The EU locked in its sanctions on Russia for an unprecedented three years this week, and paid for it by letting two of the country's richest men off the list. Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman were delisted at the insistence of Slovakia, France, and Luxembourg, DW reported.

France pushed to remove Usmanov, a Kremlin-linked metals and telecoms magnate, as part of a secret deal to free prisoners held in Azerbaijan, and Luxembourg pushed to remove Fridman, who is pursuing the country for about $16 billion in arbitration over the losses his sanctions caused, the Financial Times reported.

Kyiv's reaction was immediate and furious

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called the decision shameful and unjustified and urged EU states to impose their own national sanctions on the pair.

"In Moscow, they celebrate, because they got what they wanted: a sense of impunity, humiliation of the European Union, and division among Europeans," he wrote on X.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who raised the issue with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen in New York, called the delisting "suicidal and counterproductive."

"Wars end with resolve and strength, not concessions to the aggressor's cronies," he said, thanking von der Leyen for agreeing to work on adding more Russian names to the lists.

At the same time, he stated that he "is grateful to Ursula for her willingness to work on adding more Russian individuals to the EU sanctions lists."

The step was a bargain of durability for names. Rather than roll the sanctions over for the usual six months, the EU previously extended them to 22 September 2029, keeping some 2,600 Russians and companies, including President Vladimir Putin, frozen out for three years, after weeks of deadlock that at one point nearly let the whole regime lapse.

The deal came only after the bloc pushed its deadline back a week to buy time, and its Irish presidency called the result a difficult compromise.

More than two-thirds of the Russian soldiers holding the Zaporizhzhia front carry criminal records. Ukraine's "South" grouping says a third of them enlisted to escape prosecution, most are over 30, and no fresh reinforcements are arriving, spokesperson Anastasia Shevchenko told Ukrinform.

The reasons they signed up track with that: 31 percent enlisted to dodge criminal liability, 24 percent for money, 26 percent on ordinary contracts, and 13 percent through mobilization. It is Russia's prison pipeline in a single snapshot, a model that has pulled well over 100,000 inmates into the war with pardons and suspended sentences and thrown many of them at Ukrainian lines in disposable assault waves.

"It is worth noting that 69 percent of the Russian personnel have a criminal record," Shevchenko said.

The model dates to Wagner's prison recruiting in 2022 and has run under the Defense Ministry since.

A middle-aged force holds the line

The men are not young. More than a third, 36 percent, are between 31 and 40; another 24 percent are 41 to 50; 31 percent are 21 to 30; and just 9 percent are 20 or under.

This is a force of grown men with records, not fresh conscripts, and it points to who Russia can still find willing to fight in the south: people with little to lose and a sentence to escape among Ukrainian civilians, women and children.

The prison pipeline runs dry

What Shevchenko did not report is any sign of that force being rebuilt. Russia has enough men and equipment to keep fighting on the Zaporizhzhia front, she says, but no substantial replenishment is coming.

That fits a wider problem for Russia: its supply of convict recruits is thinning as word of the front's lethality spreads through the prisons, with some inmates now signing military contracts only to bolt on the way to the front, in one case killing their escort to get away.

Russia's practice of replenishing its ranks from prisons is breaking down, and officials are resorting to ever more coercive measures to keep the flow going.

Ukrainian drones struck Rosneft's Kuibyshev refinery in Samara overnight on 22 September, hitting two primary crude-processing units and triggering a large fire, Ukrainian drone and missile maker Fire Point confirmed. The strike is part of Ukraine's ongoing campaign against the fuel infrastructure that sustains Russia's war—the same plant had to halt crude processing after a drone attack in June. The attack came one day after US President Donald Trump for the second time in a week urged Ukraine's leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to stop the refinery campaign.

FP-1 drones hit both primary processing units

Fire Point said its FP-1 drones struck the Kuibyshev refinery, hitting the AVT-4 and AVT-5 atmospheric-vacuum distillation units—the plant's primary crude-processing installations. A large fire broke out on the refinery grounds. The Kuibyshev refinery is part of Rosneft and has a designed processing capacity of about 7 million tons of crude oil per year. It is located more than 900 km from the war zone in Ukraine.

Ukrainian Telegram channel Exilenova+ began reporting explosions and air defense activity in Samara Oblast at 3:50 a.m. By 4:24 a.m., the channel posted videos showing a night fire at the refinery. OSINT channel World Militaries identified the AVT-5 unit as the initial fire site.

Russian news Telegram channel Astra separately confirmed the fire at the Kuibyshev refinery.

By morning, the fire was still burning. The smoke plume stretched about 100 km across Samara Oblast, Exilenova+ reported.

The Kuibyshev refinery stopped processing crude in June 2026 after Ukrainian drones hit its AVT-4 and AVT-5 units—the same pair now struck again. Each unit processes about 10,000 tons of crude per day, or roughly 73,000 barrels. The refinery had also suspended operations after a drone attack in August 2025.

Other targets in the overnight wave

Exilenova+ also reported that Ukrainian forces struck a military base in the city of Pochep in Bryansk Oblast overnight, with fire observed at the site. Residents of Tolyatti in Samara Oblast reported explosions, and witnesses suggested the Tolyattikauchuk synthetic rubber plant had been hit, Suspilne reported.

Samara Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev confirmed the attack, claiming Russian air defenses intercepted "dozens of drones." He said drones "targeted industrial enterprises" but did not name which ones. Russia's Defense Ministry claimed 297 Ukrainian drones were intercepted over 14 oblasts and occupied Crimea.

Part of an ongoing campaign against Russian fuel infrastructure

Ukraine's General Staff confirmed strikes on both the Bashneft-UNPZ refinery in Ufa and the Kuibyshev refinery in Samara, with fire observed at both sites. Ukraine has been striking Russian refineries continuously for months—hitting targets in Saratov and Volgograd on 11 September, Slavyansk-na-Kubani on 14 September, Syzran on 15 September, Yaroslavl on 17 September, and Ufa on 21 September, the night before the Kuibyshev strike. Earlier, the General Staff said the campaign has disabled 45% of Russia's oil-refining capacity. The strikes have also pushed Russia's fuel crisis into Central Asia, where shortages forced Kazakhstan to seek emergency supplies.

Trump urged Zelenskyy to stop the campaign for the second time in a week during their 21 September call, telling him "don't hit diesel fuel" and blaming Ukrainian strikes—not the Iran conflict—for rising US diesel prices.

A Kremlin-backed program aimed at primary-school children claims 10,154 participants in occupied Zaporizhzhia, nearly 30 times Yunarmia's 355 members—Russia's uniformed military youth organization—Petro Andryushchenko, head of the Center for the Study of Occupation, said. Cadet classes in the same region account for another 387, according to Andryushchenko.

Yunarmia may represent only a fraction of Moscow’s system for militarizing Ukrainian children under occupation. Movement of the First, a Kremlin-backed mass youth group covering ages 6 to 18, claims about 65 times Yunarmia's membership in occupied Zaporizhzhia—over 23,000 by the end of 2025, up from about 14,000 a year earlier, according to Andryushchenko's breakdown of the series. A separate infographic in the same series puts the figure at over 19,000. Moscow has sustained the broader campaign throughout the full-scale invasion, combining classroom indoctrination, Kremlin youth movements, military games, and weapons training.

Andryushchenko explains why: Movement of the First is not a military organization, and that is precisely its function—a mass base that enrolls children without their joining any military-patriotic structure, then moves some into specialized programs. Through it, Zarnitsa stopped being a school game and became part of Russia's military-patriotic system. The movement functions as a gateway, not an endpoint.

In Kherson Oblast, the pattern repeated: over 2,700 children and young people passed through Movement of the First events in 2024, and by spring 2025, the registered count had reached 6,200, with primary cells growing from about 70 to 114–115.

From Eaglets to Zarnitsa: programs across occupied Zaporizhzhia

Andryushchenko said Eaglets of Russia, a program aimed at primary-school children aged 6 to 10, claims 10,154 participants across 97 schools and 626 class-teams in occupied Zaporizhzhia, while more than 2,000 children aged 11 to 17 have passed through the Zarnitsa 2.0 military game. In May 2026, children from all four occupied oblasts appeared at a federal Eaglets session alongside children from Russian regions—a sign the occupied territories are already integrated into the system.

He said military-applied instruction now fills about half of the OBZR course, Russia’s “Fundamentals of Security and Defense of the Motherland” subject, in occupation schools. He described a broader system stretching from kindergarten and mass children's organizations through military games and cadet structures to practical training in drones, tactics, weapons, and military medicine.

Military training center claims thousands across four occupied territories

Beyond Zaporizhzhia, Andryushchenko said the Russian military-sports training center VOIN claims 14,450 trained cadets across four occupied Ukrainian territories in his overview post. A later infographic in the series gives 10,381 for the same four territories, suggesting the figures may count differently.

That cannot be read as a count of children because VOIN programs accept participants aged 14 to 35, according to the Center's own website, and no age breakdown was provided. VOIN says it has trained more than 100,000 cadets across 21 Russian regions overall.

Andryushchenko's post opened a six-part series tracing the system "from first grade to cadet"—though the series itself showed the pipeline actually begins in kindergarten, with "Conversations about Important Things" starting at age 5. Part two, published on 22 September, broke down Movement of the First's role as a gateway, with Zarnitsa 2.0 next. The participation totals cited in his post are claims by Russian-run organizations relayed by the Center. They may overlap, have not been independently verified, and do not show how many individual children participated or whether children move from one program to another.

Militarization has continued throughout the full-scale invasion

These latest participation claims are the newest snapshot of a campaign that has expanded steadily throughout Russia’s full-scale invasion. In 2023, occupation schools were already teaching children to use assault rifles and provide battlefield first aid.

By late 2024, Putin had ordered the expansion of military-sports camps and youth indoctrination programs.

Reports published in 2025 and 2026 described mandatory “patriotism” lessons from first grade and documented Ukrainian orphans who entered cadet schools and later appeared in Russian military uniforms.

Expulsion of general who was second only to Xi in military hierarchy ‘marks one of the most dramatic purges’

Russian drones have entered Moldovan airspace 39 times since the start of 2026, against 17 in all of last year, President Maia Sandu said after a meeting of the country's National Security Council, Liga reported. Moldova's military can defend individual sites and little more, and Sandu said the country has to speed up building air defenses it spent three decades without. The council also ordered better protection for the energy facilities the country runs on, drones included.

What Moldova has to shoot with

Moldovan forces hold portable anti-aircraft missiles, anti-aircraft machine guns, and electronic warfare equipment, Sandu said. Their capabilities are mostly limited to protecting individual pieces of critical infrastructure. Three decades of ignoring air defense will not be paid off in five, she said, and Moldova is working with partners to speed the process up.

The military is now working to extend the range its air defenses cover. Moldova received €120 million from the EU to buy a medium-range system, and it is looking with international partners for more modern and cheaper ways to bring drones down.

Chișinău is also deepening cooperation with countries in the region to receive and pass on threat data faster. Interception is the part Moldova cannot yet do: Romania has shot down drones that reached it after crossing Moldovan territory, while Moldova mostly records them.

Explore further

Moldova is investing in air defense against the Russian drones crossing from Ukraine—Romania shoots down the ones that reach it

A month of incidents

The pace has picked up this month. A drone tracked over Moldova on 8 September held up seven flights, among them Volodymyr Zelenskyy's plane as it took off for King Harald V's funeral in Norway.

Three days later, Moldova temporarily withdrew its staff from three border crossings on Ukrainian territory because of the threat of Russian strikes, after Russia hit at least five of Ukraine's western crossings since late August.

On the morning of 18 September, a loud explosion went off near Chișinău and police found drone wreckage at the site. In August, a blast near the village of Talmaza marked the country's third airspace breach in nine days.

Warning the public is the other gap

Moldova is still building the system that would tell people a drone is overhead. MD-Alert needs more time to implement and is costed at €5 million, Sandu said, and until it works the government will use whatever notification mechanisms it already has.

The council that produced the drone count was convened on energy, and its decisions ran from gas reserves and fuel stocks to cyber vulnerabilities. Among them, Sandu wrote, were measures to better protect the facilities the country's energy supply depends on from hostile action, including the danger of drones.

Russia wants to build 14,000 of a new cruise missile next year, enough to fire them at Ukrainian cities by the thousand. The weapon, the Dan-T, is a cheap air-launched jet missile that flies hundreds of kilometers on its own, RBC-Ukraine reported.

The danger is volume, not finesse. Russia aims to produce up to 2,000 Dan-T missiles by the end of this year and scale it drastically, RBC-Ukraine's sources say. Fired in large numbers, it would add a fresh layer to the Gerans and the cruise and ballistic missiles that already saturate Ukraine's skies on the worst nights.

Numbers make the threat

The experts are less worried about any single Dan-T than about the swarm. High speed, long range, and the ability to launch the missiles by the thousand would stretch Ukraine's air defense further with every strike, forcing crews to spend scarce interceptors on yet another cheap target.

The missile flies to its objective autonomously, and Russia claims a special flight profile designed to make it harder for air defense to spot and shoot down.

A target drone becomes a weapon

The Dan-T has an unusual pedigree. It began as the Dan-M, a jet-powered target drone Russia's Sokol bureau built in the early 1990s and imitated US Tomahawk cruise missiles for air-defense practice, now planned to be stripped of its recovery parachute, fitted with a warhead, and fired at Ukrainian cities. Like Russia's other new cruise weapons, it carries no operator link, steering itself by satellite and inertial navigation.

The Banderol joins the list

The Dan-T is not the only new weapon unsettling Ukraine's military. The experts named it alongside the S8000 Banderol, a separate cheap cruise missile that Russia already builds at up to 80 a month and has used in some of its heaviest strikes on Kyiv. The Dan-T closely resembles the Banderol and, being cheaper, may end up replacing it.

Russian authorities left residents in and around Moscow without air raid sirens or phone alerts during Ukraine's largest combined strike on Moscow Oblast, apparently to guard turnout at Russia's parliamentary elections, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said. The silence angered residents and even pro-war commentators as a major oil refinery burned.

For most of this war, Russia has handled strikes on its cities as a routine to be announced, warned about, and waited out. Withholding warnings during the heaviest raid yet, in the middle of a national vote, suggests authorities will trade residents' safety for the look of a calm election when a political milestone is on the line.

Sirens stayed off during the biggest raid

Ukraine hit strategic sites across the Moscow area overnight on 19-20 September, the last day of Russia's State Duma vote. Moscow Oblast officials did not switch on air alert sirens or send the SMS warnings they had used during far smaller attacks. They quietly restricted mobile service without major public notice. Ukraine struck oil and logistics targets, not polling stations, according to the experts, and authorities appeared to place high turnout above protecting civilians.

Moscow Oblast residents complained that no alert reached them, some posting on the Telegram channel of regional Governor Andrei Vorobyov before it closed comments. A prominent Kremlin-linked military blogger attacked the official response, saying it erodes public trust and that cutting mobile service does "not really help."

What the drones hit

Ukraine's General Staff reported striking the Gazpromneft-Moscow Oil Refinery in the city's Kapotnya district, one of Russia's largest plants, causing a large fire. Ukrainian manufacturer Fire Point said its FP-1 drones completely shut down the refinery, with all primary processing units damaged.

Governor Andrei Vorobyov claimed air defenses countered 249 drones across 17 municipal districts. The strike was part of Ukraine's widening campaign against the fuel sector funding Russia's war, with about a fifth of Russian refining capacity offline.

Russia is quietly moving to expand the capacity of the plant behind its long-range attack drones, a step that could sharply raise how many it launches at Ukraine, according to Politico. The plan turns on a single carbon fiber factory in Russia's Tatarstan region and runs to the end of the decade.

These files add something narrower than Russia's known intent to fight on: they identify carbon fiber as a critical material capping how many drones it can build. To break that cap, the Kremlin is funding production lines that will not run until the decade's end—a bet on winning by out-building Ukraine, even as the strikes grind on.

The bottleneck Russia wants to break

Politico obtained internal documents from Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom showing its Alabuga-Volokno plant would add 500 tons of military-grade aerospace carbon fiber a year by 2029. Rosatom declined to comment. Weapons expert David Albright, who heads the Institute for Science and International Security, estimated that volume could yield airframes for about 28,000 more attack drones a year—a 78% jump.

Ukraine already estimates Russia can build more than 36,000 Shahed/Geran kamikaze drones a year. Carbon fiber is the choke point: it keeps the airframes light and strong, and Russia has no cheap substitute.

"Without the carbon fiber, they can't make the drone. Can't substitute for the carbon fiber in the drone and keep its weight down," Albright said.

Moscow is investing in the raw material, not just more assembly halls—the fiber, not floor space, is what caps output.

Ground already cleared in Tatarstan

Documents gathered by the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center describe a new factory on the site designed to produce UMT42S-3K aerospace-grade fiber. Satellite images from May to July show land cleared for construction. Albright's own August imagery shows foundations going in. He said the stated 2027 completion date "requires rapid construction." Russia has spent the past year adding new assembly halls at the same site.

The plant and its parent, Rosatom's Umatex Group, already sit under US, UK, and other Western sanctions. The US House Select Committee on China and the Ukrainian government both verified the documents, officials told Politico.

The push comes as Russia leans harder on jet-powered Shaheds, which Ukraine's Air Force says are hard to down with conventional defenses. Kyiv has fielded its first jet interceptor and tested a new one in September—but the plant is a bid to out-build those defenses faster than Ukraine can scale them.

