Ukraine’s 425th Separate Assault Regiment Skelia is moving under the operational command of the 1st National Guard Corps Azov, as the Ukrainian military works to consolidate scattered Skelia units under a single command and eventually deploy them on the same section of the front.

The move comes amid scrutiny of Skelia following an investigation into dozens of non-combat deaths among its recruits and ongoing criminal proceedings over alleged abuse. It also forms part of broader reforms being carried out by newly appointed Commander-in-Chief Mykhailo Drapatyi, who made the decision to place Skelia under Azov’s operational command, according to the regiment.

Oleksii Bratushchak, head of communications for the Skelia regiment, announced the change on 13 August on the YouTube channel “Butusov Plus”. He stressed that Skelia is not becoming part of Azov’s organizational structure. The arrangement concerns operational command, meaning Azov will direct the regiment’s combat employment.

Skelia’s scattered units are being brought together

Bratushchak said Skelia is currently carrying out combat orders under Azov Corps command, although not all of its units have yet been transferred.

The regiment’s units have been spread across several areas and operating under different higher commands. The plan is to gradually bring them together so they can operate on the same part of the front.

Part of Skelia will move to the Dobropillia direction, where Azov Corps is deployed. Other elements remain on their current assignments for now, including the Pokrovsk, Kharkiv, and Kostiantynivka directions.

Bratushchak said Skelia’s command has already met with Azov and established cooperation. He described the decision as one made by Drapatyi and said the regiment views it positively.

The move follows personnel changes that began earlier in August. On 7 August, Ukrainska Pravda reported that Skelia had begun transferring soldiers to around 10 other units, citing sources in the regiment and Ukraine’s Defense Forces. 

The regiment confirmed that personnel were being reassigned on orders from higher command, while stressing that its units remained at their positions and continued carrying out combat tasks. The number of troops being transferred was not disclosed.

The move is part of Drapatyi’s ongoing reforms of Ukraine’s armed forces following his appointment as commander-in-chief. In July, the General Staff launched an audit of how personnel are distributed among brigades, regiments, and corps, reflecting Drapatyi’s focus on addressing imbalances in how Ukraine’s forces are manned.

Explore further

Ukraine’s army has some brigades starved of soldiers and others overstaffed. New commander is now auditing why

Skelia remains a separate regiment under Azov’s operational command

The change does not dissolve Skelia or turn it into an Azov unit. The regiment remains a separate military formation, while Azov Corps takes operational control over its forces for combat tasks.

Ukraine has been reorganizing its ground forces around corps-level commands, intended to give commanders greater control over multiple brigades and regiments operating in the same area.

Azov itself is now the core of Ukraine’s 1st National Guard Corps, commanded by Brigadier General Denys Prokopenko, known by his call sign “Redis.” The corps has been operating in the Donetsk region as part of Ukraine’s effort to consolidate forces and command structures on the battlefield.

The backdrop: deaths and abuse allegations inside Skelia

The reorganization comes less than two months after a major investigation into conditions inside Skelia’s training system triggered criminal and institutional investigations.

Babel’s investigation published in June documented 25 non-combat deaths among Skelia recruits between late 2025 and spring 2026, including cases where forensic findings raised questions about reported causes of death. Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigations opened a criminal case, and Skelia’s commander was suspended pending the investigation.

Skelia confirmed that 25 of the 26 deaths cited in the investigation had occurred but disputed some of the reported circumstances. The regiment has denied that abuse was systemic.

Explore further

Ukraine opened a criminal case over 25 non-combat deaths at its largest assault regiment. Serving soldier’s response was to call reporter “media killer”

The investigation has since produced further legal action. Two Skelia servicemen were placed in pretrial detention in July over allegations of illegally detaining and beating fellow soldiers. 

On 11 August, Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Fediyenko said, citing National Police data, that 103 criminal proceedings had been opened in 2026 over non-combat deaths in the regiment, with three people charged and one case sent to court.

The new operational arrangement does not itself indicate a change in the status of those investigations. Skelia’s communications office has said personnel transfers and organizational decisions are matters for higher military command and part of the management of Ukraine’s armed forces during wartime.

Russia may expand hybrid attacks against Poland and the Baltic states, including infrastructure sabotage or false-flag attacks, Bloomberg reported on 12 August, citing an unnamed European intelligence official. 

The warnings come amid concern that Moscow wants to intimidate Ukraine’s supporters. The CIA warning follows Russian threats, incursions, alleged sabotage plots, and disinformation against Poland and the Baltic states. Most Western military aid reaches Ukraine through Poland, while the Baltic states rank among Kyiv’s strongest supporters. Sabotage of transport, energy, or communications can slow aid delivery and test NATO while hiding Russia’s role.

Separately, a European government official told Bloomberg that the CIA had warned countries in the region of a possible future Russian attack. The CIA declined to comment.

The same official said Russia might instead be creating the impression of an impending attack to sow fear as part of an information operation. The official saw no signs that Moscow was preparing a conventional attack or invasion.

