Russia is likely attempting to force Ukraine to capitulate by spring 2027 through a large-scale campaign of long-range strikes, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in its 27 September report. Russian President Vladimir Putin's new theory of victory relies heavily on the mass use of jet-powered drones and ballistic missiles against Ukraine, the institute assesses.

Russia keeps shifting to faster jet-powered drones that Ukraine's defenses struggle to stop, forcing it to spend scarce missiles on them. Russia's use of jet-powered drones rose eightfold from June to August, with Moscow launching around 7,700 such drones since their initial deployment, Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said on 23 September. But Putin likely does not expect the campaign to last indefinitely, and he may hold off on a new mobilization until he sees whether the strikes work, ISW assesses.

Putin's modified theory of victory

Putin's modified theory of victory largely depends on Russia's ability to mass-launch cheap jet-powered Gerans that get through Ukrainian defenses often enough, the institute notes.

Even a Kremlin-linked Russian milblogger claimed on 27 September that the Russian strategy, which relies heavily on long-range strikes, is costly and cannot continue indefinitely, not least because Ukraine is hitting Russia harder too, according to the analysis.

At the same time, Putin stated on 25 September that Ukraine "must feel" Russia's "retaliatory" strikes. ISW assesses that this suggests he intends to intensify Russia's strike campaign in winter, as he has in previous winters.

If Putin is counting on Ukraine to break and capitulate this winter, he may be ignoring what the campaign will cost Russia over time, the institute notes. This strategy also counts on Ukraine's shortage of Patriot interceptors against ballistic missiles, and on the country's power grid and other vital systems giving way under months of strikes.

Until that approach runs out, Putin is unlikely to back down on his demands or agree to real ceasefire talks, ISW assesses.

Ukrainian interceptors could disrupt Russia's plan

A Kremlin-linked Russian milblogger claimed on 27 September that Russian forces launched predominantly jet-powered Geran-5 drones at Odesa, Mykolaiv, and Kyiv during the night of 26–27 September. According to the blogger, Russia's diverse arsenal of strike weapons and Ukraine's shortage of air defense assets allow Russian forces to maintain the current pace of strikes and expand the range of targets, ISW writes in its analysis.

At the same time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 26 September that Ukraine's interception rate for jet-powered Shahed drones currently stands at 55%. Of more than 2,730 such drones Russia had launched in September by then, Ukrainian forces had downed or suppressed more than 1,500, he added.

Ukraine is testing interceptor drone prototypes in combat conditions, Ukrainian Presidential Office head Kyrylo Budanov told Novyny.LIVE on 27 September. The mass deployment of interceptors capable of shooting down jet-powered Gerans could begin within several months, he added. Ukrainian companies have already successfully tested several interceptor drones capable of intercepting Russian jet-powered drones in field conditions, the institute notes.

At the same time, it remains unclear whether Ukraine will be able to scale up its interceptor program quickly enough and achieve sufficient success to disrupt the intensification of Russia's campaign during the winter, ISW notes.

Why Putin may hold off on a new mobilization

Expanding Russia's arsenal of strike weapons is cheaper than carrying out a second mobilization economically, militarily, and socially, a Kremlin-linked Russian milblogger cited by the institute claimed.

Putin may put off large-scale forced mobilization until he sees whether the strikes deliver, ISW assesses, though his officials have been laying the groundwork for it despite Kremlin denials. Still, the need to replace Russia's enormous battlefield losses could push him to order such a mobilization as early as this fall, ISW notes, as Ukrainian and other sources have repeatedly reported he is preparing to do.

Russia says it is punishing Ukraine, and it is not hiding it. Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesperson, says Ukraine must "pay a price" for its actions in recent months and calls Russia's intensified strikes "part of this price," according to UNIAN, citing Russian media.

Russia rarely admits its strikes are meant to punish a country rather than hit military targets, but Peskov did just that, casting the wave of attacks on Ukraine, which have struck apartment blocks, trains, and this week Kyiv's Academy of Sciences, as a "price" Ukraine has to pay. In the Kremlin's telling, Ukraine is being punished for its own deep strikes inside Russia.

Moscow calls the strikes a 'price'

Asked how Ukraine's strikes had affected Russia's position on peace talks, Peskov says Ukraine "will have to pay a price for the actions that have taken place in recent months," adding, "This is what is happening now."

Russia, he says, must ensure "no one gets the idea to announce plans to inflict devastating strikes on it."

Kyiv's deep strikes draw the reprisal

The "actions" are Ukraine's strikes deep in the Russian rear, targeting its assets, helping it to fund the war. Russian President Vladimir Putin complained last week of a large Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow during Russia's parliamentary election and a June strike on St. Petersburg during an economic forum, Reuters reported.

Ukraine has also battered Russian refineries with long-range drones and missiles, cutting fuel output enough to spark shortages and force Moscow to curb exports and buy fuel abroad.

The price falls on civilians

What the Kremlin calls a price has fallen largely on Ukrainian civilians. Through September, Russian strikes have hit trains, data centers, gas stations, and educational institutions, and on 28 September, a drone set fire to the National Academy of Sciences in central Kyiv as people inside fled through the windows.

A Ukrainian Hornet drone struck a Russian radar system about 120 kilometers behind the front, Taras Myshak, senior communications officer of the 59th Separate Assault Brigade of Unmanned Systems, said on Suspilne on 28 September, ArmyInform reported. The brigade's Signum unmanned systems battalion carried out the strike about a week earlier, he added.

Russia's air defenses depend on radars to see Ukrainian drones and missiles coming. Every radar it loses weakens that watch and gives the next Ukrainian strike a better chance of getting through.

According to Myshak, the target was a "quite expensive" Russian radar system.

A radar system is effectively the "eyes" of the Russian air defense system: it detects aerial targets, determines their coordinates, and transmits information to other elements of the system.

Russians continue probing Ukrainian defenses

Russian forces in the brigade's zone, roughly along the Donetsk Oblast border, continue to operate in small infantry groups and use infiltration tactics, Myshak says. At the same time, the Russians are trying to cut Ukrainian logistics, he adds, saying that the brigade is effectively holding the Russian army back from infiltrating into Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

The Russians' main means in this sector remain drones and infantry, the serviceman says. The number of infantry has decreased somewhat compared with previous periods, but the pressure from the enemy has not stopped, he adds.

"Of course, they will try, they will constantly probe, so to speak, our defense with their infiltrations. And likewise with drones, of various ranges, working on logistics, making it impossible for us to enter positions, to deliver everything necessary to the positions, in order to make our defense impossible," Myshak emphasized.

At the same time, Ukrainian troops are trying not only to defend against these actions but also to deprive the Russians of radars, electronic warfare systems, and other equipment, the serviceman says. "We likewise don't let them relax," he said.

Ukraine systematically knocks out the "eyes" of Russian air defense

In October 2024, Ukraine's military said it had hit a Russian Nebo-M radar station with ATACMS ballistic missiles to blunt Moscow's ability to spot and shoot down aircraft and missiles, Reuters reported. The military estimated each such system at more than $100 million.

Ukraine is systematically increasing its use of medium-range strike drones, which can hit targets up to 200 kilometers deep inside enemy territory, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry reported in May this year. Russian air defenses and radars are among the main priorities of such operations, as their destruction weakens the system for detecting and intercepting aerial targets, the ministry said. Medium-class drones, including the FP-2, Hornet, and Bulava, play a critical role in such strikes, the ministry noted.

According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Ukrainian forces struck at least 25 major Russian air defense and radar systems during April, about 12 of which were radar systems, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry also wrote in May this year.

A Russian strike on an apartment building in Kharkiv injured dozens of people, many of them children, early on 28 September, regional prosecutors reported. Through the rest of the day, Russian drones hit Kyiv, Dnipro, and other cities, killing civilians in several of them.

Russia has moved much of its aerial campaign to jet-powered drones that fly too fast for the cheap interceptors Ukraine built against older models. Every switch to a faster weapon reopens gaps in city defenses that Ukraine had only just begun to close.

Two floors partly destroyed in a Kharkiv apartment block

Russia hit a nine-story building in Kharkiv's Saltivskyi district around 04:00. By early afternoon, the count had risen to 43 injured, including 11 children, prosecutors said.

A man of 43 and a girl of 14 remain in hospital with blast wounds, and the others have moderate or light injuries, Kharkiv Oblast head Oleh Syniehubov said. Three children lived in the apartment that took the hit. Their father carried them out himself, and none of them was seriously hurt.

The strike hit the second floor and destroyed the ceiling between the third and fourth floors. Rescuers brought 32 people out of the building. Across the district, the attack damaged 18 apartment buildings and blew out more than 1,500 windows. More than 100 volunteers are helping city services seal them, Syniehubov added.

A resident who fled Kramatorsk a year and a half ago said her family never heard the blast itself.