Cities around the country are ditching Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, and replacing them with equivalent cameras from law enforcement contracting giant Axon. That move in large part comes in response to 404 Media’s coverage of how local cops performed lookups in Flock for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and how a cop in Texas searched Flock cameras nationwide to look for a woman who self-administered an abortion.

That brings up questions: what are cities and law enforcement agencies using Axon ALPRs for? And who are they in turn sharing that data with? 404 Media has started to find out, but needs the help of local residents and community members to figure out what is happening across the country.

Over the last few weeks, 404 Media has filed requests with various cities and police departments for Axon “activity reports” and “sharing reports.” These show in granular detail when a police officer searched Axon’s ALPRs, the name of the officer, their badge number, the license plate they reached, and, most importantly, the stated reason why. These activity reports are essentially Axon’s version of Flock’s “network audits,” which has been the basis of much of 404 Media’s Flock reporting, and local and national media outlets’ around the country. You can see an example of one here:

So far, 404 Media has obtained activity reports from the Benton County Sheriff's Office, WA; Falmouth Police Department, ME; Johns Creek Police Department, GA; Ocean Shores Police Department, WA; Pleasanton Police Department, TX; and Red Wing Police Department, MN.

But we need your help. Has your local police department or city switched to Axon ALPR cameras? Were they already using Axon? And do you want to know what they’re using those cameras for?

We’re asking interested readers to file the below public records request. You can simply copy this language, tweak it a little if necessary to apply to your state, then file the request with the relevant agency. You can do this by finding their relevant public records request email address, or by filing it through Muckrock. This is the platform we use for sending and organizing our records requests.

The Internal ALPR Activity report is the one shown above. The Network ALPR Activity report shows what other agencies the police department or city shares their data with. The ALPR Data Sharing report provides a history of when other agencies were invited, or removed, to receive the data. And the ALPR Hostlist Management Audit report details changes made to alerts the agency may receive.

If you file a request and get data back, please feel free to email it to us at joseph@404media.co. We’ve seen with the nationwide conversation about Flock that local residents can do a lot to reveal how surveillance technology is being used in their own communities. We hope we can find out a bit more about how agencies are using Axon’s cameras too.

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the [YOUR STATE’S PUBLIC RECORDS LAW], I hereby request the following records:

1. Internal ALPR Activity report in Axon.

The report should include data logged from the period of January 1, 2025, to the date this request is processed. Per Axon's documentation, the Internal ALPR Activity report is available within the LPR > ALPR Search > LPR Audit menu. You can find instructions to locate this here: https://www.axon.com/help/fusus/software/fusus/alpr/alpr-audit.htm

2. Network ALPR Activity report in Axon.

The report should include data logged from the period of January 1, 2025, to the date this request is processed. Per Axon's documentation, the Network ALPR Activity report is available within the LPR > ALPR Search > LPR Audit menu. You can find instructions to locate this here: https://www.axon.com/help/fusus/software/fusus/alpr/alpr-audit.htm

3. ALPR Data Sharing report in Axon.

The report should include data logged from the period of January 1, 2025, to the date this request is processed. Per Axon's documentation, the ALPR Data Sharing report is available within the LPR > ALPR Search > LPR Audit menu. You can find instructions to locate this here: https://www.axon.com/help/fusus/software/fusus/alpr/alpr-audit.htm

4. ALPR Hotlist Management Audit report in Axon.

The report should include data logged from the period of January 1, 2025, to the date this request is processed. Per Axon's documentation, the ALPR Hotlist Management Audit report is available within the LPR > ALPR Search > LPR Audit menu. You can find instructions to locate this here: https://www.axon.com/help/fusus/software/fusus/alpr/alpr-audit.htm

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response within the time period that the statute requires.

Sincerely,

[YOUR NAME]

For years, Ukraine’s air defenses blunted Russia’s attempts to terrorize its cities from the sky. Now, after four years of adaptation, Moscow is fielding faster drones, massing ballistic missiles, and finding new ways to overwhelm a Ukrainian air-defense network running short of the interceptors needed to stop them.

Russia’s aerial campaign is becoming harder to contain just as its attacks are killing more Ukrainian civilians. July recorded at least 437 civilian deaths, the highest monthly toll since the early months of the full-scale invasion, with UN monitors pointing to Russian missile and drone attacks as a key factor.

That shift is visible most clearly in Russia’s rapidly expanding use of jet-powered Geran drones. These drones can exceed 400 km/h, making them significantly harder to intercept than the slower, propeller-driven Shaheds Ukraine has spent years learning to counter. Russia reportedly launched as many as 2,850 jet-powered drones in August alone.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that Russia’s escalation with the new drones is becoming “increasingly terrorist” and called for urgent efforts to develop defenses against them.

While Ukraine’s Western partners have taken steps to strengthen its air defenses, Russia has spent the same period adapting and expanding its ability to attack from the air. The gap is becoming increasingly visible in the skies over Ukrainian cities.

Ukrainian civilians are already paying the price

Russia has increasingly turned its ability to strike deep inside Ukraine into a weapon against civilian life itself: hitting residential areas, fuel stations, railways, energy infrastructure and other sites across cities far from the front.

Since late August, Kyiv has faced near-continuous Russian drone attacks, with Russia increasingly sending waves of drones against the capital throughout the day and night. The shift has made air-raid alerts, explosions and disruptions to daily life a near-constant reality.

For Ukrainians, Russia’s evolving aerial campaign is measured in destroyed homes, injuries, deaths, and lives permanently changed. 

In Kyiv, it has also changed everyday life: explosions interrupt sleep and work, people run for shelter as strikes unfold overhead, and the threat of another attack is never far away.

And the pressure is no longer confined to Kyiv. Kharkiv, Odesa, Sumy and Zaporizhzhia are all facing increasingly sophisticated combinations of drones and missiles.

The danger is not simply that Russia is launching more weapons. It is that Moscow has spent years learning which weapons can penetrate Ukraine’s defenses, how to combine them, and how to force Ukraine to spend its most valuable interceptors.

Zelenskyy’s warning captures the urgency: “You cannot simply wait for Russia to perfect its repertoire of killings.”

Russia is adapting faster than Ukraine can rebuild its shield

The jet-powered Geran is only one part of the problem.

Russia has also dramatically increased its use of ballistic missiles. Reuters reported that 228 ballistic and hypersonic missiles were launched in July and the first eight days of August, with more than half being inaccurate RM48U training missiles repurposed for combat. 

Ukraine has virtually exhausted its US-made Patriot interceptors, the only systems in its arsenal capable of reliably intercepting Russia’s ballistic missiles, while Moscow continues launching them at a high tempo.

The result is a more complex aerial threat: fast drones that are difficult to intercept, ballistic missiles that are extremely difficult to stop, and large waves of cheaper weapons that can force Ukraine to expend scarce defensive ammunition.

Ukraine is developing new ways to counter them, including interceptor drones specifically designed to hunt down the jet-powered Gerans. But Ukraine is developing these systems as Russia is already deploying its new weapons at scale.

Western countries have continued providing air-defense assistance. Canada, for example, announced a C$350 million package for interceptors earlier this month. But Ukrainian officials continue to say that deliveries remain far below what is needed to protect the country from Russia’s expanding aerial campaign.

Russia has spent years expanding the weapons it can use against Ukraine, while Ukraine and its partners are still racing to develop and supply the systems needed to stop them.

The threat Europe helped Russia develop

Some of Ukraine’s Western partners are now confronting a threat Russia has spent years developing over Ukraine: an increasingly sophisticated aerial arsenal that could eventually be turned against them.

European officials and defense analysts are increasingly warning that NATO countries themselves lack enough air and missile defenses to deal with a large Russian attack. 

Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkēvičs recently said Europe is not sufficiently prepared for the kind of drone and aerial warfare Russia has developed in Ukraine, including because of delays in supplying Ukraine with critical air-defense systems.

Those concerns are no longer hypothetical. On 14 September, an Italian NATO fighter jet shot down a Russian-made Geran-2 drone over Lithuania after it entered the country from Belarus. Poland and Romania have also faced Russian drone incursions since 2025.

This creates a problem that is partly of Europe’s own making. Russia has had more than four years to refine its drones, missiles, production lines and tactics while Ukraine’s partners have often been too slow to provide enough weapons to counter those systems as they were developed and deployed at scale.

In that same period, many European countries continued trading with Russia, particularly in fossil fuels, allowing Moscow to keep generating revenue from European markets even as those same governments were providing military aid to Ukraine.

The result is a Russian aerial arsenal that is more capable than the one Ukraine faced in 2022 – while some of the countries now worried about a future Russian threat lack the air defenses needed to protect themselves.

Western governments helped Ukraine fight Russia’s air war, but not at a scale or speed sufficient to prevent Russia from adapting. 

Ukrainian civilians are paying the price for the time Russia was given to expand and refine its aerial warfare. Now, Europe is having to prepare for the possibility that those capabilities could one day be used against it. 

Ukraine launched a massive long-range drone attack on Moscow and Moscow Oblast overnight on 20 September, striking a major Russian oil refinery and a logistics facility, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Ukraine is increasingly targeting Russian oil refineries, logistics hubs, and other strategic infrastructure that helps generate the fuel, revenue, and supplies Russia needs to sustain its war against Ukraine. Striking them allows Kyiv to put pressure on Russia’s war economy and military logistics far beyond the front line.

The Moscow Oil Refinery was among the facilities hit. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin confirmed that an object at the refinery was damaged, while OSINT analysis by ASTRA of eyewitness footage also identified the refinery as one of the attack’s targets.

Zelenskyy said the strikes were carried out using a range of Ukrainian long-range weapons and targeted infrastructure that generates revenue for Russia’s war effort.

The attack took place on the second day of Russia’s three-day State Duma elections, with voting taking place across the country from 19 to 21 September.

Moscow refinery targeted

Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces struck “one of the key enterprises of the Russian oil industry” in the Moscow region, along with a logistics facility.

The Moscow Oil Refinery is operated by Gazprom Neft and is located in Moscow’s Kapotnya district. According to information cited by ASTRA, it can process 11 million tons of oil annually and supplies about 40% of Moscow’s fuel market and 70% of the Moscow region’s gasoline and aviation fuel needs.

Sobyanin said an object on the refinery’s territory was damaged and that there were no casualties there.

Ukraine’s long-range campaign

Zelenskyy said Ukraine used FP-1, RZ-100, MICH-2000, Palianytsia, Vendetta, Liutyi, Bars, Flamingo, Sich, and Pelican systems in the operation.

He thanked the Security Service of Ukraine, Unmanned Systems Forces, Special Operations Forces, military intelligence, and Foreign Intelligence Service for their involvement.

“The billions of dollars” generated by such facilities help sustain Russia’s military machine, Zelenskyy said, framing the strikes as part of Ukraine’s effort to reduce Russia’s ability to finance and wage its war.

He also said Moscow should end its war rather than build layered air defenses using systems taken from other Russian regions.

Russian authorities report casualties

Russian officials claimed the overnight attack caused two deaths and six injuries across Moscow Oblast.

Governor Andrei Vorobyov claimed Russian air defenses and electronic warfare systems intercepted or suppressed 249 drones across 17 municipal districts between 3 and 5 a.m.

Vorobyov also claimed that a drone strike in Sofyino damaged six apartments in a three-story building, killing a 44-year-old woman and injuring five people. Another person was reportedly killed in a private house in the Orekhovo-Zuyevsky district.

In Ramenskoye, Russian authorities reported a fire at a 21-story apartment building and said about 400 people were evacuated.

Sobyanin separately claimed that the attack was intended to disrupt Russia’s State Duma elections, which were taking place on 20 September. Ukrainian authorities did not say that this was the purpose of the strikes.

Russia has begun using large numbers of a missile originally designed as a training target for air-defense crews, despite the weapon being significantly less accurate than the ballistic missiles Russia normally uses for precision strikes. The RM48U is now being launched against targets in Ukraine from S-400 air-defense systems.

The development comes as Russia has sharply increased its use of ballistic missiles against Ukrainian cities in recent months, while Ukraine faces a critical shortage of the interceptors needed to defend against them. Russian forces had more than tripled their monthly ballistic missile launches between April and July, according to Ukrainian military intelligence, as Ukraine's stocks of Patriot interceptors have dwindled.

More than half of the 228 ballistic and hypersonic missiles Russia launched in July and the first eight days of August were RM48Us, according to Ukrainian data reviewed by Reuters in an investigation published on 18 September.

A training missile turned into an inaccurate weapon

The RM48U was originally developed as a training target to help Russian air-defense crews practice intercepting incoming threats. It was not designed as a precision ground-attack missile.

Ukrainian investigators told Reuters that the missile is less powerful and less accurate than the Iskander, Russia's main short-range ballistic missile. They estimate that RM48Us deviate from their intended targets by around 300 meters on average.

The missiles nevertheless follow a high-speed ballistic trajectory when used in combat, making them difficult for Ukrainian air defenses to intercept.

Russia launches the RM48U from S-400 systems, repurposing part of its air-defense arsenal for offensive strikes.

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Ukraine strikes two Russian S-400 launchers in Bryansk. The same systems were used to attack Kyiv overnight.

Russia is using inaccurate missiles at scale

The number of RM48U launches increased sharply during the summer.

Russia launched 158 ballistic and hypersonic missiles against Ukraine in July, according to Ukrainian data reviewed by Reuters. Of those, 87 were RM48Us.

Russia then launched another 36 RM48Us among 70 ballistic and hypersonic missiles fired during the first eight days of August.

July was the highest month for Russian ballistic and hypersonic missile launches since the start of the full-scale invasion, according to the Ukrainian data.

The surge in RM48U use also coincided with a major decline in Russia's use of Iskanders. Russia launched more than 100 Iskanders in June but only 38 in July.

The shift indicates that Russia is using the less capable RM48U to sustain its ballistic missile campaign to continue causing indiscriminate destruction in Ukrainian cities while conserving more capable weapons.

RUSI analyst Sidharth Kaushal told Reuters that this allows Russia to preserve missiles such as Iskanders, as well as other more advanced weapons, for future attacks.

Less accurate does not mean less dangerous

The RM48U's poor accuracy has already had deadly consequences.

Ukrainian investigators concluded that an RM48U struck a railway platform in the Brovary district of Kyiv Oblast on 5 August, killing eight people. 

According to Ukrainian prosecutors cited by Reuters, the missile's warhead also scatters metal fragments over a wide area.

The attack illustrates the danger of Russia using a weapon that was never designed for precision strikes in populated areas. Even when the missile misses its intended target, its large deviation can leave civilians and civilian infrastructure within the affected area.

Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians and says it strikes military and other strategic targets.

Russia plans to produce more

Ukraine's military intelligence told Reuters that Russia plans to produce 480 RM48U missiles in 2026, more than twice the 200 produced last year.

That would give Russia a growing supply of a relatively simple ballistic weapon that can be used alongside its more sophisticated missiles.

The large-scale deployment of the RM48U represents a new development in Russia's ballistic campaign: a missile built to serve as a training target for air-defense crews is now being used as an offensive weapon against Ukraine.

At a time when Ukraine is struggling to replenish the scarce interceptors needed to stop Russia’s ballistic missiles, Moscow is expanding the range of weapons it can use to strike Ukrainian cities, killing more civilians and destroying more civilian infrastructure with each escalation.

Illia Bilyk, a 21-year-old Ukrainian national, admitted five counts of racially and religiously aggravated criminal damage on 17 September over graffiti at five Muslim institutions in east London, the BBC reported.

The BBC and Hope Not Hate linked Bilyk’s attacks to the same Russian network behind arsons targeting properties connected to former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The network operated Direct Action UK, a fake British far-right group that recruited people through Telegram and shared images of the resulting vandalism. Investigations have documented the same recruitment model across Europe for surveillance, sabotage, and other criminal assignments.

The Metropolitan Police said Bilyk sprayed offensive graffiti at three mosques, Noor Ul Islam Primary School, and the Islamic Shariah Council on 23 and 25 January 2025. Images then appeared in a Direct Action UK Telegram group. Russian operators created the group to pose as a British far-right movement, the BBC reported. Bilyk will be sentenced on 19 October.

The handler, known as EL or “El Money,” also recruited through Telegram groups used by Ukrainians seeking work, the BBC found. Ukrainian builder Roman Lavrynovych was paid in cryptocurrency and steered from posters and graffiti to arson.

In May 2025, Lavrynovych set fire to a car and properties connected to Starmer. Nobody was injured. Lavrynovych was jailed for seven years, while Ukrainian-born Romanian national Stanislav Carpiuc was also convicted.

The BBC identified EL as Yevgeny Lyukshin, a 23-year-old Russian diplomat and son of a senior Foreign Ministry official. It cited matching personal details, his presence in the Direct Action UK chat, family connections, and information-warfare training from Rybar, a sanctioned pro-Kremlin Telegram outlet.

However, the BBC could not conclusively establish that Lyukshin was EL, while British police said they had no evidence the attacks were state-sponsored. Lyukshin did not respond. The Russian Embassy denied any connection between Russia or its Foreign Ministry and unlawful activity.

Paid local recruits make Russia-linked attacks look homegrown

The London operation is one of several cases across Europe and other continents.

UK intelligence warned that Moscow increasingly relies on non-state actors, meaning hired civilians and criminals outside its formal services, for espionage, sabotage, assassination, and information operations.

This month, US prosecutors alleged that another Russian network recruited local residents for surveillance, sabotage, and murder-for-hire.

Russia has placed the Russian assets of French retailer Auchan, Swiss food giant Nestlé, and the former Leroy Merlin chain under temporary management, stripping the companies of effective control over their businesses in the country.

