Russia plans to test-fire a new type of ballistic missile before the end of 2026, one built to fly farther than the Iskander missiles it now launches at Ukraine, according to Ukraine's military intelligence. Its deputy chief outlined the plan at a Ukraine-NATO meeting on 8 September, ZN reported.

A longer-range missile would erode the relative safety of western Ukraine, where the routes carrying Western aid run beyond the front, and stretch air defenses already struggling against ballistic strikes.

A longer reach into western Ukraine

Russia plans final tests of a new ballistic missile with a range of up to 800 kilometers, or about 500 miles, by year's end, Vadym Skibitskyi, deputy head of the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine (HUR), told the Ukraine-NATO Interparliamentary Council, citing the agency's own assessments. Russian forces may try to hit targets in western Ukraine during those tests, he said.

The deputy chief noted that Moscow is raising both the output and the range of its ballistic missiles to intensify strikes and push Ukraine into a social and economic crisis. He urged partners to tighten sanctions until Russia loses access to the foreign components in its long-range weapons.

Russia's modernized 9M723-2, also called the Iskander-1000, reaches up to 550 km, HUR says, and the older 9M723-1 covers 390 km. An 800-km weapon would carry strikes well past the front.

The missile Russia already fields

Russia already fields a longer-range Iskander variant. This summer, its forces first fired the modernized 9M723-2—part of the Bora-M system—in a combined missile strike on Kyiv. A bigger engine and a larger launcher gave that missile its extended reach, HUR said. Ballistic missiles are the hardest of Russia's strikes for Ukraine to stop, and Moscow has poured them out in recent months, running its plants above quota and firing them in larger salvos.

Losing more soldiers than it signs up

Russia is waging a war of attrition despite heavy losses and has not given up on destroying Ukrainian statehood, Skibitskyi said. Skibitskyi put Russia's August losses at 43,000 soldiers against 39,000 recruited. Russia has struggled to fill its ranks for months. Russia's General Staff sees intensified mobilization as the only way to reach its main goals—fully occupying the Ukrainian Donbas and seizing the strategic initiative—he explained.

The Kremlin plans to mobilize about 600,000 people across 2026 and 2027, half of them by the end of this year, he said. Russia will also try to close the Black Sea to Ukraine and to drag Belarus into the war and into hybrid operations against NATO, he added, though HUR sees no signs of Russian strike groupings forming there yet.

Each new kilometer of range puts more of Ukraine within reach from deep inside Russia, without moving a launcher closer to the border.

Ukrainian drones set a fuel-oil terminal on fire in the port of Novorossiysk again overnight on 9 September, monitoring channels reported. Novorossiysk's mayor claimed drone debris came down on enterprise grounds in the Russian city. Ukraine's military later reported strikes on the naval base there, including on warships that carry cruise missiles.

Analysts placed the fire on a fuel-oil terminal

Ukrainian defense news outlet Militarnyi located the strike through geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) analysis, which matches published photos and video against satellite imagery and maps. That work showed drones hitting the mazut (fuel-oil) terminal inside the port in Krasnodar Krai. Fire broke out on the terminal grounds, and at least one storage tank took damage. Around midnight, residents began reporting the sound of drones overhead, Russian air defense fire, and explosions.

The Ukrainian Telegram channel Exilenova+ started posting videos of the attack on the port around midnight, further into the morning sharing more footage of the fire at the fuel-oil terminal. Russian news Telegram channel Astra wrote of fires on the grounds of several enterprises and near a residential building, with a column of dark smoke in eyewitness video. Its analyst then established from that footage that the burning object was the Novorossiysk Fuel Oil Terminal. Astra called the work open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysis, meaning conclusions drawn from publicly available imagery and records.

Satellites feeding NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), which flags heat sources from orbit, recorded several seats of fire in Novorossiysk after the night raid. An OSINT reading of eyewitness video also placed a fire at an apartment building in the city.

Novorossiysk mayor Andrei Kravchenko claimed overnight that air defenses were still fighting off the drone attack. He stated that drone debris had come down at several enterprises and near a residential building, and claimed that preliminary information showed no casualties. Kravchenko later acknowledged hits on enterprises while describing the cause as "falling debris."

Ukrainian drones and missiles hit the same naval base overnight on 12 August, damaging Kalibr-carrying frigates and stopping all three of the port's grain terminals.

Ukraine's account named ships, the harbor, and the terminal

Robert Brovdi, callsign Madyar, commands Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, the military branch that runs the country's drone units. He said Ukrainian Defense Forces struck the Russian naval base at Novorossiysk in a combined operation overnight, and that the Russians lost several military vessels there, missile carriers among them.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed strikes on Novorossiysk and Krasnodar Krai around midday. He said Ukraine hit a terminal used for shipping oil, military harbor facilities, and warships, including carriers of Kalibr cruise missiles.

No independent assessment of damage to the vessels had emerged by midday, and Russia's defense ministry did not address the naval base.

The port Ukraine keeps returning to

The targeted terminal stores and transships fuel oil, a heavy refinery product, along with light petroleum products, and its throughput runs to about 4 million tons a year. It belongs to the Novorossiysk Commercial Sea Port, the largest seaport in Russia, and counts among the leading enterprises of the city's transport hub.