"We didn't hear any explosion. Glass came pouring down, and a column of smoke stood there," Yuliia Baldzhy told Suspilne Kharkiv. "The children were sleeping in another room, and my husband and I barely squeezed through, grabbed them, and got out."

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said the city had not taken a hit "of this level" in some time. Officials are still establishing the weapon. Syniehubov named guided aerial bombs (KABs) and counted six of them over the oblast in the past day. Prosecutors named a UMPB-5, a Russian munition, as the preliminary version. Terekhov said the city was checking whether it was a KAB or a Banderol, a small cruise missile.

Russia has hit Kharkiv high-rises with guided bombs before. In November 2024, one such strike injured 25 people, including an infant.

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Kyiv hit through the night and into the day

In the middle of the working day, a Russian jet drone struck the main building of the National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv's historic center. The attack killed a woman and injured five people, the Kyiv City Military Administration said. Three of them were hospitalized, Klitschko said. People climbed out of windows to escape the fire.

"Russia will definitely get a response to this," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

Overnight and into the morning, Russian drones hit a gas station in Obolon, a café by a gas station, office buildings, and a 16-story residential building in Podil. The attacks injured three teenagers in Podil, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. A 17-year-old boy was hospitalized.

Nationwide, Russia launched 165 drones overnight, 79 of them jet-powered, the Air Force reported. Air defenses downed or suppressed 112, and hits were recorded at 14 locations.

The capital is now under attack daily. On 27 September, Russian strikes injured nine people in Kyiv, and Russia hit a Kyiv data center twice. That evening, a Russian drone struck the Stolychnyi market in Sofiivska Borshchahivka, just outside the city, and killed two people. Zelenskyy wrote that one of the two killed in Kyiv Oblast was a citizen of Azerbaijan.

Deaths in Dnipro and Synelnykove

Around 11:15, a Russian drone hit a business center in central Dnipro, killing three people. The number of injured rose to 15, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast head Oleksandr Hanzha said. Rescuers led 47 people out of the burning building, regional council head Mykola Lukashuk said.

"Nearby are residential buildings, a park, a library, offices, shops. The center of Dnipro. In the middle of the working day, hundreds of people are here," Hanzha wrote.

In Synelnykove, a Russian strike on a logistics company's branch killed one person. It injured three others, including a 15-year-old boy now in hospital in serious condition.

Overnight, Russian drones also hit infrastructure in the Vasylkivka community and a market in Nikopol.

Strikes across other regions

In Kharkiv Oblast on 27 September, a Russian FPV drone killed a 67-year-old driver in Shestakove, prosecutors said. A drone on fiber-optic control also killed a 41-year-old woman in a car in Velykyi Burluk and injured a 46-year-old man.

Explosions sounded in Poltava overnight. In Rivne Oblast, a Russian attack damaged a detached house without injuring anyone. In Odesa Oblast, Russia struck a warehouse, and an evening attack injured a man of 62 and a woman of 63. Zelenskyy also listed a Palau-flagged ship hit in Odesa Oblast and an ice cream plant damaged in Zhytomyr Oblast, in the same post.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has again told US officials that Russia can capture Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast within several months, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Speaking to the UN General Assembly on 24 September, Zelenskyy said this was the latest in a long series of similar promises as Russia has spent nearly five years trying to seize the region. He said Putin has made such promises 17 or 18 times, repeatedly pushing the deadline further back.

He contrasted those promises with Russia’s heavy battlefield losses and relatively limited territorial gains.

Russia has paid a huge price for its Donetsk offensive

Zelenskyy said Russian forces suffered 248,964 troops killed or severely wounded between January and August 2026.

He said Russia had captured only slightly more than 1,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory this year, while Ukraine had already liberated a significant portion of those gains.

Zelenskyy presented the figures as the human cost of Putin’s continued attempt to seize Donetsk, arguing that Russia is paying an enormous price for relatively limited territorial gains.

“Always the same: ‘Just a few more months,’” Zelenskyy said, adding that Putin would again fail to meet his latest deadline.

The Russian offensive is also facing a recent setback in northern Donetsk. Ukraine launched Operation Vivaldi in September to clear Russian infiltrators and retake ground near Lyman, disrupting Russia’s plan to encircle the fortified cities of the Donetsk “Fortress Belt.”

Ukrainian forces have reported retaking several settlements and clearing up to 125 square kilometers in the operation, although the full scope of the offensive remains undisclosed.

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Zelenskyy also warned that Russia’s ambitions extend beyond Donetsk. After saying Putin would again fail to capture the region, he said Russia would continue seeking other Ukrainian cities, naming Odesa, Kharkiv and Dnipro, while also pointing to Russian pressure on Moldova and threats toward Poland and the Baltic states.

Russia continues to pour missiles and drones into Ukraine

The battlefield campaign has been accompanied by a sustained Russian long-range attack campaign against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure.

Since the beginning of 2026, Russia has launched more than 2,100 missiles against Ukraine, including more than 950 ballistic missiles, according to Zelenskyy.

Ballistic missiles are particularly difficult for Ukraine to counter because it has a limited supply of interceptors capable of engaging them. Russia’s heavy use of ballistic weapons is therefore contributing directly to civilian deaths and infrastructure destruction.

Over the first eight months of the year, Russia also used 63,000 attack drones of various types, Zelenskyy said. More than 7,700 were jet-powered Geran drones, which he described as particularly destructive and dangerous.

The newer jet-powered drones are faster and more advanced than earlier Shahed-type models, making them harder to intercept and adding to the pressure on Ukraine’s air defenses as Russia attacks cities and infrastructure.

Zelenskyy said Russia was using the drones continuously to disrupt economic activity and normal life in Ukrainian cities, including by making it harder for children to attend school.

The figures show the scale of the Russian campaign beyond the front line. Alongside its ground offensive, Russia is using sustained missile and drone strikes to kill civilians, destroy infrastructure, and exhaust Ukraine’s air-defense resources.

North Korean troops add to Russia’s war effort

Zelenskyy also highlighted North Korea’s direct involvement in Russia’s war, saying its troops have suffered heavy losses while gaining battlefield experience alongside Russian forces.

He said North Korea’s military capabilities were also benefiting from its cooperation with Russia, pointing to improvements in its ballistic missiles and drone capabilities.

Ukraine recently transferred two North Korean prisoners of war to South Korea. Zelenskyy said capturing the soldiers alive had been difficult and described one prisoner’s attempt to take his own life after realizing he was about to be captured.

He said the soldiers had been conditioned to believe they had to die rather than surrender.

“Do you really want to give such a force more time to learn how to fight?” Zelenskyy asked.

Zelenskyy calls for de-escalation before winter

Zelenskyy separately warned that Russia could again target Ukraine’s energy and heating infrastructure this winter.

Russia has already intensified attacks on Ukraine’s energy system ahead of the cold season.

Russia has also explicitly threatened to “freeze” Ukraine this winter, with its Defense Ministry linking the threat to attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. The country spent much of the previous winter dealing with the consequences of Russian strikes on power and heating infrastructure, including blackouts and disruptions to heat supplies.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine expects the coming winter to be difficult but warned that if Russia continues attacking Ukraine’s energy and heating systems, Ukraine will make the winter painful for Russia as well.

He called for steps toward de-escalation before winter, saying that diplomacy and military strength were both needed to end the war.

OpenAI, the US company behind ChatGPT, will hand Ukraine's government free access to a cyber-defense system and its most powerful artificial-intelligence (AI) model, Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi reported. The company unveiled the deal alongside the UN General Assembly, pitching it as a cyber shield for the hospitals and power plants Russia keeps targeting.

Russia's war on Ukraine runs through wires as much as skies. Its hackers have hammered energy, transport, and defense networks for years, on top of the blackouts its missiles already force on Ukrainian cities—and Western tech firms have kept stepping in to help hold the line.

What the Daybreak system does

The tool is called Daybreak. It scans digital systems, finds their weak points fast, and helps specialists close them, the report said. Daybreak handles the whole job on its own—a loop of inventory, detection, verification, assignment, remediation, and confirming the fix held.

The system is meant to shield civilian infrastructure, hospitals and power stations among it, from cyberattacks, BBC reported. Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) logged nearly 6,000 cyberattacks in 2025.

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Ukraine also gets OpenAI's top model

The agreement opens access to GPT 5.6 Sol, OpenAI's flagship and strongest model. The company built it for complex professional work—programming, research, science, and cybersecurity, the report said. Both come as part of one agreement between OpenAI and Kyiv.

George Osborne—Britain's former chancellor and now Head of OpenAI for Countries—put the aim plainly.

"Protecting civilian infrastructure means defending it against both physical and digital attacks, so people can continue to live, work and access essential services," he said.

Independent analysts called the deal useful but not unprecedented. Rafe Pilling of cyber firm Sophos said it could serve as a force multiplier for a Ukrainian cyber defense that is already highly capable but heavily burdened. Jamie MacColl of the Royal United Services Institute noted that Western tech firms have been supporting Ukraine for some time, partly altruistically but also because they gain valuable intelligence from an active conflict, and that Ukraine already has access to AI tools from OpenAI's competitors, including Google. The same frontier AI capabilities cut both ways—spotting weaknesses helps defenders block hackers and attackers find a way in.