Foreign companies have long been urged to leave Russia because their continued operations generate revenue for a state waging war against Ukraine. They also face growing risks of asset seizure, legal and financial liabilities, and reputational damage as the Kremlin increasingly uses foreign-owned businesses as political leverage.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the decree on 17 September, transferring the assets to L.E.V. Management, a little-known Russian company. The decree also covers Russian assets linked to French logistics companies FM Logistic and Bati Logistics.

The measure does not formally change ownership. However, the companies' Russian assets are now controlled by the Kremlin-appointed administrator, and similar temporary-management arrangements have previously preceded forced sales or transfers to Russian buyers.

L.E.V. Management is headed by Andrei Krayushkin, a Russian Interior Ministry major general who previously served as first deputy head of the ministry's migration department.

According to Reuters, the Kremlin justified the move by pointing to the companies' ties to countries Russia considers "unfriendly." Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the countries involved are actively supporting Ukraine and participating in actions against Russia.

Companies warned they could lose their assets

The move comes after years of warnings to Western companies that remained in Russia carried an increasing risk of expropriation.

Denys Svyrydenkov, a representative of the B4Ukraine coalition, told Euromaidan Press that the organization had repeatedly contacted Auchan, Nestlé, and Leroy Merlin, warning them that their Russian assets could be seized.

"We repeatedly warned these companies about the serious and growing risks of continuing to operate in Russia, including the possibility of losing their businesses through nationalisation," Svyrydenkov said.

According to Svyrydenkov, the companies defended their continued presence in Russia by arguing that they provided essential goods and protected the livelihoods of Russian employees.

He rejected both arguments, saying Russia is largely self-sufficient in food and that Western sanctions do not prevent food or humanitarian goods from reaching the country. He also pointed to Russia's severe labor shortage and historically low unemployment, arguing that alternative employment opportunities are widely available.

"By staying, they were effectively running businesses that were no longer truly theirs," Svyrydenkov said.

Auchan and Nestlé remained in Russia

The three companies took different approaches after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Auchan did not leave Russia and continued operating its large retail network. It currently has around 230 stores across 100 Russian cities. The chain's Russian turnover reached 127 billion rubles ($1.5 billion) in the first half of 2026, according to The Moscow Times.

Nestlé also remained, but reduced its Russian operations. The company halted investments, withdrew some brands including KitKat and Nesquik, and said it did not intend to profit from its Russian business. It still operates six production sites in Russia, making products including coffee, confectionery, baby food, and pet food.

Leroy Merlin's owner announced its departure from Russia in 2023. Its Russian legal entity was renamed Le Monlid, while its stores now operate under the Lemana Pro brand.

Nestlé said on 18 September that it was assessing its options and would take "all necessary steps" to protect its rights and ensure business continuity, particularly for its employees.

A warning to companies still operating in Russia

The seizure reflects a broader pattern that has emerged since Russia began using temporary administration to take control of Western-owned businesses.

Companies including Danone, Carlsberg and Finnish energy firm Fortum have previously seen their Russian assets placed under state control. Reuters reported that Russia had seized more than $50 billion in foreign assets by 2025.

Svyrydenkov said the latest move was "more than predictable," arguing that Russia has repeatedly used Western companies' exposure to its domestic market as leverage.

"The Kremlin's seizure of the Russian assets of Auchan, Nestle and the former Leroy Merlin reinforces a reality that has been evident for years: Russia is a hostile and unpredictable environment where foreign companies' assets remain at the mercy of an authoritarian regime," he said.

He warned that companies remaining in Russia face the possibility of sudden expropriation while also continuing to generate economic activity inside a country waging war against Ukraine.

"The latest asset seizures should serve as a warning to all companies still operating in Russia: waiting for the Kremlin to decide the fate of your business is not a risk-management strategy," Svyrydenkov said.

Belarus sent tank and mechanized battalions to training grounds near Poland and Lithuania for four-day drills that Minsk says focus on border security, counter-sabotage operations, and defense against drones and light aircraft, Militarnyi reported on 17 September, citing the Belarusian Defense Ministry.

The exercise includes tank and mechanized infantry battalions, units typically used in conventional ground warfare. Minsk says their tasks include guarding checkpoints and infrastructure and defending against drones. Some drills are taking place near the Suwałki Gap, the only land route connecting Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to the rest of NATO. The corridor lies between Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad region, which is separated from the rest of Russia. Belarus denies any offensive intent.

What Belarus says it is practicing

Belarus’s Western Operational Command is holding the exercises from 15 to 18 September under Chief of the General Staff Pavel Muraveyko, according to the ministry’s schedule outlined by Militarnyi.

The drills are taking place at the Gozha range near Lithuania and at the Brest and Ruzhany ranges near Poland. RBC-Ukraine wrote that mechanized and tank battalions are taking part and that the Brest and Ruzhany sites lie about 15 and 60 kilometers from the Polish border, respectively. Reservists have also been called up to local territorial-defense units, the ministry said.

Militarnyi cited the ministry as saying that one unit guarded a water intake, another directed traffic with police, and a mechanized brigade manned a checkpoint with border guards. The ministry also said truck-mounted fire teams were posted around the clock to defend against drones and practiced firing at targets imitating surveillance drones.

Muraveyko said the army was not considering offensive action and called allegations of preparations for an attack baseless, according to remarks quoted by Militarnyi. Belarus has not disclosed the total number of troops involved, and the exercise’s scale has not been independently verified.

The Moscow Times reported that the ministry also claimed the exercise remained below the notification thresholds set by the 2011 Vienna Document, an international agreement requiring advance notice of large military exercises.

How Russia could exploit the Suwałki Gap

In December 2025, security analyst Taras Zhovtenko warned that Russian propaganda had laid the groundwork to cite an alleged blockade of Kaliningrad to justify a limited incursion and the establishment of temporary checkpoints.

A German war game later modeled Russia staging border incidents before seizing key routes, although Baltic officials said the scenario severely underrated their armed forces.

Separately, French open-source analyst Clément Molin found that defenses along the Polish and Baltic borders with Russia and Belarus remained patchy and shallow, with Lithuania the most exposed. These assessments describe possible vulnerabilities, not evidence that an attack is planned.

ZVS Holding evacuated its ammunition factory in Snina, a town in eastern Slovakia, on 16 September after a fire broke out on the roof of a production building. Work stopped temporarily in the affected section, but nobody was injured, Militarnyi reported.

The Snina plant has an annual capacity of roughly 100,000 shells and plans to triple it, Noviny reported. The blaze briefly disrupted part of a facility under expansion for Europe’s ammunition buildup, although co-owner CSG expects no impact on customer deliveries. Authorities across Europe are investigating suspected Russian sabotage against defense companies, but no evidence links the Snina fire to that campaign.

ZVS Holding is owned equally by the Slovak state and the Czech defense conglomerate Czechoslovak Group (CSG). It makes 155 mm artillery shells, 120 mm tank rounds, and 30/35 mm cannon ammunition.

In December 2025, ZVS signed a seven-year framework agreement with Slovakia’s Defense Ministry to supply EU states. Purchases under the agreement may be financed through the bloc’s SAFE defense-loan program. Its Euro 58 billion ceiling represents the maximum possible value of future orders, not guaranteed purchases.

Firefighters brought the blaze under control during the afternoon. As thick black smoke rose over Snina, town officials advised nearby residents to limit time outdoors, close windows and doors, and switch off ventilation systems drawing in outside air.

Slovak Defense Minister Robert Kaliňák said the fire had not reached the plant’s production equipment and that the affected part of the building was not being used for manufacturing at the time. That section makes metal projectiles, he said.

Kaliňák said welding during the renovation may have sparked the fire, but stressed that investigators had not established the cause.

CSG said the fire started during roof repairs conducted by an external contractor. The company said the damage and cause still had to be assessed, but it did not expect the incident to affect customer deliveries, STVR reported.

Why sabotage fears shadow Europe’s arms plants

The Snina blaze was at least the fourth fire or explosion at a European ammunition facility since 10 August, after two fires struck a Bulgarian company and an explosion hit an Italian factory. No common cause has been established.

Preliminary findings pointed away from outside interference in the first Bulgarian fire. No evidence of sabotage, however, was reported after the Italian blast, and only the second Bulgarian fire remains under investigation for possible sabotage.

Czech authorities are examining a possible Russian trail behind an arson attack on a factory making drones and thermal optics for Ukraine.

Estonia has also probed suspected arson at a military-robot maker after courts documented earlier attacks directed by Russian military intelligence.

Russia launched a large-scale missile and drone attack on Ukraine overnight on 17 September, striking Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Odesa Oblast, among other regions.

The attack damaged civilian infrastructure in Kyiv, including apartment buildings and educational facilities, while water infrastructure was also affected. Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko reported 20 people injured, including at least two children.

Water infrastructure hit as winter concerns grow

The overnight strikes affected Kyiv’s water infrastructure, temporarily disrupting water supply on the left bank and reducing pressure in some areas on the right bank.

Kyivvodokanal said its specialists restored operations and that water supply is now fully functioning across the capital.

The damage comes as Ukrainian authorities have warned that Russia could target critical water infrastructure as winter approaches, potentially adding another major threat to civilians alongside attacks on Ukraine’s electricity and heating systems.

Russia has repeatedly used winter strikes to target Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, particularly electricity and heating, leaving civilians without power, heat, and basic services during freezing weather. 

This winter is expected to bring a heavier campaign: Russia has intensified its attacks since the summer, increasingly targeting food-related infrastructure and supplies in addition to energy facilities.

No missiles intercepted, once again

Russia launched ballistic and cruise missiles alongside 157 Shahed-type attack drones and decoy drones, according to Ukraine’s Air Force.

The ballistic missiles included Iskander-M, S-400 and North Korean KN-23 missiles launched from Russia’s Bryansk and Voronezh oblasts. Russia also launched four Kalibr cruise missiles and Oniks missiles.

Ukraine’s air defenses reported destroying or suppressing 131 aerial targets, but none of the ballistic weapons were among those intercepted. The 131 targets consisted of seven Bandеrol/Dan-T missiles and 124 Shahed, Gerbera, and other drones.

Once again, Ukraine intercepted none of the Russian ballistic missiles, underscoring the country’s shortage of high-end air-defense interceptors needed to defend against Russia’s increasing ballistic missile attacks.

However, Ukraine’s General Staff reported strikes on two of the S-400 systems that Russia uses to launch ballistic missiles from Bryansk Oblast. 

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Ukraine strikes two Russian S-400 launchers in Bryansk. The same systems were used to attack Kyiv overnight.

Kyiv hit across several districts

Kyiv police reported damage in the Darnytskyi, Dniprovskyi, and Solomianskyi districts.

Apartment buildings, educational facilities, a municipal building, vehicles, and railway tracks were damaged. Most of the 16 injured people were residents of a damaged 16-story apartment building in Dniprovskyi district.

The victims included a 10-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy.

Kyiv’s military administration also reported a strike on a warehouse building in Podilskyi district.

The Air Force said Russian missiles and attack drones hit 36 locations across Ukraine, while debris from intercepted targets fell at five locations.

Russia also hits Odesa and Zaporizhzhia

Russia’s overnight attack on Odesa Oblast continued for much of the night, injuring seven people, including children aged four and 13, Odesa Oblast Governor Oleh Kiper reported.

One Russian drone struck a high-rise apartment building in Odesa, destroying 10 apartments on the 14th–16th floors and damaging 11 cars. Three people were injured there, including the four-year-old child. 

Other strikes damaged at least five residential buildings, a kindergarten, a dormitory, a restaurant’s outdoor area, warehouses, garages, and cars. An elderly woman and the 13-year-old child were among four other people injured.

Zaporizhzhia was also hit by Russian missiles, with three people injured – a woman and two men. The missiles struck industrial facilities, partially damaging buildings and causing a fire at one site.

Later in the day, Russia attacked the village of Storchove in Zaporizhzhia Oblast with guided aerial bombs. One bomb hit a private house and outbuildings, killing a 51-year-old woman and injuring a 70-year-old man. The strike destroyed property the family had accumulated over decades, according to the Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Administration.

Russia also struck a passenger bus in Zaporizhzhia with an FPV drone near a public transport stop. Five people were injured. A regional official said Russia had “once again chosen not a military target, but people who were simply traveling about their business.”

China and Russia employing most of North Korean labourers who send their remittances back to North Korea

Russia's attempt to encircle the fortified cities of Donetsk Oblast has lost its northern pincer, the commander of Ukraine's Third Army Corps, Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, said in a television interview reported by Ukrinform. He described where the two Russian pincers were meant to meet, far behind the front line, and what Moscow must do now that one of them is gone. He also named what the Ukrainian operation there is meant to achieve, after declining to do so when he revealed it two days earlier.

Two pincers that were to meet in another oblast

Biletskyi set out the Russian design "to envelop the so-called fortress cities from the north and from the south"—the four cities, Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, and Kostiantynivka, that have been the backbone of Ukraine's defense in the oblast since 2022..

"From the south it was an envelopment through Dobropillia, and from the north through this salient, which is now being cut off, it went to the city of Sviatohirsk and further, to the settlement of Barvinkove, where these two claws of the Russian army, the Dobropillia one from the south and the Sviatohirsk one from the north, were supposed to close," the commander said.

Barvinkove sits in Kharkiv Oblast, west of the fortified belt. The distance from there to the current front line shows how far behind Ukrainian lines the ring was meant to close.

Neither pincer got near it. Ukrainian forces stopped the Russian infiltration near Dobropillia last year, Biletskyi said, and the situation there remains difficult but under control. Russian assault groups have kept pushing toward the town in recent weeks, though Ukrainian troops have mined or destroyed the main approaches.

On the northern pincer he was blunt: 

"The northern claw has effectively been routed and destroyed," he said.

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Now the cities have to be stormed

Holding that result now depends on Russian supply, Biletskyi said. The critical task is "paralyzing logistics, paralyzing the rear areas, not letting the Russians restore this offensive."

He then set out what the failure costs Moscow.

"Then they will have to storm the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk and the Druzhkivka-Kostiantynivka agglomerations head-on," he said. "And storming these cities head-on is a far more painful and costly business for them than trying to envelop them and effectively take them without a fight."

Russia has taken none of them: it has been fighting for Kostiantynivka since October 2025 and has not reached the other three. Ukraine reinforced the sector last month, placing two newly formed groupings under Azov commanders. One of them has since warned that Russia may mobilize up to 600,000 troops for its next offensive.

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Ukraine’s Vivaldi counteroffensive disrupts Russia’s plan to encircle Donetsk Fortress Belt – ISW

What Vivaldi is actually for

Two days after the operation was made public without a stated objective, Biletskyi gave one, and it is defensive.

"Our main strategic task for the Armed Forces of Ukraine is defense on the Donetsk and Luhansk axes, the defense of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts," he said.

Ukrainian forces are not trying to take as much ground as they can, he added. 

"We are not fighting there just for tens or hundreds, and at one time thousands, of kilometers. We are fighting first of all for favorable defensive lines."

Vivaldi is meant to put the troops on exactly those lines. That sets a different yardstick than captured settlements: the operation will be judged on the ground Ukraine ends up holding, not on how much of it there is.

The US House of Representatives has approved sweeping new sanctions on Russia and the countries and companies that help finance its war, sending the measure to the president to sign into law, The Hill reported. The vote breaks a nearly two-year stretch in which Congress passed no major measure to back Ukraine. It also hands Washington fresh power to choke the oil money that keeps Moscow's war running.

For most of the full-scale war, US backing for Kyiv came through emergency spending battles, not laws built to cut off Moscow's income. Washington's long wager that negotiations would end the fighting kept its sharpest economic tools on the shelf. That bet has now shifted toward squeezing the customers who keep the Kremlin's oil trade alive.

The vote and what comes next

In the House, 58 Democrats broke from their party's leaders on 16 September to join most Republicans. The bill passed 262-159, with 203 Republicans and one independent also voting yes, and seven Republicans joining 152 Democrats against.

Whether the full weight of the bill lands is now Trump's call. A White House official said he planned to sign it, and the White House had pushed House Republican leaders to move it. The bill directs him to impose the tariffs and mandates sanctions on Putin, senior officials, and Russian banks, though he can waive them by certifying that it serves US national interests, and how far he goes stays uncertain.

His posture on Russia keeps shifting. Days before the vote, he urged Kyiv to stop striking Russian oil refineries. He said the strikes were pushing diesel prices up worldwide. Those same strikes drain the war economy this bill sets out to squeeze.

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US sanctions relief for Russian oil shipments appears to end with no renewal issued

What the sanctions do

The bill directs Washington to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the five biggest buyers of Russian crude, the five biggest buyers of its gas, and the five countries doing most to help Moscow evade oil sanctions—a target aimed squarely at China and India. Countries whose Russian gas imports are less than 15% of everything Russia exports in gas, and that take significant steps to cut them, would be exempt from the gas-based tariff. There is no such carve-out for crude.

It also blacklists Russian officials, banks, and the aging tankers of Russia's shadow fleet, the vessels that move sanctioned crude around Western restrictions. The measure also extends US sanctions on Iran's energy and weapons sectors, a piece Trump asked for. That is why the bill's full name is the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act.

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US sanctions 13 Iran-Belarus-China entities supplying Iran’s IRGC. That’s three of four “Axis of Upheaval” states

Why a stalled bill finally moved

For more than a year, the package sat frozen. It had a veto-proof majority of co-sponsors, but the White House wanted room to negotiate with Moscow, and the bill never reached a vote. Its author, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, spent more than a year negotiating the measure before he died in July. Lawmakers in both parties revived and fast-tracked it in his name, and Trump dropped his resistance and signaled he would sign.

