The Russian government has submitted a draft federal budget for 2027–2029 to the State Duma, Meduza reported on 30 September, citing TASS. In all three years, Russia's expenditures will exceed its revenues, the outlet noted.

Russia's finances have been eroding since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. To keep paying for the war, the Kremlin has drained its reserves, borrowed more, and pushed tax burdens onto residents and businesses, while the wider economy stalls.

The government listed social obligations, including aid to those who fought in its war against Ukraine and their families, along with defense needs among the budget's priorities, while its press release left out the planned cuts to social spending and the rise in military spending, Meduza noted, citing The Bell.

Spending will exceed revenue by about 2% of GDP a year

Russia's federal budget for 2027 sets spending at 48.8 trillion rubles ($585 billion) and revenue at 43.3 trillion ($519 billion), the Russian government stated, leaving a deficit of 5.5 trillion rubles ($66 billion). It claimed the draft is "balanced" and that healthcare spending will rise compared with 2026.

Deficits of 5.1 trillion rubles ($61 billion) in 2028 and 5.3 trillion ($64 billion) in 2029 are also planned, about 2% of GDP a year, Meduza noted.

This year's deficit is now set to reach a record 7.345 trillion rubles ($88 billion), nearly double the previous forecast of 3.785 trillion ($45 billion), The Moscow Times reported on 1 October. To help close the gap, Moscow plans an array of tax hikes for 2027–2029 to fund military spending. Already by May, its four-month deficit had run 50% above what it had planned for the whole year.

Even as the deficit widens, Russia plans its highest defense spending since the full-scale invasion began: 17.1 trillion rubles ($202.58 billion) in 2027, 27% more than the 13.5 trillion originally planned.

Only 2.3 trillion rubles ($28 billion) of that sum is itemized in public documents, and 34.9% of all 2027 spending will be classified, the highest share in at least 12 years, exiled outlet Vyorstka reported. The Duma is expected to hold the first of three readings on 29 October, the date proposed by Budget Committee chairman Andrei Makarov, Interfax reported.

Ukraine has cracked the riddle of strange metal "whiskers" that appeared on Russian jet-powered drones striking Kyiv, and they don't appear to be some clever new sensor. They are a simple mechanical detonator, a metal tube, and a rod that, on impact, closes a circuit to set off the warhead, Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, presidential adviser, says, ending online guessing about the strange devices.

Photos of Russian drones with long metal prongs jutting from the nose had set off speculation about what they were for. The answer, Flash explains, is low-tech: when the prong hits something, the contact closes, and the charge goes off, with no sensors or electronics.

That simplicity sits against a more worrying trend: Russia is steadily upgrading what its drones carry, from the mix of warheads on the jet-powered Geran-4 and Geran-5 to a new charge designed to sever power pylons.

A contact closes the circuit

"It's all mechanically simple, no sensors or complex detectors," Flash says, commenting on the "whiskers".

It is the kind of crude, cheap fuze that suits a weapon meant to be built and spent in the thousands, where cost matters more than finesse.

Russia upgrades the warheads

Russia's jet drones, now built at roughly 3,000 a month, have become the dominant threat in its nightly campaign. The day when Flash published his "whiskers" post, Russia hit Kyiv with another round of drone strikes, hitting a school, a café, and warehouse buildings across the capital. The children inside the school were in its shelter. Fires broke out across two districts, and one person in the city was wounded.

On 28 September, Russia struck Kyiv's Academy of Sciences, which has a century-old history.

On the same day, Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesperson, said Ukraine must "pay a price" for its actions in recent months and calls Russia's intensified strikes "part of this price."

Less than 50% of the F-16 fighter jets delivered to Ukraine may be operational, Defense Express reports, citing a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial published on 29 September. On the same day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Belgium would deliver three F-16 fighter jets this year.

F-16s are used extensively to intercept Russian cruise missiles and drones. As the number of Russian attacks has increased, these aircraft have become particularly important for Ukraine. However, the jets Ukraine receives are old, and keeping them flying takes regular maintenance, extra work, and hard-to-find parts.

Routine inspections are taking as long as 40 weeks in Belgium, retired US Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery told the WSJ.

The maintenance process for these aircraft for Ukraine is lengthy

A likely reason for the problem is the lengthy maintenance process handled by Belgian company Sabena Aerospace Engineering, according to the WSJ, whose questions the company declined to answer. This process, according to Defense Express's estimates, takes 6–20 times longer than maintenance in the United States, which usually takes between 2 and 6 weeks. Ukraine uses the services of the Belgian company, meaning its F-16s are not being serviced quickly enough.

Delivering three additional fighter jets will not significantly help the Ukrainian military until the issue with aircraft maintenance times is resolved, Defense Express notes. The lengthy turnaround may be caused by a large maintenance backlog at the company, limited capacity, or logistical constraints, and older jets may need extra work and scarcer parts.

