Ukraine's new top commander wants the army's combat-tested sergeants to have real careers, real authority, and clear paths to promotion — not just a role training recruits. Commander-in-Chief Mykhailo Drapatyi has met the senior sergeants of the force's branches, corps, and command bodies and set concrete steps to reform the sergeant corps, saying most had come straight from combat zones, Texty reported.

The push targets an old weakness. Ukraine inherited its rank system from the Soviet army in 1991 — a centralized model in which officers decided almost everything and sergeants were little more than senior soldiers, with no authority or career ladder of their own. A 2020 reform law began to change that by aligning the system with NATO standards, making the sergeant an independent figure.

Drapatyi, who became commander-in-chief in July 2026 with a mandate to carry that overhaul forward and a reputation for favoring decentralized command, is now pressing it directly.

Sergeants outgrow the training role

The sergeant's job long ago stopped being only about preparing troops, Drapatyi said. Sergeants now settle new arrivals into combat areas, handle supply and equipment, ready personnel for tasks, and command them directly in battle.

"A sergeant was a soldier yesterday. Today, he is a commander who is closest to the soldier and sees the real state of the unit on the ground best of all," Drapatyi said.

Drapatyi assigns the reform tasks

The meeting worked through the structure of the corps, the split of responsibility between sergeants and officers, training, appointments, and pay. For each, Drapatyi continued, he set specific tasks, defined next steps, and named the people responsible.

"We cannot build a modern, combat-capable sergeant corps on old approaches," Drapatyi said.

He believes that a sergeant's combat experience should turn into authority, professional development, responsibility, and a real say in how troops are trained and led.

Russian strikes cut power to nearly a million Ukrainian families across four oblasts last week. Ukraine's largest private energy company, DTEK, brought it back, fully or partly restoring electricity to 596 settlements in Donetsk, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kyiv oblasts between 31 August and 6 September, the company said.

Russia is hammering Ukraine's power grid again as the cold season nears, and the country's winter-resilience plans were less than half complete at the start of September.

Odesa and Donetsk absorb the worst

Most of the week's work was in Odesa Oblast, which Russia has been striking without pause. Ukrainian crews there returned power to more than 366,000 families, DTEK said.

Much of that damage followed a massed missile-and-drone strike on the region's main energy facilities on 2 September, after which national operator Ukrenergo imposed temporary grid limits to keep damaged equipment from overloading.

Donetsk Oblast came close behind, with power restored to nearly 360,000 homes despite what the company called an extremely difficult situation for its repair teams. In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, crews reconnected almost 172,000 homes, and in Kyiv Oblast nearly 9,000 more.

Strikes keep cutting the grid

The reconnections are happening under continued fire. Russia keeps attacking energy sites in Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts, damaging lines faster than they can be fully secured. DTEK crews can only begin repairs once the military and emergency services have cleared access to the damaged equipment.

"Russia keeps attacking our energy system. Despite everything, we keep working and restoring power — now on the 1,657th day," said Alina Bondarenko, chief executive of DTEK Grids.

Winter sharpens the threat

The timing is the danger. Ukraine has until the heating season to shore up a grid that Russia has spent the war trying to break.

This year's attacks have again concentrated on the energy system as temperatures start to fall.

A Ukrainian company has placed third in a NATO contest to find ways of keeping an enemy's airfields shut down over time. Its artificial-intelligence targeting module finished among the top three of more than 60 entries in the Persistent Airfield Denial Innovation Challenge, Ukraine's Defense Ministry said.

The challenge was run jointly by NATO Allied Command Transformation and the NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training and Education Center, the first jointly staffed NATO-Ukraine body. The result shows NATO is building a direct channel for Ukraine's combat-tested technology into its own capability development.

On the NATO side, the finalists' proposals were evaluated by representatives of the Alliance's Commands, as well as the NATO Defense Innovation Accelerator DIANA.

An AI module lands third place

Organizers received more than 60 applications and brought nine finalists to Warsaw. The Ukrainian team took third place with a module designed to enhance the autonomy and accuracy of strike systems. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry did not name the developer.

A Czech firm, LPP Holding, won with a long-range system designed to work with minimal outside control, and a Polish team came second with a plan for the pre-planned destruction of key airfield infrastructure.

JATEC feeds Ukraine's lessons to NATO

Ukrainian experts helped define the problem and judge the entries, including officers from the Air Force Command, the Unmanned Systems Forces, and the National Guard's Omega unit.

The challenge, which carried up to €250,000 in prize funding, was the second of the two bodies to run together, after a 2025 round that fast-tracked European firms to counter Russian glide bombs.

In July 2026, Russian aviation used approximately 8,000 guided aerial bombs against Ukrainian cities.

The winning solutions now move to testing and combat validation, which the Defense Ministry said will show how well they work and whether they can scale.

Ukraine says it has found a way to shoot down Russia's Banderol jet missiles for less than the missiles themselves cost. A system from a developer in the Brave1 defense-tech cluster has already destroyed at least four of them, Brave1 said, releasing video of the intercepts.

The point is the price tag, not the kills. The Banderol is built to be cheap for Russia and expensive for Ukraine to stop, forcing Kyiv to spend scarce, costly air-defense missiles on a low-cost weapon. A counter that costs less than the target flips that math back against Russia.

A cluster developer downs four Banderols

Russia introduced a new missile-drone called "Banderol" to terrorize Ukrainian cities, and Ukraine already has a technological answer

A Brave1 said the country built an interceptor that destroys "Banderols" at a fraction of the cost of the missile-drones themselves
Brave1 pic.twitter.com/9TKWdFWfyW

— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) September 7, 2026

The footage Brave1 shared shows a defender in the cluster hitting at least four Banderol missiles.

"The cost of interception is substantially cheaper than the cost of the drone-missiles themselves," the cluster said.

It added that several products capable of countering the Banderol now exist, and that it is scaling the ones that work.

Kronshtadt built the missile to bleed defenses

The S8000 Banderol is a hybrid of a cruise missile and a jet-powered attack drone, made by the sanctioned Russian firm Kronshtadt, which also builds the Orion reconnaissance drone that launches it. It flies at a cruising speed of 520 to 560 km/h and up to 650 km/h at full throttle, and carries a 114.3-kilogram fragmentation-high-explosive warhead, of which 49.5 kilograms is explosive.

The design is built for cheap mass production: it runs on a Chinese hobby turbojet sold online for about $16,000, and Ukrainian media have put the cost of a single Banderol near $100,000, Ukrainska Pravda reported. Russia has used it to strike Odesa, Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Black Sea ports.

Ukraine keeps finding cheap answers

Brave1's system is the newest in a pattern of low-cost counters. In July, Ukrainian troops downed Banderols with Swedish Bofors L70 anti-aircraft guns designed in the late 1940s. The task now is to turn scattered successes into enough deployed systems to blunt a weapon Russia is firing in growing numbers, which is what Brave1 says it is racing to do.

Ukraine now has 67 companies working to shoot down Russia's jet-powered drones en masse, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. He gave the number at a Kyiv press conference alongside US presidential envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Ukrinform reported.

Most of those firms are still chasing the problem, and only a few have working systems. The race matters because Russia's jet-powered Geran drones fly too fast for the mobile gun teams that once downed the slower models. Russia has sharply expanded the jets' use over the summer, launching them by day as well as by night and driving air-raid alerts over Kyiv almost hourly.

Prototypes outnumber proven interceptors

"Today, we have about 60 companies in Ukraine already working on intercepting jet-powered drones, and doing so on a mass scale. To be precise, there are 67," Zelenskyy said.

He added that three to five have shown real results, and the next step is mass production.

Zelenskyy calls it all "Plan B"

Zelenskyy framed the entire defensive build-up as a fallback.

"All this defense is 'Plan B,' though right now it is very relevant. 'Plan A' is to accelerate diplomatic possibilities as much as possible, to reduce escalation from Russia," he said.

He spoke as the US envoys pressed a peace push in Kyiv, with no breakthrough announced.

He also called anti-ballistic defense Ukraine's weak point, saying he would raise it in upcoming meetings in Norway and Canada, and that the US plans to increase production of Patriot interceptors next year while Germany expands its own output under existing licenses.

Ukraine needs the interceptors to down Russian ballistic missiles that come several times per week. Each Russian attack on Kyiv costs the city budget about $12 million.  More than four thousand buildings in Kyiv have been damaged by Russian strikes, with each attack adding to a repair bill the city carries alongside the human losses.

Russia's foreign minister says the war has to end so that "no more Nazism" is left in Europe. Sergei Lavrov made the claim in a speech to students, casting Russia's war once again as a fight against a Nazi threat.

Earlier, Aleksei Selivanov, a sanctioned collaborator who became a senior official in the occupation administration of Zaporizhzhia Oblast, revealed the meaning behind the term "denazification". "Denazification is re-Russification," he said, adding that where Russian troops arrive, Ukrainian nationhood "ceases to exist," according to United24.

"Wherever Russian troops arrive, Ukrainians cease to exist."

At an official event in Moscow, Russian Lieutenant Colonel Alexey Selivanov openly admitted their true goal is the total erasure of Ukrainian identity. pic.twitter.com/53zI9G2GwS

— UNITED24 Media (@United24media) August 31, 2026

Russia reportedly points on Germany, one of Ukraine's main supporters

Meanwhile, Andrii Kovalenko, Head of the National Security and Defense Council's Center for Countering Disinformation, linked Lavrov's statement to the recent conflict between Germany and Russia over the drone attack on Ukraine's plane in Leipzig.

"Russia’s aggression is now becoming even more overt, with the main focus being placed on the political dismantling of the current elites who refused to acknowledge this aggression right under their noses," Kovalenko said.

Germany has been a long-term supporter of Ukraine, sending tons of aid, including Gepard anti-drone guns and Leopard tanks.

Russia plans Ukraine's new power figures after the war

"This war must be ended so that there is no more Nazism in Europe, which has again spread its metastases here," Lavrov said.

He added that leaving Ukraine's leadership in power would betray those who defeated Nazism in 1945.

The framing collapses on contact with the facts. It was Russia that launched the full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, and it continues the war today.

Ukraine has no Nazi government. Its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish and was elected democratically. "Denazification" has functioned since the invasion's first day as a pretext, drawing on the Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War to recast an attack on Ukrainian identity as a war on fascism.

Earlier, Lavrov said that one of Russia's war goals in Ukraine was to protect the "honor and dignity" of Russian citizens, including their right to use the Russian language and practice the Orthodox faith, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported.

In August, Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), said during a sermon at the Holy Trinity Seraphim-Diveyevo Convent that the Soviet Union's creation of the nuclear bomb was the result of divine intervention.

At a Kyiv press conference on 6 September, Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Gordon asked US special envoy Steve Witkoff, to his face, whether he found it repugnant to sit across a table from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Witkoff did not answer directly, saying only that settling the war means keeping relations and communication open with both sides, according to Gordon.

US President Donald Trump began his peace efforts as soon as he returned to the White House in January 2025, promising to end the war in a single day. It did not happen. Instead, Russia has only stepped up its strikes on civilians and expanded the volume and types of weapons it uses for mass terror.

“And finally, aren’t you disgusted to be sitting at the same table with an international war criminal, the butcher of the Ukrainian people, who is personally responsible for the tragedy in Ukraine?” Gordon asked.

It is a reference with legal grounding, as the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023 over the deportation of Ukrainian children.

The questions Witkoff would not answer

Witkoff did not provide direct answers to the questions. He only added that, in order to resolve the war, it is important to maintain relations and communication with both sides of the conflict.

According to Trump’s special envoy, he has traveled to Moscow approximately eight times, where he met with Putin and his team, and said they "have always received respect from President Putin".

In practice, however, none of these meetings resulted in anything other than an intensification of the strikes. In the winter of 2025, a specific peace plan was discussed that, at the time, consisted of 20 points.

