Exclusives

Ukraine's cardboard protests look like democracy working. In a war, that's also the risk.. Three weeks on, the protests go on—smaller but daily. Fedorov's old seat is filled by an acting minister, and Fedorov himself won't join the crowds demanding his return.

Military

"What happens here affects next 50 years": why American left Pennsylvania to fight in Ukraine's 47th Brigade. "Lighthouse", a soldier in the 47th Brigade's reconnaissance company, came from Pennsylvania after the full-scale war.

"This is money of his accomplices burning": Russian partisans and Ukraine hit Siberian plant tied to Putin's inner circle. The plant is located over 2,000 km away from the Ukrainian border and is one of Russia's largest.

Ukraine's Crimea campaign could strike seven times more targets with faster funding, Brovdi says. To clear the skies over the peninsula, the force destroyed more than 300 Russian air defense assets in recent months, its commander said.

Russia's advance in Ukraine slows as casualties per square kilometer rise 3.5-fold, Radio Svoboda reports. Ukrainian drone operators say Russian infiltration units moving on foot lose all but one soldier out of every fifteen.

Zelenskyy says Russia could receive up to 50,000 North Korean troops. Kyiv says North Korean deployment numbers have grown from hundreds to tens of thousands within roughly two months, according to Ukrainian estimates.

Drones strike Russian oblasts overnight: thick smoke over a Nizhnekamsk refinery as Crimea's Krasnoperekopsk industrial zone burns. Unmanned aircraft reportedly hit a Tatarstan oil hub and the occupied peninsula, with satellite sensors flagging heat signatures and 15 airports halting flights.

Russian electric locomotive was named target of Ukrainian partisan operation. It carried military supplies toward Kharkiv front. The ATESH partisan movement says its agents destroyed the cab of an electric locomotive.

Intelligence and technology

Forged end-user certificates through eight countries: how one network kept European tech flowing into Russian missiles. Austrian counterintelligence exposed an international network that funneled high-tech industrial equipment to Rostec-linked Russian defense firms.

70 ballistic missiles and 12 launchers: Ukraine lines up deep-strike refill from an unlikely supplier. The M39 ATACMS flies about 165 kilometers the short-range original, carrying a warhead that scatters 950 bomblets over troops and air defenses.

Russian plants are overfulfilling monthly missile production quotas by 110-120% and unlikely to pause strikes, Ukraine's intelligence says. Moscow met its full-year Zircon and Onyx output targets by early August, seven months into 2026, Ukraine's deputy intelligence chief said.

New Iranian loitering munition has started reaching Ukraine, analyst says. It's built to hit deep behind front. Iran is improving its Shahed-107 kamikaze drones based on the Ukraine war, adding shrapnel elements.

International

Ukraine gave up 1,900 nuclear warheads in 1994 on Western promises that didn't work. New plan would replace them with Britain's shield instead. Plan pairs Britain's nuclear deterrent with Ukraine's army as Europe doubts US protection and struggles to deter Russia.

The Atlantic: US firms may fear cheaper Ukrainian Patriots, Republican official says. A Republican congressional official says intellectual-property concerns may mask fears of Ukraine being able to make Patriots more cheaply and more quickly.

Humanitarian and social impact

A $20,000 "welcome bonus" that was never paid: how a Colombia-registered recruiter sent Peruvians into Russia's war. Russia has deceived more than 450 Peruvian citizens into its army, and some have already been killed.

Occupied Ukraine's schools get a new Russian ideology class, a separate military-training track, and behavior grades from 1 September. Behavior grades for children as young as the second grade, a standalone military-training course, and a compulsory Russian identity subject take effect together across the temporarily occupied territories from 1 September.

A Russian missile took Oleksandra Paskal's leg at six. At 10, she competes in rhythmic gymnastics across five continents. She returned to the gym roughly seven months after the amputation, and now trains as hard as any girl in her group, on a prosthesis.

July was Ukraine's deadliest month for civilians since 2022 — and Russia is scaling its ballistic missile salvos toward 200 at once. Kyiv's unmanned-forces commander warns the Kremlin is racing to swamp a depleted air shield, echoing intelligence that Moscow now overfulfills its monthly weapons plans.

ISW: Russia strikes the Mayaki bridge linking southern Ukraine to Romania and Moldova. Moscow's overnight hit on the M-15 highway forced Kyiv to halt traffic toward the Danube ports, its main grain outlet after sea exports collapsed.

