Russian troops are falling back in Sumy Oblast in northern Ukraine.

That’s not surprising. The Kremlin has pulled no fewer than five marine and airborne brigades, regiments and divisions from Sumy and redirected them south to Donetsk Oblast, where a pair of Russian field armies are struggling to hold back a Ukrainian counterattack.

Both sides in Russia’s 43-month wider war on Ukraine have shifted troops from Sumy to Donetsk as the battle for the fortress city of Pokrovsk intensifies. But it’s evident the Russians have weakened their forces in Sumy more than the Ukrainians have.

In recent days, Ukrainian troops have ejected the Russians from the area around the villages of Kostiantynivka and Novokostiantynivka in Sumy just a few hundred meters from the border with Russia, analysis group Deep State reported Sunday.

“There are achievements in the Sumy region,” Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Sept. 12.

It seems the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade is the main Russian formation in the vicinity of Kostiantynivka and Novokostiantynivka. It’s the last large marine unit left in Sumy after the Kremlin concentrated five marine regiments and brigades east of Pokrovsk in recent weeks.

Pokrovsk is one of the last major Ukrainian strongholds between hundreds of thousands of Russian troops and the main Kramatorsk-Sloviansk urban center in western Donetsk. If Pokrovsk falls, all of Donetsk may fall.

Donetsk is the priority. And the Kremlin seems to be willing to risk its gains in Sumy to make further gains in Donetsk. In addition to moving the marines to the east at the expense of the north, Russian commanders have shifted existing field armies in the sector surrounding Pokrovsk.

East of Pokrovsk, three Russian field armies and corps—the 8th and 51st Combined Arms Armies and the 68th Army Corps—face around nine Ukrainian regiments and brigades plus a few separate battalions, some of them under the command of the new 1st Azov Corps.

Russian horde

Counting the newly arrived marines, there may be around 80,000 Russians and perhaps half as many Ukrainians along a stretch of the front line that’s no longer than 25 km.

Ukrainian forces may have an advantage in drones, however. Russian marine commanders are reluctant to deploy their armored vehicles toward Pokrovsk “due to the enormous amount of [Ukrainian] UAVs in the air, Ukrainian drone operator Kriegsforscher explained.

The Russians are still reeling from the 1st Azov Corps’ recent counterattack against a Russian motor rifle brigade that infiltrated under-manned Ukrainian lines northeast of Pokrovsk last month; even with all those reinforcements, they’ve yet to regain the momentum in the sector.

And that middle performance so far may be costing them in Sumy as the Ukrainians take advantage of new gaps in Russian lines.

This was a predictable outcome. In robbing Sumy to reinforce Donetsk, the Kremlin gambled the Ukrainians had finally exhausted their reserves and could no longer respond in kind in Donetsk—or exploit Russian weakness in Sumy.

The gamble hasn’t paid off—at least not yet. At least one observer expected this would happen. The Russians “actually thought Ukraine was out of infantry,” American analyst Andrew Perpetua mused.

While it’s true Ukrainian brigades are struggling with a shortage of trained infantry, there’s a big difference between Ukraine have too few trigger-pullers to comfortably perform every possible mission … and having so few that it’s impossible to respond to large-scale Russian moves like we’re seeing in Donetsk and Sumy.

According to Perpetua, Ukrainian commanders had made the deliberate decision to leave some trenches empty—potentially including some around Pokrovsk—in order to buy time for certain brigades, such as the 95th Air Assault Brigade, to rebuild.

“It was a sacrifice,” Perpetua said. “Sacrifice ground for time while refitting and then you can attack later.”

It’s possible these rebuilt brigades are the ones giving the Russians so much trouble now—counterattacking in Donetsk and Sumy, and pushing back the Russians in the latter oblast. The 95th Air Assault Brigade, it’s worth noting, is on the front line in Sumy.

The Russian tank factory in Omsk, in Siberia 2,300 km from Ukraine, stopped building new T-80 gas-turbine tanks back in 2001. The simpler diesel-fueled T-72 and T-90 would be Russia’s main tanks for the next quarter-century.

But then Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022—and Ukrainian forces got to work wrecking the Russian tank corps and its 3,000 active tanks, including around 500 upgraded T-80BVs and T-80BVMs.

That’s essentially all the active pre-war tanks plus another 700 older T-80s that Russian forces fetched from long-term storage and refurbished in Omsk before shipping them off to the front line.

The initial order came two years ago. And now the new tanks are “in manufacture,” according to Aleksandr Potapov, CEO of Russian tank-maker Uralvagonzavod.

Be skeptical and adjust your expectations. Before halting production in 2001, the Omsk plant hadn’t manufactured a T-80 totally from scratch since 1991. Instead, it assembled “new” T-80s from a stockpile of chassis and components workers had manufactured years prior.

It’s no wonder that Potapov has been talking about building T-80s from scratch for two years: it might have taken Uralvagonzavod that long just to find new suppliers for the thousands of parts that make up a 46-ton, three-person T-80.

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Maybe the Omsk factory is finally piecing together a few new T-80s using 1991-vintage hulls plus recently produced components. The new T-80s could supplement the dwindling number of refurbished T-80s rolling out of Omsk at a rate of around a dozen a month.

There were nearly 1,900 decommissioned T-80s rusting in Russia’s sprawling vehicle parks as recently as 2022. By now, perhaps a thousand of these old tanks have cycled through Omsk for rework. Hundreds of those rebuilt tanks have already been destroyed in Ukraine.

Omsk will eventually run out of old stored T-80s to fix up. At that point, whatever new T-80s it can piece together will be the only T-80s it can deliver to front-line regiments.

1/ From storage base to the battlefield – I’m back with a big research/investigation on Russian T-80 tanks. I’ve tracked the movement of these tanks and am going to uncover refurbishment rates and look closely at storage bases for more insights. Grab a coffee before we start :) pic.twitter.com/yCFvJE36ET

— Just BeCause (@a_from_s) October 17, 2024

Tank hype

It’s worth noting that Russian officials tend to exaggerate how many tanks Uralvagonzavod can produce. It’s possible some independent analysts are guilty of the same tank inflation.

The pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team recently concluded Russian industry was making hundreds of new T-90Ms every year: enough to keep its best tank regiments fully armed for the wider war in Ukraine … or some future clash with NATO.

“According to our estimates, Uralvagonzavod produced 60 to 70 T-90M tanks in 2022,” CIT reported. “In 2023, amid efforts to mobilize the defense industry, output may have increased to 140 to 180 tanks, and by 2024, it may have surpassed 200 units annually, possibly approaching a production rate of 250 to 300 tanks per year.”

But according to one expert, CIT is wrong. Sergio Miller, an analyst and former British Army intelligence officer, believes Russia is struggling to complete even 100 T-90Ms a year—and most of those it does complete are revamped T-90As rather than all-new vehicles.

“In total, UVZ only claimed to deliver 100 tanks in 2024,” Miller told reporter David Hambling. “I have no idea where the high figures quoted by some Western reporting come from. There is no evidence this is the case.”

It gets worse for the Russians. So far this year, Miller concluded, Uralvagonzavod has completed 10 or fewer T-90s. With so few new tanks, the Kremlin would struggle to restore its depleted armored regiments.

There are reasons to trust Miller over CIT. Squeezed by sanctions, Uralvagonzavod is probably struggling to source high-tech tank parts such as optics and electronics. In that context, the lower figure for T-90 production makes sense. Likewise, Potapov’s claims about new T-80s already taking shape in Omsk may be inflated.

New production might not be able to halt the steady “de-mechanization” of the Russian armed forces that began with Russia’s first battlefield defeats in the spring of 2022. There are too few tanks left in open storage … and possibly too few tanks rolling out of Uralvagonzavod’s factories.

Hollywood couldn’t stage this: one Ukrainian T-64 plowing through three Russian T-72s and surviving. From Soviet tanks turned against their former masters to American Abrams and German Leopards, Ukraine’s armored forces have rewritten battlefield rules. These are the stories of skilled operators like “Adam” and “Song” who break encirclements, save thousands of comrades, and turn desperate defenses into victories.

1. “Adam”: the tank operator whose T-64 withstood three Russian T-72s

A Ukrainian T-64 against three Russian T-72s — and victory stayed with the Ukrainians. This was the battle of Yevhen Mezhevikyn, call sign “Adam”, in the fall of 2014 during the defense of Donetsk Airport, Army Inform reports. His tank didn’t just stop the enemy advance — it pushed through fire to reach the terminals, where the Ukrainian “cyborgs” held out for months without water or heat.

At that time, the Ukrainian army was only beginning to recover after the collapse of the 1990s and early 2000s: outdated equipment, minimal supplies, and almost no combat experience.

But due to operators like “Adam”, the army held the airport and endured.

Mezhevikyn not only destroyed enemy vehicles, but they also trained fellow operators on the frontline, repaired damaged tanks, and led the riskiest breakthroughs.

When Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, “Adam” formed a tactical group. With volunteers and repaired tanks, they immediately went into battle near Kyiv and then fought near Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Bakhmut. For this path, from “cyborg” to commander of a legendary group, Mezhevikyn became the first tank operator awarded the Order of the “Golden Star” Hero of Ukraine. Mezhevikyn now serves on the General Staff.

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2. “Captured tank against a column”: one operator against a Russian column

A single Ukrainian tank faced an entire Russian column. In August 2014, during the battle for Ilovaisk, Colonel Yevhen Sydorenko took a captured T-72B into combat and stopped the enemy advance. Cases like this are rare in military history, mostly seen in World War II.

Ukrainian forces were outmatched: surrounded by regular Russian troops, with minimal equipment and ammunition, against full battalion groups. Despite the odds, they fought on and prepared for a breakout.

On 29 August, after repelling an attack, the column moved to break out of encirclement. Sydorenko’s tank led the movement, covering retreating comrades.

For this action, Yevhen Sydorenko was awarded Hero of Ukraine. Their feat became a symbol of self-sacrifice, showing how one tank can change the course of a battle.

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3. “Song”: three tanks breaking encirclement, thousands saved

In the early days of the full-scale invasion, 23-year-old platoon commander Yevhen Palchenko, call sign “Song”, defended his brigade’s escape from encirclement near Kherson, risking their life.

Breaking through the Russian ring, their three tanks held positions near the Antonivsky Bridge, allowing comrades to escape. About 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers and their equipment were saved. On 2 March 2022, Lieutenant Yevhen Palchenko was awarded Hero of Ukraine for this heroic action. Their story shows how the courage of a single tank operator can save an entire brigade.

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4. “Company under fire”: one tank against two dozen enemy vehicles, and it survived

One tank against two dozen enemy vehicles, and the crew survived. Captain Serhii Ponomarenko’s company was thrown into combat just hours after arriving near Barvinkove on 12 March 2022. Since then, the 3rd Separate Tank Brigade of the Ukrainian Ground Forces has been continuously defending Kharkiv Oblast.