The delivery is part of an earlier commitment. Belgium plans to provide seven fighter jets this year: three for operational use and four for spare parts, Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken said in June.

"I'll propose to the government to send all our F-16s to Ukraine in the coming years. It depends on having the F-35s in place because, of course, we have DCA [dual-capable aircraft] capacity. We have our role in the nuclear doctrine of NATO," Francken said.

Belgium has pledged its entire F-16 fleet of 53 aircraft as F-35s replace them, according to Defense Express.

F-16s in Ukraine have already shot down several thousand Russian aerial targets

F-16s operated by Ukrainian pilots have shot down more than 3,150 aerial targets. These include 666 cruise missiles and around 2,500 drones of various types. The aircraft have also carried out more than 650 strikes against Russian ground targets, Lieutenant General Anatolii Kryvonozhko, Commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, said during a meeting between a Ukrainian Air Force delegation and representatives of Lockheed Martin on 29 September.

At the meeting, Conor McGuire, Lockheed Martin's head of F-16 capability development, highly praised the combat use and operation of F-16s by Ukrainian pilots and the entire ground aviation personnel. He also expressed his intention to help Ukrainians enhance the capabilities of the existing platform, the statement said.

Student journalists, their advisors, and legal advocates say colleagues and administrators are attempting to undermine student reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, Gaza, and other issues that public institutions would rather not have their reputations connected to.

Public records obtained by 404 Media show administrators taking meetings with parents and alumni when they take issue with student reporting and asking advisors to compromise their professional ethics. They also show escalating tensions between student newsroom staff and administrators, prompting more legal aid requests to advocacy groups. 

This comes as student journalists at The Cornell Daily Sun earned recognition for breaking the “Cornell Seven” story regarding the lawsuit filed in New York’s trial court last month by a Jane Doe accusing current and former Cornell University students of drugging and sexual abuse. The student journalists told The Cut this week that a vague university and campus police statement from nearly two years ago prompted more questions than answers. Such is the basis for most accountability journalism on college campuses. 

The cases we reviewed involved the phase of the reporting process that comes later, where a factual dispute the newsroom has defended or a complaint where the person doesn’t bother to explain what is allegedly wrong with the students’ reporting. 

In Colorado, a high school social studies teacher emailed the student publication’s advisor at the time, accusing a student’s opinion piece called “Why is Gaza Important?”of being “published with factually inaccurate and racist information,” but then said in the same email, “I’m not going to start listing the inaccuracies along with the omissions.”

In California, a high school principal told a student journalism advisor to redact the name of an individual threatening to sue the district for defamation after student journalists published an Instagram carousel to their school’s newspaper account about the number of times their county turned up in the Epstein files. In this case, which has already been widely reported on, the administrator told the journalism advisor to redact the name of the woman who was threatening suit without determining whether the reporter made a factual mistake (the students did not). 

“I can’t remove the name without your help,” the principal told the advisor via email, after the advisor said the students would first seek legal guidance from the Student Press Law Center before taking any actions.

Soon after the op-ed was published, the student newspaper’s advisor was reassigned to another role within the district. The advisor from the California school district stepped down from her role during the last school year; she now consults schools and nonprofits on best practices for their student media programs. Mike Hiestand, who is a lawyer with the Student Press Law Center, has spent decades advising student newsrooms. He says it’s common for administrators to target advisors, adding that it’s one of the more effective censorship methods available to them. 

“School officials, they see employees as kind of an easy target over whom they have some authority, and they know that in many places, that relationship between the students and their advisor is a tight one,” Hiestand told 404 Media. “Unfortunately, some school officials take advantage of that bond and definitely go after advisors.” 

In 2025, the Student Press Law Center (SPLC) claimed that the nonprofit had responded to nearly 1,000 hotline inquiries from student newsrooms in 46 states and Washington D.C. The most common inquiries involved censorship, libel and copyright. Overall, SPLC says calls are down, but hotline inquiries about censorship specifically are up 17 percent from the year prior. 

“One of the biggest things we’ve certainly found with censors over the years is they want to be called everything but a censor,” he added. “What they’re doing is everything but censorship.” 

This tracks with what 404 Media is observing through public records requests into school, library and university censorship. The same state laws that have been used to restrict how topics like race, gender, and systemic inequality can be accessed and taught have also put student journalists covering those beats in a bind. 

Records from Pensacola State College obtained by 404 Media show that last spring, an administrator tried to block funding for a journalism professor to print students’ class assignments for their portfolios because at least one of the stories involved reporting on the LGBTQ+ community. The campus later relented and agreed to release funding for students’ portfolios. In an email to the advisor, an administrator involved in the situation wrote that “the proper role of administration is to facilitate rather than impede the completion of legitimate classroom projects.” 