Yet as the discussions continued, Russia intensified its terror against civilians, destroying an entire thermal power plant in Kyiv and plunging millions of Kyiv residents and people in other cities into darkness amid temperatures as low as -15°C. Now, as the US is holding its anti-ballistic missile interceptors, this scenario will likely continue this winter.

“The language of force”

“Don’t you think that Putin, the Russians, and Russia understand only one language well — the language of force?” the journalist asked.

There was no direct answer to this question either. Instead, Witkoff said that their job is to bring the two sides together and improve communication.

Earlier, there have been numerous occasions when channels of communication between Russia and Ukraine have existed. This was confirmed by Kyrylo Budanov, Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine and former intelligence chief, according to The New York Times.

Russia attempted to murder Gordon

In 2025, the Security Service of Ukraine said it had foiled an assassination attempt against journalist and media manager Gordon. According to the agency, the FSB of Russia was behind the plot to murder the prominent media figure.

According to investigators, the Russian intelligence service offered a $400,000 reward for carrying out the assassination.

As then-SBU chief Lieutenant General Vasyl Maliuk told journalists, Dmytro Gordon “triggers” Russians, while the Russian authorities regard him as Ukraine’s main “propagandist.”

Ukraine's drone forces say they struck 58,465 Russian targets in August, an average of nearly 1,900 a day. The tally is up almost 9 percent on July and more than double January's, and it included 54 vessels of Russia's shadow fleet, 33 air-defense systems, and 168 energy nodes, Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Madiar" Brovdi reported on his Telegram channel.

The volume matters less than where some of it lands. Cutting power to occupied Crimea and the south is meant to blind Russian air defense, much of which runs on the grid. Meanwhile, the strikes on Russia's sanctions-evading shadow fleet squeeze both Crimea's fuel supply and Moscow's oil exports.

Ukraine's drone forces claim 11,010 Russian troop casualties in August

Brovdi also said the strikes killed or wounded 11,010 Russian soldiers over the month, about 355 a day — a figure that counts only losses the drone force attributes to its own strikes, not Russia's total casualties.

That daily rate was slightly below July's 374, down about 5 percent, even as the number of targets rose. Compared with January, the force said Russian personnel losses were up 17.3 percent.

Three campaigns inside the count

Most of the headline volume is small front-line targets, but three named operations account for the strategic hits. Under Operation "Milk", the force said it struck 54 shadow-fleet vessels in August, bringing the total to 260 since the campaign began on 6 July. Operation "PPOpad" — a play on the Ukrainian for air defense — hit 33 Russian air-defense elements in August and 263 across 2026.

The third, Operation "Crimean Switch Off", struck 168 energy nodes in August, bringing the total to 349 since early July. That campaign has been running for months, blacking out swaths of occupied Crimea.

Brovdi has argued that cutting power to stationary radars and other air-defense elements opens the airspace for deeper Ukrainian strikes. Months of these strikes have left occupied Crimea rationing fuel and living with rolling blackouts, and cut the Kerch ferry crossing's capacity by about three-quarters. All of the figures are the force's own, and Ukraine's military claims of Russian losses are not independently verified.

Ukraine's anti-corruption investigators say a senior official in the Office of the Prosecutor General set up and ran a criminal organization from within the office. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO) said in a statement on 5 September that the group took bribes to allow fraudulent call centers to operate and laundered millions.

The case cuts into Ukraine's own prosecution service, the body meant to bring such crimes to court. NABU, widely regarded as the country's most independent anti-corruption institution, and SAPO opened the operation this week, at a time when fraudulent call centers have become a major problem for organized crime. Meanwhile, authorities are pursuing hundreds of suspected operations at home and abroad.

More than $450,000 was spent on real estate

According to the investigation, a head of a structural unit at the Office of the Prosecutor General created and led the organization in mid-2025, recruiting both serving prosecutors and close associates. Members allegedly took systematic bribes in exchange for not obstructing the so-called call centers, which defraud Ukrainian citizens and foreigners on a mass scale. Such operations run phone and online scams that strip money from victims at home and abroad.

The proceeds were laundered, investigators say. More than $450,000 was spent on real estate, jewelry, and other valuables, while roughly $225,000 was placed in associates' bank accounts and passed off as business income. The alleged organizer also re-registered previously acquired assets to third parties to hide his ownership, including property in a popular apartment complex near the Carpathian Mountains worth at least $270,000.

According to NABU, the criminal group included:

• "Chancellor", its leader
• "Muza", a close friend of the Chancellor
• "Comrade", Chancellor’s driver
• "Flash", Chancellor’s assistant

The investigation shows that the "Chancellor" has managed to consolidate all the levers of influence over fraudulent call centers in his hands. The individual decided which call centers to “protect” and which ones to shut down. Bribes were also allegedly paid to secure appointments to senior positions in the prosecution service.

“I can’t just go to work for the sake of going to work. I need to live there, not just exist. If you’re going to do something, then go all in. But I prefer it this way: if you’re gonna f*ck, f*ck a queen, if you’re gonna steal, steal a million,” Chancellor says in an audio recording released by NABU.

Five charged, more expected

Five people have been exposed so far, suspected of creating, leading, or participating in a criminal organization and of laundering money. The investigation is continuing, and NABU says it is identifying other possible participants.

The Office of the Prosecutor General said it would assist the anti-corruption agencies and suspended the employee in question for the duration of the pre-trial investigation.

"I have a Porsche, Loro Piana, Mimi, flowers"

At the same time, the Prosecutor General’s Office is calling for an assessment of the legality of NABU’s nighttime searches. It says the searches of the offices of senior officials and the investigators’ access to materials from other criminal proceedings require a legal assessment.

Meanwhile, the recordings show that after NABU began searching the people involved in the scheme, they panicked and covered up the most obvious traces of their alleged wrongdoing, including deleting photos of their luxurious lifestyles from social media.

“I need to delete everything… I have a Porsche, Loro Piana, Mimi, flowers, watches, bracelets, bags here. I need to delete everything,” an accomplice in the scheme, known by the pseudonym "Muza", tells "Chancellor" in the recordings.

Earlier, Ukrainska Pravda reported, citing its own sources, that on 4 September NABU detained Serhii Kropyva, deputy head of the Department of International Legal Cooperation at the Prosecutor General’s Office.

A Ukrainian National Guard unit says it destroyed one of Russia's rarer electronic-warfare stations, 55 kilometers behind the front. Lasar's Group said its own bomber drones hunted down an R-330Zh Zhitel jamming station near Sievierodonetsk in mid-summer, in a statement on its Telegram channel.

The Zhitel is worth the effort. It detects and jams GPS, satellite, and cellular signals, and Russian forces have been using it to blind Ukrainian reconnaissance drones over the Sievierodonetsk area. Mounted on a KamAZ truck, it can operate alone or be integrated into a wider jamming network, Militarnyi reported.

How the unit says it did it

The strike was the unit's own from start to finish, Lasar's Group said. Its intelligence analysts, working with the unit's aerial reconnaissance crews, pinpointed the Zhitel's exact position.

Ukrainian soldiers from "Lasar's Group" of the National Guard destroyed a rare Russian R-330Zh "Zhitel" jamming station deep in Russian-held territory

Russian troops had used the system mainly to blind Ukrainian reconnaissance drones over the Siverskodonetsk
Lasar's Group pic.twitter.com/JEQeADMSBk

— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) September 5, 2026

Strike crews then flew in-house-built LASAR bomber drones 55 kilometers deep to destroy it.

The rationale is simple: the fewer electronic warfare systems the Russians have, the freer Ukrainian drones are at the front, which is why such systems sit high on the Lasars' target list. The Zhitel they hit had been used mainly against reconnaissance drones, keeping Ukraine's forces from monitoring the area around Sievierodonetsk.

Not the unit's first

It is at least the second Zhitel Lasar's Group has claimed this year. In April, the unit destroyed a Zhitel and a command-and-staff vehicle in Kharkiv Oblast. The unit has made a specialty of hunting high-value Russian assets deep in the rear: in March, its drone crews tracked down a roughly $50-million Yastreb-AV counter-battery radar in occupied Luhansk Oblast, one pilot even landing a drone on the vehicle to follow it as Russian forces tried to move it to safety.

Taking out a jamming node like the Zhitel has an outsized effect: it restores freedom of movement for Ukrainian drones, brings back GPS-dependent navigation and weapons in the area, and makes it harder for Russia to blind Ukrainian reconnaissance.

Ukraine's private defense industry says no single part of the government is actually responsible for it. The Ukrainian Council of Defense Industry, an alliance of more than 400 companies, has called on the authorities to create a state body with clear powers over defense-industry policy.

The gap sits under a fast-growing sector: Ukraine's top defense-market segments more than doubled to $6.8 billion in 2025, and the private arms market has grown roughly tenfold since 2022. By industry estimates, the sector now employs on the order of 300,000 people. The council argues that a sector of that scale has no government home with the authority to steer it.

Responsibility with no owner

The council traces the problem to July 2025, when the government merged the Ministry of Strategic Industries into the Ministry of Defense, a move meant to unify defense management. More than a year on, the council says the relevant functions remain split among the Defense Ministry, the ministries of economy, finance, and digital transformation, the National Security and Defense Council, and various state agencies.

Each institution handles one slice, the council says, but none holds enough authority or bears comprehensive responsibility for developing the defense industry. That, it argues, makes it harder to solve producers' problems, coordinate policy, attract investment, scale production, and enter foreign markets.

What the council wants

The council stresses that it is not demanding the restoration of the Strategic Industries Ministry. Instead, it wants a capable body with clear powers, adequate resources, and defined political responsibility — a single point of contact between the state and Ukrainian producers.

Such an institution should:

• Develop a medium-term defense-industrial policy aligned with the needs of the Defense Forces and budget planning;
• Coordinate the development of production capabilities, technologies, testing infrastructure, investment, and joint production;
• Serve as the state’s single point of contact with Ukrainian defense manufacturers;
• Ensure the systematic promotion of Ukrainian defense products abroad and protect the interests of Ukrainian companies in international partnerships;
• Involve manufacturers and relevant industry associations in developing decisions that affect the sector.

The council, chaired by presidential adviser Oleksandr Kamyshyn, groups more than 360 private producers, 28 drone-pilot schools, and 20 defense venture funds.

"We represent the industry's common position and help producers work with the state, the military, and international partners," it says of its role.

The defense-industrial complex is critical to Ukraine's ability to defend itself, the council says, and its scale now demands a matching system of state management.

The Russian drone that hit Ukraine's Security Service headquarters in Kyiv came down next to Slovakia's consular section in central Kyiv. Bratislava condemned the strike and ordered Russia's ambassador summoned, Slovak Foreign Minister Juraj Blanár said on 5 September, a day after the attack, according to the Slovak Foreign Ministry.

The response is a rare rebuke from a government that has been among the EU's friendliest to Moscow. The jet-powered Geran drone struck the SBU's central building on 4 September, injuring 12, in what Ukraine called a deliberate hit on the office of its Acting Security Service chief, Oleksandr Poklad, who was unharmed.

What Blanár said

"We strongly condemn today's Russian attack with a jet-powered drone on the building of the Ukrainian Security Service, which is located near the consular section of the Slovak Embassy in Kyiv," Blanár said.

The building has been operating on a limited basis for security reasons, he added, and no one was inside during the attack.

Blanár said Slovakia would not confine itself to a statement.

"I have ordered the Russian ambassador to the Slovak Republic to be summoned," he said, to seek an explanation from Moscow, and called on Russia to refrain from actions that could endanger civilians.

A condemnation with a hedge

He paired the rebuke with an appeal that treated the war as a two-sided problem, urging "both sides" to avoid further escalation and pointing to a "peaceful settlement." The strike, however, was carried out by Russia against Ukraine.