OpenAI's rival Anthropic has restricted access to its most powerful cyber models on those grounds, while OpenAI has opened them to some European firms and UK banks, BBC reported.

Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed on 22 September 2026 that it had surrounded Dobropillia, but the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) found no evidence to support the announcement. Dobropillia is a small town in Donetsk Oblast, known as the "pearl of the Donbas" for its coal industry, which has helped make Ukraine's Fortress Belt cities, holding the region from Russians since 2014, per RBC Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Vivaldi counteroffensive in Donetsk Oblast broke the northern arm of Russia’s plan to surround the fortified cities. ISW says Moscow’s Dobropillia claim diverts attention from that setback and portrays Ukrainian defenses as collapsing during the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, held on 21-28 September. The institute says Russia is likely spreading such claims to support its push for Ukraine’s capitulation.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian officers say Russian assault groups are still trying to break through toward Dobropillia, but have made no major gains.

Russia’s encirclement claim clashes with Ukrainian battlefield reports

Russia’s Ministry of Defense has claimed its troops were advancing toward Oleksandrivka, a village northwest of Dobropillia, but published no map to support its account.

At the same time, Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets said Ukrainian troops still held positions south and northeast of the city, which the experts said was inconsistent with the claimed encirclement.

ISW reported that a Ukrainian artillery reconnaissance battalion chief of staff said on 22 September that Russia had made no major advances near Dobropillia. He said Russian commanders kept postponing deadlines because of heavy losses and a gap between their plans and battlefield conditions.

A Ukrainian battalion officer said Russian troops were still trying to slip through Ukrainian lines in small groups.

How Dobropillia fits Russia’s plan to surround the fortress belt

Dobropillia is a transport hub on the southwestern approach to Ukraine’s “fortress belt,” which includes Kostiantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk, and Sloviansk. These cities have anchored Ukraine’s defense in Donetsk Oblast since 2022.

Ukraine’s Third Army Corps commander, Andrii Biletskyi, whose corps is conducting the Vivaldi counteroffensive north of Lyman, explained that Russian forces advancing through Dobropillia were meant to join another force coming from north of Lyman, behind the fortified cities, encircling them rather than attacking them head-on.

ISW had already assessed on 16 September that Vivaldi had made the two-sided plan infeasible. In its 22 September report, ISW said Russia’s false claim about Dobropillia partly aims to divert attention from those Ukrainian gains.

Russian assaults toward Dobropillia continue

The setback north of Lyman has not stopped Russia’s push toward Dobropillia. Ukrainian staff sergeant Dmytro Davydenko reported on 14 September a sharp increase in assault groups moving toward the city, sometimes more than his unit could engage. He said Ukrainian troops had mined, blocked, or destroyed the main approaches.

ISW reported that Russia was preparing armor and drone support for possible assaults using armored vehicles this fall. A Ukrainian battalion officer said fog might help Russia move that equipment, although Ukrainian reconnaissance and drones would make it difficult. He said Russian glide bombs continued to strike infrastructure in the area.

Ukraine's Vivaldi counteroffensive rolled back a Russian advance north of Lyman in Donetsk Oblast. However, Moscow shifted part of its forces south, Roman Pohorilyi, co-founder of the Ukrainian battlefield mapping project DeepState, told Radio NV. Russian troops are now infiltrating Mykolaivka, a key strongpoint on the approach to the fortress city of Sloviansk, Pohorilyi said.

The halted advance was one arm of Russia's plan to encircle Ukraine's Donetsk fortress belt—the fortified cities of Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, and Kostiantynivka. Pohorilyi warned that losing Mykolaivka would create serious problems for Sloviansk's defenders. Russia is still pressing toward Dobropillia on the belt's southwestern flank.

Pohorilyi said Russia formed a "claw" north of Lyman by exploiting Ukrainian brigades short of personnel and pushing small groups into their lines. Ukraine's Third Army Corps stabilized the area, built up forces, and counterattacked. The push "multiplied all [Russia's] previous efforts by zero," he said.

Russian forces had repeatedly tried to capture or bypass Lyman, Pohorilyi said. Russian groups still infiltrate the approaches to the city, although Ukrainian forces have stabilized the situation there.

The corps says Vivaldi's first two phases regained control of 125 square kilometers, including 50 that had been under Russian occupation. It reported liberating Shandryholove and Derylove, securing Drobysheve, and inflicting more than 3,000 Russian personnel losses. Those battlefield figures have not been independently verified.

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Pohorilyi noted that the area around Mykolaivka had, until recently, been under the responsibility of Ukraine's 11th Army Corps and is now under the Third Army Corps.

Ukrainian troops must now find and stop infiltrating Russian groups before they establish control, he said. Personnel shortages on the Lyman axis persist, although he said reinforcements are being distributed more evenly.

Operation Vivaldi and the wider fight for Donetsk's fortress belt

The Third Army Corps first disclosed Operation Vivaldi on 15 September after conducting the counteroffensive north of Lyman under information silence. Commander Andrii Biletskyi said the announced gains were only the first phase; the corps said its attacks had disrupted Russian supply routes.

A 60th Mechanized Brigade captain said Ukrainian units quietly assembled near Derylove and Drobysheve, then struck Russian drone launch sites at planned times so infantry could advance. The corps disclosed a second phase on 20 September.

Farther southwest, Dobropillia faces even heavier pressure, Pohorilyi said. Russia has concentrated large forces there and is pushing with relentless infantry across a wide front, backed by thousands of drones each month—reconnaissance, strike, FPV, and Lancets—with numbers still rising. Russian troops are moving on settlements south of Dobropillia to establish a strongpoint and push deeper into Donetsk Oblast.

The pressure is not new: Biletskyi said Ukrainian troops halted a Russian incursion there last year. After Moscow claimed on 22 September to have encircled the town, the Institute for the Study of War found no evidence to support the claim.

Russian missile strikes shut down or damaged four of Ukraine's largest steel plants in August and September, halving steel output and prompting the operator of the country's largest plant to call on the government to pass a dedicated rescue plan, RBC-Ukraine reported.

Russia's full-scale war has already cost Ukraine the Azovstal plant in Mariupol, one of its largest steel mills, and more than two years of disrupted production across the sector. The latest strikes hit plants that produce the bulk of remaining capacity, concentrated in a single month, in what the industry describes as a deep crisis for a sector that supplies 6% of the country's GDP.

Steel output halved as missiles hit plants producing 70% of Ukraine's steel

The 11 August strike on Zaporizhstal killed seven workers and injured 21 as they headed for a shelter, Metinvest said; a second ballistic strike on the plant followed on 27 August. Two died and 13 were injured at ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih, and five were killed at Kametstal. Russia also hit the Dnipro Metallurgical Plant. On 12 September, Russia struck both Zaporizhstal and ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih again with ballistic missiles.

Zaporizhstal and Kametstal, both part of the Metinvest group, stopped entirely. ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih—Ukraine's largest steel plant—partially shut down. Zaporizhstal and ArcelorMittal alone produce more than 70% of Ukraine's steel.

August steel production fell to 277,000 tons, down 57.3% year on year and 39.4% from July, according to Ukrmetalurhprom data cited by GMK Center. Rolled-metal output dropped to 270,000 tons.

Strikes, a port blockade, and rising costs hit at once

The strikes came on top of a Black Sea port blockade that has shut down maritime exports of iron ore and steel since late July. A 30% increase in rail tariffs took effect on 1 August. Alternative routes—rail through western border crossings, Danube ports, and roads—can carry at most 50% of what the Black Sea ports handled, GMK Center analyst Andrii Hlushchenko said. Steelmakers also have to compete with farmers for that limited rail capacity.

Rail exports of iron ore and metals dropped 2.5 times in the first 15 days of September compared with the same period last year, Ukrzaliznytsia said. Shipping iron-ore pellets through European ports costs $50–60 per ton, making many deliveries unprofitable.

The steel sector generated 6% of Ukraine's GDP last year, brought in 13% of all foreign-currency earnings, and paid UAH 27 billion (about $606 million) into budgets between January and July. Deputy chair of the parliamentary economic committee Dmytro Kysylevskyi called the situation "a perfect storm."

Meanwhile, Türkiye re-rolls Russian slabs and sells the resulting steel on Ukraine's domestic market. China uses cheap Russian energy to undercut Ukrainian prices.

"We are effectively importing Russian metal in the form of finished products," Ukrmetalurhprom President Oleksandr Kalenkov said.

ArcelorMittal calls for a Cabinet rescue resolution

ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih CEO Mauro Longobardo said the government should pass a dedicated Cabinet resolution assigning specific tasks and deadlines to multiple agencies at once.