Moscow tests NATO’s eastern flank

Poland and Lithuania had already raised similar concerns. In July, Poland said it had credible intelligence that Russia was planning new provocations. Lithuania later warned that Moscow might rebuild captured Ukrainian drones for false-flag strikes on critical infrastructure.

In September 2025, between 19 and 23 Russian drones entered Polish airspace, shutting down airports and damaging buildings. Poland closed four airports as NATO aircraft responded.

Meanwhile, five people are on trial in Lithuania over attacks allegedly organized for Russian military intelligence in 2024, Bloomberg reported. Lithuania has reinforced infrastructure sites and deployed troops since June.

These warnings and incidents place the CIA alert within a wider pattern of pressure on NATO’s eastern flank and Ukraine’s supporters. 

How Russia strikes without starting a war

Bloomberg cited several recent unexplained drone incidents in Germany alongside the CIA warning. Citing Die Zeit, Euromaidan Press reported that an explosive-laden drone struck the wing of a parked Ukrainian An-124 at Leipzig-Halle airport and failed to detonate. A US Defense Department official in Europe told CNN that Washington assessed the drone belonged to Russian intelligence. 

Bloomberg also reported that a cargo plane hit an unidentified object and that drones appeared over a military base the following day. It did not connect either incident to Russia.

More broadly, Russian hybrid operations have grown sharply since the full-scale invasion. CSIS found that attacks in Europe tripled from 2023 to 2024, after quadrupling the previous year. Separately, the US Helsinki Commission mapped nearly 150 operations in NATO territory attributed to or suspected of Russia between February 2022 and November 2024.

Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges told Euromaidan Press in February that attacks on ports, railways, and cables can probe routes needed for NATO reinforcements. Their deniability raises the political cost of responding.

By hiding its role, Moscow can disrupt support for Ukraine and test NATO without openly starting a war. 

Lithuania's government approved an expanded plan on 12 August to fortify its borders with Russia and Belarus against a possible attack, LRT reports. Lithuania, a Baltic state and NATO member, sits wedged between Russia's Kaliningrad exclave and Belarus. The decision opens a new counter-mobility belt reaching inland from the border, a 20-meter strip that widens to 150 meters where the army marks out areas for operations.

The buildout answers a fear that has gripped the Baltics since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022: that a Russia left unchecked in Ukraine could turn on them next. Western intelligence agencies have warned for years that Moscow could eventually threaten NATO itself, and former CIA director David Petraeus has singled out Lithuania as the likeliest first target, pinned between Kaliningrad and Belarus and sitting beside the Suwałki Gap, the thin land corridor that is NATO's only overland route to the Baltic states.

The decision raises the number of engineering parks, storage depots for obstacles like concrete blocks and roadblocks, from 27 to 50, and gives that work until the end of 2028, more than three years past the original April 2025 target. The state rail company LTG Infra is to store the equipment. The changes could cost an extra €50 million ($58 million) from the State Defense Fund between 2026 and 2030.

Of the Baltic states and Poland fortifying their eastern borders, Lithuania is the most at risk yet the least fortified, according to a satellite review by open-source analyst Clément Molin, even as Belarus keeps testing that border with engineered migrant crossings. The plan is Lithuania's share of the Baltic Defense Line, the joint barrier it launched in 2024 with Latvia and Estonia, alongside Poland's parallel East Shield.

The design comes straight from Ukraine. Lithuania began building counter-mobility parks in 2023, drawing on Russia's war against Ukraine, and much of what it is now putting into the ground, the swamps, ditches, and obstacle fields, was tested first on Ukrainian battlefields, where mud, water, and simple barriers have repeatedly stalled armored advances.

The restored swamps should make some ground impassable to heavy military vehicles within a few years, the Defense Ministry says, with that work due by the end of 2030. Plans for defensive ditches and streams in the Marijampolė municipality were dropped, and the ministry found better sites in the Vilkaviškis and Šakiai districts. Deadlines for obstacles on roads and bridge approaches, and for fitting bridges with holders for explosives, were also moved to the end of 2028.

"Military counter-mobility is an important part of Lithuania's defence preparedness," Deputy Defense Minister Tomas Mikelkevičius said. "We seek to make the best possible use of Lithuania's terrain and engineering measures to impede an adversary's movement if necessary and create more favorable conditions for our armed forces to operate."

Lithuania approved its first counter-mobility plan in July 2024. The plan's original 2024 estimate put the full system at around €600 million ($690 million) over the decade.

Russia's pressure on the Baltic borders

The buildout lands amid steady friction along NATO's eastern edge. Latvia has absorbed the bulk of the migrant crossings funneled from Belarus, and this week found its first used smuggling tunnel under the border. Estonia has switched on the first sensors of a planned drone wall along its Russian frontier and is reallocating €500 million ($575 million) toward air defense and long-range strike. Russia, for its part, has shut seven rail crossings with Latvia, Estonia, and Finland without explanation.

