Exclusives

Desperate to save Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, Ukrainian forces counterattack and reinforce. A Russian pincer is slowly closing around the last two big free cities in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region. Winter will be a brief reprieve.

Military

Ukraine's Khartiia soldiers clear 4 km² near Kupiansk, while Russia pushes for main rail hub (VIDEO). On the left bank, Russian supply was so broken that they delivered water by drone.

Drones hit fuel depots in Sochi and an explosives plant 1,300 km away on the same night.

Spain keeps arming Ukraine against Russia's ballistic missiles, and promises even more. Madrid is readying a fresh batch of interceptors for Kyiv, and has ordered four new Patriot systems of its own in a $1.7 billion Raytheon deal.

Ukraine's F-16s are so short of Western missiles that pilots fall back on jet's built-in M61A1 Vulcan cannon, which risks killing civilians below. The AIM missiles the jets are rationing are the same ones defending Kyiv from the ground.

Ukraine says it struck a Bastion in Crimea, the launcher Russia pairs Zircon and Oniks missiles on. One of those missiles flies at hypersonic speed, and Russia has aimed both at targets far from any coastline.

Russian drone strikes SBU headquarters in central Kyiv. Zelenskyy says "geography" of Ukraine's response is set. The midday strike injured 12 people and damaged the nearby Sofia Kyivska historic complex, as Russia continues its relentless drone campaign against the capital.

Gunman on a motorcycle shoots the Russian air force general Ukraine says ordered the strike on Kyiv's children's hospital. The officer was hit twice as he stepped outside in a settlement near Engels, and surgeons in Saratov worked through the morning to keep him alive.

For first time, Ukraine shows its British Rapid Ranger air-defense system mounted on Spanish off-road chassis. Its crews call it "close-range storm". This 500-kilogram missile system is designed to catch what radar misses.

Intelligence and technology

Russia's answer to Starlink was written off as a failure, its satellites are still climbing. Forty-six days after their 19 July launch, the new craft sit at a median 365 km, higher than Russia's already-working first batch was at the same age.

Russia straps two small attack drones to wings of its long-range Gerans and releases them deep inside Ukraine. It rarely works, Flash says. An FPV drone drop was recently recorded in Kyiv Oblast, but there is no confirmation yet that it was carried out using a Gerbera.

Russia now hunts Kyiv by daylight too, Flash explains why.

International

Germany suspects Russian intelligence behind arson attack as hybrid warfare threat grows across Europe. The Munich attack follows attempts to disrupt Germany's power grid and comes amid mounting evidence of Russian covert operations targeting European countries supporting Ukraine.

Witkoff and Kushner to visit Kyiv and Moscow to revive peace talks as Russia ramps up attacks across Ukraine. The US envoys will meet Russian and Ukrainian leaders as Washington attempts to put peace talks back on track.

Finland ran Europe's largest civil defense drill since World War II inside a shelter carved under a sports arena. More than two thousand people spent hours underground in Kuopio while rescue services tested a facility that had never once been used for its wartime purpose.

Germany will close Russia's Bonn consulate after attributing Leipzig Airport drone attack to Moscow. Germany is tightening its response to Russia after the Leipzig drone plot, with new restrictions targeting Russian institutions and citizens as investigators identify two suspects.

Estonia paid $81 million for Ukraine's shells to firm that had never made one, now its defense minister is out. Estonia may have to repay €70 million in EU funds. The ammunition failed quality standards.

Poland sent Ukraine 350 tanks, Europe just agreed to refund it half a billion dollars. Once Hungary lifted its two-year veto, Warsaw's total refund for arming Kyiv is nearing $1.4 billion, with $500 million more due in 2027.

EU foreign ministers want Russia's ex-fighters out. Nobody has written down what counts as proof. Each member state would have to judge individual cases, and the bloc set itself a June deadline for the plan that its council still cannot approve.

Russian Black Sea attacks, low Danube waters push EU to seek alternative routes for Ukrainian grain exports. Ukraine's two main wartime export outlets are under pressure at once, threatening farm revenue as global crop prices climb.

Ukraine takes Zelenskyy's Russian airspace warning to UN aviation body. Kyiv's letter asks the UN aviation body to recommend that member states stop flying over Russia.

Belgium points Ukraine to next year's European loan instead of Russia's frozen cash. Earnings from the immobilized money underwrite an earlier European loan, while the sum they come from stays behind one government's objections.

Humanitarian and social impact

Ukraine adopts two-tier air raid alert system as Russia's mass drone attacks become the new normal. The new system will distinguish drone threats from the heightened threat of missile or combined strikes, changing how businesses and cities respond to air raids.

Political and legal developments

Ukraine orders temporary ceasefire as US envoys visit Moscow. Air raid alert sounds in Kyiv immediately as pause begins. The reported order covers 5–8 September as Washington seeks to restart peace talks after months of stalled negotiations, but Russian attacks continued as the pause was due to begin.

After years of disputes, Hungary finds common ground with Ukraine, on honoring Soviet deportations from Zakarpattia. A Rada resolution honors thousands who died in a Soviet deportation campaign targeting Hungarian- and German-speaking Zakarpattia residents.

Ukraine's anti-corruption agencies target Prosecutor General's Office official linked to fraudulent call centers. The operation targets an alleged criminal organization linked to a network of fraudulent call centers and asset laundering.

Read our previous daily review here.

Ukrainian Defense Forces units have been ordered to temporarily observe a ceasefire along the line of contact from 00:00 on 5 September through 23:59 on 8 September, Ukrainska Pravda reported, citing sources in several military brigades and a senior security official.

The order comes as US President Donald Trump’s special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are expected to visit Moscow and Kyiv this weekend for talks aimed at ending Russia’s war against Ukraine.

According to Ukrainska Pravda’s sources, Ukrainian units operating across the front have received instructions to observe the temporary “silence regime” during the four-day period.

An air raid alert was issued in Kyiv at 00:00 on 5 September just as the temporary ceasefire was due to take effect, with Russian drones reported over Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts.

Pause coincides with US envoys’ visits

Witkoff and Kushner are expected to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on 5 September before traveling to Kyiv for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on 6 September.

Their visit comes after months of stalled negotiations. US-mediated talks between Russia and Ukraine froze in February following the outbreak of war between the US, Israel and Iran, while subsequent contacts between US, Russian and Ukrainian officials have failed to produce a breakthrough.

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Witkoff and Kushner to visit Kyiv and Moscow to revive peace talks as Russia ramps up attacks across Ukraine

Zelenskyy said on 4 September that Ukraine would ensure conditions for the US envoys’ safe travel and called for Russia to reciprocate by refraining from strikes during the period needed for the meetings and related logistics.

The reported Ukrainian order would extend the pause beyond the envoys’ visits, covering 5–8 September.

Russia has continued its intensive drone campaign against Ukrainian cities even as diplomatic contacts have resumed. Kyiv remains skeptical of Moscow’s willingness to accept a genuine ceasefire, with Ukrainian officials warning that Russia may use negotiations to buy time while continuing its military campaign.

German security authorities have found strong indications that a suspected arson attack near defense companies in Munich may have been carried out on behalf of a Russian intelligence service, German broadcaster Tagesschau reported on 3 September.

The attack is part of a growing series of suspected sabotage and espionage operations in Germany as European governments warn that Russia is using covert methods to target countries supporting Ukraine.

Two Bulgarian nationals were arrested after allegedly throwing incendiary devices at a construction site near the headquarters of Rohde & Schwarz in Munich. One device started a fire, while another was found unexploded and neutralized by police specialists. No one was injured and there was no major damage. The two suspects were placed in pre-trial detention on 4 September, according to Tagesschau.

Rohde & Schwarz develops defense and security technology, including systems used to detect, track and jam drones. The construction site is also near the headquarters of Helsing, a German defense company that produces AI-enabled combat drones and supplies Ukraine’s armed forces.

It has not been established whether either company was specifically targeted.

Investigators suspect Russian intelligence link

According to Tagesschau, German security authorities have strong indications that the Munich attack could have been carried out by so-called “low-level” or disposable agents working for Russian intelligence services.

Such agents can be recruited through intermediaries to carry out individual tasks for payment, ranging from photographing defense companies to conducting sabotage operations.

German authorities have already identified other cases in which people were allegedly recruited to gather information on defense companies involved in supporting Ukraine.

In August, German authorities arrested a 33-year-old Ukrainian citizen in Thuringia who is accused of photographing a Bavarian defense company in June and sending the images to an alleged handler. Investigators suspect the activity was preparation for a sabotage operation, according to Tagesschau.

German authorities also arrested two people in March over an alleged plot to spy on a Bavarian drone manufacturer and its managing director. Investigators said they believed the operation may have been intended to prepare the man’s assassination.

Power-grid attacks remain unresolved

The Munich attack came days after two attempts to sabotage Germany’s electricity grid in Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia.

The attacks involved improvised devices apparently designed to cause short circuits on high-voltage lines. German investigators are treating the cases as possible terrorism or anti-constitutional sabotage, according to Tagesschau.

Authorities believe the two attacks may be connected, but have not established who was behind them. A Russian intelligence connection remains possible, although investigators currently have no evidence linking the power-grid attacks to the suspected Russian operation in Munich.

German authorities are investigating multiple possible forms of hybrid activity rather than assuming that every recent sabotage incident has the same origin.

More than 165 suspected sabotage cases and 747 suspicious drone incidents in Germany this year

The incidents come amid a broader increase in suspected sabotage and espionage activity in Germany.

A confidential assessment by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) recorded more than 165 suspected sabotage cases across Germany between January and the end of August, according to Tagesschau.

The assessment also recorded 112 crimes linked to espionage, including 26 cases in which authorities suspect agent activity for sabotage purposes.

German authorities recorded 747 suspicious drone incidents during the same period, involving 1,068 drones spotted over critical infrastructure, military facilities and defense companies.

The figures do not establish that Russia was responsible for all of these incidents. But German authorities have increasingly identified Russian intelligence services as a potential source of sabotage and espionage as Moscow seeks to pressure European countries supporting Ukraine.

Germany and its allies have also accused Russia of being behind an August drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport, which Berlin and its partners described as part of a Russian hybrid campaign intended to intimidate and divide European countries supporting Ukraine.

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Germany blames Moscow for Leipzig drone attack, closes consulate and cultural center among sweeping diplomatic measures

The suspected Munich attack adds to growing evidence that Russia’s war against Ukraine is being accompanied by covert operations targeting the defense industry and critical infrastructure of countries helping Kyiv.

Budapest praised the Verkhovna Rada—Ukraine’s parliament—after it voted 261–0 to classify mass arrests, deportations, and persecution by the Soviet military administration in Zakarpattia (also known as Transcarpathia) from 1944 to 1946 as crimes of the communist regime.

The vote makes the Verkhovna Rada the first state body in the world to recognize the repression of Zakarpattia’s Hungarian community as a crime, according to European Pravda. It creates an opening for historical reconciliation after years of minority-rights disputes, strained relations, and blocking Ukraine’s EU accession. However, Budapest continues to press Kyiv for further concessions.

After Soviet forces took control of Zakarpattia—Ukraine’s westernmost region, bordering Hungary and home to the country’s largest ethnic Hungarian community—the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, and SMERSH, Soviet military counterintelligence, detained civilian men aged 18 to 50 under the pretext of mobilization.

The men were deported without trial to labor camps and the Soviet Gulag prison-camp system. Hungary’s Foreign Ministry said tens of thousands of Hungarian- and German-speaking men were deported, and many thousands died under the inhumane conditions of forced labor.

The campaign became known in Hungarian as malenkij robot. Derived from a Russian phrase meaning “a little work,” Soviet troops used this deceptive phrase when taking people away.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Anita Orbán—no relation to former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—called the declaration “a fitting tribute” to thousands targeted by Soviet terror because of their Hungarian identity. She said Hungary was ready to help uncover the truth about the past and honor the victims.

The resolution calls for memorials, archival publications, research, and the inclusion of the repression in educational programs. It also draws a parallel with Russia’s present-day occupation practices, saying Moscow is committing similar large-scale repression against civilians in occupied Ukraine.

Marton Hajdu, chair of the Hungarian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, nevertheless said reconciliation must be accompanied by Kyiv’s full implementation of its June agreement with Budapest on minority rights.

A cautious thaw in Hungarian-Ukrainian relations

The exchange adds to tentative signs of improving relations since Péter Magyar ended Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power in April. Magyar’s government summoned Russia’s ambassador after Moscow struck Zakarpattia and later closed a money-laundering case involving $82 million belonging to Ukraine’s state-owned Oschadbank, reversing another Orbán-era dispute.

Budapest and Kyiv also reached a June agreement covering Hungarian-language education and the use of Hungarian in public services. Yet Magyar’s government has continued to slow parts of Ukraine’s EU accession process amid domestic pressure to defend Zakarpattia’s Hungarian community. The recognition of Soviet crimes, therefore, provides new common ground without settling the wider disagreements between the neighbors.

Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) have launched an operation targeting an alleged criminal organization headed by an official of the Prosecutor General’s Office and involved in protecting a network of fraudulent call centers and laundering assets.

Fraudulent call centers have become a major organized-crime problem in Ukraine, with authorities investigating hundreds of suspected operations and working with international partners to pursue these networks.

NABU announced the operation on 4 September, saying further details would be released later.

Deputy department head reportedly detained

Ukrainska Pravda, citing sources, reported that NABU and SAPO had detained Serhii Kropyva, deputy head of the Prosecutor General’s Office’s Department of International Legal Cooperation.

Ukrainska Pravda also reported that investigators were carrying out searches at the Prosecutor General’s Office. The outlet published footage showing NABU employees entering the building, including climbing over its fence with ladders.

The allegations against Kropyva have not been detailed publicly by NABU, and his detention has not been officially confirmed by the Prosecutor General’s Office.

Prosecutor General’s Office pledges cooperation

The Prosecutor General’s Office said the circumstances surrounding the possible involvement of one of its employees in illegal activity connected to fraudulent call centers must be established by investigators.

The office said it would provide anti-corruption authorities with all information and assistance required by law and that the case should receive an objective legal assessment.

The employee under investigation will be suspended from official duties for the duration of the pre-trial investigation, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office.

Ukraine has been targeting fraudulent call centers

The Prosecutor General’s Office said authorities have carried out more than 1,050 searches over the past 12 months and shut down around 340 fraudulent call centers comprising more than 5,000 operator positions.

Ukrainian prosecutors have also participated in 37 international joint investigation teams coordinated by Eurojust and supported by Europol, the office said.

Authorities are currently investigating 147 criminal proceedings related to the activity. More than 183 people have been notified of suspicion, while indictments against 93 people have been sent to court, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office.

The established losses suffered by victims amount to tens of millions of hryvnias, it said.

Kropyva’s previous positions

According to Ukrainska Pravda, Kropyva previously worked in Ukraine’s Cyber Police, where he headed its Kyiv department and later served as first deputy head.

The outlet reported that former Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova appointed Kropyva to head a newly created department in 2022 without a competitive selection process. The department was responsible for economic crimes and state cybersecurity, according to Ukrainska Pravda.

Before joining the Prosecutor General’s Office, Kropyva reportedly served as deputy head of the Odesa Regional State Administration under Oleh Kiper.

The investigation is ongoing, and the allegations have not yet been adjudicated by a court.

The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine adopted a decision to introduce two levels of air alerts, with yellow for drone attacks and red for a heightened threat of missile or combined strikes, Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi said on 3 September. Under the yellow level, designated businesses can operate if they meet safety requirements, while a red alert will require work to stop and people to move to shelters.