"No single agency can solve the full set of problems. Without a single document with assigned responsibilities and deadlines, each issue is dealt with in isolation and stalls," ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih representatives said.

The resolution should cover EU negotiations on deferring the carbon border tax (CBAM) until at least the end of martial law plus one year, restoring steel quotas to last year's level, stabilizing rail tariffs, securing long-term electricity contracts for industry, and launching anti-dumping investigations against Turkish and Chinese imports, Longobardo said.

Ukraine's Economy and Environment Ministry said it is in talks with the European Commission on easing CBAM and expanding quotas. A Cabinet source told the outlet that Black Sea trade negotiations with Russia are possible in October, after the Duma elections that ended on 20 September.

Four foreign volunteers serving in the Babai rifle battalion are training to operate FPV drones in Ternopil Oblast in western Ukraine, where they have formed a dedicated drone team, Suspilne reported on 22 September.

Ukraine's military increasingly looks to unmanned systems for roles traditionally carried out by soldiers. In May, an adviser to the commander of Ukraine's Third Army Corps said the corps planned to replace roughly 30% of its infantry with ground robotic systems by the end of 2026 "to save the lives of our soldiers." The plan concerns ground robots rather than FPV aircraft, but reflects the broader move toward using unmanned systems on the battlefield.

From mortars to FPV drones

The team was assembled by Harry, a British volunteer who has fought in Ukraine since arriving in March 2022. He served as a machine gunner in Kharkiv and during the Kharkiv counter-offensive, as well as in Bakhmut and Zaporizhzhia.

Before coming to Ukraine, Harry served with People's Defense forces against ISIS in Syria. He said Ukraine's battlefield is fundamentally different, with drones and artillery making combat more dangerous.

For Fuzzy, a former British Army infantryman and counterterrorism specialist, the transition came after more than two years as a mortar operator. He arrived in April 2022 and initially trained Ukrainian defenders before moving into combat roles.

Fuzzy said he had initially been reluctant to switch from mortars to FPVs but found the drones not as difficult to operate as he had expected after training for more than two months.

Not everyone on the team flies. Rupert, who served in the British and Israeli armies, called Ukraine the clearest case of right against wrong since 1939 and said anyone who does nothing will regret it. His role on the team is technical: setting up antennas and checking drones before flights. "The younger guys can fly," he said.

Mac, an American with no previous military service, joined the war in a different role. He arrived in February 2025 and served with the Azov brigade as a logistics specialist in Donbas. Ukraine first appeared on his radar with the 2014 Maidan protests, he said, and when Russia's full-scale invasion began—"seeing the massacre in Bucha, the maternity hospital blown up in Mariupol"—he called it a higher calling and began preparing to come.

Adapting to the battlefield

The volunteers came to Ukraine with different backgrounds and have taken different roles during the war. Harry assembled the FPV team from fighters he had served with in different Ukrainian units. Fuzzy said the changing nature of the war made the transition necessary.

"The war has changed so much that what I was teaching could no longer be applied everywhere," Fuzzy added. "At this stage of the war, we have to keep pace with the times—everything is improving now."

Harry said his long-term goal is to live permanently in Ukraine and open a business. "I see Ukraine as my home," he said. "I want to defend not just the Ukrainian people but also the place where I want to live the rest of my life."

Russia is trying to "scare Europe" through hybrid attacks so that it provides less support to Ukraine, but Moscow has neither an interest in nor the capability to escalate to a full-scale military confrontation with NATO, Finnish President Alexander Stubb told Politico on 21 September during an interview on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly—even as other European leaders warn that Russian strikes on NATO territory could come within months.

Ukraine critically needs Western support as Russia's full-scale invasion continues. NATO's PURL program has provided about 75% of all Patriot battery missiles and 90% of the missiles used in other air defense systems since its launch last summer, according to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on 3 February. Some countries are also hubs for defense companies that produce weapons for Ukraine. Russia is trying to pressure such countries, including through hybrid attacks. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and the head of the Czech security service have warned that Russia could strike NATO territory within months. The Finnish president says his own intelligence sees activity but no imminent military threat, and calls it an "overreaction" when intelligence services tell their neighbors they are next for a Russian invasion.

Finnish intelligence sees Russian activity but no imminent military threat, Stubb says

Stubb calls claims by some intelligence services that Europe is next for a Russian invasion an "overreaction" and says he sees no evidence of this.

"We think we have to be vigilant and awake. But, you know, we have the longest border in NATO with Russia, it's half the border. In our intelligence we see that there is activity but no imminent military threat right now," Stubb added.

He says Russia will continue hybrid attacks, so Europe must be prepared and support Ukraine

Europe should prepare for Russia's "continued hybrid and sabotage attacks," but should not "overreact" to them, as Russia wants to scare its allies so that they slow down their support for Ukraine, the Finnish president said.

"And any time we overreact to a hybrid attack, they have actually won the battle in that particular way," Stubb told Politico.

Europe should remain "cool, calm and collected" during such Russian intimidation, the Finnish president said.

Germany's recent decision to officially hold Russia responsible for an attempted drone attack in Leipzig is "exactly what you need to do," Stubb said.

"You need to point the finger and say, we know what you're doing, and these are the consequences," he added.

A pro-Kremlin group, Global Citizens Against War 1984, issued an ultimatum to Latvia, Poland, and Portugal to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine by 7 October, threatening to disrupt defense companies in those countries.

Warnings from Warsaw and Prague paint a different picture

Russia could carry out "accidental" drone or missile strikes against NATO countries supporting Ukraine in an attempt to weaken the Alliance's integrity and persuade members that Article 5 is more theoretical than practical, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in parliament on 17 September, citing NATO, Ukrainian, and Polish intelligence assessments.

"There is a real risk that drones or other types of missiles could enter the territory of one or several NATO countries on the eastern flank," Tusk said.

The head of the Czech security service warned separately that Russia could undertake a limited incursion, false-flag provocations, and a massive influence campaign in a matter of months rather than years.

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.

NATO's top generals gathered in Copenhagen, and Ukraine was at the center of the table. The Alliance's Military Committee, its 32 chiefs of defense and two strategic commanders, met to reaffirm support for Ukraine, accelerate its readiness, and appoint a new chairman, Ukraine's General Staff said.

The meeting comes as intelligence services and Western leaders warn that Russia may be preparing to move against NATO itself, not only Ukraine. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has recently told his parliament that intelligence points to Russian plans for drone and missile strikes on NATO countries.

Ukraine anchors the agenda

The annual conference, held in Copenhagen and chaired by Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone alongside the Alliance's two strategic commanders, followed up on decisions from the recent NATO summit in Ankara and centered on deterrence, defense, and new technology, with Ukraine running through it all, according to the NATO Representation in Ukraine.

Cavo Dragone said the Alliance maintains its unwavering support for Ukraine, and that allies continue to send equipment, conduct training, and provide aid while absorbing the hard lessons of Ukraine's defense.

The chair calls out Russia

Cavo Dragone framed the moment bluntly. The Alliance had again seen "the reckless behavior of Russia, including airspace violations, drone incidents, hybrid activities," he said at a joint press conference. He credited allied forces for their swift responses to those incidents and vowed the Alliance would defend every inch of its territory.

Germany's Breuer takes the helm

The chiefs have also elected General Carsten Breuer, Germany's chief of defense, as the next chair of the Military Committee, NATO's highest military body. He will take over in the summer of 2027 for a three-year term, succeeding Cavo Dragone.

Breuer, Germany's chief of defense since 2023, was the front-runner, and his selection, backed by Washington, hands the role to Europe's largest military spender and signals Germany's growing weight in the Alliance's command.

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.

A man who volunteered to fight for Ukraine has landed in a Russian prison—seized not on the battlefield but on another continent, according to an investigation by Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat (HS). He had gone to West Africa for civilian work when a Russia-aligned junta grabbed him and handed him to Moscow.

Russia has turned the Sahel's coup governments into clients, trading security for mining access. Its grip now reaches far enough that in what Yle calls the first such case, a man who once fought against Moscow was picked up on another continent and delivered to its courts—the war's reach no longer stops at Ukraine's borders.

From Ukraine's army to an African gold mine

The 50-year-old, identified in the reporting only as Mikael, joined a Ukrainian army unit soon after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. Fluent in Finnish and Russian, he later worked as a liaison between foreign fighters and Ukrainian troops. His return to Finland at the end of winter 2025 was abrupt: Ukrainian authorities had opened an investigation into his handling of funds and imported cars.

HS's investigation also found he had given false information about himself to both his family and Finnish authorities, and that his Finnish criminal record includes embezzlement and fraud. By spring, he joined about ten men bound for Sierra Leone to guard a gold mine, HS reported, as Yle relayed. They wanted work that wasn't the war.