Not everyone wanted it. Most House Democrats voted against, saying the bill hands the president broad new tariff powers and lets him waive away the sanctions it claims to impose. Nearly a dozen Republicans privately pressed leaders to strip the new powers out, alarmed they could push up prices at home before the midterm elections. Their leaders moved it through anyway. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had lobbied for weeks, even watching an early Senate vote from the chamber.

"To Vladimir Putin—we have your number," said Senator Richard Blumenthal, who co-wrote the bill, after the vote. "And to Ukraine—you are not alone."

Kyiv's response

Ukraine welcomed the vote within hours. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha thanked the House for its bipartisan leadership and said Ukraine honors Graham's legacy. Parliament speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk thanked both chambers of Congress and House Speaker Mike Johnson. He singled out Blumenthal for carrying the bill through after Graham's death. What matters for Ukraine, Stefanchuk said, is that pressure on Russia's war funding is turning into concrete decisions.

President Zelenskyy called the timing symbolic: the House voted during another Russian missile and drone attack on Ukraine. The bill and other strong sanctions steps are "an extremely powerful instrument capable of stopping this terrorist war," he said.

A US-based recruit was promised up to $1,500 to surveil a prominent Russian dissident before being offered $40,000 to “eliminate” or “disappear” the target, the US Justice Department (DOJ) said on 15 September.

The charges connect that alleged plot to what prosecutors describe as a wider Russian assassination network operating since at least 2024 against dissidents, defectors, and countries perceived as supporting Ukraine.

A federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted five alleged members of what prosecutors call the “RIS Network”:

• Yuri Khrameev, 63: A Russian national and former colonel in the Russian intelligence services who allegedly recruited people to kill Russian dissidents.
• Kirill Khrameev, 27: Yuri Khrameev’s son and an officer in the FSB, Russia’s principal security service and a successor to the Soviet KGB.
• Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, 35: A Cuban national living in Russia who allegedly coordinated attacks and arranged travel for operatives.
• Yaidel Delgado Suarez, 35: A Cuban national accused of recruiting people in the US for surveillance and murder.
• Angel Eduardo Castro, 22: A Venezuelan national accused of helping Suarez recruit US residents to spy on and kill a Russian dissident.

Suarez sent the US resident two locations associated with the dissident, according to the indictment. After the resident delivered photographs and videos, prosecutors say, Suarez and Castro made the $40,000 offer. When the resident declined to carry out the killing, they allegedly asked whether he knew “someone [who] can do the work.”

In 2025, the indictment alleges, Kirill Khrameev recruited a US citizen to photograph a target in Lithuania for a promised $200. Yuri Khrameev then offered approximately $25,000 to kill the man. When the recruit refused, Khrameev allegedly proposed a “simpler job”: burning a warehouse or attacking an electrical substation. He said the purpose was to target countries helping Ukraine, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors also allege that Durruthy coordinated travel and logistics for attacks in Prague, Czechia, in June 2024 and in Lithuania that September. The Justice Department did not specify what either attack involved.

All five defendants are charged with conspiracy to finance terrorism, carrying up to 20 years in prison. Yuri Khrameev, Suarez, and Castro also face a murder-for-hire conspiracy charge carrying up to 10 years.

All five remain at large. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Moscow saw no need to comment without “credible evidence,” Reuters reported. An indictment is an allegation, and the defendants are presumed innocent.

From military espionage to alleged murder plots

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, its covert campaign against Ukraine’s Western allies has combined intelligence gathering with escalating sabotage. CSIS found that suspected Russian attacks in Europe nearly tripled from 2023 to 2024, often using locally recruited agents against infrastructure and industries supporting Ukraine.

In August 2025, US prosecutors charged active-duty soldier Taylor Adam Lee with trying to transmit Abrams tank information and deliver hardware to someone he believed represented the Russian government, allegedly in exchange for Russian citizenship. That case involved an American insider allegedly offering military secrets, not a proven Russian recruitment operation.

After the Russian convoy docked in Tobruk, a column including armored personnel carriers, mine-resistant vehicles, and at least three Tornado-U armored trucks was seen heading west from the port in imagery published by the open-source intelligence project Russia Maritime Watch, as reported by Militarnyi.

The armor delivery comes as Russian forces have lost more than 10,000 armored and protected vehicles in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion, Britain’s defense chief said. Africa Defense Forum reported that Moscow is funding work at six Libyan air bases, some of which support the movement of weapons and personnel toward Sudan and the Sahel. Russia’s Africa Corps already supports military governments in the Sahel, including Mali’s, while a Russian-operated base in Libya has supplied Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

The cargo ships Anastasiia and Yuriy Arshenevskiy carried the shipment, while the Aleksandr Shabalin, a Russian Navy landing ship capable of transporting vehicles and troops, provided an armed escort, according to Militarnyi.

All three vessels crossed the Mediterranean without broadcasting Automatic Identification System data, the signal normally used to reveal a ship’s position.

This was at least the second Russian military shipment to reach Tobruk under naval escort this year. Both cargo ships are under sanctions and have previously carried military cargo. Satellite imagery showed equipment being loaded onto them in August at Baltiysk, a naval base in Russia’s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, Militarnyi reported.

In January 2026, the sanctioned Mys Zhelaniya delivered military cargo to Tobruk under escort by a large Russian anti-submarine warship.

Tobruk lies in eastern Libya, which is controlled by forces loyal to commander Khalifa Haftar. The six bases under development host Russian personnel, air defenses, combat aircraft, and drones.

Maaten al-Sarra, one of the six bases, lies near Libya’s borders with Chad and Sudan and supports Russian operations extending toward Sudan and the Sahel, the belt of countries immediately south of the Sahara.

Russian and Libyan authorities have not said who will receive the latest cargo, so there is no confirmation that the vehicles are intended for the Africa Corps, the Russian Defense Ministry-run force that took over much of Wagner’s former role in Africa.

Africa Defense Forum reported that Moscow pivoted toward Libya after the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, having previously used Syria as a transit hub. Moving the vehicles under naval escort as Russian forces absorb continuing battlefield losses in Ukraine underscores the importance Moscow appears to place on keeping its African corridor supplied.

How Russia expands its reach across Africa

Libya is one node in Russia’s wider African system. Through the Africa Corps, Moscow supports autocracy-minded military governments and armed groups throughout the continent in exchange for political influence and access to natural resources. Human rights groups and local residents have accused Russian personnel and their partners of killings and other abuses against civilians, including in Mali.

Ukraine’s military intelligence says Kremlin-backed Russian Houses seek to cultivate young Africans with pro-Moscow views. Moscow also invests in education programs and cultural events across the continent to spread a positive image of Russia, its politics, and its culture.

Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said in August that nearly 500 Africans recruited into Russia’s military had died. Ukrainian drone specialists are also helping forces fighting Russian troops in Mali and operating in Sudan and Libya, CNN reported.

A large-scale police operation is underway after a drone of unknown origin crashed 1 kilometer from a Bundeswehr base, German media outlet Bild reported on 15 September.

Drones have repeatedly flown over German military bases, and German prosecutors are already treating one August find near Ukraine-bound cargo as attempted sabotage. Germany's military counterintelligence has tied repeated sabotage on German soil to Russia, with high probability. Neither the owner nor the origin of this drone is known. Russia has denied involvement in earlier incidents, some of which Germany has officially attributed to it.

Discovery near airbase triggers large-scale search

Parts of the drone were found east of Lake Steinhude, the media outlet said. The crash site is one kilometer from the Bundeswehr's Wunstorf air base in Lower Saxony, the German military confirmed to the outlet. The drone crashed in an open, uninhabited area, the state criminal police office said. After the debris was discovered, authorities launched a large-scale search operation in the area to find additional parts of the UAV, according to Bild.

Investigators do not yet know who owns the drone

The search continues, and the state criminal police office says there are so far no indications of a danger to the public. Investigators learned about the discovery on Monday and want to analyze any other drone parts they find to determine its origin, the media outlet reported. Only then could more be said about the circumstances of the crash, it added.

Drones have been spotted over Bundeswehr bases many times

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the number of reports of drone sightings has "increased significantly" and become "more consistent," a spokesperson for the Bundeswehr Operations Command told RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND) in August.

"Overall, several hundred suspected drone overflights have been reported in the area of the German Armed Forces in recent years," the command spokesperson told RND.

What came before this crash

Germany is the busiest front in Russia's covert campaign in Europe. A Semtex-laden drone turned up beside a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig/Halle airport in August, and investigators this month named a Russian intelligence operative and a Belarusian petty criminal. Berlin blamed Moscow and ordered Russia's Bonn consulate closed.

Two Bulgarians were arrested over a September arson at a Munich building site between two defense-tech headquarters, a day after two attempts to sabotage the power grid that Germany has not attributed. Germany suspects a planned assassination of a Bavarian drone maker's boss, watched by agents hired for single jobs.

Explore further

The throwaway agents Moscow sent after a Bavarian drone boss arming Ukraine—and how Germany stopped them

Not every strand leads to Moscow. German military counterintelligence this week attributed part of the drone activity over Bundeswehr sites to Chinese intelligence.

Elsewhere the tempo holds: Polish prosecutors have opened more than a hundred espionage cases in 20 months, and in the Netherlands a former commander of US Army forces in Europe said Russian saboteurs attacked the rail network and tried to kill him, which Dutch Railways said they knew nothing about.

Ce texte est le deuxième d’une série consacrée aux transformations de la lecture. Après avoir discuté de l’hypothèse d’une société « postlittéraire », à partir de l’article de Rose Horowitch, The End of Reading Is Here, je m’intéresse ici à l’autre versant de la question : qu’est-ce qui fait qu’une société demeure une société de lecteurs et de lectrices?

Chaque 12 août, depuis maintenant plus d’une décennie, l’initiative J’achète un livre québécois! invite les Québécoises et les Québécois à entrer dans une librairie et à repartir avec un livre d’ici. Si on en a les moyens, le geste est simple : choisir un livre, l’acheter, peut-être le lire, le donner ou en parler. Et pourtant, cette journée dit quelque chose d’important sur la lecture : une culture du livre ne se maintient pas toute seule. Elle se construit, se transmet et s’entretient.

Cette réflexion s’est aussi nourrie des conversations que j’ai eues autour du 12 août, d’abord avec Alexandre Sirois dans La Presse, puis à ICI Côte-Nord, avec Catherine Paquette et mon collègue Mathieu Dauphinais, de la Bibliothèque de Sept-Îles. Plutôt que de rester prisonniers et prisonnières de la question spectaculaire de « la fin de la lecture », je voudrais donc déplacer le regard vers ce qui permet à la lecture de continuer à occuper une place dans nos vies : si nous voulons demeurer une société de lecteurs et de lectrices, quelles conditions devons-nous collectivement préserver?

Car on ne devient pas lecteur ou lectrice par la seule force de sa volonté. On le devient parce que des livres se trouvent à portée de main. Parce que quelqu’un nous en a lu lorsque nous étions enfants. Parce que nous avons parfois grandi dans une famille où les livres étaient présents, où lire allait de soi, où certaines habitudes, dispositions et familiarités avec la culture nous ont été transmises. La lecture est aussi affaire d’héritage culturel, au sens où l’entendaient Pierre Bourdieu et Jean-Claude Passeron — et cet héritage est inégalement distribué.

Mais ce qui n’est pas hérité peut aussi se construire ailleurs. Parce qu’une personne enseignante nous a fait découvrir un livre qui nous parlait. Parce qu’une bibliothécaire a su nous conseiller. Parce qu’une librairie existe dans notre quartier ou qu’une bibliothèque scolaire ou publique nous permet d’emprunter gratuitement. Parce que nous avons vu d’autres personnes lire, entendu parler de livres, reçu des recommandations, participé à une heure du conte ou à un club de lecture.

C’est là que les institutions et les communautés prennent toute leur importance : elles peuvent élargir, prolonger, parfois même compenser ce qui n’a pas été transmis dans la famille. Au contact de ces personnes, de ces lieux et de ces expériences se construisent progressivement les capacités, les habitudes, l’attention, le désir et la motivation nécessaires pour entrer dans un texte et y demeurer. Autrement dit, la lecture est une pratique sociale avant d’être seulement une compétence individuelle.

L’infrastructure de la lecture

On parle beaucoup de l’accès aux livres. Avec raison. Mais avoir des livres disponibles ne suffit pas à faire des lecteurs et des lectrices. Entre la présence d’un livre sur une tablette et son appropriation par une personne existe tout un monde de médiations : familles, écoles, bibliothèques, librairies, maisons d’édition, médias, organismes communautaires, auteurs et autrices, enseignants et enseignantes, bibliothécaires, événements littéraires, politiques culturelles et éducatives. C’est cette infrastructure de la lecture qui m’intéresse.

Le mot infrastructure peut sembler étrange lorsqu’il est question de lecture. Nous l’associons plus spontanément aux routes, aux réseaux électriques ou aux télécommunications. Mais les pratiques culturelles reposent elles aussi sur des infrastructures, certaines matérielles, d’autres sociales et institutionnelles. Elles sont souvent peu visibles, comme nous l’a enseigné Susan Leigh Star, précisément parce que, lorsqu’elles fonctionnent bien, nous finissons par les tenir pour acquises.

Une société de lecteurs et de lectrices repose ainsi sur une véritable écologie de la lecture : des livres, certes, mais également des lieux où les rencontrer, des personnes qui les font circuler, des institutions qui en garantissent l’accès, des communautés dans lesquelles on peut en parler et, chose peut-être de plus en plus précieuse, du temps et de l’attention pour les lire.

Cette manière d’envisager la lecture rejoint aussi les travaux que nous avons menés autour de la littératie communautaire. Celle-ci invite précisément à ne pas considérer la littératie comme une compétence qui se développerait uniquement dans l’individu ou dans l’école, mais à regarder l’ensemble des milieux, des relations, des acteurs et actrices qui contribuent à la rendre possible. Les pratiques de littératie sont situées : elles prennent forme dans des communautés, des institutions et des contextes sociaux particuliers, traversés par la diversité et par des conditions d’accès inégales.

Cette perspective permet alors et surtout de déplacer le regard de la responsabilité individuelle vers une responsabilité partagée. Familles, écoles, bibliothèques, organismes communautaires, librairies, institutions culturelles et politiques publiques ne jouent évidemment pas le même rôle, mais leurs actions sont interdépendantes et peuvent se renforcer mutuellement. Soutenir la lecture revient alors moins à demander aux individus de lire davantage qu’à construire intentionnellement et collectivement les conditions dans lesquelles lire devient possible, significatif et désirable.

Les bibliothèques : créer les conditions de la rencontre

Les bibliothèques constituent un bon observatoire de cette écologie. Selon les données de l’Enquête annuelle sur les bibliothèques publiques, qui couvre les bibliothèques publiques autonomes, les bibliothèques affiliées aux Réseaux BIBLIO (CRSBP) ainsi que BAnQ, compilées par l’Institut de la statistique du Québec, les bibliothèques publiques québécoises ont enregistré en 2023 environ 52 millions de prêts de documents, dont 42 millions de livres imprimés. Le volume des prêts avait ainsi retrouvé 96 % de sa moyenne des cinq années précédant la pandémie. La même année, elles ont enregistré environ 24 millions d’entrées, soit une hausse de 21 % par rapport à 2022.

Mais un autre chiffre retient particulièrement mon attention : les activités proposées par les bibliothèques ont attiré 1,5 million de participations, soit 33 % de plus qu’en 2022. La reprise de la participation aux activités a donc été plus rapide que celle des entrées physiques — même si, dans les deux cas, les niveaux demeuraient encore inférieurs à ceux d’avant la pandémie.

Il ne faudrait pas faire dire à ces chiffres davantage qu’ils ne permettent d’établir. Ils ne prouvent pas que les Québécois et les Québécoises fréquentent désormais les bibliothèques davantage pour leurs activités que pour leurs collections. Ils nous rappellent cependant quelque chose que l’on ne peut plus ignorer : une bibliothèque ne se contente pas de mettre des livres à disposition.

Heures du conte, clubs de lecture, rencontres avec des auteurs et autrices, ateliers, conférences et autres formes de médiation littéraire sont autant d’occasions de faire découvrir des textes, d’en parler et de créer des relations entre des personnes, des œuvres et des idées. Et ces initiatives débordent souvent les murs de la bibliothèque : elles s’inscrivent dans des réseaux de littératie communautaire où bibliothèques publiques et scolaires, écoles, organismes communautaires et autres acteurs du milieu peuvent conjuguer leurs interventions dans le contexte québécois.

L’accès et la médiation sont deux choses différentes, mais complémentaires. Nous avons beaucoup travaillé, à juste titre, à démocratiser l’accès aux livres et à l’information. Le défi de notre temps pourrait être aussi de préserver — et peut-être de renforcer — les conditions sociales de leur appropriation.

Quand l’infrastructure se fragilise

Cette infrastructure n’a cependant rien d’acquis. Elle peut se fragiliser par petites ruptures, lorsque disparaissent certains des lieux, des ressources ou des médiations qui permettent aux livres de circuler et d’être lus. On vient par exemple d’annoncer la fin d’ateliers de lecture en milieu carcéral. Dans le réseau de l’éducation, les récentes décisions budgétaires en donnent une autre illustration : quelque 38 millions de dollars auparavant consacrés à l’achat de livres pourront désormais être utilisés à d’autres fins.