Russia continues to attack Ukrainian cities with drones and other long-range weapons, repeatedly disrupting civilian and economic activity. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia is using mass drone attacks to wear down civilian life and economic activity, while the existing system of signaling all aerial threats in the same way no longer fits Russia's tactics.

How it will work

Businesses cleared to operate under a yellow alert must ensure staff and visitors can reach shelters. Where that access is missing, the Cabinet is giving businesses three months to provide it.

The General Staff, the Air Force, the government, the Defense Ministry, the Interior Ministry, and the State Emergency Service will set the specific indicators for declaring each level weekly, Zelenskyy said.

What still has to be worked out

Zelenskyy also directed officials to develop geographic targeting for alerts, so warnings can be limited to areas facing an actual threat. The measure is still being worked out and is not yet part of the new system.

The new approach is intended to allow economic activity to continue during drone threats while preserving stricter measures for more serious attacks. The government has not yet finalized which businesses will qualify to remain open under a yellow alert or all of the criteria for applying the two levels.

US President Donald Trump’s special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are expected to travel to Moscow and Kyiv this weekend for talks aimed at restarting efforts to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, Axios reported, citing US officials.

The planned trip comes as Washington seeks to revive negotiations that stalled earlier this year and as Russia continues its military campaign against Ukraine. Russia has dramatically stepped up its attacks on Ukraine in recent weeks, launching increasingly large waves of drones and missiles against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure.

Moscow talks Saturday, Kyiv on Sunday

Witkoff and Kushner are expected to travel to Moscow on Friday, 4 September, and meet Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday, 5 September, Axios reported.

They are then scheduled to travel to Kyiv for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday, 6 September. Zelenskyy confirmed the planned meetings on 4 September.

The Kyiv visit would be the first by Witkoff and Kushner since Trump returned to the White House. The two envoys have traveled to Moscow several times to meet Putin but have not previously visited Kyiv during the current Trump administration.

Ukrainian and US officials have discussed a Kyiv visit for several months, but it has reportedly been postponed multiple times for various reasons.

Zelenskyy confirms visit, calls for reciprocal pause in strikes

Zelenskyy said Ukraine is preparing for the envoys’ visit and will ensure the necessary conditions for their safe arrival.

He said Ukraine would refrain from airstrikes against Russia for the period required for the talks and related logistics, and called on Moscow to provide a reciprocal pause in its air attacks.

“We care specifically about them, not Russia,” Zelenskyy said, adding that Kyiv expects Russia to “mirror” the pause.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine wants the visit and negotiations to be as constructive and substantive as possible, while acknowledging that the outcome will depend on the proposals Witkoff and Kushner bring and Russia’s response to them.

Talks stalled earlier this year

The Trump administration’s mediation between Russia and Ukraine was effectively frozen in February after the outbreak of the US-Israeli war with Iran.

Witkoff and Kushner have continued holding separate discussions with Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in the months since, but the talks have produced little significant progress.

The renewed push comes as Washington has again sought a path toward direct negotiations. CIA Director John Ratcliffe also recently traveled to Moscow and discussed the possibility of restarting diplomatic efforts, including a potential Trump-Putin-Zelenskyy summit.

Kyiv remains skeptical of Moscow’s intentions

The diplomatic effort comes alongside continued Russian attacks and an increasingly escalatory military situation.

Kyiv has faced near-constant large-scale drone attacks in recent weeks, while Ukrainian officials have warned that Russia may be preparing further military escalation. Axios reported that Ukrainian officials remain highly skeptical of Putin’s intentions and believe Russia could be preparing a major escalation in the war.

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Russian drone strikes SBU headquarters in central Kyiv. Zelenskyy says “geography” of Ukraine’s response is set

At the same time, Ukrainian officials have continued to argue that negotiations should not be abandoned.

Kyrylo Budanov, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff and former military intelligence chief, told The New York Times that US-mediated talks could resume in September. He said, however, that conditions for a ceasefire were unlikely to emerge before spring 2027.

Budanov has argued that Ukraine must keep diplomatic channels open even while fighting continues, saying that “the war cannot be eternal.”

The planned meetings will therefore take place against a backdrop of continued battlefield fighting and increased air attacks, with major disagreements still unresolved between Kyiv and Moscow.

A Russian drone struck the central building of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) on Volodymyrska Street in central Kyiv on September 4, injuring 12 people, according to Ukrainian officials.

The strike hit the SBU’s central headquarters directly opposite St. Sophia’s Cathedral, one of Kyiv’s best-known historic landmarks.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said nine of the injured were hospitalized, with two in serious condition.

Drone targeted SBU chief’s office

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the drone was directed toward the office of SBU chief Oleksandr Poklad inside the building.

The SBU confirmed that the strike was deliberately aimed at Poklad’s office, but said he was not injured.

Zelenskyy said he had ordered Poklad to prepare a “meaningful” and, if possible, symmetrical response to the Russian attack, with Ukraine’s military supporting the operation.

Later, Zelenskyy said Ukraine had already determined the "geography" of its response and would choose the timing based on when it could achieve an effective result.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called the strike on the SBU headquarters “major escalation that demands resolute responses,” saying it showed Moscow’s rejection of diplomacy during a renewed push for peace.

Kyiv faces near-daily Russian drone attacks

The strike occurred in the middle of the day in one of central Kyiv’s busiest areas, with large numbers of civilians and vehicles on nearby streets, according to Euromaidan Press sources on the ground.

The attack came amid a sustained Russian campaign of drone attacks on Kyiv and the surrounding oblast, with the capital repeatedly targeted by large waves of jet-powered Geran drones and other weapons.

The attacks have increasingly brought explosions, fires and falling debris to residential and civilian areas across the capital and its suburbs, forcing emergency crews to respond repeatedly as the city remains under a persistent aerial threat.

Russia’s new models of Geran drones, developed from Iranian-designed Shaheds, are harder for Ukrainian air defenses to intercept. Moscow is deploying them in growing numbers, increasing the chances that drones reach Ukrainian cities and intensifying the threat to civilians.

Building damaged and fire breaks out

The drone strike caused a fire in the building, which emergency crews later extinguished.

Klitschko said sections of the building’s ceiling and an exterior wall were destroyed. Emergency services remained at the scene after the fire was brought under control.

The SBU said the damaged headquarters would be restored.

The agency also vowed that Russia would face a response through further Ukrainian operations, including strikes against Russian assets and networks.

Historic Sofia Kyivska complex damaged

The Russian strike also damaged a building within the National Conservation Area “Sofia Kyivska,” located directly across Volodymyrska Street from the SBU headquarters, according to Suspilne.

According to the reserve’s director general Nelia Kukovalska, the blast shattered windows and destroyed the glass entrance structure of the complex’s Consistory building, whose exterior faces Volodymyrska Street.

No one at the reserve was injured, as staff and visitors took shelter. The historic St. Sophia Cathedral itself was not damaged, according to Kukovalska.

The nearby Zavertailo bakery was also damaged, though all staff and customers survived after taking shelter in the basement.

Russia's newest batch of Starlink-style satellites is gaining altitude sooner and sitting higher than the country's already-working first batch did at the same point, an analysis by Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi found. That complicates recent reports that the batch will stay far below its working altitude—though a few of the craft clearly have malfunctioned.

Moscow is racing to field its own orbital network to replace the Starlink service its troops used without authorization, a system experts warn could one day relay commands to long-range strike drones.

Where the "failure" verdict came from

Business Insider reported that all 16 satellites in the second Rassvet batch—launched 19 July—had fallen short of their target orbit, citing public US Space Force tracking data. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) noted that many of the craft sat between 300 and 400 kilometers, well below their intended orbit. Russia looks unprepared to deploy at this pace and will likely face further delays, ISW assessed. At those low heights, thicker air drags on satellites and shortens their lives. Rassvet—Russian for "Dawn"—is built by the Russian firm Bureau 1440. Moscow rushed the network in after SpaceX cut off Russian forces' access to Starlink.

What the altitude data shows

Militarnyi's own reading of the tracking record points the other way. A rocket drops the satellites near 300 kilometers, and they raise themselves over months on their own engines. The July batch fired those engines days earlier than the March group, giving it a head start. By day 46, the new batch's median altitude was 365 kilometers, against 314 for the first. Thirteen of the new craft had passed 320 kilometers and ten cleared 350, against five and one for the first batch. The newer craft climb at a slower daily pace, but the early start left them well ahead on height.

Militarnyi cautions that the batch cannot be judged before roughly 100 to 125 days after launch—around late October—the window in which most of the March craft passed 500 kilometers.

The malfunctions are real

Two satellites show no real climb and are sinking toward the atmosphere, a third rose and slipped back, and a fourth stalled with the cause unclear. The March launch lost one craft outright and left two more stuck below working height. The company had listed a target orbit near 800 kilometers, yet the first batch settled far lower and still works. Militarnyi counts thirteen of its satellites in a stable orbit near 508 kilometers, where Business Insider and ISW put twelve of them at roughly 550. By its count, they now open at least two communication windows over Ukraine each day, each running longer than an hour.

Ukrainian drones set fire to two fuel depots around Sochi and hit a Russian air defense position overnight on 4 September, according to monitoring channels. They also reported that drones struck an explosives factory and a petrochemical plant in Bashkortostan the same night, more than a thousand kilometers from Ukraine. Russian officials acknowledged the depot fire and said nothing about the air defense site.

Two depots burned behind their anti-drone screens

Astra's OSINT analysts geolocated the fires to the Rosneft-Kubannefteprodukt depot in Sochi's Adler district and to the Lukoil-Yugneftprodukt depot on the federal territory of Sirius. Sochi mayor Andrei Proshunin confirmed a fire at a depot. The regional operational headquarters claimed there were no casualties. Sochi is a Russian resort city on the eastern Black Sea coast, about 600 km from the frontline in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian OSINT channel Cyberboroshno identified one of the hit sites as the BATO aviation fuel terminal, which fuels aircraft at airports across Krasnodar Krai. Every tank there stood behind purpose-built protective structures, Militarnyi reported, and the Lukoil site holds 12 tanks with a combined volume of about 8,400 m³. The burning depot sits roughly 100 meters from Sochi international airport, Russia's fifth-busiest by passenger traffic in 2024, the Russian outlet Agentstvo found.

Panoramic imagery from this year shows anti-drone netting around the tanks at both depots. Two days before the strikes, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak claimed Russian refineries were better protected than those in the UAE, and Russian President Vladimir Putin said their protection level was now completely different.

An air defense position caught fire near the Abkhazia border

Astra analyzed eyewitness footage and placed a detonation and fire at a launch position near the settlement of Sirius, by the Psou river on the Abkhazia border, where an S-300 or S-400 system is based. The Ukrainian monitoring channels Exilenova+ and Supernova+ said drones struck the air defenses directly. Russia's Defense Ministry and local authorities reported nothing about it.

Drones had tried the same area in May. A Ukrainian sea drone struck the Russian supply vessel Nefrit at Sochi port the previous day.

Explosives and petrochemicals hit in Bashkortostan

Drones reached Sterlitamak on the morning of 4 September, hitting the Avangard plant and the Sterlitamak Petrochemical Plant, footage published by Supernova+ shows. Residents reported a series of explosions, and one man said on video that about a dozen drones had already flown toward the petrochemical works. The frames show Ukrainian FP-1 strike drones. 

 Russia's Defense Ministry claimed it downed 490 drones overnight across several regions, occupied Crimea, and the Black Sea.

Spain will send Ukraine more Patriot interceptor missiles, Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares confirmed, according to Le Monde.

Patriot interceptors are among the few weapons Ukraine has that can stop Russian ballistic missiles. The specialized rounds are scarce worldwide, and manufacturer Raytheon cannot build them fast enough to meet demand. Each costs $3 million to $4 million.

Spain confirms the flow will grow

Albares spoke at an informal meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Ireland on 2 September. He reaffirmed Madrid's support as Kyiv pressed for more interceptors. "We have been doing this for a long time, and we will continue to do so," he said. He confirmed that Madrid is preparing a new batch. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the bloc is also working with non-member states to lift Ukraine's air defenses.

Madrid and Kyiv meet in Wicklow

The confirmation followed talks with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha. They met on the sidelines of the same EU gathering, in Wicklow. Sybiha said he pressed Ukraine's urgent need to strengthen its air and ballistic missile defenses. He also thanked Spain for its solidarity. Albares reaffirmed Spain's role as a founding member of the Integrated Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition, which ten countries launched in Paris on 13 July. The group aims to build a shared anti-ballistic capability, and its declaration calls the coalition purely defensive. Spanish military instructors are training Ukrainian technicians to maintain the systems.

What Spain has promised so far

Spain is not just giving—it is also buying. In December 2025, Madrid signed a $1.7 billion contract with US arms maker Raytheon for four new Patriot systems. It was Spain's largest Patriot order yet. The deal covers radars, launchers, command-and-control stations, and training. Spanish firm Sener builds the control system for the GEM-T interceptor those launchers fire. Spain is one of only a handful of European countries that operate Patriots.

What Spain has already sent

Spain has supplied Ukraine with Patriot missiles before. In March, Madrid pledged five older PAC-2 interceptors from an air-defense artillery regiment at Marines, near Valencia. Madrid has pledged €1 billion ($1.16 billion) in military aid for 2026. Ukraine has spent months urging partners to release interceptors from their stockpiles.

Finland shut more than 2,000 people into a rock-hewn shelter that is normally a sports hall in Kuopio on 2 September, with some remaining overnight to practice operating the facility, the Associated Press reported. The two-day exercise, Shelter 2026, was the largest civil defense drill in Europe since World War II, by AP's account. Its scenario had cyberattacks cutting power and water while the threat of Russian missile strikes grew.

What two hours underground exposed

Three colleges got the alarm at 11:30 on 2 September, and students had about half an hour to reach the shelter, called Luola, or the Cave, Yle reported that evening. Staff barred the doors behind them. Partitions divided the sports hall into rooms of about 200 people. There were not enough beds, so people rested in shifts, and 60 dry toilets served everyone. The internet worked poorly, and the air grew heavy after an hour. The site holds up to 7,000 people under emergency law.

Antti Haataja, preparedness chief at the North Savo Rescue Department, said the move underground went calmly and faster than he expected. A real emergency would put those inside to work, he added, including emptying the toilets. More than a hundred people stayed through the night into 3 September, Yle said, while AP described hundreds sleeping on trestle beds.

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Finland ends nuclear weapons ban as parliament approves major NATO-aligned defense shift

Finland is reading Ukraine's experience

Retired Finnish Army Colonel Asko Muhonen, who organized the drill, said Finland has to learn from Ukraine, where people sometimes have only minutes to reach a metro station. What matters is cover they can actually get to, not a shelter that survives a nuclear blast. Ukraine's parliament is advancing a Finnish-style bill that would put one within 10 minutes of everyone.

Dmytro Untila, 20, a Ukrainian student in Kuopio, was at home in Odesa when Russian missiles hit the city on 24 February 2022, and waited the strike out in his building's entrance hall, having nowhere better to go. Training like this would have helped in Ukraine, he said, "because nobody knew this could happen."

The pressure Finland and its neighbors are drilling against

Finland shares more than 1,300 km of border with Russia and joined NATO with Sweden after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Shelters answer only part of the pressure. Russia is running a campaign of sabotage across Europe, Western officials say, a Russian aircraft is suspected of having entered Finnish airspace on 20 August, and US intelligence has warned that Poland and the Baltic states may face wider Russian hybrid attacks for backing Kyiv.