During an assault on Topolske near Izium, six Ukrainian tanks engaged more than twenty Russian vehicles. Due to skill and training, nine enemy tanks were destroyed. One Ukrainian T-72 took multiple hits, and Ponomarenko risked their tank to save the operators, as per Facty. 

“The T-64 has an excellent fire control system, with a ballistic calculator measuring wind and direction and automatically adjusting. The sight has a zoom for precision. The T-64 works like a sniper rifle of a large caliber. The T-72’s sight is poor,” Ponomarenko explains.

However, the T-72 engine starts more easily in the cold, but the T-64’s acceleration is comparable despite needing preheating. The T-72 may be faster, but the T-64 holds its own in maneuvering.

The operators supported their commander, suppressed enemy positions, and recovered the damaged tank under fire. On 2 April 2022, Serhii Ponomarenko was awarded Hero of Ukraine with the Order of the “Golden Star”.

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5. “Phoenix on the battlefield”: T-64 crew rises twice from the dead

A mine exploded, but the operators kept fighting, destroying an enemy mortar team. Sergeant Vitaly Shevchenko, gunner Andrii Mukhin, and mechanic-gunner Maksym Kravchuk survived two near-fatal attacks near Sloviansk — first from a mine, then from an anti-tank guided missile. Twice, like a mythical Phoenix, they rose from the flames to continue the fight, according to Uriadovyi Kurier.

From the first day of the war, this crew has been on the frontline, performing missions in the toughest zones. Their tank became a guardian for infantry, its gun a deadly weapon against enemies. During one attack, additional fuel tanks exploded, yet the operators advanced, breached a concrete barrier, and destroyed enemy mortar positions. The commander personally extinguished flames, protecting the crew. After minor repairs, the tank returned to combat.

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6. “Ramming for comrades”: a young tank operator against a T-72

One tank against a T-72 to save comrades. On 12 August 2014, tank operator Artem Abramovich, 24, rammed a Russian T-72 near Stepanivka, covering the retreat of Ukrainian soldiers. The enemy tank was destroyed, but Artem died in battle. Their heroism became a symbol of self-sacrifice. Posthumously, on 13 August 2015, they were awarded the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky III class.

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7. American hardware in Ukrainian hands

BMP Bradleys, in coordination with Abrams tanks, became a formidable battlefield force.

During operations near Novoivanivka in the Kursk Oblast, operators of the 47th Mechanized Brigade showcased extraordinary skill.

They rotated personnel, provided fire support, and destroyed enemy forces hiding in buildings. Every shot and maneuver was precise, and every decision was life-or-death.

“American hardware is decisive on the battlefield, but without skilled operators, it’s nothing,” the brigade noted.

The operation decimated Russian forces, halted the invasion of Sumy Oblast, and showed that Ukrainian forces could take the fight into enemy territory.

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8. “He lost a leg but saved the tank”

The driver of a Leopard from the 33rd Brigade saved lives despite losing a leg in combat. Known as “Hor,” a former bartender, his comrade recounts the moment as a defining act of courage. Mobilized in March 2022, they began on a T-72, fought in counteroffensives, and then retrained on the Leopard.

Near Mala Tokmachka, Russian helicopters fired missiles. Their mechanic lost a leg. Despite this, they drove the tank out of combat, saving the entire crew. Later, near Kurakhove, their crew fired 49 rounds, destroying two tanks, two BMPs, one BTR, and three Russian positions.

Ukrainian forces struck and damaged another ship supporting Russia’s war effort on the Black Sea on Thursday night.

Another ship strike isn’t remarkable. In the 43 months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine, the Ukrainians have sunk or damaged roughly a third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s three dozen warships. Most notably, the cruiser Moskva, holed by two Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles way back in April 2022.

What’s notable about the Thursday strike on the Project MPSV07 rescue and salvage ship was how and where Ukrainian operators hit it. The 73-m salvage ship, operated by Russia’s auxiliary rescue agency, was patrolling just outside the port of Novorossiysk, in southern Russia, 400 km from the front line.

Rather than send a squadron of comparatively slow drone boats or expend a precious cruise missile that might cost $1 million or more, the Ukrainian military intelligence service, the HUR, flew a fixed-wing attack drone at very low altitude all the way to Novorossiysk, and struck the Project MPSV07’s bridge area, where many of the most delicate electronics are.

The hit on the Project MPSV07 had the effect of “destroying its electronic warfare systems and forcing it out of action,” the Ukrainian strategic communications service announced.

The raid came just two weeks after a Ukrainian drone team scored a hit on a Black Sea Fleet missile corvette in a similar way—by maneuvering an attack drone at wave-top height and striking the corvette’s topside electronics.

Blowing up topside radar masts and satellite receivers with a small drone might not sink a ship, but it can inflict a lot of difficult-to-repair damage—and at low cost and risk to the attacker. Even the priciest attack drones cost just $200,000; most are in the range of five figures.

It’s worth noting that the Project MPSV07 is an ice-hardened vessel, with a reinforced hull for sailing through icy northern waters. All that extra steel makes a Project MPSV07 a harder target than, say, a thinner-hulled missile corvette.

In that context, the attack on the vessel’s electronics makes even more sense. The Ukrainians hit the ship where it’s most vulnerable.

Special forces of the Ukraine's Military Intelligence (HUR) struck a Russian Black Sea Fleet ship near Novorossiysk.

A Ukrainian-made combat drone hit the command post area of a $60 million Project MPSV07 vessel, destroying its electronic warfare systems and forcing it out of… pic.twitter.com/6FWOvotBmX

— SPRAVDI — Stratcom Centre (@StratcomCentre) September 11, 2025

Rolling back the air defenses

The virtuosic raid didn’t come together overnight. Until recently, the waters around Russian-occupied Crimea were protected by one of the densest air-defense networks in the world: dozens of Russian radars, mobile guns, surface-to-air missile vehicles, and batteries, including long-range S-300 and S-400 SAM sites.

Moreover, Ukraine’s Starlink satellite terminals, which most of its drones rely on for control and communication, work just fine over Crimea. They generally don’t work over Russia proper—likely a deliberate choice by Starlink founder Elon Musk.

Bayraktar is back—and it’s all over Crimea

That the airspace over and around Crimea is becoming more favorable to Ukraine is evident—and not only in the Thursday hit on that Russian salvage ship. Ukraine’s Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2 drones are now very active over Crimea, flinging tiny precision missiles at Russian boats and other equipment.

Ukraine’s 60 or so TB-2 led Ukraine’s initial drone counterattack in the first weeks of Russia’s wider invasion in early 2022. However, the big, expensive TB-2—it weighs nearly 700 kg and costs millions of dollars—eventually lost relevance.

TB-2s were big, fat, and hard to replace. Smaller, better, and cheaper drones—many of them made in Ukraine—soon displaced the surviving TB-2s.

That some TB-2s are back in action over Crimea speaks to the insatiable demand for drones as Russia’s wider war grinds into its 43rd month. But it also points to yawning gaps in Russia’s air defenses.

The TB-2s were vulnerable three years ago. They’re even more vulnerable now, but only when the Russians can deploy their best air defenses.

It’s clear that, over southern waters, the Russians can’t deploy their best air defenses. At least, not without them swiftly coming under attack by the very drones they’re supposed to defeat.

Russian reinforcements are surging into Donetsk Oblast, staging for what many observes anticipate will be a major mechanized assault on the fortress city of Pokrovsk.

But Ukrainian forces aren’t just sitting around waiting for the attack. They’re positioning their own reinforcements around Pokrovsk. And they’re hitting the newly arriving Russian regiments at their assembly points in Donetsk City—potentially with a previously unknown cruise missile type.

That Ukraine can still surprise observers with a new missile type isn’t actually all that surprising. Forty-three months into Russia’s wider war, Ukraine has become a world-leader in deep-strike technology. By necessity.

On Monday, the Ukrainians targeted the defunct Topaz metallurgy plant on the eastern edge of Donetsk City, 50 km southeast of Pokrovsk. The plant is well-known as a staging base for Russian forces moving toward the Donetsk front line.

A barrage of aerial munitions pummeled Topaz. Photos and videos from the plant confirmed no fewer than three different types of munitions. Possibly more.

Among other weapons, it seems the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces or special services struck Topaz with propeller-driven An-196 and, potentially, Morok attack drones. Meanwhile, the air force launched locally made Bars or Peklo cruise missiles as well as British-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles.

The missiles and drones zoomed in one after another, in quick succession. Imagery from the aftermath of the attack pointed to heavy damage. Other imagery may have revealed fragments of a new Ukrainian missile.

The potentially 3-m missile seems to have a simple fiberglass fuselage and wing and a dorsal pylon for what appears to be a K-450 miniature jet engine made by Taiwanese company KingTech.

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The wreckage doesn’t match the Peklo’s sleeker profile. Nor does it match the admittedly few things we might know about the Bars. That first imagery of what may be a crashed Bars seems to point to a different engine type—a SW400 from Chinese firm Swiwin.

Is there a third Ukrainian cruise missile type in the class of the Peklo and Bars? Or did the designers of the Bars switch to a Taiwanese engine? We don’t know.

But we shouldn’t be shocked if the Topaz attack involved a new missile type.

1. This soldier was very excited because he scored a jet engine. A big question is, what drone is this a part of? Cutting up a drone before taking photos is common, and makes identification a more interesting challenge. pic.twitter.com/hEvjIK3oAE

— DanielR (@DanielR33187703) September 8, 2025

Mass production

Ukrainian firms build long-range attack drones at a rate of at thousands per month—and the Ukrainian military and special services launch them at Russian air bases, factories and oil refineries as far as 1,000 km from the front line, on a roughly weekly basis.

Back in December, Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Ukraine would acquire 30,000 one-way attack drones in 2025. It’s evident actual deliveries will exceed that goal. Fire Point, the firm that builds the Flamingo, claimed it’s already churning out 100 FP-1 attack drones every day.

To add range and firepower to its escalating deep-strike campaign, Ukraine is also developing cruise missiles including the Peklo, the Bars, and the Flamingo. Hundreds of millions of dollars in financing from the United Kingdom and Germany are helping Ukraine ramp up production of these new missiles.

The Peklo and Bars may both range around 800 km, likely with small-ish warheads—possibly lighter than 100 kg. The Flamingo is in a whole different class. It reportedly ranges 3,000 km with a 1,100-kg warhead. All three types are jet-propelled—and thus fast—and probably navigate using a combination of satellites and internal inertial systems.

The Flamingo is a ground-launched weapon; the Peklo and Bars may be compatible with the Ukrainian air force’s upgraded Sukhoi Su-24 bombers, which also launch the Storm Shadow and SCALP-EG cruise missiles Ukraine has received from the United Kingdom, France, and Italy.