Handcuffed hours after arrival

When most of the group moved on, Mikael and an Italian named Paolo—another Ukraine volunteer—continued to Burkina Faso for the same mining firm. Within hours of reaching their hotel in Ouagadougou in June 2025, men blindfolded and handcuffed the two and drove them off, according to the same HS investigation, carried by NV. Burkina Faso's Russia-backed junta found Mikael's Ukrainian military passport and identified both as men who had fought in Ukraine. Italy's embassy freed Paolo after three months. Mikael stayed behind.

Stateless on paper—but maybe not

In autumn 2025, Burkina Faso secretely handed Mikael to Russia, which charged him with "mercenarism"—the statute carrying seven to 15 years that Moscow uses against foreigners who fought for Ukraine. His trial lasted about two months. Moscow's Basmanny District Court, which handles cases the state treats as sensitive, ruled in November 2025 and classified its decision. The sentence and its finality stay unknown, and he now sits in a prison in Samara. Mikael holds no Finnish passport: born in the Soviet Union, he lived in Finland on a residence permit and traveled on documents marking him "stateless"—a status HS's investigation calls into question.

HS's investigation, though, found he likely holds a Russian passport—a status Russia has not confirmed, and one that may explain why Helsinki never treated him as its own to rescue. His relatives pressed Finland's Foreign Ministry to help while he was still in Burkina Faso, but it never demanded his return. Russia tried him, it seems, as a foreigner—a citizen would have faced treason charges. Finnish police, the security service, and the Foreign Ministry are now investigating, with National Bureau of Investigation commissioner Sami Liimatainen saying they aim to locate a missing man and suspect no crime.

Ukraine’s Naftogaz has signed a memorandum with Hungarian energy company MOL to build fuel storage facilities in Hungary near the Ukrainian border, creating additional reserves outside the reach of Russian strikes.

Acting Naftogaz CEO Sergiy Fedorenko said the project will diversify fuel supply routes and provide storage capacity outside areas exposed to Russian attacks. He said this could make fuel supplies more reliable for Ukrainian consumers while also expanding cross-border energy infrastructure.

The agreement was announced during the Carpathian Economic Forum, held as part of the first summit of the Carpathian Eight regional cooperation format.

Why Ukraine needs fuel storage outside the country

Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s fuel infrastructure, including oil and gas production facilities, filling stations, and other sites needed to supply fuel across the country. These attacks increase in the lead up to and during winter months, where the impacts on civilians are especially severe.

Naftogaz said Russian attacks destroyed 37 of its filling stations during the first seven months of 2026. The company said fuel availability is particularly important for emergency services, medical teams, public transport, and communities near the front line.

Russia has also attacked Ukraine’s oil and gas production facilities. In August, Naftogaz said a major Russian attack damaged seven Ukrnafta production facilities and forced some of them offline, reducing oil and gas production.

Storing fuel in Hungary would give Ukraine additional reserves beyond the reach of these attacks and another route for bringing petroleum products into the country if domestic infrastructure is damaged.

Fedorenko said the agreement could make fuel supplies to Ukrainian consumers more reliable while supporting the development of energy infrastructure connecting the two countries.

Ukraine-Hungary ties improve

The deal comes as Kyiv and Budapest have begun rebuilding relations following years of tensions under former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Péter Magyar replaced Orbán as Hungary’s prime minister in 2026, and the new government has moved toward closer cooperation with Ukraine, although major disagreements remain. 

In June, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha described the relationship as entering a “new page” after Kyiv and Budapest reached an agreement addressing longstanding disputes over the rights of Hungary’s ethnic minority in Ukraine. 

The two countries have since continued talks on normalizing relations. In September, the relationship was showing tentative signs of improvement, including progress on minority-rights issues and preparations for a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Magyar.

Energy cooperation has already featured in the renewed dialogue. During a Ukrainian government visit to Budapest in 2025, the two sides discussed Hungarian participation in modernizing Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and agreed to continue economic cooperation.

The improvement in relations has not eliminated disagreements. Hungary continues to block progress on parts of Ukraine’s EU accession process, citing concerns over the rights of Hungary’s ethnic minority in Ukraine.

The planned fuel-storage facilities therefore mark a practical area of cooperation between the two countries at a time when Russia’s attacks are making secure fuel supplies increasingly important for Ukraine.

Russia has destroyed 2.1 million square meters of Ukraine’s modern warehouse space out of a total 5 million, wiping out more than two-fifths of the country’s storage capacity as Moscow expands its air campaign against Ukraine’s economy, according to the Financial Times.

Russia is increasingly targeting the infrastructure that keeps Ukraine’s economy running and its citizens supplied, including warehouses, distribution centers, railways, fuel stations, and other logistics facilities. By hitting these sites far from the front line, Russia is disrupting the supply of everyday goods and making it harder for Ukrainians to find what they need.

Around 900,000 square meters of warehouse space has been destroyed in recent months alone, according to Ukrainian entrepreneur Ruslan Shostak, founder of the Eva and Varus retail chains, cited by the Financial Times.

Russia is destroying Ukraine’s warehouse capacity

The loss of warehouse space is creating problems for businesses across Ukraine.

Russian strikes have hit warehouses and distribution centers belonging to major Ukrainian retailers, pharmaceutical companies, publishers, and logistics operators.

One recent strike destroyed a warehouse belonging to toy retailer Budynok Ihrashok near Kyiv, FT reported. The facility was hit by a jet-powered drone and caught fire, but firefighters were unable to intervene while Russian drone attacks were continuing.

The company now plans to distribute its inventory among smaller warehouses and its network of 67 stores rather than rely on a single large distribution center.

The destruction of large warehouses is forcing companies to rethink how they store and distribute goods, increasing costs and making supply chains more vulnerable to further attacks.

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The attacks are spreading across Ukraine’s economy

Warehouses are not the only economic infrastructure being targeted.

Russian drones have increasingly struck railway infrastructure in western Ukraine, while fuel stations are also being hit farther from the front line. These attacks can disrupt the movement of goods even when they do not directly destroy the businesses producing them.

The result is a widening pressure on Ukraine’s logistics network. Companies must find alternative storage and transport routes while operating under the continuing threat of Russian airstrikes.

The attacks are part of Russia’s broader long-range air campaign against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure. Moscow is increasingly using drones and missiles to hit economic targets deep inside Ukraine, putting strain on the systems that allow the country’s economy to function during the war.

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’s Third Army Corps says its forces have liberated Shandryholove and Derylove and established full control over Drobysheve in Donetsk Oblast as part of its ongoing “Vivaldi” offensive.

Ukraine is taking the initiative in northern Donetsk, where Russia has spent years trying to seize the remaining Ukrainian-held territory. By retaking ground and disrupting Russian logistics, the “Vivaldi” counteroffensive could complicate Moscow’s plans for a broader offensive in the Donbas.

According to the corps, Ukrainian forces and attached units have regained control of 125 square kilometers during the first two phases of the operation, including 50 square kilometers that had been under Russian occupation.

The corps said the operation has also inflicted more than 3,000 Russian personnel losses across the two phases, including 800 more during the latest phase. 

Ukraine expands gains in “Vivaldi” offensive

The Third Army Corps said its forces captured Shandryholove and Derylove and established full control over Drobysheve during the second phase of the offensive.

The offensive is aimed at degrading Russian forces operating in the area, with the corps saying it is targeting elements of Russia’s 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies and 1st Guards Tank Army.

Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, commander of the Third Army Corps, said Ukrainian assault groups are preceded by drones and unmanned ground vehicles.

The corps said its heavy bombers have been used to deliver kamikaze ground robots more than 10 kilometers behind Russian lines. Artillery and drone units have targeted Russian command posts, communications nodes, logistics, crossings, and reserves.

Ukrainian air defense and electronic warfare units have also helped shield the area of operations, according to the corps.

The operation involved units from the 60th Mechanized Brigade, 125th Heavy Mechanized Brigade, 3rd Assault Brigade, KRAKEN, the 3rd Separate Reconnaissance Battalion, and the corps’ 25th Anti-Tank Battalion, along with attached units.

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“One of the most important victories for Ukraine in 2026”

Open-source analyst Clément Molin, who has tracked the offensive using publicly available information, described the developments as highly significant.

“This is one of the most important victories for Ukraine in 2026, which will delay the offensive on northern Donbas,” Molin said.

He also cautioned against claims that a large Russian grouping had been encircled, while assessing that Ukrainian advances had put pressure on Russian positions and supply routes.

The information surrounding the operation has remained limited, with Ukrainian forces maintaining operational security around their movements.

The Third Army Corps said the offensive is continuing and that further developments are expected soon.

Ukrainian engineers near the front rewrite their drones' software every couple of days. A NATO army needs about six months to push the same update. That gap in speed is the central challenge for the Western trainers working with Ukrainian troops in Poland, who say Ukraine's wartime tempo is exposing how slowly the West moves in peacetime, the Business Insider reports.

Russia's war forces the Ukrainian Army to buy, train, and adapt at a pace peacetime armies are not built for, and its experience is pushing NATO to confront how much its own bureaucracy slows it down.