On 4 September, Ukraine's military intelligence agency HUR published drone footage of an August operation against a Russian coastal missile launcher in occupied Crimea, it said on Telegram. Its special unit Group 13 struck the launcher and hit fuel trucks and a command vehicle on the peninsula in the same operation. 

What HUR says its operators hit

The target was a Bastion, the carrier of Zircon and Oniks missiles. Russia uses those missiles for terrorist strikes against Ukraine, HUR said.

Group 13 operators destroyed and struck two fuel trucks and a command-and-staff vehicle belonging to Russian forces, the agency said. It placed the work in August 2026 without giving a date or a place on the peninsula.

The footage shows the view from drone cameras closing on the targets. HUR did not say what kind of drones its operators used, and the unit works with both aerial and naval systems, including naval drones rigged to carry FPV drones.

Designated 3K55, the system defends a shoreline and hits both surface and ground targets, warships among them. It takes up to five minutes to deploy, fires supersonic P-800 Oniks and hypersonic Zircon missiles, and reaches from 300 to 600 km depending on the missile and the mode of use. It doubles as an air defense asset, tracking up to 50 objects along the horizon at up to 250 km with passive radar and 450 km with active radar. Russia has fielded it since 2010 and builds it in a mobile version and a silo-based one.

Other Ukrainian services have hit Bastions before

Ukraine's Navy said its forces struck a Bastion's launch positions and deployment site on the peninsula overnight on 16 August, without naming a unit. Ukrainian forces hit a Bastion launcher in the occupied village of Aktachi in March, and in February they struck the concentration area of the Russian brigade that operates the system in Crimea.

In an operation earlier in the summer, one of Group 13's uncrewed boats launched attack drones at two Russian radars in occupied Crimea without the vessel ever reaching shore.

Strikes on the peninsula continued overnight

Drone attacks on occupied Crimea have been running for weeks, and they continued into 4 September, though what was hit this time is not yet known. 

Explosions sounded in Sevastopol and Dzhankoi district, Suspilne reported. Monitoring channels logged blasts and drone flights past 04:00, and satellite imagery showed a fire west of the airfield at Hvardiiske, with the cause unconfirmed. Russia's Defense Ministry claimed 490 drones downed over Crimea, other occupied territories, and Russian regions.

Ukraine's F-16 pilots are so short of air-to-air missiles that on some daytime sorties they go up with nothing but the plane's gun. Instead of using effective AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) and the shorter-range AIM-9 Sidewinder, Ukrainian forces are left with the M61A1 Vulcan 20mm rotary cannon, which can pose a grave danger to civilians, the War Zone reports.

Destroying Russian targets with the M61A1 Vulcan 20mm rotary cannon carries risks: the cannon rounds, similar to grenades, can strike a fairly wide area when they hit the ground, potentially killing innocent people.

Worse, the AIM missiles the F-16s are rationing are the same ones that arm the NASAMS batteries defending Kyiv, so every jet-fired round competes with ground air defense for the same scarce stock.

A 107th Wing commander using the callsign "Phantom" confirmed the shortage when a journalist asked him directly whether Ukraine was severely short of missiles for its F-16s.

“Yes, that’s true. Any aircraft without weapons is … useless,” Phantom said.

Kyiv wants the missiles, and a way to make them

Stopping as many Russian Geran drones and cruise missiles as possible before they reach Ukrainian cities takes missiles, and Phantom was blunt about what the fleet needs. He called for more air-to-air missiles and for interceptors to reload the US-made ground-based Patriot batteries.

"We require more means of protection, such as Patriot missiles and air-to-air missiles, AIM-9s or AIM-120s to our fleet," he said.

The fix he wants outlasts any single shipment: "At least we need to try to increase the production, or at least to allow Ukraine to localize the production in Ukraine or other European countries."

Until that exists, the arithmetic stays brutal, as every missile fired at a Russian drone or cruise missile is one fewer for the next attack.

A cheaper rocket enters the mix

One weapon Phantom did not mention may ease that math. Ukrainian F-16s now appear to carry the laser-guided 70mm APKWS II rocket.

Built from a standard unguided rocket fitted with a laser-guidance kit, it is far cheaper than an AMRAAM and has already become a primary anti-drone weapon for US jets in the Middle East — a lower-cost way to knock down drones and subsonic cruise missiles without spending a scarce air-to-air missile on each one.

Germany will close Russia’s General Consulate in Bonn, terminate the agreement concerning the Russian House in Berlin, and tighten entry controls for Russian citizens. Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul announced this at a joint press conference with Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt on 1 September, after German authorities formally attributed the attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport to Russia.

German investigators have identified two suspects allegedly linked to the operation: a Russian-born man with a Latvian passport and a Belarusian man with a Russian passport. This information was reported by Süddeutsche Zeitung. Investigators believe both have links to Russian state structures, according to the report.

Both men have already left Germany, complicating efforts to bring them to justice, Tagesschau reports. One of Berlin’s responses was the closure of Russia’s Consulate General in Bonn — the last Russian consulate general remaining in Germany.

Germany tightens its Russia policy

Russia’s General Consulate in Bonn will close on 18 September, according to Wadephul. Germany will also seek additional EU sanctions against people linked to Russian hybrid attacks, increase pressure on Russia’s “shadow fleet,” and strengthen entry controls for Russian nationals.

He stated that since the beginning of "the unlawful war of aggression" against Ukraine, Germany's goal has been to bring the war to an end, restore the peace order in Europe, and return to a constructive relationship.

"However, this requires a minimum level of willingness on the Russian side. We must acknowledge that Russia shows no willingness to reach an accommodation,” Wadephul said.

Moscow rejected the accusations. Russian President Vladimir Putin called Germany’s response a “grave mistake,” TASS reports.

The investigation leads to two suspects

According to German investigators, the Belarusian suspect left DNA traces on one of the drones, inside a container containing explosives, and on an antenna found near the airport. The Russian-born suspect, who holds a Latvian passport, is believed to have coordinated and directed the operation, entered Germany through Berlin, and then traveled toward Saxony.

The Russian-born suspect left Germany two days before the attack, while the Belarusian suspect also left the country.

What happened at Leipzig Airport

The diplomatic response stems from a sabotage attempt on 4 August, when a bomb-laden drone struck a Ukrainian An-124 cargo aircraft but failed to detonate. The drone, carrying explosives, remained unnoticed for about four hours before being discovered, while later analysis indicated it had been aimed at the aircraft near its fuel tanks.

Exclusives

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Military

Ukraine's Khartiia soldiers clear 4 km² near Kupiansk, while Russia pushes for main rail hub (VIDEO). On the left bank, Russian supply was so broken that they delivered water by drone.

Gunman on a motorcycle shoots the Russian air force general Ukraine says ordered the strike on Kyiv's children's hospital. The officer was hit twice as he stepped outside in a settlement near Engels, and surgeons in Saratov worked through the morning to keep him alive.

Russia now hunts Kyiv by daylight too, Flash explains why.

Intelligence and technology

Poland sent Ukraine 350 tanks—Europe just agreed to refund it half a billion dollars. Once Hungary lifted its two-year veto, Warsaw's total refund for arming Kyiv is nearing $1.4 billion—with $500 million more due in 2027.

Russia straps two small attack drones to wings of its long-range Gerans and releases them deep inside Ukraine. It rarely works, Flash says. An FPV drone drop was recently recorded in Kyiv Oblast, but there is no confirmation yet that it was carried out using a Gerbera.

For first time, Ukraine shows its British Rapid Ranger air-defense system mounted on Spanish off-road chassis. Its crews call it "close-range storm". This 500-kilogram missile system is designed to catch what radar misses.

Ukrainian brigade trials Serval Cube EW dome in combat-like conditions, suppresses every drone launched at it. Serval Cube jams the control, navigation, and video-transmission channels a drone depends on rather than destroying it outright.

International

Ukraine takes Zelenskyy's Russian airspace warning to UN aviation body. Kyiv's letter asks the UN aviation body to recommend that member states stop flying over Russia.

Humanitarian and social impact

Russian Black Sea attacks, low Danube waters push EU to seek alternative routes for Ukrainian grain exports. Ukraine's two main wartime export outlets are under pressure at once, threatening farm revenue as global crop prices climb.

Political and legal developments

Estonia paid $81 million for Ukraine's shells to firm that had never made one—now its defense minister is out. Estonia may have to repay €70 million in EU funds. The ammunition failed quality standards.

EU foreign ministers want Russia's ex-fighters out. Nobody has written down what counts as proof. Each member state would have to judge individual cases, and the bloc set itself a June deadline for the plan that its council still cannot approve.

Belgium points Ukraine to next year's European loan instead of Russia's frozen cash. Earnings from the immobilized money underwrite an earlier European loan, while the sum they come from stays behind one government's objections.

Read our earlier daily review here.

Estonia's defense minister resigned on 2 September over a failed €70 million ammunition deal for Ukraine, ERR reported. The state procurement agency paid EU funds to companies that had never sold artillery shells. Estonian taxpayers may now have to cover the losses.

The Baltic states have poured billions into defense since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Estonia alone redirected €500 million toward air defense and drones. It pledged 0.25% of GDP in annual aid for Kyiv. Defense budgets have grown faster than the procurement systems managing them.

Minister walks over "socks and ammunition"

Hanno Pevkur has held the post since 2022. Amid the scandal, he told Estonian public broadcaster ETV he would step down.

"The minister does not count socks and ammunition," Pevkur said.

RKIK's former chief countered that no major decisions were made without the ministry's approval.

Three opposition parties called for his resignation before he announced it. Prime Minister Kristen Michal said Pevkur was not personally at fault but acknowledged political responsibility applied. The resignation followed a National Audit Office report released on 28 August. Estonia's Prosecutor's Office has also opened a criminal investigation into the procurement.

The deal that fell apart

In 2024, Estonia's Center for Defense Investments (RKIK) signed four contracts with Datasel S.R.L., an Italian-registered firm. Eesti Ekspress reported that the Indian company Neco Defense Munitions owned it. Neither had ever sold a single artillery shell. RKIK paid roughly $81 million in advance using the EU's European Peace Facility. The first delivery was due in November 2024. Ammunition that arrived failed to meet quality standards. Estonia canceled the deals and filed a case at the European Court of Arbitration in Strasbourg.

Pevkur is the second Baltic defense minister to resign in four months. Latvia's Andris Sprūds stepped down in May after drone incursions from Russia's war destabilized the country's government.

Poland will recover hundreds of millions of euros from a shared European Union fund for weapons it handed to Ukraine, the defense outlet Militarnyi reported. The money had been frozen for two years and only started moving after a change of government in Hungary lifted a veto.

Europe's ability to keep weapons moving to Ukraine rests on members trusting they will be paid back for what they give away. When that cost-sharing seizes up, national governments face the full bill alone, and the case for the next donation gets harder. A single member's veto can jam that machinery for years.

The money starts flowing again

Poland will receive up to $500 million in 2027 from the European Peace Facility (EPF), an EU fund that reimburses member states for military aid to Ukraine. Deputy Defense Minister Paweł Zalewski told the Polish news agency PAP that the ceiling combines the $465 million now secured with a possible $12–35 million more, depending on which of the two payout options the European Commission picks. Warsaw had already collected $960 million earlier, bringing its total EU reimbursement to roughly $1.4 billion.

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The reimbursements had stalled in 2024, when Hungary blocked a $7.7 billion tranche. Budapest dropped the veto in June 2026 after a new government took over, unfreezing the funds. The bloc is now steering part of the money toward joint arms purchases and its training mission for Ukraine, rather than just reimbursement.

Where Poland stands among donors

By Militarnyi's tally of Kiel Institute figures, total Polish aid has reached $6.8 billion, with $5.2 billion of that military. That ranks Poland 11th among donors by raw volume. When weighed against each country's economy, it ranks 9th, equal to 1.021% of Polish GDP, with the military share at 0.775%.

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What Warsaw handed over

Poland has supplied ammunition and other weapons since early 2022, before the full-scale invasion, and has since handed over more than 350 tanks—14 Leopard 2A4, about 60 PT-91 Twardy, and roughly 280 Soviet-era T-72 variants. Warsaw also sent Krab self-propelled howitzers, Piorun shoulder-fired air-defense missiles, and Grad rocket launchers. Alongside Slovakia, it was among the first NATO states to send Ukraine fighter jets, delivering 14 MiG-29 jets and 10 Mi-24 attack helicopters between 2022 and 2024.

EU foreign ministers have given broad backing to an entry ban on Russians who fought in Ukraine and to stricter tourist visa rules for Russian citizens, DW reported. The bloc's foreign policy chief announced that support on 2 September, after an informal meeting in Wicklow, Ireland, without setting out what the tightening would involve. She tied the visa question to the risk of sabotage in Europe.

"Broad support," and nothing pinned down

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas spoke to reporters after the ministers finished. 

"There was broad support for moving ahead with a ban on entry to the EU for Russian ex-combatants and tougher visa restrictions for Russian tourists," she said.

She did not name the restrictions planned for Russian tourists, say when they might take effect, or say which categories of Russian citizens they would cover.

The bloc has no unified position on tightening visa rules further, Kallas acknowledged. Some member states have so far argued against additional steps in that direction, she said.

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Many EU countries say tourist visas serve sabotage preparation

Reporters asked Kallas about accounts that one suspect in the Leipzig attack may have entered the EU on a tourist visa issued by Italy. German authorities have to confirm or refute those accounts, she said. If the information is correct, it shows that visas can be used to enter the bloc by potential wrongdoers who intend to harm it, she added. Many EU countries pointed out that tourist visas are used in preparing sabotage, because the people who carry it out need to get onto EU territory, she said.

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"It is not normal": Russians in Europe while Russia bombs Ukraine

Many ministers raised the visa question while the meeting was discussing Russia's war against Ukraine, Kallas said.

"It is not normal when a country bombs Ukraine, kills civilians—in July and August more than ever during this war—and at the same time Russians enter and enjoy the hospitality of European countries. That should not be," she said.

EU representatives said in July that the ban, kept separate from the tourist visa rules, was agreed in principle but still needed an evidence standard for refusing entry. The EU Council signs off after that, and the European Commission hoped at the time to finish by October.

Ukraine's National Guard says its assault units have cleared four square kilometers of ground near Kupiansk. According to the military, fighters of the 23rd R.U.G. Assault Regiment of the Khartiia corps have pushed Russian forces out of territory between the settlements of Dvorichna and Zapadne, working with the 35th Separate Marine Brigade on one stretch.

Russia wants Kupiansk as a logistics node and a springboard for pushing deeper into Kharkiv Oblast. Just outside the city sits the Kupiansk-Vuzlovyi station, a key rail hub whose capture would let Russian forces move supplies and equipment far more easily.

“Overall, another 4 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory have been liberated. As long as the enemy remains on our land, the work continues,” the National Guard said.

A city fought over from both banks

The clearing north of the city is only one part of a contested picture. Kupiansk straddles the Oskil River: Ukraine holds the left, eastern bank, while Russian forces have pushed onto the right, western bank closer to Ukraine's rear.

On 2 September, Viktor Tregubov, head of communications for Ukraine's Joint Forces Group, said Russian troops had infiltrated part of northern Kupiansk on that right bank.

"On the right bank, the Russians are trying to hold the northern parts of the city, where they've already infiltrated some of their fighters," he told Suspilne, adding that Ukrainian forces are making trouble for them there.

The infiltrators are trying to reach the city through the village of Holubivka, he said.