It’s unclear whether that fourth Ukrainian cruise missile type—if indeed that’s what we witness in the Topaz raid—launches from the ground or from the air.

Ukraine is about to get more of its best long-range missiles and drones. A lot more, and fast.

At a meeting of Ukrainian and allied leaders on London on Tuesday, German and British officials separately announced major investment in Ukraine’s deep-strike capabilities.

Germany will spend an additional $350 million on long-range munitions for Ukraine. The U.K. will buy “thousands” of one-way attack drones for Ukraine over the next year.

Given that a single Ukrainian attack drone in the class of the Fire Point FP-1 might cost just $50,000—and a heavier Ukroboronprom An-196 might cost a couple hundred thousand dollars—the new German and British spending could put nearly 10,000 deep-strike drones on the tarmac by the fall of 2026.

That’s … a lot of drones. And most of them are destined to strike Russian soil. “Ukraine is increasingly taking the war to Russia now,” American-Ukrainian war correspondent David Kirichenko wrote in a new essay for The Atlantic Council.

Back in December, Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Ukraine would acquire 30,000 one-way attack drones in 2025. But it’s clear this production will exceed that figure. Fire Point alone claims it’s building 100 FP-1s a day.

Ukraine’s homegrown deep-strike arsenal includes dozens of drone types including pilotless sport planes than can drop bombs and then return to base to reload. It also includes one of the most powerful ground-launched cruise missiles in the world: the new Fire Point Flamingo: a seven-ton behemoth that may range as far as 3,000 km with a 1,100-kg warhead.

Deepening strikes

After two years of escalation, Ukraine’s campaign of deep strikes targeting Russian air bases, factories, and oil refineries can now hold at risk targets thousands of kilometers inside Russia. But the heaviest strikes occur at a range no farther than 1,000 km from the border with Ukraine.

In this zone, no facility is safe. Russia’s air defenses are spread too thin to protect every possible target.

In a series of increasingly destructive raids on Russian oil refineries last month, Ukrainian drones throttled Russia’s refinery output by a staggering 24%. Besides costing the Russian economy billions of dollars, the hits on refineries have also led to gasoline shortages in some Russian regions.

Churning out many thousands of long-range drones and missiles a month at workshops spread across the country, Ukrainian industry is helping the Ukrainian military and special services match Russia’s own drone and missile strikes.

The Russians routinely launch hundreds of cruise and ballistic missiles and Shahed drones at Ukrainian cities, sometimes several times a week. The Shahed is Russia’s main deep-strike munition. Russian forces flung around 6,000 of the explosive drones at Ukraine in July alone.

It gets worse for the Russians. The aims of Russia and Ukraine’s respective deep-strike campaigns couldn’t be more different. Russia’s goal is to inflict terror on civilians. Ukraine’s goal is to inflict military and economic damage.

What that means, in practice, is that Russia’s drone and missile campaign mostly targets Ukrainian cities in a country of just 603,400 square km. Ukraine’s drones and missiles target air bases, factories, and refineries in a country of 17 million square km.

Ukraine’s air defense problem is hard but simple. Ukrainian air defenses must contend with nearly daily raids involving potentially hundreds of drones and missiles, but they can concentrate around the biggest cities that are the Russians’ main targets.

By contrast, Russia’s air defense problem is hard and complex. “The Kremlin simply does not have enough air defense systems to protect thousands of potential military and energy targets spread across 11 time zones,” Kirichenko wrote.

Russia’s goal is to inflict terror on civilians. Ukraine’s goal is to inflict military and economic damage.

Ukrainian strike planners already have a lot of options. And these options are only growing as more foreign financing flows into the expanding Ukrainian munitions industry.

It’s possible, as 2025 grinds toward 2026, that Ukrainian strikes on Russia will inflict more lasting damage than Russian strikes inflict on Ukraine. After all, civilian morale is a renewable resource. An oil refinery, by contrast, is a difficult thing to fix once it burns to the ground.

The Ukrainian army stood up the 156th Infantry Brigade in the spring of 2024. Not long after, the unit converted into a mechanized brigade with additional armored vehicles.

The brigade recruited and trained its thousands of troops through the fall and winter and, this summer, deployed to the front line in Sumy Oblast in northern Ukraine.

Now the 156th Mechanized Brigade is one of the growing number of Ukrainian units rushing south to Donetsk Oblast to meet a mass of Russian troops and tanks poised to strike at the fortress city of Pokrovsk for what Ukrainian drone operator Kriegsforscher described as a “last, final battle.”

As recently as last month, the 156th Mechanized Brigade was helping to hold the line in Sumy alongside other brigades in the new 18th Army Corps. But with the defeat of its infantry-led incursion northeast of Pokrovsk in recent weeks, the Kremlin made a portentous decision.

Rather than give up on Pokrovsk, it doubled down—and surged reinforcements around the city for what’s shaping up to be a powerful, tank-led offensive.

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The reinforcements had to come from somewhere. No fewer than five Russian marine and airborne brigades and regiments plus a tank regiment, an infantry regiment, and two motor rifle brigades have redeployed—or are in the process of redeploying—from Sumy to the sector around Pokrovsk.

These fresh forces, plus a motor rifle division redeploying from Kherson Oblast in the south, amount to the equivalent of an entire field army. They join the eight or so Russian field armies already laying siege to Pokrovsk and nearby towns.

Throughout 2025, Russian regiments have mostly attacked on foot or on motorcycle. Now it’s clear why. “Slowly but surely, it’s being proven that Russia was indeed holding back armor in the rear and reducing mechanized attacks to the bare minimum,” analyst Jompy noted.

Russian commanders were saving their armored vehicles for something. That something, it seems, is the biggest—and potentially last for a while—mechanized assault on Pokrovsk, the last major strongpoint between the Russians and main Ukrainian “fortress belt” threading through Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in western Donetsk.

Russia’s largest armored assault in months

The coming clash “will be bigger, bloodier” than the infantry battles that were common around Pokrovsk earlier this year, Finnish analyst Joni Askola warned. It will fall on newly arriving units such as the 156th Mechanized Brigade to hold off a much larger Russian force.

The 156th Mechanized Brigade hit the road to Donetsk last month, according to Unit Observer. It joins the national guard’s 1st Azov Corps and adjacent units that rushed toward Pokrovsk in early August to block, and then roll back, that Russian infantry incursion that briefly threatened one of the two remaining main supply lines into Pokrovsk.

Other Ukrainian units currently in Sumy could follow the 156th Mechanized Brigade to Donetsk as more Russian troops quit Sumy and head south for the coming push on Pokrovsk. The next round of Ukrainian reinforcements could include the 80th and 95th Air Assault Brigades.

Compared to those elite air assault formations, the 156th Mechanized Brigade is a workmanlike unit. It rides in T-64BV tanks, BMP-1TS with new 30-millimeter autocannon turrets, M-113 tracked armored personnel carriers, upgraded BTR-60D wheeled APCs, Kozak armored trucks and M-109 howitzers. Many of these vehicles sport add-on anti-drone armor.

Ukraine’s tank-killing strategy faces its biggest test

Expect the 156th Mechanized Brigade to dig in and prepare for tank attacks. The older Ukrainian brigades around Pokrovsk are skilled tank-killers, but the 156th Mechanized Brigade’s relatively green troopers should be able to pick up the standard tactics fairly quickly.

They took out those tanks with mines, artillery, anti-tank missiles and—perhaps most importantly—explosive first-person-view drones and grenade-dropping bomber drones. The Russians are betting that tank-led assaults can help them win the battle for Pokrovsk. The Ukrainians are betting they can blow up the tanks in the usual way.

Russia’s tank reserves running dangerously low

If the Russians can’t break through the reinforced Ukrainian defenses around Pokrovsk in the coming months, they might not get another chance anytime soon—at least not with tanks.

Russia’s Uralvagonzavod tank factory is building new T-90Ms—but it’s unclear how many. The factory’s output may have collapsed this year. Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s vehicle storage bases, once brimming with Cold War leftovers, are now mostly empty of usable vehicles.

The Ukrainian air force lost important aerial jamming capacity when one of its precious few ex-French Dassault Mirage 2000 fighters crashed on 22 July. Fortunately for the air force, France is likely to at least double the number of supersonic, delta-wing Mirage 2000s it’s giving to Ukraine.

“France will announce that it is giving 20 Mirages instead of 10,” former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told Le Monde recently. At least one observer believes France will eventually give Ukraine more than two dozen of the 1980s-vintage, but heavily upgraded, jets.

The first of the single-seat Mirage 2000s arrived in Ukraine in February.

The French air force still flies two squadrons worth of Mirage 2000s—around 26 airframes. But newer Dassault Rafales are gradually replacing the Mirage 2000s, freeing up surplus jets for onward transfer to Ukraine.

The extra planes Kuleba mentioned would soften the blow from the July crash. “An aircraft equipment failure occurred” during an evening training flight, the air force reported at the time. The pilot ejected—and a search team quickly fetched him. “There were no casualties on the ground,” according to the air force.

It was yet another in a series of incidents that have depleted Ukraine’s inventory of newer Western-made warplanes. The service has also lost four of its ex-European Lockheed Martin F-16s since the fighters began flying combat sorties back in August. Three pilots have died.

More Mirage 2000s and F-16s are coming, but we don’t yet know exactly how many—or how fast. France may donate a couple of dozen Mirage 2000s. Meanwhile, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway have pledged at least 87 flyable F-16s. It’s possible that around 50 of the F-16s are already in Ukraine or in Romania, where NATO instructors train Ukrainian pilots.

Jets without jammers

Between its surviving ex-Soviet Sukhoi Su-24s, Su-25s and Su-27s, Mikoyan MiG-29s and the Mirage 2000s and F-16s, the Ukrainian air force probably still operates 125 or so fighters—roughly as many as it had before Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022.

In all, the Ukrainians have written off nearly 100 jets. To sustain its Soviet-era fleet, the Ukrainian air force has taken delivery of surplus MiG-29s from Slovakia, Poland, and Azerbaijan and excess Su-25s from Croatia. Ukrainian technicians have also restored many grounded airframes and returned them to front-line service.

With the help of their allies, the Ukrainians have upgraded the ex-Soviet jets to carry new precision munitions, including cruise missiles and glide bombs. But the Western jets are even better equipped, especially when it comes to defensive systems.

The Americans have equipped the Ukrainian F-16s with underbelly AN/ALQ-131 electronic countermeasures pods. The AN/ALQ-131 is a new and critical capability for the Ukrainian air force, which entered the wider war in 2022 without an aerial jamming capability. That exposed Ukrainian jets to Russian missile fire—and resulted in heavy losses in the early months of the wider war.

In addition to the AN/ALQ-131s, the F-16s have the option of carrying the Pylon Integrated Dispensing System and the Electronic Combat Integrated Pylon Systems: PIDS and ECIPS.

