure from drones—even when the controller is foreign.

Ukraine escaped the empire in 1991. The empire struck back.. It took 22 years of Moscow holding the strings, and then an invasion, to make Ukrainians fight for the real thing.

Why did Ozon fall as much as 29% while Russia's market lost 2.9%?. After five weeks of strikes on privately held Wildberries, attacks on listed Ozon gave investors a direct price for warehouse risk.

Military

The fifth fire at the same refinery this year—and Russia still calls it debris. Ukraine's military confirmed the strike, naming the Afipsky plant as a fuel supplier for the forces invading Ukraine.

Ukraine destroys depot that occupiers filled with generators, after Russian state TV filmed them. Russian propagandists inadvertently filmed the target themselves.

Intelligence and technology

Poland signs $2 billion Piorun order, largest ever for launcher Ukraine has used since 2022. The framework deal covers several thousand launchers and missiles, more than 80 percent of them for Poland.

For first time, Ukraine is tendering ground robots to ministry-set specifications and no maker can take more than half of any class. The Defense Procurement Agency is applying the tender template it introduced for fiber-optic drones three days ago.

Russia's attack drones now jam the cheap interceptors sent to kill them. The jammer reads the interceptor's own video frequency, then floods it—blinding the operator who steers the drone.

Ukrainian drone maker is pitching its new five-inch strike FPV as assault squad's mortar. F-Drones says its F5 carries a kilogram, fits several to a rucksack, and flies six kilometers on fiber.

Ukraine mapped Russia's Su-35 down to individual control units—and found 22 firms nobody has sanctioned. The names cover engines, guidance, jamming gear, and the air-to-air missiles the aircraft fires.

International

Spanish nun's foundation brings her 45th convoy to Kyiv on Independence Day. It hands ambulance and six vehicles to border brigade fighting for Kharkiv. A convent foundation from Manresa delivered an ambulance, a pickup, and five cars, then opened the next stage of a medical program.

Humanitarian and social impact

A Russian drone chose its own target and killed three. The code that told it what to look for was readable. Ukrainian investigators found an Nvidia Jetson Orin module inside the wreckage, unencrypted, with the object-recognition code still readable.

582,000 children, 2,000 schools, no Ukrainian language: Russia sent occupied territories its first lesson – on "Unity of the Peoples of Russia". Ukrainian language was removed as a school subject entirely under federal standards on 15 December 2025.

Chernivtsi Oblast commissions three mini power plants to keep heat on during blackouts. The 3.9 MW addition contrasts with a March finding that 41% of 137 tracked donor units remained uncommissioned.

Aid the Ukrainian Red Cross stockpiled for winter in Kherson burned in a Russian drone attack. Alongside the cold-weather equipment, the warehouse held the emergency materials aid workers use to close up buildings torn open by Russian strikes, the Ukrainian Red Cross says.

Political and legal developments

Russia set target specific target for military recruits in 2026: in Arkhangelsk Oblast, man was sent to front after being detained for drinking on street. The School of the Conscript recorded 11 complaints in July and August.

About 50 grams of suspected military explosive lay in a German field 10 days after the attempt on Ukraine's plane. Germany's police worked the ground for two days before a first assessment identified the substance, and other leads had already taken officers to a village north of the runways.

Read our earlier daily review here.

A delegation from the Spanish Santa Clara Convent Foundation, with Sister Lucía Caram, visited Ukraine on its most important day. It handed an ambulance, a pickup, and five cars to the 11th Border Detachment, the "Forpost" brigade holding one of the hardest sectors in Kharkiv Oblast, the State Border Guard Service reported.

The vehicles are the visible part of a medical channel. Sister Lucía Caram, based in Manresa, delivered its 45th convoy to Kyiv this week, according to Atalayar.

The surgery program moves to its next stage

Acting Border Guard Service head Major General Valerii Vavryniuk met the delegation alongside a simultaneous video call with Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles.

Two commitments came out of it. The border service is to continue rehabilitating severely wounded border guards in Spanish medical facilities, and to begin advanced training for its own surgeons in reconstructive surgery.

Housing came up as well

Caram raised an initiative by the HANSEN Ukrainian Mission, which offered partnership support in housing families who lost their homes to fighting in the east.

The two sides also discussed rehabilitation more broadly for border guards wounded in combat. Vavryniuk thanked Caram and Spain for the aid programs.

Catalan business pays for the convoys

Before the meeting, Caram and the head of the 10th Mobile Border Detachment laid flowers at the Nebesnyi Dozor monument in Kyiv's Darnytskyi district. She also attended Ukraine's National Prayer Breakfast, the annual interfaith event bringing together political, religious, and civic figures.

Earlier, Robles announced Spain would transfer 100 VAMTAC armored tactical vehicles to Ukraine, along with a batch of 155 mm artillery shells.

In March, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced a new €1 billion military aid package for Ukraine for 2026. Part of the aid, financed through the EU SAFE instrument, was intended to support the development of joint production within Ukraine’s defense industry. 

Ukrainian troops have been shooting down Russian aircraft with Polish Pioruns since 2022. Poland's Defense Ministry has signed a framework agreement worth more than $2 billion for several thousand shoulder-fired systems in the largest order ever placed for these launchers and missiles.

The money comes from SAFE, the European Union's 150-billion-euro defense loan facility created in response to Russia's war. Poland holds the largest national envelope at 43.7 billion euros, ahead of 18 other participants, TVP World reports.

Four countries split the order

The systems will go to the armed forces of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Norway, the last of which is not an EU member. More than 80% of the missiles and launchers are earmarked for the Polish army, with the implementation agreement for Poland financed from SAFE funds, according to the ministry's release.

The contract also covers simulators, training, and logistics packages. Mesko, part of the state-owned PGZ defense group, manufactures the system.

"Piorun is our export hit," said Magdalena Sobkowiak-Czarnecka, state secretary at Poland's Defense Ministry, adding that other EU countries showed interest in them during talks on the SAFE mechanism.

The seeker head does the work

The Piorun is a modernized Grom that remains in Polish service. The upgrade brought a modified launch mechanism, a new and more sensitive homing head, and an electro-optical sight mounted on a rail.

Those changes improved target acquisition, resistance to countermeasures, and effective range against low-flying aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles, and drones.

Ukraine's record set the reference

Poland approved its first Piorun transfer to Ukraine on 1 February 2022, three weeks before the full-scale invasion. Ukrainian crews have since used the system against cruise missiles, aircraft, and helicopters, and Western analysts list it among the short-range systems European industry can supply without American approval.

The ministry's announcement names no allocation for Ukraine.

Ukraine's ground robots ran more than 100,000 missions in the first eight months of 2026. The Defense Procurement Agency will now buy logistics and strike ground robotic complexes according to specifications set by the Defense Ministry, rather than approving models one at a time, the ministry announced.

The mechanism is three days old. The agency applied the same structure to fiber-optic FPV drones on 22 August—classes, multiple lots each, no supplier above half a class. Ukraine is standardizing how it buys entire weapons categories, one category at a time.

The rules sort makers by class

Complexes will be divided into classes by operating range and payload, with four to five lots per class. No single manufacturer may take more than half the order within one class.

Suppliers must meet the technical specifications and hold at least one codified ground robotic complex. The procurement runs in a closed environment under defense security requirements.

"A tender is one of the best instruments for this, because we can buy more equipment for the same money and minimize the risk of supply disruptions by splitting the order among different manufacturers," Deputy Defense Minister Mstyslav Banik said.

Mission volume keeps climbing

Monthly figures of ground robot missions logged in the DELTA combat system rose almost without interruption: 7,511 in January, 11,028 in April, 19,969 in July. Units recorded another 15,729 between 1 and 20 August, about 790 a day compared with roughly 640 a day in July, The Defense Post reported.

Ukraine has contracted more than 22,000 ground robots since January, nearly double the total for all of 2025. The number of units operating them grew from 117 at the end of 2025 to 230 by mid-2026.

A commander disputes the evacuation case

The ministry lists casualty evacuation as one of the tender's purposes. A frontline officer challenged that three days ago.

Tetiana Chornovol, who commands an anti-tank guided missile platoon, said ground robots are too slow for evacuation and often easy targets for Russian drones, arguing brigades need staffed evacuation teams and small light-armored vehicles instead.

Ukraine's cheap interceptor drones have been knocking Russia's nightly attackers out of the sky, so Russia has now bolted a jammer onto some of its own drones to blind them, according to Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, an adviser to Ukraine's President on defense technology. He examined the system, found in drone wreckage, and mapped how it strikes back at the interceptor sent to hunt it.

Russia batters Ukrainian cities with long-range drones most nights, and Ukraine has leaned on a cheap shield—drones costing a few thousand dollars—instead of burning through far pricier missiles. Anything that dulls that shield pushes the cost of defending the sky back up.

A jammer that waits for the interceptor

The unit rides on a Geran, Russia's version of the Iranian Shahed one-way drone. It listens for the video signal an approaching Ukrainian interceptor beams back to its pilot. Its receiver reads the interceptor's working frequency, then orders a transmitter to bury that same channel in noise, Beskrestnov found.

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By his first estimate, the jammer's signal runs about five times stronger than the interceptor's video link—enough to wipe the picture and any chance of steering the drone onto its target.

Seconds decide it

In Beskrestnov's account, the system detected a test transmitter and switched on jamming after about three seconds, and the feed cut out. The device stays nearly idle until a hunter comes close, then jumps to full power to smother the signal. It targets the ordinary analog video band around 5.8 gigahertz that many cheap interceptors still use.

Possible answers, include interceptors with terminal-guidance homing for the final stretch of flight, digital communication links, or transmitters set to non-standard frequencies.

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An old problem for Russia's drones

Russia has tried again and again to keep its one-way drones alive against Ukraine's defenses, including wiring jammers into some Shaheds earlier this year. Spending weight and power to protect a drone from a far cheaper interceptor shows how well those cheap drones work.

A Ukrainian drone maker is pitching a weapon that works like a mortar, not a drone. F-Drones has unveiled the F5, a compact five-inch strike FPV built for assault units working treelines, built-up areas, and position support at short range, according to the company's announcement.

Fiber-optic drones are now a bulk consumable. Ukraine's military received 374,000 under state contracts in 2025 and nearly as many again in the first four months of 2026, the Defense Ministry reported in April.

The F5 arrives three days after Ukraine's Defense Procurement Agency launched its first purchase of fiber-optic FPV drones, in line with ministry-set specifications rather than individual manufacturers.

The specifications come from the manufacturer

F-Drones describes a lightweight five-inch carbon frame that carries up to one kilogram and is supplied in two control configurations.

The fiber-optic version flies about six kilometers. The radio version reaches roughly twice that, up to 13 kilometers. Several drones fit in one backpack, and a ground robot can deliver nine to a position at once, compared with the six FPVs per carrier on the Black Widow ground system.

Fiber optics buys immunity at a cost

F-Drones calls the fiber version fully invulnerable to electronic warfare. Fiber-optic control does defeat jamming because the drone emits no radio signal, but the cable restricts range and maneuverability and can snap or tangle mid-flight, cutting control. Ukrainian crews have also tracked Russian operators by following reflective fibers in sunlight back to the launch point.

The company compares its drone to a mortar

The pitch is about availability, not reach.

"In its role, the F5 is closer to an 82mm mortar than to a classic long-range FPV: always nearby and ready to close out the task here and now," the company said.

The F5 ships with a codified Opera electronic initiation board, and F-Drones says the aircraft has been tested and codified by Ukraine's Defense Ministry.

Ukraine's military intelligence has named the Russian companies that build the Su-35S fighter jet and singled out those no country has sanctioned, according to the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine's Defense Ministry (HUR). The unsanctioned suppliers make parts as ordinary as wheels and fuel-system units, and one of them helped develop the aircraft. Kyiv wants sanctions efforts synchronized across every link of Russia's military-industrial complex.

The 22 firms no one has sanctioned

HUR identified 79 companies in the Su-35S production chain. Of those, 22 face no sanctions from any country restricting Russia over the war. The agency highlighted three. Rubin Aviation Corporation supplies the aircraft's braking and non-braking wheels. Gidroavtomatika builds the AU46-05 control units inside the fuel system. The Oktava research institute carried out design and development work on the Su-35S itself.

What the rest of the network builds

The 79 firms develop and produce the engines and fuel system, the control, communications, and guidance systems, the electronic warfare suite, and the main aviation missiles the jet carries into the war against Ukraine. HUR set the data out in the "Components in weapons" section of its War&Sanctions portal. The page carries a rotatable 3D model of the aircraft whose parts open onto the firms behind them, alongside directory listings and a profile for each company.

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Three sanctions regimes, loosely aligned

The gaps HUR points to exist because the restrictions are not one list. The EU legislates in packages, the US and other G7 states maintain their own designations, and Ukraine issues sanctions by presidential decree, each covering a different set of firms. Kyiv has spent years asking partners to synchronize those lists, and its own designations often run ahead of them. A company can therefore supply a frontline fighter and still trade freely under most of them.

Previously, HUR ran the same exercise on the Su-34, where a third of the production network was still unsanctioned. The same pattern shows up above the component level, with Russia's largest arms conglomerate covered by EU measures while hundreds of its subsidiaries are not, and Western machine tools still sitting inside Russian missile plants. 

Ukrainian drones struck the Afipsky oil refinery in southern Russia overnight on 25 August, monitoring Telegram channels reported. Regional authorities claimed falling drone debris caused fires. Ukraine's General Staff later confirmed the strike, and, in the same post, a hit on a gas processing plant in Astrakhan Oblast the night before. 

Fire at the plant, and Russia's debris account

Initially, the Ukrainian monitoring Telegram channels Exilenova+ and Supernova+ reported the strike, publishing footage of the fire and placing one burning storage tank on the plant's grounds. NASA's FIRMS satellite fire data confirmed the burning site, Militarnyi reported.

The Krasnodar Krai operational headquarters stated that falling drone parts started the fire. Governor Veniamin Kondratyev claimed that debris fell on the grounds of the Afipskaya railway station, killing two people and injuring two more, and stated that fires broke out in the nearby settlement and at the refinery itself.

Ukrainian forces struck two U-272 gas separation units at the Astrakhan gas processing plant the night before, the General Staff wrote in the same post. That plant makes technical sulfur, which goes into explosives. 

Drones also attacked Rostov Oblast overnight, with the Novoshakhtinsk refinery as the target, according to Supernova+.

The refinery Ukraine keeps targeting

Drones have reached the plant repeatedly this year, in January, March, June, and July, making the latest hit the fifth since the start of the year, The Moscow Times counted. In the July case, the Russian news Telegram channel Astra said the fire started near the tank farm.

Ukrainian drones have attacked Russian refineries more than 70 times since the start of 2026 and knocked several dozen plants out of service, The Moscow Times said, while Ukraine's General Staff counted 194 strikes on refineries in the first half of the year alone. Five stopped processing entirely after strikes since 1 August: Permnefteorgsintez, Orsknefteorgsintez, Zapsibneftekhim, and the Saratov and Volgograd refineries, the outlet said.

Russian propagandists filmed the target for Ukraine themselves. Operators of Ukraine's 422nd Separate Unmanned Systems Regiment "Luftwaffe", part of the 17th Army Corps, have destroyed a Russian logistics hub that occupation forces had set up inside a former Epicentr hardware store in occupied Melitopol, regiment commander Major Mykola Kolesnyk told Army TV.

Melitopol sits on Russia's land corridor to occupied Crimea. The city was occupied on the second day of Russia's full-scale war in 2022.

Russian occupation forces had moved a large consignment of generators and other equipment into the building for military use. Russian state television broadcast footage of the delivery.

Propaganda footage exposed the shipment

The video gave the regiment its confirmation. Russian channels posted footage showing many generators that had not been there before, Kolesnyk said, that had been brought in deliberately.