On the left bank, Russian units are trying to reach the railway station.

"The Russians are pushing very hard toward it. They want to narrow our bridgehead," Tregubov reported.

No confirmed Russian advance

Back in July, Trehubov mentioned the Russian forces’ logistical problems in this direction, according to ArmyInform.

He explained that logistics for Russian forces in the area had been effectively paralyzed by a fuel shortage, with even water being delivered exclusively by drones.

The European Union is discussing export support with Ukraine and its neighboring countries, including through so-called solidarity lanes, Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen told Bloomberg on 2 September.

Strikes in the Black Sea have curtailed exports from both Ukraine and Russia, while low water limits how much grain vessels can carry on the Danube, Ukraine’s main fallback when sea traffic slows. Wheat and corn prices are at multiyear highs, and the Bloomberg Agriculture Spot Index jumped by more than 13% in August, its sharpest monthly rise in over a decade. Hansen said the EU’s role as a major food exporter means drought-driven production losses could cause shortages elsewhere.

Created after Russia's full-scale invasion, the solidarity lanes carry Ukrainian exports by road, rail, and river through neighboring countries when Black Sea shipping is disrupted.

The European Commission is separately weighing relief for drought-hit EU farmers. Hansen urged governments to use flexibilities in the Common Agricultural Policy, the EU's farm-subsidy system, including exemptions for circumstances beyond farmers' control, emergency fertilizer aid, and earlier payments, but proposed no new measures in a letter seen by Bloomberg. EU agriculture ministers are due to discuss the drought in Ireland next week and in Brussels later in September.

Russian attacks squeeze Ukraine’s export routes

Low water is only one obstacle to Ukraine’s southern export routes. Russia has repeatedly attacked ports and transport links along the Danube and on Odesa Oblast’s Black Sea coast. Some Ukrainian farmers have sold wheat below production cost as port prices fell, leaving less money for the next sowing.

Romania detected more than 100 drones during seven attacks on Danube ports in mid-August, interim Romanian Defense Minister Radu Miruță said. Russia struck Izmail, Ukraine's largest Danube port, three times in August. The 29 August attack killed one person and destroyed five grain trucks, Odesa regional authorities said.

Ukraine and Moldova have pursued a rail corridor through Moldova to Constanța, Romania’s main Black Sea port, as an alternative. Moldova later halved transit tariffs through 31 December. Ukrainian officials estimate the corridor could handle around 10% of Ukraine's grain exports, Reuters reported.

Russia has been bolting small FPV attack drones to the wings of its long-range Gerans and releasing them deep inside Ukraine, far behind the front. The tactic may now have reached Kyiv Oblast, where an FPV drone was recently recorded, though it is not confirmed that a Geran delivered it, Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, the president's adviser on defense technologies, told UNIAN. A Geran drop is one of the versions being weighed.

A Geran (the Russian-built version of Iran's Shahed-136) can fly hundreds of kilometers, so bolting short-range FPVs to its wings carries them far past the front line before release. Russia has done the same with its Molniya and Gerbera drones, and in May Euromaidan Press reported FPVs delivered this way, turning up dozens of kilometers from the border, on the ground, and even on the roofs of apartment buildings.

A year-old experiment, still rare

"The Russians have been running these experiments for a while. They attach two FPVs above the wings and drop them," Beskrestnov said.

He last recorded the tactic a week ago in Konotop, in Sumy Oblast, where Russian forces held two such drones on a carrier's wings and released them.

Until now, he added, it had shown up only on conventional Gerans. Holding an FPV on a jet-powered Geran is far harder because the speed is too high for a clean release, "but technologically it's entirely possible," Beskrestnov believes.

Ukrainian air defenders have brought at least one carrier down: in March, the Darknode anti-Shahed unit destroyed a Geran carrying two wing-mounted FPVs over Ukrainian airspace before it could release them, Militarnyi reported.

Low yield, mostly a scare tactic

Russia uses the tactic sparingly, and by its own measure, it does not work well.

"If you look at the number of successful strikes they've had with these FPVs, it's small," Beskrestnov explained, because controlling a drone dropped this way is difficult.

The FPVs carry no large warhead, and the launches often serve mainly to terrorize civilians, he said.

The dropped drones are usually flown over ordinary mobile networks rather than through a relay mounted on the carrier.

"There's an ordinary SIM card, and they control the FPV through it," Beskrestnov said, adding that Ukraine has been recording the practice on and off for about a year.

A gunman on a motorcycle shot a Russian Aerospace Forces officer twice in Saratov Oblast on the morning of 3 September, Radio Svoboda reported. Telegram channels identify the wounded man as Nikolai Varpakhovich, the major general who commands Russia's heavy bomber division at Engels. Ukraine's security service and prosecutors named that officer a suspect three days earlier over the missile strike on Kyiv's main children's hospital.

Ukraine's services have pursued senior Russian officers in the rear, sometimes unofficially claiming the operation and sometimes saying nothing at all. Bombings have killed at least three generals in and around Moscow since December 2024, and a fourth died in a Moscow restaurant blast whose target Russia has never established. Nobody has claimed the Engels shooting yet, and Ukrainian officials have not commented on it.

Two shots outside Engels, then the motorcycle was gone

The attack happened in Probuzhdeniye, a settlement next to the city of Engels in Russia's Volga region. The Russian Telegram channel Shot said the officer was leaving a shop when an unknown man on a motorcycle fired twice, hitting his face and his body. Another Russian channel, Mash, reported that the gunman rode up to a detached house, that one bullet struck the abdomen and the other the head, and that surgeons removed both. The accounts of the spot and the wounds do not match.

The officer's driver was hit as well, got away, and called an ambulance himself. The attacker wore a helmet and fled, and doctors in Saratov operated before preparing the officer for a flight to Moscow. 

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Russia confirms a shooting and leaves the name out

The regional branch of Russia's Investigative Committee stated that someone had attempted to kill a serviceman and that the victim was hospitalized. Investigators stated they had recovered cartridge cases and bullets at the scene and opened a case for attempted murder and illegal weapons trafficking. They released no name.

The  Telegram channel Dosye Shpiona, possibly linked to the Ukrainian special services, named the victim as Nikolai Varpakhovich, commander of the 22nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Division of Russia's long-range aviation. Meduza noted that no official source has confirmed this. Agentstvo reported that Varpakhovich comes from Ryazan, served earlier as deputy head of the 43rd flight-crew training center, and has lived in Saratov Oblast since at least 2024, with documents listing an apartment in Engels and a house in Probuzhdeniye.

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Ukraine named him a suspect on 31 August

The SBU and the Prosecutor General's Office announced an in absentia suspicion against Varpakhovich on 31 August. Investigators say he issued the combat order for the strike that hit Kyiv's Okhmatdyt children's hospital on 8 July 2024, killing two people and injuring 32. Russia's Defense Ministry claimed that day's missiles went at military-industrial sites and airbases.

It was his second notice this year. Ukraine charged him in June over a 2022 cruise-missile strike on an Odesa apartment block that killed eight, and prosecutors had notified his division's commander of suspicion back in June 2023.

Ukraine formally notified the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) on 2 September that Russian airspace is unsafe for civilian flights because of increased military activity, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said. The letter behind the notification asks the organization to urge its member states to stop civil flights over Russia altogether, ZN reported.

ICAO, the UN aviation agency, cannot close Russian airspace or order carriers to reroute. European and US airlines already avoid Russia's airspace, while carriers from China, Türkiye, and the Gulf states have kept flying through it. Those remaining airlines must assess the safety of flying amid drone and air defense operations. Drone alerts during reported Ukrainian attacks have repeatedly shut Russian airports and delayed hundreds of flights.

The notification follows a 1 September warning by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who told airlines, insurers, and other aviation stakeholders that Russian skies were becoming unsafe as Ukrainian drones reached deeper into the country.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine's Foreign Ministry would pass information about the risks to international organizations. The letter to ICAO came from another office—Mykola Kalashnyk, Ukraine's minister for recovery, infrastructure, and transport, whose portfolio covers aviation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Zelenskyy's statement amounted to "a bid for state terrorism" and that Moscow would find a way to respond if civilian "tragedies" followed.

Sybiha urged airlines to avoid Russian airspace and said the notice was meant to prevent unintended incidents, arguing that Moscow was failing to disclose the dangers its war had created. He invoked Ukraine’s inherent right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, the provision that recognizes states’ right to defend themselves against an armed attack. The foreign minister further stated that the war was “returning home to Russia.”

In its separate statement, ICAO warned of rising threats to civil aviation worldwide. It did not mention Russia, endorse Ukraine’s assessment, or say Kyiv’s notification had prompted it.

The UN aviation body identified long-range weapons, drones, navigation-signal interference, and advanced air-defense systems as growing dangers to civilian aircraft. It reiterated that international aviation law prohibits the use of weapons against them.

ICAO urged member states to assess airspace under their control, share threat intelligence quickly, and improve military-civilian coordination.

Russian airports were already facing repeated closures

Russian airspace has not been legally or completely closed. The disruption has instead taken the form of temporary restrictions at individual airports.

From 5–7 May 2026, restrictions during reported Ukrainian attacks delayed more than 450 flights at Moscow airports, while limits at Vnukovo remained in place for nearly 18 hours.

On 6 July 2025, Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport canceled 171 flights, while airports in five other cities suspended operations. During an earlier wave on 22 May 2025, Domodedovo halted flights four times in one day and Sheremetyevo three times, while Vnukovo and Zhukovsky also restricted operations.

Airports in Kaluga, Nizhny Novgorod, Saratov, and Tambov were temporarily closed during a 27 May attack in which Moscow claimed 99 drones were intercepted. Two days later, another alert delayed 20 arrivals and 14 departures at Vnukovo, pro-Kremlin Telegram channels claimed.

Russia has started launching its strike drones during the day, not only after dark. The reason is the new jet-powered Geran drones, which fire groups cannot take down, so for Russia there is no longer any difference between attacking by day or by night, Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, President Zelenskyy's adviser on defense technologies, told Glavcom.

The near-hourly daytime raids are the new face of a campaign that culminated on 1 September, Knowledge Day, when Russia hit Kyiv and its region with ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones and killed 12 people. That strike culminated a six-day assault on the capital that began on 27 August, two days after CIA Director John Ratcliffe arrived in Moscow. However, even after that, the attack continued. Sirens now sound across Kyiv and the surrounding oblast roughly once an hour, around the clock.

Why the shift to daylight

The daytime raids carry an added economic and psychological weight, he said. The threat of strikes forces shops and businesses to open and close unpredictably, snarls transport, and can halt rail service.

"They understand perfectly well that daytime attacks hurt the population and business," Beskrestnov said, adding that the state railway Ukrzaliznytsia is paralyzed.

Keeping the defenders on their feet

A further aim is to hold Ukraine's air defense in a permanent state of readiness, Beskrestnov said. Round-the-clock attacks mean radar stations and generators must run without pause.

"Radar stations and generators run constantly, and that also puts a strain on our troops," he added.

Kyiv remains a Russian prime target because it carries symbolic as well as military weight, as the capital houses the government, business, and warehouses, and a strike there would resonate far more than terrorizing a small town.

Russian forces first concentrated on districts nearer the drones' launch corridors — Kyiv's Left Bank, and the Brovary and Boryspil raions — before switching to the other bank to hunt for targets. As the cold season approaches, he expects Russia to intensify strikes on the energy infrastructure it has so far spared.

Belgium's foreign minister said the kingdom's opposition to using Russia's frozen assets for Ukraine has not changed, Reuters reported. A push by four member states to revive the plan "generated little enthusiasm or appetite" among European Union foreign ministers, he said. Belgium points instead to part of an already-agreed European loan arriving sooner.

Nothing has changed, Belgium's foreign minister told the room

Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot spoke after an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers in Ireland on 2 September. Four countries had put the frozen-assets question back on the agenda, and his colleagues showed little interest in taking it up, he said. Belgium's own position has not moved in a year, he added. Anything that amounts to confiscating the money would carry very significant risks for his country, he said.

The country's Defense Minister Theo Francken told Flemish broadcaster VRT in remarks published on 30 August that the door is closed and the question is not open for discussion. He also said the Baltic States should be more careful about returning to it, and recalled how much support Belgium gives Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, The Moscow Times reported.

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In August, Russian gains ticked upward in key sectors along the 1,200-km front line of Russia's 55-month wider war on Ukraine.

The coming winter could slow Russian advances as the trees lose their leaves and infantry infiltrators have nothing to conceal them from overhead drones. But for the next month or two, the trees will still have their leaves, and the infiltrators will still have their cover.

And that means, as fall wears into winter, Ukraine may lose yet more ground in the north and especially in Donbas region in the east, where Russia enjoys a substantial manpower and firepower advantage. "Russian forces still hold the operational initiative and are slowly capturing ... Donetsk Oblast as well as border zones in Sumy and Kharkiv Oblasts," mapper Thorkill warned.

The Russian gains belie a greater truth, however. In the middle of the fifth year of wider war, the situation on the ground only changes along the margins even as thousands die.

According to Thorkill's tally, the Russians occupied just under 220 square km of Ukrainian soil in August. That's 25% more territory than they captured in July. "The situation has deteriorated sharply in the Donbas in August," mapper Clément Molin explained.

To be fair, the Russians are advancing much more slowly than they did a year ago. "Compared to August 2025, Russian gains are down by nearly half," Molin noted. That's cold comfort to Ukrainian civilians and defenders in the areas where the Russians are still gaining ground, however. And the sheer proximity of the most aggressive Russian formations to the most vulnerable Ukrainian settlements means it might not take much more effort on the part of the Russians to turn these settlements into battlegrounds.

The Russians' main effort is still directed at the last big free cities in Donetsk. Inching forward at great cost from several directions, Russian forces are slowly closing a pincer around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk and the tens of thousands of civilians who still live in the adjacent cities.

Thorkill's map places the forwardmost Russian forces in Mykolaivka, just 4 km east of Sloviansk. This is the middle joint of the Russian pincer. The pincer's southern claw is a zone of disputed control stretching along the road between the ruins of the city of Kostiantynivka and the battleground town of Oleksiievo-Druzhkivka.

If the Russians can march through Oleksiievo-Druzhkivka, they can lay siege to the town of Druzhkivka, a few kilometers to the northwest. If they can capture Druzhkivka, they can turn north and assault Kramatorsk, a mere 6 km away.

Ukrainian counterattacks

The most fragile part of the claw is to the north. Bucking the overall trend of Russian gains in August, Ukrainian forces counterattacked in several sectors the same month. Most dramatically, a clutch of Ukrainian mechanized and air assault brigades extended a slow advance through the town of Nove, mostly cutting across a 100-square-km salient of Russian forces around 25 km northeast of Sloviansk.

The Nove counterattacks offer some hope that targeted Ukrainian action may slow the Russian march on Sloviansk and Kramatorsk from the north. Meanwhile, a reshuffling of Ukrainian units south of Kramatorsk could improve Ukrainian defenses against an assault on the twin cities from the south.

As new Ukrainian commander-in-chief Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi gradually addresses some of the imbalances in the Ukrainian ground forces, certain key units are getting help. Most notably, the 425th Assault Regiment is now subordinate to the 1st Azov Corps, which is responsible for the defense of Kramatorsk.

Keenly aware that the Russians intend to slowly infiltrate front-line settlements with small teams of infantry rather than rushing them with masses of easily-droned armored vehicles, the 1st Azov Corps has assigned the aggressive 425th Assault Regiment "to clear enemy infiltrators from the brigades’ areas of defense," the corps stated.

