North Korea has pulled in as much as $22 billion in foreign earnings since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022—nearly four times what it earned in the previous four years, and the most cash Kim Jong Un has commanded in his 15 years in power, Bloomberg Economics estimates.

That money is the bill for Russia's war, paid to the other side of the world. In exchange for the shells and soldiers keeping Moscow's offensive alive, Pyongyang has been handed the cash, food, and military technology to turn itself from an isolated pariah into a nuclear power that no longer needs to negotiate with anyone. The war draining Russia has quietly built a second, stronger adversary.

Half of Russia's shells, and thousands of soldiers

By the end of 2025, North Korea was covering up to half of Russia's need for 122mm and 152mm artillery ammunition, Ukrainian intelligence estimates—a share Euromaidan Press has tracked since the shipments began in 2023. Pyongyang backed the shells with men: some 16,000 soldiers, for whom Russia paid roughly $2,000 a month each, plus extra for the dead, by Bloomberg's accounting.

The turning point came in 2022. Kim had spent the previous years humiliated—a failed summit with Donald Trump, a harvest failure that triggered hunger, a self-imposed Covid border closure that severed trade with China. In a 2020 national address, he wept while apologizing for the economy. Then Putin's stockpiles ran low, and North Korea's warehouses became a resource Kim could turn into hard currency.

Cash, food, and the technology to build better weapons

The dangerous part is what came back the other way. Russia handed over advanced military technology alongside the payments, and US Forces Korea has said the transfers let Pyongyang compress its weapons-development timelines. Moscow supplied air defenses including at least one Pantsir-class system—a transfer Euromaidan Press reported last year—and a Pantsir-M worth about $20 million now sits on one of North Korea's two new 5,000-tonne destroyers, the largest warships it has ever built. The two countries have also begun jointly producing attack drones.

Kim poured the windfall into a nuclear buildup that, Bloomberg reports, puts North Korea on a path to rival France's arsenal. The country's economy grew 3.5% in 2025, its third straight year of expansion, according to the Bank of Korea.

A windfall that outlasts the war

The boom does not depend on the war continuing. Over the past decade Kim assembled the world's most prolific army of crypto thieves: hacking groups tied to Pyongyang now account for more than 70% of global cryptocurrency thefts, up from about 30% in 2017, according to blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs. The stolen funds are laundered mostly through Chinese organized-crime networks that take a cut in exchange for clean offshore accounts. "It's absurd to think North Korea now has access to that much money," said Nick Carlsen, a senior TRM investigator.

Kim is spreading his bets diplomatically, too, hosting officials from Singapore, Indonesia, Belarus, and Vietnam over the past year to loosen his reliance on Moscow.

The Kim once written off as an erratic recluse is emerging as the durable leader of a growing nuclear power—one with little reason left to bargain. "Pyongyang has proven its ability to adapt to persistent sanctions," said Jenny Town of the Stimson Center. "And as international law and norms are eroding, it has found camaraderie in its resistance."

Polish President Karol Nawrocki used a speech marking his first year in office to restate that Poland will keep backing Ukraine's war against Russia—and to frame that backing as cold strategic interest rather than solidarity, warning in the same speech that continued help does not extend to tolerating Ukrainian nationalist symbols" on Polish soil. He spoke on 6 August at a ceremony in the courtyard of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw, reported by RMF FM.

The remarks land at the hottest point yet in a Polish-Ukrainian memory row that has stripped Kyiv of much goodwill from its most important frontline ally. Poland's interest, Nawrocki said, is that Ukrainians fight "as long as possible and as effectively as possible" against Russia, keeping it far from Poland—help offered not out of shared cause but because a Ukraine that bleeds Russia serves Warsaw. Coming from the country most vital to Ukraine's supply lines, it is a statement of support recast as conditional self-interest.

