In five days, Ukraine dismissed its prime minister, installed a new Cabinet, and removed the defense minister who built its drone war—and for the first time since last summer, thousands of Ukrainians filled the streets of 17 cities against a wartime decision of their own president. The prime minister nobody protested for is gone quietly. Thousands demanded the reformer stay. He is gone anyway.

What the week decided is who now governs Ukraine, and the question reaches past Kyiv into EU accession talks and the shape of postwar politics. Three forces claim the ground: the constitutional institutions on paper, the Office of the President in practice, and a society that has now twice in 12 months forced its leader to answer to the street.

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Ukraine’s government reshuffle followed the letter of the Constitution. But did it follow its spirit?

Five days, one government

Late on 11 July, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signaled coming personnel changes on the diplomatic front. The next day, he set out the scope.

“Ukraine is changing its political strategy,” he wrote on Telegram, assigning each foreign-policy priority to “a specific person,” announcing that the Cabinet would be renewed, and thanking Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko for her work while offering her “a new significant direction in relations with a key partner”—wording widely read as the Washington ambassadorship.

On 14 July, Parliament voted 258 to accept Svyrydenko’s resignation, which under the Constitution brought down her entire Cabinet with her.

On 15 July, it emerged that Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov—the 35-year-old who built Ukraine’s drone ecosystem, and whose first months in the ministry produced an audit exposing $7.2 billion in defense overspending—would not be renominated.

In a parting post, he named three unfinished reforms: completing the ministry’s NATO-standard reorganization, moving all procurement to open tenders, and building a culture of accountability for decisions taken.

In the same accounting, he pointedly noted that Ukraine had tested a ballistic missile developed within the ministry’s area of responsibility on 14 July—the very day the government fell—with its accuracy maximized and its cost cut by 30%. “Symbolically,” he called the timing.

Serhii Sternenko, whose foundation delivered over 118,000 FPV drones to the army, resigned as a ministry adviser the same day, calling the state “further from victory.” By evening, the first rallies formed in Lviv.

On 16 July, Parliament appointed Naftogaz chief Serhii Koretskyi as prime minister with 289 votes, then approved his Cabinet as a package with 264 votes, leaving open the two seats the president alone nominates: defense and foreign affairs.

Much of the government stayed: Denys Shmyhal kept the energy portfolio as first deputy prime minister, and several deputy ministers moved up a chair.

Outside, “cardboard protests” spread to Kyiv and at least 16 other cities. Deputy Air Force commander Pavlo Yelizarov resigned in protest, warning that the firing and the blocking of Fedorov’s reforms “will cause numerous casualties and destruction of Ukraine.”

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That evening, Zelenskyy did two things at once. He told the crowds they were right to protest even in wartime—then pressed ahead anyway, passing over both Fedorov and Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, his own reported first choice for defense, to name special-operations commander Yevhenii Khmara acting defense minister.

Klymenko did not stay at Interior either: the president moved him to run the National Security and Defense Council, and National Police chief Ivan Vyhivskyi took over Interior.

By 17 July, the demonstrations had entered a second day, and Ukraine had a defense minister whom Parliament had not confirmed.

The explanation the president gave

This time, Zelenskyy offered reasons. The reshuffle would refocus the government on energy resilience before another winter of Russian strikes and on EU accession—a logic under which Koretskyi, who ran Naftogaz through Russia’s campaign against the grid, is a defensible pick.

On Fedorov, the president pointed to a broken relationship between the Defense Ministry and the military command, said he could not choose between the minister and Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, and refused to assign the blame to either side alone.

“Together we win, and together we bear responsibility for things that cause confusion and public resonance,” he said at a press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, adding that he still wanted Fedorov on the team.

The stated reasons leave the central question standing. In a documented conflict between a reforming minister and his commander-in-chief—a conflict Fedorov himself has now described in detail—the president resolved it by removing the minister mid-reform, not the commander. Nothing in the public account says why that was the choice.

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“It was about personal loyalty”

Oleksiy Haran, professor of comparative politics at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and research director at the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation, told Euromaidan Press the search for a policy rationale starts from the wrong end.

The problem is not this reshuffle, he argued, but where decisions get made: in the Office of the President, on Bankova Street—under Zelenskyy and, before his dismissal, under his chief of staff Andriy Yermak. “Definitely, it was about personal loyalty,” Haran said.

In his reading, this is a system Zelenskyy built and cannot imagine running any other way: the president “is not democratic in essence” and believes himself a “messianic leader”—a self-conception dented by early wartime failures, then restored by success.