Les effets se font sentir au-delà des murs de l’école. Lors du récent Congrès mondial d’IBBY à Ottawa, j’ai entendu des maisons d’édition jeunesse québécoises témoigner directement des répercussions de ces mesures sur leurs ventes. J’y étais moi-même pour présenter une étude sur les contestations et la censure des livres jeunesse en matière de sexualité ainsi que de diversité sexuelle et de genre au Canada, ce qui rappelle une autre manière dont cette infrastructure peut être compromise : non seulement lorsque les ressources diminuent, mais lorsque certains livres sont retirés, déplacés, restreints ou rendus plus difficiles d’accès.

On pourrait encore allonger la liste. Un bilan critique récent fait ainsi état d’une « érosion silencieuse » de la mission de BAnQ. Il faudrait aussi parler du financement longtemps jugé insuffisant dans le milieu des CRSBP (Réseaux BIBLIO), malgré les bonifications récentes, alors que ceux-ci jouent un rôle déterminant dans l’accès aux bibliothèques sur une grande partie du territoire québécois. Ces institutions ont ceci de particulier qu’elles relèvent, à des degrés divers, d’une responsabilité nationale plutôt que strictement municipale — comme les bibliothèques scolaires — et qu’elles semblent pourtant demeurer dans l’angle mort des politiques publiques. À filer la métaphore de l’infrastructure, les nids-de-poule ne manquent pas sur la route historique de la littératie au Québec.

Ces phénomènes sont évidemment différents, mais ils invitent à regarder l’ensemble du réseau du livre et de la lecture, plutôt qu’une simple chaîne linéaire. Lorsqu’un de ses nœuds s’affaiblit, ce sont les possibilités de rencontre entre une diversité d’œuvres et leurs publics, jeunes ou moins jeunes, qui se réduisent. Le paradoxe est alors frappant. D’un côté, nous nous inquiétons du recul de la lecture chez les jeunes et cherchons des moyens de leur donner le goût des livres. De l’autre, nous fragilisons parfois les conditions mêmes qui leur permettent de les rencontrer.

Lorsque nous constatons que certains jeunes lisent moins, la question ne peut donc pas être uniquement : Pourquoi ne lisent-ils pas davantage? Elle doit également être, encore une fois : quelles conditions leur donnons-nous pour devenir lecteurs et lectrices?

Le 12 août : rendre visible une écologie du livre et de la lecture

C’est ce qui donne au 12 août une portée qui dépasse l’achat individuel d’un livre. J’achète un livre québécois! met en lumière, pendant une journée, tout un réseau : des auteurs et autrices écrivent, des maisons d’édition publient, des librairies font circuler les œuvres, des bibliothèques et des écoles les rendent accessibles, des médiateurs et médiatrices les font découvrir, des lecteurs et lectrices les lisent, les recommandent et les transmettent.

Acheter un livre québécois ne « sauvera » évidemment ni la lecture ni « la civilisation » — ce n’est d’ailleurs pas l’ambition de l’initiative. Mais l’événement accomplit quelque chose de moins sensationnel mais peut-être de plus intéressant : il rend le livre visible et socialement désirable.

Car les pratiques culturelles ne se développent pas sur le seul mode de l’injonction : il faut lire davantage. Elles se nourrissent de désir, de curiosité, de rencontres et d’une communauté qui leur accorde de la valeur. À sa manière, le 12 août contribue à entretenir une culture dans laquelle les livres et la lecture comptent.

Et les jeunes?

La question devient particulièrement pressante lorsqu’on observe le recul de certaines pratiques de lecture chez les jeunes. Il est tentant d’en chercher la cause du côté des écrans, de TikTok, des téléphones ou du manque d’attention. L’intelligence artificielle ajoute toutefois une dimension nouvelle. La technologie peut désormais non seulement concurrencer la lecture, mais accomplir une partie de son travail à notre place.

Les outils d’intelligence artificielle générative peuvent résumer un livre, expliquer un texte difficile, répondre à des questions sur son contenu et même produire une analyse qui donne toutes les apparences de la compréhension. Ils peuvent certes soutenir l’apprentissage, mais ils rendent aussi possible quelque chose d’assez radical : obtenir certains des produits de la lecture sans avoir accompli soi-même le travail de lecture.

C’est pourquoi la lecture profonde (Deep Reading) me paraît devenir, paradoxalement, plus importante à l’ère de l’IA — cette forme de lecture attentive, réflexive et exigeante à laquelle se sont notamment intéressées Maryanne Wolf et Naomi Baron, et sur laquelle je reviendrai dans un prochain billet. Ce qui est en jeu n’est pas tant la survie du livre comme objet que l’expérience de la lecture elle-même : entrer dans un texte complexe, y consacrer du temps et de l’attention, l’interpréter, le confronter à d’autres idées et construire son propre jugement.

L’enjeu pour les bibliothèques comme pour les différentes instances des réseaux de littératie, sera donc moins d’empêcher l’usage de ces outils que de faire en sorte qu’ils soutiennent l’apprentissage et la pensée plutôt qu’ils ne nous dispensent de penser.

Entretenir une culture de la lecture

C’est peut-être là que le diagnostic d’une société « postlittéraire » devient utile, à condition de ne pas en faire une prophétie. La lecture n’est peut-être pas en train de disparaître. Elle devient une pratique qu’il faut activement soutenir. Non pas en idéalisant un âge d’or où tout le monde aurait lu de longs romans — il n’a probablement jamais existé — ni en opposant systématiquement le livre aux écrans. Mais en nous demandant quelles expériences de lecture nous jugeons suffisamment précieuses pour vouloir les transmettre et les préserver.

Cela suppose bien sûr des livres, des lieux et des personnes qui les font circuler. Mais aussi quelque chose de plus difficile à protéger : du temps et des espaces pour lire, réfléchir et discuter sans être constamment sollicités ailleurs. Acheter un livre québécois le 12 août est un geste culturel. Faire en sorte que nous ayons encore le désir, le temps et la capacité de le lire est un projet social.

Ce billet reprend le mot d’ouverture prononcé dans le cadre du marathon d’écriture « Wikipédia – 25 ans, fière et engagée », organisé à l’Université du Québec à Montréal le 26 mars, à l’occasion du Printemps de la recherche et de la création en collaboration avec Wikimédia Canada et l’Institut de recherches et d’études féministes. Cet événement, porté aussi par le collectif Les sans pagEs – Montréal, dans lequel je suis impliquée, visait à soutenir la création et l’amélioration d’articles consacrés à des femmes chercheuses, militantes, ainsi qu’à des personnes issues de communautés encore trop peu visibles en ligne.

-> À noter que le support de présentation utilisé lors de cette intervention est disponible à la fin du billet.

Je suis très heureuse d’être avec vous aujourd’hui pour ouvrir ce marathon d’écriture Wikipédia. Je me présente brièvement : je suis Marie D. Martel, professeure à l’EBSI, à l’Université de Montréal, et impliquée dans le groupe Les sans pagEs Montréal, un collectif engagé dans l’amélioration de la représentation des personnes s’identifiant comme femmes et marginalisées sur Wikipédia. Merci pour cette invitation, merci à Simon Côté-Lapointe, bibliothécaire à l’UQAM, pour la qualité de son engagement et de l’organisation.

Fondée en 2001, Wikipédia célèbre ses 25 ans cette année. En un quart de siècle, elle est devenue une infrastructure majeure du savoir, avec plus de 60 millions d’articles, dont plus de 2,5 millions en français, dans plus de 300 langues, et des centaines de millions de consultations chaque mois. Mais il faut insister sur un point fondamental : Wikipédia ne fait pas que diffuser le savoir, elle contribue aussi à définir ce qui est visible, reconnu et documenté. Une personne sans page Wikipédia est beaucoup moins visible, moins citée, moins reconnue ; à l’inverse, le simple fait d’y être présent contribue à sa reconnaissance dans l’espace public.

Lorsque l’on regarde les données, le constat est clair. Environ 19 % des biographies dans les projets Wikimédia concernent les personnes identifiées comme femmes, et à peine plus de 20 % sur Wikipédia en français. Les autres identités de genre restent presque invisibles, autour de 0,15 %. Du côté de Wikidata, la base de données qui structure ces contenus, on observe également des écarts : environ 24% de femmes pour le Canada, contre 33 % à l’échelle globale. Ce sont des chiffres qui ne traduisent pas seulement un manque : ils révèlent un déséquilibre structurel dans la manière dont le savoir est produit et rendu visible.

Ce déséquilibre s’explique en grande partie par la composition de la communauté contributrice. Les enquêtes de la Wikimedia Foundation montrent que celle-ci reste encore largement masculine, historiquement entre 80 et 90 % de personnes identifiées comme hommes y contribuent. Cela a des effets directs : moins d’articles sur les personnes identifiées comme femmes, certains sujets moins développés, et plus largement, il y a une reproduction des hiérarchies existantes dans les sources. 

Quand on dit qu’il y a une « reproduction des hiérarchies existantes dans les sources », on veut dire que Wikipédia dépend fortement de sources déjà reconnues — comme les articles dans les médias, les articles et les ouvrages académiques ou les institutions. Or, ces sources ne sont pas neutres. Historiquement, elles ont davantage documenté : les hommes, les figures institutionnelles, les trajectoires dominantes Et beaucoup moins : les femmes, les personnes autochtones, les actrices communautaires ou certaines figures locales.

Or,  Wikipédia s’appuie sur ces sources pour l’écritute des articles… et donc, ce faisant, elle reproduit les mêmes déséquilibres. Autrement dit, Wikipédia ne fait pas que refléter le monde, elle contribue aussi à perpétuer et structurer certaines inégalités dans la production et la circulation du savoir.

Dans le cas du Québec, la situation se complexifie encore. Les contributeurs de Wikipédia en français sont majoritairement européens, et notamment français. La présence canadienne y est relativement faible : on l’estime autour de 7 %, avec environ 300 personnes contributives actives canadiennes contre près de 4000 françaises. Mais on ne dispose pas de données précises permettant d’identifier la part de la contribution québécoise, ni celle des contributrices. 

Cette absence de données est en soi révélatrice : elle rend difficile la mesure des inégalités tout en contribuant à invisibiliser des dynamiques territoriales, sociales et culturelles bien réelles. 

À cela s’ajoute une reconnaissance moindre de certaines sources québécoises dans les protocoles d’évaluation, notamment lorsque le statut de médias comme Le Devoir ou La Presse comme sources nationales est questionné. Alors, les effets sont cumulatifs : invisibilisation des personnes identifiées comme femmes, invisibilisation des figures québécoises, et sous-documentation de nombreuses trajectoires locales. Nous sommes donc face, à tout le moins, à un double biais, à la fois de genre et géographique.

C’est dans ce contexte que s’inscrit le projet Les sans pagEs qui vise à combler le fossé des genres sur Wikipédia, notamment à travers des éditathons comme celui d’aujourd’hui, et aussi par la formation et l’accompagnement à l’écriture. Mais il ne s’agit pas seulement de produire des articles : il s’agit aussi de créer des communautés, de rendre la contribution plus accessible et de valoriser d’autres trajectoires et d’autres savoirs. 

Il existe plusieurs autres initiatives : Art + féminisme, WikiGap, le projet Women in Red, le marathon d’aujourd’hui. Ce sont des initiatives très fortes, mais elles ont leurs limites : elles reposent largement sur le bénévolat, elles restent ponctuelles et elles ne transforment pas automatiquement les structures qui produisent les inégalités.

C’est ici qu’intervient la notion de féminisme des données. Il ne s’agit pas seulement d’ajouter des femmes dans les données, mais de transformer les conditions mêmes de production du savoir. Les travaux de Catherine D’Ignazio et Lauren Klein montrent que les données ne sont jamais neutres : elles sont produites dans des contextes sociaux et reflètent des rapports de pouvoir. Cela implique de se demander qui décide des critères, quelles sources sont reconnues, qu’est-ce qui rend visible — ou invisibilise — certains savoirs. L’enjeu n’est donc pas seulement de combler un manque, mais de transformer le système qui le produit.

Aujourd’hui, en participant à ce marathon, vous pouvez faire encore bien plus qu’écrire des articles. On peut aussi s’exercer à développer une conscience critique et envisager d’autres niveaux d’action dans une perspective de féminisme des données.

À un second niveau, nous chercherons, en outre, à analyser les biais et à rendre plus visibles les inégalités. Comment ? En mesurant les écarts, en identifiant les absences, en repérant les déséquilibres dans les contenus ou les catégories. Il s’agit également de montrer comment les systèmes de classification participent eux-mêmes à l’invisibilisation de certaines figures, afin de mieux comprendre ces mécanismes. C’est dans cette perspective que Simon Villeneuve et moi avons travaillé à quantifier le fossé des genres dans les ressources biographiques, en particulier canadiennes, en incluant notamment les projets Wikimédia.

Cette étape est cruciale, car elle permet de situer précisément les problèmes, d’en objectiver les manifestations afin de mieux les déjouer et d’orienter des pistes d’amélioration. Toutefois, elle ne suffit pas entièrement.

À un autre niveau, il devient nécessaire de chercher à transformer le système lui-même. Cela implique d’agir sur les sources, de questionner les critères de notoriété, d’accompagner activement de nouvelles contributrices, de mobiliser différents acteurs du réseau documentaire dans une forme convergence par rapport à ces enjeux, en plus d’améliorer la structuration des données afin de rendre certains contenus plus visibles. À titre d’exemple, j’ai créé il y a quelques années la catégorie « bibliothécaire québécoise », précisément pour mettre en évidence un angle mort dans la structuration des savoirs. Ce type d’intervention, à la fois modeste et stratégique, participe d’un travail plus large de reconfiguration des infrastructures informationnelles.

Et dans le contexte québécois, par exemple, cela peut vouloir dire constater le manque de biographies de personnes s’identifiant comme femmes ou issues des diversités sexuelles et de genre, mais aussi agir concrètement sur les sources : documenter ces figures dans des publications reconnues (articles scientifiques, presse nationale et régionale), soutenir la production de contenus éditoriaux (catalogues d’exposition, ouvrages collectifs), mobiliser des archives existantes souvent peu visibles, améliorer leur repérabilité (indexation, métadonnées, numérisation) et leur admissibilité selon les standards de Wikipédia. Cela implique également de traduire ou adapter certaines sources pour les rendre davantage mobilisables, de diversifier les corpus de référence en intégrant des savoirs situés ou communautaires, et de renforcer les liens entre institutions (bibliothèques, centres d’archives, milieux culturels) afin de consolider l’écosystème documentaire. Autrement dit, il s’agit d’intervenir à la fois sur la production, la reconnaissance, la structuration et la circulation des sources afin de rendre ces figures plus admissibles et visibles dans l’encyclopédie.

C’est ce que l’on entend lorsque l’on affirme qu’il ne s’agit pas seulement de combler des absences, mais de comprendre — et d’agir sur — les mécanismes qui les produisent. Le chemin est plus exigeant, mais il permet d’avoir un impact plus profond et ouvre la voie à une véritable forme de justice sociale.

L’exposition « Sur l’air de la liberté : Chansons de résistantes dans les prisons nazies » offre une relecture forte et poignante de l’engagement de la bibliothécaire et résistante Yvonne Oddon. Autour de 19 chansons documentées par cette dernière à son retour des prisons et camps nazis, cette exposition musicale et documentaire révèle comment les arts populaires et la création poétique ont pu devenir des armes de survie, d’espoir et de résistance. En donnant à entendre ces voix de femmes emprisonnées et déportées, l’exposition témoigne aussi d’une part oubliée d’une histoire culturelle et mémorielle.

Sur l’air de la liberté : quand chanter devient résister

Conçue, dans le cadre de la chaire de recherche du Canada en musique et politique, sous la direction de Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis avec la collaboration de Cécile Quesney, l’exposition réunit les tapuscrits originaux des chansons, les partitions et les airs populaires sur lesquels elles ont été chantées. Le fonds provient de la Bibliothèque La Contemporaine, Nanterre (France).

L’exposition présente également des reconstitutions vocales a cappella ou accompagnées au piano que l’on a pu entendre lors d’un récital mémorable présenté lors du vernissage à la Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges (Montréal, Québec). Offerte en formats physique et numérique depuis le 28 mars 2025 jusqu’au 2 mai, on peut la voir et l’entendre au Centre d’études allemandes et européennes de l’Université de Montréal (Pavillon 3744 rue Jean Brillant, 5e étage) ; elle est hébergée sur un site web dédié, enrichi de contenus analytiques et historiques.

La version itinérante est appelée à circuler dans plusieurs institutions au Québec et en France, prolongeant ainsi l’impact pédagogique et mémoriel du projet. Ce projet s’inscrit dans une démarche de recherche-création et qui a donné lieu à diverses publications scientifiques qui approfondissent le sujet des dynamiques de résistance à l’œuvre dans ces chants de détention.

Yvonne Oddon, pionnière oubliée de la bibliothéconomie

Yvonne Oddon, la plus américaine des bibliothécaires françaises, occupe une place importante dans le livre « Bâtisseuses de la lecture publique », publié en 2024 aux Presses de l’ENSSIB, sous la direction d’Isabelle Antonutti. Cet ouvrage remarquable réhabilite la mémoire de soixante pionnières de la lecture publique en France. En s’appuyant sur des archives souvent fragmentaires, cet ouvrage met en lumière le rôle fondamental joué par les femmes dans la structuration de la profession, dans un univers historiquement façonné au masculin et où les figures des bibliothécaires sont longtemps restées invisibilisées. Préfacé par Arlette Farge, cette recherche fait émerger une véritable histoire sociale des travailleuses de bibliothèque, en exposant leurs réalisations, leurs luttes pour la reconnaissance, et leur apport dans l’évolution de la lecture publique. Un article et plusieurs entrées dans cet ouvrage sont consacrés à Yvonne Oddon.