The symmetry fits Bratislava's stance under Prime Minister Robert Fico, whose government has been the most openly pro-Moscow in the EU and repeatedly at odds with Kyiv. Relations soured over Ukraine's decision to end Russian gas transit to Europe, and Fico has called President Zelenskyy an "enemy" of Slovakia. Meanwhile, Kyiv has accused him of acting as a "mouthpiece" for the Kremlin.

In occupied Donetsk Oblast, the Russian occupation authorities had some 500 schoolchildren take part in an "anti-terrorist dictation." The rights group Zmina says the occupiers and their collaborators stage such events deliberately to intimidate local residents, children, and teenagers among them.

The exercise is one instrument of a documented system. In July 2026, an OSCE expert mission invoked by 41 states found that Russia's use of terrorism and extremism legislation against Ukrainian children may amount to a crime against humanity.

Only in 2025, occupation authorities sent 48 Ukrainian children in Donetsk Oblast to psychiatric hospitals on extremism charges. For example, teenager Maksym Lypkan is being forcibly subjected to psychiatric treatment because he said that the war against Ukraine is an act of villainy.

The test drilled Russian criminal law

The dictation was held in 17 schools across occupied Donetsk, Mariupol, Makiivka, and Volnovakha, with pupils in grades eight through eleven answering questions in writing, according to the occupation's Donetsk News Agency, cited by Zmina.

The three themes were basic definitions, criminal responsibility, and the roles of the state and citizens in combating terrorism, with an emphasis on Russian criminal code provisions on terrorism and extremism.

Some questions were situational. In one, pupils were told that an internet user had shared someone else's post containing banned content, and then asked whether only the original author bore responsibility, or whether the person who reposted it had also broken the law.

Afterward, teachers walked the teenagers through the correct answers. Particular attention was given to the point that criminal liability for terrorism offenses begins at age 14, said Marharyta Kucheriava, who heads a committee on information policy and countering extremism and terrorism within the occupation's "youth parliament" in Donetsk Oblast.

One arm of a wider effort

The dictation sits alongside a broader remaking of occupied schools. From 1 September, the occupation authorities introduced a compulsory Russian-identity subject, a separate military-training track, and behavior grades for children as young as second grade.

A Ukrainian soldier in a trench or in a vehicle can now get a short alert on their phone the moment a Russian FPV drone or glide bomb starts closing in. The system behind it, Hrafit (Graphite), pulls together data from nearly all available radio-technical intelligence and surveillance into a single picture, ArmyInform reported.

The threat no longer stops at a command post. The warning reaches the soldier at an observation point, the sector command, and the commander-in-chief at once. To use it in a position, a soldier needs only a protected smartphone and satellite internet, including Starlink, and on the ground, it comes down to one short push notification.

Hrafit answers one question: Is the sky clear?

In modern combat, a second's hesitation can be enough for an infantry soldier in a trench or a crew in a vehicle to be caught by an FPV drone or a guided glide bomb. Hrafit is the Ukrainian answer, moving situational awareness onto an ordinary phone.

Military programmers built it for Ukraine's Defense Forces to answer the one question that matters most in the field: is the sky clear? Militarnyi reported that the system is being supplied to the Armed Forces, the National Guard, the Security Service, and the Border Guard Service.

It tracks drones and glide bombs

Working in real time, Hrafit flags a wide range of incoming threats:

• FPV drones, both kamikaze and loitering types
• tactical quadcopters such as the DJI Mavic, which are often used to direct fire
• winged Russian drones like the Molniya and Privet
• guided glide bombs and other aerial munitions

Three versions run from HQ to the trench

Hrafit runs on Android, iOS, and the web, in three versions.

The full version, for analysts, commanders, and electronic warfare and air defense operators, adds reporting, filters, frequency-band analysis, and a global map of the fighting.

For instance, Hrafit Lite strips down the interface for troops on the zero line, showing only the local area, so nothing distracts from the fight.

A third module, Sova (Owl), is built for logistics crews, drivers, and medical evacuation: it runs during a drive, moves its monitoring sector across the map with the vehicle, and warns of danger along the way.

Soldiers can learn the system through an official online course in the Army+ app, which teaches them to operate and configure Hrafit and issues a completion certificate.

On the afternoon of 4 September, a Russian drone struck the building of Ukraine's Security Service in Kyiv, flying straight at the office of the acting chief, Oleksandr Poklad. One source close to the security services was blunt about the mood afterward, telling LIGA.net that everyone was "not just furious — everyone is absolutely livid."

It was a rare direct hit on a top government building — the first time the SBU headquarters had been struck in the four-and-a-half-year war. The central building stands on Volodymyrska Street opposite St. Sophia's Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Russian drone strikes SBU headquarters in central Kyiv. Zelenskyy says “geography” of Ukraine’s response is set

Poklad was unharmed, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had ordered a response that mirrors the attack.

Beskrestnov: a planned operation, guided from the ground

Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, President Zelenskyy's adviser on defense technologies, argued the strike was too precise to be a stray hit.

"My personal opinion: the Geran was controlled and guided online through a MESH radio relay with internet access, which a Russian agent switched on somewhere nearby — within five kilometers — for a short period during the attack," he wrote.

Such a relay is small, about the size of half a school backpack, he said. He added that no other jet-powered Gerans were in the air over Kyiv at the moment of the strike, which, in his view, rules out the drone being flown along a relay chain reaching back into Russia and points instead to local control.

Europe calls it a major escalation

Katarína Mathernová, head of the EU Delegation to Ukraine, said the drone hit near where she and her colleagues live and work, and her Kyiv staff again had to leave their desks for shelter. Under her post, former EU Ambassador to Ukraine José Manuel Pinto Teixeira called Russia a terror state.

"Time for Ukrainian drones visiting the center of Moscow," he said.

Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said Russian drones had struck "the very heart of Kyiv," and pressed for tighter sanctions and deeper isolation of Moscow.

"The Kremlin’s objective remains unchanged: inflict maximum carnage, sow terror, and trample every norm of international law," he said.

Ukraine's F-16 pilots are so short of air-to-air missiles that on some daytime sorties they go up with nothing but the plane's gun. Instead of using effective AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) and the shorter-range AIM-9 Sidewinder, Ukrainian forces are left with the M61A1 Vulcan 20mm rotary cannon, which can pose a grave danger to civilians, the War Zone reports.

Destroying Russian targets with the M61A1 Vulcan 20mm rotary cannon carries risks: the cannon rounds, similar to grenades, can strike a fairly wide area when they hit the ground, potentially killing innocent people.

Worse, the AIM missiles the F-16s are rationing are the same ones that arm the NASAMS batteries defending Kyiv, so every jet-fired round competes with ground air defense for the same scarce stock.

A 107th Wing commander using the callsign "Phantom" confirmed the shortage when a journalist asked him directly whether Ukraine was severely short of missiles for its F-16s.

“Yes, that’s true. Any aircraft without weapons is … useless,” Phantom said.

Kyiv wants the missiles, and a way to make them

Stopping as many Russian Geran drones and cruise missiles as possible before they reach Ukrainian cities takes missiles, and Phantom was blunt about what the fleet needs. He called for more air-to-air missiles and for interceptors to reload the US-made ground-based Patriot batteries.

"We require more means of protection, such as Patriot missiles and air-to-air missiles, AIM-9s or AIM-120s to our fleet," he said.

The fix he wants outlasts any single shipment: "At least we need to try to increase the production, or at least to allow Ukraine to localize the production in Ukraine or other European countries."

Until that exists, the arithmetic stays brutal, as every missile fired at a Russian drone or cruise missile is one fewer for the next attack.

A cheaper rocket enters the mix

One weapon Phantom did not mention may ease that math. Ukrainian F-16s now appear to carry the laser-guided 70mm APKWS II rocket.

Built from a standard unguided rocket fitted with a laser-guidance kit, it is far cheaper than an AMRAAM and has already become a primary anti-drone weapon for US jets in the Middle East — a lower-cost way to knock down drones and subsonic cruise missiles without spending a scarce air-to-air missile on each one.

Ukraine's National Guard says its assault units have cleared four square kilometers of ground near Kupiansk. According to the military, fighters of the 23rd R.U.G. Assault Regiment of the Khartiia corps have pushed Russian forces out of territory between the settlements of Dvorichna and Zapadne, working with the 35th Separate Marine Brigade on one stretch.

Russia wants Kupiansk as a logistics node and a springboard for pushing deeper into Kharkiv Oblast. Just outside the city sits the Kupiansk-Vuzlovyi station, a key rail hub whose capture would let Russian forces move supplies and equipment far more easily.

“Overall, another 4 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory have been liberated. As long as the enemy remains on our land, the work continues,” the National Guard said.

Ukraine said its assault units have cleared another four square kilometers of ground near Kupiansk

Fighters of the 23rd R.U.G. Assault Regiment of the Khartiia corps pushed Russian forces out of the territory between the settlements of Dvorichna and Zapadne
The National Guard pic.twitter.com/aOXrXm0BRw

— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) September 3, 2026

A city fought over from both banks

The clearing north of the city is only one part of a contested picture. Kupiansk straddles the Oskil River: Ukraine holds the left, eastern bank, while Russian forces have pushed onto the right, western bank closer to Ukraine's rear.

On 2 September, Viktor Tregubov, head of communications for Ukraine's Joint Forces Group, said Russian troops had infiltrated part of northern Kupiansk on that right bank.

"On the right bank, the Russians are trying to hold the northern parts of the city, where they've already infiltrated some of their fighters," he told Suspilne, adding that Ukrainian forces are making trouble for them there.

The infiltrators are trying to reach the city through the village of Holubivka, he said.

On the left bank, Russian units are trying to reach the railway station.

"The Russians are pushing very hard toward it. They want to narrow our bridgehead," Tregubov reported.

No confirmed Russian advance

Back in July, Trehubov mentioned the Russian forces’ logistical problems in this direction, according to ArmyInform.

He explained that logistics for Russian forces in the area had been effectively paralyzed by a fuel shortage, with even water being delivered exclusively by drones.

Russia has been bolting small FPV attack drones to the wings of its long-range Gerans and releasing them deep inside Ukraine, far behind the front. The tactic may now have reached Kyiv Oblast, where an FPV drone was recently recorded, though it is not confirmed that a Geran delivered it, Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, the president's adviser on defense technologies, told UNIAN. A Geran drop is one of the versions being weighed.

A Geran (the Russian-built version of Iran's Shahed-136) can fly hundreds of kilometers, so bolting short-range FPVs to its wings carries them far past the front line before release. Russia has done the same with its Molniya and Gerbera drones, and in May Euromaidan Press reported FPVs delivered this way, turning up dozens of kilometers from the border, on the ground, and even on the roofs of apartment buildings.

A year-old experiment, still rare

"The Russians have been running these experiments for a while. They attach two FPVs above the wings and drop them," Beskrestnov said.

He last recorded the tactic a week ago in Konotop, in Sumy Oblast, where Russian forces held two such drones on a carrier's wings and released them.

Until now, he added, it had shown up only on conventional Gerans. Holding an FPV on a jet-powered Geran is far harder because the speed is too high for a clean release, "but technologically it's entirely possible," Beskrestnov believes.

Ukrainian air defenders have brought at least one carrier down: in March, the Darknode anti-Shahed unit destroyed a Geran carrying two wing-mounted FPVs over Ukrainian airspace before it could release them, Militarnyi reported.

Low yield, mostly a scare tactic

Russia uses the tactic sparingly, and by its own measure, it does not work well.

"If you look at the number of successful strikes they've had with these FPVs, it's small," Beskrestnov explained, because controlling a drone dropped this way is difficult.

The FPVs carry no large warhead, and the launches often serve mainly to terrorize civilians, he said.

The dropped drones are usually flown over ordinary mobile networks rather than through a relay mounted on the carrier.