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Glide bomb then infiltrate. This is Russia’s new way of war.

Infiltrators aren't the only problem, however. The Russians' favorite tactic combines small teams of infantry with massive aerial firepower in the form of precision-guided KAB glide bombs flung by supersonic Sukhoi Su-34 fighter bombers.

"Glide bombs hurt," Ukraine's 4th National Guard Brigade reported. "It's about 200 kg of explosives flying your way. And you can't really shoot them down like you can shoot down drones. They can collapse fortified buildings, bunkers, and entire urban blocks much more effectively than artillery."

After the dust settles from the glide bomb impacts, Russian infantry "infiltrate through the damaged areas, using the ruins for cover and concealment," the national guard brigade explained.

The same lack of long-range air defenses that exposes Ukrainian cities to relentless Russian bombardment also deprives front-line forces of protection from the Su-34s and their glide bombs. And so the Russians can keep bombing and keep infiltrating as long as the trees offer some concealment for the infantry.

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Ukraine’s secret counteroffensive takes the pressure off Sloviansk

The clock is ticking. The Russians will aim to position their forces for more direct assaults on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk no later than next year. The Ukrainians will aim to slow down the Russians, trading a little space for more time. Time Drapatyi may use to institute further reforms in the Ukrainian ground forces.

Zooming out and taking the long view, no one should expect major changes on the map of Russia's wider war as the fifth year of fighting grinds toward the sixth. Yes, the last two big free cities in the Donbas are in trouble. But "the overall situation remains unchanged since October 2023," Thorkill wrote.

The Russians slowly advance. The Ukrainians slowly fall back. And losses deepen on both sides.

A well-drawn food illustration can make a dish look irresistible, steam curling off a bowl, glossy sauce catching light, a burger stacked just right or a sweet, juicy pancake. But no matter how appetising the drawing is, it's still just sitting there, doing nothing while a real dish is sizzling, steaming, or dripping. That gap is exactly what image to video tools close, taking a still food illustration and giving it the motion that makes it genuinely mouthwatering. Dreamina, powered by its most advanced video generation model, Seedance 2.5, turns that transformation into something any menu, brand, or food creator can pull off without a full animation team.

Why food illustrations were always missing something

So much of what makes food appealing is sensory and time-based, steam rising, cheese stretching, sauce dripping slowly down the side of a plate. A still illustration can suggest all of that, but it can't actually deliver it. It is the motion that finally makes an illustrated food look realistic and thus satisfy the craving.

What features make a food video clip appetizing?

The most successful food videos usually have some common characteristics, such as:

- Motion corresponding with the movements that the real food can do, e.g., steam coming out, dripping, melting
- Warm appetizing light, not something cold and artificial
- Slow enough speed to be considered delicious, not quick
- The amount of motion that looks natural, but not exaggerated

How to animate your food illustration using Dreamina

Step 1: Upload your illustration and describe the motion

Log in to Dreamina and find the "AI Video" category. Click on "Add reference image," upload your food illustration and describe how it should move.

To create a video, use the following prompt: "Create a video of a ramen illustration, including rising steam from the broth, slow lifting of the noodles with chopsticks from the bowl, and warm glowing light across the toppings."

Step 2: Generate with Seedance 2.5

Choose the Seedance 2.5 model, set your video length, then pick an aspect ratio, 1:1 or 4:5 for a menu or social post, 9:16 for Reels and TikTok. Click Dreamina's generate icon and let the dish come alive.

Step 3: Refine and export the finished video

Use Dreamina's editing tools to finish it off. Upscale for richer detail on texture and steam, generate a soundtrack for a light ambient or sizzling audio layer, then export and use it across your menu or marketing channels.

What Seedance 2.5 adds to food visuals

Seedance 2.5, Dreamina's most advanced video generation model, is well matched to the small, sensory motion food content depends on.

Texture and warmth that feel real

Comprehensive quality improvements reduce the flat "AI look" and add believable texture and warmth, so steam, glaze, and melt all read as genuinely appetizing rather than artificial.

Precise touch-ups on a single detail

Local editing lets a single garnish or detail be adjusted without regenerating the whole scene, useful when only one part of an otherwise great shot needs a fix.

A complete creative brief

Multimodal input support means a menu description or brand style reference can be layered in alongside the illustration, giving the model more context than the image alone.

A clean file, ready for longer sequences

Stray subtitles and unwanted background music are removed automatically, and extended duration up to 180 seconds in Ultra-long mode supports a full recipe-style sequence when needed.

Writing prompts that capture texture

Naming specific sensory details — steam, glaze, melt, drip — gives the model a much clearer sense of what kind of motion to render, rather than defaulting to generic, non-specific movement across the dish that could apply to almost any plate.

Choosing the right format for your platform

A square or vertical format suits a menu screen or social feed post, while a slightly longer, wider version works well for a website hero section or a paid ad where viewers are more likely to watch a few extra seconds.

Tying movement to the mood of the meal

There is a world of difference between a quick breakfast dish and a slow-cooked meal. While a brisk movement works well with the former, there needs to be something more substantial in terms of the latter in order to do justice to its mood and nature. The best prompts are always those that match the mood of the meal and not ones where you try to use the same pace of movement for all dishes.

Mistakes that undercut a food animation

A few habits tend to weaken the result:

- Overcomplicating the prompt with too many food elements moving at once
- Choosing lighting language that reads as cold or clinical instead of warm
- Skipping sound entirely, which leaves an otherwise appetizing clip feeling flat
- Leaving out sensory detail in the prompt, which can lead to motion that looks technically fine but not actually hungry-making

Where animated food illustrations get used

This format shows up naturally on restaurant menus, food delivery apps, recipe content, and social campaigns for food brands, where a dish that moves tends to hold attention and drive appetite far more effectively than a static illustration sitting in a grid. Delivery apps in particular have leaned into it as a way to make menu browsing feel less like scrolling a list.

A food illustration was always trying to make someone hungry, motion just finally gives it the tools to do that properly. With Dreamina and the sensory precision behind Seedance 2.5, a drawn dish can finally look as good as it was always meant to taste, without needing a real kitchen or a food stylist on set.

Ukraine’s Third Army Corps has released photos of the RapidRanger air defense system mounted on a URO VAMTAC armored vehicle. The troops themselves described the system as a “short-range storm.”

The system defends the sky in areas where radar cannot spot a target and other weapons cannot reach it, filling the gap between mobile fire groups and heavy, less-mobile air-defense systems. That niche — fast, cheap, and radar-independent — is exactly where Russia's Shaheds and small reconnaissance drones have been slipping through.

The images show a crew of the 1030th "Aquila" Anti-Aircraft Missile-Artillery Regiment arming the launcher with missiles before going on combat duty for the first time, RBC-Ukraine reports.

Light enough to ride a pickup

Rapid Ranger weighs only 500 kilograms and has a modular design that allows it to be mounted on pickups, armored cars, or even tracked platforms.

The systems in Ukrainian service ride Spanish URO VAMTAC tactical off-roaders, which reach 135 km/h, drive on public roads, and can change position quickly or cover long distances.

That mobility is the point: a launcher that can shoot and move is far harder for Russian forces to find and destroy than a fixed battery.

Laser guidance beats the decoys

The system's LMM Martlet missiles are 1.3 meters long, weigh 13 kilograms, and reach 1,800 km/h, striking targets up to seven kilometers away. Crucially, the missiles use laser guidance, not only infrared, so Rapid Ranger can hit targets with a low thermal signature or those carrying heat-emitting decoys. That makes it effective against Russian reconnaissance drones like the Orlan-10, whose small heat trail slips past heat-seeking weapons.

A 360-degree electro-optical surveillance suite gives the crew all-around coverage, and the system detects targets out to about 15 kilometers, which is more than twice its engagement range, giving the crew time to track a threat before firing.

Rapid Ranger reached Ukrainian units as part of a British military aid package, and Euromaidan Press reported in April that the system was already downing Shaheds from its Spanish mounts. The 3rd Corps' photos are the newest confirmation that Ukraine's newest Western air-defense hardware is now integrated and standing combat duty at the front.

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Ukraine spent three years learning to catch Russian drones—so Russia made them fly faster. Russia's jet-powered drones don't beat Ukraine's missile defense. They threaten the cheap layer that keeps it affordable—and they are turning the war into a contest over reaction time.

Military

42,020 troops, 1,827 artillery systems, 89 tanks: Ukraine's tally of what it cost Russia to keep fighting in August. As frontline losses climb, Moscow fires ballistic missiles and jet drones Ukraine cannot catch.

Ukraine confirms strike hit Novatek fuel plant at Russia's Ust-Luga port. Kyiv says the Baltic-coast facility supports Russia's military, while the strike's effect on production remains unknown.

Putin says Russia is 12 km from Sumy—1.5 km farther than in June. Just two months ago, the Kremlin claimed Russian troops were 10.5 km from Sumy—now it says they are 12 km away.

Foot soldiers get a long spear: Ukrainian assault units strike deep behind Russian lines. Ukraine's trench units now fly strike drones 150 km into the Russian rear—a job that once belonged to specialists.

Intelligence and technology

Twenty Ukrainian firms are racing to catch Russia's jet-powered Shaheds. This one's interceptor is already flying combat missions. Firebolt Engineering joins Ukraine's jet-interceptor drone race.

Kazakh refinery deal could ease Russia's front-line fuel pressure—but it covers just 0.3% of demand. Central Asia lacks capacity to solve Moscow's shortage, while potential suppliers risk Western sanctions.

Ukraine says it bought 5,000 pickup trucks through open competitive bidding and saved more than $45 million. Six suppliers will deliver the all-wheel-drive diesels by year's end.

International

190 or 580 Patriot missiles? What Ukraine's EU-loan request could buy—and why Washington still decides. The EU is weighing Ukraine's loan request to buy Patriot missiles, von der Leyen confirmed—member states take it up on 7 September.

Russia says Armenia's EU accession law means leaving Moscow-led trade bloc. Yerevan disagrees. At their first meeting since Armenia's June election, Pashinyan rejected Putin's claim that Yerevan had begun leaving Moscow's economic bloc.

A masked figure got into a Polish drone-parts plant—Poland now suspects a foreign spy service set the fire. Poland has opened a foreign-intelligence and terrorism case. A masked figure got in over the fence, the fire followed, and no one is charged.

Humanitarian and social impact

Russia's air war has cost the average Ukrainian mall 166.8 working days since 2022, about eight months of closed floors. Ukraine's malls spent a fifth of August under air-raid alerts, a new record.

Zaporizhzhia's largest mall closes as Russia's attacks seek to make Ukrainian cities unlivable. City Mall will remain closed throughout September after a Russian strike hit a nearby hypermarket, as repeated attacks disrupt businesses and everyday life across Ukraine.

Political and legal developments

Ukraine says it busted a Kyiv crypto ring that drained EU citizens' wallets. The SBU says the alleged scheme's monthly turnover from stolen funds could reach $1 million during its most lucrative periods.

Putin dismisses mobilization reports as Ukraine warns Russia could call up 600,000 to war. Russian officials gave similar assurances before the Kremlin's 2022 call-up, while the decree authorizing it was never formally revoked.

Russian Church installs Soviet military veteran to lead occupation-created diocese in Kherson Oblast. After Patriarch Kirill consecrated him in Moscow, Igor Pashentsev will oversee Russian Orthodox parishes across five occupied Kherson districts.

Ukraine's Security Service says it foiled FSB plot to assassinate Russian opposition leader in Kyiv – several wounded in street shootout. The clash followed the reported disappearance of a Russian Volunteer Corps commander and a Ukrainian investigation into an alleged Russian assassination attempt.

Putin calls Zelenskyy's airspace warning "state terrorism" as shares in Russia's national airline fall 5%. European and US airlines already avoid Russian airspace, while carriers from China, Türkiye, and Gulf states continue using it.

New developments

Estonia quarantines emails from Russian domains over cyberattack risk. Messages will undergo automated security screening rather than being blocked outright. Local governments and some state bodies remain outside the system.

Russian propagandists fake Polish newspaper claiming Ukraine faces famine. The Matryoshka disinformation network fabricated a Polish newspaper front page claiming that Russian strikes could leave 63% of Ukrainians facing famine.

Read our earlier daily review here.

Ukraine's 58th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade has tested a domestic dome-type electronic-warfare system, Serval Cube, against drones simulating a Russian attack. The brigade's electronic-warfare unit staged the trial under conditions close to real combat, the brigade said.

Serval Cube jams the control, navigation, and video-transmission channels a drone depends on rather than destroying it outright, Armyinform said. That kind of interference does not bring down the aircraft. It strips it of the ability to complete a mission or return to its operator.

Ukraine's counter-drone field is crowded

Ukrainian defense firms have been racing to field more of this kind of gear this year: in July, Contra Drone unveiled a 20-system counter-drone architecture combining electronic warfare, radar, and autonomous interceptors.

Another firm, Rebel Group, said this week its stationary jamming and signals intelligence system, Brama, has cleared range and lab testing and is now seeking official codification. Brama works by detecting a drone's analog video frequency, decoding it, and jamming both the video and control channels at once.

EW now shields nearly everything at the front

Electronic warfare has become one of the key elements of front-line defense, the brigade said, covering troops, positions, logistics routes, transport, shelters, and the launch sites of Ukraine's own drones against Russian FPV drones and reconnaissance UAVs.

FPV drones — small, camera-equipped quadcopters flown by a remote pilot wearing video goggles — have become a primary strike weapon for both sides along the front this year. That is why soldiers constantly test and refine the equipment they carry, the brigade said.

A scripted attack, and nothing got through

The brigade's electronic-warfare company ran the test, building a scenario meant to mirror combat as closely as possible: at one position, operators launched Mavic quadcopters, widely used for reconnaissance, alongside FPV strike drones. At another, the unit deployed the Serval Cube complex.

Serval Cube suppressed every drone launched against it during the trial — none reached its designated target, the brigade said.

Twenty Ukrainian companies are now building jet-powered interceptors to down Russia's increasingly fast jet-powered drones. One of them, the Ukrainian-British startup Firebolt Engineering, already has an interceptor flying combat missions with two Air Force units and Ukraine's special operations forces, Defender Media reports.

Russia launched more than 2,500 jet-powered drones at Ukraine in August alone, straining air defenses built to catch the slower, piston-engine Shahed-136. Ukrainian Defense Minister Yevhen Khmara said on 30 August 2026 that four interceptor systems have cleared field testing and are being scaled toward mass production. It is unclear whether Griffen, Firebolt's drone, is among them.

Grenadyr funds a spinout

Firebolt was spun out after the UK-based investment fund Grenadyr backed the team behind the interceptor project. Grenadyr's director, Tomasz Wozniak, told the outlet that a reliable way to intercept jet-powered Shaheds "has never been more important" as Russia scales up the faster drones.

Grenadyr and Firebolt have not disclosed the size of the investment, though the fund's check ranged from $350,000 to $1.3 million.

The new company employs up to 25 people across Ukraine and the UK, split into component manufacturing, final assembly, and calibration, plus a separate R&D unit. Its CEO, who asked to be identified only as Mykola, led the interceptor project prior to the spinout.

Griffen flies, but not against jets yet

Griffen, Firebolt's first product, is a fixed-wing, jet-powered interceptor that reaches speeds above 350 km/h, altitudes above 7.5 km, and a range of up to 120 km, according to Defender Media. Mykola said the team aims to push its speed past 400 km/h through aerodynamic changes. The drone currently costs an estimated $8,300–$10,500.