The alliance has studied that experience without yet fully absorbing it: in an Estonian war game last winter, a ten-person Ukrainian drone team wiped out two NATO battalions in a day.

Now NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is calling for a large-scale transformation of the West's defense industry so its armies can react faster.

Two speeds meet in Poland

The place where those speeds collided was Camp Jomsborg, a base Norway built in an eastern Polish forest in a matter of months. There, under an operation called Legio, trainers from across northern Europe drill Ukrainian soldiers while the Ukrainians hand their front-line lessons back to NATO.

The camp sits, as its operations officer, a major identified only as John, put it,  at "the mental and geographical middle point between war in the east and peacetime mechanism in the West."

A drone update tells the story

Brigadier General Atle Molde, who commands the task force, put the gap in numbers. If a Western drone needs new software, he said, "you have to send it to a Western country or a company, and an update takes six months." 

In Ukraine, "they have the engineers sitting close to the front updating every two days, every two weeks, developing software, adapting it to genuine situations."

Molde said he wants to see greater initiative in innovation within Western armies, but to achieve that, "it has to be some major changes that have to be done on all levels when it comes to legislation."

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.

Drones get most of the attention in this war, and deservedly so—but the snipers are still out there, two Ukrainian marksmen told Army Inform, and the same drones have made their work far harder to survive. It now turns on watching, not shooting: long stretches at a hidden position, a thermal scope always running, and a constant fight to stay unseen.

Across the drone-saturated front, cheap cameras overhead have rewritten nearly every job—infantry, logistics crews, and now marksmen—so that surviving depends less on firepower than on never being seen.

The job is mostly watching

The men—a squad leader in a special-purpose sniper company, callsign Efiop, and his partner Maister—serve in the National Guard of Ukraine's 3rd Operational Purpose Brigade Spartan. Maister worked a factory milling machine before joining in 2022. He saw what Russian troops were doing, he said, and Ukrainian children started dying: he went to fight for the children, and he has a daughter of his own. A team takes a sector and holds it around the clock through a thermal scope.

"We can sit 40 days and never fire a shot. Or we go in, and in a single day we take down a lot of them," Efiop said.

His longest stint at one spot ran 48 days, and the greatest distance he has worked was 2,540 meters—more than a mile and a half.

Up to 154 pounds on your back, over 12 miles to cross

Reaching a position is often the hardest part. A sniper carries a vest, helmet, an assault rifle and the sniper rifle, and what supplies will fit—60 to 70 kilograms, or 132 to 154 pounds. They stay more than a month, and a month's worth will not go on one back. That load sometimes crosses more than 20 kilometers, over 12 miles, of open ground with no tree line to hide behind.

"You don't walk, you run," Maister said.

Lately it has eased a little: food can be dropped in by a heavy Vampire bomber drone.

Drones rewrote the rulebook

The biggest shift came from the sky. Russian drones with thermal cameras can see a bullet in flight because it is warm, Efiop said, and then burn out the position.

"They caught us like that once. We took out three, they saw where we fired from and burned the spot. We moved right away, and everyone lived," Efiop noted.

Now the snipers watch remotely from a safer place instead of lying behind the scope for hours. Once, that safer setup saved a life outright: a mortar round came in and pierced only the rifle scope.

Salvo, a large black-and-tan dog rescued as a puppy in Pokrovsk, Donetsk Oblast, now visits patients at the UNBROKEN rehabilitation center in Lviv with his owner, volunteer Kostyantyn Bidnyi, according to a 16 September report by Ratusha. The visits bring dogs and patients together for play, simple activities, or time spent nearby.

The visits are part of UNBROKEN ANIMALS, a volunteer project in which people bring their own household dogs to the rehabilitation center. UNBROKEN says its center has treated more than 20,000 wounded Ukrainians since Russia's full-scale invasion and provides physical, psychological and psychosocial rehabilitation, making the dog visits one small part of a much larger rehabilitation setting.

Patients can choose whether to play with a dog, walk it on a leash or simply spend time nearby. One patient, Vyacheslav, said, “I almost never skip the dog sessions.”

In one session, a blind patient who had lost both arms could not take part in most of the usual activities with Salvo. Volunteers described the dog's size, coloring, ears and tail to him, and he tried to touch Salvo, spoke to him, and then talked with people nearby, Bidnyi told Ratusha.

The activities can include throwing a ball, giving a command, offering a treat or walking the dog on a leash. Bidnyi said these simple actions can work on movement and coordination while the dog provides emotional motivation.

“We don't treat anyone,” Bidnyi said. Doctors and rehabilitation specialists handle patients' medical recovery, while the volunteers provide emotional support.

Salvo is one of several dogs that take part in the sessions. Ratusha reports that two or three owners usually come with their pets, giving patients different dogs to interact with. The animals are not specially trained working dogs; they are the volunteers' own pets, who accompany them to UNBROKEN on designated days. What starts as a regular outing becomes an hour of volunteering before the pairs return to their usual routines.

Salvo's name carries both halves of his story: in Latin, the language medicine still runs on, salvo means I heal, I keep safe — and the same root gave English "salvo," an artillery volley.

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.”

Ukraine's arms industry wants the government to scrap a steep fee on weapons exports, warning it undercuts their prices just as Europe's defense market opens, RBC-Ukraine reported. The same fee has opened a second fight in Kyiv, where parliament this week declined to turn its revenue into money for the army.

Russia's war on Ukraine has pushed Europe into rearming, and Ukraine's battle-tested arms makers are among the few that can deliver at scale right now—an opening that domestic red tape could blunt, handing the advantage to competitors just as the market grows.

A €60 billion European window—and a fee in the way

The push comes as Europe opens a major market for Ukrainian weapons. The EU's €90 billion Ukraine Support Loan for 2026-2027 reserves €60 billion for defense purchases, and partners increasingly want weapons built on their own soil. International partners report more than 200 cooperation approaches to Ukrainian firms still without a decision, according to the industry's press release. Producers link the fee fix to Build with Ukraine, a co-production push they consider strategically significant.

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Ukraine’s Build with Ukraine has 200-plus foreign cooperation bids pending decision. Its arms industry, representing 400-plus firms, wants to help fix mechanism

Parliament won't route the money to the army

On 15 September, the Verkhovna Rada—Ukraine's parliament—rejected a bill in first reading that would have sent fee revenue collected from 1 August 2026 into a special budget fund for the Defense Ministry, half for buying, modernizing, and repairing weapons, half for soldiers' pay. The vote left the fee itself untouched, since it rests on the Cabinet resolution, and settled only that its revenue will not be earmarked for the army.

The fee producers want gone

The Ukrainian Council of Arms Manufacturers, joined by other defense and employer groups, prepared proposals to rework the July government resolution, No. 875. They want the fee—20% on finished goods and technologies, 30% on parts—cut to zero, or capped at 5%. Firms must also pay upfront, before any foreign payment lands, with no refund guaranteed if a deal collapses. A UAH 15 million (about $337,000) threshold shuts out the small test shipments new clients often begin with.

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Ukraine put an Italian-Swiss Skyguard into combat duty. The missile inside is a Cold War design derived from the American Sparrow

The fee has drawn complaints since the resolution took effect in early July. Ihor Fedirko, the council's executive director, earlier said the 30-day review window was welcome but warned it could clog into a bureaucratic queue as staff leave the agencies running it. One of the associations behind the submission calls the 30% rate on parts prohibitive, since Europe is where Ukrainian firms would undercut Chinese suppliers on price.

Ukraine has swung from banning weapons sales abroad to courting foreign buyers, and its defense sector now ranks among the country's fastest-growing industries. Wartime certification to NATO standards is turning that output into something European militaries can actually buy.

Ukraine's air defense forces have put another Western-supplied system to work as the country prepares for a fifth winter of Russian aerial strikes on its energy grid, Militarnyi reported. The 38th Anti-Aircraft Missile Regiment released the first public footage of the Italian-Swiss Skyguard/Aspide on combat duty.

Ukraine enters the 2026-2027 heating season with an interceptor gap that keeps widening. Patriot deliveries fell from 675 in 2023 to 364 last year and 264 projected for 2026, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. F-16 pilots have resorted to gun-only sorties when missiles run out. Every additional short-range system that covers drones and cruise missiles frees scarce high-end interceptors for the ballistic threats Russia keeps sending.

Ukraine just showed the system in action

The Ukrainian unit posted a video of crews loading missiles onto the launcher and the system standing watch.

The system arrived through two European pipelines. Spain delivered the first batch in November 2022, then-Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov confirmed. A month earlier, 19 Ukrainian troops had trained on the system at Spain's Zaragoza base. Madrid also asked Switzerland for re-export permission, Texty reported, since the Swiss firm Oerlikon Contraves — now Rheinmetall Air Defense — built the Skyguard fire control unit the missiles are paired with.