"The hub was used, above all, to supply the people fighting directly against us, as their forward positions are not far from there. Calling it a civilian facility would be a considerable stretch, because this really was a hub whose services were used directly by Russian troops," Kolesnyk explained.

Operators tracked the target before striking

The regiment watched the site before hitting it, and no civilian was harmed, according to Kolesnyk. He set the operation against the Russian strike on Kryvyi Rih on 21 August, when two waves of drones, half an hour apart, killed 16 people and injured 130, including 23 children.

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine visited the site and a hospital and said the shopping center was operational and full of civilians when it was struck, and that the attack appears to breach international humanitarian law.

Generators feed the drone war

The hub's destruction will narrow Russian capacity to equip shelters, Kolesnyk said. The generators mattered for a more specific reason.

"A generator is what makes it possible to charge batteries for the unmanned component that then flies at us. So it is an absolutely legitimate target, and I am sure we will not stop here," the commander added.

Ukraine has dismissed Mykola Hladyshenko as chair of the supervisory board of state-owned Sense Bank after NABU released recordings that it says show the bank was used to launder 150 million hryvnias ($3.3 million) to post bail for a former minister.

The Cabinet’s 21 August decision ended Hladyshenko’s powers and appointed a state representative to the board to help restore a quorum. The Finance Ministry and National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) must now ensure the bank is properly governed and prepare it for sale.

New recordings changed the NBU’s assessment

The NBU’s 20 August decision followed a review opened in May, when recordings linked to the wider Mindich case raised questions about Hladyshenko’s independence. The regulator twice asked Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies for evidence, but they could not release pretrial investigation materials. Hladyshenko stepped aside while the review continued.

NBU Governor Andrii Pyshnyi told Parliament that new public evidence changed the regulator’s assessment. The material suggested that Hladyshenko’s withdrawal had been merely formal and that he continued to influence the bank.

It also raised questions about the remaining board members’ oversight. That evidence emerged on 19 August as part of Operation “Forest Gump”.

The Mindich tapes are recordings from NABU’s investigation into an alleged $100 million kickback network at state nuclear operator Energoatom. They are named after businessman Tymur Mindich, a former business partner of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

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The NBU also demanded that Sense Bank suspend Liudmyla Snihur, head of the bank’s financial and currency monitoring department, while it investigates possible interference with the bank’s operating systems. The government initiated suspension proceedings against the chair of the management board, Oleksii Stupak.

According to Ekonomichna Pravda’s account of the NABU materials, investigators allege that the group moved illicit cash through Sense Bank, companies under its control, and private individuals before using the money to post bail for former Energy and Justice Minister Herman Halushchenko, a suspect in the Mindich case.

Snihur allegedly helped create a temporary “window” during which transactions passed without the bank’s usual checks.

Sense Bank was already for sale

Ukraine nationalized Sense Bank, formerly Alfa-Bank Ukraine, in 2023 after sanctions barred its Russian-linked owners from controlling it.

Kyiv was preparing to privatize Sense Bank before the current investigation. The government accelerated sale preparations on 20 August and said the proceeds would fund Ukraine’s defense forces.

Russia is ramping up a campaign of covert mobilization to recruit troops for its war against Ukraine. Over the past month and a half, residents of at least 17 Russian regions have complained of forcible detention, beatings, and coercion into signing contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry, the independent outlet Verstka reported, citing three legal-aid organizations.

Russia recruited 403,000 soldiers in 2025 and set a target of 409,000 for 2026, Ukraine's military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said. Since April, Russian companies have been ordered to nominate two to five employees each for military service.

The School of the Conscript recorded 11 complaints in July and August. Five came from Udmurtia, one each from Primorye, Irkutsk, Ryazan, and Arkhangelsk oblasts, one from Buryatia, and one from the temporarily occupied territories of Donetsk Oblast.

The victims share a profile

The men targeted are not chosen at random. In most appeals, complainants say the victims are men with alcohol, drug, or mental health problems, older or physically disabled men, men living alone, and men with pending legal trouble, said Timofey Vaskin, who heads the legal department at the School of the Conscript.

Four cases show the method

Idite Lesom documented how the coercion works in practice. In Novorossiysk, a man was taken to a police station, beaten, had drugs planted on him, and was made to sign a contract.

In Arkhangelsk Oblast, a man detained for drinking on the street was sent to the front. In Omsk, a man was taken from his workplace, held, and had the contract signed for him. In Udmurtia, a man was removed from a psychiatric register and sent to Donetsk Oblast.

Recruiters work from state records

The targeting runs on official data. Authorities know who carries debts, who is under investigation, and who has recently lost a driver's license, and those are the people they pursue, said Idite Lesom's director, Grigory Sverdlin.

Volunteers are getting harder to find, which is why the pressure is increasing, he added. Call to Conscience advised men in affected regions to grant relatives the power of attorney to represent them at enlistment offices, avoid drinking alone, and refuse to sign a contract under any circumstances.

Ukrainian investigators recovered an unencrypted American AI module from a Russian Molniya drone that killed three civilians near a Zaporizhzhia gas station on 6 July, and read the code that guided its targeting, the New York Times reported. No human operator made the final call.

Commercially sold AI boards have been turning up inside Russian strike weapons for more than a year, and autonomy is the direction both armies are moving in. What changed is the evidence rather than the technology. Until now, autonomy had to be inferred from what a wreck lacked—an antenna, a radio trace.

Tetiana Bubynets, a 19-year-old accounting student at Zaporizhzhia National University, was declared dead at a hospital, one of her professors said. Oleksii Svirin, 41, and Roman Karpii, 48, later died of their injuries. The drone had attempted to navigate around an apartment building toward the gas station's propane tanks but struck a wall and detonated near people sheltering there.

What investigators found in the wreckage

The wreckage contained an Nvidia Jetson Orin minicomputer, an off-the-shelf AI module that costs a few hundred dollars. The chip was not encrypted. Ukrainian officials said they could read the terrain imagery loaded for visual navigation and the object-detection code that defined what the drone was trained to target, NYT reported. The drone carried no radio antennas and was flying in a wave of approximately six, none of them transmitting. A missing antenna alone would not prove self-targeting—a drone flying a preprogrammed route needs no antenna either, but it would have no use for an Nvidia chip.

Human operators had programmed the drone to fly toward the gas station and set the general target area before launch. Once near the site, the onboard system identified and selected the specific object—most likely propane tanks it had been trained to recognize—on its own, drone experts and military officials said. Vadym Kushnikov, a drone expert at the Kharkiv Aviation Institute, described the drone as "a preprogrammed tool trained in virtual reality to track specific objects," NYT reported.

Where else the Nvidia module has turned up

Kateryna Bondar, a senior fellow at the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told NYT that no earlier Russian strike by a self-targeting drone has been documented killing civilians, which would make 6 July the first such case on record. She called the Nvidia module "the best proof" that Russia was experimenting with autonomous AI.

The Jetson Orin is not new to the battlefield. The module is made by the American chipmaker Nvidia. Ukraine's sanctions on Russia's AI drone supply networks, imposed in August 2025, hit Russian, Chinese, and Belarusian drone developers and component suppliers—not Nvidia.

Ukrainian intelligence first identified the module in the V2U autonomous strike drone in June 2025, mounted in a Chinese Leetop A203 minicomputer. It has since reported Jetson-based AI modules in Russia's Lancet and Klin drones—the Klin an older Jetson TX2—and, most recently, in the S-71 Monokhrom cruise missile.

In those cases, the finding was the hardware, and what Ukrainian intelligence inferred from it. This time, the code itself was legible.

Nvidia confirmed to NYT that the photographed board was a Jetson Orin. The company said the minicomputer is a consumer-grade product "sold to students, developers and start-ups for a wide range of beneficial applications," that it does not sell the computer in Russia, and that it is widely available through resellers.

Zaporizhzhia as testing ground

Russia began test flights of AI-guided Molniya drones in May, and had begun testing self-targeting systems in the V2U several months earlier, some of those for last-mile guidance only, Ukrainian air defense experts told NYT. Local air defense officials said Russia has been aiming at civilian objects—pumps and propane tanks at gas stations—along with military recruitment centers while trying out autonomous drones in Zaporizhzhia. Why those targets were chosen for the tests is not clear.

Gas stations have been under sustained attack independently of the AI trials. Russia has destroyed approximately 200 across Ukraine since spring, around 50 in June alone, by UNITED24 Media's count.

In Zaporizhzhia, gas stations now prop plastic sheeting at odd angles around propane tanks to confuse the drones' image recognition, and Ukraine has turned to shooting down drones that electronic warfare cannot jam.

Russian forces are fighting against time to close a pincer around the last free cities in eastern Ukraine. The deadline: the coming winter, which will strip the leaves from the trees and leave any attacking force exposed to overhead surveillance and attack.

But in one key sector, Ukrainian forces are spoiling the coordinated Russian operation to partially surround Sloviansk and neighboring Kramatorsk. With admirable operational security, or OPSEC, a clutch of Ukrainian brigades under the 3rd Army Corps hasn't just blunted the advance of the Russian Center Group of Forces—it has pushed the Russians back.

This Ukrainian counterattack along the axis through the town of Lyman, ongoing since May, has largely escaped widespread notice. Yes, there is some scant video evidence of Ukrainian attacks. And yes, a few analysts have adjusted their maps to account for apparent Ukrainian advances, especially in the direction of Nove, a Russian-occupied village 15 km north of Lyman, which itself lies 15 km north of Sloviansk.

But for the most part, Ukrainian and Russian sources have avoided talking about Lyman. "The Ukrainians kept a good level of OPSEC and the Russians have been reluctant to publish videos from these areas" depicting their retreats, analyst and mapper Clément Molin noted in June, just a few weeks after the Ukrainians attacked toward Nove.

Molin, for one, expects the OPSEC to lift in the coming days. "By the end of the month, we should have an official update on the good results of a Ukrainian offensive that has largely remained secret," he wrote on Monday.

April offensive

The Ukrainians' limited counteroffensive around Lyman apparently kicked off on in mid-April. One of the first attacks that left any real evidence occurred on 22 May, when a small Ukrainian mechanized force—perhaps from the 60th or 66th Mechanized Brigade, the 77th Air Assault Brigade, or the Presidential Brigade—attacked in armored trucks and M-113, Stryker, and BTR-4 armored personnel carriers. Heavy bomber drones flew top cover.

The Russian 144th Motor Rifle Division fought back with its own drones. Interceptor drones took aim at the bombers. First-person-view and heavy bomber drones blasted at least one BTR-4, hitting it before and after it dropped off its infantry passengers. Drones struck some of the disembarked Ukrainian infantry.

How many Ukrainian troops survived and entrenched in new positions on 22 May is unclear. Regardless, the Ukrainian 3rd Army Corps wasn't done with Nove. Attacks continued. And sometime after the 22 May assault on Nove, "the Ukrainians managed to consolidate their gains," Molin concluded after scrutinizing a few videos and some satellite imagery.

By early July, Ukrainian forces had succeeded in "operationally encircl[ing] the Russian forces defending the village of Nove," according to analyst and mapper Thorkill. "Fierce fighting is currently underway to expel the Russians from that locality," Thorkill reported at the time.

The aim of the Ukrainian counterattacks is obvious. The 3rd Army Corps intends to put pressure on the northern right flank of 10 km-by-10-km salient jutting into the battleground north of Lyman. The Russian 144th Motor Rifle Division has been pouring troops into the salient, clearly intending to surround and isolate Lyman instead of directly assaulting it—all in order to clear a path toward Sloviansk.

Salients are risky for both sides, however. The farther the Russians extend their Lyman salient, the more exposed they are on their flanks. The Ukrainians know this. And even if the 3rd Army Corps can't fully cut across the salient in order to surround the Russians inside of it, the corps can at least take advantage of the salient's exposed flanks.

Capturing Nove, on the very northern edge of the salient, could allow the Ukrainians to bring to bear more artillery and drones on the Russians south of Nove. The 3rd Army Corps doesn't have to fully encircle the Russian troops closest to Lyman in order to hammer them with withering firepower.

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Just how successful the 3rd Army Corps has been in its local counteroffensive could become clearer very soon. That won't spell lasting relief for Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, however. Fighting against the clock as summer begins turning into fall and then winter, the Russians are slowly advancing toward the twin cities from several directions.

The siege of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk is coming. Perhaps not this year, but surely by 2027. To fully safeguard the twin cities, the Ukrainians would need to duplicate their success north of Lyman along several other directions.

That's a big ask of a Ukrainian force that's overall still outnumbered and outgunned.

The school year in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine will open with propaganda. On 1 September, pupils in territories outside Ukrainian government control will begin the day with a flag-raising, Russian anthem, and a first lesson drawn from the state "Conversations about Important Things" program, the occupation outlet Donetsk News Agency reported.

Russia's curriculum now governs almost 2,000 schools in the temporarily occupied territories, shaping the education of more than 582,000 children, according to research by the Almenda Center of Civil Education, Ukrainska Pravda reports. Ukrainian was removed as a school subject entirely under federal standards on 15 December 2025.

Russia's education minister Sergey Kravtsov said the relevant recommendations have already been sent to the regions.

The first lesson carries a state theme

The opening session is tied to what Moscow calls the Year of the Unity of Russia's Peoples. The stated content covers cohesion among the country's peoples, "careful treatment of historical memory," and the formation of patriotic views and spiritual-moral guideposts.

"Conversations about Important Things" run every Monday in schools and colleges across Russia and the occupied territories. In practice, the sessions serve as propaganda.

Three other changes land on the same date

The flag ceremony is not the only thing new this September. A compulsory Russian identity subject, a standalone military training course, and behavior grades for children in second grade all take effect on 1 September, the Yellow Ribbon resistance movement reported.

Two new regional history textbooks also became compulsory for grades 5–7 that day. They recast Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts as historically Russian land.

Earlier, an expert mission under the OSCE's Moscow Mechanism told the OSCE Permanent Council that Russia's remaking of education in the occupied territories breaches Article 43 of the Hague Regulations and Article 50 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The local administration told Suspilne that Chernivtsi Oblast, on Ukraine’s borders with Romania and Moldova, has commissioned three gas-fired cogeneration units totaling 3.9 MW since the beginning of 2026. The units generate electricity and usable heat from the same gas, allowing municipal boiler houses to continue supplying heat when grid power fails.

Ukraine’s Communities Ministry says smaller, decentralized plants are part of the country’s response to repeated Russian attacks on energy infrastructure. Producing power close to where it is consumed helps maintain essential services when larger facilities or transmission lines are damaged.

A strike at one large plant can cut off all services. When generation is divided among boiler houses and utilities, damage to one unit affects only that site, while the others continue operating. Disabling the whole system would require attacks on many separate targets rather than on a single concentrated source.

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According to Vasyl Zazuliak’s Facebook post, one 1.2–1.3 MW unit installed in Chernivtsi fully covered a large boiler house’s electricity demand and could send an additional 400–500 kilowatts into the grid. Zazuliak, then Chernivtsi’s deputy mayor, said the boiler house could therefore continue operating during a blackout.

The latest Suspilne report says the oblast installed two earlier units, each with 1.5 MW of capacity, during 2024–2025. Five more units totaling 10.5 MW are due by the end of 2026, followed by seven totaling 20.4 MW in 2027. Officials withheld their locations because disclosure could harm national security.

Delivery has outrun commissioning

Lviv-based investigative outlet NGL.media surveyed Ukraine’s regional administrations about cogeneration equipment supplied during 2022–2025. Its March investigation found that 59% of 137 identified units had been commissioned by February.

Ukraine’s Communities Ministry told the outlet that USAID had supplied 188 units in total, meaning the 59% figure covers the documented sample rather than the entire program. Projects often stalled because utilities could not finance connections or find specialists to install and service the equipment.

The Cabinet later allocated funding to connect 75 existing units with almost 100 MW of electrical capacity. It ordered communities to complete the connections by 1 October after acknowledging that local authorities lacked sufficient financing and technical expertise.