PIDS ejects metal chaff and hot-burning flares to spoof incoming radar and infrared-guided anti-aircraft missiles. ECIPS houses passive defenses to complement the active chaff and flares, including the AN/ALQ-162 jammer for defeating radars on the ground and an AN/AAR-60 missile warning system for triggering the defenses.

The AN/ALQ-131 in particular can “give you a pocket of air superiority for a moment’s time to achieve an objective that has strategic importance and impact,” a US official explained.

The Mirage 2000s are similarly equipped with a combination of Serval radar warning receivers, Sabre jammers, and Eclair chaff and flare dispensers. This electronic countermeasures suite was on the cutting edge of aerial warfare in the 1980s, but began to fall behind a generation later.

Recognizing this and appreciating the gravity of the Russian missile threat over Ukraine, the French defense ministry promised to install new electronic countermeasures in the Mirage 2000s before transferring them to Ukraine. It’s likely the ministry was referring to the mostly analogue Integrated Countermeasures Suite Mark 2 or the fully digital Integrated Countermeasures Suite Mark 3.

The Ukrainian air force has been taking full advantage of the F-16s and Mirage 2000s’ ability to fill Russian radar screens with electronic noise. The F-16s “act as ‘flying air defense’ with advanced missile warning tech,” the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team analysis group noted.

The arrival of the first F-16s back in August, and the first Mirage 2000s six months later, allowed the air force to organize complex strike packages mixing ex-Soviet and ex-European jets combining different offensive and defensive capabilities.

“Sometimes when we arrive, there are already F-16s waiting there, or sometimes Mirages,” a Ukrainian fighter pilot said in an official video from March. The F-16s and Mirage 2000s “either cover the whole package that is sent there to [strike] our enemies, or also strike [themselves],” the pilot said.

All that is to say, every F-16 or Mirage 2000 Ukraine loses costs it more than a single airframe. Without the critical jamming capability the ex-Western jets provide, Ukraine’s complex strike packages could unravel.

It’s fortunate, then, that France is poised to hand over more Mirage 2000s.

On 30 August, a Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy was shot eight times in the back while walking in Lviv in broad daylight. He died from his injuries.

The detained suspect claims he acted out of “revenge against Ukrainian authorities” after his son went missing in action near Bakhmut. But investigators haven’t ruled out Russian involvement.

Parubiy was hardly welcome in Moscow. The 52-year-old former parliament speaker had spent decades promoting Ukraine’s break from Russian dominance and participating in the key democratic revolutions that threatened Kremlin’s influence.

Ukraine’s parliament responded swiftly to his death. On 4 September, 296 lawmakers voted to appeal to European parliaments, condemning Parubiy’s murder as “an act of political terror by Russia.” They demanded international investigations and stronger sanctions.

Reshat Ametov: First victim of Crimean occupation

Crimean Tatar activist

Reshat Ametov, a 39-year-old Crimean Tatar and father of three, became a symbol of resistance to Russian occupation back in 2014.

He worked as a welder in Simferopol and maintained active political views. On social media, he frequently criticized Russian policies in Chechnya, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan, and strongly supported the pro-democracy Euromaidan protests in Kyiv.

The year 2014 marked a turning point in Ukraine’s modern history. Following months of the Euromaidan protests that demanded closer ties with the EU and democratic reforms, pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych ordered security forces to open fire on demonstrators in February, killing over 100 protesters. Faced with massive public outrage as even more people flooded the streets demanding changes, Yanukovych fled the country. 

Russia exploited this chaotic political situation in Ukraine and sent troops to Crimea, while simultaneously supporting separatist movements in eastern Ukraine. This Russian intervention would eventually escalate into the full-scale war that began in 2022.

One man against the Russian oppressive machine

On 28 February 2014, Ametov announced his intention to protest Russia’s seizure of Crimean government buildings.

“Approximately on Monday I’ll go to the Council of Ministers. Standing protest. Do you also dare?” he wrote on Facebook.

Three days later, Ametov stood alone outside the seized building holding a Ukrainian flag. Surveillance cameras captured what happened next: three men in camouflage uniforms from the illegal “Crimean Self-Defense” formation forced him into a car at gunpoint. That was the last time he was seen alive.

This occurred in broad daylight as Russian forces consolidated control over the peninsula.

Tortured and killed for resisting Russian occupation in Ukraine

March 16, 2014 was supposed to be Russia’s moment of triumph—the day Crimeans would vote in a sham referendum to “legitimize” the peninsula’s annexation. The official results showed overwhelming support for joining Russia, but the referendum was conducted under military presence and is regarded illegal by the majority of international community.

However, the day before the staged vote, farmers made a horrific discovery in Zemlyanichnoye village, 60 kilometers from Simferopol.

A body lay partially buried in the earth, bearing signs of torture. The victim’s head was wrapped in tape, stab wounds marked the left eye socket, and hands remained cuffed. When authorities identified the corpse, the timing became clear: this was Reshat Ametov, the lone protester who had disappeared twelve days earlier.

Russian occupation authorities opened a criminal case in April 2014 but closed it after one year, claiming they could not identify the perpetrators. Ukrainian investigators later identified two “Crimean Self-Defense” members and a former Russian Armed Forces serviceman as suspects in 2019, while the case went to court in November 2023.

In May 2017, President Petro Poroshenko posthumously awarded Ametov the title Hero of Ukraine.

Ametov became Crimea’s first occupation victim, but not the last, according to Yevhenyi Yaroshenko of the KrimSOS organization. Human rights groups documented 59 enforced disappearances during the first decade of Russian rule. Seventeen people remain missing.

Amina Okuyeva: The Ukrainian-Chechen with two homelands, but one enemy

Studying medicine in Ukraine

Three years later and hundreds of kilometers away, another story of resistance was taking shape. Amina Okuyeva would become the woman who carried two nations’ struggles against the same Russian enemy, fighting with both medical skills and military weapons until assassins silenced her forever.

Born in Odesa, Okuyeva carried both Ukrainian and Chechen heritage. She lived in Moscow and Grozny before returning to Ukraine in 2003 due to the Chechen war.

During the Second Chechen War (started in 1999), she actively supported the resistance, but Chechen fighters convinced her to return to Ukraine and study medicine—they desperately needed trained medics as too many fighters were dying from treatable wounds.

After completing medical education in Odesa, she worked as a surgeon while maintaining connections to Chechen resistance movements.

In 2009, she met Adam Osmayev, a Chechen exile accused by Russia of plotting to kill Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin’s puppet in Chechnya, and Vladimir Putin himself. Though they never legally married, they became life partners united by their shared opposition to Russian oppression.

Medic-turned-sniper in fighting Russia since 2014

When Russia launched its aggression in eastern Ukraine in 2014, just months after seizing Crimea, Okuyeva saw her chance to fight the same enemy that had devastated Chechnya.

She joined the Kyiv-2 volunteer battalion as a paramedic. Despite her official medical role, she participated in combat operations in Debaltsevo and Chornukhivo and served as a sniper in her final months of military service.

Okuyeva later became spokesperson for the Chechen Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalion, comprised mainly of Chechens opposing Kadyrov’s regime.

In 2015, Ukraine awarded her the “People’s Hero of Ukraine” order for defending the country.

Okuyeva frequently criticized Kadyrov as a “national traitor” and Russian collaborator. His family had switched from fighting Russia in the First Chechen War to serving as Moscow’s puppet rulers after 1999.

Chechen exiles widely despise him for his brutal suppression of independence movements and human rights abuses.

“Kadyrovites are national traitors. There is no worse form of betrayal than national betrayal and collaboration with occupiers,” Okuyeva stated.

For Moscow, Chechens fighting alongside Ukrainian forces represented a double threat: not only were they effective fighters, but their presence contradicted Russian propaganda about protecting ethnic minorities from Ukrainian “fascists.”

Okuyeva’s vocal criticism of Kadyrov while serving in Ukrainian ranks made her elimination a priority for both Russian intelligence and Chechen loyalists.

Previous assassination attempts

Russian bloggers called her a “Chechen terrorist.” Kadyrov supporters sent death messages through social media. On 1 June 2017, a fake French journalist shot her husband Adam Osmayev during a staged interview. The assassin, Arthur Denisultanov-Kurmakaev, was captured, but the couple knew more attempts would follow.

Okuyeva killed in car near Kyiv

Four months later, driving near Kyiv on 30 October, automatic gunfire erupted from roadside bushes. Her partner Osmayev hit the accelerator.

“The shooting came from the right side,” he recalled. “It lasted literally a few seconds until I got out of the shooting zone. But in those few seconds, unfortunately, she was hit.”

Okuyeva died instantly from head wounds. She was 34. Osmayev survived with a leg injury.

In January 2020, authorities arrested Igor Redkin, a 56-year-old from Dagestan, after his DNA was found on an abandoned Czech automatic rifle near the crime scene. Investigators identified seven members of the criminal group responsible for Okuyeva’s murder and connected them to other contract killings.

The prosecution alleged the assassination was ordered from Chechnya as revenge against Osmayev’s anti-Kadyrov activities.

Mamikhan Umarov, a Chechen political emigrant who had warned Ukrainian intelligence about the assassination contract, was himself killed near Vienna in July 2020, eliminating a key witness in the case.

Iryna Farion: Fighter for Ukrainian language

Academic and political career

As Ukraine’s resistance proved stronger than Moscow expected and Western support solidified after the full-scale invasion in 2022, assassinations on Ukrainian soil became more frequent and brazen as the next cases will demonstrate.

Iryna Farion built her career defending Ukrainian language and identity. After working as a librarian, she obtained philological education and became a professor at Lviv Polytechnic National University. In 2005, she joined the Svoboda party and was elected to parliament in 2012, where she headed a higher education subcommittee.

Following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and launch of war in eastern Ukraine, questions of language and identity became increasingly urgent for many Ukrainians, especially as Moscow consistently used “protection of Russian speakers” as justification for military intervention.

Farion turned language defense into political warfare, targeting anyone who dared speak Russian in official settings.

Controversial statements about soldiers

Farion’s advocacy for Ukrainian language often generated controversy due to her uncompromising positions.

She publicly challenged officials who spoke Russian, including then-Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, asking whether his poor Ukrainian reflected political bias or mental limitations.

In 2018, she described Russian-speaking citizens as “mentally backward traitors and Ukraine’s biggest problem.”

The rhetoric intensified after Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022. Farion criticized Russian-speaking Ukrainian soldiers, arguing they should call themselves “Russians” rather than Ukrainians.

“Russian-speaking warriors disgrace Ukraine’s Armed Forces,” she stated, adding that fighting internal “Moscow-speaking savages” was more important than battles on the frontline.

Her November 2023 comments triggered a firestorm. She described Russian-speaking “Azov” fighters as “crazed” and suggested Ukrainian soldiers speaking Russian had no right to be considered Ukrainian.