"There's an ordinary SIM card, and they control the FPV through it," Beskrestnov said, adding that Ukraine has been recording the practice on and off for about a year.

Russia has started launching its strike drones during the day, not only after dark. The reason is the new jet-powered Geran drones, which fire groups cannot take down, so for Russia there is no longer any difference between attacking by day or by night, Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, President Zelenskyy's adviser on defense technologies, told Glavcom.

The near-hourly daytime raids are the new face of a campaign that culminated on 1 September, Knowledge Day, when Russia hit Kyiv and its region with ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones and killed 12 people. That strike culminated a six-day assault on the capital that began on 27 August, two days after CIA Director John Ratcliffe arrived in Moscow. However, even after that, the attack continued. Sirens now sound across Kyiv and the surrounding oblast roughly once an hour, around the clock.

Why the shift to daylight

The daytime raids carry an added economic and psychological weight, he said. The threat of strikes forces shops and businesses to open and close unpredictably, snarls transport, and can halt rail service.

"They understand perfectly well that daytime attacks hurt the population and business," Beskrestnov said, adding that the state railway Ukrzaliznytsia is paralyzed.

Keeping the defenders on their feet

A further aim is to hold Ukraine's air defense in a permanent state of readiness, Beskrestnov said. Round-the-clock attacks mean radar stations and generators must run without pause.

"Radar stations and generators run constantly, and that also puts a strain on our troops," he added.

Kyiv remains a Russian prime target because it carries symbolic as well as military weight, as the capital houses the government, business, and warehouses, and a strike there would resonate far more than terrorizing a small town.

Russian forces first concentrated on districts nearer the drones' launch corridors — Kyiv's Left Bank, and the Brovary and Boryspil raions — before switching to the other bank to hunt for targets. As the cold season approaches, he expects Russia to intensify strikes on the energy infrastructure it has so far spared.

Ukraine’s Third Army Corps has released photos of the RapidRanger air defense system mounted on a URO VAMTAC armored vehicle. The troops themselves described the system as a “short-range storm.”

The system defends the sky in areas where radar cannot spot a target and other weapons cannot reach it, filling the gap between mobile fire groups and heavy, less-mobile air-defense systems. That niche — fast, cheap, and radar-independent — is exactly where Russia's Shaheds and small reconnaissance drones have been slipping through.

The images show a crew of the 1030th "Aquila" Anti-Aircraft Missile-Artillery Regiment arming the launcher with missiles before going on combat duty for the first time, RBC-Ukraine reports.

Light enough to ride a pickup

Rapid Ranger weighs only 500 kilograms and has a modular design that allows it to be mounted on pickups, armored cars, or even tracked platforms.

The systems in Ukrainian service ride Spanish URO VAMTAC tactical off-roaders, which reach 135 km/h, drive on public roads, and can change position quickly or cover long distances.

That mobility is the point: a launcher that can shoot and move is far harder for Russian forces to find and destroy than a fixed battery.

Laser guidance beats the decoys

The system's LMM Martlet missiles are 1.3 meters long, weigh 13 kilograms, and reach 1,800 km/h, striking targets up to seven kilometers away. Crucially, the missiles use laser guidance, not only infrared, so Rapid Ranger can hit targets with a low thermal signature or those carrying heat-emitting decoys. That makes it effective against Russian reconnaissance drones like the Orlan-10, whose small heat trail slips past heat-seeking weapons.

A 360-degree electro-optical surveillance suite gives the crew all-around coverage, and the system detects targets out to about 15 kilometers, which is more than twice its engagement range, giving the crew time to track a threat before firing.

Rapid Ranger reached Ukrainian units as part of a British military aid package, and Euromaidan Press reported in April that the system was already downing Shaheds from its Spanish mounts. The 3rd Corps' photos are the newest confirmation that Ukraine's newest Western air-defense hardware is now integrated and standing combat duty at the front.

Ukraine's 58th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade has tested a domestic dome-type electronic-warfare system, Serval Cube, against drones simulating a Russian attack. The brigade's electronic-warfare unit staged the trial under conditions close to real combat, the brigade said.

Serval Cube jams the control, navigation, and video-transmission channels a drone depends on rather than destroying it outright, Armyinform said. That kind of interference does not bring down the aircraft. It strips it of the ability to complete a mission or return to its operator.

Ukraine's counter-drone field is crowded

Ukrainian defense firms have been racing to field more of this kind of gear this year: in July, Contra Drone unveiled a 20-system counter-drone architecture combining electronic warfare, radar, and autonomous interceptors.

Another firm, Rebel Group, said this week its stationary jamming and signals intelligence system, Brama, has cleared range and lab testing and is now seeking official codification. Brama works by detecting a drone's analog video frequency, decoding it, and jamming both the video and control channels at once.

EW now shields nearly everything at the front

Electronic warfare has become one of the key elements of front-line defense, the brigade said, covering troops, positions, logistics routes, transport, shelters, and the launch sites of Ukraine's own drones against Russian FPV drones and reconnaissance UAVs.

FPV drones — small, camera-equipped quadcopters flown by a remote pilot wearing video goggles — have become a primary strike weapon for both sides along the front this year. That is why soldiers constantly test and refine the equipment they carry, the brigade said.

A scripted attack, and nothing got through

The brigade's electronic-warfare company ran the test, building a scenario meant to mirror combat as closely as possible: at one position, operators launched Mavic quadcopters, widely used for reconnaissance, alongside FPV strike drones. At another, the unit deployed the Serval Cube complex.

Serval Cube suppressed every drone launched against it during the trial — none reached its designated target, the brigade said.

Twenty Ukrainian companies are now building jet-powered interceptors to down Russia's increasingly fast jet-powered drones. One of them, the Ukrainian-British startup Firebolt Engineering, already has an interceptor flying combat missions with two Air Force units and Ukraine's special operations forces, Defender Media reports.

Russia launched more than 2,500 jet-powered drones at Ukraine in August alone, straining air defenses built to catch the slower, piston-engine Shahed-136. Ukrainian Defense Minister Yevhen Khmara said on 30 August 2026 that four interceptor systems have cleared field testing and are being scaled toward mass production. It is unclear whether Griffen, Firebolt's drone, is among them.

Grenadyr funds a spinout

Firebolt was spun out after the UK-based investment fund Grenadyr backed the team behind the interceptor project. Grenadyr's director, Tomasz Wozniak, told the outlet that a reliable way to intercept jet-powered Shaheds "has never been more important" as Russia scales up the faster drones.

Grenadyr and Firebolt have not disclosed the size of the investment, though the fund's check ranged from $350,000 to $1.3 million.

The new company employs up to 25 people across Ukraine and the UK, split into component manufacturing, final assembly, and calibration, plus a separate R&D unit. Its CEO, who asked to be identified only as Mykola, led the interceptor project prior to the spinout.

Griffen flies, but not against jets yet

Griffen, Firebolt's first product, is a fixed-wing, jet-powered interceptor that reaches speeds above 350 km/h, altitudes above 7.5 km, and a range of up to 120 km, according to Defender Media. Mykola said the team aims to push its speed past 400 km/h through aerodynamic changes. The drone currently costs an estimated $8,300–$10,500.

Griffen still flies on Chinese engines while its British partner, Dynamic Propulsion, develops a turbojet built specifically for the drone, with test samples expected by the end of summer. Firebolt can build 30 Griffens a month and is working to add more crews to fly them, Mykola said. The drone's first confirmed kill, however, was a conventional-engine Geran — not the jet-powered variant it was designed to catch.

Autonomy waits on Ukraine's radars

Firebolt is developing a homing system meant to let Griffen find and strike targets without an operator, a goal shared by rival interceptor makers The Fourth Law, SkyFall, and F-Drones. The system is in testing and expected to ship by default by mid-fall, Mykola said.

Full autonomy, he added, is bottlenecked by Ukraine's radar coverage, which he described as too thin and fragmented to reliably feed target data to an autonomous drone. Closing that gap, he said, depends on the state buying more radars — a decision outside Firebolt's control.

Air-raid alerts covered a record share of working hours at shopping centers across Ukraine in August. Sirens ran for 21.8 percent of the hours malls were open, the Ukrainian Council of Shopping Centers reported.

For more than a fifth of the hours malls were open to serve customers, sirens instead sent staff and shoppers to shelters. The share has more than doubled in a year. The climb is related to Russia's escalating air campaign: Moscow ran a seven-day barrage of ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones against Kyiv into early September, the kind of assault that keeps sirens running through the business day.

Every tracked measure rose

The council considers four figures: the number of alerts, the number during mall working hours, the total alert duration, and the duration during working hours. All four climbed from July to August, it says.

Five regions bear the worst of it

The five regions with the most daytime alert time, between 10 a.m. and 9 p.m., barely changed over the month, the council says. Donetsk Oblast led at 82.0 percent, followed by Sumy at 76.4, Zaporizhzhia at 71.4, Kharkiv at 60.3, and Chernihiv at 40.1.

The sharpest monthly jump fell in Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast.

Faster drones drive the sirens

Russia has switched to jet-powered drones that fly more than three times faster than the propeller Shaheds Ukraine spent three years learning to shoot down. The faster a drone reaches a city, the less time defenders have to catch it.

That is what fills the sirens. Alerts sound earlier and stay on longer, which is the shared council measure.

Ukraine races to answer them

Ukraine has four interceptor systems in field testing, built to take down jet drones, Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara said on 30 August. The country now wants to bring them to standard and build them in the thousands.

Until that layer works, every jet-drone raid costs Ukraine a long air alert that empties a shopping center.

Downtime piles up over years

Since the full-scale war began, the average Ukrainian mall has lost 166.8 working days to air-raid alerts, according to the report. August 2026 alone accounted for 6.4 of them.

That is more than eight working months of shuttered trading floors, and it is still climbing.

Russian losses reached one of the highest of the entire full-scale war in August, Ukraine's Defense Ministry says, citing General Staff data. Last month, Ukraine killed or wounded 42,020 invaders.

As its frontline losses climb, Russia is escalating its terror against Ukraine's civilians. Moscow uses large numbers of ballistic missiles and new jet-powered drones to do it. Russia opened its latest drone assault on 27 August, two days after CIA director John Ratcliffe arrived in Moscow, and has kept it up since.

For comparison, Russia lost 42,860 soldiers in July, 33,760 in May, and 39,290 in June, the ministry says.

Ukraine takes another step toward its goal

Ukraine's Defense Ministry states that effectively destroying Russian manpower and logistics is among its priorities, so that Russia's losses reach a level that forces it to abandon its plans of conquest.

"August's losses for the Russian army were another step toward reaching that goal," the Defense Ministry says.

Ukraine began its logistics lockdown late this May. It is a coordinated campaign to scale up medium-range drone strikes against Russian supply convoys, depots, command nodes, and air-defense systems 20 to 200 kilometers behind the front.

Russia loses more than men

Ukraine's Defense Forces also struck 13,835 vehicles and fuel tankers in August.

Over the month they hit an estimated:

• 89 tanks;
• 197 armored combat vehicles.
• On top of that, 1,827 Russian artillery systems were destroyed or disabled.

"Inflicting such losses systematically raises the cost of continuing the war for Russia and forces it to spend ever more resources replacing manpower, equipment, and weapons," the ministry says.

How does Russia answer the losses?

Ukraine's Office of the President has said Russia is preparing an additional mobilization wave in 2026–2027, aiming to draft 300,000 people this year and 300,000 next. Those figures are a response to the steady rise in frontline losses, the office adds.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin called that information "nonsense" after the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek.

At the same time, legal-aid organizations report a covert mobilization across Russia's regions and occupied territories. Over the past month and a half, residents of at least 17 Russian regions have complained of forcible detention, beatings, and coercion into signing contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry.

