Ukraine condemns Russia for jailing people on fabricated terrorism charges. Yet, its own security services keep sending Kremlin opponents back to Moscow, human rights defender Borys Zakharov said in an interview with Ukrainian outlet Texty.org.ua.

The handovers are not a relic of a friendlier past. They slowed after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, then resumed; the transfers now run through third countries, Zakharov says, and at least one has ridden the prisoner swaps that bring Ukraine's captured soldiers home. Ukraine is returning the exact people who bet their lives on it; at the moment, it presents itself to the world as the rule-of-law side of this war.

A double standard, few in Kyiv discuss

Zakharov directs the charitable foundation Human and Law, which defends people fleeing authoritarian states. Russia prosecutes captured Ukrainians on invented terrorism charges, and Kyiv rightly calls it a sham. But when Chechens, Ingush, and other North Caucasians ask Ukraine for protection, officials sometimes brand them criminals and send them back—men who often fled two brutal Chechen wars and the crackdowns after them, and some of whom later fought Russia in volunteer units.

"We say: yes, they are criminals. We hand them over to Russia to die," Zakharov said.

International law forbids this. The principle of non-refoulement bars any state from returning a person to a country where they face death, persecution, or torture. Zakharov says Ukraine's migration authorities often skip that risk assessment entirely.

The cases the West never heard about

Take Timur Tumgoev, an Ingush volunteer fighter whom Ukraine extradited in September 2018. A Russian court sentenced him to 18 years on terrorism charges, his defenders call fabricated. Zakharov says he was tortured so badly that he can barely move.

Others escaped by luck. Ukraine nearly removed Zelimkhan Belkharoev, a wrestler, in 2016 despite an emergency order from the European Court of Human Rights, Zakharov says; a deputy justice minister intervened in time. Adam Osmayev, a Chechen battalion commander whose wife Amina Okueva was killed in a 2017 assassination attempt, was saved the same way years earlier.

Why did it not stop after 2022

The war did not end the handovers—it rerouted them. Direct extraditions paused; the transfers now run through Belarus, Moldova, and Turkiye, Zakharov says.

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Zakharov says Zaur Shogentsukov, a Kabardian who crossed from Belarus to join Ukraine's forces, allegedly failed a polygraph test with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and was pushed back into Belarus under a readmission deal. His tortured body later came back to his family in Nalchik, he says.

Alexey Gerasimov, a student from Russia's Chuvash region who reportedly backed his homeland's independence, slipped into Ukraine in 2024 to join the Sibir Battalion, a unit of Russian volunteers. He ended up in one of the large prisoner exchanges that followed the May 2025 Istanbul talks, and Ukraine delivered him to Russia, where he now faces terrorism charges—the independent Russian outlet Verstka reported in an investigation carried by Novaya Gazeta Europe.

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The most recent case is still unfolding. Aslan Khakimov, a Russian engineer who fled the Federal Security Service (FSB) in 2015 and spent years building robots for Ukraine's army, has sat in a migration facility since April 2026, accused of financing terrorism and facing deportation.

The most recent case is still unfolding. Aslan Khakimov, a Russian engineer who fled the Federal Security Service (FSB) in 2015 and spent years building ground robotic systems for Ukraine's army, entered on forged documents and lived for a decade under a false identity, Ruslan Puptaiev—the illegal stay Ukraine's migration service cites for the deportation order it issued in April 2026. Russia has separately convicted him in absentia of terrorism, a charge his defenders call fabricated. His supporters argue that returning him would be a death sentence.

Ukraine's services frame these as wartime security decisions, and infiltration is a genuine risk. But non-refoulement admits no wartime exception: even a proven spy is not a country's to send to his death.

The money question

Zakharov offers a blunter explanation for at least some cases: money. In the Tumgoev handover, he says, the man's family was quietly invited to outbid Moscow—to top the sum Russian handlers allegedly pay SBU officers for each person delivered.

"Totalitarian regimes spare no money persecuting their opponents," he said.

Ukraine's security service has not confirmed his account, and the allegation rests solely on his testimony.

Russia, for its part, has already shown its games in these exchanges, at times swapping in people with no link to the war. As Kyiv negotiates ever-larger exchanges to free its own soldiers, the same machinery can carry the Russians and Caucasians who fought for Ukraine the other way — a propaganda gift to Moscow and a warning to the next would-be defector that Ukraine's protection may not hold. For a state that anchors its whole cause in the rule of law, that is a debt that keeps compounding.