German investigators now count three drones around the failed 4–5 August attack on a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig airport, Tagesschau reported on 25 August. Officers found the third machine and a suspected military explosive in a field near the runways. Security circles assume Russian intelligence services helped plan the attempt, and Russia denies any role.

A third drone and about 50 grams of suspected hexogen

Investigators found the third drone on the early evening of 14 August in a field in Kabelsketal, security circles told NDR, WDR, and the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). The area borders the airport's western edge in Saxony-Anhalt. Forensic technicians from Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) arrived that day, and the next day they reportedly found a substance at the site. First assessments put it at about 50 grams of hexogen, a military explosive known internationally as RDX. The perpetrators may have had a far larger attack in mind than what has become public, according to Tagesschau. 

The target was a Ukrainian plane

The drone found on the tarmac was meant to hit a Ukrainian Antonov cargo aircraft that moves military goods, according to the investigation cited by the public broadcasters NDR and WDR and SZ. The bomb never went off, because its detonator was apparently defective. The plane had been apparently loaded with ammunition the previous day. Leipzig/Halle carries military freight for the German armed forces and NATO allies, and Ukraine's Antonov Airlines uses it as a base, Euronews reported the same day.

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The first drone turned up on the airport grounds at around 23:42 on 4 August. Shortly afterward, at about 00:03, a second drone reportedly collided with a cargo plane of the delivery company DHL. That aircraft had broken off its landing because the first find shut the airport, and it probably hit the drone at fence height at several hundred kilometers per hour. Neither that drone nor parts of it have turned up, NDR, WDR, and SZ reported. The German broadcasters placed the damage on the tail unit, while Bild gave a different account, putting the collision about six kilometers out with minor damage to the nose, Euronews said.

Camera footage analyzed after the attempt showed a quadcopter carrying Semtex plastic explosive fly into the wing of a parked An-124 Ruslan without detonating, and Washington assessed that the drone belonged to Russian intelligence. The same airport saw a parcel ignite in July 2024, before crews could load it onto a DHL cargo plane, in what security services treated as a suspected Moscow-linked arson plot.

State-protection officers at the BKA work under orders from Federal Prosecutor General Jens Rommel to establish how the attack was meant to run and who is responsible. Investigators are following several leads, among them recovered DNA. Germany ranks among Ukraine's biggest military backers, and its authorities suspect Russia of orchestrating many of the drone incidents as part of a campaign of sabotage, espionage, and disinformation, Euronews said.

Humanitarian supplies stored for the coming winter in Kherson burned in a Russian drone attack, the Ukrainian Red Cross said. The fire at the organization's warehouse also took stock kept for emergency repairs after Russian strikes. The attack injured no staff or volunteers, and Red Cross teams keep working in Kherson and Kherson Oblast.

Winter equipment, medical supplies, and blankets among the burned stock

The attack occurred on the evening of 23 August. The fire damaged or destroyed aid worth almost UAH 28 million ($626,000), the Red Cross said. Part of the stock was equipment and materials for the autumn and winter period. Another part was held for fast response after Russian shelling, including materials for temporarily covering damaged buildings. The warehouse also stored medical supplies, blankets, hygiene kits, and equipment for supplying water and electricity.

Kherson and the de-occupied part of Kherson Oblast come under Russian attack every day with various weapons. Authorities there report civilian casualties and damage daily. Ukrainian prosecutors have documented more than 11,000 small-drone attacks on civilians since 2024, with nearly half of the cases in Kherson Oblast.

Aid the Ukrainian Red Cross stockpiled for winter in Kherson burned in a Russian drone attack

Aid stores keep burning across Ukraine

In early August, the Ukrainian Red Cross said Russian forces had subjected its facilities to "unprecedented attacks" in July, which hurt its ability to respond quickly and deliver aid to people. A massive Russian attack on Kyiv damaged one of its warehouse complexes, burning 320,000 units of humanitarian cargo and hospital equipment worth more than $1.77 million. Russian forces destroyed a Red Cross humanitarian aid warehouse in Kherson on 20 December 2023. 

Other aid stores have burned this summer, among them a World Health Organization medical warehouse in Dnipro and a Kyiv Oblast warehouse holding HIV-prevention supplies.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made inadequate drone defenses and slow repairs grounds for putting private assets under state management. His 24 August security decree opens a new way to government control over Russia’s economy.

It expands a mechanism Russia has used against foreign-owned businesses since 2023, according to research by Nektorov, Saveliev and Partners (NSP), a Russian law firm that tracks state takeovers.

A business need not lose a facility before the measure can apply. Decree No. 604 allows action over late security measures, safety violations, conduct that endangers normal operations, ineffective counter-drone steps, or delayed restoration.

The text does not specify what counts as “ineffective” drone protection or how quickly a facility must be restored. Covered sectors include energy, industry, communications, utilities, transport, logistics, and life-support infrastructure, plus any sites deemed important to Russia’s security or economic stability.

Foreign controllers are also covered, including foreign organizations and citizens controlling Russian companies. Temporary management can reach all or part of an entity’s Russian property, securities, stakes in Russian companies, and other property rights—the rule is not limited to the damaged or vulnerable facility alone.

“Temporary” control has no deadline

At the same time, the text mentions no automatic return deadline. Putin must instruct the government to begin temporary management and then end it. By default, the Federal Property Management Agency assumes the owner’s powers, except for the right to dispose of the assets. The assets’ costs will be covered from its income.

Interfax published Denis Manturov’s remarks. The first deputy prime minister said the measure would be used selectively for specific security tasks and would leave formal ownership unchanged.

Komsomolskaya Pravda’s Alexander Kots raised a practical problem: Russian law, he wrote, gives businesses no instructions for defending sites against drones or cruise missiles, while barriers require extensive approvals, and private guards cannot easily be given weapons more powerful than shotguns.

The decree followed weeks of Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries, ports, and warehouses. Ozon reported six disruptions at its facilities after 22 August. The listed retailer’s shares fell as much as 29.09% from Friday’s close on Monday, after five weeks of strikes on privately held Wildberries.

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Refining hit two-decade lows as strikes forced Russia to import gasoline, while a sixth Ust-Luga attack since March struck the country’s largest Baltic port.

NSP’s nationalization study records more than 100 cases since 2022 and about 6.5 trillion rubles (about $78 billion) in seized assets. It says cases averaged one court hearing and roughly two months.

The NSP temporary-management table lists several foreign-owned businesses placed under “temporary” management from 2023 whose owners still lack access because the arrangements remain indefinite.

In 1991, Ukraine did not shed a drop of blood. It was a transition of power. We raised a flag, we declared ourselves independent, and we received our independence as a gift.

Now we are shedding rivers of blood for real independence.

That is the difference between this Independence Day and the ones before it, and I do not think we have absorbed it yet.

Colonial theory has a name for what happened to us thirty-five years ago. It is called flag independence. You raise the flag, you declare the state, and for a while you believe that was it—that this was the end, and now we simply continue as an independent nation.

In theory it was believed to be like that. In practice, every decolonized nation eventually discovered the same thing: it is not the end. It is the beginning.

The nations that gathered at Bandung in Indonesia in 1955 worked this out before us. They had their flags. They also had the former metropolis still holding the strings—to their economies, their cultures, their political classes. They named it: neocolonialism.

And they understood that real independence would take something longer and harder than a declaration. Not only liberation with arms, but liberation of the mind from the colonial legacy. Not erasing the colonial memory—reworking it, synthesizing it into something new.

So here is the shape of it. Before 1991, Ukrainians waged a struggle for independence without statehood. After 1991, we have been waging a struggle for independence within statehood. The struggle did not end. It changed its conditions.

What was gathered into the Act of Independence

The declaration was a beginning, but it was also a result—of generations.

It begins in the nineteenth century, with people like Taras Shevchenko, who essentially invented a Ukrainian identity. It was a construction. It was not, as Putin claims, the invention of Vladimir Lenin. It was the invention of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, and religious leaders, who constructed this nation on the basis of what came before—the Cossack Republic, Kyivan Rus, the long stretch from the Middle Ages through early modernity.

Then the dissidents of the Soviet period. Then the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought on two fronts against three colonizers: the Germans, the Poles, and the Soviets. Their struggle was clearly anti-colonial. Brutal, but anti-colonial. I do not justify everything they did. I am applying postcolonial theory in order to make sense of what they did, or tried to do. They were defeated. Their ideas resurfaced in 1991 and were gathered into the Act of Independence.

And that Act, while it closed a long period of Ukrainian struggle without a state, opened a new one.

Today, more independence than colonialism

Before 2013, I would say, there was more neocolonialism than independence.

This is a description, not a figure of speech. The former metropolis re-established the strings. Russian capital came into the economy under the presidencies of Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych, and Russian corruption came with it.

Proxy parties were planted—the Party of Regions and its various clones. Russian pop music was everywhere, which sounds like a small thing and is not: in postcolonial studies, literature and popular culture are considered among the most effective vehicles of neocolonial control.

Today it is the other way around. Neocolonialism has not evaporated, but the proportion has changed. There is now more independence than neocolonialism—and that itself is what thirty-five years of struggle have achieved.

And corruption was a neocolonial instrument. This is the part Ukrainians resist, so let me put it plainly: our fight against corruption is effectively an anti-colonial fight. In Ukraine people sometimes present this as a dilemma—either we fight corruption or we fight the Russians, we cannot do both. From the perspective of postcolonial studies the dilemma does not exist. Both are anti-colonial efforts. They go hand in hand.

Empires have always travelled with religion on their shoulders, and religion has always helped establish imperial rule in the colonies. In the Ukrainian case it was first the Greek Catholic Church, established in 1596 an instrument of Polish colonization, although this is not the case anymore. But that is how it began.

And presently Russia’s instrument of recolonization is the Moscow Patriarchate, still present in Ukraine as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC MP).

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Here I have to say something uncomfortable for many Ukrainians.

Nations that decolonize very often produce new subalterns. In post-colonial language, these are parts of the population that are subdued, oppressed by the dominant power. But we may be producing such subalterns as an effect of pushing back against Russian colonization: groups of Ukrainians belonging to the UOC MP being marginalized, subalternized, by our own struggle. It is a very difficult dilemma how to deal with this subalternization, and I do not have a resolution for it.

Two revolutions against the ratio

Both of Ukraine’s major “Maidan” protests were anti-neocolonial revolutions.

In the Orange Revolution of 2004 and again during the Euromaidan Revolution in 2013, Ukrainians protested because they had decided there was not enough independence—that what we had was more neocolonial than independent, more fake than real, and that the proportion had to be corrected. That is what a Maidan is. A public consensus that the ratio is wrong.

In February 2022, independence very nearly ended. People gave our statehood three days—and not only Russians. That was the opinion of most observers. It did not end. We survived it. But our statehood is still not secured, and it is being secured every day, including today.

What Ukraine contributed to the empire, and how

There is an argument against everything I have said so far, and Ukrainians make it as often as anyone. They object: look, we have contributed to the Russian Empire and to the Soviet one. We have basically built them.

Which is true.

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But Ukrainians were never permitted to contribute as independent agents. They were allowed to contribute exactly as long as they lost their identity—as long as they denounced their own agency. They were contributors without their will and without their identity.

Corsica is my example. It had its own culture, its own identity, its own language, still spoken in pockets. Go into a good Corsican restaurant in Corsica and they may speak Corsican to you; I have had this experience. But it is not a language widely spoken anymore. It has been completely subsumed by French, and France holds Corsica tightly today. And what is France? To a great extent, it is the creature of a great Corsican named Napoleon Bonaparte, who built the French Empire. Nobody concludes from this that Corsica was not a colony.

It is remarkable to me that Putin still does this. He puts people with Ukrainian backgrounds into key positions—in the military, in propaganda, in negotiations.

• Vladimir Medinsky, one of his chief propagandists and now his negotiator, was born in Smila, in Cherkasy Oblast, my own small motherland.
• Valentina Matviyenko, third in the official hierarchy, comes from Shepetivka in Khmelnytskyi Oblast.
• Kirill Dmitriev, who negotiates with the Americans, was born in Kyiv to a family of Ukrainian biologists.

It was Medinsky, incidentally, who announced in a 2012 interview that the Russian people has one extra chromosome—his explanation for how Russia survived the catastrophes of the twentieth century when other nations, the Scythians and Sarmatians among them, broke and vanished. Russians mocked him for it, since an extra chromosome is the marker of Down syndrome.

As a claim, though, it is a race claim. Made by a man born in Cherkasy Oblast, about a people he was not born into.

They contribute to the Russian neo-empire. They contribute to it not as Ukrainians but as those who denounced Ukrainian identity. This is how empire functions. It absorbs the representatives of subaltern nations who willingly denounce their own will. It was so under the Romanovs. It was so in the Soviet empire. It is so in Putin's quasi-empire now.

Ukrainians were, and still are, a subaltern nation.

Papua, and Scotland

There are worse outcomes than ours and there are better ones.

The Papuans of West Papua tried. They fought for independence, failed, and many of them were killed. They are still oppressed. That is the bad end of the range, and it is not hypothetical.

The better scenario would be the Scots. They had statehood, and it was strong—kings and queens, pride, history, narratives, everything a full and self-sufficient nation possesses. Then they lost it. They are not being killed. They do not suffer the way the Papuans suffer. And yet many of them remain deeply dissatisfied with what they are. We support the United Kingdom, of course, but we are also mindful of the peoples who constitute it—Scots, Irish, Welsh. They have their pride, their nation, their language, their history, their self-consciousness, their identity.

They cannot fully live any of it without independence.

That would be a much better scenario for us than the Papuan one. From where we are now, I still do not think it would be enough.

Colonies taken by neighbors

Timor-Leste has stayed with me. One of the newest countries in the world, independent since 2002, and before that a genocide. Up to a third of its population died. Its capital, Dili, was destroyed in 1999.

Our own Baturyn, the capital of the Cossack Hetmanate, was destroyed by Peter I's army in 1708 in the same way.

And Timor is not an overseas colony. That is the other thing. There is the colonization conducted across an ocean—the Dutch in the Malay Archipelago, to which Timor belongs—and there is the colonization conducted by a neighbor. Indonesia, having been a Dutch colony itself, became independent, developed a colonial attitude within thirty years, and invaded Timor.

Ukraine was taken by neighbors too. First Poland, then the Russian Empire. Both committed atrocities here. We always resisted, and always with some violence—there has never been an anti-colonial struggle that was not violent, and ours is not an exception. I wish it were an exception. It was not.

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The first colonization, and the first decolonization

The Polish colonization is the one Ukrainians forget, and it matters for a reason that has nothing to do with Poland.

It ended. And the decolonization from it was successful: we regained our ground, re-established Ukrainian identity on our territory, our own way of living. And there was a process of reconciliation that worked, at least to some extent. That is the first decolonization Ukrainians ever accomplished, and it is the paradigm I hold onto when I think about what happens with Russia.

Which does not mean it is finished. Some of the reactions coming from the Polish side now are, to me, surprising and incomprehensible, and I can explain them only through this lens: post-colonial phantom pain. They lost a limb and they still feel it. Russia feels the same phantom pain about what it calls the Russian World, and reacts far more violently, because Russia is historically far more violent. But the pain is the same kind of pain.

One white nation killing another

Much of the world does not accept that any of this is decolonization. In the Global South the response is: one white nation is killing another white nation, why should we care.

They should care, because our struggle is the same as theirs was. If ours is meaningless, then theirs was meaningless too.

They are working with a black and white colonial paradigm—sometimes literally—which skims over the surface. There is a name for what we are: a South within the North. Inside the Global North pockets of land and people exist whose experience and self-perception are closer to the peoples of the Global South than to their neighbors. Ukraine is one of those pockets. Our vision of ourselves may be nearer to the Global South than to Europe.

Race is the real difference, and I will not pretend otherwise. Though even there the resemblance is closer than people assume. When we were a Polish colony, the Poles developed the idea that we were an inferior people—chłopy—while they were Sarmatians, a superior nation. Not race as skin color. Race as ethnic origin, which does the same work.