Italy pledged additional Skyguard units in February 2023. The Italian launchers differ from the Spanish ones. They carry a target-illumination radar and a TV tracking unit mounted directly on the launcher.

A Cold War-era missile in a drone war

Skyguard/Aspide, a related variant of Italy's Spada, is a short-range air defense system built to guard military sites and critical infrastructure from aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles, and drones. It pairs a Swiss fire control unit with Italian Aspide missiles derived from the American AIM-7 Sparrow, a radar-guided weapon the US Navy developed starting in the late 1940s to shoot down jet bombers during the Cold War. The system can engage targets at distances up to 12–25 km and altitudes from 15 m to 6,000 meters.

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.

Ukraine's largest arms-industry group says it is backing the country's drive to sell and co-produce weapons abroad, while pressing the government to fix two separate obstacles in its way. The Council of Defense Industry, which represents more than 400 companies, wants a costly new export-permit fee and a stalled joint-production program to be upgraded, it said on Facebook.

The two problems are distinct. Resolution 875, the wartime rules for shipping arms abroad, charges a 20-30 percent fee on export permits, which the industry says prices Ukrainian goods out of the market.

The export fee bites

Resolution 875, adopted in July, was intended to streamline exports, with a 30-day review period and a streamlined path for partner countries. But the fee has choked it: only about 10 small export contracts have been signed since exports began, and not one permit has been issued under the new rules, Militarnyi reports.

"Resolution 875 in its current form contains provisions that could substantially worsen the competitiveness of Ukrainian producers," the group says.

Build with Ukraine is a separate track

The program lets producers export their technology and set up joint production abroad, reaching EU markets, financing, and infrastructure, while partners fund weapons production inside Ukraine.

The program lets producers export their technology and set up joint production abroad, reaching EU markets, financing, and infrastructure, while partners fund weapons production inside Ukraine. Talks are underway with Denmark, Norway, and Germany.

President Zelenskyy has said $43 billion was raised for Ukraine's defense industry in 2025, floated a goal of partner states each spending 0.25 percent of their GDP on it, and stressed that no Ukrainian technology will reach countries tied to Russia.

The Council, whose ecosystem spans more than 360 manufacturers, 28 drone-pilot schools, and 20 defense venture funds, says it is ready to help refine the mechanism.

On pense souvent la guerre comme un moment profondément transformateur, qui modifie les logique sociales et rebat les cartes, modifiant les statuts sociaux, introduisant de nouvelles pratiques et de nouvelles relations avec l’État. Bien sûr, cela est vrai à bien des égards. Il n’y a rien d’ordinaire à vivre sous les bombardements, à prendre les armes ou à se mobiliser pour combattre. Cependant, la sociologie des sociétés en guerre démontre que les comportements en temps de guerre sont fortement ancrés dans les dynamiques sociales en temps de paix. Les transformations en temps de guerre sont enracinées dans les expériences sociales, l’histoire et les valeurs préexistantes.

Les analystes s’appuient souvent sur des schémas binaires familiers lorsqu’ils comparent la Russie et l’Ukraine : autoritarisme contre démocratie, cercle restreint vieillissant autour de Poutine contre jeune leadership ukrainien, agression contre résistance, et répression contre mobilisation. Mon analyse adopte une perspective différente, en explorant trois dimensions clés qui façonnent l’évolution des deux sociétés : l’importance de l’adaptation en tant que compétence sociale fondamentale ; la relation des citoyens à l’État ; et l’évolution des perceptions de soi et de l’autre.

A lire dans cet article (en anglais) pour lequel je remercie The Brookings Institution, et qui reprend les idées exprimées lors de la conférence que j’ai donnée dans le cadre de la 21e Raymond Aron Lecture à Washington DC le 5 juin dernier.

Un commentaire à chaud sur la vidéo enregisrée par l’ancien ministre de la défense Fedorov, où il formule une critique du fonctionnement politique du pays et appelle à des élections.
Vous entendrez parler de crise politique, de fragilisation de l’équipe présidentielle, de l’émergence d’un opposant politique. Rien de cela n’est faux, on rentre dans une zone de turbulence. Mais pour moi, le vrai sujet n’est pas forcément là.

Les critiques que l’ancien ministre fait dans sa vidéo ne sont pas nouvelles. Elles sont partagées par un grand nombre d’Ukrainiens: nécessité de faire vivre la démocratie, critique de la gestion d’équipe par le président, inacceptabilité de la corruption en temps de guerre. Comme je l’ai dit à plusieurs reprises, les Ukrainiens savent faire la part des choses entre ce qu’ils reprochent à leur président et à leur parlement, et la nécessité de soutenir leurs institutions pour préserver la souveraineté de l’Etat. Mais tout le monde sait que le jour où les élections se tiendront, ce bilan va peser.

Sur le fond, les critiques de Fedorov ne sont pas le signe d’un dysfonctionnement politique, mais plutôt d’un fonctionnement assez sain. Un acteur politique de premier plan se positionne comme une alternative à Zelensky. Ce n’est pas un militaire mais un civil; ce n’est pas non plus quelqu’un d’étranger à la défense de l’Ukraine. C’est une personnalité qui a des soutiens dans la société; il est populaire dans les milieux tech des forces armées et de la société. Fedorov a clairement la posture d’un canddiat à la prochaine présidentielle. Et c’est tout ce que l’on peut souhaiter à une démocratie: une pluralité de candidats portant des projets sérieux. Que cet opposant potentiel soit issu du cercle même des proches de Zelensky est aussi, finalement, très banal dans un fonctionnement démocratique. Il y a peut-être une crise politique, mais pas de crise systémique.

Ce qui est nouveau dans l’adresse de Fedorov, c’est cependant l’idée que les élections sont possibles. L’argument politique est recevable: la guerre s’est installée dans la durée, refuser la tenue d’élections, c’est aussi donner à la Russie une victoire en la laissant rythmer le timing du jeu politique ukrainien. Mais Fedorov ne parle pas seulement du principe. Sans rentrer dans le détail, il dit: la tenue d’élections est possible. L’Ukraine doit retrouver un processus d’alternance démocratique, sans attendre la sortie de loi martiale.

Et là, il faut se rappeler qui est Fedorov: ancien ministre de la numérisation qui a transformé une bureaucratie d’imprimante et de papier en un système modernisé et rapide. Ancien ministre de la Défense qui a accompagné l’innovation et l’esprit d’initiative qui permettent aujourd’hui à l’armée ukrainienne d’accomplir des choses que personne n’avait anticipées. S’il travaille vraiment à un projet permettant de tenir des élections en temps de guerre, nous avons tout intérêt à suivre le sujet de près. J’imagine que le vote électronique sera au coeur de ce projet – collègues spécialistes du sujet, réglez vos radars, car ce sera riche d’enseignements.

J’attends la suite avec intérêt plus qu’avec inquiétude. Une fois de plus, l’Ukraine pourrait être là où personne ne l’attend.

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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U.S. President Donald Trump is considering sending Ukraine an additional Patriot air defense system, a move that would mark his administration's first major weapons transfer to Kyiv, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on July 8, citing two defense officials.

The report is the latest in a series of contradictory messages from the Trump White House in recent days regarding military aid to Ukraine. While the Pentagon on July 2 announced a halt in weapons shipments to Kyiv due to dwindling U.S. stockpiles, Trump later claimed he wasn't responsible for the decision and wanted to send more weapons to Ukraine.

A U.S. defense official told the WSJ that Trump has asked the Pentagon to look into options for supplying Ukraine with more arms, including a Patriot air defense system. Officials are also reportedly exploring whether other nations can send Patriots to Kyiv.

The claim dovetails with recent media reports about the administration's plans to bolster Ukraine's air defenses. Axios reported on July 8 that the White House is pursuing a plan to have Germany sell another Patriot battery to Ukraine, with the U.S. and European allies splitting the cost of the purchase. Sources told the outlet that Trump also pledged to send 10 Patriot interceptor missiles to Kyiv.

If the U.S. provides Ukraine with an additional Patriot system, it would mark the first time Trump has approved a major military aid package to Kyiv that wasn't previously greenlighted by former U.S. President Joe Biden.

Washington has thus far provided Kyiv with three Patriots, a former Pentagon official told the WSJ. Germany has also sent three, while a group of European countries provided one. According to the official, not all systems are in use at the same time due to maintenance issues.

The U.S.-made air defense systems are in high demand around the world. Each system consists of two or three launchers, a radar, a command and control element, and interceptor missiles. Patriot missiles are also in short supply globally: Ukraine faces an urgent need for the munitions amid increased Russian aerial attacks, and the Guardian reported on July 8 that even the U.S. has only 25% of the interceptors required by its defense readiness plans.

According to one of the officials who spoke to the WSJ, the U.S. military would be able to supply an additional Patriot to Ukraine if ordered by the White House.