Ukraine saved more than $45 million on a single army purchase by opening it to competing bidders. The purchase was 5,000 pickup trucks, carried out through the open Prozorro tender system, Ukraine's Defense Ministry said on 2 September.

Competitive tenders of this kind saved its procurement agency nearly $362 million on non-lethal supplies in 2025, about 15 percent below expected cost, the ministry reported. The trucks are one more category moved from closed contracts to open bidding.

Volunteers used to carry this

Pickups are among the most-wanted vehicles at the front and among the longest neglected by the state, the Defense Ministry noted when it launched the tender. Until now, the need fell to volunteer drives and troops' own money.

"These are brand-new vehicles with a manufacturer's warranty, all-wheel drive, with powerful diesel engines," Mstyslav Banik, Ukraine's deputy defense minister, said.

The trucks do everything up close

The pickups are essential for logistics, evacuation, unit mobility, and drone-crew work, former DOT director Arsen Zhumadilov said when the tender opened. That range of use is why they rank among the most-requested vehicles on the front.

The agency ran the market consultations, set the technical requirements, and vetted the suppliers for the order.

Six suppliers, not one

The order was split into lots, so six different companies will deliver the trucks rather than a single contractor. The ministry frames that as insurance: if one supplier fails, the rest still deliver. This is the largest batch of pickup trucks from the state.

The purchase began in May, so the first trucks would arrive before the cold. The full batch is due by the end of 2026.

Drones are meant to be next

Then-defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in May that an earlier competitive tender for 155mm shells had cut costs by more than 16 percent. The next category to move to open bidding, he said, would be FPV, mid-strike, and deep-strike drones.

Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, leader of the opposition European Solidarity party, has offered to unite with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a new type of government. He has explained his initiative as necessary to save the country and adopt crisis-response measures amid a new phase of the war.

Russia's strike campaign has become a governance problem as much as a military one. Each attack on Kyiv costs the city about $12 million, and they now arrive almost twice a week. Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi said on 28 August that, roughly speaking, 90% of retail chains' food logistics had been destroyed in the latest attacks, which included jet-powered drones that trigger an air alert in Kyiv every hour.

"We are the opposition, but we are ready to cooperate with the authorities in the legislative provision of all necessary decisions, up to the creation of a coalition and a government of national unity," he said.

Speaking in a video address on 31 August, he set out five issues to solve for the parliamentary session.

One: keep the capital running

The current barrage has forced Kyiv to a near-standstill, with alerts sounding through the working day. If they are permanent, Poroshenko argued, the rules for how the city runs must change, and the government, military, transport operators, and business must agree on a single published procedure. When the capital is shut down for hours, much of the economy stops with it, and the lost billions never reach the army, he added.

"Let us say honestly what Putin is doing. He wants to switch Kyiv off. To make people finally say: it is impossible to live here," Poroshenko said.

Two: give parents a school plan

The school year opens on 1 September under a rule allowing in-person classes only where a school has a shelter with room for everyone. Kyiv's administration told UNN that 94% of city schools have basic shelters, but capacity limits set the ceiling, forcing shifts or blended formats when a shelter cannot hold every child at once.

"Tomorrow is 1 September. Thousands of parents still do not understand how their children will study, especially where there are no proper shelters," Poroshenko said.

Three: return Kyiv's money

Kyiv has lost revenue to the central budget even as its defense costs climb, a dispute with the government that predates the barrage. Poroshenko demanded the return of about $180 million to the budget, along with the personal income tax paid by combat brigades.

"This week Kyiv is forced to carry out a budget sequester for the first time," he explained, cutting spending on doctors, teachers, and the socially vulnerable to fund the city's own defense.

Four: scale up war-risk insurance

Russia's strikes have hit businesses faster than any recovery system can answer, with warehouses and logistics hubs among the targets this month. Business needs war-risk insurance, money for rapid recovery after strikes, new logistics, and the ability to invest in its own protection, including private air defense, Poroshenko said.

Five: fund energy resilience now

Putin has named energy as his main target, the former president pointed out, and the coming winter is the pressure point. Kyiv's small, maneuverable generation, cogeneration, and backup power for hospitals, water utilities, and communications must be installed now, he added.

On 1 September — the day Ukraine marks Knowledge Day, when schoolchildren and students are meant to begin the new academic year — Russia launched a massive attack on Kyiv and its region with ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones. Moscow used different types of its fast, deadly weapons, including ship-launched Kalibr, and hypersonic Zircon missiles, and jet-powered drones to target the Ukrainian capital.

This attack was the culmination of a 6-day assault on the capital and region that began on 27 August. It started two days after CIA Director John Ratcliffe arrived in Moscow on 25 August. US President Donald Trump announced that the visit was linked with US-initiated peace efforts to end the war against Ukraine. Throughout this 5-day period, air raid sirens sounded every hour in the capital and region, paralyzing life in Kyiv, according to Sky News.

As early as the day after the 5-day attack began, Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotsky stated that Russia had destroyed about 90% of the food logistics infrastructure of retail chains, according to UkrInform.

Russia injures three children and continues the attack

As a result of the "ballistic" attack on Kyiv and the region, hits from enemy missiles and strike drones were recorded at 28 locations, and debris from downed targets fell at 10 locations, according to the Air Force of Ukraine.

In addition, some enemy missiles did not reach their targets, and the locations of those missiles are being clarified.

"Unfortunately, as a result of the Russian attack, there are dead and injured. The attack continues, with more than ten Russian drones in the airspace," the military reported.

According to the Kyiv City Military Administration, civilian infrastructure was damaged in 5 of Kyiv's 10 districts — Holosiivskyi, Darnytskyi, Dniprovskyi, Sviatoshynskyi, and Solomianskyi.

"As a result of the attack, unfortunately, 8 people died. Another 7 people were injured, including 3 children," the Kyiv authorities said.

Railway workers are still receiving treatment and remain hospitalized

Russia struck a railway facility, a critical link in the country's logistics chain, as its airways have been closed since 2022.

Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, head of the board of Ukrzaliznytsia (Ukrainian Railways), stated that Russia carried out a targeted ballistic attack on Kyiv's railway infrastructure. Russia killed six railway workers.

According to him, another employee was injured and is in the hospital, where they are receiving the necessary care.

He added that dozens of employees managed to take shelter and survive the attack. They are now being helped to recover from what they experienced.

Pertsovskyi noted that the strike caused "extensive destruction," including the complete destruction of one workshop, and that efforts to extinguish fires at the facility were still ongoing.

He said that, due to the attack's consequences, movement was temporarily restricted on two railway sections, but it was later restored.

Earlier, a source close to the Russian president told The Economist that Vladimir Putin most likely regarded Ratcliffe's visit as a sign of American weakness. He already interpreted former CIA Head Bill Burns' meeting with Russian authorities in 2021 the same way, where he warned about the consequences of Russia's war against Ukraine. Three months after the meeting, Russia launched the full-scale invasion.

A Ukrainian defense company has built a single device that finds an FPV drone, reads its video feed, and jams it. Rebel Group has developed Brama, a stationary electronic warfare and reconnaissance system to counter FPV drones, which it plans to codify for use by the Defense Forces, the company's press service told Oboronka.

Brama can both detect a drone's signal and jam it, allowing an operator to move from spotting a drone to suppressing it.

Two jobs from one point

Brama can detect the frequency of an analog video signal, decode it, and then apply directed electronic warfare to suppress both the video channel and the drone's control link, the press service explained. Once an operator receives target data and locates a drone, they can suppress it immediately without additional equipment, Militarnyi reports.

"Both functions are implemented in a single device, so the operator does not need to use additional equipment to move from detection to suppression," a Rebel Group representative says.

Rebel Group is seeking codification

Brama has already passed laboratory testing and trials in combat conditions, according to the company. It is now going through Ukraine's military codification procedure, the required step before defense equipment can be approved for broader use by the armed forces.

Its producer company, Rebel Group, specializes in electronic warfare and reconnaissance systems, and some of its equipment has already been codified and tested at the General Staff's proving grounds, the press service noted.

It joins a widening Ukrainian EW effort

Brama is one of several recent Ukrainian counter-drone systems. In July, Ukraine unveiled Lima Quant, an upgraded electronic warfare system built to defeat the advanced satellite-navigation antennas Russia now fits to Shahed drones, cruise and ballistic missiles, and guided bombs, United24 reported.

Those antennas, newer 12- and 16-element arrays, had proven resistant to earlier jammers, which is why each side keeps building the next countermeasure as the other adapts.

More than half the drones Russia fired at Ukraine over the past four days were jet-powered, and Kyiv was the main target. Of the more than 1,500 drones launched, about 800 were jet-powered, Colonel Yurii Ihnat, head of the communications department of Ukraine's Air Force Command, said, UNIAN reports.

A massive attack on Kyiv and the Kyiv region began on 27 August, two days after US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow. According to President Donald Trump, the visit was related to efforts to broker an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine, per Sky News.

Previous interceptors won't work

The attack on Kyiv and the surrounding region, accompanied by repeated air-raid alerts, has continued for all five days since then.

A jet-powered Shahed is a version of the strike drone fitted with a turbojet engine in place of a propeller, which makes it three times faster and far harder to shoot down.

Ukraine intercepts about 88 to 90 percent of all drones, but the rate against jet-powered ones is lower precisely because of their speed, Ihnat noted.

The problem is structural: Ukraine's interceptor drones reach roughly 300 kilometers per hour and physically cannot catch a target moving faster and flying at about five kilometers' altitude, beyond the reach of mobile fire teams and portable SAM systems.

Russia adds jet drones every month

Moscow began using jet-powered UAVs in large numbers in July, launching five times as many as in June, Ihnat noted. Their number may rise further by the end of August, he added.

The jet-drone attacks come from every direction. Ihnat said the debris of recovered Shaheds shows they were manufactured just two weeks earlier, meaning production is running without pause.

Banderols fly like cruise missiles

Russia has also stepped up its use of Banderols, systems that combine features of drones and missiles and fly at up to 600 kilometers per hour, Ihnat said. They are harder to shoot down, so short-range surface-to-air missile systems and aircraft with air-to-air missiles are used against them.

Jet-powered drones are significantly more expensive than conventional ones, Ihnat noted.

The strikes hit specific targets

Russia's attacks are aimed not only at psychological pressure on the capital's residents but at specific targets, Ihnat said. These are logistics and shopping centers, postal terminals, critical infrastructure, and other strategic sites.

Strikes of this kind have destroyed about 90 percent of Ukraine's modern warehouse space in recent weeks and slowed grain exports through the Black Sea corridor.

Russia has destroyed 90% of Ukraine’s modern commercial storage capacity. Retail logistics are being reshaped

Ukrainian troops say they have trapped about 2,500 Russian soldiers on the Kinburn Spit. Systematic drone strikes and remote mining have let them cut the Russian supply lines and destroy almost all of Russia's artillery on the spit, scouts told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's "Crimea.Realities" project.

The Kinburn Spit is a narrow sandy peninsula about 40 kilometers long, between the Dnipro-Buh Estuary and the Black Sea, the last part of Mykolaiv Oblast that Russia has held since 2022. Whoever controls the spit controls the sea exit from the ports, which is why Moscow kept artillery there to shell the southern coast, said former Head of the Mykolaiv Regional State Administration Vitali Kim.

Now, the troops say, Russia can reach the coastal zone of Mykolaiv Oblast only with long-range guns from occupied Kherson Oblast.

Supply runs through a single corridor

The Russian force has one way in — a single land route Ukrainian troops keep under fire, from Zaliznyi Port through Heroiske.

"Our task here is to neutralize everything that drives onto the Kinburn Spit. Since we started destroying Russian troops at a rapid pace, they cannot bring in anything effective," reconnaissance unit commander with the call sign "Yava" explained.

A scout calls the spit a trap

Intercepts show panic among the Russian units, the troops say.