By my own study, something like 90% of the criteria that apply to other colonies apply to Ukraine. Perhaps 10% do not.

But before the world can see this, we Ukrainians have to see it.

Why the blood

Fanon believed that violence is embedded in colonialism—that it is intrinsic, that you cannot be a colonial power without being violent, without being prepared to kill the subalterns. He also believed that anticolonial struggle is inevitably violent. Sartre, who wrote the preface to him, believed it too. Maybe that is right, and it would be a good and easy explanation.

But our struggle is particularly bloody for a particular reason, and it is Russian. Russia has adopted most of its ideas from the West, and has almost always put them into practice through violence exceeding anything done in the place the idea came from. Marxist ideas about the counter-revolutionary nature of the peasantry produced the Holodomor; American culture wars are producing this one.

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Our resistance is violent because their aggression is. It is a reaction, and it does not exceed the action. If anything it is disproportionate in the other direction. They kill our civilians in daylight and destroy hospitals and residential buildings. We destroy their oil plants and the warehouses of their online marketplaces.

From the standpoint of genocide studies, what is being done to us is a classical genocide. Not a rhetorical trope—a scientifically provable case. What is unprecedented is not the death toll but the intensity: the quantity of weaponry and ammunition involved in this anti-colonial war has no precedent among anti-colonial wars.

Agency

This is what Ukraine has to contribute to postcolonial theory, and I think it is the important thing.

The victims are not powerless and they are not will-less. They have their own volition. They have their own agency. And the purpose of an anti-colonial struggle is to regain agency—not merely independence, not merely economic freedom, not merely the cutting of ties with international capital or with the old and new empires. Agency.

Our struggle is a struggle for and through our agency. And it is a path that other peoples still living with the residues of colonialism could follow.

The neocolonialism that is not Russian

The Russian form is the most obvious available to us. It is not the only one.

The newest arrived with the Trump administration, which tried to exchange support for our resources—rare earth elements and so forth—essentially requiring us to give them up in return for help. This is a classical neocolonial attitude. It is what happens when a neocolonial power is being established.

I want to be careful here, because this is the policy of the White House and not of Americans. Most Americans who come to Ukraine come as volunteers, prepared to sacrifice their lives, because they understand that global democracy depends on what happens here. The neocolonial attitude belongs to a minority. Unfortunately, that minority currently holds power.

It is a new situation for us, but it is not unique for the world. Still, we can survive it if we understand what it is.

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Whether it is worth it

It is not for us to answer that.

Our generation has decided that it is worth it. But we should remember that we have also decided for the next generation. The Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, a volunteer legion of students and intelligentsia raised in Lviv in 1914, decided in their time that it was worth sacrificing themselves for Ukrainian independence, and we now judge that they were right. The UPA, fighting into the 1950s, decided the same. They were defeated.

We do not know how the next generation will judge us. Because there will be millions of Ukrainians who will not have been born as a result of this war. They will not decide whether we were right or wrong. They will not exist.

Those who do exist will make the judgment.

Cyril Hovorun

Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun is a professor of ecclesiology, international relations and ecumenism at Sankt Ignatios College, University College Stockholm, and a director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Edited by Alya Shandra

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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Ukrainian drones worked over dozens of Russian military and industrial sites overnight on 24 August, reaching from occupied Ukraine and the Black Sea to southern Russia, the commander of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) reported. The night's targets included a fighter jet at a Russian airbase, air-defense radars, fuel and propellant facilities, and vessels of Russia's sanctions-evading shadow fleet. A fuller breakdown released later in the day named the site of each strike and the unit that carried it out. Footage released with the breakdown shows the strikes.

Ukraine has been running mid-range strikes across the belt from occupied Crimea to Rostov Oblast for months, taking out the radars, missile batteries, and the aircraft that fly air-defense patrols over it — a rolling effort to thin the cover that meets every deeper Ukrainian strike.

A fighter jet and a decoy at the same airbase

Robert Brovdi, callsign Madyar, said his crews hit 66 targets in the operational depth of the Russian rear. Among them was a MiG-29 at Dolotinka, on the grounds of the Millerovo airbase in Rostov Oblast. The 1st Separate Center of the SBS carried out that strike.

The same unit hit a mockup of a Ka-52 Alligator attack helicopter at the same location. Russia uses such decoys to draw drones away from real aircraft.

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It was the third Russian fighter jet Ukrainian drones reached in two days. Crews struck another MiG-29, a jet SBS identified as a Su-33 and Militarnyi assessed as a Su-30SM, and an Orion strike-reconnaissance drone at Vityazevo in Krasnodar Krai on 23 August. Ukrainian drones have caught a MiG-29 on a Russian airfield before, at Kursk in July.

Four radars, from Rostov Oblast to occupied Crimea

Crews hit four radar systems overnight. Two Kasta-2E2 sets went down at Geraskin and Karaichev in Rostov Oblast, and a Nebo-SV at Gukovo in the same oblast. All three fell to the 1st Separate Center.

The fourth, an ST-68, stood at Rozdolne in occupied Crimea. The 9th Kairos battalion of the 414th Madyar's Birds brigade struck it.

The radar work is part of a campaign against Russian sensors and launchers that has run for months without a pause.

Rocket propellant, fuel, and two ships

The 1st Separate Center struck the Kamensky Combine at Kamensk-Shakhtinsky in Rostov Oblast, a plant producing solid rocket fuel, according to SBS. The 9th Kairos battalion hit a fuel tank at Yeysk in Krasnodar Krai. In occupied Luhansk Oblast, the 20th K-2 brigade struck a fuel depot belonging to the 106th material support brigade of Russia's 41st Army at Dovzhansk. 

Brovdi also said his crews hit and destroyed two shadow-fleet vessels, a tanker and a bulk carrier, in the Black Sea. No independent account of either loss has appeared.

A drone school, relays, and a base in occupied Kherson Oblast

In occupied Kherson Oblast, Ukrainian crews destroyed the quarters of a Russian National Guard rapid-response unit and hit two relay stations for Geran attack drones, according to the SBS breakdown.

They also struck a shelter for a Zala reconnaissance drone crew in occupied Crimea, a drone school in occupied Zaporizhzhia Oblast, and a drone laboratory in occupied Donetsk Oblast.

Brovdi also reported 11 Russian rear deployment points burning across occupied Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts, along with strikes on energy nodes in occupied territory.

Russian forces have gained ground on the eastern approaches to Sloviansk and continue to prioritize an eastern route toward the city, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Their earlier push from the northeast had bogged down, and Russia now aims to set up a future assault on one of the last major cities Ukraine still holds in Donetsk Oblast. A quick move on the city itself remains extremely unlikely, ISW said.

Russia's 2026 summer campaign in the east has advanced through field edges and small villages rather than the breakthroughs the Kremlin keeps promising, the grinding pattern that has defined the fighting across Donetsk Oblast for years.

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Kostiantynivka: Why one city in Donbas matters so much that Putin lies about having captured it

The eastern approach

Ukrainian military observer Kostiantyn Mashovets reported that Russian forward units are advancing across several tactical areas at once in the Sloviansk direction. He said the command of Russia's 3rd Combined Arms Army rushes assault infantry forward right after each successful infiltration. Russian troops reached the southeastern edge of Pyskunivka, east of Sloviansk, from the east and northeast, moving off positions they had seized on the southern bank of the Siverskyi Donets, Mashovets said. Zakitne lies northeast of Pyskunivka and Kryva Luka southeast of it, and ISW read the advance as evidence Russia has consolidated positions in both.

They also infiltrated the southern and southeastern outskirts of Mykolaivka from western Rai-Oleksandrivka. ISW assessed that Russia is running a dual effort to connect its units near Kryva Luka with those at Rai-Oleksandrivka, so it can assault Mykolaivka from dominant terrain to the east and south at once. Mashovets added that other Russian groups slipped through three settlements along the E-40 Bakhmut-Sloviansk highway, trying to hold the western bank of the Siverskyi Donets-Donbas Canal and reach the river just east of the city.

ISW observed reports on 23 August that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian infiltration attempt in Mykolaivka.

Oleksandr Borodin, spokesperson for Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps, said the Lyman direction falls in his corps' zone and that Russia's goal there is to half-encircle the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration from the flank—first securing bridgeheads across the rivers, then cutting logistics. He called those plans unrealistic:

"We have quite serious defensive positions there and have been preparing for a long time. The capabilities they currently have to try to accomplish this task are insufficient even to come close to achieving such a goal."

Why Moscow switched directions

Russia prioritized attacking Sloviansk from the northeast through Lyman when it opened its spring-summer 2026 offensive, but that effort has largely stalled. The Siverskyi Donets River, which loops north and northeast of the city, together with a web of canals, handed Ukrainian defenders a natural moat. So Russian commanders now treat Mykolaivka as a key prize. Taking it would let them strike west toward Sloviansk from the east, skirting the water obstacles that blocked the northeastern route.

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Ukrainian intelligence units will not help: Analyst warns that once Russia breaks into Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, reinforcing them only delays inevitable

A slow road into the Fortress Belt

Sloviansk anchors the northern end of Ukraine's Fortress Belt, a chain of fortified cities that has blunted Russian advances in Donetsk Oblast since 2014. ISW cautioned that Russian forces are extremely unlikely to make fast gains west of Mykolaivka, since they still need to seize several more settlements first.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 23 August that Putin has ordered his army to seize all of Donetsk Oblast by 31 December. By ISW's count, it is the 15th such deadline since 2022, and Russia has missed every one that has come due.

Zelenskyy put Russia's frontline casualties this year at around 267,000, including about 155,000 killed, and said 70% to 80% of them fall in the Kostiantynivka direction. Russia holds about 79.89% of Donetsk Oblast, by ISW's count, and Zelenskyy said the Kremlin is preparing to mobilize around 300,000 men after the 18–20 September State Duma elections, partly to reinforce Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.

Ukraine brought a small group of servicemen home from captivity on 24 August, its Independence Day, and every one of them had been carried as missing in action, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced. The men crossed back through Belarus as a separate stage of the exchange now under way. Ukraine's prisoner-of-war agency later set out who they were.

Amid Russia's all-out war in Ukraine, prisoner swaps remain one of the few Ukrainian-Russian mechanisms still producing results while every negotiating track on territory and ceasefires stays deadlocked, which leaves each completed stage as the practical measure of what still passes between two governments that agree on nothing else.

Ten men Ukraine had listed as missing, not captured

President Zelenskyy said Ukraine was bringing back 10 of its soldiers through Belarus. They serve in the Armed Forces and the National Guard, and they defended the country in the Donetsk sector in the east. He called it a special stage of the exchange.

The Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, the state body that runs Ukraine's exchanges, specified the details in the afternoon. The freed men hold the ranks of sergeant, soldier, and sailor. All 10 had been logged as missing rather than captured. 

Two had been listed as missing since 2024, the other eight since 2025. The agency said the handover came out of talks run by its own exchange working group. It described the return as the second stage of the current exchange. 

The first stage ran on 19 August and brought back 103 servicemen. 

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Two officers, 101 soldiers—Ukraine’s newest homecoming from Russian cells

Locating Ukrainian captives inside Russia or the occupied territories is often difficult, as is verifying their identities, because Russia withholds data on captured soldiers and civilian hostages. Former detainees describe beatings, electric shocks, mock executions, and refusals of medical care, and civilians held without trial report the same treatment as the soldiers.

Roughly 7,000 Ukrainian service members were in Russian captivity as of May 2026, with civilian detainees estimated at 10,000 to 20,000. Ukraine had returned 9,606 military personnel and civilians through exchanges by late June. 

Independent businesses selling through M.Video, Russia’s largest electronics chain, waited months to receive customer payments for goods already sold. One seller received it only after filing a formal demand that usually precedes a lawsuit, according to a Vedomosti report.

The sellers are independent businesses using M.Video’s website as their storefront. Under M.Video’s seller contract, a customer buys from the independent business while M.Video collects the payment as the seller’s agent.

The business pays M.Video a commission for listing the product and handling payment and delivery. Until M.Video transfers the proceeds, the seller has already handed over the product but has not received the money from the sale.

Some sellers turn to legal demands

Sellers said payments for goods sold in May and June were still missing in August. One sent M.Video a formal demand on 13 August, giving the company five days to pay and waiving interest. The money arrived on 18 August.

Another business said its demand went unanswered, while its assigned manager stopped responding. It continued shipping orders until mid-July because M.Video had promised to transfer payment for its May sales.

Similar complaints had already surfaced two months earlier. M.Video told ABN that transfers were regular, but rapid growth sometimes required additional checks before funds could be released. The same report cited a business that had waited 24 working days after approving its sales statement; its previous transfer had also arrived late.

Independent sellers are taking a larger role in M.Video’s business. M.Video’s annual results show that products from these sellers accounted for one in every ten orders in 2025. According to its half-year marketplace update, turnover from these businesses quadrupled year-on-year as M.Video expanded beyond electronics. The number of products listed grew nearly sixfold.

The shift follows heavy losses in M.Video’s store-based business. M.Video’s annual results show that it lost about 64 billion rubles (about $770 million)—nearly one-fifth of its annual revenue. The chain closed hundreds of underperforming stores and opened only 11.

The European Commission approved €6.1 billion ($7.12 billion) in new defense procurement for Ukraine on 24 August, covering air and missile defense systems, missiles, ammunition, and radars. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the decision as Ukraine marked its Independence Day.

Russia's intensifying missile campaign has outpaced what Ukraine's partners can supply, and Europe is now financing the systems its own industry can build while the scarcest interceptors stay in American hands.

How the €90 billion loan pays out

The funding is part of the EU's €90 billion ($105 billion) Ukraine Support Loan for 2026-27, with €60 billion allocated to defense and €30 billion for budgetary support. The new package comes on top of €16 billion in previously approved defense procurement. Reuters put the disbursed total at €8.35 billion.

On 30 June, the European Commission disbursed €3.9 billion as the first payment under a first tranche of around €6 billion dedicated to drone procurement. On 15 July, it disbursed €1.1 billion, and on 30 July another €3.47 billion for drones, missiles, air defense, and Gripen fighter jets. The Commission's own three defense-window payments add to €8.47 billion.

Most of the buying will be from EU defense companies, and the Commission said deliveries will mean drawing down stockpiles, reprioritizing orders, and raising production. Under the mechanism, Ukraine submits signed contracts with defense companies, and the Commission reviews them before releasing funds.

Interceptor deliveries are falling as strikes rise

Air defense is among Ukraine’s most urgent military needs as Russia steps up its aerial campaign. The European Commission said Ukraine faced 376 missile strikes in July alone.

Kyiv has repeatedly warned of shortages of interceptors, particularly for ballistic missiles. The shortfall traces to Washington: since the United States went to war with Iran, it faces its own Patriot shortage and has resisted releasing large numbers to Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy released figures ahead of the Independence Day meeting that show the scale: Ukraine received 675 Patriot interceptors in 2023 and 364 in 2025, while 264 are projected for 2026, against a request for at least 300 for the winter, according to Kyiv Post.

Allies gather in Kyiv with missiles on the table

The announcement coincided with a hybrid meeting of the Coalition of the Willing in Kyiv. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and French President Emmanuel Macron co-chaired the meeting, with Macron joining by videoconference, the Élysée Palace said. European Council President António Costa also took part, and NATO was represented by Deputy Secretary General Radmila Šekerinska.

Britain agreed to let defense firm MBDA release classified information on UK components of the long-range SCALP missile so Ukraine and France can set up local assembly lines, the UK government said. The EU decision followed Norway's pledge on 23 August to provide Ukraine with about $9 billion in support in 2027, including military, humanitarian, and financial assistance. Nordic and Baltic leaders announced the pledge during a visit to Kyiv.