Support as strategy, not solidarity

"Poland's interest is that Ukraine and Ukrainian soldiers cope as well as possible with the post-Soviet Russian Federation and keep it as far from Poland as possible. That is obvious; that is the Polish state's strategy," Nawrocki said. "Let them kill the Soviets who attacked them—it does not hurt us Poles at all. In this they can always count on our help, because where a Muscovite is beaten, Poland helps, even if it does not take part directly in this war."

The register was deliberate. Nawrocki, a historian who ran the Institute of National Remembrance before winning the presidency, used the pejoratives "Soviets" and "Muscovites" for Russians throughout, casting Polish aid as a matter of keeping the fight on the far side of the border.

The red line: no Bandera flags

The support came fenced. "It is also Poland's strategic interest that Bandera flags do not fly in Warsaw or anywhere in Poland," Nawrocki said, promising to help "but always saying: Poland first, Poles first"—not, he added, "thoughtlessly sending fleet after fleet without analysis, on phone calls and smiles."

The condition points straight at the dispute that has consumed the relationship since May, when Zelenskyy signed a decree granting a special-forces unit the honorary title "Heroes of the UPA," the insurgent army Poland's parliament holds responsible for the Volhynia killings of tens of thousands of Poles and has declared a genocide. Nawrocki stripped Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle in response; in July he pressed parliament to ban the UPA's red-and-black flag by law.

Moscow moves to widen the gap

Russia moved to pry the crack open within hours. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova derided Nawrocki as a former Gdansk war-museum director whose "clinical Russophobia," she claimed, was affecting his judgment, and reminded him that Russia and Poland share a border "with no Ukraine and no Ukrainians between us"—the erasure of Ukraine stated plainly, from Moscow's own podium.

That is the move Warsaw itself has warned about. Polish officials have cautioned that Russia would seek to exploit the Ukraine tensions, and Polish services recently detained a group accused of recruiting Ukrainians for paid anti-Ukrainian rallies on Russian instructions. The memory feud, as one Polish advocate for Ukraine told Euromaidan Press in June, is theater that serves only one audience—the one in the Kremlin.

Luxembourg contributed an additional €8 million ($8.7 million) to the Ukraine Energy Support Fund, raising its total donations to €30 million ($32.7 million), Ukraine's Ministry of Energy reported.

The contribution arrives as the fund—which crossed €2 billion ($2.18 billion) in total lifetime contributions in July—races to close a €650 million ($709 million) gap in unfunded needs ahead of the 2026/2027 winter season. Russia has destroyed more than 9 gigawatts of generation capacity since the start of the most recent heating season alone, and all previously available fund resources have been fully contracted.

Luxembourg's steady commitment

This marks Luxembourg's fourth donation to the fund since 2024. The country initially transferred €2 million in 2024, followed by €10 million in June 2025 and another €10 million in December 2025. The latest €8 million brings the total to €30 million—a notable sum from a country with a population of roughly 660,000.

Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal thanked Luxembourg and its Agency for Development Cooperation for what he called systematic support for Ukrainian energy, adding that the contribution would help provide energy companies with essential equipment and strengthen the resilience of Ukraine's power grid, European Pravda reported.

A fund preparing for its fifth wartime winter

The Energy Support Fund was established in April 2022 and is managed by the Energy Community Secretariat. It has become the primary international mechanism for channeling emergency energy assistance to Ukraine, with contributions from 37 donors across 26 countries and three international organizations.

In a June 2026 joint statement, the G7+ Energy Ramstein Group identified €650 million in priority needs for winter preparation and called for swift mobilization of additional funding.

Luxembourg's contribution is part of a broader wave of European support. Ireland announced €25 million ($29 million) for energy and critical infrastructure protection during its prime minister's visit to Kyiv on 23 July. Sweden's €123 million contribution on 8 July pushed the fund past the €2 billion milestone. Denmark has also recently added over €10 million.