Griffen still flies on Chinese engines while its British partner, Dynamic Propulsion, develops a turbojet built specifically for the drone, with test samples expected by the end of summer. Firebolt can build 30 Griffens a month and is working to add more crews to fly them, Mykola said. The drone's first confirmed kill, however, was a conventional-engine Geran — not the jet-powered variant it was designed to catch.

Autonomy waits on Ukraine's radars

Firebolt is developing a homing system meant to let Griffen find and strike targets without an operator, a goal shared by rival interceptor makers The Fourth Law, SkyFall, and F-Drones. The system is in testing and expected to ship by default by mid-fall, Mykola said.

Full autonomy, he added, is bottlenecked by Ukraine's radar coverage, which he described as too thin and fragmented to reliably feed target data to an autonomous drone. Closing that gap, he said, depends on the state buying more radars — a decision outside Firebolt's control.

Air-raid alerts covered a record share of working hours at shopping centers across Ukraine in August. Sirens ran for 21.8 percent of the hours malls were open, the Ukrainian Council of Shopping Centers reported.

For more than a fifth of the hours malls were open to serve customers, sirens instead sent staff and shoppers to shelters. The share has more than doubled in a year. The climb is related to Russia's escalating air campaign: Moscow ran a seven-day barrage of ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones against Kyiv into early September, the kind of assault that keeps sirens running through the business day.

Every tracked measure rose

The council considers four figures: the number of alerts, the number during mall working hours, the total alert duration, and the duration during working hours. All four climbed from July to August, it says.

Five regions bear the worst of it

The five regions with the most daytime alert time, between 10 a.m. and 9 p.m., barely changed over the month, the council says. Donetsk Oblast led at 82.0 percent, followed by Sumy at 76.4, Zaporizhzhia at 71.4, Kharkiv at 60.3, and Chernihiv at 40.1.

The sharpest monthly jump fell in Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast.

Faster drones drive the sirens

Russia has switched to jet-powered drones that fly more than three times faster than the propeller Shaheds Ukraine spent three years learning to shoot down. The faster a drone reaches a city, the less time defenders have to catch it.

That is what fills the sirens. Alerts sound earlier and stay on longer, which is the shared council measure.

Ukraine races to answer them

Ukraine has four interceptor systems in field testing, built to take down jet drones, Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara said on 30 August. The country now wants to bring them to standard and build them in the thousands.

Until that layer works, every jet-drone raid costs Ukraine a long air alert that empties a shopping center.

Downtime piles up over years

Since the full-scale war began, the average Ukrainian mall has lost 166.8 working days to air-raid alerts, according to the report. August 2026 alone accounted for 6.4 of them.

That is more than eight working months of shuttered trading floors, and it is still climbing.

Ukraine has asked the EU to spend billions from its support loan on Patriot air-defense missiles, a request European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen confirmed the bloc is weighing. How far the money would stretch depends on a price only Washington controls.

Russia keeps firing more ballistic missiles at Ukrainian cities than the country can shoot down, the warheads hardest for its air defenses to stop. Only a US-made Patriot system can catch them, and their interceptors remain in short supply worldwide, so who pays for them and Washington that agrees or disagrees to sell them now shapes how many cities stay covered.

The exemption Kyiv needs

The European Commission has already received a payment request covering Ukraine's air defenses, including the PAC-3 interceptors that arm Patriot systems. Von der Leyen put it at "several billion euros" and said member states were reviewing it, without naming a figure.

Suspilne, citing its own sources, reported that the request seeks just over $2.3 billion, with another $4.6 billion from the loan's defense tranche going to arms manufactured in Ukraine and the EU, mostly drones.

The money would come from the EU's $104 billion support loan for 2026–27. Because PAC-3 is US technology, spending loan money on it needs an EU exemption. National representatives will take up the decision on 7 September.

What the money actually buys

Defense Express has calculated how many interceptor missiles Ukraine can get with the loan. At the $4–5 million per round the US Army pays, $2.3 billion would fund 460-580 interceptors. At the $6.61 million export price Germany paid in late 2024, about 315. At up to $12.3 million each, the US cleared for Saudi Arabia on 30 January 2026, just 190.

Why money isn't the real problem

For Ukraine, the harder question is not price but whether it can get the missiles at all. Even 315 rounds would equal about half the world's current yearly output, which the sole producer, Lockheed Martin, is straining to lift from around 600 a year to 2,000 by 2030.

Kyiv has been short of interceptors for months. In August, Zelenskyy said Ukraine reached a deal with the US for monthly Patriot deliveries, but that it still needs at least around 5% of American output to get through winter. EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas has urged member states to hand over interceptors, especially those with shelf lives nearing their end.

Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) and National Police shut down a Kyiv-based network of several dozen people who allegedly used fake cryptocurrency investment platforms and malicious code to steal digital assets from citizens of EU countries, the SBU said on 1 September.

Investigators identified the alleged organizer as a 25-year-old Kyiv IT specialist, according to the SBU. The case reaches beyond Ukraine because the agency says the alleged victims were EU citizens. The agency said the network’s monthly turnover from funds obtained illegally could reach $1 million during its most lucrative periods.

The SBU said investigators had documented alleged crimes by every member of the group. However, its statement did not specify how long the network had operated, how many EU citizens were affected, which countries they lived in, or the total amount allegedly stolen.

The agency did not name any foreign law enforcement partners involved.

How the crypto ring operated

The alleged organizer of the crypto ring recruited other tech workers in the capital, the SBU said. Posing as cryptocurrency-platform representatives, they offered targets seemingly profitable ways to invest in digital assets.

The network found victims by posting about supposedly lucrative crypto projects in popular Telegram channels, then showed them fabricated trading results and fake profits to make the operation look legitimate, investigators said.

Engaged targets were sent a link to a counterfeit site that mimicked a real crypto service and were persuaded to connect their wallets and approve a transaction, the SBU said. The site carried malicious code called a “drainer” that, the agency said, let the operators withdraw the victims’ assets to addresses they controlled—emptying the wallets.

During 23 searches of the suspects’ offices and homes, officers seized phones, computers, money believed to be criminal proceeds, and 16 high-end cars, including Porsche, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz models, the SBU said.

Authorities were still deciding whether to serve notices of suspicion, while the investigation continued under the Prosecutor General’s Office, the SBU said. Those involved could face up to 12 years in prison with confiscation of property.

Ukraine’s role in combating cross-border cybercrime

Ukraine has previously joined with foreign agencies to pursue cross-border cyber threats. In April, the SBU said it worked with the FBI, EU law enforcement, and Polish counterintelligence to disrupt Russian military-intelligence spying through hacked routers. The operation blocked more than 100 servers and removed hundreds of routers in Ukraine from Russian control.

Russian losses reached one of the highest of the entire full-scale war in August, Ukraine's Defense Ministry says, citing General Staff data. Last month, Ukraine killed or wounded 42,020 invaders.

As its frontline losses climb, Russia is escalating its terror against Ukraine's civilians. Moscow uses large numbers of ballistic missiles and new jet-powered drones to do it. Russia opened its latest drone assault on 27 August, two days after CIA director John Ratcliffe arrived in Moscow, and has kept it up since.

For comparison, Russia lost 42,860 soldiers in July, 33,760 in May, and 39,290 in June, the ministry says.

Ukraine takes another step toward its goal

Ukraine's Defense Ministry states that effectively destroying Russian manpower and logistics is among its priorities, so that Russia's losses reach a level that forces it to abandon its plans of conquest.

"August's losses for the Russian army were another step toward reaching that goal," the Defense Ministry says.

Ukraine began its logistics lockdown late this May. It is a coordinated campaign to scale up medium-range drone strikes against Russian supply convoys, depots, command nodes, and air-defense systems 20 to 200 kilometers behind the front.

Russia loses more than men

Ukraine's Defense Forces also struck 13,835 vehicles and fuel tankers in August.

Over the month they hit an estimated:

• 89 tanks;
• 197 armored combat vehicles.
• On top of that, 1,827 Russian artillery systems were destroyed or disabled.

"Inflicting such losses systematically raises the cost of continuing the war for Russia and forces it to spend ever more resources replacing manpower, equipment, and weapons," the ministry says.

How does Russia answer the losses?

Ukraine's Office of the President has said Russia is preparing an additional mobilization wave in 2026–2027, aiming to draft 300,000 people this year and 300,000 next. Those figures are a response to the steady rise in frontline losses, the office adds.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin called that information "nonsense" after the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek.

At the same time, legal-aid organizations report a covert mobilization across Russia's regions and occupied territories. 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.

Kazakhstan’s privately owned Kondensat refinery will process Russian crude and return about 70% of the resulting petroleum products to Russia, Kazakh Energy Minister Yerlan Akkenzhenov said on 25 August, Radio Liberty reported.

Based on figures reported by Radio Liberty, the roughly 70% of Kondensat’s maximum gasoline output bound for Russia would amount to about 0.3% of the country’s daily summer gasoline demand. That makes the arrangement a limited stopgap rather than a solution. John Roberts of the Atlantic Council nevertheless told the outlet that even small additional supplies could help during an acute shortage, including at the front: “It helps, but it doesn’t solve the problem.”

Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked dozens of Russian refineries offline in recent months, forcing Moscow to restrict fuel exports and reimpose rationing, Radio Liberty reported. Gasoline caps returned to Moscow and St. Petersburg in August, while Rosneft reportedly limited fills to 30 liters per car at every station nationwide.

Kondensat has processed Russian oil before. The refinery began handling supplies delivered through Tatneft’s TANECO refinery in 2024, when Kazakhstan and Russia agreed to permit exports of fuel produced from Russian feedstock back to Russia. The arrangement was renewed in 2025, according to Radio Liberty.

Central Asia has no spare refining capacity that could materially change Russia’s situation, Ukrainian energy analyst Hennadiy Riabtsev told Radio Liberty’s Schemes project. Possible contributions from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, India, China, and Belarus would remain a drop in the ocean for the Russian market, he said.

Prospective suppliers also understand that Russian fuel demand supports the war effort and that assisting Moscow could carry sanctions risks, Ukraine’s presidential sanctions commissioner, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, told Schemes. Kyiv therefore does not expect a queue of countries willing to supply Russia with petroleum products, he said.

Russia’s fuel shortage gives Kazakhstan room to bargain

Russia’s shortage has spread from gas station queues to farming and public transport, with fuel-sale restrictions officially covering more than 40 regions by July, Euromaidan Press reported, citing The Moscow Times. Moscow’s export restrictions have also raised prices and tightened supplies across Central Asia.

Yet Russia’s growing dependence gives Kazakhstan additional bargaining room. Ukrainian strikes have previously prompted Russian retailer Wildberries to expand its warehousing operations in Kazakhstan, while Astana has promoted domestic competitors.

Ukraine saved more than $45 million on a single army purchase by opening it to competing bidders. The purchase was 5,000 pickup trucks, carried out through the open Prozorro tender system, Ukraine's Defense Ministry said on 2 September.

Competitive tenders of this kind saved its procurement agency nearly $362 million on non-lethal supplies in 2025, about 15 percent below expected cost, the ministry reported. The trucks are one more category moved from closed contracts to open bidding.

Volunteers used to carry this

Pickups are among the most-wanted vehicles at the front and among the longest neglected by the state, the Defense Ministry noted when it launched the tender. Until now, the need fell to volunteer drives and troops' own money.

"These are brand-new vehicles with a manufacturer's warranty, all-wheel drive, with powerful diesel engines," Mstyslav Banik, Ukraine's deputy defense minister, said.

The trucks do everything up close

The pickups are essential for logistics, evacuation, unit mobility, and drone-crew work, former DOT director Arsen Zhumadilov said when the tender opened. That range of use is why they rank among the most-requested vehicles on the front.

The agency ran the market consultations, set the technical requirements, and vetted the suppliers for the order.

Six suppliers, not one

The order was split into lots, so six different companies will deliver the trucks rather than a single contractor. The ministry frames that as insurance: if one supplier fails, the rest still deliver. This is the largest batch of pickup trucks from the state.

The purchase began in May, so the first trucks would arrive before the cold. The full batch is due by the end of 2026.

Drones are meant to be next

Then-defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in May that an earlier competitive tender for 155mm shells had cut costs by more than 16 percent. The next category to move to open bidding, he said, would be FPV, mid-strike, and deep-strike drones.

Asked about reports in Ukrainian and Western media that Russia could order a mass mobilization after September’s parliamentary elections, Vladimir Putin replied: “That’s complete nonsense. It’s an information attack on Russia,” RBC reported. He was speaking after the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek.

Ukraine’s military and foreign intelligence services say Russia’s General Staff has prepared a scenario for mobilizing an additional 600,000 people during 2026 and 2027—300,000 each year. Their briefing described a contingency, not an issued call-up, and did not say mobilization had begun. If activated, the agencies said, the recruits would primarily reinforce units fighting Ukraine and newly formed military units.

Ukraine’s intelligence services linked the scenario to mounting battlefield losses and a slowdown in contract recruitment. They said Russia lost roughly 240,000 personnel from January through July, including at least 140,000 killed or permanently lost, while recruiting about 232,000 contract soldiers. The figures could not be independently verified.

Russia’s military also rehearsed procedures for mobilizing residents of Kaliningrad Oblast in July, Ukrainska Pravda reported, citing The Wall Street Journal.

Reports of a possible draft have generated concern inside Russia. More than 20,000 people crossed into Georgia through the Verkhny Lars checkpoint in a single day amid fears of mobilization, as EP previously reported.

Ukraine’s warnings and Russia’s denials

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in August that Moscow planned to mobilize several hundred thousand people after the elections and roughly the same number in 2027, citing military intelligence. HUR deputy chief Vadym Skibitskyi later assessed that a call-up could provide troops for a northern offensive by February 2027, while stressing that the agency saw no preparations underway at the time.

Dmitry Medvedev, Vasily Nebenzya, and the State Duma’s defense committee have all denied plans for another mass draft. Russian officials issued similar denials shortly before Putin announced the 2022 call-up. RBC notes that the decree authorizing that mobilization was never formally revoked. No new call-up has been publicly announced or reported as underway.

Ukraine’s General Staff confirmed that Ukrainian forces struck the Novatek-Ust-Luga production complex in Russia’s Leningrad Oblast on 1 September, saying the target was hit and a fire followed. The scale of the damage remains under assessment.

Russian authorities initially acknowledged damage and a fire but did not identify the facility. Ukraine’s military intelligence later named the Novatek complex as the target, and the General Staff has now confirmed the strike and said the facility supports Russia’s armed forces. It did not explain how, nor say whether, production was disrupted.

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, HUR, was first to identify the target, saying on 1 September that its operators had struck the complex alongside Ukraine’s Defense Forces in a joint deep-strike operation. Key elements of the site’s oil-processing installation and other equipment were hit, and a large fire broke out, the agency said. The General Staff confirmed the strike the following day.

The Novatek complex at Ust-Luga separates stable gas condensate—a liquid produced during natural gas extraction—into fuel and petroleum components and handles their shipment through the Baltic port. Its design capacity exceeds six million tons a year, the General Staff said. The plant produces light and heavy naphtha, kerosene, a diesel fraction, and a marine-fuel component.

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Drone attack damages Russia’s Baltic oil port as drone crosses Latvia into Estonia

Ukraine has repeatedly targeted the Ust-Luga port

Before Ukraine named the target, Leningrad Oblast Governor Alexander Drozdenko acknowledged infrastructure damage and a fire at Ust-Luga on 1 September, but did not identify the specific facility. HUR subsequently named the Novatek complex as the target and reported damage to key equipment.