Security services (SBU) opened criminal investigations against her. Students demanded her dismissal from Lviv Polytechnic. Death threats flooded her social media.

At the moment of her assassination, the SBU investigation into her inflammatory statements about Russian-speaking soldiers remained active, with prosecutors considering charges for insulting military honor and dignity.

Assassin allegedly killed her due to personal hatred

On 19 July 2024, an unknown gunman approached Farion near her Lviv apartment building and shot her in the head. She died in the hospital that evening.

For weeks, surveillance cameras had captured the same figure watching her building, studying her routines, learning her patterns.

Six days later, police tracked down her killer 300 kilometers away in Dnipro. Vyacheslav Zinchenko was just 19 years old when they arrested him. Investigators later discovered his digital footprint told a story of radicalization: he had joined neo-Nazi Telegram groups in 2022, that promoted violence and national intolerance.

The prosecution alleged that Zinchenko developed strong personal hatred for Farion due to her Ukrainian language activism.

In August 2024, Zinchenko reportedly confessed to a cellmate that he killed Farion out of personal animosity, though he later claimed this confession was made under pressure. He faces life imprisonment on charges of premeditated murder motivated by national intolerance.

Some hated her, some were inspired

Despite the controversy surrounding her radical positions, Farion retained support among some Ukrainians who viewed her uncompromising stance as necessary resistance to Russian cultural influence.

Critics argued she promoted “ethnonarcissism” that prevented coexistence with different identities. But supporters countered that her provocative language was strategically necessary—dry academic discourse would never have reached millions or conveyed the urgency of her message.

The polarization became evident after her death.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion made the Russian imperial threat undeniable, many who had previously criticized her positions began seeing her as prophetic rather than extreme.

Social media tributes after her death wrote that “no one defended the Ukrainian language as selflessly and passionately as she did.”

Demian Hanul: Ukrainian activist declared terrorist in Russia

Ukrainian activism in a city with large pro-Russian sentiment

Demian Hanul was a Ukrainian patriot in a city where such views made him a target. Odesa, with its historically large Russian-speaking population and pro-Russian sentiment, was hardly friendly territory for activists pushing Ukrainian identity. But Hanul didn’t back down.

Both he and his father Vadym participated in the 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity that ousted Yanukovych, continuing a family tradition of resistance.

When Russia responded by seizing Crimea and backing separatists in eastern Ukraine, Hanul took part in the traumatic confrontations at Odesa’s Trade Unions House on 2 May 2014, where 48 people died in fires during clashes between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian forces. Russian media branded him a co-organizer of the tragedy and declared him a terrorist.

His activism also focused on removing Soviet monuments in Odesa, viewing each Lenin statue and Chekist memorial as a Russian imperial foothold in Ukrainian territory.

Moscow frequently invoked protection of these Soviet monuments to justify intervention since 2014, treating shared historical experiences as evidence that Ukraine belonged within Russia’s control rather than as an independent state free to determine its own commemorative landscape.

Hanul’s consistent opposition to Russian influence and imperialism made him a marked man. His activities challenging Moscow’s historical narrative and symbols led Russia to issue an arrest warrant against him in April 2024, accusing him of damaging military memorials.

Despite having a disability (he was wearing a prosthetic eye) Hanul repeatedly tried to enlist for military service but was refused. Instead, he channeled his patriotism into volunteer work, traveling to deoccupied territories in southern Kherson and Mykolaiv oblasts to provide aid and support reconstruction efforts.

Escalating attacks and Russian bounties for his death

Hanul faced multiple attacks before his eventual killing. In 2020, unknown persons set fire to his BMW X5 and later shot at his vehicle near Vizyrka village. His car was also damaged with bats. In May 2023, a group in military uniforms physically attacked him in Odesa, leading to criminal proceedings.

In July 2024, Hanul reported threats on his Telegram channel:

“A whole psychological attack on my family has begun. Various Russian information resources announced a reward for attacking me of $5,000-$10,000.”

He requested protection from the SBU and police, who opened a criminal case for death threats. However, they did not manage to protect him.

Activist killed in broad daylight in Odesa

On 14 March 2025, a gunman shot Hanul at 10:30 a.m. in central Odesa and fled. Police detained the suspect within hours—46-year-old Serhiy Shalaev, a military serviceman and former mechanized platoon commander who had deserted from the army.

In court, Shalaev confessed to the killing. Investigators charged him with premeditated contract murder and illegal weapons possession.

Police are examining several motives: a contract killing related to Hanul’s pro-Ukrainian activism, personal animosity, or Russian involvement due to his public positions.

Ivan Voronych: Spymaster who hunted Russian commanders

His unit played key role in Kursk operation

Ivan Voronych spent decades in the shadows, building Ukraine’s most lethal capabilities against Russian targets. He worked for Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) and served in the elite Alpha Special Operations Center, running what the New York Times described as “a unit that received technical support from the CIA.”

His operations included high-profile assassinations that shattered Russian proxy morale in occupied territories.

In 2016, his teams eliminated Arsen Pavlov (“Motorola”), a beloved Russian commander in occupied Donetsk, and Mikhaylo Tolstikh (“Givi”), another famous separatist leader. These targeted killings demonstrated Ukraine’s ability to reach enemy commanders deep in occupied areas, earning Voronych respected status within Ukrainian intelligence.

The colonel’s final mission involved Ukraine’s August 2024 offensive into Russia’s Kursk Oblast. His unit played a key role in the cross-border operation that seized Russian territory and held it for eight months, exposing Putin’s vulnerabilities and destroying a myth of Russian border’s inviolability.

Voronych’s high-profile successes made him a prime target for retaliation by Russian security services (FSB).

Russia wanted him dead as revenge

On 10 July 2025, Voronych left his apartment in Kyiv’s Holosiivskyi district around 8 a.m. A gunman approached in the parking lot and fired five shots from a silenced pistol. Voronych died instantly from multiple wounds. The killer fled in an SUV.

The targeting appeared to involve significant intelligence penetration, as the assassins knew Voronych’s exact address and daily routine. Former SBU officer Ivan Stupak assessed the killing as 99% likely to be a Russian special services operation, citing the professional nature of the attack.

Russians foreign recruits come to Ukraine to kill

Three days later, SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk announced the elimination of the Russia’s security service (FSB) hit team responsible for Voronych’s murder.

According to the investigation, the FSB had sent two foreign nationals – identified as Azerbaijani passport holders Gulalizade Khagani and Narmin Guliyeva – to Ukraine specifically to kill Voronych.

The handlers instructed the duo to surveil Voronych’s movements and provided coordinates for a weapons cache containing a pistol with suppressor.

When law enforcement attempted to arrest them in Kyiv Oblast, the suspects resisted and were killed in the firefight. The FSB had used them as disposable assets, with no intention of extraction or exchange.

Ukrainian officials revealed that the vulnerability was that Voronych had been living at his registered address, which was listed in publicly accessible databases, allowing the assassins to establish surveillance and plan the killing.

Andriy Parubiy: Lawmaker who called for destruction of “Russian empire”

Now back to the assassination of Andriy Parubiy, whose suspected killer was detained and the investigation continues currently. Why was he targeted? What did the suspect mean by “revenge on Ukrainian authorities”? What kind of politician was Parubiy?

Parubiy’s party declared Russia “the cause of all troubles in Ukraine”

In 1991, the 25-year-old co-founded the Social-National Party, declaring Russia “the cause of all troubles in Ukraine”—a statement so radical that Ukraine’s Justice Ministry delayed registration for four years. However, history proved him right.

He played central roles in both the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity, serving as commandant of key protest sites.

“From that megaphone I started the rally,” he recalled of Euromaidan’s first hours. “In the first minutes there were 70-80 of us, there were more police around us than us.”

Over three months, he transformed those initial 80 protesters into a sustained movement. He organized tent cities, built barricades, and created “Maidan Self-Defense”—a structured civilian militia that grew to 12,000 trained members by February 2014 and eventually toppled Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian government.

Government service

After the Revolution of Dignity, Parubiy served as Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, helping establish Ukraine’s National Guard by incorporating Maidan self-defense forces.

As Russia’s hybrid war intensified through 2014-2016 with cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns, and continued fighting in the east, Parubiy’s anti-Russian stance proved increasingly justified.

He served as Ukraine’s Parliament Speaker from 2016 to 2019, working to counter what he described as Russian attacks on Ukrainian language and culture.

Parubiy joined territorial defense in 2022

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, the 58-year-old Parubiy joined territorial defense forces and served at checkpoints around Kyiv. He consistently advocated for complete destruction of what he termed the “Russian empire,” arguing that Russia would remain a perpetual threat if not decisively defeated.

“This is today a chance for the Ukrainian army and people to destroy this empire. If it doesn’t die today, it will continue to remain a threat to us, to our children,” he declared.

Personal grief or Russian manipulation?

The suspect Mikhaylo Stselnnikov, a 52-year-old from Lviv, had lost his son Mikhaylo-Viktor “Lemberg” during fighting in Bakhmut in May 2023. The young soldier, fighting with the elite 93rd Mechanized Brigade, went missing and was never recovered.

Stselnnikov’s former wife revealed they hadn’t spoken in 27 years. Neither she nor their deceased son maintained contact with the accused. Yet somehow grief transformed into political violence.

The suspect disguised himself as a delivery courier and approached Parubiy from behind on 30 August 2025. He fired at least eight shots to the Parubiy’s back and fled.

In court, Stselnnikov called his actions “revenge on Ukrainian authorities” and rejected suggestions of Russian manipulation. He claimed he wanted quick sentencing so he can be exchanged for prisoners of war to get to Russia and recover his son’s body as the Russians had promised him.

However, investigative sources suggest the killing followed a pattern of Russian intelligence exploiting personal tragedies to recruit assassins. This method allows Russia to eliminate targets while maintaining plausible deniability—the perpetrator genuinely believes they’re acting from personal grief rather than foreign manipulation.

Whether Stselnnikov was directly recruited or simply influenced by Russian information campaigns promising body recovery remains under investigation.

The price of fighting for Ukrainian identity and independence

Across eleven years, six figures who exposed Russian lies, defended Ukrainian identity, and resisted Kremlin control were murdered in Ukraine. This pattern reveals a systematic campaign to eliminate the voices that challenge Russian narratives.

While fierce battles continue on the front line, Russia also targets the voices that expose imperial lies and strengthen national sovereignty. The aim is to create fear, silence opposition, and fracture the national unity that sustains resistance.

Direct FSB involvement appears evident in cases like SBU colonel’s assassination, but other killings show how Russian intelligence can exploit personal tragedies and ideological divisions to achieve similar results.

The continued targeting of pro-Ukrainian figures in Ukraine indicates that the struggle for independence encompasses not only territorial liberation of occupied territories but also protection of those who defend Ukraine’s sovereignty against Russian attempts at control in Ukraine that have persisted for centuries.