Née en 1902, Yvonne Oddon suit une formation à l’American Library School à Paris, puis part en stage à l’université du Michigan, aux États-Unis, où elle s’étonne de constater la place centrale accordée aux bibliothèques dans la vie universitaire. De retour en France, elle contribue activement au développement des bibliothèques dans les régions dévastées, notamment par la mise en place du tout premier bibliobus à Soissons en 1933. En 1929, elle est recrutée comme bibliothécaire du musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, devenu musée de l’Homme en 1937, où elle introduit des standards innovants inspirés des pratiques américaines : libre accès, classement méthodique, réseaux d’échange de périodiques, et une photothèque documentaire.

Résistante dès 1940, elle cofonde le réseau du Musée de l’Homme avec Boris Vildé et Anatole Lewitsky. Elle affirme, dans une archive sonore qui contient un extrait d’entretien diffusé sur France Culture en 1963, que son engagement est né d’une réaction instinctive face aux «fausses nouvelles», alors qu’elle effectuait, à titre de bibliothécaire, un travail de dépouillement de la presse. Il s’agissait donc, dès le départ, d’une posture résolument antipropagandiste, en réponse à la machine de désinformation nazie. Peu à peu, elle s’est engagée dans une résistance tous azimuts : fabrication de tracts, création du journal clandestin Résistance, contacts avec l’Angleterre pour « transmettre des renseignements nécessaires à la France libre », « transports de volontaires et d’évadés », « organisation de groupes de combat avec dépôts d’armes », etc. Suite à une dénonciation, elle arrêtée en 1941. Elle échappe à la peine de mort, mais elle est déportée et incarcérée dans plusieurs prisons et camps nazis, dont Ravensbrück et Mauthausen. C’est au cours de sa détention qu’elle compose avec ses compagnes de captivité ces chansons de résistance, rassemblées à son retour. Ce matériel constitue aujourd’hui un témoignage bouleversant de la vie culturelle au quotidien dans un contexte de violence extrême.

Après la guerre, elle reprend ses fonctions de bibliothécaire; elle participe activement à la création de l’ICOM (Internationa Council of Museums), collabore avec l’UNESCO, et réédite avec Charles-Henri Bach le Guide du bibliothécaire, devenu une référence. Elle poursuit des missions internationales en Afrique et en Haïti, où elle forme des professionnel.les de la documentation. Yvonne Oddon s’est éteinte en 1982, mais où on se souvient d’elle à la bibliothèque du Musée de l’Homme qui porte son nom.

L’exposition « Sur l’air de la liberté », devrait, à plus d’un titre, faire partie du circuit des bibliothèques et des centres d’archives, car elle appartient à l’histoire professionnelle de ces travailleuses de la mémoire et du savoir.

Nous avons besoin cette énergie de résistance que portait Yvonne Oddon, alors que nous nous abandonnons peut-être en ce moment à une forme de résignation feutrée, souvent maquillée en pragmatisme, qui banalise les reculs en matière de liberté, de justice et de mémoire collective.  Le courage d’Oddon, sa créativité, et sa vision d’une bibliothèque comme lieu vivant, solidaire et émancipateur, résonnent avec une acuité particulière dans le monde actuel. Entre démarches individuelles et actions collectives, émerge aussi une injonction à maintenir vivant et bien audible l’ espoir pour des futurs alternatifs — un appel que le parcours de Oddon vient puissamment relayer en écho.

Don’t Look Away : dans l’air du temps, un écho

Ainsi, la plus américaine des bibliothécaires françaises serait sans doute en accord avec R. David Lankes, qui, face à la vague de censure et de persécutions visant les bibliothécaires aux États-Unis, répondait avec force : « Don’t look away. » Ne détournez pas le regard. C’est exactement ce qu’Yvonne Oddon a refusé de faire et qu’il faut entendre : résister, agir et documenter.

Dans ce texte percutant, publié le 26 mars dernier et que j’ai traduit ici, Lankes s’inquiète de la dérive autoritaire actuelle aux États-Unis, où les bibliothèques et institutions culturelles, loin d’être simplement fermées, sont en voie de devenir des instruments de propagande. Il évoque les attaques contre les agences fédérales, les bibliothèques universitaires, les chercheurs et les archivistes, ainsi que la montée inquiétante de la censure, des listes de mots interdits, et des persécutions de bibliothécaires accusés d’être trop « libéraux ». Face à l’inquiétude grandissante de la communauté internationale, il appelle à ne pas détourner le regard.

Plutôt que de se contenter de déclarations officielles ou de pressions diplomatiques, l’auteur exhorte les bibliothécaires à documenter activement cette nouvelle forme de « McCarthysme anti-woke » : archiver les documents censurés, recueillir les témoignages, créer des canaux de soutien, favoriser les discussions critiques et protéger la mémoire du moment. Il insiste aussi sur la nécessité d’agir à l’échelle locale, là où les bibliothèques restent profondément ancrées dans la confiance des communautés. En cultivant des espaces de dialogue, de solidarité et de résistance, les bibliothécaires peuvent, ici comme ailleurs, défendre la démocratie. Mais pour cela : don’t look away.

Rendre visibles les invisibles, les oubliées

Yvonne Oddon faisait également partie de ces nombreuses femmes notables sans image sur Wikipédia. Pour remédier à cette absence visuelle, je me suis permis de dessiner un portrait inspiré d’un remix composite d’images disponibles (vidéo, photo… c’est toujours un défi particulier), afin de rendre hommage à sa mémoire et de contribuer à la visibilité de son engagement. Ce geste s’inscrit dans le cadre de l’initiative portée par Les sans pagEs qui lancent un appel aux illustrateurs et illustratrices pour créer des portraits de femmes dont les biographies sur Wikipédia n’ont pas d’image. Ce projet vise à réduire le biais de genre sur la plateforme en enrichissant les articles consacrés aux femmes, aux féminismes et d’autres sujets sous-représentés.

Je note, par ailleurs, que dans l’article consacré au journal Résistance sur Wikipédia, Yvonne Oddon n’est pas mentionnée parmi les créateurs de cette publication. J’en ai fait un sujet de discussion. Mais, selon le Musée de l’Homme, ce serait bien le cas; elle serait d’ailleurs à l’origine du nom du journal. C’est aussi ce qui est affirmée sur le site du Musée de la résistance en ligne.

Sources principales

Antonutti, Isabelle (dir.) (2024). Bâtisseuses de la lecture publique. Presses de l’ENSSIB.
Chapitre consacré à Yvonne Oddon, dans une étude collective sur les pionnières de la lecture publique en France.
https://books.openedition.org/pressesenssib/13279

Épisode SoundCloud – Se souvenir d’Yvonne Oddon
Témoignage audio retraçant le parcours et l’héritage de cette figure de la bibliothéconomie et de la Résistance.
https://soundcloud.com/contact-742433234/se-souvenir-dyvonne-oddon

Musée de l’Homme – Portrait d’Yvonne Oddon
Bibliothécaire du Musée de l’Homme et résistante, cofondatrice du réseau du Musée de l’Homme.
https://www.museedelhomme.fr/fr/yvonne-oddon-1902-1982

Musée de la Résistance en ligne – Biographie d’Yvonne Oddon
Notice complète illustrée retraçant les grandes étapes de sa vie, de sa formation à ses engagements résistants.
https://museedelaresistanceenligne.org/media10456-Yvonne-Oddon

Wikipédia – Yvonne Oddon (voir aussi la section bibliographie)
Article biographique détaillé retraçant sa carrière bibliothéconomique et son engagement dans la Résistance.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvonne_Oddon

Sur le projet d’exposition

Balado Sonorités – « Chansons de résistantes dans les prisons nazies »
Discussion avec Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis, Cécile Quesney et Catherine Harrison-Boisvert sur les chansons notées par Yvonne Oddon, leur portée historique et musicale.
https://podcast.ausha.co/sonorites/chansons-de-resistantes-dans-les-prisons-nazies

Exposition « Sur l’air de la liberté : chansons de résistantes dans les prisons nazies » (2025).
Projet dirigé par Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis avec la collaboration de Cécile Quesney. Reconstitution musicale de 19 chansons documentés par Yvonne Oddon. https://chansonsresistantes.crcmp.org/

UdeM Nouvelles – « Quand des détenues chantaient dans les prisons nazies » (2023)
Entrevue avec Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis sur l’exposition « Sur l’air de la liberté » et le travail de mémoire autour des chansons notées par Yvonne Oddon.
https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/article/2023/08/28/quand-des-detenues-chantaient-dans-les-prisons-nazies

On May 3, an unusual procession moved through Washington DC. Several hundred people walked beneath the monuments of the American capital carrying portraits of Red Army soldiers. Children waved Soviet flags. A live orchestra played wartime songs at the World War II memorial. The Russian embassy had filed the permit; the DC Metropolitan Police provided an escort. Russian state media celebrated the event as proof that, with the return of Donald Trump, historical truth too had returned to America.

One organizer told Russian state television: “We love, respect Russia, honor the memory of our heroes.”

Similar marches took place in Paris, Amsterdam and Busan. In Berlin, authorities announced that Soviet flags, Russian symbols and military songs would once again be banned near Soviet war memorials during May 8 and 9 commemorations.

But in Moscow, Victory Day itself appeared haunted by fear.

For decades, May 9 has been Russia’s most sacred annual political ritual, binding victory, patriotism and state power into a single language. But this year, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was reduced to announcing that the Immortal Regiment march in Moscow would continue only “in electronic format.”

The run up to this year’s Victory Day became the most anxious Moscow has experienced in recent memory. The Kremlin canceled the traditional procession in the Russian capital, moving it online. Military equipment was removed from the parade. Mobile internet access across Moscow was intermittently shut down in the days leading up to May 9. Spectator numbers in St. Petersburg were reportedly slashed from thousands to just a few hundred. The Victory Parade in Kaliningrad was canceled entirely. Russian media outlets published extraordinary reports about Vladimir Putin retreating deeper into protected bunkers amid fears of Ukrainian drone strikes and assassination attempts.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry even warned foreign governments to evacuate diplomats from Kyiv before May 9, threatening massive retaliation if Ukraine targeted the celebrations with drones.

And then came another extraordinary twist. Volodymyr Zelensky publicly “allowed” the parade to proceed. In a deliberately tongue-in-cheek decree issued after negotiations around a temporary ceasefire, the Ukrainian president formally excluded Red Square from Ukraine’s operational strike plans for the duration of the celebrations, even listing the exact geographic coordinates of the square itself.

Watching it all unfold, I kept wondering whether empires collapse more easily than the systems of feeling they create. The Soviet Union fell apart more than 30 years ago, but the architecture built around victory, sacrifice and historical grievance survived it, stretching across borders, diasporas and rival political projects. What began as Soviet myth-making about liberation has evolved into a transnational political language through which governments, activists, diasporas and rival ideological movements compete over legitimacy, victimhood and belonging.

Over the years, at Coda, in our Rewriting History current, we have tracked how the remembrance of World War II became central to Putin’s machinery of legitimacy and repression. Soon after he came to power, Russian public culture became saturated with stories of the Great Patriotic War. Watching Russian state television often felt as if the war had ended yesterday. New films, schoolbooks, drama series, speeches, parades and television specials turned victory into the emotional foundation of Putin’s Russia. Scholars of Russian memory politics have described how, under Putin, collective memory of the war became a tool for claiming legitimacy, discrediting opposition and presenting the Russian state as the eternal defender against fascism.

 It resonated because it tapped into genuine emotion passed on for generations. It was never just propaganda. It rested on something real: the scale of Soviet loss and the private grief carried by millions of families.

The Immortal Regiment began in 2012 in the Siberian city of Tomsk as a local act of remembrance. Ordinary people walked through the streets carrying photographs of relatives who died in the war. By 2015, Putin was leading the Moscow procession himself, while state-backed organizations coordinated chapters in dozens of countries. But in Putin’s Russia, where victory had already become the central organizing myth of the state, the boundary between private mourning and political mythology dissolved.

The speed of that transformation still feels important to me. It says something about the way modern political systems absorb private emotion and fold it back into the language of the state.

The Kremlin framed these Victory Day rituals as a defense against what it called Western attempts to “rewrite history” by minimizing the Soviet role in defeating fascism or equating Stalinism with Nazism. Ukraine and many Eastern Europeans came to see the marches instead as vehicles for imperial nostalgia and wartime propaganda. 

But the argument, it seems, is no longer only about what happened in the past. It is about who gets to turn memory and grief into political legitimacy in the present.

This year Germany found itself in the extraordinary position of having to ban Soviet flags and military songs near Soviet memorials, effectively regulating the symbolic language of antifascism itself. Historian Timothy Snyder once warned that “if fascists take over the mantle of antifascism, the memory of the Holocaust will itself be altered.” That is precisely the moral and historical dilemma Berlin has now forced into the open. What happens when the symbols of genuine antifascist sacrifice become inseparable from the imagery of an ongoing war? When the flags carried by the soldiers who liberated Auschwitz are also flown at embassy-organized rallies while Russian bombs fall on Kharkiv? 

At Coda, we explored some of these tensions years ago, in our documentary “What To Do With Stalin,” which examined the strange afterlife of Stalin’s image across the former Soviet world. While filming in Georgia, we encountered arguments that now feel strikingly familiar: whether remembering Stalin represented patriotism or denial, historical pride or historical amnesia.

Even then, it was obvious these battles were never really about the past.

Putin himself acknowledged as much during this year’s Victory Day speech, describing the war in Ukraine as a “just” continuation of the struggle against fascism and accusing the West of fueling confrontation with Russia “to this day.” Hours later, he suggested the war might finally be over. “I think that the matter is coming to an end,” he told reporters.

Victory Day 2026 may ultimately be remembered not for the military parade itself, but for revealing how unstable that memory system has become. Moscow performed triumph while fearing attack. Berlin restricted Soviet symbols in the name of democratic security. Washington hosted embassy-linked Soviet commemorations beneath American monuments.

I was ten years old when the Soviet Union collapsed. For those of us who grew up inside it, the end of the empire felt at once chaotic and exhilarating. Borders opened, old certainties disappeared and ideology lost its grip almost overnight. I still feel fortunate that, as a child, I witnessed an empire built on terror and repression collapse into history.

In the decades that followed, we watched Russia slowly turn the symbols and emotional reflexes of the Soviet system into instruments of political power once again. Victory Day became one of the most potent of these instruments: a ritual that fused together grief, patriotism, historical trauma and state legitimacy into a single, powerful sentiment.

Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Alexander Darchiev, praised what he described as the Trump administration’s dramatically changed attitude toward Victory Day commemorations. The holiday, he said, now played “an unequivocally positive role” in Russia-US relations. He pointed specifically to the marches held in the center of Washington, DC.

But the more I think about this year’s Victory Day, the less it feels like a story about Russia alone. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of us assumed its emotional architecture would disappear with it. Instead, parts of it were patiently cultivated and repurposed for a new era by the men in charge of Putin’s Russia.  

The emotional logic that once underpinned the Soviet system no longer belongs only to Russia and the shattered geography of its former empire. Grievances, historical trauma and rituals of belonging now shape political life all around the world. Digital networks and algorithmic systems did not create these emotional impulses, but they amplified them at a scale the Soviet state could only dream of. Perhaps that is the true afterlife of an empire: not the survival of its borders or ideology, but of the emotional systems it builds to organize fear, belonging and historical destiny.

Additional research by Masho Lomashvili and Irina Matchavariani

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A funny thing happened on the day OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora, its video generation app: Iran went all in on synthetic propaganda and very quickly started winning the global meme war. The timing is a coincidence, no doubt, but it is the kind of coincidence that illuminates. 

Watching the explosive virality of the clips offers a powerful lesson in asymmetric media operations. They deploy cultural sophistication, an understanding of online communities and the enormously powerful creation tools made available by American tech companies, tools that give everyone on the internet access to a personal reality distortion field — drones, but for your feed.

On Wednesday, as Donald Trump was trying desperately to talk down the oil markets with hints of a deal, a stream of videos, carefully calibrated for U.S., regional and third country audiences rolled out on X via embassy accounts, Russia Today, and disaffected Maga influencers. The clips, by broad social media consensus, are good. Some lean heavily on the extremely online grammar of the U.S. right. Some remix Hollywood characters and likenesses in exactly the way that OpenAI’s now nixed billion-dollar deal with Disney was supposed to sanction. Others lean more heavily into Islamic iconography, featuring Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as worshippers of Baal, the foreign demon god who figures in both the Quran and the Hebrew Bible. The Lego movie is an especially rich resource, but so are TikTok formats, and the kind of idealized AI figures beloved of Trump administration meme makers. You can watch a few of them here.

Notably, faked war footage is far from the dominant format. All of these clips foreground and celebrate their own artificiality: some are sentimental, some triumphal, many are full of the gleeful adolescent wit of gamers on discord forums. 

Researchers have long been warning that generative tools will undercut the authority of visual evidence, compounding and accelerating the damage created by slower, cruder forms of fakery: photoshop, selective editing, even gaming clips passed off as combat footage. Of course, we are already there, and have been for a while. Russia has been the paramount master of this game, in Ukraine and in its ongoing influence operations around the world. But others have learned quickly. Last year, when India and Pakistan were engaged in a brief aerial battle, social media bullshit overwhelmed and compromised traditional coverage. More recently, Israel’s obliteration of Gaza was accompanied by a sustained and comprehensive blizzard of visually compelling misinformation, propaganda, and official lies. 