Haran also punctured the “wholesale purge” framing that dominated the week’s commentary. Much of the Cabinet simply stayed or shuffled sideways. “They are just moving around,” he said. Zelenskyy speaks of a new political approach, Haran noted—“but what’s that approach about? I don’t see it.”

One appointment inside that Cabinet showed the deeper pattern. The Digital Transformation Ministry—the body that built the e-governance and digitized document app Diia and reorganized the state around it—appointed Oksana Ferchuk, the first person to lead it who was not part of Fedorov’s founding team.

As Ukrainska Pravda noted, the ministry’s reach had leaned less on its projects than on Fedorov’s political weight and his direct line to the president—a reach Fedorov himself credited to Zelenskyy’s backing.

There is a deeper reading: that inner-circle rule is the inheritance of Soviet institutional distrust and the lawless 1990s, when only personal networks could be relied on. Haran is skeptical of the tidy version.

Many Soviet citizens believed the system’s promises of justice, he noted, and Ukrainians’ distrust of state institutions is a long-run trend that predates Zelenskyy rather than a trait he personally embodies. What the war changed, he added, is that trust rose toward the army, the security services, and the anti-corruption bodies.

The other trust system

That is the half of the story that the protests made visible. Whatever its roots, personalized power is only one of Ukraine’s two working systems of trust—and this week they collided in the open.

Polling shows how differently the two are priced. In the latest national survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, conducted in May, Fedorov’s trust rating climbed to 50% from 38% in January, and his trust-minus-distrust balance now edges slightly ahead of the president’s own, KIIS polling shows.

The figures Ukrainians trust most are military commanders and volunteers; nearly every career politician on the list is distrusted by more people than trust them. Svyrydenko, the dismissed prime minister, was trusted by 27%—and her removal drew not a single placard.

Fedorov’s drew thousands. In Lviv, one cardboard sign read: “The audit showed 300 billion in theft. They removed the auditor, not the thieves.” The protesters were not demanding elections or the president’s resignation. They were defending one official on one record—open procurement, a drone industry, an audit—against a decision made without them.

Olena Shandra, 18, stood among them at a downtown Kyiv demonstration on 17 July and told Euromaidan Press what the week looked like from the square. She read it as a contest between “Soviet Ukraine and the new one”—and, for now, the Soviet one winning through Fedorov’s removal, the minister she saw as the one person in government “really wanting to introduce something new.” She had marched last July, too, against the law targeting the anti-corruption agencies.

Yet she drew a hard line at where the anger should stop: the president “has overstayed,” she said, but toppling him now would be “senseless and bad for Ukraine, because it plays into the hands of our main enemy—the one outside, waiting for exactly that moment.”

It is the same civic reflex that, last July, combined with a freeze on EU aid, forced Zelenskyy to reverse a law stripping the anti-corruption agencies of their independence within days.

The president has acknowledged the crowds’ right to stand there. He has not, so far, moved for them. Ukraine ends the week with a prime minister chosen for the winter, an acting defense minister awaiting a confirmation vote, a reform program running without its architects—and, on the squares of 17 cities, a piece of cardboard that reads “Results take time.”

Ukraine completed a wholesale government reshuffle in just four days, with every constitutional requirement observed—formally. But according to a leading Ukrainian constitutional expert, the sequence of events tells a different story.

But according to a leading Ukrainian constitutional expert, the sequence of events tells a different story. Instead of the parliament choosing a prime minister and the president acting on that decision, Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared to settle the outcome first, leaving parliament to ratify what had already been decided.

“Politically, however, it looked as though the decision had already been made by the Presidential Office,” says Andrii Biletskyi, a lawyer and criminologist who serves as administrative director of the Anti-Corruption Research and Education Centre (ACREC) at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

It raises questions about transparency, constitutional practice, and the growing concentration of power in wartime Ukraine. And it could very well damage Ukraine’s international reputation.

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The sequence ran backward

On 12 July, Zelenskyy announced the government “reset”, and the same day, Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko confirmed that she would step down. Parliament voted her out on 14 July, dissolving the entire Cabinet with her. On 15 July, the president told journalists that Serhii Koretskyi was “surely the most prepared candidate for the post of prime minister of Ukraine.”

The formal submission reached parliament the same day, registered as Draft Resolution No. 15414, its subject of legislative initiative listed as the President of Ukraine.

“Formally, the constitutional procedure was followed,” says Biletskyi.