Ukraine’s new Flamingo cruise missile appears to include older, cheaper and easy-to-acquire components. Leftover Soviet-made free-fall bombs as warheads. And, for propulsion, a simple jet engine borrowed from a military training plane.

The inclusion of off-the-shelf components that are readily available from manufacturers in Ukraine or allied countries is good news as the Flamingo’s builder, Fire Point, aims to ramp up production to as many as seven missiles a day by next month.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the Flamingo, including its cost. Fire Point is under official investigation in Kyiv for possibly inflating the missile’s capability and price.

Regardless of the outcome of that probe, photos and videos of the massive, seven-ton missile hint at a reliable and affordable design. A close look at the fiberglass missile’s nose seems to indicate the warhead is actually two warheads: a pair of repurposed gravity bombs packed end to end.

The Flamingo seems to be based on the FP-5 missile design from U.K. firm Milanion. The firm claims the FP-5 ranges 3,000 km with a 1,000-kg payload. There isn’t a 1,000-kg Soviet-style gravity bomb in widespread use, according to missile expert Fabian Hoffmann. So “the payload could consist of two stacked FAB-500 unguided bombs,” each weighing 500 kg, Hoffmann wrote.

The evidence points to the FAB-500 M62, one of the most ubiquitous Soviet-era unguided dumb bombs. The Soviet air force left behind potentially thousands of the bombs when it left Ukraine in 1991. Many munitions companies continue to build new FAB-500s, including Bulcomers KS in Bulgaria.

Seems Flamingo's warhead is a modified FAB-1000 general purpose bomb. Ukraine likely has 10,000s leftover from Soviet aviation depots

The airframe appears to be carbon composite. A somewhat crude missile but it should be very impactful if manufactured at the claimed scale. https://t.co/HdTlUoG2sR pic.twitter.com/qoFbDy1r8x

— John Ridge (@John_A_Ridge) August 21, 2025

Abundant bombs

It’s not for no reason that, when the Ukrainian air force recently developed a simple precision glide-bomb similar to the Russian UMPK, it used old FAB-500 M62s as the basis—and added pop-out wings and satellite guidance.

With end-to-end FAB-500s, a Flamingo should be able to strike with the equivalent of 550 kg of TNT, Hoffmann estimated. That “is substantially more than the long-range drones and mini-cruise missiles Ukraine currently employs.”

Satellite imagery from the aftermath of the first confirmed Flamingo raid, targeting a Russian intelligence and hovercraft base in occupied Crimea on Aug. 30, depicts a large crater and other damage that may confirm Hoffmann’s assessment.

The ramp-launched Flamingo depends on a simple rocket booster to get it off the ground—and, it seems, an Ivchenko AI-25TL turbofan engine to propel the giant missile as fast as 950 km/hr. The AI-25TL, which powers Aero L-39 jet trainers and other aircraft, produces 1,850 kg of thrust.

An L-39 weighs five tons, which is two tons less than a Flamingo weighs. But the L-39 must be maneuverable, where the Flamingo is expected to fly a simple course at steady speed under inertial and satellite guidance. The AI-25TL is more than adequate—and, more importantly, it’s in production in Ukraine with firm Motor Sich. It’s priced to move at around $40,000 per engine.

With a low-cost warhead and equally affordable engine, a Flamingo might cost less than $1 million. That’s quite low for a long-range heavy cruise missile. A Russian Kh-101 or American Tomahawk both cost several times as much.

The Flamingo could change the deep-strike math for Ukraine. The new missile “has so much range and such a big warhead that that’s one of the important ones that could really make a difference,” Finnish analyst Joni Askola said.

And if the missile really is as cheap as it appears to be, Fire Point may actually be able to ramp up production to seven missiles a day.

The Ukrainian army’s 425th Assault Regiment is about to deploy ex-Australian M-1 Abrams tanks, making it only the second Ukrainian unit to do so. But even after the 69-ton M-1s arrive, the regiment’s most important assets may be the creativity, courage and sheer aggression of its infantry.

Consider the 425th Assault Regiment trooper who recently posed as Russian, fell in with two Russian soldiers—and then gunned them down from a few feet away. One of the regiment’s drones observed the cold-blooded ambush from overhead.

Russian and Ukrainian infantry often wear similar uniforms—and identify themselves with colored armbands. Further complicating the identity crisis, Russian sabotage groups have been known to dress in captured or copied Ukrainian uniforms when they infiltrate Ukrainian lines.

In any event, the victims mistook that 425th Assault Regiment Trooper for an ally. The Ukrainian trooper may have encouraged this misconception by speaking the right language. Most Russians speak Russian, of course—but then, so do many Ukrainians.

Recall that, in May 2024, a squad from the Ukrainian 3rd Assault Brigade captured a Russian radio during a bitter skirmish over a Russian-held gully somewhere north of Kharkiv. “We will now try to fuck them over,” the Ukrainian infantry leader said in the official video depicting the fight. “Who is a Russian-speaker?”

A Russian-speaking Ukrainian soldier hopped on the captured radio. “We’re 1st Company,” he transmitted—part of the same battalion as the Russians in the gully. The Russians shifted their fire to avoid hitting their “allies.”

“Let’s go,” the 3rd Assault Brigade infantry leader ordered. “Yell in Russian!” By the time the Russians realized the soldiers approaching them weren’t actually fellows Russians, it was too late. They were all but surrounded.

Blending in

There are entire regiments and brigades in the Russian order of battle that are manned by Ukrainians from occupied oblasts—Ukrainians who are likelier to speak Russian. One of these units, the 132nd Motor Rifle Brigade, was at the vanguard of the Russian 51st Combined Arms Army’s effort to extend a salient northeast of the fortress city of Pokrovsk, in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, last month.

These Ukrainians fighting for Russia “would better understand the area and potentially blend in,” noted Rob Lee, an analyst with the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. But that local knowledge didn’t save them when, early last month, the Ukrainian 1st Azov Corps and other units—including the 425th Assault Regiment—counterattacked.

A month later, the salient and the 132nd Motor Rifle Brigade have both been mostly eliminated. Now the 425th Assault Regiment is pushing back Russian forces around Myrnohrad, just east of Pokrovsk. Surprisingly, the one-man ambush may have taken place in Boykovka, 15 km north of Myrnohrad in a zone many observers assume is largely under Russian control.

The circumstances are hazy. Was the ambusher a member of Ukrainian sabotage group infiltrating Russian lines the way Ukrainians routinely infiltrate Ukrainian lines?

The increasing porousness of the front makes deadly cases of misidentification more likely. “There isn’t a coherent front line,” American analyst Andrew Perpetua explained. Instead, there’s a wide no-man’s land between areas of clear Russian and Ukrainian control. That no-man’s-land is largely depopulated except for scattered—and carefully concealed—underground fighting positions for a few harried infantry doing their best to hide from the ever-present drones.

It’s that porousness that allowed the ill-fated 132nd Motor Rifle Brigade march right past undermanned Ukrainian trenches and extend their brief-lived salient northeast of Pokrovsk last month. The same lack of contiguous defenses may explain why a very dangerous Ukrainian and his supporting drone were wandering around Boykovka looking for gullible Russians to kill.

Tiny first-person-view drones are everywhere all the time over the 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 43-month wider war on Ukraine. But most of them are surveillance and attack assets. They scan for targets over or near the front line—and then zoom in and explode.

Now at least one Ukrainian unit is finding a new use for the ubiquitous FPVs. The 225th Assault Regiment, holding the line outside Vorone in southern Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with its M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles, has begun attaching FPVs to infantry squads to help the squads clear buildings of Russian troops.

“Clearing buildings is deadly—an enemy can be in every corner,” the regiment explained. When the infantry must enter a structure, they can send an FPV “to scout ahead.” “If the enemy is found,” the regiment explained, “the drone strikes, keeping our infantry safe.”

It’s delicate work requiring extreme precision on the part of the distant drone operator, who wears a virtual-reality headset to see what the warhead-clutching FPV sees. An FPV explodes on contact with any surface, so an imprecise maneuver can endanger the drone’s human squadmates.

To guarantee an uninterrupted signal between the operator and their drone, the 225th Assault Regiment uses fiber-optic FPVs for clearance missions. Fiber-optic drones send and receive signals via kilometers-long optical fibers, making them impervious to radio jamming and the signal dead zones created by buildings or hills.

Clearing buildings is deadly—an enemy can be in every corner.

Alliance Division of the 225th Assault Regiment uses fiber-optic FPV drones to scout ahead. If the enemy is found, the drone strikes, keeping our infantry safe. pic.twitter.com/m2Vf7bfYg0

— 225 Окремий штурмовий полк (@225_oshp) September 2, 2025

Drones as suppressive fire

The Ukrainians aren’t the only ones innovating with their smallest drones. The Russians have new ideas, too. FPVs are so dangerous—and so terrifying—that soldiers tend to duck into their trenches as soon as they hear the drones’ distinctive buzzing. For that reason, some Russian regiments use the drones as suppressive fire.

Suppressive fire is an infantry tactic that’s as old as gunpowder. Basically, it means shooting at the enemy with something—rifles, machine guns, mortars or artillery—with enough intensity to drive the enemy underground for as long as it takes friendly forces to “breach” the enemy’s defenses … and advance.

Drones can suppress the enemy without even striking. “Soldiers begin to hide from the sound of UAVs alone and do not leave cover for a long time,” Russian blogger Unfair Advantage wrote.

“If the enemy is accustomed to being afraid of drones, then a UAV ‘carousel’—that is, the successive replacement of one strike UAV with another, can lead to the effect of suppressing positions, despite significant time intervals between strikes,” Unfair Advantage explained.

Infantry should begin their movement to contact with the enemy during an initial wave of drone attacks. “After the strikes are completed, the infantry takes cover and waits for the next wave of UAVs to arrive—or continues to move, but out of the line of sight of the defenders,” the blogger wrote. “This is repeated several times until the infantry reaches the immediate vicinity of the attacked position.”

There, the attackers wait for more drones before making their final push through the enemy positions. Drones should be overhead the whole time during the breach—”a mixed carousel of observation UAVs and attack UAVs,” Unfair Advantage advised.

To prolong the endurance of any turn of the UAV carousel, the operators can land some drones on the ground or on rooftops, idling their engines but keeping their cameras on—thus preserving the robots’ batteries. As long as at least one drone is audible by the defending infantry, the infantry should keep their heads down. They should, in other words, remain suppressed.

The respective new drone tactics belie deepening manpower problems on both sides of the wider war. More and more, both the Ukrainian and Russian armed forces are counting on robots to perform tasks most militaries still assign to human beings.

Ukraine’s manpower shortage is well-known. It’s possible Ukrainian brigades are short 100,000 trained infantry. But Russia has too few troops, too—despite generous bonuses and deceptive recruiting practices that lure or trap tens of thousands of fresh enlistees every month. Overall, Russian regiments probably have plenty of soldiers. But like Ukrainian brigades, they may specifically lack trained and experienced infantry.

