The Ukrainian air force's Swedish-made Saab ASC 890 radar early warning planes have been flying combat sorties since March, the Ukrainian defense ministry has revealed—six months of operations Kyiv kept quiet. Sweden donated the pair of planes as part of a $1.25-billion aid package Stockholm announced in May 2024.

It is the first airborne radar Ukraine has ever operated. It is not the first one Ukraine has built. The Antonov An-71 flew from the Sviatoshyn factory airfield in Kyiv on 12 July 1985, a radar plane designed and assembled in the city it would have defended. The airframe worked—one prototype logged 362 flights. The radar, built by VEGA in Moscow, never did. Funding died with the Soviet Union. Of three prototypes, one was scrapped, one sits in storage at Antonov, and one is in the State Aviation Museum in Kyiv, the only An-71 in any collection anywhere.

The two twin-propeller ASC 890s with their top-mounted radars are a powerful addition to Ukraine's aerial arsenal. Cruising at around 6 km, the radar planes can detect and track aerial targets out to 450 km—roughly 350 km against fighter-size targets in heavy jamming—and hold 1,000 airborne and 500 surface tracks at once. Their Link 16 radio data links relay target data to the air force's Lockheed Martin F-16s, Dassault Mirage 2000s and Saab Gripens.

But there's a problem, one the Russians know all too well. Radar early warning planes are big, slow and the opposite of stealthy. Radiating electromagnetic energy from high altitude, they're easy for enemy forces to locate. Hitting them is harder given how far from the front line a radar plane typically flies. But a missile with sufficient range could do the job.

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And that's why Ukraine's ASC 890 crews should worry. The more they fly and contribute to Ukraine's air defense operations, the harder the Russians may try to shoot them down.

The risk isn't theoretical. The Russian air force went to war with as few as seven of its own Beriev A-50U radar early warning planes. The lumbering aircraft tracked Ukrainian warplanes and helped vector Russian fighters to intercept.

The Ukrainians fought back. A Ukrainian drone damaged an A-50U on the ground in Belarus in February 2023. In January 2024, a long-range Ukrainian missile—reportedly a American-made Patriot—shot down an A-50U over the Sea of Azov in southern Ukraine. Six weeks later, in February 2024, another Ukrainian missile, an ex-Soviet S-200, struck a third A-50U in the air in the same area.

The Russians learned the hard way that the A-50Us can't survive within the roughly 250-km range of Ukraine's best air defenses. The A-50Us redeployed deeper into the Russian interior. Today they mostly patrol the likeliest routes for incoming Ukrainian cruise missiles targeting strategic industries along the Volga River.

No retreat

Ukraine's ASC 890s can't retreat the way Russia's A-50Us have done. Russia is big. Comparatively, Ukraine is small. The Russian air force's best R-37M air-to-air missiles, fired by Sukhoi Su-35 and Mikoyan MiG-31 fighters, fly as far as the ASC 890's radar detects. To be useful, the Ukrainian radar planes must operate inside the envelope of the R-37M.

It's apparent how the ASC 890s can help the Ukrainian war effort. They can detect and track incoming Russian drones and cruise missiles, giving ground- and air-based defenses time to get into position to intercept. The Swedish-made planes could work alongside F-16s to stage complex aerial ambushes like the kind the F-16s pulled off with help from a ground-based Patriot battery back in July. That ambush took out a Russian Su-35.

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So far Ukraine has won that gamble. The ASC 890s have flown combat sorties for six months without a loss—and for most of that time, nobody outside the Ukrainian air force knew they were flying at all. The silence may have been part of the protection. It has now ended.

But each sortie is a gamble. As long as the Russian air force can push Sukhois and MiGs armed with R-37Ms close to the disputed gray zone in Ukraine, the ASC 890s could be targets. Nor is the R-37M the only threat: analysts have flagged Russia's S-300V4 surface-to-air system and its Krasukha-4 jammers as risks to the Swedish planes. Ukraine's ground-based Patriots and S-200s and air-launched AIM-120 missiles could push the Sukhois and MiGs farther back, but all of those missiles are in short supply.

But even a more favorable aerial environment wouldn't fully protect the ASC 890s. Ukrainian drones and missiles have destroyed or damaged several Russian A-50Us on the ground at their airfields. Between missions, the ASC 890s are just as exposed to Russian drones and missiles.