That continues. On March 28, Israel killed three journalists in a targeted strike in Southern Lebanon, claiming without evidence that one of them, Ali Shoaib, was a member of Hezbollah’s Radwan forces. They later distributed a photograph of him in military fatigues to reinforce the point, but explained to Fox news that in fact, they’d had to photoshop the uniform in because no such picture existed.

Meanwhile, in the Trump administration’s domestic war on immigrants and political opponents, we’ve seen a complete resetting of norms around the tone of official communication and any expectation that it is rooted in fact. Nowhere was that more evident than in the altered footage posted by the White House of the arrest of the prominent Minneapolis activist Nekima Levy Armstrong in January. In the video, shared by the official White House handle, a handcuffed Levy Armstrong is sobbing, her skin visibly darkened. In fact, she had faced arrest calmly. 

Questioned by reporters about this blatant falsification, deputy White House communications director Kaelan Dorr responded: "Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.” Collapsing the distinction between a meme and the factual record with the aid of AI is the final step in this administration's insistence that its preferred narrative simply is reality.

The problem for the White House and its allies is that their choices in tech policy, official communication, and press freedom level the playing field for information war in ways that Tehran’s media strategists understand and they, for all their immersion in online worlds, do not.

Iranian propagandists know that the currency of visual information online has already been completely debased. They’ve dealt with it plenty, and no doubt practiced it themselves in regional battles for narrative dominance. Their insight is that as cheap and easy as it is to create and distribute fakes, returns on the effort of mobilizing what disinformation researchers call “coordinated inauthentic action” are diminishing. They still do it, but it isn’t where the action is.

Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have, in a very practical sense, wrought this moment in concert with Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, JD Vance and Donald Trump. At their urging, the U.S. has surrendered unrivaled dominance in scarce, expensive information and cultural assets in exchange for a political economy of media that widely distributes cheap, abundant ones.

Tech leaders and conservative politicians have worked consistently for a decade to deprecate the trustworthiness of American journalism and constrain its liberties. They have smeared its practitioners as “enemies of the people”; they have captured the commanding heights of the broadcast and culture industries through crony deals, and they have launched an assault on both press freedom and standards, two assets that once made American news outlets the envy of the world. Needless to say, the economic collapse of traditional media companies fostered by Google’s  and Meta’s advertising duopoly only served to deepen the damage. Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post shuttered its Middle East bureaus just days before the war began.

Meanwhile, lying from agency podiums and the Oval Office, makes Karoline Leavitt barely distinguishable from Baghdad Bob, Iraq’s minister of information in 2003 whose surreal, truth-dodging press conferences during the U.S.-led invasion made him a global laughingstock. And the DOGEing of both the nominally independent Voice of America, as well as the state department’s Global Engagement Center leaves the administration with neither broadcast nor digital counter-propaganda assets. 

When no one can be trusted with the actual truth, we are left with the AI equivalent of 19th-century editorial cartoons, produced at industrial scale and distributed globally. America has little advantage in that war, particularly when it is at a moral, political and legal nadir.

If anything, Iran, which combines repression with an enormously rich literary culture, film scene and advertising market brings serious capabilities to the fight.

Of course, the ebbing of information power was already under way during the first Trump administration, and during Joe Biden’s term in ways that are indissociable from broader democratic decline. The “trust and safety” architecture adopted by big platform companies was designed — implicitly if not always visibly — to conserve information authority, and ensure that it functioned in broadly pro-democratic ways. 

After the disastrous failures of the Rohingya genocide — which rights groups and UN investigators blamed Facebook for facilitating — and the fears surrounding the manipulation of the U.S. electoral environment in 2016, there was a clear threat to the commercial and political health of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Tech companies, governments, researchers and human rights experts devised rules and norms for content moderation grounded in existing standards, tools for detecting coordinated inauthentic behavior, and a framework for crisis response.

The community of practitioners and institutions that sprung up to combat the flesh-eating virus attacking the body politic were working with bandaids in the battlefield hospital even before Covid, a coordinated attack from the right, and the second Trump victory hit them, but they succeeded in imposing some limits. That project now lies in ruins. 

The Stanford Information Laboratory has been shut down. Trust and Safety teams at Meta and X have been disbanded. The national security arm of the project, centered around the State Department is gone, and private funding for countering misinformation has largely dried up.

Where are the hyperscalers, the AI titans, whose tools are being so effectively deployed, in all of this?

The trust and safety people who do work at OpenAI are dutifully putting out reports every few months. They are detailing how they foiled efforts to use ChatGPT for a Chinese influence campaign aimed at Sanae Takaichi, the Japanese prime minister, and exposing a Russian content mill feeding African newspapers. “Pro-tip for governments,” wrote Head of National Security policy Sasha Baker on LinkedIn of the February report. “Please don’t use our products to spread lies online.”

Governments, in the world of Sam Altman’s “democratic AI” do not include that of the United States. OpenAI has not mentioned a single U.S. ally — let alone the administration itself — in these reports. 

OpenAI has hired multiple ex-Clinton, Obama and Biden officials, and in their work a weird, attenuated piece of the old national security approach to information integrity lives on, alongside the project of selling products to the Pentagon. The company’s leaders clearly treat these issues  as a complement to messaging around Western AI, or a picayune adjunct to the bigger questions of AI risk, which are handled way up in the organizational stratosphere, as they are at Anthropic.

Perhaps the larger lesson is that you can’t really shut down Sora, or put AI-generated video back in its box. If you choose to prosecute an illegal war of choice after surrendering the hard-won high ground of a robust, democratic information environment, high tech weaponry will not offset the deficit. On the contrary, you will have compounded the risk of both tactical failure and strategic geopolitical defeat. When that happens, and in some ways it already has, those who made this war, and their enablers in Silicon Valley, will have only themselves to blame.

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Ukraine has synchronized its sanctions against Russia with the last three packages of economic penalties imposed by the European Union, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on July 8.

"Three more packages of EU sanctions are fully effective in Ukraine," Zelensky said in his evening address.

Earlier on July 8, the president announced a new round of sanctions, including restrictions on five Chinese-registered companies accused of supplying components found in Russian Shahed-type drones used to attack Ukraine.

Vladyslav Vlasiuk, Zelensky's sanctions commissioner, told reporters on July 8 that the latest decrees bring Ukrainian penalties in line with the EU's 15th, 16th, and 17th packages of sanctions against Russia.

The 15th package targets individuals from Russia, Belarus, and China, among other countries, according to Vlasiuk. It includes the Russian pilot Alexander Azarenkov, who was involved in the deadly attack on the Okhmatdyt children's hospital in Kyiv. Zelensky signed the sanctions decree on the one-year anniversary of the strike.

The 16th package includes individuals from Russia, China, Turkey, and other nations. It also targets the Voin Center, Russia's military-patriotic education organization operating in occupied Ukrainian territories, and Pivdennyi Flot LLC, which transports Russian oil via its "shadow fleet," Vlasiuk said.

The 17th package designates firms from Russia, China, Turkey, and other countries, including the gold-mining company Petropavlovsk and the Chinese company Skywalker Technology Co. Ltd, produce drone parts for Russia.

The EU is expected to approve its 18th package of sanctions against Russia later this week, after facing opposition from pro-Kremlin bloc members Slovakia and Hungary.

Ukraine has taken measures to coordinate sanctions with international partners in order to amplify pressure on Moscow. Zelensky on June 27 signed a decree to synchronize Ukraine's sanctions against Russia with those imposed by the EU and Group of Seven (G7).

Ukraine war latest: Trump reportedly pledges to send 10 Patriot missiles to Ukraine, asks Germany to send battery

* Trump reportedly pledges to send 10 Patriot missiles to Ukraine, asks Germany to send battery * ‘They have to be able to defend themselves’ — Trump says US will send additional weapons shipments to Ukraine, criticizes Putin * EU to impose ‘toughest’ sanctions on Russia in coordination with US senators, French foreign minister says * Russia’s Black Sea Fleet shrinks presence in key Crimean bay, Ukrainian partisans say * Putin signs decree allowing foreigners to serve in Russian army during

The Kyiv IndependentThe Kyiv Independent news desk

The International Criminal Court (ICC) said on July 8 that it had issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders, accusing them of crimes against humanity and gender-based persecution following the group's takeover of Afghanistan in 2021.

The move follows Russia's recognition of the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government on July 3. Russia, which had previously designated the Taliban as a banned terrorist group, became the first country in the world to recognize it.

In a statement, the ICC named Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and Afghanistan's top judge Abdul Hakim Haqqani as suspects in a campaign of systematic oppression targeting women, girls, and others who do not conform to the group's rigid gender ideology.

The court said the alleged crimes took place across Afghanistan from the Taliban's return to power on August 15, 2021, and continued at least until Jan. 20, 2025. The suspects are believed to have played key roles in the enforcement of Taliban policies that led to "murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and enforced disappearance."

The persecution was not limited to women and girls, according to the ICC. The court said that men perceived as allies of women or opponents of Taliban ideology were also targeted.

The ICC emphasized that the Taliban implemented a state-led policy of repression that violated fundamental human rights and freedoms across the country.

Most of the international community has refused to formally recognize the Taliban regime due to its human rights abuses and failure to meet international standards.

Meanwhile, since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 the Kremlin has deepened relationships with authoritarian regimes, including North Korea, Iran, and now the Taliban. Russia has expanded trade with Afghanistan and allowed Taliban officials to participate in Russian forums.

In December 2024, the Russian State Duma passed a law allowing certain groups, including the Taliban, to be removed from the country's list of banned terrorist organizations. The move paved the way for official recognition.

Putin has referred to the Taliban as "allies," and Lavrov has called them "sane people," despite the group's ongoing enforcement of strict Islamic law, including gender apartheid, public executions, and bans on women's education.

Seeing war through the lens of narcissism

We usually think of narcissism as a personal flaw — a grandiose ego, a craving for attention, a lack of empathy. But what if narcissism is not just a diagnosis, but a lens? A way of understanding how individuals — and even entire nations — cope with wounds too painful to face directly?

The Kyiv IndependentDr. Gary E Myers

U.S. President Donald Trump said on July 8 he was "not happy" with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"We get a lot of bullsh*t thrown at us by Putin," he said at a cabinet meeting. "He's very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless."

Trump has vacillated for months between criticizing Putin and praising the Kremlin. So far, he has failed to increase military aid to Ukraine or sanction Russia despite Moscow's refusal to accept a ceasefire.

During his election campaign, Trump repeatedly pledged to end the war in Ukraine within "24 hours." However, his efforts to broker a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia have seen no progress.

Trump also addressed U.S. legislation on sanctions, saying the Senate's Russia sanctions bill was "totally optional" for him to implement or terminate.

"I'm looking at it very strongly," Trump said.

The bill would impose 500% tariffs on imports from countries purchasing Russian oil, gas, uranium, and other products. It was introduced in April but has seen no progress since then.

Earlier, Trump signaled growing openness to tougher measures against Moscow, ABC News reported on June 29.

According to Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump privately told him it was "time to move" the Russia sanctions bill.

"I’m confident the president is ready for us to act," Graham said.

The Senate is expected to vote on the bill after Congress returns from a break in July.

"(Putin is) killing a lot of people — his soldiers and their soldiers mostly. And it's now up to 7,000 a week," Trump said on July 8, referring to Russia's battlefield losses.

In recent weeks, Trump has been critical of the Russian president. Following a phone call with Putin on July 3, Trump said he was "very disappointed," signaling growing frustration with the Kremlin.

When asked by a journalist on July 8 whether he would take action, Trump responded: "Wouldn't be telling you... We want to have a little surprise."

Trump also commented on the the current pause in weapons deliveries to Ukraine. He pointed to the previous transfer of advanced systems, including Javelin anti-tank missiles and Patriot air defense systems, calling them "the best equipment in the world."

His remarks come after the United States halted military aid shipments to Ukraine on July 2 amid an internal Pentagon review of stockpile capacity. The freeze coincided with a surge in Russian aerial attacks, leaving Ukraine increasingly vulnerable amid a shortage of U.S.-supplied air defense systems.

The U.S. halted weapons shipments to Ukraine amid a capability review, the White House and Pentagon previously confirmed, with Trump later denying the pause.

On July 7, the Pentagon said it would renew shipments, saying the additional defensive weapons were intended to help Ukraine protect itself while the U.S. works toward "a lasting peace."

Dnipropetrovsk village likely contested despite Russia’s claim of its capture

The village of Dachne in the southern part of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast appears to be contested, according to the Finnish Black Bird Group open-source intelligence collective. The Russian Defense Ministry on July 7 claimed to have seized Dachne, which would mark the first village to be under Russian control in the industrial Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, located just west of the war-torn Donetsk Oblast. The Ukrainian military denied the claimed capture, calling it “disinformation.” Viktor Tregubov, spok

The Kyiv IndependentAsami Terajima

Russia's crude oil shipments have dropped to their lowest level since February, as refinery processing outpaces production growth and trims available export volumes, Bloomberg reported on July 8.

Russia has used its revenues from energy exports to finance the war in Ukraine.

Seaborne crude flows averaged 3.12 million barrels a day over the four weeks to July 6, a 3% decline from the previous period ending June 29, according to tanker-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. That's the lowest level recorded since the four-week period ending Feb. 23.

The gross value of Moscow's oil exports rose by about $100 million, or 8%, to $1.36 billion for the week ending July 6, Bloomberg said. That increase was due to higher volume, although average export prices declined for a second consecutive week.

Most of Russia's oil continues to head to Asia. Shipments to the region averaged 2.73 million barrels per day, slightly lower than the previous month. Flows to Turkey fell to 370,000 barrels a day, and shipments to Syria held steady at 25,000 barrels a day.

The European Union is seeking to tighten sanctions on Russia. Ambassadors have yet to approve the EU's 18th sanctions package due to opposition from Hungary and Slovakia. The bloc failed to adopt the new package on June 27.

The new package includes restrictions targeting Russia's energy and banking sectors, as well as transactions linked to the Nord Stream gas pipeline.

Death of top Russian oil executive fuels fresh scrutiny of elite’s ‘window falls’

The unexplained death of a top Russian oil executive on July 4 is fueling renewed scrutiny over the rising number of high-profile Russian officials and businessmen who have died under mysterious circumstances, specifically, have fallen out of windows. Andrei Badalov, vice president of Transneft, Russia’s largest state-controlled pipeline transport company,

The Kyiv IndependentTim Zadorozhnyy

Three men were found guilty on July 8 in connection with an arson attack on Ukraine-linked businesses in London, which British authorities say was orchestrated by Russia's Wagner mercenary group, Reuters reported.

The alleged ringleader, Dylan Earl, 21, had already pleaded guilty to aggravated arson over the 2024 blaze targeting companies that were supplying Elon Musk's Starlink satellite equipment to Ukraine, according to Reuters.

The systems are considered vital to Ukraine's communications and defense against Russia's ongoing invasion.

Earl also became the first person convicted under the U.K.'s National Security Act after admitting to a separate plot to attack a wine shop and restaurant in London’s upscale Mayfair district and to kidnap its owner, a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Two others, Jake Reeves, 23, and Earl’s associate, also pleaded guilty to aggravated arson, with Reeves admitting to a charge under the National Security Act for receiving a material benefit from a foreign intelligence agency.

A jury at London's Old Bailey court convicted three additional men, Nii Kojo Mensah, 23, Jakeem Rose, 23, and Ugnius Asmena, 20, of aggravated arson. They had denied the charges. A fourth man, Paul English, 61, was acquitted.

Two other defendants, Ashton Evans, 20, and Dmitrijus Paulauskas, 23, were charged with failing to disclose knowledge of terrorist activity. Evans was convicted on one count and cleared of another. Paulauskas was acquitted of both charges and reportedly broke down in tears as the verdict was read.

Commander Dominic Murphy of the London Metropolitan Police reportedly said he was confident the Wagner Group and the Russian state were behind the attacks.

The U.K. has designated the Wagner Group as a terrorist organization.

Earl had exchanged hundreds of encrypted messages with a supposed Wagner handler using the alias "Privet Bot" on Telegram. According to reporting by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), the account was previously advertised by Grey Zone, a Wagner-affiliated channel.

Prosecutors said Earl expressed interest in fighting for Wagner and was encouraged to recruit contacts from British soccer hooligan networks, Irish republican groups, and organized crime circles, Reuters reported. He and Evans also admitted to unrelated charges of dealing cocaine.

The Russian Embassy in London has denied any involvement in the warehouse attack and accused the British government of blaming Russia for domestic issues.

The Kremlin has consistently rejected accusations of sabotage and espionage, despite growing evidence and convictions tied to Russian-linked operations across Europe.

‘Neither side wasted time’ — Ukraine’s economy minister on minerals deal negotiations with Trump’s ‘business-oriented’ administration

Ukraine’s Economy Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko says her task is simple — to get the investment fund behind the closely watched minerals deal with the U.S. off the ground, and prove its detractors wrong. “There are so many criticisms from different parties that this fund is just a piece of paper we can put on the shelves — that it won’t be operational,” Svyrydenko, who is also Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister, tells the Kyiv Independent at Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers on July 4, the morning

The Kyiv IndependentLiliane Bivings

U.S. President Donald Trump has promised to send 10 Patriot interceptors to Ukraine - a smaller number than had been paused previously while en route to the country, Axios reported on July 8, citing its sources.

Trump has also suggested that Germany sell one of its Patriot batteries to Ukraine, according to three sources cited by Axios. They said the U.S. and European allies would split the cost of the purchase.