"In the intercepts, they're screaming that they can't do logistics, that they don't want to go in, because it's death. The road is cut, and they have very little ammunition. The spit is a trap for them," the scout said.

Mining the supply routes is the main method

The problem, the troops say, is that the occupiers disguise themselves as civilians, changing into civilian clothes, which places limits on when Ukrainian soldiers can strike. The main method is catching the Russians on logistics by mining their routes.

"A vehicle hit a mine that was dropped maybe a week ago, maybe yesterday. The first thing is cutting Russia's logistics — the vehicles, the resupply by quad bikes and motorcycles," deputy reconnaissance company commander with the call sign "Holova" explained.

A Ukrainian drone maker is selling its unmanned aerial vehicle as a kit that users assemble themselves. BlueBird Tech has unveiled the Bebradrone Kit, a modular drone whose configuration the buying unit sets when it orders, choosing the control system, video transmitter, camera, flight electronics, and navigation gear, Defender Media reports.

The name Bebradron comes from the Ukrainian joke meme “nyukhai bebru” (“sniff the bebra”), a humorous euphemism for the male genitalia.

The airframe comes in three grades

Units choose how much is pre-assembled. The Base version is a bare mechanical airframe for self-installation, at about $150, according to Brave1 Market. The ARF adds pre-installed motors for about $335, and the Pro comes with a configured flight controller for about $130.

A fully built Bebradrone glider without added configuration runs about $875 on the marketplace. BlueBird also offers a custom option, with its own engineers selecting and integrating equipment for a specific mission.

The specifications hold in the base build

In its base configuration, the Bebradrone Kit cruises at 90 kilometers per hour and reaches up to 150. Its tactical radius is up to 45 kilometers, and it carries up to 7.5 kilograms.

Flight time can reach 30 minutes, with a working altitude of 150 to 500 meters. The drone launches from a pneumatic catapult, which needs no runway or prepared strip.

The company grew from a volunteer group

BlueBird describes itself as having started with a small group of enthusiasts testing drone ideas and learning from their own mistakes. That grew into an R&D operation and production workshops, with separate units for development, manufacturing, quality control, service, and military contact.

The company now employs more than 350 specialists across several Ukrainian cities, building electronic warfare, drone detection, strike FPV, and communications systems. Its products are tested under real-world conditions and refined based on feedback from the front lines.

A Ukrainian maker known for ground robots has built a flying attack drone. Ratel Robotics has unveiled the Ratel K1, a strike FPV drone for ground targets with a tactical range of up to 30 kilometers, according to Defender Media.

The K1 will likely join the number of weapons that clear out Russian logistics. The campaign scales medium-range drone strikes against Russian supply convoys, depots, command nodes, and air defenses 20 to 200 kilometers behind the front. On 29 May, Ukrainian forces destroyed 483 Russian vehicles in a single day, an all-time record that pushed cumulative Russian motor-transport losses past 100,000.

A 30-kilometer FPV sits at the near edge of that fight, reaching supply routes and second-line positions that shorter drones cannot.

The company came from ground robots

Ratel Robotics is a Ukrainian ground robotics maker whose fielded line includes logistics, casualty evacuation, mining, and demining platforms. The K1 is its move into aerial strike, and the company brings a wartime production record to it rather than starting from scratch.

Ratel's ground systems took part in the military parade in Kyiv on 24 August, marking Ukraine's 35th Independence Day, the company said. The firm has also joined a campaign, with the National WWII Museum and the Tallboy brand, to raise nearly $447,000 for a planned museum of modern military technologies, according to Ratel.

The specifications come from the maker

The K1 is built on a 22-inch frame, reaches a top speed of 75 kilometers per hour, remains airborne for up to 35 minutes, and carries up to 2 kilograms.

The drone uses a digital video system and a daytime camera and is controlled via a satellite link through Starlink. Per Brave1 Market, it has no built-in autonomous navigation, no auto-takeoff, and no automatic return-to-home landing.

The manufacturer is currently working on the next iteration of the Ratel K1, refining the system based on test results and operational experience.

The Ukrainian military is completing work on new aviation developments. They are essentially finished and already in testing, and the aircraft carrying them will enter combat, aviation commander Colonel Oleksandr Diakiv said in an Air Force Command segment.

Ukraine has already done with jets built decades ago. Its crews turned the 1970s-era Su-24 bomber into a launcher for British-French Storm Shadow and SCALP cruise missiles, which carry a 450-kilogram warhead to about 250 kilometers, and used them to strike a Russian command post in occupied Luhansk Oblast on 25 May.

A commander whose air force already remade its Soviet fleet this way is probably not making an empty promise when he says more is coming.

The commander hints at what is coming

Ukraine's aircraft are not done gaining capability, Diakiv said. Standing in front of his own aircraft, he said it would still prove itself.

"We have ideas, we have developments, and we are working on this. We have surprises for our neighbors," Diakiv said.

Part of the work is already in testing, and he tied it directly to combat.

"They are starting to work, they are going through their trials. And it is not for nothing that I say these aircraft will enter combat. Let it be a surprise," he noted.

The old jets already took on new roles

The track record runs across the fleet. The MiG-29 and Su-27 now serve as multirole fighters that strike both air and ground targets, Diakiv said, a shift Ukraine achieved by mastering new weapon types during the full-scale war.

That adaptation is documented. US contractors helped Ukrainian crews modify Su-27s and MiG-29s to fire American AGM-88 HARM anti-radiation missiles at Russian air defenses, and the jets also drop Western precision glide bombs.

The war has no template

Ukrainian aviation adapts constantly to Russian air defenses, fighters, and electronic warfare, Diakiv said. Pilots complete missions and return to base.

This kind of prolonged, high-technology war, fought across many domains, has no precedent, he added, and Ukraine's combat experience is becoming the basis for further developing its aviation.

A Russian strike on southern Odesa Oblast killed one person overnight and set grain trucks on fire. Five trucks loaded with grain were destroyed and three more damaged, with one person killed and three injured, the head of the Odesa Regional Military Administration, Oleh Kiper, said.

The strike hit the Izmail district, home to Ukraine's largest Danube port. The port became a maritime lifeline after Russia's 2022 Black Sea blockade, carrying the overflow whenever the sea lanes are constrained, National Security Journal reported. The attack is part of a campaign against the food supply.

Ukraine is one of the world's largest suppliers of wheat, maize, and sunflower, so the strikes register far beyond its borders, in the import-dependent countries that buy its grain.

Fire destroyed eight trucks

The attack set eight cargo trucks and dry grass nearby alight, the press service of the State Emergency Service in Odesa Oblast reported. Rescuers have since put out the fires.

"Unfortunately, a person was killed in the attack, and three more were injured," the service said.

The strike hit transport infrastructure

Russia struck the Izmail district overnight on 29 August, damaging transport infrastructure, the Izmail District State Administration reported. The district sits on the Danube close to the Romanian border.

"There are casualties. Sadly, a person has been killed. The injured have been given the necessary help. Representatives of the security structures and medical workers are working at the scene," the administration said.

The Danube corridor is a standing target

The strike fits a pattern. Russia hit Izmail's port infrastructure on 13 August, cutting power in parts of the city, and struck it again days later, damaging a Togo-flagged civilian vessel. The attacks come during Ukraine's peak wheat harvest, expected at around 60 million metric tons this year, close to the 2025 crop. Farmers need the export revenue now to finance next year's sowing, and storage is filling as grain goes unshipped.

Russia's Defense Ministry has described its Izmail strikes as hitting berthing terminals for military cargo and depots for Western-supplied weapons. The trucks burned in this strike were carrying grain.

Poland's prime minister says the next seven or eight months could decide the region's security. Donald Tusk said there are signs of serious Russian preparations to escalate tensions, both in the war against Ukraine and across the region, according to Ukrinform.

Tusk's warning follows weeks of similar alarms from the countries on NATO's eastern edge. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said on 15 July that intelligence pointed to possible Russian strikes on critical infrastructure in the Baltic states or Poland, according to Defense News.

Poland is the main transit route for Western military aid to Ukraine, which makes its security inseparable from Ukraine's. Tusk himself said in July that Russia could be ready for a confrontation with Europe as early as 2027.

The CIA visit was not the whole of it

At the meeting, reporters asked Tusk about the recent visit of CIA Director John Ratcliffe to Moscow. Poland is in constant contact with the agency's leadership and was not caught off guard by news of Ratcliffe's activity, he said.

Some security information must stay confidential, Tusk added, but that does not mean the public should be deprived of information about the most important threats.

The signals go beyond one trip

The matter is no longer only the CIA director's visit to Moscow, Tusk said. Over recent weeks, numerous public signals have pointed to Russian preparation for escalation.

Russia is very seriously preparing to escalate tensions, both in the war with Ukraine and across the whole region, and that for Russia this fall and winter are meant to be key, he claimed.

Moscow states its aims openly

Some Russian figures have described the war's purpose in plain terms. This week, State Duma vice-speaker Pyotr Tolstoy said Russia views Ukraine as a "territory" that would allow Moscow to export its energy to Europe via a short route, not as a sovereign country.

Tolstoy, whom the EU sanctioned in 2022 as a central figure in Russian state propaganda, also called for massed bombing of Ukrainian cities to break the population into surrender. His remarks are one more public signal of the kind Tusk pointed to.

Ukraine's new defense minister wears his war on his wrist. Yevhenii Khmara's bracelet carries, on each of its chains, the engraved name of a comrade who did not come back from the war, The National Interest reported.

Khmara took over the Defense Ministry on 19 August, replacing Mykhailo Fedorov, whose July dismissal set off nationwide protests. He came to the job from the SBU, Ukraine's Security Service, which he had led for seven months when Ukraine's campaign against Russian oil refining reached its widest scale.

He did not volunteer the story

Khmara did not explain the bracelet until a reporter asked him about it over dinner in Kyiv this month. The names now travel with him into the meetings where decisions about Ukraine's defense are made.

He ran the SBU during the oil campaign

Alpha, the SBU's special operations unit, is a tiny share of Ukraine's armed forces, yet the service's own accounting credits it with an outsized share of the damage inflicted on Russia, up to 20 percent of all enemy infantry losses.

More telling is what happened to Russian oil during his seven months in charge of the service. Ukraine's General Staff now estimates that nearly 43 percent of Russia's refining capacity has been knocked out. To a large extent, this is the result of the campaign Khmara helped oversee.

Khmara also developed a doctrine of ruthless cost asymmetry: strike operations designed to cost roughly 2 percent of the economic damage they inflict, targeting not individual facilities but critical nodes within the system.

Khmara insisted that part of the staff of the previous minister stayed

Earlier, Khmara has proposed that the core of the former Defense Ministry team remain in their positions. In particular, this concerns specialists responsible for procurement reform.

Mstyslav Banik, who served as a deputy to Fedorov, confirmed that he was staying on under the newly appointed defense minister. He led a central part of the ministry's modernization and is responsible for implementing the defense procurement reform.

Ukraine has decided which Western fighters it will build its air force around. The Air Force settled on three platforms, the Swedish JAS 39 Gripen, the French Rafale, and the American F-16, aviation commander Colonel Oleksandr Diakiv said in a segment by the Air Force Command.

Ukraine entered the full-scale war flying Soviet-era jets and has spent three years assembling a Western fleet. F-16s arrived in 2024 and now fly combat missions. France has delivered Mirage 2000s, and Sweden has pledged to deliver Gripen. The choice narrows Ukraine's field to three types it can sustain, arm, and repair at war tempo.

The choice weighed more than performance

Ukraine assessed every platform that might suit it, Diakiv said, and concluded it could operate three with maximum effectiveness. The decision turned on aircraft and operating costs, weapons, logistics, parts availability, what Ukrainian infrastructure can support, and the speed of repairs and battle-damage recovery.