The operation continued Ukraine’s campaign against Ust-Luga’s energy and port infrastructure. Ukrainian agencies confirmed the first strike on Novatek’s complex overnight on 24–25 March. Drones returned on 31 March, setting fuel-storage tanks ablaze, damaging a pier and pumping equipment, and temporarily halting port operations, followed by another reported attack on 7 April. Ukrainian drones last hit the port on 14 August, marking the sixth such attack there in 2026.

Estonia is automatically diverting emails using Russia’s .ru internet domain into quarantine for additional security checks before they reach state institutions connected to the country’s secure government network, Justice and Digital Affairs Minister Liisa Pakosta told Estonia's public broadcaster ERR.

The measure is intended to protect Estonian government computer systems amid a post-2022 surge in cyberattacks that officials link to Russia. It applies only to institutions operating inside the secure state network, leaving local governments and some state bodies outside.

Many Estonian residents, particularly Russian speakers, still use .ru email services, ERR noted. Because the filter is triggered solely by the address ending, legitimate messages will be screened alongside potentially malicious ones and may take longer to arrive.

Pakosta said the safeguard was necessary because cyberattacks against Estonia had increased “exponentially” since 2022 and that many were linked to Russia. She said such attacks had not succeeded against Estonia, while major public-sector cyberattacks had succeeded in both Latvia and Lithuania.

The rerouting is automatic and handled centrally, so agencies do not need to take any action, Pakosta said. A large proportion of state institutions have already moved behind the government’s unified cyber shield, while the transition continues.

Pakosta described the quarantine as one small measure within Estonia’s wider cybersecurity work. Estonia’s courts have gone further, saying they will ask parties in legal proceedings to stop using .ru addresses for official communication, according to ERR.

How the Baltic states are hardening against Russia

Estonia's email quarantine forms part of a broader Baltic effort to limit Russian influence and strengthen defenses against military, cyber, and covert threats.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are constructing a Baltic Defense Line, a planned network of bunkers, anti-tank ditches, and other barriers, along their borders with Russia and Belarus. Latvia has also banned imports of Russian and Belarusian books, clothing, toys, and other goods.

The threat extends beyond cyberattacks: an Estonian court found that Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, ordered the 2024 firebombing of a Ukrainian restaurant in Tallinn, part of a wider Russian sabotage campaign targeting European supporters of Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Armenia's 2025 law launching the EU accession process "amounts to a declaration of withdrawal" from the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan replied that Armenia had filed no notice to leave and had violated none of the bloc's rules. The leaders met on 1 September in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, during a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit.

The exchange turns Armenia's westward shift into an open dispute over how far it has already moved from Moscow. Yerevan is preparing an EU application and has frozen participation in Russia's military alliance, but it still belongs to the trade bloc. Russia remains Armenia's largest trade partner, accounting for about 35% of its foreign trade.

The disagreement

In the opening minutes, Putin acknowledged that Armenia's aspiration to join the EU was the country's "legitimate right," but said it "creates difficulties" given Armenia's membership in the bloc that links Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia. He told Pashinyan that adopting a law launching the process of joining another organization "amounts to a declaration of withdrawal from ours."

Putin urged Armenia to decide quickly and repeated his call for a referendum on whether Armenia should remain in the trade bloc or pursue EU membership, telling Pashinyan to give the people a choice so the matter could be closed.

Pashinyan pushed back. He noted that the bloc's rules have no mechanism to expel a member state—only a voluntary withdrawal process requiring six months' notice—and that Armenia has filed no such notice. He told Putin the issue had not matured enough for a referendum, arguing that Armenia first needs to submit a formal EU application, receive a response, and agree on an accession roadmap.

How far Armenia has moved

Armenia's parliament passed a law launching the EU accession process in March 2025, though the government has said the law does not amount to a formal membership bid. On 24 August, Pashinyan told lawmakers that the government would begin preparing a formal application "in the near future." Armenia has also dropped the "strategic partner" label for Russia from its new government program and effectively frozen its participation in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization since early 2024.

Russia's response

Since May 2026, Moscow has imposed a series of bans on Armenian agricultural imports—including fruit, vegetables, and mineral water—citing phytosanitary concerns. The EU called the measures "economic coercion" and announced a support package of more than €50 million for Armenia in June.

Pashinyan says dialogue will continue

After the meeting, Pashinyan posted a video describing the talks as "very good" and saying the two leaders had agreed to continue a "sincere and constructive dialogue" during a future visit to Moscow. He said bilateral relations needed to be "rethought" under new circumstances.

On 1 September, Russian President Vladimir Putin said during a conversation with journalists that Russian troops had 12 km left to reach Sumy. Censor.NET estimated from DeepState’s map that Russian forces were approximately 17 km from Sumy’s administrative boundary.

Russian military commanders have systematically exaggerated their gains on the battlefield. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) describes such claims as part of a Kremlin information campaign aimed at creating the impression of major Russian gains. In this case, the Russian president cited exaggerated gains that, compared with his previous claims, appear to be a setback.

What Putin said

“The ‘North’ group of forces continues to create a security belt along the Russian-Ukrainian border in the border areas of the Sumy region... There are 12 km left to Sumy, to the Sumy ring road,” Putin said during the press conference.

Censor.NET reported that Russian forces were about 17 km from Sumy without specifying the reference point, while Putin did not say which section of the city’s ring road his 12 km figure referred to.

Putin previously gave a different distance

On 28 June, during an interview with Russian propagandist Pavel Zarubin, Putin said that Russian troops had “about 10.5 km” left to reach Sumy. At the time, he also explained the offensive as the creation of a “security zone” along Russia’s border.

Putin’s claimed distance to Sumy therefore increased by approximately 1.5 km in just over two months, contradicting the Kremlin’s portrayal of a continuing advance.

Other exaggerations

In July 2026, Putin claimed that Russian forces had “completely captured” Kostiantynivka. Ukraine’s General Staff rejected the claim, saying Ukrainian forces continued defensive operations in the city. ISW also said some videos of Russian flags being raised in Kostiantynivka were likely AI-altered.

On 2 December 2025, Putin claimed that Russian forces had captured Pokrovsk in Donetsk Oblast. ISW found no evidence confirming the city’s complete capture and assessed that its fall would not enable Moscow to achieve a significant breakthrough.

US Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe's visit to Moscow has triggered much speculation. The main thesis is that Russia may be preparing to conduct an act of aggression against a NATO member in the relatively near term to invalidate NATO's Article 5.

According to sources cited by the Wall Street Journal, Ratcliffe delivered a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were singled out in a Politico report on 26 August, citing two "sources familiar with the matter."

Every warning names the Baltics. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are where the CIA pointed, where the intelligence assessments focus, where NATO has massed its tripwire forces. But the Baltics are defended. The one piece of NATO territory Russia could seize before anyone could stop it—and that hands hesitant Western capitals a ready-made excuse not to respond—lies far to the north. It is Svalbard.

The timeline

On 6 August, citing new US intelligence reports, the Wall Street Journal reported that "US intelligence is warning that Russia may attempt to test NATO's resolve by carrying out a limited strike against one of the Alliance's member states within the next few years." US intelligence assessments indicate that any action by Russia could occur between this autumn and 2029. This is only the latest in a series of warnings of the risk of war with Russia. Leaders of NATO's eastern flank countries recently issued public warnings, citing intelligence that Russia is preparing provocations on their territory.

On 29 August, the Polish Prime Minister said there were signs that Russia was seriously preparing for an escalation and that the next seven to eight months could be critical for the security of Ukraine, Poland, and the entire region.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) argues that a CIA director's personal visit to deliver a message is unusual and generally reserved for sensitive matters of the highest importance. Ratcliffe's arrival in Moscow on a C-17 military transport aircraft and his use of an American motorcade suggest that the US regarded its intelligence as urgent and sensitive—not a warning of a distant threat. The visit indicates concern about a much shorter timeline than the US intelligence reports of early August suggested.

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That timeline is shaped by Europe's urgent effort to close its critical military vulnerabilities by 2030. Russia is unlikely to wait until Europe has regained its strength.

The last CIA director's trip to Moscow was in November 2021, when William Burns made a final effort to deter Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. To state the obvious: Burns' effort failed—and he served a president friendly to NATO and to international law. Ratcliffe serves a president who treats Europe as a strategic adversary; his warning is unlikely to shift Moscow at all.

The threat: sub-threshold is over

The EU White Paper describes Russia as the "fundamental threat" to European security for the foreseeable future, citing its war economy, industrial mobilization, nuclear posture, and cooperation with Belarus, Iran, and North Korea.

According to assessments by several EU intelligence services, Russia's rapidly expanding military-production capacity could give it the ability to test the unity of Western countries and the effectiveness of Article 5 within the next three to five years. The US recently warned Poland that Russia is planning an armed provocation on Polish soil designed to test NATO's commitment to collective self-defense.

Let us be clear: Russia has been testing the unity of Western countries and the effectiveness of Article 5 for years already.

It is waging an ever-escalating hybrid war that could—and arguably should—have triggered Article 5 long ago. It is attacking critical infrastructure, conducting sabotage and cyberattacks, running influence and information operations, violating NATO airspace with missiles and drones, and flying UAV intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions over allied territory. On 23 August, The Telegraph reported, citing Western intelligence sources, that Russia has launched a new wave of attacks on weapons factories in Europe, recruiting members of local criminal gangs and testing NATO's response.

None of it has forced a response. That is the point. To test NATO's commitment to collective defense—rather than merely its patience—Russia must escalate beyond the sub-threshold. It must stage the one thing it has so far avoided: a military operation that forces NATO to confront Article 5.

The window for doing so is closing. On 11 December 2025, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned that Russia could attack a NATO country within five years, adding that the Alliance must "be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured"—the first time since World War II that a secretary general has raised the prospect of a full-scale war on NATO soil. NATO's generals warn of war by 2029; Europe will not be ready until 2035. Russia has every incentive to act inside that gap, before it narrows.

The gap is real. These assessments have emerged against a backdrop of critical munitions shortages: Patriot interceptors, long-range precision-guided missiles, tactical ground-launched missile systems, 155mm artillery shells, and Stinger short-range surface-to-air missiles. US stocks have been badly depleted by weak defense-industrial production and by the Israel–US confrontation with Iran. NATO has since named Integrated Air and Missile Defense a top priority for the Alliance's survival and deterrence, calling for a 400 percent increase in air- and missile-defense capabilities. That is the measure of the shortfall. Worse, recent exercises have shown the Alliance is nowhere near ready to fight a drone war with Russia.

Most analysis fixes on the Baltics. In my opinion, there is a more likely scenario: the seizure of Norwegian sovereign territory in the High North.

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Why Svalbard: the tripwire it lacks

Admittedly, no intelligence service has ranked Svalbard above the Baltics. That is puzzling, given that while the Baltic states are a challenge for Russia, Svalbard is a challenge for NATO.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are defended by a standing tripwire. NATO permanent battlegroups operate in each—the UK leads in Estonia, Canada in Latvia, Germany in Lithuania—backed by a forward-defense posture built to stop any incursion at the border rather than liberate territory afterward. In response to Russian airspace incursions, drone provocations, and GPS jamming, NATO stood up the Eastern Sentry initiative; after repeated undersea cable cuts, it added Baltic Sentry to patrol the sea and guard the infrastructure. The Suwałki Gap—the 60-kilometer land corridor linking Poland to Lithuania between Belarus and Kaliningrad—is heavily fortified and rehearsed in large multinational exercises.

An attack on the Baltic countries hits allied forces on day one, forcing the Alliance to act, and it requires a force buildup that telegraphs intent and escalates toward exactly the general war Russia wants to avoid.

Svalbard offers the opposite. There is no permanent garrison and no fortification, because Article 9 of the 1920 Svalbard Treaty bars naval bases, fortifications, and any "warlike" use of the archipelago. Norway retains the sovereign right to defend it—Coast Guard and naval vessels call at Longyearbyen, and defensive measures under Article 5 are permitted—but there is no standing tripwire, and the treaty ensures there never will be.

That is the vulnerability: Russia can seize the archipelago by surprise and present a fait accompli before any force can reach it.

And it hands hesitant Western capitals a ready-made excuse. Svalbard is Norwegian sovereign territory, and Norway holds—correctly—that Article 5 applies to it. The land-territory question is not genuinely ambiguous; Russia manufactures the ambiguity, contesting Norway's interpretation and pointing to the treaty's demilitarized character to argue that any response is itself a violation. But in a strategic environment where Western leaders seek any reason not to engage Russia, that manufactured doubt—remote outpost, unpopulated rock, a "demilitarized" treaty—is enough.

The excuse is political, not legal. And the excuse is the objective: a visibly divided Alliance, unable to agree whether or how to respond, is the entire purpose of a Russian move against a NATO member.

If Russia achieves surprise, it will meet no opposing force. The Northern Fleet operates in the area routinely; Russia's Arctic forces—roughly 15,000 to 20,000 troops across motor-rifle and naval-infantry brigades, with cold-weather armor and layered anti-access/area-denial systems—are already in place. Svalbard sits within range of Russian tactical aviation flying from the Kola Peninsula, which could establish air control fast enough to keep NATO from landing at all.

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What Russia would gain

The occupation would also pay for itself many times over, shifting the balance across the entire Arctic and North Atlantic.

The primary military incentive is nuclear. The Kola Peninsula houses Russia's strategic ballistic-missile submarines, and holding Svalbard would close the shallow Barents Sea into a protected bastion where those submarines—the core of Russia's second-strike deterrent—could operate insulated from NATO. Control of the archipelago also locks the "Bear Gap," the stretch between Svalbard and Norway's North Cape. Anti-ship and anti-air batteries on the islands would let Russia choke off NATO surface and anti-submarine forces from the Barents Sea while guaranteeing its Northern Fleet unhindered breakout routes into the North Atlantic.

The archipelago is also a forward platform. Using existing infrastructure such as Longyearbyen's airport, Russia could base tactical aircraft and long-range maritime patrol aircraft hundreds of kilometers further west than its current fields on Franz Josef Land. Seizing SvalSat—one of the world's largest commercial satellite ground stations—would let Moscow blind or repurpose a hub critical to Western environmental, civilian, and dual-use satellite operations. And by holding the "gateway to the Arctic," Russia would gain physical leverage over the western entrance to the Northern Sea Route, an increasingly viable shipping lane as the ice retreats.

These are gains Russia would want under any circumstances. They are not why Svalbard is the likely next target—that case rests on the tripwire it lacks and the window that is closing. But they explain why, of all the ways to test Article 5, this one carries no offsetting cost.

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Conclusion

The map confirms the logic. Baltic officials and government-affiliated analysts stress that NATO should take the Russian threat seriously but that their immediate assessment has not changed—there is no large-scale buildup along the Russian border with the Baltic states. The only NATO territory open to invasion without such a buildup is Svalbard.

According to the Norwegian Intelligence Service, Russia "will remain intent on preventing NATO from making military use of the archipelago" and aims "to increase Russian scope for action in Svalbard, to influence attitudes to Norwegian defence policy, to instil fear, polarisation and political apathy in the population and to undermine trust in Norwegian authorities—in addition to weakening support to Ukraine." Norway's proximity to the Arctic, its energy supply to Europe, and its role as a logistics and reception hub for allied forces all make it a target.