Under Article 114 of the Constitution, parliament appoints the prime minister on the president’s submission, which should rest on a proposal from the parliamentary majority.

“However, in practice, the sequence of events looked different,” Biletskyi said in comments shared exclusively with Euromaidan Press. The president announced Svyrydenko’s departure—though formally her resignation should have been her own initiative—and publicly indicated Koretskyi’s name before the parliamentary majority had officially nominated him.

“Legally, parliament’s role was preserved because MPs still voted on the appointment. Politically, however, it looked as though the decision had already been made by the Presidential Office, while parliament simply confirmed it,” Biletskyi said.

A parliament that confirms rather than chooses

In Biletskyi’s assessment, “parliament’s role has become largely formal.” The Constitution assigns the Verkhovna Rada a central role in appointing and overseeing the government; in reality, he says, most key political decisions appear to be made by the president and the Presidential Office, with parliament approving them afterwards.

The war explains part of the concentration of power in the executive. Still, “the system of checks and balances works best when parliament acts independently rather than simply endorsing decisions that have already been made elsewhere.”

The pattern continued past the vote. Hours after the new Cabinet was approved on 16 July, Zelenskyy appointed Yevhenii Khmara, head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), as acting defense minister, saying he would seek parliamentary approval afterward. Appointment first, ratification after.

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That appointment carries a legal problem of its own, Biletskyi notes: Khmara is a serving military officer—a major general—while Ukraine’s Law on National Security requires the defense minister and his deputies to be civilians. A serving soldier or security service officer must leave active service before he can be formally appointed.

Parliament, meanwhile, has dispersed until 18 August, MP Yaroslav Zhelezniak wrote on Telegram. Zelenskyy appeared to acknowledge the hurdle himself: “Once the necessary legal procedures have been observed, I will turn to parliamentarians for support of Yevhenii Khmara for the post of Minister of Defense of Ukraine,” he said in a statement. Until then, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry is run by a man the law does not yet permit to run it.

What martial law allows

No rule bars replacing a government in wartime, Biletskyi says. Article 10 of Ukraine’s law on the legal regime of martial law states that the Cabinet’s powers may not be terminated while martial law is in force. But the provision reads together with Article 115 of the Constitution, which expressly allows the prime minister to resign, and provides that the resignation brings down the entire Cabinet.

The outgoing government must then keep working until the new one starts. That is what happened: Svyrydenko’s ministers stayed on in acting capacity until the 16 July votes.

What the EU can and cannot do

The EU cannot tell Ukraine who should be prime minister or how its government should be formed—“those are decisions for Ukraine’s constitutional institutions,” Biletskyi says. But Brussels does expect “candidate countries to have strong democratic institutions and an effective system of checks and balances.”

“When major political decisions are made without a clear public explanation, it raises questions about transparency and the concentration of power,” he said. The EU has few practical tools to intervene in what is essentially an internal political matter: “The biggest consequences are likely to be reputational. A government reshuffle without a convincing public explanation can undermine trust, both inside Ukraine and among its European partners.”

The explanation gap remains open. Zelenskyy tied the change to winter preparation and an updated political strategy; government sources told Suspilne the president was satisfied with Svyrydenko’s work and had no complaints. The dismissal of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, folded into the same Cabinet dissolution, drew thousands of protesters into the streets of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Lviv, and other cities.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the crowds demanding the return of dismissed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov that they were right to protest even during the war—then pressed ahead anyway, naming his special operations chief Yevhenii Khmara acting defense minister and passing over both Fedorov and Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, the reported frontrunner.

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It was the second time in a year that street protests have thrown one of Zelenskyy’s decisions into doubt. Last July, a week of rallies forced him to reverse a law stripping Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies of their independence. He called his own answer an ellipsis rather than a full stop and said Fedorov would remain on his team in a role to be named later, he told a briefing reported by Ukrainska Pravda.

The president tied the incoming minister’s first task to ending “busification”—recruitment officers seizing men in public and bundling them into minibuses bound for enlistment offices. At the briefing, he floated Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko as the man who could stop it. By evening, he had chosen Khmara instead.

The rallies he answered had filled nearly 20 cities that morning, most of the crowds young, and they stayed peaceful.

The man he fired blames the army

Fedorov, in his own farewell briefing hours earlier, argued that no minister can fix mobilization without deeper change within the army, since Ukraine’s recruitment centers answer to the military command rather than the Defense Ministry, as reported by LIGA.net.