"We went through all the platforms that were possibly acceptable for us. And we came to the conclusion that Ukraine can use three platforms with maximum effectiveness," Diakiv explained.

The F-16 already operates in Ukraine, so the Air Force has both the aircraft and trained pilots, technicians, and specialists who know its quirks. That experience will speed the adoption of the other Western types, according to Diakiv.

The Gripen suits a country under fire

Also, Diakiv singled out the Gripen, a multirole fighter that can strike air and ground targets and carries Swedish and other European weapons. Its main advantage is that it demands little infrastructure.

The jet can operate from unprepared surfaces and stretches of road and requires minimal ground crew to prepare for another flight in 15 to 20 minutes, according to the commander.

The aircraft is only part of the system

Taking on a new platform is not a matter of handing over jets, Diakiv believes. Weapons, ground support, parts, logistics, and trained people all have to arrive together, and Ukrainian pilots, engineers, and logistics specialists are now training abroad.

"You can buy a plane, you can buy a missile, you can buy a bomb, but you cannot buy experience," Diakiv said.

That combat experience, according to the colonel, is increasingly shaping the aviation coalition, with allies helping Ukraine realize ideas drawn from its own fighting rather than only offering finished solutions.

Russia is looking for its next foreign recruits in Indonesia, Kyiv says. Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service reports that it has obtained documents on at least eight Indonesian citizens recruited into the Russian occupation army.

Russia has recruited at least 27,000 foreign nationals from more than 130 countries since February 2022, a joint report by the International Federation for Human Rights and Truth Hounds found in April, separate from roughly 14,000 North Korean troops. Up to 20% of these fighters do not survive the first four months.

The scheme runs on false promises

"The scheme by which Moscow seeks foreign cannon fodder has already been tested on dozens of other countries," the Foreign Intelligence Service said.

Recruiters offer high pay, non-combat work, fast-tracked Russian citizenship, and social guarantees, drawing in people who often have no idea where they are actually being sent, the service said. The same model worked earlier on citizens of Nepal, Cuba, Kenya, and India, and most ended up on the front line without training, with some dying in the first weeks.

Recruitment fills three needs at once

Each foreigner serves several functions for the Kremlin, the service said. A recruit fills a personnel gap at the front and doubles as propaganda about supposed global support for the war.

The third driver is domestic. Discontent over the economy, the war, and plans for a new wave of mobilization has cut the number of Russians willing to sign contracts, bringing dissatisfaction to 69 percent.

The pattern is widening by design

Indonesia is the latest example of Russia's system to fight with its hands of foreign mercenaries.

"Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country with a population of over 280 million, has joined the list of countries that have become the Kremlin's latest market for cheap human labor for the war," the service said.

Ukraine's drone interceptors work until the weather turns. On 28 July, Presidential advisor Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov wrote that fog and cloud in fall, winter, and spring can leave an interceptor pilot unable to see more than a dozen meters, and that success rates fall as soon as winter begins, a problem that is especially severe over the sea.

Cheap interceptor drones have become one of Ukraine's main answers to Shahed saturation. But nearly every system shares the flaw Beskrestnov names: it depends on a pilot or camera seeing the target. Ukrainian and foreign teams are all racing toward the same fix, an onboard seeker head.

The method started simple

The earliest approach was primitive but cheap and effective, Beskrestnov said. A pilot flies the interceptor to the right point using the radar network, then finds the target by eye, chases it, and attacks.

Russia answered not only with jet Shaheds but with onboard electronic warfare, evasion systems, in-flight maneuvers, and rear-facing cameras to watch the sky behind, he explained. Ukraine replied with machine-vision target capture and guidance.

Bad weather remains unsolved

None of that fixes visibility, Beskrestnov wrote, and the problem hits both ordinary and jet interceptors. The way out, he argued, is an autonomous seeker head, acoustic, thermal, or radar, mounted on the interceptor itself.

A radar seeker is the ideal, in his view, because it opens the door to a fully autonomous system with no human in the loop: the network sees the target, launches the nearest interceptor, guides it by tactical radar, and the seeker locks on for the kill.

A US firm has put a price on it

Building a radar small enough for an interceptor has proven hard, and teams in Ukraine and abroad are working on it, Beskrestnov said, adding that he would not discuss the Ukrainian efforts because the subject is sensitive.

He pointed to the American company Archimedes, which he said announced a radar days ago, operating at 24 gigahertz with a 25-by-14-degree field of view and a one-kilometer lock-on range, shown in a promotional video mounted on several Ukrainian interceptors, at about $4,000 per unit. Whether it works remains to be seen, he added, given how hard the problem is.

A Ukrainian ground robot used to run 12-15 missions. Near Kupiansk, it now survives three or four. The lifespan is collapsing under the denser Russian FPV drone and mining fire, Andrii Kopach, call sign "Matematyk", who commands a ground-robot unit in the "Lava" unmanned regiment of the "Khartia" corps, told Oboronka.

Ground robots have become a daily part of the front in Ukraine. Ukrainian units ran 16,676 logistics, strike, and evacuation missions with them in June, up 122 percent since January, and the military has contracted more than 22,000 for 2026, nearly double the 2025 total. That scale runs into a wall at the front, where Russia now assigns FPV crews, including fiber-optic drones, specifically to kill the robots.

The lifespan keeps shrinking

The pace of technological change is the core problem, Matematyk said. Ukrainian makers keep improving the platforms, but cannot always keep pace with how quickly the fighting evolves.

A machine may last only three or four missions now, as in Kharkiv Oblast, where it was eight or nine before and 12 to 15 earlier still, he said. Mining, Russian fiber-optic activity, FPV activity, and a targeted focus on countering robots all drive the decline.

Speed is the missing requirement

Most robots at the front are technologically outdated in speed and suspension, Matematyk said. Current figures of 10 to 15 kilometers per hour no longer allow a machine to cross logistics routes safely.

He put the problem in an image. Gun-armed combat robots, he said, are "Persian elephants", fearsome but so slow to reach the objective that "a couple of centuries" pass first. What the army needs are "Arabian steeds" that gallop in, do the job, and gallop back.

AI defense is in development

Ukrainian troops are working with Brave1 and the Digital Transformation Ministry on AI-based active-protection systems that could autonomously detect and neutralize enemy FPVs, Matematyk said. The approaches vary, from a camera to a mini-radar to a camera paired with sound.

The countermeasures could be net launchers, or for fast machines, shotgun blasts and shrapnel, he said. The detection and response are trained on models built from the data his unit has logged over previous years. Ukraine still holds a quality edge over Russian robots through better Starlink-based communications and decentralized robot groups in its units, he added.

Ukraine's new defense minister went to Kherson Oblast days after Russia destroyed the heat of its main city. Yevhenii Khmara visited the region and met the head of the regional military administration, Oleksandr Prokudin, to discuss the region's most urgent needs, the Defense Ministry reported.

Russia hit the Kherson combined heat and power plant with a glide bomb on 26 August, then struck it again overnight with four more, destroying all the heat- and power-generating equipment that remained, Naftogaz said.

Prokudin has urged residents to leave, warning the city may go without heat and power through the winter. He said that Russia has dropped 170 glide bombs on the oblast since 1 July, more than in the entire first half of 2026.

Air defense topped the agenda

Khmara and Prokudin discussed strengthening defenses against various types of drones and protection against aerial bombs, as well as the safety of roads and critical infrastructure, which are being attacked by Russians day and night. They also addressed giving troops in this direction more capacity to strike the Russian targets that threaten civilians and soldiers.

The needs match the threat Prokudin has described. No region of Ukraine currently has the means to shoot down jet-powered Shaheds or glide bombs, he said, and Russia has begun using both more heavily against Kherson's infrastructure.

The minister met marines and the wounded

Khmara spoke with commanders and troops of the 30th Marine Corps operating on the Prydniprovskyi direction, the ministry said. The talks covered financial support for combat units and larger purchases of strike systems.

"We have taken up the soldiers' requests that need Defense Ministry decisions," the ministry said.

Khmara also visited a medical facility treating wounded troops and presented state awards.

The ministry frames it as direct contact

The Defense Ministry said it plans to keep working directly with troops and the leadership of front-line regions to strengthen the Defense Forces and protect Ukrainian lives.

Russia is filling its assault units from the bars of occupied Donetsk, partisans say. An agent of the ATESH movement inside the headquarters of Russia's Dnepr group of forces reported that local recruiters in the city are hunting men in bars and on the streets, mainly those drinking, and taking them heavily intoxicated to enlistment offices, the partisans say.

The claim fits a pattern documented three days earlier. On 24 August, three Russian legal-aid groups recorded 47 complaints of forced recruitment across 16 Russian regions and occupied Donetsk Oblast in July and August, targeting men with alcohol, drug, or mental health problems. ATESH now reports the same method inside occupied Donetsk.

There, they are pressured into signing contracts with the Russian army.

The recruits fill named units

The first such "volunteers" have already appeared in two Russian units, according to ATESH. The group named the 328th Guards Air Assault Regiment on the Zaporizhzhia direction and the 77th Separate Motor Rifle Regiment in Donetsk Oblast.

Both units use the men to replace losses in formations that the Russian command keeps throwing into assaults, ATESH said. The claim could not be independently verified.

The method points to a recruitment shortfall

Russian authorities can no longer fill losses with promises of payments and propaganda, so enlistment offices, local administrations, and recruiters have turned to deception, pressure, and what the group called the effective abduction of people.

That reading matches what a Russian rights group said. Volunteers are getting harder to find, which is why the pressure is increasing, said Grigory Sverdlin, director of the anti-mobilization group Idite Lesom.

ATESH works from inside the occupation

ATESH is a Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar partisan movement founded in September 2022. It operates in the occupied territories and inside Russia, and says its network includes Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, anti-war Russians, and sources within Russia's military and occupation administrations. Its claims are often impossible to verify independently.

A NATO country's defense minister wanted Mykhailo Fedorov the day after Ukraine dismissed him. Fedorov, Ukraine's former defense minister, has agreed to advise Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto on defense innovation, he wrote on Telegram.

As deputy prime minister and digital transformation minister, Fedorov created the Brave1 defense-tech cluster, then ran the Defense Ministry from 14 January 2026 until his dismissal in July. The removal triggered nationwide protests through July, with demonstrators calling for his reinstatement.

Earlier, Fedorov refused every other post Zelenskyy offered, saying only the defense minister, the president, and the commander-in-chief truly shape the war.

"I thanked Guido for his personal support and for offering me the opportunity to serve as his adviser on defense innovation. In this role, I will help Italy develop modern warfare technologies," he said.

Crozetto moved within a day

The Italian minister said he called Fedorov the day after the dismissal and asked when he would come to Rome to work as an advisor.

Fedorov met Crosetto on the first stop of an international trip focused on digitalization and defense technology.

The focus stays on his own projects

Fedorov said his main focus is unchanged and that he continues working in Ukraine on his own projects to strengthen its defense and attract international resources. In the advisory role, he will help Italy develop technologies of modern war and adapt to new security challenges, he wrote.

The two discussed drones, autonomous systems, air defense, and the development of a defense-tech ecosystem. The future of defense belongs to countries that can quickly test and scale new solutions, Fedorov said, and Ukraine's experience could serve as the basis for a new defense model for Europe.

Earlier, the Ukrainian parliament approved Yevhenii Khmara as the new defense minister. During his first speech, Khmara made it clear that he would continue his predecessor's course — the technologization of the army.

He added that there "would be more Ukrainian weapons, and strikes would be more precise.

Ukraine is bolting the war's most common rifle onto its robots. A company in the Brave1 cluster has developed a turret built around the Kalashnikov that mounts on low-cost unmanned ground vehicles, the state cluster's press service told Defender Media.