After a months-long pause, US President Donald Trump's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner opened their first round of peace talks in Kyiv to end the Russo-Ukrainian war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced their visit and talks on Telegram on 6 September. A day earlier, they visited Moscow and met with Russian President Vladimir Putin there. Ukraine came in with prepared proposals and a demand for security guarantees. Witkoff called the discussion substantive, and the British, French, and German national security advisers joined the later rounds. Despite their previous multiple visits to Moscow, this was their first-ever visit to Kyiv.

Zelenskyy came with a written package and one demand

Zelenskyy gathered his negotiating team before the meeting and wrote on Telegram that Ukraine was ready to talk. 

"Peace is needed. Security guarantees are needed. A dignified character of the post-war peace is needed. Our proposals have been prepared," he said, adding that it was important to work in a coordinated, substantive, and realistic way.

The preparatory meeting brought together head of the President's Office Kyrylo Budanov, Foreign Intelligence Service head Rustem Umierov, Servant of the People faction leader David Arakhamia, and First Deputy Head of the President's Office Serhii Kyslytsia—Ukraine's likely negotiating team.

The post announcing the start of the talks, published shortly after 2 p.m., carried video of Zelenskyy greeting the two Americans. He also told reporters the day would run in stages: one session with the US side, then another with the European advisers.  After the first part, Zelenskyy thanked American and European partners. 

The presidential website had published no report on the talks by the time this article went out.

Ending the fighting is not the goal, the envoys said

Witkoff called the talks substantive and said the US team was ready to continue working, TSN reported. He said Washington was looking for openings on external security issues and coordinating closely with Germany, France, and the UK.

Kushner said the goal was not only to end the fighting but to create conditions for a lasting peace. He called it “a very, very hard and complex problem,” but “a very worthy problem of solving,” and said a lasting peace should allow Ukraine to turn its wartime “bravery and ingenuity and strength” toward rebuilding the country.

Kushner also said Trump is determined to end the war and then shift toward investment and economic cooperation, which he argued could bring the countries closer and open new opportunities for Ukraine and Europe. He added that the talks continue between visits, with the US side speaking almost daily with the four Ukrainian negotiators, whom he named only by their first names.

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The Europeans joined the later rounds

Zelenskyy's spokesman Serhii Nykyforov said the first round with Witkoff and Kushner had finished, and that a second, expanded round with the national security advisers of the UK, France, and Germany would follow after a short break. A source familiar with the matter told Reuters the three advisers were in Kyiv on Sunday, without specifying which sessions they would attend.

A third round then opened, public broadcaster Suspilne reported. Witkoff described the discussion as substantive, concrete, and important shortly before it started.

Moscow, the day before

Witkoff and Kushner held three hours of talks with Putin in Moscow on 5 September. Putin's aide Yuri Ushakov stated the meeting was substantive, very frank, and constructive, and said Putin told them Russia would achieve its war aims and that the war's so-called "root causes" must be removed—Kremlin shorthand for Ukraine abandoning NATO membership and disarming, which Kyiv rejects.

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A White House representative told Radio Svoboda that the sides discussed concrete plans for next steps, to be announced in the coming weeks. Bloomberg reported that sources close to the Kremlin said Putin is ready to end the war only on his own terms, with Moscow's demands hardening. Axios reported that a US Treasury official responsible for sanctions policy joined the trip but did not attend the Putin meeting, alongside State Department and National Security Council staff.

Trump said on 4 September that Witkoff and Kushner were carrying a proposal to both Moscow and Kyiv, which he described as fresh, without giving details.

How the envoys reached Kyiv

Umierov published video this morning showing Budanov, Umierov, Arakhamia, and Kyslytsia welcoming Witkoff and Kushner at Kyiv’s railway station as the US envoys arrived for talks.

Ukraine had prepared to receive the envoys by air, but Russian strikes made that impossible, Zelenskyy said. He met them instead on Sofiivska Square before the delegation went inside St Sophia's Cathedral. In a 4 September address, Zelenskyy said Ukraine would keep Russian airspace safe for the envoys’ travel and demanded Moscow do the same.

A pause that covered two capitals

Ukraine ordered a three-day halt to strikes on Moscow around the visit, and the Kremlin claimed it would pause strikes on Kyiv until Monday. Nothing else stopped. Ukraine logged impacts at 11 sites across the country while the American delegation was in the Russian capital. Ukraine's 6 September strike hit the Ryazan oil refinery and set a core unit on fire, about 470 km from Ukraine.

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Twenty months of rounds without a deal

Trump made ending Russia’s war a priority after taking office in January 2025, but US-mediated talks produced little and later stalled during the US-Israeli war against Iran. Washington said in early August it intended to step up the effort, and Russian attacks intensifying pushed a planned August visit to Kyiv back.