Ukraine is building a sea-facing layer of air defense along its southern coast, Kyrylo Liukov, head of the unmanned technologies department at the Serhii Prytula Foundation, wrote in a column for RBC-Ukraine. Winged interceptors now reach the Russian spy drones that guide strikes in the south.

Russia's nightly drone strikes on Ukrainian cities have turned air defense into a race to close every corridor Russia can fly through, over land first and now over the open sea. Kyiv does it with cheap interceptors rather than costly missiles, and keeps having to chase Russian workarounds. The sea was the stretch air defense could not reach, and it is where Russia keeps the spotters that make its Shahed swarms steerable.

Land and sea are two different fights

Defending the sky over land and over open water are two different problems, Liukov wrote. Multirotor copters are fast and simple to launch near the coast, but past roughly 25 km offshore, a multirotor is almost useless. Russia builds its mission routes so that drones cross dozens of kilometers over sea before they turn toward Ukrainian targets. Fixed-wing drones close the gap. Built like gliders, they loiter for over an hour and hold a link at 40 km and beyond, helped by an open radio horizon that land's terrain and buildings deny them.

Recon drones are the priority target for a reason. Beyond spotting and confirming hits, they work as relays in a MESH network for a group of strike drones. In that setup, Russian crews can steer Shaheds by hand right up to the moment of impact, Liukov wrote.

Southern units recently set three distance records with foundation-supplied interceptors. The 18th aviation commandant's office of Air Command South downed a Russian Orlan-30 reconnaissance drone 110 km out. It used a Wovkulaka Spitfire interceptor, the longest kill on record for that system.

The 12th Separate Special Purpose Center set the other two, flying a system from the miltech company TechnoTaras: an Orlan downed at 86 km, and a 145 km hunt measured from the takeoff point that held a stable digital link the whole way, Liukov wrote. That leaves Russia's drones exposed much farther from shore than its planners assume, he added—and if such results become routine, Russia has to pull its transit routes farther out still.

The Maiachnia beacon line

A less obvious problem was navigation, not shooting. A drone flying without GPS steers by landmarks, and over open sea, there are none. Late last year, the foundation, the 12th Separate Special Purpose Center, and TechnoTaras launched a project called Maiachnia. It strings radio beacons on the Skyline system along the coast from Ochakiv to Izmail. The beacons work on their own and keep backup power, tied to a central network that operators can adjust remotely. An operator can then track the drone even under GPS jamming, bad weather, or a temporary loss of link, and bring it home. More than five southern units now fly the foundation's winged drones.

The real stakes sit offshore—the southern ports and the Black Sea grain corridor that Russian drones threaten and that land-based copters can barely reach. Keeping Russian drones farther offshore would buy room there. But Russia is scaling up a faster, jet-powered Shahed, and the interceptor answer to it is early—so the offshore edge just won will have to be defended again.

Ukrainian strikes on Ozon’s warehouses sent the listed retailer’s shares down 29.09% from Friday’s close at Monday’s low, RBC’s market report said. The Moscow Exchange shifted Ozon’s main trading session to a 30-minute auction, while other trading modes remained open, exchange rules show.

Unlike privately held Wildberries, Ozon’s listing made investors’ response to the disruption immediately visible. The sell-off came before Ozon had calculated the physical damage, which the company said it would assess later in its statement on Chapayevsk.

Since 22 August, Ozon has reported disruption at six facilities: warehouses in Chapayevsk and Orenburg, three facilities in southern Russia, and another warehouse in Krasnodar.

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Ukrainian drones hit warehouse belonging to Russian online retailer Ozon for the first time

Russia was simultaneously attacking Ukraine’s retail and logistics infrastructure. Russian strikes burned two Epicentr hypermarkets in Odesa on Monday morning and caused fires at food warehouses in the city, regional authorities said.

Two days earlier, President Vladimir Putin had said Kyiv should “expect a response targeting your most sensitive economic sectors” in comments published by state journalist Pavel Zarubin.

Ozon falls farther than the market

The MOEX index fell about 2.9% on 24 August. Ozon’s 29.09% decline went far beyond the broader sell-off, indicating that investors were reacting to company-specific risk rather than merely following the Russian market.

That risk had appeared before Ozon’s warehouses were struck. Its shares fell 2.3% on 22 July over concerns that the retailer might become a target. Six days later, VTB Bank fell 2.5%, with analysts attributing part of the decline to uncertainty surrounding its Wildberries partnership.

Wildberries, Ozon, and their smaller rivals sell goods and services worth the equivalent of 8.5% of Russia’s GDP and employ 4 million people—more than 5% of the country’s workforce.

The August attacks turned that risk into operational disruption. Ozon reported fires at its Makhachkala facility and Krasnodar warehouse. In Chapayevsk, the company evacuated more than 500 workers, suspended operations, and redirected shipments. The following day, it evacuated more than 300 workers and closed its Orenburg warehouse.

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Dagestan, Stavropol Krai, Adygea: Ukraine’s drones worked straight down the delivery map of Russia’s No. 2 online store

Rerouting allowed Ozon to keep orders moving by transferring the workload to facilities that remained open. That is the business risk investors were pricing: a distributed warehouse network can absorb an isolated closure, while repeated attacks progressively reduce the capacity available to absorb the next one.

Each strike leaves fewer warehouses

Ukraine’s campaign against Wildberries shows how warehouse losses accumulate across a retail network. By the end of July, Verstka counted eight affected warehouses covering 860,000 square meters, or 15.4% of the company’s total warehouse space.

By mid-August, ISW counted seven of its ten largest hubs knocked out. The two estimates measure different things, but both show disruption spreading through the network.

A distributed warehouse system can absorb an isolated closure by moving shipments through other hubs. As more sites are lost, fewer alternatives are available to carry out that work. The economic effect, therefore, depends not only on the value of the buildings or goods destroyed, but on how much spare capacity remains after each strike.

Russia’s attacks on Ukraine illustrate the same logistical resilience. Two strikes destroyed warehouse buildings at Aurora’s distribution center, CEO Taras Panasenko said, but the retailer kept its stores open. Ozon similarly redirected shipments after closing warehouses in Russia.

Continued sales do not mean that the strikes had no economic effect. They show that retailers can absorb individual losses by relying on the rest of their networks. Repeated attacks gradually consume that protection, and Ozon’s public listing allowed investors to price the risk before the company could calculate the damage.

Ukraine celebrated 35 years of independence on 24 August, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy marked the day with an address listing what the invasion has cost Russia, published by the President's Office. He said Putin is mortal and out of time to understand Ukraine, and said Ukraine will not hand over Donbas or save the Kremlin half a million soldiers. He also asked partners for sanctions and weapons strong enough to force an end to the war.

Russia has been invading Ukraine since 2014 and fighting a full-scale war on it since 2022, and Ukraine now supplies a growing share of the missiles and drones it fights back with, while the air defense shielding its cities still hangs on decisions taken in Washington and European capitals—which is what makes a holiday speech a statement of what Kyiv will not trade and what it needs built or delivered next.

The losses he read back to Moscow

President Zelenskyy turned from his own citizens to Russia partway through the speech. 

"You wanted to take all our Ukraine, all our land; instead, you lost your oil refineries, your fleet, your profits, your entire generation that you sent into the meat grinder," he said. 

A country that wanted Ukraine erased from the map, he added, is now absent from the international agenda of the future civilization.

He set Moscow's self-image against its filling stations. 

"For 27 years, the head of Russia has talked about greatness, while Russia is standing in lines for gasoline," Zelenskyy said. 

Moscow and St. Petersburg brought back gasoline rationing this month, and Rosneft capped fills at every station in the country.

On the Russian leader he was blunt. 

"Putin hopes that we are tired. But we know that he is mortal," he said, adding that Putin never understood Ukraine and now will not have the time to.

A fifth Independence Day at war

Before the holiday, Russian ballistic missiles hit Kyiv and its main airport hub twice in 24 hours. A solution to Russian ballistic terror must be found, Zelenskyy said, and that gamble must not pay off. 

Russia does not want peace, it wants mobilization, the president said. Ukraine will not let Moscow seize the initiative or convince Europe that surrendering Donbas ends the war. Russia keeps pushing back the dates for taking all of Donetsk Oblast and will keep pushing them back, he said.

The president called Ukraine's defense industry a giant that forges independence around the clock, and demanded more from it. Mid-range strikes cut Russian logistics and long-range weapons cut Russian profits, he said, listing Moscow, Tuapse, Tula, Ryazan, Olenya, and Omsk among the places already hit. 

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Ukraine’s drones hit two Russian fighters and a spy drone—and blinded radars from occupied Crimea to Rostov

Ukraine's home-built Flamingo cruise missiles should stop being a rare species and arrive en masse: "They must 'winter' in Russia," Zelenskyy noted. 

Previously, Flamingos have hit defense plants more than 1,000 km from the border, though they still appear in strikes in small numbers.

"China should no longer remain silent"

Ukraine is not asking anyone to fight for it, the president said — only for everything needed to stop the war before Putin starts the next one. He wants sanctions that make Russians howl and Moscow at a negotiating table, and said Washington has lost its illusions about Russian intentions. Europe must be Europe, he said: united, ambitious, brave. 

"China should no longer remain silent," he added, saying Beijing must cool the ardor of someone who puts on a sailor's uniform and cap and talks about a nuclear strike—a description that fits Putin.

Ukrainian drones struck three warehouses of the Russian online retailer Ozon across the country's south overnight on 24 August, monitoring Telegram channels reported. Ozon is Russia's second-largest online store, an Amazon-style marketplace, shipping customer orders out of huge regional depots. Fires broke out, the company closed one hub, and its shares fell in Monday trading.

Three warehouses, 314,714 square meters

The three struck sites cover 314,714 m² in three Russian regions, Militarnyi calculated. The largest, about 130,000 m², stands in Tyube in Dagestan, 800 to 900 km from Ukraine's border. Russian news Telegram channel Astra called it the company's biggest warehouse in the North Caucasus. Residents said the fire was visible up to 10 kilometers away.

Nevinnomyssk in Stavropol Krai holds the second site, 93,514 m². The third, 91,200 m², sits near Enem in Adygea, on the boundary with Krasnodar Krai. Drones have now hit five Ozon warehouses, Militarnyi noted.

The company's account differs

Ozon said fires started at its Dagestan and Krasnodar warehouses and that people were injured in Dagestan. In Nevinnomyssk it evacuated staff, closed the site, and stated that the facilities and the goods inside were "in order."

Six of the retailer's complexes have come under drone attack in three days, according to the company. The company also said the Adygeysk and Nevinnomyssk warehouses escaped damage. Monitoring data places a struck 93,514 m² warehouse in Nevinnomyssk.

Russian officials blame falling debris

Krasnodar Krai Governor Veniamin Kondratyev claimed drone debris allegedly killed two children at a private children's center in Krasnodar, with the injured count later put at 12.

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One Russian warehouse smolders near Kazakhstan while a bigger fire rages near St. Petersburg

Head of Adygea Murat Kumpilov confirmed a fire at the Ozon center in Takhtamukaysky district. Acting head of Dagestan Fyodor Shchukin claimed falling drone fragments started the Kumtorkalinsky district fire and hurt nobody, which the company contradicts. Stavropol Krai Governor Vladimir Vladimirov claimed air defenses were repelling a raid on Nevinnomyssk's industrial zone.

Rostov Oblast head Yuri Slyusar claimed 120 drones were downed over the oblast. Russia's Defense Ministry claimed 351 Ukrainian drones destroyed across 10 Russian regions and occupied Crimea, without saying how many got through.

Ozon shares dropped 28% on Monday morning, state agency TASS reported, while Reuters put the fall at almost 13%.

The third night in a row

Ukraine has destroyed or damaged 29 marketplace warehouses since 18 July, RFE/RL said, mapping them with satellite imagery. Drones struck the Orenburg complex on 23 August, where the company pulled more than 300 workers out. On 22 August they hit the Chapayevsk warehouse in Samara Oblast, the first strike on the company, where people were injured.

Before Ozon, Ukrainian drones spent weeks on Wildberries, Russia's largest marketplace, wrecking about 15.4% of its storage space in July alone.

Ukrainian partisans have dedicated their new “catch” to Ukraine’s Independence Day. According to ATESH, they destroyed a military KamAZ truck that was used in assaults on Donetsk Oblast and was stationed with Russian occupation forces in Rostov Oblast.

ATESH is a Ukrainian-Crimean Tatar partisan movement founded in September 2022 in response to Russia's full-scale invasion. The group operates in occupied Ukrainian territories and in Russia itself, with members including Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, and Russians who were mobilized into the Russian army but now work for Ukraine.

The operation was carried out without the partisans even having to do it themselves. The vehicle was used in the offensive toward Kostiantynivka, one of the hottest sectors of the current fighting, alongside the Russian advances toward Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.

The sabotage was carried out by a soldier from the Russian Armed Forces’ “Center” Group of Forces, which is assaulting Kostiantynivka. The vehicle was actively used to supply the advancing forces, and its loss disrupts Russian logistics.

Putin has a primary target, Zelenskyy says

Earlier, President Zelenskyy said that the offensive toward Kostiantynivka would remain one of the Russian military’s main priorities through the end of the year, according to Suspilne.

“Putin’s unchanged primary objective on the front is Kostiantynivka–Sloviansk. The latest deadline he has given his generals is to complete the occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts by the end of the year,” he said.

Since the beginning of 2026, Russia has lost 267,000 personnel along the entire front line, including approximately 155,000 killed, according to the figures cited in the report. Russian forces are suffering their heaviest losses specifically in the sector stretching from Sloviansk to Kostiantynivka.

How was the operation carried out?

The agent joined the movement out of revenge: his commanders killed his fellow soldiers after he refused to pay extortionate demands. The partisans said that such abuses in the Russian army are commonplace, and that the only way to survive and punish those responsible is to resist from within.

Earlier, the partisans reported that Russia’s 64th Motor Rifle Brigade, which has been implicated in crimes in Bucha, was concealing its actual losses. The command allegedly registers many of the dead as “missing in action” in order to reduce the official death toll and avoid payments to their families.

Meanwhile, security and counterintelligence services are reportedly putting pressure on the women, threatening them with criminal charges for “discrediting” the army and the complete loss of any payments if they continue searching for their missing relatives.

Exclusives

Russia’s thermobaric launchers used to just drive up and fire. Now they move one at a time, in steel boxes built to stop Ukrainian drones. Ukraine has knocked out at least 36 of them. Twenty-seven burned outright.

Ukrainians rally across dozens of countries to demand Europe use Russia’s frozen billions. The EU backed a €90 billion Ukraine loan with its budget while €210 billion in Russian central bank assets remain immobilized.

Ukraine finally hit three Russian Kalibr ships on 12 August. On the 19th, an untouched one hit Kyiv. Prior to 12 August, the Russian Black Sea Fleet had eight warships capable of firing Kalibr cruise missiles. It still has at least four.

Military

Ukraine’s drones hit two Russian fighters and a spy drone—and blinded radars from occupied Crimea to Rostov. The aircraft sat at Vityazevo, a Black Sea airfield the jets had fled to after strikes made occupied Crimea too dangerous to park in.

One Russian warehouse smolders near Kazakhstan while a bigger fire rages near St. Petersburg. The parcel depot near Kazakhstan can hold tens of millions of orders and had to be cleared out.

Ukraine says it hit an Iskander launcher near the border—part of a dedicated hunt for Russia’s ballistic launch sites. The tactic gives Kyiv another way to reduce the missile threat when its stocks of anti-ballistic interceptors are low, Zelenskyy says.

Intelligence and technology

Ukraine’s ousted defense minister confirms M&M’s operation planning and discloses real story behind its name. The planned operation involved using autonomous, AI-powered drones to target Moscow’s airports and disrupt air traffic.

Reports credit North Korea’s newest missile of terror with 2.5-ton warhead and 900-km range. Expert explains why those numbers can’t both be true. Russia may receive up to 150 North Korean missiles, including the KN-30.