A limited attack on NATO's northern flank would aim to invalidate Article 5 by producing a situation the North Atlantic Council—which must vote unanimously to honor the mutual-defense clause—cannot resolve. Moscow would choose the operation most likely to leave NATO unable to unify on a decisive response, and thus unable to come to the aid of the member attacked.

A failure to invoke Article 5, or to act on it, would gut the credibility of the guarantee—one of Vladimir Putin's longest-standing strategic objectives beyond Ukraine.

Retaking Svalbard would mean moving NATO amphibious forces more than 1,000 kilometers across open ocean patrolled by Russian submarines and dominated by Russian aviation—an extremely risky and costly endeavor, with no guarantee of success. A Russian occupation would also feed an unhinged American president's fixation on Greenland, eroding Alliance cohesion further still.

Attacking the Baltics—defensively prepared, reinforced by allied forces, and offering none of Svalbard's advantages—makes no comparable sense.

The information war has already started. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov published an article on 31 August accusing NATO of militarizing the Far North in a "direct threat" to Russian security and an attempt to turn the Arctic into a "new front" against Russia—laying the groundwork to frame any Russian move as a pre-emptive defense. The same day, Russia's Ambassador to Norway, Nikolay Korchunov, claimed that Norway's "creeping abandonment of its own guiding principles regarding foreign military activity on its territory undermines the country's sovereignty" and warned of "a slide into direct military conflict."

NATO has committed, repeatedly and at every level from the Strategic Concept to the Secretary General, to defend "every inch of Allied territory." Svalbard is where Russia intends to prove that commitment empty.

Russia has exhausted the sub-threshold; forcing the Article 5 question now requires a discrete military act, and the window for it closes as Europe rearms. The one place that act can be staged—without a telegraphing buildup, against territory with no tripwire, offering a built-in political excuse for NATO to hesitate—is Svalbard.

That is why, if Russia moves, the logic points north.

Hans Petter Midttun

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

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Russian propagandists used the Matryoshka disinformation network to circulate a digitally altered front page of the Polish regional weekly Przegląd Regionalny warning of a “hungry fall and winter” in Ukraine, the country’s Center for Countering Disinformation reported.

The fake turns genuine anxiety over Russian attacks on warehouses and food logistics into an unsupported prediction of mass starvation. The Center said Matryoshka routinely disguises fabricated material as reporting by established Western outlets, lending Russian narratives borrowed credibility while creating the impression that foreign media consider Ukraine’s situation hopeless.

The fabricated Przegląd Regionalny front page claimed Russian strikes would push 63% of Ukrainians to the brink of famine over a “hungry autumn and winter.” No such article ran—the real front page of that issue looked entirely different, and the circulated image was built using graphics-editing software, the Center said.

The image spread through Matryoshka, a network that dresses invented content in the mastheads of recognized Western outlets. In this case, the campaign was meant to frighten Ukrainians and weaken public confidence, according to the Center.

Although it impersonated a Polish outlet, the Center described Ukrainians—not Polish readers—as the campaign’s target: the Polish masthead supplied an apparently independent foreign voice for a Russian narrative.

The fake works because the disruption it points to is real. Russian attacks on warehouses and food logistics had destroyed up to 90% of Ukraine’s modern food storage capacity, and suppliers were moving stocks and changing delivery routes and storage methods in response, Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi said on 28 August 2026, according to Interfax-Ukraine.

Supermarket chain ATB has temporarily capped purchases of certain essential goods at 6 units of any single product per customer, citing both Russian strikes and resellers buying in bulk.

What the fake predicts, though, is not what officials expect. Presidential defense-technology adviser Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov urged Ukrainians not to panic and said a systemic food shortage was not expected, ZN.UA reported.

How Russia spreads disinformation in Poland

Russia has repeatedly exploited Poland’s information space to turn political, economic, and security anxieties against Ukraine. Polish Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said Russian intelligence had offered Poles €3,000–€4,000 ($3,500–$4,600) to spread disinformation before the 2025 presidential election.

After Russian drones entered Poland that September, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the Kremlin was using real fears and emotions to fuel anti-Ukrainian sentiment. False claims about Ukrainians living off Polish taxpayers have also fed hostility as bilateral relations frayed.

A fire at a Polish plant that makes drone parts for Ukraine's and Poland's militaries is being investigated as possible sabotage by a foreign intelligence service, Militarnyi reported. Poland's National Prosecutor's Office opened the case on two counts: foreign-intelligence activity against the country and a terrorist offense.

Fires and break-ins like this fit a widening pattern — the factories and supply lines that keep Ukraine armed are increasingly targets far from the front line. Across the continent, prosecutors keep opening the same kind of arson case against plants tied to Ukraine's defense.

A masked intruder and a two-hour fire

The fire started shortly after midnight on 31 August in the assembly hall of the WB Electronics plant in Skarżysko-Kamienna and spread to the storage rooms. Five crews put it out in under two hours. No one was hurt, but the storage rooms were destroyed, leaving at least 15 million zloty ($4 million) in damage. The plant had no permanent guards on site; a security company monitoring it remotely reported the fire.

Prosecutors say the blaze was set deliberately with a planted charge of flammable material, and no one has been charged. Security cameras recorded a masked person who climbed a fence and got onto the site.

Why Poland is looking at Moscow

Czesław Mroczek, deputy head of Poland's Interior Ministry, told RMF FM radio that many signs point to arson, and that a Russian trail is the obvious inference. An attack on the defense industry can suggest Russian involvement, he said, since European states have faced sabotage for years while backing Ukraine. Mroczek said protection plans for key defense plants must be richer than what this site had. No one has been detained, and investigators are still tracing how the intruder got in and who may have ordered it.

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What the plant actually makes

WB Electronics is the core of WB Group, Poland's biggest private arms holding, whose firms build reconnaissance and strike drones such as the FlyEye and the Warmate. The Skarżysko-Kamienna site itself makes drone components for unmanned systems, used by both Polish and Ukrainian forces. Ukraine received FlyEye drones back in 2022 under its Army of Drones program, and in 2025 WB Group launched drone production inside Ukraine.

Ukraine's assault regiments, the troops built to storm trenches, have taken on a new role in 2026, reaching far into the Russian rear with their own strike drones, according to a feature by Ukrainska Pravda. Two of them merged their drone teams into a single experimental command and now plan deep strikes and ground assaults together, hitting the roads that feed Russian forces before the infantry moves.

Through 2026, Ukraine has turned drones into a way to choke the logistics that keep the invasion moving, backed by dedicated funding aimed squarely at the enemy's rear. The shift now under way puts that reach in the hands of the units doing the ground fighting, so the same troops who storm a position can first starve it from dozens of kilometers away.

Assault troops with a long reach

For most of the war, deep strikes behind the front belonged to specialized drone units. That is changing. The 475th Separate Assault Regiment, known as CODE 9.2, was possibly one of the first non-specialist units to run mid-strikes, flights by medium-range attack drones that hit targets 50 to 150 kilometers past the front.

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Then CODE 9.2 and the 1st Separate Assault Regiment named after Dmytro Kotsiubailo built a joint command for multidomain operations, code-named Phalanx (Falanha), so they could plan and strike as one. Before that center existed, each unit fought its own stretch of front at its own pace. In plain terms, ground units now own part of the fight far beyond their own trenches.

Drones go in before the infantry

Reporters watched a soldier follow a live feed from a mid-strike drone called Darts as it flew over occupied Zaporizhzhia Oblast toward the Tokmak–Melitopol road, one of three the report calls key for Russian forces on that stretch. Crews log every flight in Ukraine's Delta battlefield system. When several drones go down in one area, an analyst reroutes the next ones around Russian air defenses. The goal is to wear down the enemy's supply before the infantry ever advances.

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Where the shift began

CODE 9.2 launched its first mid-strikes at the end of 2025, during the Kupiansk operation, its commander Oleksandr Nastenko, call sign Flint, recalled. In the interview, the two commanders trace the center back to a build-up of heavy bomber drones, then a plan to isolate the enemy's transport and supply. For assault units, that kind of reach is recent. The regiments had already worked together earlier in 2026 to strike Russian routes into occupied Crimea, hitting bridges and trucks that keep the peninsula fed.

Zaporizhzhia’s largest shopping and entertainment complex, City Mall, will remain closed throughout September following a Russian drone strike on a neighboring hypermarket last week.

Russia’s attacks are increasingly disrupting the basic civilian life of Ukrainian cities, as strikes on shops and other commercial facilities make it harder for businesses to operate and residents to go about their daily lives. The pattern is especially pronounced in cities close to the front, where Russia is unable to seize territory but can continue attacking from the air.

City Mall announced the closure on 1 September, apologizing to visitors and saying it would provide updates on when operations could resume. The complex did not give an official reason for the decision.

The announcement came four days after a Russian strike hit an Epicentr hypermarket located near the mall on 28 August. The attack sparked a fire covering about 2,000 square meters.

Russia targets Ukraine’s civilian economy

Shopping centers and other commercial facilities have increasingly been caught up in Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian cities.

In recent weeks, Russia has stepped up attacks on commercial sites and retail storage facilities, particularly in and around Kyiv, as well as other major cities closer to Russia and the frontlines.

On 21 August, a Russian drone strike on a shopping center in Kryvyi Rih killed at least 15 people and injured 130, including 23 children, according to local authorities. A second strike hit emergency responders about 30 minutes later as they worked at the scene.

The attacks have also hit Ukraine’s retail sector financially. As of August, three shopping centers had been destroyed and nine more damaged by Russian attacks since the beginning of 2026, with direct losses to the sector reaching 3.226 billion hryvnias ($72.5 million), according to industry data cited by Censor.NET.

Fear of attacks is also keeping shoppers away. Air raid alerts accounted for 21.8% of shopping centers’ operating hours in August, up from 20.1% in July and 9.4% a year earlier.

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Zaporizhzhia under Russian attack

For Zaporizhzhia, the pressure is particularly severe. The major city lies close to the front line and has faced sustained Russian attacks throughout the full-scale war. 

Unable to seize the city through ground advances, Russia has repeatedly used missiles and drones to strike its infrastructure and civilian areas.

The result is a city where even businesses that survive direct strikes can be forced to close because of the continuing threat.

The head of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, personally consecrated Igor Pashentsev as bishop of Skadovsk and Oleshky after occupation authorities appointed him to lead the Skadovsk diocese, the Ukrainian outlet IPC-South reported, citing Russian sources.

The appointment advances the Russian church’s incorporation of occupied Ukrainian parishes into a Moscow-controlled structure created after Russia seized the area. Pashentsev will oversee churches across five occupied Kherson districts through a diocese IPC-South describes as operating illegally on Ukrainian territory.

Ukraine banned the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church from operating in the country in 2024 and established a court process for suspending Ukrainian religious groups that fail to sever Russian control. The measure targets Russian control, not Orthodox Christianity.

IPC-South says Pashentsev graduated from a Soviet military command school of chemical defense and served in the Soviet Defense Ministry’s 12th Main Directorate from 1981 to 1992. The Federation of American Scientists says the directorate stored, maintained, transported, and secured the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal, but public records do not identify his duties there.

Ordained in 1993, Pashentsev completed the Moscow Theological Seminary in 1998, later led a Tambov diocesan office for relations with the armed forces and detention facilities, and served in the Barysh diocese. Known in the church as Joseph, he held the rank of archimandrite—a senior Orthodox monk—before his consecration.

During a Dormition liturgy—a major Orthodox feast honoring the Virgin Mary—Kirill gave Pashentsev an episcopal staff symbolizing a bishop’s authority and delivered instructions before his ministry began, Russian church accounts relayed by IPC-South said.

The Russian Orthodox Church created the Skadovsk diocese—a regional church administration—on 27 December 2023 after the occupation made it impossible for the existing Kherson diocese to oversee parishes on the Dnipro’s left bank. The new body incorporated parishes across the occupied Oleshky, Hola Prystan, Kalanchak, Skadovsk, and Chaplynka districts. IPC-South describes it as operating illegally on Ukrainian territory.

Russia weaponizes church control while suppressing other faiths

Pashentsev’s appointment is part of the Moscow Patriarchate’s wider effort to control religious life in occupied Ukraine. Religious communities that reject Kremlin authority face interrogations, threats, closures, and confiscation.

Ukraine’s Security Service has accused church structures of recruiting and training mercenaries for Russia’s military. The Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think tank, says occupation authorities also arbitrarily detain clergy and destroy places of worship while suppressing independent Ukrainian religious identity.

A shootout involving Ukrainian security personnel in Kyiv left several people wounded on 2 September, with Ukrainian authorities now saying the confrontation occurred during an investigation into an alleged Russian plot to assassinate a Russian opposition figure in Ukraine.

The incident took place overnight in Kyiv’s Dniprovskyi district, amid reports that Stepan Kaplunov, deputy commander for combat operations of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), had been abducted.

Shootout follows reported abduction

Ukrainska Pravda reported, citing Kaplunov’s lawyer Taras Borovskyi, that law enforcement officers arrived at the serviceman’s home after his reported disappearance.

According to Borovskyi, Kaplunov’s fellow soldiers came to the location after being alerted, after which gunfire broke out. The lawyer also published video from the scene, Ukrainska Pravda reported.

The RDK had previously said that unknown individuals abducted Kaplunov from the courtyard of his home.

Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation confirmed to Ukrainska Pravda that it had received a complaint from Kaplunov’s lawyers alleging his abduction and was examining it for possible registration as a criminal proceeding.

Ukrainska Pravda, citing sources in Ukraine’s security services, reported that the confrontation involved the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR). Its sources said three HUR personnel had been wounded as of Wednesday morning.

SBU links confrontation to Russian plot

The SBU later said the confrontation occurred during an investigation into an alleged terrorist attack organized by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).

The agency said its investigators were conducting a search at one of the addresses connected to the case when a group of people launched an armed attack on them. The group allegedly blocked the investigators’ vehicles with cars and attempted to prevent the search.

The SBU said its Alpha special operations unit was deployed to stop the armed resistance. Officers used their weapons, and several people who resisted were wounded, according to the agency.

The attackers were detained, the SBU said. Initial investigative work found that they belonged to one of Ukraine’s Defense Forces units, while weapons and documents were seized from them.

The agency did not identify the detainees or their military unit.

Alleged assassination attempt

Earlier on 2 September, the SBU said it and HUR had jointly foiled an FSB plot to assassinate a leader of a Russian opposition nationalist political movement who had traveled to Ukraine for Independence Day.

The SBU did not name the alleged target or provide details of the planned attack.

RBC-Ukraine, citing sources, reported that the target was Kaplunov. The outlet also reported that HUR later deleted a statement about the foiled attack.

The SBU’s later statement about the shootout did not name Kaplunov or explicitly identify the armed group involved as HUR personnel.

The Russian Volunteer Corps is a unit operating within Ukraine’s military intelligence structures and composed of Russian nationals fighting against Russia’s invasion.

Budanov calls for investigation

Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s Presidential Office, said the incident should be thoroughly and impartially investigated, according to RBC-Ukraine.

He said no one should be allowed to abduct servicemen, open fire in Ukrainian cities, or give or carry out criminal orders with impunity.

The Prosecutor General’s Office has opened a pretrial investigation into threats against and an attempt on the life of a law enforcement officer, the SBU said.

Authorities have not publicly provided a full account reconciling the different reports surrounding the incident. Investigative actions are ongoing.

Ukraine and Russian opposition figures

Ukraine has become a base for some Russian opposition figures and anti-Kremlin activists since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Some have joined Ukrainian military units or otherwise supported Ukraine’s war effort.

That has also made some of them targets for Russian intelligence operations.