“When you have a principal coming in who doesn’t have a lick of journalism experience claiming that they’re there to guide young journalists, that’s where I have problems,” Hiestand said. “Every principal and every superintendent in the country seems to think that they are qualified editors.” 

Similar verbiage has appeared in other public records requests involving student journalists, like in the case of a Maryland school district memo about principals reading and approving every story before publication. In the memo, the chief of schools wrote that “[a]s responsible adults and educational leaders, we have the duty to guide the work of our students as they are developing their skills in a school setting during a school-directed activity.” But internal correspondence obtained by 404 Media suggests that the memo was “really to be sure an administrator could initial any printed posters, review school apparel, and scan over the yearbook to be sure that there is no violation” of the student handbook. 

Marie McMullan, program manager and counsel for the Student Press Legal Hotline with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, says so far, 2026 has been a very consequential year for students leading their school publications. 

“Student journalists are a very bright group,” McMullan told 404 Media. “They are great at sounding the alarm and bringing advocates out of the really blatant examples. But I always just worry about making sure that student journalists know their rights so that they can assert them in cases where there are subtler forms of censorship.”

At Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE), student reporters with The Alestle, the university’s student newspaper, claim that the institution’s marketing and communications department had become more insistent on attending interviews conducted by student reporters in recent months. The department took issue with editor-in-chief Dylan Hembrough’s framing of the dispute, calling several of the claims “inaccurate.” In an interview with 404 Media, Hembrough said the paper investigated and determined there was nothing inaccurate about the story. When Hembrough did not retract the story, the executive director of marketing and communications at SIUE sent an open letter to the entire campus—a mailing list of more than 14,000 people, including faculty and staff—taking issue with that story, along with other stories throughout the years as well. 

“The Alestle appears willing to substitute alarming headlines for verified facts, to rely on posturing rather than careful reporting and to treat corrections as an inconvenience rather than a professional obligation,” the open letter reads. With the letter was a link to a 27-page document of corrections the department expected student leadership to act on.

“I have been on the other side of panicking over things like this,” Hembrough told 404 Media. “Something that has helped me get through that, or at least stave it off, is the idea that the truth is more important than whatever I feel about it. Embarrassment or humiliation should have no bearing on how or even whether a publication makes a correction.” 

Then in September, Hembrough learned via email that he was being investigated by the campus police for harassment against the department. When Hembrough’s journalism advisor asked the officer to clarify on what grounds, the officer said the report was based on a line in an email, which read: “Marketing and communications’ insistence on interfering with our newsgathering process is dangerous and detrimental to both press freedom and freedom of speech.” Hembrough shared his email with 404 Media, which reads as an editor defending another student reporter’s right to conduct an interview without the department exercising prior restraint over the publication. In her statement to campus police, she reportedly told the officer that “other members of my office have approached me stating Alestle reporters have been by my office uninvited,” and that she didn’t have a lock on her door. 

“Due to the media between Marketing and Communications and the Alestle I am worried a ‘January 6th’ type of crowd may be outside my office,” the complainant told the officer, according to the campus police report. The officer advised her to contact facilities management about getting a lock for her office door and concluded that the facts of the case don’t “meet the statutory threshold for Harassment by Electronic Communications.” 

The public records reviewed by 404 Media from SIUE support the claims The Alestle’s journalists make throughout their reporting on the department. SIUE did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

The situation at SIUE serves as an example of a dispute about institutional reputation that’s escalated to involve campus law enforcement, but law enforcement nonetheless. McMullan says this escalation has an undeniable chilling effect on free speech, noting that policies and laws that public institutions use to silence young reporters still need to abide by the First Amendment. But overall, she’s impressed with how students at SIUE and other campuses are meeting the moment, even when the adults in the room aren’t.

“Whether it’s in a court of public opinion or a court of law, students are not accepting censorship,” she said. “They’re pushing back against it.”

The Kremlin is signaling that it will hold the Russian assets of European companies hostage to pressure Europe into rethinking its sanctions, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) wrote on 30 September. Moscow has already put well-known European retailers and food makers under Russian "temporary management." A senior Russian official has now hinted that European banks could be next.

As Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine, it has long turned hostages and threats into weapons. Its record includes nuclear threats against Europe from its Oreshnik missile launch sites and a fresh warning over Kaliningrad. It has played games with Europe's largest nuclear plant that it occupied in 2022, applied gas and water pressure on its neighbors, and Kyiv accuses it of blackmailing the families of Ukrainian prisoners of war. Europe's companies are now one more lever in that kit.

"Let them be scared"

Russia is taking "asymmetric measures" to make Europe rethink its sanctions, a senior Russian government source with direct knowledge of the seizures claimed, Reuters reported. "Let them think about what measures they are taking and what sanctions they are introducing," the source said.