Why risk them on a mission that a robot with a skilled operator can handle?

Desperate to staunch the bloodletting around Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, the Kremlin rushed in reinforcements. A lot of them.

But those reinforcements—the best of Russia’s available naval infantry and airborne forces—are already suffering heavy casualties in a sector they clearly do not understand. Attacking in armored vehicles along drone-patrolled roads just east of Pokrovsk on the evening of Aug. 28, the Russian 155th Naval Infantry Brigade was immediately spotted from the air by the Ukrainian state security service’s Ivan Franko Group.

The Ivan Franko Group attacked with its own explosive first-person-view drones—and also called in rockets from nearby High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems. The combined firepower “inflicted devastating losses on the enemy’s assault armored group, which ultimately could not reach the forward positions of the 79th [Air Assault] Brigade and was completely defeated,” the Ivan Franko Group reported.

The group counted five destroyed vehicles and two abandoned ones. “The enemy’s manpower losses as a result of the complex strike of FPV and HIMARS amounted to 50 to 100 men,” the group claimed. See the official video below.

Russia is finalizing its strategic regrouping.
Having redeployed forces from Sumy and Kherson, its offensive will likely enter a new phase soon. pic.twitter.com/U4CILpUwLn

— Unit Observer (@WarUnitObserver) August 30, 2025

It was a swift and bloody setback for Russia’s best effort to shift the battlefield momentum around Pokrovsk back in its own favor.

For more than a year now, a Russian force with at least eight corps and field armies, together overseeing dozens of regiments are brigades each with potentially thousands of troops, has been trying—and mostly failing—to capture a chain of Ukrainian cities stretching from Pokrovsk to Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine Donetsk Oblast.

The Russian 51st Combined Arms Army came close to closing a pincer around Pokrovsk and cutting off one of its two main supply routes in early August, when its 132nd Motor Rifle Brigade slipped thousands of troops past undermanned Ukrainian trenches northeast of Pokrovsk.

They marched 15 km toward the village of Dobropillya, which sits astride the T0515 road, Pokrovsk’s easternmost main supply route.

A brief-lived salient

But the Russians underestimated the strength of the Ukrainians’ reserves. Ukrainian commanders had made the deliberate decision to leave some trenches empty in order to buy time for certain brigades to rebuild. “It was a sacrifice,” American analyst Andrew Perpetua explained. “Sacrifice ground for time while refitting and then you can attack later.”

A dozen or so Ukrainian brigades, regiments and battalions, some fighting under the command of the national guard’s new 1st Azov Corps, assaulted the Dobropillya salient from both sides with drones, tanks, armed ground vehicles and infantry—and quickly destroyed the Russian 132nd Motor Rifle Brigade, likely inflicting thousand of casualties.

Rather than accepting defeat in the Dobropillya salient, the Kremlin scraped forces from Kherson Oblast in southern Ukraine as well as from the front stretching from Kursk Oblast in western Russia to Sumy Oblast in northern Ukraine—and sent them to Pokrovsk.

The reinforcements include no fewer than five Russian marine and airborne brigades, regiments and divisions including the ill-fated 155th Naval Infantry Brigade. The units that have been fighting around Pokrovsk learned the hard way, many months ago, that armored vehicles simply cannot survive on the roads threading toward the city. Their biggest successes have resulted from swift motorcycle assaults and hard-to-spot infiltrations by small groups of infantry.

The 155th Naval Infantry Brigade moved out in at least one tracked BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicle and other armored vehicles along with a few bikes, winding through a village—Malynivka—the has been under bombardment by Ukrainian air force jets lobbing American-made Joint Direct Attack Munition precision bombs.

Their inexperience and recklessness doomed them—and wasted the Kremlin’s first attempt to preserve what little is left of the Russians’ Dobropillya salient. But the Ivan Franko Group, for one, isn’t surprised. “The enemy will continue to try to carry out meaty assaults on our positions,” the group mused.

For two years, Ukraine’s drone boats have hounded the Russian Black Sea Fleet—delivering explosive payloads to sink ships at sea and in port, firing guns and missiles to take down Russian aircraft and even launching tiny first-person-view drones at coastal air-defense sites.

Now Russia is striking back with its own drone boats. On Thursday morning, a Russian Orion surveillance drone spotted the Ukrainian navy’s Simferopol reconnaissance ship on the Danube River just outside Romanian waters. An explosives-laden Russian unmanned surface vehicle motored up to Simferopol—and struck the 179-foot-ship amidships.

Two of the vessel’s 29 or so crew died, Ukrainian navy spokesperson Dmytro Pletenchuk said Friday. Several sailors were missing or injured. A search was underway for the missing, Pletenchuk said.

It’s painful loss for the depleted Ukrainian navy, which lost most of its large vessels—including its sole frigate, scuttled by its crew in Odesa—in the first few days of Russia’s wider invasion in February 2022. Since then, the navy has evolved, trading big ships for smaller boats and drones.

But the navy still had Simferopol, a former trawler that Ukraine fitted with a Melchior radio intelligence station and other systems and launched in 2019. Simferopol could detect Russian radio transmissions from hundreds of kilometers away. But the lightly armed ship was vulnerable—and the Ukrainian navy knew it. It’s not for no reason that Simferopol had apparently spent much of the wider war hiding out on the Danube.

https://twitter.com/sambendett/status/1961512010299953614

Three years hiding

For 42 months, the intel ship succeeded in avoiding missile attack. But then the Russians deployed their very first explosive drone boat—and chased down the once-lucky Simferopol. The USV may be the same type that Russian firm RoboCorp recently tested in Sevastopol, in Russian-occupied Crimea.

The exact specifications of the Russian USV are unclear. But if it’s anything like the Ukrainian state security agency’s own Maguara V5 USV, it might measure 18 feet from bow to stern, travel 800 km or so under satellite guidance and pack up to 300 kg of explosives. As the Simferopol strike demonstrated, that’s enough firepower to sink a medium-sized vessel.

Fast and low on the water, USVs are hard to detect and defeat. Russia has put in place a layered defense against Ukraine’s drone boats: patrolling with drones, jets, helicopters and boats and placing armed sentries on likely targets. As Russian USVs proliferate, Ukraine may need to duplicate these defenses—especially around Odesa, Ukraine’s strategic grain port.

And if the Russian USVs evolve the way the Ukrainian USVs have, they may begin striking with guns, rockets and FPV drones. They could even threaten Ukrainian aircraft.

In the spring of 2024, enterprising Ukrainian engineers kluged together a combination of sensors and R-73 and AIM-9X infrared dogfighting missiles borrowed from the Ukrainian air force—and mounted the resulting system on some of the security agency’s Magura V5s.

On 31 December, the air-defense Magura V5s claimed their first victims: two Russian Mil Mi-8 helicopters. six months later on May 2, separate formations of Ukrainian USVs attacked Russian navy anchorages in Crimea and in Novorossiysk, a port in southern Russia.

Russian drones detected the wakes and Russian warplanes sortied to attack the incoming USVs. The drone boats fired back with at least one AIM-9X—and shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighter. It was the first-ever shoot-down of a manned warplane by an unmanned warship.

But if Ukraine can do it, Russia can, too—now that it has its own drone boats.

A Ukrainian Neptune cruise missile battery tried to strike targets in southern Russia’s Krasnodar Krai region on Thursday. The strike failed as Russian S-300 air-defense missiles rose to intercept the incoming Neptunes—and then the Russians struck back.

A surveillance drone spotted a truck-mounted Neptune launcher, apparently the same launcher that targeted Krasnodar Krai. An Iskander ballistic missile streaked down, damaging if not destroying the Ukrainian launcher.

The hit on the Neptune battery underscores the risk to Ukrainian forces as they induct new and harder-hitting drones and missiles and escalate their deep strike campaign bombarding Russian factories, air bases, oil refineries and other strategic targets.

Russian troops and key war-industry workers are in growing trouble as the Ukrainian munitions strike farther and harder. But the Ukrainian missile and drone crews aren’t immune to harm. Russia is responding to Ukraine’s deep strike campaign with a counter deep strike campaign.

It’s unclear what the Ukrainian Neptune battery was trying to hit in Krasnodar Krai. There’s no shortage of targets, including air bases, air-defense sites and others. In any event, Russian surface-to-air missile batteries were ready, for once.

While the Russians “can’t defend everywhere,” according to retired US Army general Mark Hertling, they managed to defend Krasnodar Krai on Thursday. Four S-300 long-range SAMs spiraled into the air, swatting down the salvo of Neptunes.

It’s hard to say whether the Neptunes in the attempted raid were the standard 300-km version of the made-in-Ukraine missile or the new 1,000-km “long” version. The Ukrainian navy used standard Neptunes, which are capable of anti-ship and land-attack strikes, to sink the Russian navy cruiser Moskva in April 2022.

Since then, Ukraine has expanded its deployment of the subsonic missile, which packs a 150-kg warhead and may feature satellite and inertial navigation and a radar or infrared seeker. And it has added an even more powerful missile: the Flamingo, which ranges a staggering 3,000 km with a massive 1,000-kg warhead. Its guidance and seeker may be similar to the Long Neptune’s.

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Ukraine strikes back

With scores of cruise missiles and thousands of one-way attack drones a month, “Ukraine is increasingly taking the war to Russia now,” American-Ukrainian war correspondent David Kirichenko wrote in a new essay for The Atlantic Council. Drone and missile attacks on Russian oil refineries in recent weeks have throttled Russia’s refining by as much as 14%.

Russia is also waging a deep strike campaign, of course—and with more drones and missiles. But Russia’s drone and missile attacks mostly targets Ukrainian cities in a country of just 233,000 square miles. Ukraine’s drones and missiles target military and industrial targets in a country of 6.6 million square miles.

Between them, the Long Neptune, the Flamingo and Ukraine’s best attack drones should be able to hold at risk roughly half that area.

Ukraine’s air defense problem is hard but simple. Ukrainian defenses must contend with nearly daily raids involving potentially hundreds of drones and missiles, but they can concentrate around the biggest cities that are the Russians’ main targets.

By contrast, Russia’s air defense problem is hard and complex. “The Kremlin simply does not have enough air defense systems to protect thousands of potential military and energy targets spread across 11 time zones,” Kirichenko wrote. In that context, the successful interception of the Neptunes streaking toward Krasnodar Krai may have been an outlier.

And it makes sense for the Russians to target Ukraine’s best cruise missiles “left of the boom.” to borrow a US Army term. It’s better to blast a missile launcher, and kill or injure its crew, than to risk missing a missile after it launches.

Ukrainian missileers should know they’re being hunted. Every time they roll out for a launch, Russian drones will be looking for them—and Russian ballistic missiles will be ready to take aim.