The fortification drive is a bet on time. Estonia's military chief has set a two-year clock, warning Russia could be combat-ready again by 2027, and ISW analysts assessed in May that Moscow was manufacturing pretexts for aggression against the Baltics. Poland's parallel East Shield, meanwhile, has gone up far slower than promised, leaving the region's defenses still thin where the threat is judged greatest.

Ukraine struck the Novorossiysk naval base in Russia's Krasnodar Krai overnight on 12 August, and for the first time coordinated more than 15 different strike systems in a single operation, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. The package combined Palianytsia jet drones, Neptune anti-ship missiles and naval drones, hitting warships, air defenses and oil infrastructure at the Black Sea Fleet's main base.

Novorossiysk is the refuge Russia's fleet fled to after Ukrainian drones and missiles pushed it out of occupied Crimea. Reaching its warships there with a mixed salvo — and getting through air defenses that bystander footage showed firing heavily — is the operational read the strike carries, more than any single ship damaged.

The systems and the targets

Zelenskyy named more than a dozen systems that worked together for the first time, from the Palianytsia and Peklo drones to the long-range Neptune and a set of naval drones. He thanked weapons developers for the added reach, framing the coordination itself as the milestone rather than the results.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) confirmed hits on two Kalibr-carrying frigates, the Admiral Essen and Admiral Makarov, and the patrol ship Vasily Bykov. The same strike hit an S-300 radar, a firing position on one of the port's piers, the Sheskharis oil terminal and three of the harbor's berths — a target list wider than the ships alone.

How many ships

The three Ukrainian accounts agree on the two frigates but not on the full tally. The General Staff counted four warships, adding a Buyan-M missile ship to the SBU's three. Zelenskyy separately cited a large landing ship and a corvette among the vessels hit.

Independent analysts who reviewed satellite imagery told The Maritime Executive the damage did not appear catastrophic, with no ships visibly burning or sinking. Ukraine's General Staff said the assessment is still under way.

The fleet's shrinking refuge

The strike extends a campaign that has driven Russia's fleet eastward without Ukraine fielding a navy of its own. Having lost safe basing in Sevastopol, Russia moved its ships more than 300 kilometers from the front — far from Ukraine, but no longer out of reach.

The operation's footprint reached past the base. Russian authorities in Novorossiysk declared a state of emergency and cut water to the port city, and the strike on the Sheskharis oil terminal hit infrastructure that helps fund the war. Zelenskyy said Ukraine would keep striking such targets, and that Russia alone can end the war it started.

Ukrainian drones struck the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat oil-refining and petrochemical complex in Russia's Bashkortostan on the morning of 13 August, setting off a fire — the second strike on one of Russia's largest refineries in a month.

The repeat hit lands as Ukraine's deep-strike campaign forces Russian refining to its lowest level since 2002 and pushes fuel shortages back into at least 16 regions, where drivers again face queues and sales limits at filling stations. Striking the same plants faster than Moscow can repair them is the point — each return resets the clock on units that take weeks or months to rebuild.

What happened

Bashkortostan's head, Radiy Khabirov, confirmed that debris from a downed drone fell in Salavat's industrial zone and sparked a blaze, which he called a "terrorist attack." Ukrainian monitoring channels Exilenova+ and Supernova identified the target as the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat plant, and residents reported a column of black smoke over the site. Ukraine's military had not commented on the strike.

The complex is one of Russia's largest refining and petrochemical sites. It processed about 7.2 million tons of crude in 2024 — roughly 2.7% of Russia's total refining — and turns out gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, ammonia, and more, according to Reuters, citing industry sources.

Ukrainian drones struck the same plant on 14 July, damaging two primary distillation units and halting operations; industry sources told Reuters the repairs could take weeks to months. Open-source data cited by Radio Svoboda places Russia's only heptyl rocket-fuel producer, the Salavat Chemical Plant, inside the same industrial perimeter, though there is no confirmation it was hit.

A campaign that keeps resetting repairs

Since early August, at least four refineries have stopped processing after Ukrainian strikes, including plants in Orenburg, Tyumen, Saratov, and Volgograd oblasts. Across 2026, attacks have interrupted work at no fewer than 26 refineries, seven of them still offline at the end of July, according to S&P Global.

Russian refining has fallen to about 3.6 million barrels a day, the lowest since 2002, per EA Analytics — the trigger for the fuel crisis now resurfacing. Shortages had eased by late July, but by mid-August residents of at least 16 regions were again reporting queues and sales restrictions, with Ai-92 and Ai-95 grades pulled from some Gazprom and Lukoil stations.

Attack on warehouse Wildberries

Drones also struck a Wildberries logistics center under construction in Bashkortostan's Chishminsky district, according to the monitoring channel Astra.

Wildberries is Russia's largest online retailer. The hub—about 187,000 square meters—has been under construction since 2024 on the grounds of the "Center of Agrotechnologies" agropark.