International

Six Nordic-Baltic leaders came to Kyiv. Norway put a $9 billion figure on 2027 support. The visitors joined Ukraine's State Flag Day events ahead of Independence Day, alongside bilateral and multilateral talks with the Ukrainian president.

Humanitarian and social impact

Every Russian attack on Kyiv costs the city about $12 million. They now come almost twice in week. Over 4,000 buildings were damaged in the Ukrainian capital.

Russia holds up to 20,000 Ukrainian civilians in captivity. One of newest is teacher who stayed in her occupied village to care for her 83-year-old mother. Russia is replacing detained Ukrainian teachers with its own educators in occupied territories, where they are used to impose propaganda narratives.

New developments

Zelenskyy awarded Vikings star, ballistic missile CEO took stage, and strike drone got signed with messages to Russians: Ukraine’s major UNITED24 platform turns four. Ukraine's UNITED24 platform has raised nearly $4 billion in four years of war.

Read our earlier daily review here.

Each Russian attack on Kyiv costs the city budget about $12 million. Russian strikes have already damaged more than four thousand buildings in the capital, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in answer to a Novyny.LIVE journalist.

Russian forces now strike Kyiv with ballistic and cruise missiles or drones on average almost twice a week. The latest massed attack, on the night of 20 August, killed at least 16 people in Kyiv and the region.

The cumulative damage keeps growing

The toll on the city's housing is vast. More than four thousand buildings in Kyiv have been damaged by Russian strikes, Klitschko continued, with each attack adding to a repair bill the city carries alongside the human losses.

New shelters are planned, but old money went unspent

Kyiv plans to expand its shelter network. By the end of 2026, the city intends to install new mobile shelters, placed first in districts and locations that lack other accessible cover, Klitschko stated.

The plan follows a failure that the mayor acknowledged. Last year, Kyiv allocated $12 million for mobile shelters, but the district administrations did not use the money. It was returned to the city budget.

The capital also still lacks enough professional bomb shelters capable of better protecting people during missile strikes, he added. This gap persists as tens of thousands of Kyiv residents shelter in metro stations through the attacks.

The city is building a backup heating system

Meanwhile, Kyiv is preparing for winter under fire. The city has completed more than 50% of planned work to create a backup heating system, with readiness at some sites already reaching 90%, the Kyiv mayor added.

Russia has struck Ukraine's energy and heating infrastructure each winter of the war. A backup system is Kyiv's insurance that a successful strike on one heat source does not leave districts frozen, part of the same preparation for the heating season that Ukraine's government is racing to complete nationally before the cold.

Russia is now building its TOS-1A thermobaric rocket launchers with factory armor wrapped around the rocket tubes. The tracked TOS-1A and its flame-producing 220-mm rockets are a powerful and terrifying weapon. But the launcher is also extremely vulnerable to Ukraine's drones and artillery. The add-on armor may be the only way the launchers can survive.

The TOS-1A is a T-72 with the turret swapped out for 24 thermobaric rockets, and the newest ones arrive inside a welded steel shell that lifts open when the tubes elevate. Russia is armoring the launcher the way it armors the tanks it's built from. What happens when the armor fails is not the same.

The TOS-1A adds a 24-round launcher onto the hull of a T-72 tank. The system's MO.1.01.04M rocket travels as far as 6,000 m with a payload of fuel that, once ignited, burns as hot as 3,000 degrees Celsius. The fuel can spread across the ground and into buildings and bunkers, allowing even a single TOS-1A to scorch a wide area.

It's not for no reason that the TOS-1A is one of Russia's preferred siege weapons. TOS-1As rolled into action early in Russia's wider war on Ukraine. In one of their first actions, in May 2022, TOS-1As staged on hilltops overlooking the city of Lyman, in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, rained fire down on the front-line city. A few days later, Russian troops temporarily occupied Lyman.

The best day the TOS-1A ever had came at Bakhmut. In early April 2023, Russian crews fired across the Bakhmutka River at entrenched Ukrainian positions and opened a 300-m gap in the line, US Army analysts later reconstructed. Wagner mercenaries poured through and covered 1.25 km in a single day. At Pavlivka, thermobaric fire breached the Ukrainian line and the settlement eventually fell—though it took five months and cost Russia two wrecked naval infantry brigades.

With its origins firmly in the 1970s, the TOS-1A was designed for a different era, however. An era where rocket launchers could, with a little support, safely approach to within a few kilometers of the enemy. Artillery is an ever-present danger, of course. But artillery can be suppressed—usually by other artillery.

The era of relative safety for the TOS-1A ended as tiny explosive drones began filling the sky over Ukraine in 2023. Even the tiniest of these tiny drones has the range to hit a TOS-1A before the TOS-1A can get into position to fire its rockets. Worse, the TOS-1A's thermobaric rockets are extremely volatile—and tend to explode in massive fireballs when struck.

"Nasty weapons—and also great targets" for anti-tank missiles and other munitions, is how Czech analyst Jakub Janovsky described the TOS-1A in the war's opening days, before the drones even arrived.

The launcher has a weather problem, too. Its rockets carry an oxidizer premix, which means crews can't fire them in the rain or from high ground.

Deep losses

The Russians started losing TOS-1As almost immediately. Retreating from Kyiv Oblast on 1 April 2022, they left behind at least three launchers—two of them knocked out by Ukrainian Stugna-P missiles, one captured intact. Then the losses began piling up.

Today, 54 months into the wider war, the Ukrainians have destroyed, damaged or captured no fewer than 36 TOS-1As. 27 of them burned. Ukrainian crews turned at least one captured launcher on its former operators, firing it near Kreminna during the 2023 counteroffensive.

The losses are a problem for the Russians. US Army analysts estimated Russia's prewar TOS-1A fleet at 48 launchers, only a portion of which ever went to Ukraine. Documented losses now stand at 36, and Oryx counts only what it can see in a photograph. How much of that gap Russian factories have refilled isn't public.

What the losses did not do was change the war. For all its ferocity, the TOS-1A has had little to no effect on the conflict's outcome, US Army analysts concluded—and they name the short reach as the reason. A weapon that has to park within 6,000 m of the enemy is a weapon the enemy can find.

Armor, not range

The Russians got to work improving the TOS-1A and building more copies. The Omsk transport machinery plant, Omsktransmash, has turned out fresh batches for the defense ministry in September 2022, November 2022, November 2024 and again in November 2025, its parent concern Uralvagonzavod announcing each handover. It's unclear just how many replacement launchers the Russians acquired, but it's safe to assume they number in the dozens.

They also changed how they use the thing. Russian units now move single launchers up to the line under covering artillery fire rather than travelling in groups, reducing the likelihood of detection, the same US Army analysts reported. And the latest copies are up-armored against drones, with a shell of additional armor protecting the 24 launch tubes and their highly flammable rockets.

That isn't a brand-new idea. An earlier drone-protection variant was showcased in April 2024, and a different, serially produced kit went onto the batch shipped in November 2025. What circulated this month is fresh footage of the up-armored TOS-1As working out at a training range in Russia's Saratov Oblast.

The add-on armor is apparently factory-standard at this point, and it's a purpose-built enclosure rather than the improvised slat and mesh Russian regiments tend to weld onto their tanks before sending them across the drone-patrolled gray zone. The function is the same: put something between the drone and the thing that matters.

The best up-armored "turtle tanks" have been known to absorb dozens or even scores of drone impacts. A TOS-1A crew should hope the launcher's new armor is equally tough. After all, the consequence of a turtle tank losing its shell and taking a direct drone hit is often immobilization: the tank throws a wheel or a track or loses power and simply can't move anymore.

Explore further

Russia has thousands of tanks it can’t risk. One drone shield decides whether they roll

Armor is the cheap answer, and it isn't the real one. The real one is a launcher that doesn't have to park 6,000 m from a Ukrainian drone operator.

Uralvagonzavod says a modernized TOS-1A on a T-80 chassis is nearing the end of trials, with better accuracy, more automation and a longer reach. How much longer, the company hasn't said. Analyst Alexey Tarasov expects a new launch module able to take longer-range rockets, perhaps carrying the system to roughly the 15 to 20 km of the wheeled TOS-2. Until then, the crews get a steel box.

It had better hold. The earlier, cruder answer didn't: a TOS-1A wearing a field-built metal cage burned anyway when a Ukrainian FPV drone found it. And if a TOS-1A's armor fails, the next drone hit could trigger 24 rockets each weighing 217 kg and packed with concentrated fuel that's primed to explode.

Ukraine's drones hit three Russian aircraft and eleven air-defense targets in one day, its Unmanned Systems Forces reported on 23 August. The strikes reached from occupied Crimea to airbases hundreds of kilometers inside Russia. They pushed the force's August count of struck Russian air-defense assets to 20, the latest run in a Ukrainian campaign against Russia's radars and launchers that has not paused for months.

A one-day sweep of 14 targets

The Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) commander, Robert Brovdi, callsign Madyar, put the 23 August haul at 14 targets. They included two fighter jets, a strike-reconnaissance drone, eight radar systems, a Tor and a Pantsir short-range launcher, and a position of an S-400 — a Russian long-range air-defense system.

Eleven of the 14 fell in Rostov Oblast and Krasnodar Krai in southern Russia. The other three were in occupied Crimea. 

Jets that fled Crimea, caught on the mainland

The three aircraft were struck at Vityazevo, a Krasnodar Krai airfield about 300 km from the front line, the 1st Separate Center of the Unmanned Systems Forces said. Militarnyi assessed that the jet SBS called a Su-33 was likely a two-seat Su-30SM, judging by its cockpit hump.

Russia flies the Su-30 from its southern bases to attack Odesa and Mykolaiv oblasts, to hunt Ukrainian sea drones, and to patrol occupied territory. The struck jet likely belonged to a naval aviation regiment pushed off Crimea by repeated Ukrainian strikes on the peninsula.

Based on the SBS footage, Militarnyi says one drone could not hit the fighter cleanly. It exploded beside the aircraft and set off a fire that Russian crews tried to put out — a near miss, but enough to sideline the jet for a long stretch. A second drone then found the MiG-29 fighter jet and scored a direct hit, starting a large fire. A third caught the Orion, a strike-reconnaissance drone Russia uses to launch small cruise missiles and to track Ukrainian naval drones in the Black Sea.

Radars, launchers, and an S-400 on the coast

The air-defense targets ran across three regions. In occupied Crimea, crews hit a Nebo-U long-range radar at Sevastopol, the ST-68 at Yevpatoria some 30 km from the front, and a 36D6M at Uiutne. In Rostov Oblast and Krasnodar Krai they knocked out more radars, including two Kasta-2E2 sets and two Podlyot radars, plus the Tor at Pudovy and the Pantsir at Yeysk.

The 413th Reid regiment of the SBS reported hitting the S-400 position near Gelendzhik on the Krasnodar coast — the same stretch where drone crews have caught the system out in the open before.

An August of hunting Russia's air shield

A battlefield video counter run by the force reached 20 Russian air-defense assets struck through August. The month's work extended a campaign that has steadily burned through the sensors and launchers guarding Russian airfields and occupied territory. 

On 5 August, Russia detained Hanna Pyrozhenko, a resident of Pershokostiantynivka in Kherson Oblast. The 52-year-old former teacher is currently being unlawfully held in Henichesk. Her husband, who tried to find out where she was being held, was tortured by the Russians and ordered to leave the occupied village, Zarema Bariieva, a manager at the Crimean Tatar Resource Center, says.

Russia is currently holding around 7,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war and up to 20,000 civilian hostages. Some of them are subjected to systematic torture and cruel treatment, including amputations without anesthesia and denial of medical care to wounded detainees, says Deputy Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament Olena Kondratiuk, according to ZMINA.

Teacher who stayed

Hanna is a former teacher at a local school with more than 20 years of teaching experience. After the full-scale war began, she resigned from her job to care for her 83-year-old mother and her 77-year-old brother.

“She could not and did not want to leave her native village, where she had spent her entire life,” Bariieva said.

Russian security forces first searched the Pyrozhenkos’ home in January 2025. They found nothing at the time and left the couple alone for a while.

Russia troops don't answer questions

On 5 August, FSB officers searched the Pyrozhenkos’ home for a second time. This time, they confiscated Hanna’s phone and laptop and detained her.

“The woman was given just a few minutes to change clothes. Then, without explaining anything, they ordered her to go with them. Her husband’s questions about where he should look for his wife and when she would return home went unanswered,” the human rights activist added.

The Crimean Tatar Resource Center established that Hanna was initially held in Chaplynka and was later transferred to Henichesk. It is currently unknown what exactly she is accused of. A lawyer appointed by the occupation authorities said she would be returned home only to participate in an investigative experiment.

Propaganda teaching instead of truth

At a time when Ukrainian teachers are being detained by Russian security forces, Russia continues to bring its own teachers into the occupied territories.

Russian educators, in turn, are attempting to “re-educate” schoolchildren by eradicating everything Ukrainian from them, according to Ukraine’s Center of National Resistance.

“They tell children about ‘heroes of the SMO’ [the Russian term for its war in Ukraine] and ‘Ukrainian Nazis,’ involve them in activities to support the occupation forces, and organize clubs centered around ‘Victory Day fanaticism’ and the creation of rocket models,” the statement said.

The Kremlin's policy of "re-educating" Ukrainian children and fully colonizing the occupied territories is overseen by Russia's highest leadership. This is evidenced by the visit of Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's presidential commissioner for children's rights, to the occupied areas of Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

The International Criminal Court has accused her, along with Russian ruler Vladimir Putin, of war crimes over the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied territories.

To ensure that teachers in the occupied territories of the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions teach in accordance with the Kremlin's directives, they are sent to Russia for "professional development" training.

Former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has confirmed that Kyiv had planned an operation against targets in Moscow. Recently, The Atlantic reported that at the beginning of 2026, Kyiv had planned Operation M&M’s, which involved using AI-powered drones against Moscow's airports to paralyze them.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned at the time that if any of the drones struck a civilian aircraft, Ukraine’s actions could be perceived as an act of piracy. Nevertheless, work on implementing the plan began.

Sources in the Office of the President have declined to confirm the organization of the operation in comments to journalists. However, former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who initiated the operation and whose departure from office led to the plan being shelved, did confirm it.

Why M&M’s?

In an interview with 24 Channel, Fedorov declined to explain the idea behind the operation, adding that it could still be implemented in the future.

But he provided details on the operation’s codename, saying journalists had misinterpreted it, as the plan had nothing to do with deploying a large number of cheap drones.

“That is a mistake. At a meeting where we were discussing fully autonomous deep-strike drones, I was handing out M&M’s to everyone. It was my birthday, and someone gave me a box of M&M’s. I shared them with everyone and said that we would call this autonomous-drone project M&M’s," Fedorov said.

What does the former minister plan to do next?

During the interview, Fedorov said he wants to create a venture fund to attract Western capital for investment in Ukrainian startups and developers.

“I have several priorities. One is cheap missiles, because I am convinced that they are the future of warfare involving artificial intelligence. These are inexpensive missiles that could be used to deter strikes and further escalation," he explained.

Another priority for him is the robotization of the front line and the deployment of sensors.

"We need to think about how to remove infantry from the front line. We need to robotize the front line as much as possible so that people do not have to spend months in dugouts under drone attacks," he said.

Opposition to the system

Fedorov also announced that he planned to travel to the US the following week, not to seek President Donald Trump’s support after calls for Ukraine to hold elections.

When asked whether he planned to meet Elon Musk there and continue their cooperation in some form, the former minister replied, “We’ll see.”

He said he did not yet know whether he would run for president or parliament, or, if so, which political team he would join, adding that everything would become clear only after it was possible to prepare for a vote.

The former minister also said that he was currently in opposition—not to any particular politician, but to the system.

“We are not talking about one person, or two people, or just some top officials. We are talking about hundreds of people who have simply become accustomed over the years to making money from the state budget,” he said.