Putin throws ‘a lot of b*llshit’, Trump says as he ‘looks strongly’ at Russia sanctions bill

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 Kyiv IndependentAnna Fratsyvir

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

Ukraine's current ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, will be replaced in the near future, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha confirmed in an interview with Ukrainian Radio on July 8.

Earlier on July 8, a source in the Presidential Office told the Kyiv Independent that President Volodymyr Zelensky had informed Markarova of her pending dismissal.

"We can expect about 20 decrees dismissing and appointing new heads of foreign institutions," Sybiha said, specifically mentioning the U.S. as one of the planned replacements.

In his comments, Sybiha described Markarova as "one of our most successful ambassadors."

"She is extremely effective and charismatic, but surely every diplomat has a rotation cycle," he said. "I can confirm that the Ukrainian president's vision is to carry out rotations in all countries, both G7 and G20. That is, first and foremost, to strengthen these countries, in particular the U.S. track."

Zelensky and Sybiha on June 21 announced plans to overhaul Ukraine's diplomatic corps, teasing major personnel changes in a bid to secure better military aid packages and other support from international partners.

Zelensky discussed replacing Markarova specifically in a recent phone call with U.S. President Donald Trump, a source in the President's Office told the Kyiv Independent on July 7.

There are multiple "strong candidates" in the running to replace Markarova, the source said. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna, Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, and Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko are among the candidates, Bloomberg previously reported.

In his evening address, Zelensky said that a meeting with all Ukrainian ambassadors is scheduled for July 21. It was not immediately clear as to when the changes to the posts may take effect.

Markarova has served as Kyiv's ambassador to Washington since April 2021, and played a central role in coordinating U.S. military and financial support during the early phases of Russia's full-scale invasion.

The announcement of her dismissal comes at a high-stakes moment in relations between Kyiv and Washington. The U.S. Defense Department recently paused shipments of critical weapons systems, including Patriot air defense missiles and precision-guided munitions, even as Ukraine faces intensifying Russian attacks.

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

During the call with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, U.S. President Donald Trump proposed that Germany sell one of its own Patriot batteries to Ukraine.

The Kyiv IndependentAnna Fratsyvir

Ukraine's state energy giant Naftogaz has commissioned a new exploration well producing 383,000 cubic meters of natural gas per day through its subsidiary Ukrgazvydobuvannya, CEO Sergii Koretskyi announced on July 8.

The 5.7-kilometer deviated well was drilled and commissioned six weeks ahead of schedule as Ukraine works to boost domestic production amid Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure, including gas storage facilities in western Ukraine.

"This is a significant achievement, given the country's need for gas," Koretskyi said.

Naftogaz produces the lion's share of Ukrainian gas, but its production facilities were severely damaged in a series of Russian missile strikes earlier this year, reducing production by as much as 40%.

According to data from Naftogaz, Ukrgazvydobuvannya lost about 50% of its production due to shelling.

Ukrgazvydobuvannya managed to increase commercial gas production to 13.9 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2024 compared to 13.2 bcm in 2023, commissioning 83 new wells despite wartime conditions.

Ukraine previously produced 52 million cubic meters daily before Russia's full-scale invasion, but required 110-140 million cubic meters during winter months, covering the shortfall from underground storage.

Russian strikes have repeatedly targeted Ukraine's gas infrastructure, including a February 11 combined missile and drone attack that damaged Naftogaz production facilities in Poltava Oblast.

To secure winter supplies, Naftogaz has signed four contracts with Poland's Orlen for delivery of 440 million cubic meters of U.S. liquefied natural gas. The latest agreement, announced July 2, covers an additional 140 million cubic meters.

According to Bloomberg estimates, in 2025 Ukraine may import a record 5 billion cubic meters of gas from Europe.

Ukraine's gas storage situation has also deteriorated significantly, with underground reserves falling to 6.02 bcm as of May 11 — the lowest level in at least 11 years.

The facilities are operating at just 19.4% capacity, with 2.79 billion cubic meters less gas available than the previous year.

Ukraine’s minerals fund focus of private investment ahead of major recovery conference

This week, thousands of companies, business heads, and global leaders are headed to Rome for the fourth Ukraine Recovery Conference on July 10, with many companies hoping for more clarity around the future of a U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal. It’s been over two months since President Volodymyr Zelensky signed Washington’s so-called “minerals deal” — which, in reality, covers all Ukraine’s natural resources, including oil and gas, related infrastructure, and now, defense projects. While the Economy

The Kyiv IndependentDominic Culverwell

The United States has only about 25% of the Patriot missile interceptors it needs to meet Pentagon military plans, a shortage that led U.S. President Donald Trump's administration to pause a major transfer of weapons to Ukraine, the Guardian reported on July 8.

The decision to halt the delivery, made on July 2, followed an internal review showing low stockpiles of critical air defense systems. The depletion was largely due to recent U.S. operations in the Middle East, including the interception of Iranian missiles after strikes on the American Al Udeid airbase in Qatar, according to the Guardian.

According to officials familiar with the matter, the Pentagon's munitions tracker, used to measure the minimum supplies needed for U.S. war plans, showed Patriot interceptor levels had fallen below acceptable levels. That prompted concerns that sending more to Ukraine could put U.S. defense readiness at risk, the Guardian wrote.

The freeze reportedly affected Ukraine's two key arms transfer methods: drawdowns from Pentagon stockpiles and the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), through which the Defense Department orders new weapons from contractors.

Because U.S. orders take priority, Ukrainian requests for new weapons, including Patriot missiles, face years-long delays.

The pause came at a critical time for Kyiv, as Russia intensifies large-scale aerial attacks on Ukrainian cities. With limited options to acquire precision-guided and other key munitions, Ukrainian forces have increasingly relied on Western-supplied air defenses to counter the growing threat.

For its latest aid package, the U.S. had planned to send dozens of Patriot interceptors, along with Hellfire missiles, air-to-air Sparrows, GMLRS rockets, and anti-tank weapons, according to the Guardian.

NBC News reported on July 4 that U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unilaterally halted a weapons shipment to Ukraine despite internal military assessments showing the aid would not compromise American military readiness.

The assessment concluded that while some munitions stockpiles, including precision weapons, were low, they had not fallen below critical thresholds.

Amid the ongoing questions over Washington's weapons pause, Trump has apparently promised to send 10 Patriot interceptors to Ukraine, Axios reported on July 8. Sources also told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that Trump claimed he wasn't behind the decision to halt arms to Kyiv in a recent phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

How to enter Ukraine’s defense market: A short guide for foreign companies

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in the op-ed section are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the views of the Kyiv Independent. For editorial coverage of Ukraine’s weapons procurement, the country’s Defense Ministry and the scandal-ridden Defense Procurement Agency click on the links

The Kyiv IndependentVladyslav Bandrovsky

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

Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers rejected a nominee to lead the economic crimes agency, drawing swift criticism from lawmakers and businesses over alleged interference in the selection process.

The agency, the Bureau of Economic Security, was created in 2021 to investigate economic crimes. It has since faced accusations of being used to pressure — and in some cases extort — businesses, prompting multiple calls and efforts to overhaul it.

Selecting a new director of the agency by the end of July is one of Ukraine's obligations to the EU and International Monetary Fund as part of international financing packages extended to the war-torn country by the institutions.

As part of a recent attempt to relaunch the bureau, Oleksandr Tsyvinsky on June 30 was officially nominated by the bureau's selection commission that consists of six members — three from the government and three international experts. Tsyvinsky is known for exposing schemes involving illegal land seizures in Kyiv..

But Ukraine's government on July 8 said it had rejected Tsyvinsky following alleged concerns raised by the country's intelligence service of potential Russian connections.

The government unanimously decided to ask the commission to submit two new candidates who meet all security requirements, the government press service wrote on its official Telegram channel, a move it claims aligns with the law.

Following Tsyvinsky's nomination, it was revealed that his father holds a Russian passport. He has said he hasn't spoken to his father, who lives in Russia, in years.

Tsyvinsky holds clearance for state secrets and has passed special vetting, backed by over 20 years in law enforcement, including nearly a decade at the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).

Opposition lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelizniak, said the government had no grounds to reject a properly nominated candidate, claiming President Volodymyr Zelensky's office is behind the blocking of the nomination.

"The (bureau's) legislation provides no legal grounds for the cabinet to demand a new shortlist or impose additional, undefined requirements such as 'security criteria.' The term itself is absent from any statute and therefore has no legal force," Zhelizniak said.

"The SBU letter in this case is nothing more than an indicator of the winner's disloyalty to the President's Office and a desire to block the appointment," said Olena Shcherban, deputy executive director of the AntAC in a statement following the news.

Major business associations have called on Zelensky, Parliament Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk, and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal to reverse the government's decision.

The business groups warned that failing to reform the agency will harm investment decisions, particularly as Ukraine's wartime economy needs to attract capital.

"War is a time for radical changes in the rule of law and business climate, otherwise the economy cannot ensure the country's survival," the businesses wrote in an open letter.

‘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

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

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