The United States and Ukraine are working together to put fresh missiles into Ukraine's aging Soviet-era S-300 air defenses, retired US Army colonel Robert Hamilton told PBS NewsHour. These long-range systems shoot down aircraft, but the missiles that feed them have been depleted. The effort—retrofitting old rounds or building a newer variant—would revive launchers Ukraine already owns.

Ukraine's air defense runs on a shrinking supply of interceptors, with Russian ballistic and drone strikes outpacing what allies can ship. The chokepoint is production capacity, not willingness—and Hamilton frames the S-300 rebuild as one of the slower-burn fixes that ease the strain on scarce Western systems rather than replace them.

A working system near the end of 2026

Hamilton, who heads the Delphi Global Research Center, said the joint effort should come online near the end of 2026 and could turn out "100 or a couple of hundred" anti-aircraft missiles a year. He described the work as an effort to "essentially retrofit or upgrade the old S-300 missiles or a newer variant of the S-300" and give the system better capabilities.

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In September 2024, then-US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced at the Ramstein contact group that Washington, in partnership with several European companies, was working with Ukraine to "design and build a substitute" for the Soviet S-300 and the R-27 air-to-air missile used by fighter jets. He never spelled out what that substitute would be.

Why Ukraine's S-300s ran law

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine held roughly 25-30 S-300PT/PS battalions in varying states of readiness. As the missiles ran out, Kyiv came to lean on Western air defense systems and interceptors while Russia keeps launching mass strikes.

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Anything Ukraine can build or rebuild on its own soil is a supply that no foreign stockpile or political fight can cut off.

That same logic is pushing Kyiv toward co-producing Patriots with US firms and fielding its own ballistic interceptor—a race to turn air defense into a domestic industry before the next winter of strikes.

Since the evening of 6 August, Russia has attacked Ukraine with various types of drones, including decoys, the Ukrainian Air Force Command said. Although 114 of those 147 were shot down, some hit their targets, killing at least 2 people and injuring more than 10.

The Russian military has repeatedly used drone decoys to distract Ukrainian air defenses from real targets. By overloading Ukrainian air defenses, more drones reach their targets, which often include Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. In particular, attacks on post offices have become increasingly targeted.

Strike on Sumy Oblast

A Russian drone struck a market in Bilopillia community, Sumy Oblast, on the morning of 7 August, injuring 10 people. Two of them are in serious condition, head of Sumy Oblast Oleh Hryhorov said.

Overnight into 7 August, Russia attacked Sumy Oblast with aerial bombs and various types of drones, Hryhorov said. The attacks damaged infrastructure, non-residential buildings, vehicles, and private homes. Two civilians were injured, but their condition is not serious. One was a 57-year-old man wounded after one of two aerial bombs struck near his home, Sumy City Military Administration Head Serhii Kryvosheienko said. A drone also struck a post office in the Hlukhiv community.

Over the past 24 hours, Russian forces struck 34 settlements across Sumy Oblast in 48 attacks, injuring 13 people, including a child, Sumy Oblast police reported.

Strike on Dnipropetrovsk Oblast

At the same time, Russia attacked five districts of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with artillery and various types of drones, with no casualties reported initially, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Head Oleksandr Hanzha said. He added that the strikes damaged private homes, an administrative building, vehicles, and infrastructure. In Nikopol district, a post office and a gymnasium were damaged in the Russian attack.

Russia continues to strike civilian infrastructure

On the night of 7 August, Russian forces also struck Zaporizhzhia. A drone damaged an office building, causing a fire.

On 6 August, a Russian Banderol cruise missile struck a Ukrposhta sorting depot and a base for mobile post offices. Two Ukrposhta employees were killed, and a mechanic was injured in the strike, Ukrposhta CEO Ihor Smilianskyi said.

“The enemy wanted to stop our movement here, but we will not let them do it. All backup schemes are already working. Pensions, medicines, parcels and letters are being delivered on schedule,” Smilianskyi said.