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• The fifth fire at the same refinery this year—and Russia still calls it debris

• Ukraine destroys depot that occupiers filled with generators, after Russian state TV filmed them

On 23 August, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said Norway will keep Ukraine aid unchanged in 2027, Ukrinform reported. He spoke during Ukraine’s State Flag Day ceremony in Kyiv, attended by six Nordic-Baltic leaders. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked them and tied the flag to Ukraine’s resistance against Russia’s war.

Norway keeps 2027 support at about $9 billion

Norway's PM Støre put Norway’s 2027 assistance at about $9 billion, the same level as this year. It will cover military, humanitarian, and financial support.

“In 2027, we will maintain aid at the same level as this year—approximately $9 billion,” Støre said.

He said every party in Norway’s Parliament supports continued aid. Støre also said the package would follow Ukrainian priorities. He noted that supporting and rebuilding Ukraine is not just aid but an investment in Europe's own security.

Støre said Norway and Ukraine were due to sign a strategic partnership declaration later on 23 August. He said it would put cooperation on a long-term footing and benefit both countries.

Zelenskyy puts Ukraine’s flag at the center of the ceremony

Ukraine marked State Flag Day on 23 August, one day before Independence Day. In his address, President Zelenskyy pointed to the historic Independence Flag displayed at the ceremony. Ukrainians carried that flag into Parliament after restoring independence on 24 August 1991.

Zelenskyy said Ukrainians had preserved their blue-and-yellow symbol through 70 years of Soviet rule. He then connected it directly to Russia’s invasions.

“In 2014 and in February 2022, Russia attacked to take away this flag, our symbols, our freedom and independence,” Zelenskyy said.

He also thanked the Nordic-Baltic leaders standing alongside him. The visitors came from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Norway.

Ukraine marks the 35th anniversary of restoring its independence tomorrow, on 24 August.

Norway’s support already spans defense, budget, and energy needs

The 2026 Nansen Program covers Norwegian support for Ukraine’s military and civilian needs.

• Norway supplied Ukraine with missiles for NASAMS air defense systems in January.
• In March, Oslo provided $200 million in budget support for pensions, teachers, emergency workers, and other civilian needs.
• Zelenskyy and Støre signed a declaration on enhanced defense and security cooperation in April.
• Norway then pledged $45 million for Ukraine’s energy resilience in May.
• In June, Støre pledged further support for Ukraine’s air defenses after a Russian attack.

Ukrainian drones struck a logistics complex belonging to Russian online retailer Ozon in Orenburg on 23 August, the second Ozon warehouse hit in two days, monitoring Telegram channels reported. The site sits about 1,200 km from the war zone, near Russia's border with Kazakhstan. Hours earlier, a large fire tore through a separate warehouse outside St. Petersburg, roughly 900 km north of Ukraine, though local authorities declared no drone or missile threat.

Drones hit Russia's biggest Ozon warehouse

Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ published video of the strike moment, after which a fire took hold on the site. Independent Russian outlet Astra analyzed eyewitness footage showing an emergency vehicle racing toward the depot. The complex spans more than 200,000 m² and was designed to hold over 31 million items, ranking among Ozon's biggest in Russia.

The warehouse stands inside the city's special economic zone, a tax-favored industrial park on the eastern edge of European Russia. The first phase opened in August 2024, and a second building followed in 2025.

Orenburg mayor Albert Yumadilov claimed several drones were downed over the special economic zone and that debris fell on the Ozon complex, starting a fire that crews quickly put out with no one hurt. 

Ozon confirmed the strike, saying it evacuated more than 300 workers, pulled its goods from the marketplace and stopped taking new deliveries while the site sat idle. 

A second fire near St. Petersburg, with no air-raid alert

Overnight, a large blaze hit a warehouse in the Kolpino area south of St. Petersburg. Astra established that the warehouse stood about 350 m from an Ozon site, and witnesses said they heard no drones or air defense. Ukrainian Telegram channel Exile+ identified the burning facility as a storage warehouse run by Logistera.

Part of a widening campaign on Russian marketplace logistics

The Orenburg hit followed the first-ever Ozon strike a day earlier, at a warehouse in Chapaevsk, Samara Oblast. Before turning to Ozon, Ukrainian drones had struck more than 10 warehouses belonging to the larger Russian marketplace Wildberries. Such marketplace hubs move not only consumer goods but dual-use items like electronics and drone components that can reach Russia's military.

Ukraine has struck a Russian Iskander launcher near its border as part of a dedicated operation against nearby ballistic-missile launch positions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told journalists, according to Ukrinform. 

President says Ukraine hit an Iskander launcher

President Zelenskyy described the strike as a success but said the sensitivity of the operation prevented him from providing many details.

“We struck an Iskander launcher near our borders,” he said. “I am grateful to our warriors who are carrying this out. This is our operation to hunt their systems positioned nearby.”

The president, however, didn't disclose where the launcher was located or what weapon Ukrainian forces used to hit it.

Zelenskyy said strikes on launchers are one way Ukraine is trying to counter Russian ballistic attacks when anti-ballistic interceptor stocks are limited.

“When our anti-ballistic missile stocks are at a minimum, there is another tactic. It is more difficult, and we developed it,” he said. “It is hunting their nearby positions from which ballistic missiles are launched.”

He described the effort as a separate program and operation. Euromaidan Press could not independently verify the reported strike.

Ukraine has already targeted Russian ballistic missile infrastructure in several operations this year. In April, Ukrainian drone forces reported strikes on two bases linked to Iskander systems in occupied Crimea.

On 30 May, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces said they destroyed an Iskander system at a launch position near Taganrog in Russia’s Rostov Oblast.

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SpaceX rejected Ukraine’s request to use Starlink inside Russia

The launcher strike comes as Ukraine is also looking for better ways to operate long-range drones against military targets in Russia. Zelenskyy said SpaceX ultimately refused to let Ukraine use Starlink inside Russia because of escalation concerns.

Kyiv had wanted Starlink to work over Russian territory for defense operations, including drone strikes on Russian ballistic-missile launchers near the border. The Defense Ministry asked him in the first half of 2026 to raise the issue with US President Donald Trump, Zelenskyy said. Zelenskyy said Trump relayed that decision to him at a later meeting. Ukraine continues discussing the issue with the US side.

Ukraine and European partners are separately developing the FREYJA anti-ballistic system, with Kyiv seeking a prototype capable of demonstrating practical results by mid-2027. The project is intended to combine Ukrainian missile technology with European radars, sensors, and command systems.

Russia may soon get 150 more missiles from North Korea, and their inaccuracy is precisely what makes them dangerous to civilians. This characteristic makes them above all weapons of terror, military expert and Defense Express director Serhii Zghurets said on Espreso.

The particular danger may carry the KN-30, credited with a range of up to 900 kilometers and a 2.5-ton warhead. For comparison, the warhead in Russia's Kalibr cruise missile is 450 kilograms, as in the Iskander ballistic missile, and even those destroy large objects. A missile carrying anything near five times that payload would hit far harder than any weapon already devastating Ukrainian cities.

The claimed specs don't add up

Zghurets urged skepticism toward the most hyped missile. The KN-30's credited figures can hardly be combined in one missile, he said. Physics forces a trade-off.

"If we are talking about a missile that can fly 900 km, then it has a significantly smaller warhead weight. If we are talking about 2.5 tons, then the range will be much shorter," Zghurets explained.

Either version remains dangerous, but the claims as advertised describe a missile that likely does not exist.

A 150-missile delivery is under discussion

North Korea keeps feeding Russia's arsenal. Pyongyang continues to strengthen Russia's military potential with missiles of several types, including the KN-23, KN-24, and KN-30, and a possible supply of about 150 North Korean missiles to Russia is now actively discussed, Zghurets said.

Even if the missiles' real characteristics differ from the claims, such a number would be a substantial addition to the Russian arsenal, he noted, more missiles for the campaign Russia fires at Ukrainian cities regardless of how well each one performs.

Inaccuracy makes them terror weapons

The missiles' precision is their defining flaw. By one estimate, Zghurets cited, missiles flying about 800 kilometers can deviate from their target by 18 kilometers, an error radius wider than most cities.

That rules out military precision but not harm.

"There is definitely no talking about any accuracy with these missiles. But as a weapon of terror that supplements the Russian arsenal, the Russians will of course need it now," Zghurets said.

A missile that can land anywhere within 18 kilometers of its aim point cannot reliably hit a military target, but if fired at a city, it will hit something, which is how Russia has used North Korean missiles against Ukrainian civilians.

Both sides get what they want from the axis

Moscow's interest goes beyond missiles. Russia is also interested in bringing in North Korean troops, which would free part of its own forces for combat against Ukraine, Zghurets said.

Pyongyang is paid in money and technology. North Korea seeks military-technological advantages from the cooperation, including improving its submarine-launched ballistic missile technology, and over the years of the war, may have received about $20 billion from Russia, Zghurets estimated.

The Moscow-Pyongyang military alliance is a serious challenge for the West, he said, though it is hard to predict how actively the US will try to limit the two countries' cooperation.

Kyiv held the UNITED24 MODE Summit 2026, dedicated to the results of four years of work by UNITED24, the president’s fundraising platform. The event came two days before Ukraine's Independence Day.

Since its launch in 2022, the initiative has raised nearly $4 billion to support Ukraine. The platform has become an important fundraising tool, bringing together millions of donors from 145 countries.

The largest contributions through UNITED24 have come from the US, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Norway, Belgium, Ireland, Japan, Poland, Lithuania, Türkiye, Singapore, Paraguay, El Salvador, and Guinea-Bissau.

Zelenskyy awarded Vikings star

During the event, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded several prominent UNITED24 ambassadors, volunteers, and philanthropists for their significant support of Ukraine.

Liev Schreiber, the American actor and director, received the Order of Merit. Katheryn Winnick, the Canadian actress best known for Vikings, received the Order of Princess Olga, 3rd Class. Both of them are UNITED24 ambassadors, according to Ukraine's Presidential Office.

Ballistic missile developer attended event

The main topic of the summit was the further development of Ukrainian defense technologies — from creating new solutions to serial production, scaling, and international cooperation, ArmyInform reports.

The discussion featured Fire Point CEO Iryna Terekh, STARK Ukraine COO Maksym Cherkis, and Brave1 head Andrii Hrytseniuk.

Fire Point is the company that is working on the development of the first Ukrainian ballistic missiles.

Behind buying military equipment, platform helped healing Ukrainians

Overall, donors and philanthropists have also contributed to the purchase of medical equipment.

During this period, more than 117,000 medical devices and pieces of equipment were purchased for a total of more than $51.6 million, according to Ukraine's Health Ministry. These included:

Ambulances: 247 vehicles worth $15.0 million.

Armored evacuation vehicles for military medics: 43 vehicles worth $10.6 million.

Anesthesia machines: 83 units worth $2.6 million.

Neurosurgical microscopes: 10 units worth $2.1 million.

C-arm X-ray systems: 39 units worth $3.1 million.

What are platform's next tasks

The panel was moderated by Hanna Hvozdiar, an adviser to Ukraine’s defense minister, who outlined the state’s key priorities for developing Ukraine’s defense technology sector. She said Ukrainian Defense Tech had already demonstrated its ability to respond extremely quickly to the challenges of war.

Over the past several years, a new industry has effectively emerged in Ukraine, in which a battlefield need can be turned into a technological solution several times faster than in the traditional defense industry.

“The next task is to preserve this speed, scale up the strongest developments, and turn the technological advantage Ukraine is creating today into a long-term strength of the state,” she said.

Particular attention was also paid to Ukraine’s technological independence, including the development of its own critical technologies and component base alongside deeper international partnerships.

“Ukraine continues to develop cooperation with Ukrainian manufacturers, the technology community, and international partners so that promising developments can be scaled up faster,” the Defense Ministry said.

Participants left message to Russians on wings of drone

At the summit, Fire Point presented its FP-1 long-range drone, whose wings were signed with messages to Russians by summit participants, according to UNN.

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha also left his message to Russians on the wings of the FP-1.

“The farther our special long-range ‘sanctions’ fly, the closer peace and our victory come,” he wrote.

Exclusives

Ukrainians rally across dozens of countries to demand Europe use Russia's frozen billions. The EU backed a €90 billion Ukraine loan with its budget while €210 billion in Russian central bank assets remain immobilized.

Ukraine finally hit three Russian Kalibr ships on 12 August. On the 19th, an untouched one hit Kyiv. Prior to 12 August, the Russian Black Sea Fleet had eight warships capable of firing Kalibr cruise missiles. It still has at least five.

Military

Evacuation is "force majeure that no one is ready for" in most Ukrainian units, and robots are too slow to fix it, commander says. Chornovol says casualty evacuation remains improvised chaos in most Ukrainian units, calling for dedicated evacuation teams and light-armored transport.

Ukrainian intelligence units will not help: Analyst warns that once Russia breaks into Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, reinforcing them only delays inevitable. Russian forces are 12 to 13 km from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk and could begin infiltrating the fortress-belt cities by late 2026.

Ukrainian drones hit warehouse belonging to Russian online retailer Ozon for the first time. Ozon suspended operations at the Chapayevsk hub and began redirecting deliveries and orders through other facilities.

Ukraine says its drones hit major Russian refinery amid deepening fuel shortages. Militarnyi describes the target as one of Russia's 10 largest refineries. Damage or interruption to production remains unconfirmed.

Ukrainian drone unit seriously wounded Colonel Dmitry Shabaev, commander of Russia's 64th brigade, tied to 2022 Bucha atrocities that killed 637 civilians. The strike hit 80 km behind the front line.

Intelligence and technology

One pilot, five bombers: Ukraine's Lasar's Group ties whole raid to single operator to save manpower. Facing a manpower shortage, Ukraine is building autonomy into its drones and ground robots so one operator can run several at once.

Four times pixels of anything before it: Ukrainian firm's rare thermal camera aims to see targets from much farther away. Ukrainian company Oko Camera is developing the Oko HD thermal camera.

Intelligence: Putin ordered secret biolab built on island, so protected that fishing is banned, and its own guards fear infection. Ukraine's military intelligence says Russia runs a secret biolab complex in Tver Oblast, an inversion of Russia's own false claims about Ukraine.

Ukraine is buying jam-proof fiber-optic drones for first time to single standard, so any maker can compete. Ukraine's Defense Procurement Agency launched its first buy of fiber-optic FPV kamikaze drones to Defense Ministry-defined specifications.

Ukraine has shown its answer to Russia's most powerful drones for first time. Meet Alexa Spatium, which can carry thermobaric warheads and fly back home. Ukraine codified its first jet-powered interceptor drone, the Alexa Spatium, built to destroy Russia's jet Geran drones.

Russia's North Korean missiles could threaten Kyiv and six other regions, ISW says. Moscow is expected to keep saving ballistic and cruise missiles for periodic mass attacks designed to overwhelm Ukraine's air defenses.

Ukraine is fielding more drone-hunters than ever. Free simulator now lets operators learn each one before it reaches their hands. Two Ukrainian interceptor drones, the P1-SUN and Bullet, were integrated into the UFDS combat simulator.

Humanitarian and social impact

Russia has burned 13 million Ukrainian books in three months, nearly third of everything country printed in 2025. Publishers have asked President Zelenskyy to convene the National Security Council.

Russia struck Kyiv and Boryspil, its main airport hub, twice in 24 hours with ballistics Ukraine can't stop without US Patriots, days before Independence Day.

Political and legal developments

"Only Ukrainians will decide for themselves who our heroes are," says Zelenskyy at International Veterans Forum with US envoy, as number of veterans passes two million. Zelenskyy said Ukraine will create a national pantheon for those who shaped its identity.

New developments

From Warsaw to New York, Ukrainians will form human chains on Independence Day. Communities scattered by Russia's invasion will revive a symbol from Ukraine's independence movement to keep the country visible abroad.

Ukraine's army doesn't have as extensive human resources as Russia, so it is teaching its machines to do more of the work on their own. Ukrainian developers are building autonomy into aerial and ground drones so the systems take over tasks the operator once did, the defense outlet Oboronka reported.