Ukraine sent rescuers to help fight wildfires in France, and they returned from a first-of-its-kind mission. Workers of Ukraine's State Emergency Service (DSNS) have reached Ukraine from France, where they spent nearly two weeks helping to contain large forest fires, Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi announced.

The deployment was Ukraine's first mission to aid an EU member state under the bloc's own civil-protection system, with a combined unit of 70 rescuers and 15 pieces of special equipment, a role reversal for a country that has spent the war receiving European aid rather than sending it.

What the team did in France

The Ukrainians worked the fires alongside crews from several countries. Their work involved dozens of call-outs, hundreds of hectares of surveyed territory, and fire pockets that kept smoldering underground, Vyhivskyi says

With them, they took wartime methods to the work. The Ukrainian rescuers patrolled the forests, used drones to spot new ignitions, and contained the fire together with their colleagues. The days became shared work and shared experience, uniting rescuers from Ukraine, France, Slovakia, and other countries, with different languages but with one profession and goal. For the European emergency employees, it was a chance to grasp the unique experience they gained during the full-scale war.

The mission is a marker of Ukraine's changed role

Vyhivskyi says that every day, Ukraine's rescuers respond to the aftermath of Russian strikes dozens of times, working in extremely difficult conditions, but despite those challenges, Ukraine is always ready to lend a shoulder to its partners.

When Ukrainian and French forces fought wildfires together, the combined detachment deployed six water tankers on the ground, supported from the air by three French aircraft, two planes, and a helicopter.

During the mission, the Ukrainian rescuers discovered that local residents hang “thousand thanks” banner in recognition of their service.

Russia is upgrading more of its drones to escape Ukraine's drone hunters. Russia has begun fitting jet engines to another attack drone model, the BM-35, presidential adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov reported.

The move is a direct answer to Ukraine's interceptors, and it is spreading across Russia's drone fleet. As Ukraine's interceptors have improved, the Russians are replacing their engines with jet engines not only on long-range Geran drones but also on budget mid-strike drones.

Each Ukrainian advance in shooting drones down pushes Russia to make them faster, Beskrestnov says.

The jet BM-35 is built to be harder to catch

Beskrestnov shared a Russian report showing the jet version of the BM-35 and its claimed characteristics. According to the Russian segment, the jet BM-35 can reach over 350 kilometers per hour, has a range of over 200 kilometers, and carries a 10-kilogram warhead.

The speed is the whole point. Russian fighters claim the increased speed is intended to make the drone harder for Ukrainian interceptors to catch, according to the Russian report. A faster drone gives Ukraine's interceptors less time to close and strike, which is exactly the problem the jet engine is designed to create.

The change is driven by Ukraine's own success

Ukraine has scaled up cheap interceptor drones that take down tens of thousands of Russian drones a month, and that success is what forces Russia to respond, swapping propeller engines for jets to fly above the speed interceptors can reliably catch.

The result is a cost-and-speed contest. Jet engines make each drone more expensive and complex than the cheap propeller models Russia has relied on for mass attacks. So by making its interceptors effective, Ukraine has pushed Russia toward pricier, faster drones, the same dynamic seen with the jet Gerans that now strike Ukrainian cities.

Russia's war is driving advances in weapons technology without limits. This means that soon Ukraine will have to find more ways to protect itself from new weapons, as well as its allies, who have also come under Russia's attacks, such as Poland, Romania, and the Baltic States.

Russian assault troops spent days crawling through a pipe to reach Ukrainian lines, and most of them were killed before reaching the place. Russian soldiers walked 28 kilometers, then came under fire on emerging and ultimately surrendered, Ukraine's 71st Separate Air Assault Brigade reported.

This is a portrait of how Russia spends its infantry who enlist voluntarily for the war against Ukraine. The soldiers were sent on a grueling underground infiltration with bad information and no proper food, ordered forward despite wounds, and largely killed.

The 28-kilometer crawl

The group reached Ukrainian positions through underground infrastructure. The Russians covered about 27 to 28 kilometers moving inside a reinforced-concrete pipe roughly a meter and a half in diameter, spending three days on the way, sleeping inside the pipe, the 71st Brigade reports.

Their command had lied to them about what waited. The soldiers were told they were only going to reinforce a battalion and that there were no Ukrainian troops in the forest, a captured Russian says. On arrival, the opposite was true, and they were sent onward without a normal food supply, forced to forage on their own. Many of the assault troops, the prisoner said, are recruited from prison colonies, signing contracts to avoid long sentences.

From 16 to four

When the group emerged onto open ground, Ukrainian troops hit them. Of the 16 Russians who set out, only about 8 reached the forest, and later, just 4 survived.