Asked whether the Russian units of Italy's UniCredit and Austria's Raiffeisen could be placed under temporary management, the source answered: "Let them be scared."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed the decisions were driven by "the increasing level of involvement of these unfriendly countries in direct battlefield hostilities" against Russia. He suggested the moves were "reversible," but added: "For now, we do not see any grounds for a reversal."

Explore further

EU lawmakers renew push to seize frozen Russian assets as Ukraine faces its toughest winter yet with a €23 billion defense funding gap

Nestlé, Auchan, and Metro under "temporary management"

Putin's decree of 17 September placed 16 companies under the "temporary management" of a firm called L.E.V. Management, with no end date. They include the Russian units of France's Auchan and Lemana PRO, formerly Leroy Merlin, and of Switzerland's Nestlé. A second decree, on 28 September, handed the Russian assets of German wholesaler Metro AG to UK Torg Rus.

Both decrees amend Putin's April 2023 decree No. 302, which lets Moscow take over the property of firms tied to countries it labels "unfriendly." Because the "temporary" management has no expiry date, ISW considers it effectively nationalization. Independent outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe identified L.E.V. Management's director as retired Russian Major General Andrei Krayushkin.

European companies as corporate hostages

The Kremlin likely wants to use the seizures to take European companies as corporate hostages, ISW assessed. It also likely expects a temporary fiscal boost from the revenues of the seized businesses.

The strategy assumes that European firms will judge the benefits of staying in Russia to outweigh the risk of losing their assets, the think tank said. Whether a company is seized depends entirely on Moscow's relations with the country where it is headquartered, ISW added.

Explore further

Russia declares nearly 8,000 Luhansk apartments “ownerless” for “nationalization”

Seizing others' property is an old Moscow habit

Since the start of the full-scale war, Russia has introduced temporary administration at 135 foreign-linked firms, mostly from EU countries, according to TASS data cited by Reuters. Earlier targets included French food group Danone and Danish brewer Carlsberg.

The method was tested on Ukraine first. Russia's proxies in occupied Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts stole most Ukrainian assets there in 2014 and 2015. In March 2017, after Ukrainian activists blocked rail trade with the occupied areas, they placed the remaining Ukrainian-registered firms under "temporary administrations," a label close to the one Moscow uses today. The published Donetsk list alone ran to 43 assets, from coal mines and ironworks to the Donbas Arena stadium. Much of the coal and steel business later ended up with firms tied to Serhii Kurchenko, a fugitive oligarch from Yanukovych's era.

Ukraine is about to tell Washington exactly which Russian targets it wants punished under America's new sanctions law, the Associated Press reported. A senior Ukrainian diplomat said Kyiv will hand the Trump administration and Congress a wish list of companies, ships, and people this week—and at the top are the firms supplying parts for Russia's answer to Starlink.

The law requires Washington to act but lets the president waive the sanctions if he certifies that doing so serves US national interests, and the first choice falls due in weeks. For Ukraine, a measure that names no targets changes nothing on the ground—which is why the fight now is over whose names make the list before the clock runs out.

A list topped by Russia's Starlink clone

Denys Sienik, chargé d'affaires at Ukraine's embassy in Washington, said the priority is a group of Russian firms making components for Rassvet, Moscow's homegrown satellite network, which Russia hopes to complete by the end of the year—though its own officials have put the start of service in 2027. Bureau 1440, the firm building Rassvet, is not itself on US sanctions lists, but its parent company, ICS Holding, is under US blocking sanctions, according to Militarnyi. The suppliers feeding the network parts are not sanctioned, and those are the ones Kyiv wants added to the list.

Russia sped up the project after Ukraine and SpaceX cut off the Starlink terminals its troops had used without authorization at the front. If Russia completes the constellation, Sienik said, it could strike Ukraine at will with real-time information—a danger he warned would bite hardest this winter. "If these entities are not sanctioned, it will actually make this program possible for Russia and that will be a game-changer," he told reporters, Reuters reported. Kyiv wants access to Starlink inside Russia, too, so it can strike targets there.

Euromaidan Press has reported how such a network would change the battlefield: the satellites transmit in high-frequency bands that are hard to jam, and a relay overhead would feed drones and missiles fresh coordinates mid-flight, letting them fly low under air defenses that struggle to see them.

Oil tankers and attacks on US firms

Ukraine is pushing for tougher action against Russia's shadow fleet, too—the aging tankers that sell its oil around Western restrictions—and is asking the administration and American industry to publicly condemn Russian attacks on US companies' operations inside Ukraine, Sienik said.

The deadline Washington is now facing

The requests arrive as the administration faces an 18 October deadline to decide which Russian entities, if any, to sanction under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, which US President Donald Trump signed into law on 18 September. The law directs the White House to impose tariffs on Russia's biggest oil buyers and to block its banks, officials, and tankers—but lets the president waive those measures, which is why Kyiv is lobbying for the toughest list it can get.