Across reconnaissance, bombing, interception, and ground robots, Ukrainian firms are automating the steps that once tied up a pilot, allowing a single operator to run multiple drones at once.

Automating reconnaissance and mission planning

The heaviest early demand for autonomy is in reconnaissance. Farsight Vision's FSV Platform builds real-time 3D terrain maps from drone imagery for planning assaults and strikes, and models where enemy electronic warfare and radio dead zones lie, so FPV pilots can avoid losing their link.

Meanwhile, Sine Engineering offers "autonomy modules" that let a drone navigate on its own. A Mavic flies to an observation point, works for 30 to 40 minutes, and returns, with the pilot only turning the camera, so one operator can run several drones.

"70 to 80% of the need for autonomy right now is reconnaissance," Sine Engineering CEO Andrii Chulyk said.

Autonomy for bombers and FPVs

Heavy bomber drones waste most of a pilot's time in transit. A bomber's target can sit 35 to 60 kilometers from launch, over 25 minutes each way, and a mass raid needs a pilot per drone, so Lasar's Group uses route-planning software to tie up to five bombers to one pilot, who connects for a few minutes to line up each strike.

A single pilot can carry out bombing runs one after another with a group of bombers, preserving personnel for other missions.

Autonomous FPVs are pricier but far more capable: Chulyk estimated an AI drone that finds and destroys a target in a swarm would cost $2,000 to $3,000, against about $700 for a pilot-flown night FPV with auto-capture.

Sine Engineering argues one automated FPV can replace up to ten simpler drones in hard missions, while The Fourth Law's Maksym Savanevskyi favors adding auto-capture to cheap existing drones, which he says makes a radio-controlled drone two to four times more effective.

"Fire and forget" for interceptors and robots

The hardest problem for interceptor drones is the "last mile", spotting a small target against open sky. The Fourth Law's TFL Anti-Shahed module scans the sky and detects targets at twice the range of the human eye, marking a Shahed so the pilot knows where to fly.

Savanevskyi predicts Ukrainian makers will field automatic Shahed-killing solutions by year's end. That points toward "fire and forget" interception, said Yevhen Lesin of the 412th Nemesis unmanned-systems brigade, though he warned against autonomy for its own sake, noting automated launch from ground robots creates technical problems and needs more people, not fewer.

Ground-robot autopilots remain among the field's hardest tasks: DevDroid's Oleh Fedoryshyn noted it took Tesla ten years to make the car autopilot work. At the same time, frontline dirt roads, cratered and unmarked, are nothing like marked highways, so DevDroid's robots now cross only short link-dead stretches on their own before the operator resumes control.

A Ukrainian officer says the army still has no proper system for getting its wounded off the battlefield. Tetiana Chornovov, the commander of a platoon of anti-tank guided missile systems, has called for systemic reform of casualty evacuation in Ukraine's Armed Forces, saying that in the fifth year of the full-scale war, evacuating soldiers from the battlefield remains in most units "a force majeure that no one is ready for."

Most Ukrainian units lack dedicated evacuation groups and specialized armored transport, so evacuations happen in chaos with improvised means, with exceptions only in individual brigades, she says.

Amid public debate over whether ground robots can do the job, Chornovol argues the problem is larger than any single technology, and that the absence of a reliable way out shapes how soldiers fight.

The psychological stakes

Chornovol said the certainty of rescue matters as much as the rescue itself.

"You can't imagine how the existence of professional evac groups would improve the psychological atmosphere at the front. Everyone wants to hope that someone will come for them, will save them," she said.

Her own fear is concrete. Fighting in her fifth year, she said her greatest fear is "that something happens to my people and we'll be helpless, because the evacuation problems will be my problems, and in a small platoon I can't allocate resources to create my own evac group."

One evacuation, seven casualties

Chornovol has backed her argument with a case from a year ago, when her Stuhna anti-tank missile crew was subordinated to a neighboring brigade. At four in the morning, she was told of one killed and one wounded by an enemy chemical-weapons strike, with the evacuation placed entirely on her crew despite weak coordination and unfamiliar terrain.

The rescue attempts compounded the toll.

"My combat vehicle with excellent electronic warfare and an anti-mine grader, which set out for the evacuation, blew up on an anti-tank magnetic mine dropped from a drone," she recalled.

The grader saved lives, but four of her best soldiers were badly concussed. A second vehicle from the brigade, with one of her men as a guide, hit another anti-tank mine, but without a grader: "the mine exploded under the hood, the driver lost his legs, the others were concussed." A third vehicle made it through by luck and took out the wounded and the dead.

"So one evacuation, seven casualties. One severe, without legs," she said, noting the brigade simply had no normal evac group or evac protocol.

She organized the Stuhna evacuation herself, bringing in border guards to control the road, waiting for a window in drone flights, and repairing the electronic-warfare gear stripped from the first knocked-out vehicle.

What Chornovol wants built

Chornovol believes that creating separate staffed evacuation units within brigades is the most necessary reform now, each with an autonomous team and special transport.

"There should be the best drivers, with salaries like assault troops, but also medics, pilots, EW specialists, sappers to defuse mines dropped by drones, and pros: hunters with shotguns to down drones," she said.

On equipment, she argued against relying on ground robots, which she agrees are too slow for evacuation and often easy targets for enemy drones. The main transport, she said, should be a small, fast, lightly-armored vehicle with an anti-mine bottom, light enough to survive the anti-tank mines the enemy drops.

"For a platoon, such equipment is too much, but I don't understand why the whole brigade we were attached to didn't have such an evac vehicle," she said.

She nearly lost five of her men, she added, because of the absence of adequate evacuation approaches and proper light-armored vehicles in the army, asking why the National Guard has them for evacuation while the Armed Forces do not.

Ukrainians and supporters will form human chains in cities abroad at 19:00 (7 p.m.) on 24 August 2026 to mark Independence Day, Ukraine’s Mission to the European Union announced on 20 August.

Russia’s invasion has driven more than 5.6 million Ukrainians to seek refugee or other international protection abroad, according to the UN Refugee Agency. The human chains will help displaced Ukrainians and established diaspora communities show that Ukraine still needs their host countries’ support, the organizers say. Participants follow in the footsteps of Ukrainians in the Soviet era who formed human chains to demonstrate their desire for independence.

The 2026 Chain of Unity campaign website listed 55,600 participants on 22 August. Ukrainians and their supporters will gather on central streets and squares in Warsaw, London, Berlin, Rome, Toronto, New York, and other cities, where they will hold hands in local chains.

An interactive map allows people to find, join, or organize a local chain. Ukraine’s Cultural and Foreign Ministries support the action, which is being held only outside the country.

Ukrainians abroad will use Independence Day in other ways to draw attention to Ukraine’s wartime needs. Ukrainian community groups have organized rallies in 11 cities across 10 countries, calling on European governments to use Russian central bank reserves frozen under sanctions to fund Ukraine.

Why human chains still matter to Ukraine

Human chains became a powerful symbol of Ukrainian unity as Soviet rule weakened and the independence movement moved into the open.

On 21 January 1990, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians formed the nearly 700-kilometer “Ukrainian Wave” from Ivano-Frankivsk through Lviv to Kyiv. It became late-Soviet Ukraine’s largest public demonstration and helped build momentum for independence the following year.

The pro-independence People’s Movement of Ukraine (Rukh) spent five months organizing the chain. When gaps appeared, organizers bused volunteers from Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk to fill them, while participants supplied their own fuel.

The 1990 chain marked the anniversary of the 1919 union of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, two Ukrainian states that emerged after World War I. By joining hands across regions while their country remained part of the Soviet Union, participants showed broad support for restoring Ukraine's sovereignty and unity.

After 1991, Ukrainians kept the tradition on Unity Day, the 22 January holiday marking that union. They often joined hands across Dnipro bridges to symbolize east-west unity. This year’s action takes the gesture abroad: refugees, established Ukrainian communities, and supporters are using it to show they remain part of one nation.

Ukrainian analysts warn that the situation on a key stretch of the Donetsk front is becoming increasingly dangerous for two cities central to Ukraine's defense. The eastern flank of the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration is taking on an increasingly threatening character, and earlier stabilization measures are clearly not working, military analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko said.

The two cities anchor the line that has held Russia back for over a decade. Sloviansk and Kramatorsk form part of the so-called fortress belt, the line of Ukrainian fortifications that has restrained the Russian advance since 2014. The agglomeration serves as the most important bastion and logistics hub for Ukrainian forces in the east. A threat to it is a threat to the backbone of Ukraine's defense in Donbas.

Russia is 12 to 13 km away

Kovalenko laid out how close Russian forces have come. Their forward positions are 12-13 kilometers from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. He warned that if Russia's pace does not slow, the first infiltrations into both cities could come by December 2026.

The advance is measured in ground lost. The problem on the eastern flank runs about 30 kilometers, where Russia's 3rd Combined Arms Army operates.

"Only in the third week of August, Russian forces captured 21 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory in this section of the frontline," the expert said.

Russia uses the terrain of the "Cretaceous Flora" reserve, its hilly micro-relief rather than open steppe, to advance, absorbing not just square kilometers into pockets but villages and settlements.

The flank threatens neighboring sectors

The deterioration is spreading pressure sideways. The advance creates pressure from the southern bank of the Siverskyi Donets on the zone of the 3rd Army Corps, which had stabilized the Lyman direction and pinned Russian forces near Yampil, Kovalenko believes. The former Siverskyi direction saw the fastest rate of territorial loss of any sector in 2025, slowed in April and May 2026, but the 3rd Combined Arms Army's advance has not yet been stopped.

The cumulative loss is large. After losing more than 500 square kilometers over a year, the unstable flank, sagging since June 2025, is becoming a problem for other directions, looming over or pressuring them.

Kovalenko argued the sector has gone months without attention while threatening both the main agglomeration and the successfully held directions around it.

Analysts urge reinforcement before it is too late

Kovalenko proposed a specific fix. The sector must be reinforced as soon as possible, he said, suggesting that the nearest resource, Andrii Biletsky's 3rd Army Corps, often described as one of the most capable formations in Ukraine's forces, be used at least to relieve both banks of the Siverskyi Donets.

"Once infiltrations into Sloviansk and Kramatorsk begin, reinforcing garrisons and landing intelligence-directorate troops will not solve the problem but only delay the inevitable," he warned.

A second analyst gave a similar warning. Yurii Butusov, a drone company commander in the National Guard's "Khartia" corps, said that if Ukraine's forces retreat from there, Russia gains tactical advantages and Sloviansk-Kramatorsk is gradually lost, ultimately leading to the loss of the Donbas.

He also said that only Biletskyi can take responsibility for this battle.

"Only orderly command and organization at the front now will allow us to turn the course of a battle that is so far not going in our favor," Butusov said.

A Ukrainian company is building a thermal camera sharp enough to spot targets far beyond what its drones can see now. Ukrainian firm Oko Camera is developing the Oko HD, with a 1280×1024 sensor, company representatives told the defense outlet Oboronka at DALO Industry Days 2026, Scandinavia's largest defense industry exhibition, in Herning, Oboronka writes.

The camera's sensor has four times as many pixels as the company's previous lines, extending the range at which targets can be detected and recognized, directly affecting how far the drone or robot fitted with it can spot a target.

HD long-wave infrared cameras are rare on the global market and, the company says, are not currently available in Ukraine at all.

The sensor is built for long-range detection

One of the camera's main tasks is observing objects at great distances, and the higher-resolution sensor should let it detect and recognize targets from farther away, though the company has not disclosed the specific range, Oko Camera said.

Its type is what makes it uncommon.

"LWIR cameras, that is, long-wave infrared cameras with HD resolution, are not common on the world market," the company's partnerships manager said.

In Ukraine, they essentially do not yet exist, giving a drone or robotic system fitted with one a longer detection range than current domestic options allow.

It is aimed at production in 2027

The Oko HD is still a prototype. The company plans to make its first working samples by the end of 2026 and hand them to clients who have already requested the cameras, Oko Camera said.

It is meant to be both affordable and capable. The company expects the Oko HD to become one of the most accessible thermal HD cameras on the world market, and after testing confirms its specifications, plans to launch it into production in 2027.

Kyiv held the 9th International Veterans Forum. The event took place ahead of Ukraine’s Independence Day, with US Special Representative for Ukraine Keith Kellogg and German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul joining it, the Ukrainian Presidential Office reports.

As of 1 May 2026, more than 2 million people had veteran status. Of the 2,014,623 veterans in total, 1,471,193 had combatant status, while 159,132 had received disability status as a result of the war, according to the National Institute of Strategic Studies.

Ukrainians will decide who counts as a hero

At the forum, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the new Ukrainian Pantheon, where Ukrainians who played a significant role in shaping the national consciousness and identity will be buried.

Ukrainians themselves will decide whom to call their heroes, he said, adding that the veteran community should be involved in national commemoration policies.

The Cabinet of Ministers adopted a resolution establishing that the Ukrainian National Pantheon will be located on the grounds of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra National Preserve, which has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1990.

The forum brought together a veteran community of more than two million

The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra was founded in 1051 and was controlled by the Russian Church for centuries. After Ukraine gained independence, it was used by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate until the state began the process of returning it to the Ukrainian people.

“The Ukrainian Pantheon will definitely exist. Only Ukrainians will decide for themselves who our heroes are,” Zelenskyy stated.

He also emphasized that Ukraine’s independence rests on the shoulders of people who are ready to fight for it. According to Zelenskyy, independence is not a single moment in the country’s past.

“Each of us can name many important moments, days and battles when the fate of our state was being decided. And it is being decided now,” Zelenskyy stressed.

The Ukrainian president expressed hope that Ukraine would achieve peace and thanked the country’s defenders.

Ukrainian FP-1 drones struck an Ozon warehouse in Chapayevsk, Russia’s Samara Oblast, overnight on 22 August 2026, manufacturer Fire Point said.

The attack on the Chapayevsk facility expands Ukraine’s warehouse campaign from Wildberries, Russia’s largest online marketplace, to its second-largest rival, Ozon. Ukraine has repeatedly targeted Russia's major e-commerce distribution hubs to disrupt commercial logistics that Kyiv says help sustain Moscow’s war.

Ozon said the attack injured people and prompted the evacuation of more than 500 employees.

The strike was the first confirmed Ukrainian attack to damage and set fire to an Ozon warehouse, Reuters reported. A drone alert forced Ozon to evacuate a facility in Tatarstan on 31 July, but the building was undamaged and later reopened.

Fire Point said the facility is one of Ozon’s largest warehouses in Volga Oblast, storing goods and processing more than 215,000 orders for delivery each day.

Ozon and Wildberries—Russia’s two largest online marketplaces—and their smaller rivals collectively sell goods and services worth the equivalent of 8.5% of Russia’s GDP and employ 4 million people, Reuters reported in July.

Ozon suspended operations indefinitely and stopped accepting seller deliveries, the company said. As a result, shipments are being redirected to other facilities, while affected orders will either be fulfilled elsewhere or canceled and refunded.

Several people were receiving medical treatment, Samara Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev claimed. Neither he nor Ozon specified how many people were injured, and the extent of the damage remains unclear.

Ukraine’s previous strikes on Russian warehouses

Ukrainian drones had previously concentrated on Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer. Since 18 July, Ukraine has struck at least two dozen Wildberries warehouses, Reuters reported.

Ukrainian officials have alleged that Wildberries warehouses move military-linked goods, including drone components. The Kremlin has denied that the company supplies Russian forces. Fire Point made no corresponding claim about the Ozon warehouse.

Ukraine’s military said the same overnight wave also hit the Novokuibyshevsk refinery in Samara Oblast and caused a fire.

Russian and occupation officials claimed that the broader wave caused civilian deaths and injuries in Yeysk, Belgorod, Bryansk, and Russian-occupied Luhansk.