Political and legal developments

Sweden says it stopped Russian operation to discredit country and EU. But no one will be prosecuted. Sweden's Säpo exposed a Russian intelligence operation that recruited an agent in a foreign diplomatic mission to undermine Swedish decision-making.

A Russian who moved to Ukraine got 13 years the moment he visited relatives back home. Eleven alleged transfers of about 100 hryvnias ($2.23) each led Ivan Stolbov to a harsh sentence after he returned to Russia.

Zaluzhnyi, Fedorov, and Budanov lead Ukraine's trust ranking as Zelenskyy places fourth – KIIS. Three of Ukraine's most recognizable wartime figures now command the strongest public confidence, a late-July sociological study found, even as the president's standing lags noticeably behind.

Read our earlier daily review here.

The Dance of Freedom tour, featuring young Ukrainian gymnast Oleksandra Paskal, has carried her from Paris to Tokyo, Akhmetov Foundation reported. Behind it lie a seaside home reduced to rubble, 15 days in a coma, and a place among the more than 3,200 children Russia's war has killed or wounded.

Russia has spent the war striking the cities where Ukrainian families live, turning apartment blocks and holiday coasts into places where children are wounded far from any front line. For every Ukrainian child whose recovery becomes a story the world follows, many more carry injuries and losses that never surface beyond a case file.

In May 2022, three months into Russia's full-scale invasion, a missile struck a home in Zatoka, a resort village on the coast of Ukraine's Odesa oblast. No air-raid siren sounded in the neighborhood, the family says. Beneath the collapsed concrete lay Oleksandra Paskal, six years old, her leg pinned under a slab.

Her mother, Maria, lost consciousness in the blast. Maria later recounted the scene to the Museum of Civilian Voices. She described what she saw when she came to: a heavy concrete slab lying across her daughter's leg, the girl's arm dislocated with the bone exposed, a finger hanging loose, her head badly bruised. Neighbors helped lift the slab. Sasha, as the family calls her, spent 15 days in intensive care in a medically induced coma. Doctors first feared a severe head injury. Then they found that blood had stopped circulating to her left leg. They amputated.

Four years later, Oleksandra is 10 and a competitive rhythmic gymnast performing on five continents.

Her case is at once singular and representative. In the fifth year of Russia's full-scale war, the fighting is still killing and wounding Ukrainian children, even as global attention fades. Oleksandra survived and found a stage; most children harmed by the war never have their stories told beyond Ukraine. The distance between the scale of that harm and the world's diminishing notice is what her tour is built to close.

The return took roughly seven months.

She learned to walk with a prosthesis, returned to the gym, and won her first post-amputation competition in Chornomorsk.

"My passion for sport is bigger than my loss," she told CNN Sports.

In 2025, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and First Lady Olena Zelenska awarded her the "Future of Ukraine" honor. Earlier this year, she took gold at Carla's Rhythmic Cup, an international competition in Romania, where she competes against children without disabilities.

The performances abroad are part of the Dance of Freedom tour, an initiative of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation in partnership with the football club Shakhtar Donetsk, timed to the 35th anniversary of Ukraine's independence on 24 August. Over two weeks, Oleksandra performed her routine in Paris, in New York's Times Square, in Rio de Janeiro, in Nairobi, and finally in Tokyo. In New York, she met the boxer Oleksandr Usyk, visited Ukraine's mission to the United Nations, and stood beneath the Statue of Liberty.

For Oleksandra, the travel is partly an escape. "I'm really happy to travel because it's an opportunity to distract myself from what's going on in Ukraine," she said. Her mother frames it as a purpose.

"She's so strong and motivated," Maria said. "Although she's very young, she's a role model for many people with similar circumstances. We never pushed her. What she's doing comes from her."

Oleksandra's story is singular, but the injury that shaped it is not. According to UNICEF, more than 3,200 Ukrainian children have been killed or wounded since Russia launched its full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022. These are UN-verified casualties, a count that captures only the cases investigators have been able to confirm, so the real toll is almost certainly higher. Almost 2.6 million, more than a third of the country's children, remain displaced. More than 1,700 schools and other educational facilities have been damaged or destroyed. Every stop on the tour, her mother says, is meant to hold that reality before an international audience.

Oleksandra's own ambitions run past the tour. She wants to compete at the Paralympics in Brisbane in 2032 and win gold if rhythmic gymnastics is included in the program. In New York, Usyk gave her a method: write down that you are an Olympic champion, and read it every day. When they met, Zelenskyy gave her a sentence to carry: never give up and move forward.