The wounded were abandoned by their own side. Russian command was in no hurry to evacuate them, and despite wounds and Ukrainian drone strikes, the assault troops were ordered only to keep moving forward, per the captured soldier. The survivors eventually ran into fighters of the 71st Brigade, laid down their weapons, and asked the Ukrainians not to shoot.

"No money is worth this"

The captured soldier was given medical care and made an appeal to other Russians. He urged them not to go to war against Ukraine.

"I will not advise anyone to go to war. No money is worth this, nor any benefits they promise us. To die and go to a foreign land, for what? For whom? Let them put me in prison. As long as they don't send me here, I will never come here again," the prisoner said.

Ukraine has hit Russia's biggest marketplace in cyberspace as well as with drones. Cyber specialists disrupted Wildberries' operations across Russia, Ukraine's Defense Ministry's Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) reports.

Ukraine says that Wildberries is not ordinary commerce but a piece of Russia's war logistics. According to the military command, the network moves military-related goods, and President Zelenskyy has said Russia uses the platform to bring in sanctioned drone components, which is why Ukraine has spent weeks burning its warehouses and now strikes its servers.

HUR reports that on 10 and 11 August, specialists from the Cyber Corps community attacked Wildberries' digital infrastructure, causing failures in its payment and customer service systems.

The attack hit payments and support

The disruption struck where customers feel it. Because of the problems with the payment infrastructure, users complained they could not complete certain transactions.

For a platform whose whole value is the frictionless movement of goods and money, a payment system that will not process transactions is a direct hit to the business.

The strain spread to customer service. At the same time, the load on the support service rose, causing failures in the contact centers, so the attack degraded both the ability to pay and the ability to get help across Russia.

It pairs with the warehouse strikes

In July, Ukrainian drones destroyed eight Wildberries warehouses, about 15.4% of the marketplace's storage.

Pairing strikes on physical infrastructure with Ukrainian cyber operations strengthens the pressure on the company, HUR assessed.

The logic is to squeeze the same target from two directions at once: burn the warehouses that store the goods, then disable the systems that move them to customers, so damage in one domain amplifies damage in the other.

Earlier, Ukraine hit the Progress Rocket Space Center in Samara, which builds Soyuz-2 rockets used to launch Rassvet, Russia’s planned alternative to Starlink.

Samara Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev confirmed that a missile struck an unnamed industrial enterprise overnight on 15 August 2026. Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, said the Progress Rocket Space Center was burning. He provided no damage details.

Progress would be a significant target because it builds Soyuz-2 rockets used to launch Rassvet, Russia’s planned alternative to Starlink. Its Soyuz-2.1b rockets carried Russia’s first serial-production Rassvet satellites into orbit this year. However, neither the governor’s statement nor available imagery establishes that Progress itself was hit.

Exilenova+ published early footage from Samara and reported that a Flamingo cruise missile had struck the city.

A mature Rassvet network could reduce Russia’s dependence on unauthorized Starlink terminals. For now, neither damage to Progress nor the reported use of a Flamingo missile has been independently confirmed.

Open-source analysts at Falcon Insight Map geolocated the smoke near Aviakor’s Building No. 106. Militarnyi said Aviakor and Progress sit a few hundred meters apart, and available images could not establish which enterprise was hit. The industrial area lies roughly 900 kilometers from Ukraine.

Kyiv pushes strikes deeper into Russia

Ukraine has increasingly attacked factories far behind the front to disrupt the supply chains sustaining Russian weapons production.

Speaking separately to Euromaidan Press, defense scholar Marc DeVore urged Ukraine to disrupt Russian missile production and launches. Retired US Lieutenant General Ben Hodges noted that Ukraine’s interceptor shortage means it is better to “kill the archer” than try to stop every arrow. 

In June 2026, Ukrainian cruise missiles hit a Voronezh semiconductor plant supplying components for the Pantsir-S1, Iskander-K, and Kh-101.

A reported Flamingo strike in July also damaged the Avitek defense plant in Kirov, more than 1,200 kilometers from Ukraine.

The deeper strikes come as Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) says Russian factories are producing 110% to 120% of their monthly missile quotas. 

How the Samara plant supports Russia’s Starlink alternative

The Progress factory in Samara makes the Soyuz-2.1b rockets used to launch Rassvet satellites developed by Russia’s Bureau 1440. A second batch of 16 entered orbit in July, bringing the serial constellation to 32.

Rassvet’s coverage remains intermittent. However, Moscow plans to deploy 292 satellites by the end of 2027 and 924 by 2035. A Ukrainian defense adviser estimated that continuous service would require 200–250 satellites.