Ukraine is escalating its attacks on Russia’s oil refineries, hitting 10 of them in recent days and throttling the Russian oil industry’s refining by more than a million barrels per day. That’s 14% of output.

But refineries can be repaired. And Russia’s sprawling oil sector has excess capacity that could help it compensate for damage from Ukrainian raids. “Russia has a lot of these inactive refineries, and Russia is able to switch to some of them if needed,” Finnish analyst Joni Askola noted.

To make lasting dent in Russia’s most important industry, Ukraine needs to strike more often with more damaging weapons. At present, most oil raids and other deep strikes are carried out by slow, propeller-driven drones ranging fewer than 1,000 km with warheads weighing just 50 kg or so.

The drones that Ukraine has been using are just not enough because they’re quite easy to shoot down and also their warheads are quite small, as well,” Askola pointed out. It’s crucial for Ukraine to get more and better munitions “with enough range, but with a bit bigger warheads.”

The harder-hitting munitions are coming. Ukrainian companies have developed at least two new cruise missiles—the 6,000-kg Flamingo and the approximately 1,000-kg Long Neptune—that could extend the reach and effect of the oil raids. The Americans are helping, too, with a mysterious new cruise missile called the Extended Range Attack Munition.

The enormous Flamingo, traveling as far as 3,000 km with a 1,000-kg warhead, would hit the hardest and farthest targets. Right now, Ukrainian firm Fire Point is building one Flamingo a day. It aims to ramp up production to seven missiles a day by October.

The Long Neptune, ranging 1,000 km with a 150-kg warhead, is for closer and less durable targets. It’s unclear how many of the missile the Luch Design Bureau can build.

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Smallest missile

The American ERAM is the smallest of the bunch. It weighs just 1,100 kg and ranges at least 400 km. But in the short term, it may also be the most numerous. The administration of the former US President. Joe Biden launched the ERAM program in 2024, and the administration of the current US President. Donald Trump recently gave final approval for Ukraine to receive 3,350 of the small missiles. Deliveries should start in the coming weeks.

We don’t know much about the ERAM except that, in contrast to the ground-launched Flamingo and Long Neptune, the American munition is air-launched. The Ukrainian air force’s ex-Soviet Sukhoi and MiG jets, ex-European Lockheed Martin F-16s, and ex-French Dassault Mirage 2000s are all compatible with an array of precision munitions.

It’s possible the ERAM is broadly similar to the Powered Joint Direct Attack Munition developed by US defense giant Boeing. The PJDAM takes a standard satellite-guided bomb and adds pop-out wings and a tiny Kratos-TDI-J85 turbojet engine. At the low cost of just $30,000, a 220-kg PJDAM ranges as far as 500 km. Most of the PJDAM’s weight is explosive fill, making it much more damaging than Ukraine’s current deep-strike drones.

It would make sense for the US to provide Ukraine with an ERAM based on the PJDAM, as Ukraine already possesses freefalling JDAM bombs and gliding JDAMs with pop-out wings. Adding a small engine to the same basic munition shouldn’t significantly change its compatibility. Any Ukrainian jets that can carry JDAMs should also be able to carry ERAMs.

To strike Russian refineries with the same intensity that Russia strikes Ukrainian cities, Ukrainian forces need to launch hundreds of munitions several times a week. They can’t all be Flamingos and Long Neptunes, which might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. Nor should they all be the cheaper, but lighter, attack drones that are most common today.

Cheap but powerful, the ERAM is the middleweight missile Ukraine needs to intensify attacks now. The wrinkle is that the US Defense Department under Trump has reportedly barred Ukraine from striking Russia with certain American-made long-range munitions, extending similar bans put in place by Biden.

It’s unclear whether that policy would also ban deep strikes with ERAMs.

Escalating drone and missile strikes on Russia’s oil refineries have disrupted 17% of Russian refining. And it’s about to get worse for Russia’s battered oil industry as new, harder-hitting Ukrainian cruise missiles come on-line in greater numbers.

Ukrainian forces have struck 10 Russian refineries in recent days, reducing output by 1.1 million barrels per day, according to Reuters. Some Russian oblasts are also experiencing gasoline shortages and rising prices.

The oil industry accounts for 20% of Russia’s gross domestic product. If Ukraine can inflict lasting damage on the energy sector in Russia, everyday Russians are sure to notice. A souring national mood could “have an impact—and will maybe bring us a bit closer to an end of the war,” Finnish analyst Joni Askola said.

What’s most ominous for the Russians is that most if not all of the recent strikes have involved Ukrainian drone types, such as the Ukroboronprom An-196, that have small warheads weighing just 50 or 60 kg.

A 50-kg warhead delivered by a propeller-drive attack drone motoring along at just 400 km/hr isn’t likely to inflict lasting damage to a target as expansive as an oil refinery, Askola explained. Moreover, current Ukrainian attack drones rarely fly farther than 1,000 km—meaning many Russian refineries are beyond reach.

That’s changing. The new Flamingo cruise missile, from Ukrainian manufacturer Fire Point, ranges 3,000 km at a top speed faster than 900 km/hr with a massive 1,000-kg warhead. The new Long Neptune cruise missile from Ukraine’s Luch Design Bureau is probably just as fast but somewhat smaller, delivering a 150-kg warhead out to a distance of 1,000 km. Both jet-propelled missiles probably navigate with a combination of satellite and inertial guidance

The Flamingo and Long Neptune are in front-line service in limited numbers. Production is scaling up fast, however. Fire Point hopes to build as many as seven Flamingos a day starting in October, potentially signalling a vast expansion of Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign—and a lot more damage to Russian refineries.

“Flamingo has so much range and such a big warhead that that’s one of the important ones that could really make a difference,” Askola said. “But there is also the ground-to-ground version of the Neptune missile that is kind of ready now.” Ukrainian firms are also developing at least two new types of ballistic missile that could add to the destruction.

“If Ukraine can combine drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles on the same place when they’re striking, then it will be hard for Russia to shoot them down or to protect the places,” Askola said. “Hopefully Ukraine can develop as many systems as possible and then scale up on the best ones and hopefully get some results.”

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Squeezing the oil economy

Kyiv’s goal should be to permanently throttle Russian refining, with knock-on effects on state revenues—and on gasoline prices. The Kremlin sustains high levels of military recruitment—up to 30,000 fresh troops a month—with generous enlistment bonuses as high as 400,000 rubles ($4,500). That’s as much as many Russians earn in four months.

“Until now, a big part of the population has benefited from the war because if someone from your family goes to fight for the war, you earn way more money,” Askola noted. But the bonuses are a drain on government finances, which are also under strain from Ukraine’s refinery raids. Some oblasts are already cutting back.

The combined effect of shrinking bonuses and rising gas prices could turn more Russians against the war. “Again, it’s something that’s not going to change anything in the short run,” Askola said. Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin “is not going to collapse tomorrow because people suddenly don’t like the war. But in the long run, it will still have an impact.”

Ukrainian forces are battling a Russian assault on the village of Vorone, just east of the town of Velykomykhailivka in southern Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Luckily for them, they’re rolling into the fight in American-made M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles—some of the best IFVs in Russia’s 42-month wider war on Ukraine.

A video that circulated online on Monday depicts two of the 33-ton, 10-person Bradleys—belonging to the 225th Assault Regiment—rolling along a paved road in or near Vorone, firing left and right with their 25-millimeter auto-cannons at Russian infantry clinging to positions in the treelines along the road.

The Russian 5th Tank Brigade recently claimed it captured Vorone. But the 225th Assault Regiment obviously isn’t ready to give up the village.

The M-2 excels at that kind of fighting evident in Vorone. Even Russian engineers, who have inspected several captured Ukrainian Bradleys, have praised the American-made vehicle. Compared to Russian-made fighting vehicles, the M-2 boasts superior firepower owing to “the accuracy of the 25-millimeter M242 automatic cannon,” the Russians wrote in an April report.

Донеччина. Дорога під контролем — Bradley штурмового батальйону 225-го ОШП косять посадки, де сидить противник.

The road is under control — Bradley IFVs of the assault battalion of the 225th Assault Regiment are clearing out the tree lines where the russians are hiding. pic.twitter.com/zSdsJsQcVW

— 225 Окремий штурмовий полк (@225_oshp) August 25, 2025

The Bradley is one of Ukraine’s best vehicles for close combat, but it’s in short supply. The Ukrainian army has six battalions that ride in M-2s. On paper, each has 31 Bradleys. But the army only got, for free, somewhat more than 300 M-2s from the administration of former US Pres. Joe Biden before the administration of Pres. Donald Trump throttled US aid to Ukraine.

Of those 300-plus M-2s, the Ukrainians have lost no fewer than 108: 95 destroyed and 13 captured. Crews have abandoned others in places where Ukrainian engineers couldn’t recover them. Dozens are badly damaged. Between them, those six Bradley battalions need 186 vehicles. If there isn’t already a shortfall, there could be soon.

But the 225th Assault Regiment is clearly willing to risk some of its Bradleys if that means blunting the Russian 5th Tank Brigade’s advance.

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Over-extended Russians

It’s clear the Russians have pushed too far, too fast in recent weeks. And it’s clear why. Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin was desperate to project strength in the lead-up to his Aug. 15 summit with US Pres. Donald Trump in Alaska.

To Russia’s 700,000-person army of occupation in Ukraine attacked aggressively, some might say recklessly, all along the 1,100-km front line—ultimately breaking through Ukrainian lines northeast of the fortress city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.

That effort backfired. The Russian 51st Combined Arms Army failed to support its infantry marching through undermanned Ukrainian trenches outside Pokrovsk, leaving the Russian salient vulnerable to counterattack.

“Russia way over-extended,” American analyst Andrew Perpetua explained. Sensing Russian weakness in several other eastern and southern sectors in addition to Pokrovsk, the Ukrainians counterattacked in recent days. In Vorone, however, the 225th Assault Regiment and its Bradley crews are apparently still trying to just halt the Russians.

Still, that’s consistent with Ukraine’s overall strategy right now. Kyiv’s priority, Perpetua wrote, is “stability.” “Stabilize the front, retake certain positions, reinforce others. Widen the gray zone in others.”

To protect them as they push back against Russian attacks, some Ukrainian units have been adding even more additional armor to their M-2s. A recent photo of a Bradley operated by the 33rd Assault Regiment, holding the line against Russian incursion in northern Ukraine, might depict the most heavily-armored M-2 in Ukrainian service.

It boasts its normal aluminum armor and side-mounted explosive reactive armor blocks. The Ukrainians added a telescoping anti-drone screen, metal anti-drone grills along the hull and rubber mats on the hull front and beside the driver’s hatch. Incredibly, there are also tiny mesh installations plugging the gaps between the metal racks for the side-mounted explosive blocks and the aluminum hull.