The discussion comes as Ukraine is calling upon its allies, particularly the United States, to support Ukrainian air defense by supplying "life-saving" Patriot systems and relevant missiles.

The Pentagon said on July 2 that some military assistance to Ukraine had been halted as the U.S. Defense Department conducts a review of foreign aid deliveries.

On July 7, the Pentagon said it would renew shipments, saying the additional defensive weapons were intended to help Ukraine protect itself while the U.S. works toward "a lasting peace."

Merz called Trump to request the release of the paused interceptors, according to Axios. During the call, Trump proposed that Germany sell one of its own Patriot batteries to Ukraine.

While no agreement has been reached, officials on both sides say negotiations are ongoing. German officials maintain that Berlin has already sent a higher share of its available Patriot systems to Ukraine than any other NATO country, including the U.S.

Russia has escalated its aerial campaign against Ukraine in recent weeks, launching large-scale missile and drone attacks that have killed and injured hundreds of civilians across multiple cities.

The suspension of U.S. arms deliveries, which include Patriots and precision-guided munitions, drew criticism from Kyiv. During a July 4 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said he was not responsible for halting the aid, according to the Wall Street Journal.

He reportedly told Zelensky that a review of U.S. munitions stockpiles was initiated after last month's U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, but denied ordering a full pause in shipments.

NBC News reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth halted the shipments unilaterally on July 2, despite internal Pentagon assessments that the move would not jeopardize U.S. military readiness.

Special Envoy Keith Kellogg and Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov are set to meet in Rome later this week to discuss resuming the stalled military aid, Politico reported on July 7.

Seeing war through the lens of narcissism

We usually think of narcissism as a personal flaw — a grandiose ego, a craving for attention, a lack of empathy. But what if narcissism is not just a diagnosis, but a lens? A way of understanding how individuals — and even entire nations — cope with wounds too painful to face directly?

The Kyiv IndependentDr. Gary E Myers

President Volodymyr Zelensky signed an order on July 8 imposing sanctions on five Chinese-registered companies accused of supplying components found in Russian Shahed-type drones used to attack Ukraine.

The decree follows a statement by Ukraine's Security Service (SBU), which said it recovered Chinese-made parts from downed drones during a July 4 air assault on Kyiv.

Sanctions were imposed on Central Asia Silk Road International Trade, Suzhou Ecod Precision Manufacturing, Shenzhen Royo Technology, Shenzhen Jinduobang Technology, and Ningbo BLIN Machinery.

The list was published on the Presidential Office's website alongside the official decision by Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council.

Russia's domestically produced drones based on Iran's Shahed-136 is a loitering munition extensively used by Russia to target Ukrainian cities, and is assembled with components sourced from around the world. Kyiv has warned that some of these parts continue to flow through countries that have not joined Western sanctions.

China has emerged as one of Moscow's key wartime partners, helping Russia circumvent sanctions and becoming the largest supplier of dual-use goods aiding its defense sector.

Vladyslav Vlasiuk, the Ukrainian president's commissioner for sanctions, told journalists on July 7 that Russia's growing ability to sustain weapons production is being driven by a flow of Chinese components and materials.

Zelensky has repeatedly accused China of backing Russia and providing technological and logistical support for its war effort. On May 29, he said Beijing had blocked the sale of drones to Ukraine while continuing to supply them to Russia.

Ukraine has already sanctioned several Chinese companies tied to Russia's war effort.

As Russian-Chinese relations deepen, Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to visit China in September, where he is scheduled to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Putin signs decree allowing foreigners to serve in Russian army during mobilization

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s partial mobilization decree from Sept. 21, 2022, remains in force and has never been formally rescinded.

The Kyiv IndependentTim Zadorozhnyy

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on July 7 permitting foreigners to serve in the Russian army during periods of mobilization, expanding military recruitment efforts.

Putin's partial mobilization decree from Sept. 21, 2022, remains in force and has never been formally rescinded. Ending it would require a separate presidential decree specifying a termination date.

Previously, it was allowed only during states of emergency or under martial law. Despite its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has avoided formally declaring martial law.

According to the document, the Kremlin is also permitting qualified specialists who have reached the age limit to sign contracts with Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Federal Security Service (FSB), or other state security agencies.

The changes aim to strengthen recruitment as Moscow tries to keep up the pace of troop replenishment without causing another wave of unpopular conscription. The Kremlin has heavily relied on financial incentives and aggressive campaigns to attract new volunteers.

Moscow currently recruits 30,000 to 40,000 individuals into its army each month, sources familiar with U.S. and EU intelligence told the Wall Street Journal.

On March 31, Putin authorized the spring conscription of 160,000 men — the country's largest call-up in 14 years. Though Russian officials claim conscripts are not sent to the front, human rights groups and relatives have reported that many are pressured into signing contracts.

In May, Russia's Investigative Committee Head Alexander Bastrykin said 20,000 naturalized migrants were sent to fight in Ukraine after failing to register for military service.

In the summer of 2024, Russian lawmakers passed a law allowing the revocation of citizenship for naturalized individuals who do not comply with military registration requirements.

Rotterdam port prepares for NATO arms shipments amid Russia threat

Rotterdam has previously handled weapons shipments, but this marks the first time that it will designate a special berth for military use.

The Kyiv IndependentTim Zadorozhnyy

Less than a month after his release from Russian captivity, 57-year-old soldier Valery Zelensky died of injuries sustained under torture, Ukrainian media outlet Suspilne reported on July 6.

Zelensky had spent 39 months in Russian captivity. He was released as part of the landmark 1,000-for-1,000 prisoner deal on May 25. Just 22 days later, on June 16, his heart stopped.

At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, his unit delivered weapons to Ukrainian forces in Mariupol, his daughter, Valeria Zelenka, said.

"When the offensive began, they were told that volunteers were needed to go on the assault. Out of 40 (people), eight said, 'We're going.' My father was one of them," she added.

The family did not immediately find out that he had been taken prisoner for some time, and he was considered missing in action. During his years in captivity, Zelensky's family received only one letter. He had long appeared on prisoner exchange lists but did not return until this year.

"The torture was not just cruel, it was inhuman. But he endured it," his daughter told Suspilne.

"He told me, 'Daughter, I endured it because of Kyokushin (a style of karate). I have discipline, I'm tough. My body and muscles protected me.'"

Valeria said her father had been overjoyed to come home and meet his grandson for the first time. He also expressed a desire to learn Ukrainian after years of speaking Russian.

Doctors initially treated him for suspected pancreatic issues, but his condition quickly deteriorated. During surgery, they discovered his organs were severely damaged. He died in intensive care days later.

"My father told me, 'Three people died among us from torture. And when I was in a very bad state, I asked God: Please let me see the eyes of my beloved,'" his daughter said.

A medical report listed extensive injuries. He had a non-functioning shoulder and arm and showed signs of multiple organ failures.

"The first feeling is inexhaustible pain that your loved one is no longer here. He was simply tortured," Valeria said. "And there is relief that he no longer feels that torture."

Zelensky's return was part of a wider prisoner exchange agreed during a first round of direct talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Istanbul.

The case is the latest in a number of Ukrainian soldiers' deaths after their return from Russian captivity, highlighting the effects of "widespread and systematic" torture of prisoners of war (POWs) in Russian prisons, reported by the U.N.

Serhii Dobrovolskyi, a Ukrainian soldier who had been in Russian captivity since 2023, died just a month after his release at the end of May as part of a 1000-for-1000 prisoner swap, an official from the soldier's home region announced on June 21.

In 2023, a high-ranking officer from the "Azov" brigade, Oleh Mudrak, died at 35 years old, months after his release from Russian captivity.

As a POW, he survived the Olenivka camp explosion and endured a dramatic weight loss in just 100 days, as seen in the photos published by Stanislav Aseyev, a Ukrainian writer and activist.

Dmytro Shapovalov, a 32-year-old defender of Ukraine who was exchanged in 2023 after over a year in Russian prisons, died on June 9, according to Suspilne.

Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) held in Russian captivity often face torture, abuse, and inhumane treatment, according to Ukrainian officials and human rights groups.

Many former POWs have reported beatings, starvation, and psychological pressure.

The exact number of Ukrainians currently held by Russia remains unknown. Kyiv continues to call for a full all-for-all exchange. Moscow has repeatedly rejected the offer.

‘Beyond cynical’ – Russian doctor carved ‘Glory to Russia’ scar on POW during operation, Ukraine says

After more than three years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, each new revelation of cruel treatment of Ukrainians in Russian captivity hardly surprises anyone. But when a photo recently emerged online, showing a “Glory to Russia” scar on the body of a Ukrainian prisoner of war (POW), it sent shockwaves

The Kyiv IndependentDaria Shulzhenko

In anticipation of a potential war with Russia, the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands has begun reserving space for NATO ships carrying military cargo and is mapping out logistics routes for weapons transfers, the Financial Times reported on July 8.

The decision comes as NATO allies increasingly warn of the risk of a large-scale war with Russia within five years. Rotterdam has previously handled weapons shipments, but this marks the first time that it will designate a special berth for military use.

Part of the container terminal will be repurposed to ensure the safe transfer of ammunition and other equipment between vessels. Military supply logistics will be coordinated with the port of Antwerp in neighboring Belgium.

"We see each other less and less as competitors," Boudewijn Siemons, Chief Executive of the Port of Rotterdam Authority, said, referring to the port of Antwerp.

"If large volumes of military goods would have to be shipped, we'd look to Antwerp or other ports to take over some capacity and the other way around."

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Siemons added that not all terminals are equipped to handle military-grade cargo, making the logistical coordination crucial, particularly for shipments from the U.S., U.K., and Canada.

In May, the Dutch Defense Ministry confirmed that space would be allocated for military supplies at NATO's request. The move is part of broader efforts by European allies to reduce dependence on the U.S. for defense logistics.

Russia's military spending has surged amid its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Moscow's 2024 defense budget rose by 42% in real terms, reaching $462 billion, surpassing the combined total of all European countries.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said on July 5 that a Chinese military move against Taiwan could prompt Beijing to encourage Russia to open a second front against NATO states.

Rutte has repeatedly warned that Russia could rebuild its military capabilities fast enough to pose a direct threat to NATO territory, urging allied governments to act swiftly and decisively.

‘Neither side wasted time’ — Ukraine’s economy minister on minerals deal negotiations with Trump’s ‘business-oriented’ administration

Ukraine’s Economy Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko says her task is simple — to get the investment fund behind the closely watched minerals deal with the U.S. off the ground, and prove its detractors wrong. “There are so many criticisms from different parties that this fund is just a piece of paper we can put on the shelves — that it won’t be operational,” Svyrydenko, who is also Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister, tells the Kyiv Independent at Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers on July 4, the morning

The Kyiv IndependentLiliane Bivings

After failing to approve 18th package of sanctions against Russia due to opposition from Hungary and Slovakia, EU countries are expected to finalize an agreement this week, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna said on July 7.

Since EU sanctions require unanimous approval, a single veto could prevent implementation. In late June, EU ambassadors did not approve the sanctions package because of objections from Budapest and Bratislava.

"According to my information, European countries will still reach an agreement this week on the 18th package of sanctions, together with Slovakia and Hungary," she told Ukrainian broadcaster ICTV.

The delay followed earlier signs of resistance from both governments, despite the package being introduced shortly after the previous round of sanctions took effect on May 20.

"It is noteworthy that during the previous period, when the decision on the 17th package was being made, Hungary did not vote for this decision until the last day," Stefanishyna said.

"There was even almost a day when these sanctions were not put into effect."

Unlike Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has consistently opposed sanctions and military aid for Ukraine, Slovakia has not previously attempted to block new EU measures.

Bratislava requested a delay in adopting the latest package until the bloc clarifies the financial implications of RePowerEU — an initiative to end reliance on Russian fossil fuels by 2030.

"Without radical political leadership in the European Union, it will be very difficult," Stefanishyna said, warning of future veto threats by individual member states.

The 18th package includes new restrictions targeting Russia's energy and banking sectors, as well as transactions linked to the Nord Stream pipeline project.

These measures are part of a broader European effort to tighten pressure on Moscow as it continues to reject calls for an unconditional ceasefire in Ukraine.

While the EU pushes forward with additional restrictions, the United States has not imposed new sanctions on Russia since President Donald Trump took office in January.

‘Neither side wasted time’ — Ukraine’s economy minister on minerals deal negotiations with Trump’s ‘business-oriented’ administration

Ukraine’s Economy Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko says her task is simple — to get the investment fund behind the closely watched minerals deal with the U.S. off the ground, and prove its detractors wrong. “There are so many criticisms from different parties that this fund is just a piece of paper we can put on the shelves — that it won’t be operational,” Svyrydenko, who is also Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister, tells the Kyiv Independent at Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers on July 4, the morning

The Kyiv IndependentLiliane Bivings

At least nine civilians were killed and 81 others injured in Russian attacks across Ukraine over the past 24 hours, regional authorities reported on July 8.

Ukraine's Air Force said Russia launched 54 drones overnight, including Iranian-designed Shahed-type attack drones, and fired four S-300/400 guided missiles.

Air defenses intercepted 34 drones, while another eight were likely used as radar-jamming decoys. Drones struck five locations across the country.

The overnight assault was repelled using aircraft, electronic warfare, mobile fire groups, and missile defense systems, the military said.

In Kharkiv Oblast, one person was killed and 40 others were injured, including three children, as the city of Kharkiv and seven other settlements came under attack, Governor Oleh Syniehubov reported.

Russian strikes on Zaporizhzhia Oblast injured 20 people and damaged at least 64 houses and apartment buildings, Governor Ivan Fedorov said.

In Donetsk Oblast, three civilians were killed — two in Oleksiyevo-Druzhkivka and one in Novotroitske — and 10 more were injured, according to Governor Vadym Filashkin.

In Sumy Oblast, four people were killed and four more injured in Russian strikes, the local administration reported.

One person was killed and four others were injured in Kherson Oblast, where Russian forces hit residential areas and public infrastructure, damaging two apartment buildings and 17 houses, according to Governor Oleksandr Prokudin.

Three people were injured in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, where Russian troops attacked with first-person-view (FPV) drones, Governor Serhii Lysak said.

The wave of attacks follows Russia's ongoing refusal to accept a ceasefire and comes amid rising use of drone and missile strikes against Ukraine's civilian infrastructure.

‘They have to be able to defend themselves’ — Trump says US will send additional weapons shipments to Ukraine, criticizes Putin

“They’re getting hit very hard. We’re gonna have to send more weapons, your defensive weapons primarily,” U.S. President Donald Trump said.

The Kyiv IndependentVolodymyr Ivanyshyn

Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) identified Russian Armed Forces Major Denis Sheynov as allegedly involved in the July 2024 missile strike on Kyiv's Okhmatdyt children's hospital, HUR reported on July 8.

The strike, which killed two adults and injured at least 34 people, directly hit the country's largest pediatric medical center, where 627 children were receiving treatment at the time.

According to HUR, Sheynov is the head of the special engineering service of the 121st Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment, part of Russia's 22nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Division, tasked with executing the strike.

Sheynov, born in Saratov on Jan. 30, 1978, was reportedly responsible for the technical preparation of the X-101 air-launched cruise missiles used in the attack.

He graduated from the Saratov Higher Military Command Engineering School Missile Forces, and previously served in Syria in 2018. Sheynov has been awarded several medals by the Russian government, including for participation in the Syrian war.

Ukrainian authorities previously charged Russian Lieutenant General Sergey Kobylash in absentia for ordering the strike, which was widely condemned internationally.

Kobylash gave the order at around 9:15 a.m., while the hospital was struck at 10:45 a.m.

‘They have to be able to defend themselves’ — Trump says US will send additional weapons shipments to Ukraine, criticizes Putin

“They’re getting hit very hard. We’re gonna have to send more weapons, your defensive weapons primarily,” U.S. President Donald Trump said.

The Kyiv IndependentVolodymyr Ivanyshyn

Striletska Bay near Sevastopol, once a key base for Russian warships in occupied Crimea, is now nearly empty and used primarily for mooring tugboats and small patrol craft, the Atesh partisan group reported on July 8.

According to the group, Russia now uses the bay mainly for maintenance work and rare anti-sabotage defense drills, having pulled most major vessels from the area.

"Recently, the bay has been practically empty... The degradation of the occupation fleet in Sevastopol is becoming increasingly obvious. Striletska Bay, which previously housed a large number of combat vessels, is now idle." Atesh said.

The remaining combat units are periodically rotated and redeployed in an apparent effort to avoid detection by Ukrainian reconnaissance.

"Every object is under control — no ship will go unnoticed," Atesh said, adding that all ship movements are being tracked and shared with the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Sevastopol has served as the base for Russia's Black Sea Fleet since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. Repeated Ukrainian attacks using naval drones, missiles, and long-range drones have forced the Kremlin to reduce its naval presence in occupied Crimea.

Ukraine has destroyed several Russian vessels, including the Caesar Kunikov landing ship, the Sergei Kotov patrol ship, the Ivanovets missile corvette, and multiple high-speed landing crafts.

The shrinking Russian presence in Sevastopol comes as Ukraine steps up drone attacks against other Black Sea Fleet locations. On July 6, drones struck the fleet's facilities in Novorossiysk, Krasnodar Krai, a key port east of Crimea across the Kerch Strait.

‘They have to be able to defend themselves’ — Trump says US will send additional weapons shipments to Ukraine, criticizes Putin

“They’re getting hit very hard. We’re gonna have to send more weapons, your defensive weapons primarily,” U.S. President Donald Trump said.

The Kyiv IndependentVolodymyr Ivanyshyn