Ground robots have become a daily part of the front in Ukraine. Ukrainian units ran 16,676 logistics, strike, and evacuation missions with them in June, up 122 percent since January, and the military has contracted more than 22,000 for 2026, nearly double the 2025 total.

Arming them cheaply is the next step, and the Kalashnikov is the most cost-effective option because it is already the standard rifle across the force.

The robots are already in combat

Ground drones fitted with the turret are undergoing combat testing in Ukrainian units. Fighters of the Security Service Special Operations Center "A" have used one to destroy Russian ambushes set with concealed waiting-mode drones.

The complex is built on a four-wheel chassis with airless tires and an armored body. At the core of the weapon module is a twin turret mounting two Kalashnikov rifles.

The build took under six months

The developers have received a technical assignment and a grant from the cluster to create the turret. The path from idea to finished prototype took less than six months.

Beyond the base version, the turret can be mounted on other wheeled and tracked ground robots. That flexibility is the point: one weapon module across many platforms.

The rifle choice is about scale

The developers chose the Kalashnikov because it is the most widespread small arm in Ukrainian units, according to Brave1. The cluster considers it a simple, effective solution that lets Ukraine quickly scale up strike robots for assaults and for defense against Russian infantry.

Earlier, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said it would buy logistics and strike-ground robotic complexes under a new strategy that calls for sticking to the Defense Ministry's specifications rather than approving models one at a time.

Russia flies its missile raids on Ukraine from Engels-2. Ukraine keeps reaching the strategic bombers there. Soldiers of the Security Service's Alpha unit have struck a Tu-95MS missile carrier at the Russian airbase, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote.

The Tu-95 is part of Russia's nuclear triad, a Soviet-era strategic bomber Russia has used to launch cruise missiles at Ukraine since 2022. Ukraine has spent the war whittling down the fleet. On 1 June 2025, Operation Spiderweb smuggled explosive drones deep inside Russia on trucks and hit 41 strategic bombers along with other bombers in a single day.

The satellite image shows the damage

The first image of the bomber has appeared on social media. A satellite photo published on Friday, 28 August, by OSINT analysts Exilenova+ shows the aircraft suffered critical damage in the strike.

The bomber lost about a third of its right wing to the drone hit. Other damage is hard to judge in the image due to low resolution.

The Russian Engels-2 air base is home to Tu-95MS and Tu-160 strategic bombers, which regularly launch Kh-101 cruise missiles at Ukraine. The base also houses ammunition and fuel storage facilities, equipment, and aircraft maintenance infrastructure.

Strikes targeting Russian bombers and the airfield’s infrastructure are critically important. They are aimed at degrading the aggressor country’s military capabilities.

A second Engels-2 bomber in weeks

This is not the first Tu-95 Ukraine has reached at the base recently. Ukrainian drones struck Engels-2 in early July, ArmyInform reported, destroying a different Tu-95 whose tail section was torn off and thrown dozens of meters by the blast.

Analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko of Information Resistance said Russia has up to 12 flyable Tu-95MS left after Operation Spiderweb, in varying states of readiness, and that the one hit overnight belonged to the serviceable group.

A senior Russian official said out loud what Russia's missiles do every night. Pyotr Tolstoy, deputy chairman of the State Duma and great-great-grandson of Russian writer Lev Tolstoy, has called for massed bombing of Ukrainian cities to break the resistance of the people living in them and force a surrender, the news outlet 24 Kanal reported.

Russia denies striking civilians and claims after each attack that it hit military targets, even as its missiles land on homes, hospitals, power plants, and food depots. Ukraine's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi said Tolstoy's words should be grounds for an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, calling them a Russian official's demand for war crimes.

What Tolstoy has urged in public, Russian forces have done for more than 12 years while denying it.

The presenter proposed emptying the cities

On the state talk show Vremya Pokazhet, which Tolstoy hosts, he was reminded that more than 20 million people live in Ukraine and asked what would become of them if the country were turned to scorched earth. He proposed warning residents a day before strikes so they could flee their homes.

"You think we are calling for cruelty? We are calling for demoralizing the population so thoroughly that it comes out to meet our troops with its little paws up," Tolstoy said.

Then he named the reason

In the end, Tolstoy described what Ukraine means for Russia's plans.

"[Ukraine] is the kind of territory that will allow us to export our energy resources to Europe by the short route," he said.

He also characterized European leaders in the same speech.

"So gray-haired dwarves from Europe greet them (Ukrainians), and all these notorious Ursulas and Kaja Kallases, do they represent any value to us? No," Tolstoy claimed.

The descendant of a novelist, sanctioned in 2022

Tolstoy trained in France and worked with Le Monde and Agence France-Presse before working with the Russian state television and politics.

The European Union placed him on its sanctions list on 23 February 2022, the day before the full-scale war, naming him a central figure in Russian state propaganda. In 2024, he told the French channel BFMTV that Russian forces would kill French soldiers if they deployed to Ukraine.

Russians are buying their war gear on Ozon. Users of Russia's second-largest online marketplace ordered about $300 million in dual-use and military goods between August 2025 and July 2026, according to internal company data examined by the independent outlet Verstka.

Ukraine is now burning those warehouses down. Its forces struck three Ozon logistics centers covering 314,000 square meters on 24 August, part of a campaign that hit at least four Ozon hubs across southern Russia over several days, Militarnyi reports.

Body armor led the spending

The biggest class by money was tactical gear, six categories covering body armor, helmets, load-bearing vests and belts, armor plates and adapters, and neck and shoulder protection. Users ordered more than 527,000 such items for about $110 million.

Body armor was the single most-ordered product in the class. Almost 157,700 vests were sold for roughly $61 million, at an average of about $388 each.

Optics were the costliest goods

Military optics ranked second by spending and carried the highest prices. Buyers ordered almost 350,000 scopes, night-vision devices, and thermal imagers for about $87 million.

The average thermal sight went for about $1,680, with more than 28,000 ordered. Plain optical scopes were the most common, with over 110,000 orders, followed by almost 99,000 collimator sights.

Drone parts made up the rest

Users also spent about $75 million on drones and drone components. Half of that, roughly $36 million, went to a single category labeled accessories for drones and quadcopters.

That category alone drew 554,000 orders. It consists mostly of the parts to assemble a copter from scratch: frames, propellers, receivers, and cameras.

The first Ukrainian strikes on Ozon started on 22 August. Ozon and Wildberries—Russia’s two largest online marketplaces—and their smaller rivals collectively sell goods and services worth the equivalent of 8.5% of Russia’s GDP and employ 4 million people.

China is helping Russia build a faster Shahed. Russia has begun using upgraded Shahed drones with Chinese-made turbojet engines that fly at speeds close to three times those of earlier versions, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The Shahed jet is designed to beat Ukraine's air defenses. Ukrainian interceptors have downed about 90 percent of the older piston-engine drones, which cruise at roughly 180 kilometers per hour, so Russia switched to the jet-powered Geran-4, which cruises at around 500 kilometers per hour.

The engines come from one Shenzhen firm

The turbojets come from Telefly Telecommunications Equipment, founded in Shenzhen in 2010. The company chiefly makes computer hardware and communications equipment, but also sells its own line of micro-turbojets for drones.

China has long been the main clearinghouse for Shahed parts, including engine components, servomotors, and gyroscopes, the newspaper reported.

The company scrubbed its own website

After Ukraine publicized the discovery of Telefly engines in Russian drones, the turbojet section disappeared from the English-language pages of the company's website. The pages in Chinese and other languages still carry them.

China's foreign ministry, which did not respond either, has previously said it strictly regulates exports of dual-use components and rejects unilateral US sanctions on such trade.

Western parts fade as Chinese parts arrive

Downed Shaheds once carried microcontrollers from Texas Instruments in the US and linear regulators from STMicroelectronics, which the newspaper lists as being based in Switzerland. Over time, the Western components are disappearing even as the drones gain better navigation and attack systems, because US Treasury investigations found nearly all the Western parts were being diverted through Chinese intermediaries, often shell companies in Hong Kong.

Ukrainian government researcher Colonel Oleksandr Zaruba said in June that Shaheds now hold more antennas, modems, and SIM cards to correct their flight paths through local mobile networks, and that the components increasingly come from China.

Ukraine has drawn up a list of those who build Russia's ballistic missiles and wants all of them sanctioned by its allies. Kyiv is asking partners to impose sanctions on more than 100 Russian ballistics producers, presidential sanctions commissioner Vladyslav Vlasiuk said at a press conference in Kyiv, according to Ukrinform.

The demand rests on physical evidence. An Iskander that Russia fired at Kyiv Oblast on 10 July held more than 140 foreign components, 62 of them American, alongside parts from Switzerland, Germany, Taiwan, China, and Japan, Vlasiuk reported in July. Most were made recently, which means the parts are still reaching Russia. Naming the factories is Ukraine's attempt to close the gap at the production end rather than chase each shipment.

The plan runs on synchronization

The commissioner laid out several parts of the plan at the press conference. The first is getting the same producers sanctioned everywhere at once, so a firm blocked in one country cannot operate through another. He said the files were handed to partners a few weeks ago, and Ukrainian specialists expect to identify every producer on allied lists by September or October.

The plan also covers what Vlasiuk called kinetic sanctions, meaning strikes on Russian defense-industry sites. He named the Kamensky Combine, which makes components for rocket fuel, as one such target.

The critical parts are still foreign

Ukraine keeps finding Western microelectronics in identified Russian ballistics, including Iskander-M missiles and those used by the S-400 system, with parts traced to the US, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, France, Britain, and Switzerland. The most sensitive elements are the Kometa satellite navigation system and autonomous inertial guidance units, which run on American, Swiss, and French microelectronics.

Ballistics is the most demanding product for quality and precision, Vlasiuk said, which is why those two systems are the chokepoint.

Ukraine wants smaller packages, sooner

The commissioner asked partners to adopt more stringent export controls, up to licensing or banning the export of sensitive components to third countries that help Russia evade sanctions. Ukraine has also compiled a list of more than 10 critical materials, including ammonium perchlorate, aluminum powder, and tungsten, as well as the numerically controlled machine tools Russia needs to build the missiles.

The EU has already begun work on a large 22nd sanctions package. Ukraine is urging it not to wait, asking instead for an interim ballistics package in September and another in October, moving in small steps as Ukraine, Britain, and Canada already do.

Ukraine is turning ordinary cars into robots instead of building them from scratch. Three units of the Armed Forces received the Kaban remote-control system, which converts vehicles into uncrewed ones, developer Drone Fight Group told Defender Media.

Ground robots have become a daily part of Ukraine's front. Ukrainian units ran 16,676 logistics and evacuation missions with them in June, up 122 percent since January, and the military has contracted more than 22,000 ground robots for 2026, nearly double the 2025 total. Most are purpose-built platforms. Kaban takes the opposite route, converting vehicles that a unit already has.

The developers say Kaban was passed to the 3rd Army Corps, the 429th Separate Unmanned Systems Regiment "Akhilles", and the 49th Brigade of the Armed Forces.

The system bolts on without modification

Kaban installs on a vehicle without altering its construction and works with different models, Drone Fight Group said. It lets the operator switch between remote and manual control.

The operator navigates on a digital map, plotting routes and setting markers. Manual correction is built in for GPS spoofing cases. The system predicts its trajectory and can automatically stop the vehicle if the connection is lost.

Starlink carries the control link

The main communication channel is Starlink, and the system also supports analog video transmission and radio control, according to the developers. A vehicle can be fitted with thermal cameras if needed.

Kaban provides two-way audio and remote control of lights, infrared illumination, and searchlights, and it can pull data from the vehicle's onboard computer. Among the optional add-ons, the developers list net launchers and platforms for launching drones.

Combat testing came before the handover

Kaban is developed with support from the Brave1 cluster, and the system has already passed combat trials, according to the developers. Work continues to refine it using feedback from military units.