The visit was confirmed on 4 September, after two weeks of heavy Russian attacks on Kyiv, including a drone strike on the headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and an earlier six-day bombardment. Previous talks also left Kyiv and Moscow far apart over Donbas, where Russia demands Ukrainian withdrawal from fortified cities still under Kyiv’s control.

Russia attacked Ukraine from 18:00 on 5 September and through the night into 6 September with 108 strike drones and S8000 Banderol cruise missiles, Ukraine's Air Force reported. The assault ran while US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were finishing three hours of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. They left the Russian capital after midnight and were expected in Kyiv on 6 September, again carrying a US proposal to end the war. Ukraine's own offer of a four-day pause in the fighting went unmatched by Russia.

The attack was still running in the morning

By 09:30 air defenses had downed or suppressed 82 Shahed-type, Gerbera, and other drones, along with six Banderol missiles. The military logged impacts at 11 locations and falling debris at seven more, and warned that Russian drones were still in Ukraine's airspace.

Over the previous day, Russian strikes killed seven people and injured 57 across Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk oblasts, according to oblast administration figures published on the morning of 6 September. Kharkiv Oblast lost four people, three of them one family in Chuhuiv. Zaporizhzhia Oblast reported one death, 25 injured, and 886 strikes on 54 settlements.

Three hours in the Kremlin

Witkoff and Kushner met Putin on 5 September and left the Kremlin close to midnight. Putin opened by telling them he had "full trust" in the US side, Axios reported, and Washington's goal is to restart direct Russian-Ukrainian talks that stopped six months ago. Putin's aide Yuri Ushakov called the discussion "substantive, constructive, exceptionally candid," ABC News reported, and stated the envoys had promised to carry Putin's own assessments into their meetings in Kyiv. Ushakov also repeated that Russia will achieve its goals and that the war's "root causes" must be removed — the Kremlin's shorthand for barring Ukraine from NATO and cutting down its army.

A White House official told RFE/RL that the sides discussed "concrete plans" for next steps, to be announced in the coming weeks. Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev, who sat in on the talks, called the Moscow trip an important peacemaking visit, Al Jazeera reported. The Kyiv leg would be the envoys' first trip to Ukraine since taking over the US effort; it was set for August and postponed as Russian strikes intensified.

Ukrainian drones struck the Ryazan oil refinery in Russia on the morning of 6 September and set one of its core units on fire, Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi reported. The unit produces the high-octane component the Rosneft plant needs for its higher grades of gasoline. Russian regional authorities acknowledged a fire without naming the site. Ryazan is situated southeast of Moscow, about 470 km from Ukraine.

What burned at Ryazan

Drones hit the low-temperature isomerization unit for pentane-hexane fractions, designated Izomalk-2-LIN-800, according to Militarnyi's analysis. The unit sits on the refinery's grounds and is one of the critically important links in the plant's production cycle.

It converts low-octane straight-run oil fractions into a cleaner high-octane blending component. That component is what allows the refinery to produce gasolines of the higher environmental classes, Euro-5 among them, without adding harmful additives. 

Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ published videos of the strike.

The same unit was hit in December

Drones already attacked this unit in December 2025 and damaged it. Earlier waves targeted the plant's ELOU-AVT-3, ELOU-AVT-6, and AVT-1 units.

By May 2026 the refinery had lost 90–100% of its refining capacity. Satellite imagery from 3 August 2026 showed Ukraine's Defense Forces had disabled two of the four crude distillation units on site.

Ukrainian drones struck the refinery in May, and FP-1 drones set it and a nearby warehouse burning in July.

Russian officials report a fire, not a target

Ryazan Oblast governor Pavel Malkov confirmed the region came under drone attack. Drone debris damaged residential buildings in Ryazan and Sapozhkovsky district, he stated, and a fire broke out at an enterprise he did not name. He said there were no casualties and that emergency services were working.

Russian news Telegram channel Astra said its analysis of photographs taken by residents established that the fire was on the grounds of the Ryazan refinery. Ukrainian channel Exilenova+, which tracks such attacks, also reported a hit on the plant.

Russia's fuel squeeze

Ukraine's General Staff said strikes on 26 August and 1 September fully stopped two large refining enterprises: Lukoil-Nizhegorodnefteorgsintez in Kstovo, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, and the Novatek-Ust-Luga complex in Leningrad Oblast. Both supply the Russian army.

Short of gasoline, Russia has been buying more fuel abroad. Moscow discussed importing gasoline from Kazakhstan in June, and a Kazakh refinery deal would cover 0.3% of Russian demand. Belarus increased its gasoline supplies to Russia nearly 20-fold in the first half of the year.

Ukraine's drone forces say they struck 58,465 Russian targets in August, an average of nearly 1,900 a day. The tally is up almost 9 percent on July and more than double January's, and it included 54 vessels of Russia's shadow fleet, 33 air-defense systems, and 168 energy nodes, Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Madiar" Brovdi reported on his Telegram channel.

The volume matters less than where some of it lands. Cutting power to occupied Crimea and the south is meant to blind Russian air defense, much of which runs on the grid. Meanwhile, the strikes on Russia's sanctions-evading shadow fleet squeeze both Crimea's fuel supply and Moscow's oil exports.

Ukraine's drone forces claim 11,010 Russian troop casualties in August

Brovdi also said the strikes killed or wounded 11,010 Russian soldiers over the month, about 355 a day — a figure that counts only losses the drone force attributes to its own strikes, not Russia's total casualties.

That daily rate was slightly below July's 374, down about 5 percent, even as the number of targets rose. Compared with January, the force said Russian personnel losses were up 17.3 percent.

Three campaigns inside the count

Most of the headline volume is small front-line targets, but three named operations account for the strategic hits. Under Operation "Milk", the force said it struck 54 shadow-fleet vessels in August, bringing the total to 260 since the campaign began on 6 July. Operation "PPOpad" — a play on the Ukrainian for air defense — hit 33 Russian air-defense elements in August and 263 across 2026.

The third, Operation "Crimean Switch Off", struck 168 energy nodes in August, bringing the total to 349 since early July. That campaign has been running for months, blacking out swaths of occupied Crimea.

Brovdi has argued that cutting power to stationary radars and other air-defense elements opens the airspace for deeper Ukrainian strikes. Months of these strikes have left occupied Crimea rationing fuel and living with rolling blackouts, and cut the Kerch ferry crossing's capacity by about three-quarters. All of the figures are the force's own, and Ukraine's military claims of Russian losses are not independently verified.

Exclusives

Ukraine is running short of its best missiles for hunting Russia's jet drones. Now MiG-29s are firing 1970s weapons. The R-73 was the missile for the job. Ukraine has burned through enough of them to bring back a weapon that was obsolete in 2022.

Ukraine is taking 1980s Leopards from across Europe and giving them radar-guided anti-drone guns and gunner-less turrets. Thirty-one get a Belgian turret the crew doesn't sit in. Others become radar-guided drone killers, built in Rome and paid for with frozen Russian money.

Russia destroyed most of Ukraine's big warehouses. Now the country is scrambling to build small ones everywhere. Whether they can do it before winter, and at what cost to prices, is the question now hanging over the country's food supply.

Military

Ukraine's Lasar's Group says its bomber drones destroyed rare Russian Zhitel jammer 55 km behind front. The R-330Zh Zhitel jams GPS, satellite and cellular signals at once.

"Everyone is absolutely livid": Expert says Russian agent may have activated MESH relay within 5 km of attack on Security Service, enraging Ukraine and Europe. The drone was aimed directly at the acting SBU chief's office, Zelenskyy said.

Intelligence and Technology

More than 400 defense firms ask Kyiv to create one state body with real authority over $6.8 billion industry. A year after the strategic-industries ministry folded into Defense, the sector's council says responsibility is scattered across half a dozen agencies.

From HQ to the zero line: Ukraine's Hrafit system answers one important question on an ordinary phone in a trench and on the road. Built by military programmers, Hrafit fuses radio-intelligence and surveillance into one picture.

International

Slovakia, led by one of EU's most Russia-friendly governments, condemns Russia's drone strike on Ukraine's Security Service building. Slovakia condemns Russia's SBU strike but urges "both sides" to de-escalate.

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.

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.

Humanitarian and Social Impact

Russia made 500 Ukrainian schoolchildren in occupied Donetsk take part in "anti-terrorism dictation". It taught them they can be jailed for a repost at 14. The test drilled Russian extremism law into pupils. In 2025 alone, occupation authorities sent 48 Ukrainian children to psychiatric hospitals.

Political and Legal Developments

"If you're gonna f*ck, f*ck a queen, if you're gonna steal, steal a million": Ukraine's anti-corruption bureau says senior official ran criminal ring inside Prosecutor General's Office. Investigators say the suspect took bribes to shield scam call centers and laundered millions.

Read our earlier daily review here.