Where leadership and supply already work, he said, the problem disappears—pointing to the National Guard’s 13th “Khartia” brigade, which he said has a waiting list of at least 2,000 foreign volunteers. The state, he added, is selling its recruits lies and chaos.

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That runs counter to the reason given for his removal. Zelenskyy told his party’s faction that Fedorov had botched the recruitment-center reform and that he could not choose between the minister and Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, lawmakers said afterward, as Censor.net reported.

Zelenskyy turns to his special operations chief

Khmara, whom Zelenskyy had made acting head of the Security Service in January, was told to run the ministry. The president praised his experience directing Ukraine’s long-range strike operations against Russia and said he would ask parliament to confirm him once the legal formalities were done, the president wrote on his official channel.

Parliament has already confirmed a new prime minister, Naftogaz chief Serhii Koretskyi. Khmara’s confirmation is the vote still to come.

Between 92% and 95% of Ukraine’s export grain reaches the ports by rail. The deepwater terminals that once stockpiled up to seven million tons a month can now hold four to five—a gap of about 2.5 million tons a month that the Danube barges, the trucks, and the western rail crossings together cannot come close to filling, wrote Bohdan Kostetskyi, operating partner at the trade and analysis firm Barva Invest.

The country’s main farmers’ union now estimates Ukraine has lost about a third of its capacity to export grain by sea, as reported by Reuters. More than 90% of its farm exports move through three ports in Odesa Oblast, and the country had forecast around 43 million tons for the 2026/27 season, which began in July, compared with 37 million last year.

The squeeze is set to tighten on schedule: Türkiye raised its transit fee by about 15% on 1 July, and Ukrzaliznytsia has proposed a 30% rail increase from 1 August that would add $5 to $6 per ton.

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The shock reaches world markets

World wheat markets reacted immediately. Euronext wheat jumped 7% on 15 July to €231.75 ($265) a ton, its highest since February 2025. The move ran both ways: Ukraine has been hitting Russia’s own Black Sea shipping, striking more than 100 vessels in the Sea of Azov and choking a route that carries roughly a quarter of Russian grain exports.

Major traders have now suspended purchases for delivery to deepwater terminals, and shipowners have begun refusing to enter Ukrainian ports, citing force majeure, Barva Invest’s Kostetskyi said. Four of Ukraine’s 13 large export terminals had stopped buying, industry sources told Reuters.

Kernel, the country’s largest grain exporter, halted operations at its Chornomorsk terminals after strikes on 10–12 July, with around 45,000 tons of wheat and 9,000 tons of sunflower oil lost or damaged, the company reported. Deputy Economy Minister Taras Vysotskyi said the state will do what it can to keep exports at or above last year’s level.

No way around the rail line

By Kostetskyi’s figures, the land alternatives cannot take up the slack. River exports through the Danube ports run about 100,000 tons a month, truck exports roughly the same, and rail to the western border crossings tops out at 300,000 to 400,000 tons—set against the 2.5 million tons of monthly capacity the ports have lost, a trickle.

They are also getting harder to feed: the zone where trucking can compete with rail has narrowed to about 200 km from the ports, so even a rail tariff rise that might, in theory, widen the delivery radius runs into trucking costs too high to close the gap.

Falling prices hit farmers

The damage travels straight to the farm gate. With deepwater buyers gone, purchase prices have fallen within days—rapeseed bids at crushing plants dropped about 1,000 hryvnia per ton (about $24) over the week, and Kernel cut its terminal bids about 200 hryvnia per ton (about $5) in a single day, trade outlet Latifundist reported.

Every hryvnia off the price lands on producers who, the All-Ukrainian Agrarian Council warns, are being pushed toward running out of working capital for the next sowing campaign. The council, which represents more than 1,400 small and mid-sized producers, has backed port operators in asking the government and foreign partners to widen war-risk insurance and compensation.

War-risk premiums are already built into the sea leg—freight from Constanța to Alexandria runs about $5 per ton cheaper than from Odesa, and the share of the big bulk carriers that haul grain to Asia has fallen to about 20%, down from 40% to 45% in earlier years. Türkiye’s higher transit fee and the proposed rail hike would pile several more dollars per ton onto grain that is already struggling to reach a ship.

Kostetskyi does not expect a full, prolonged shutdown of maritime exports, reading the current strikes as a fixed campaign window rather than a permanent blockade. But the constraint he describes does not lift when the strikes pause. The rail line still carries almost everything, the ports still handle less than they did, and the routes meant as a fallback were never built for this.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has removed the defense minister who built Ukraine’s drone war and pushed Elon Musk to cut Russia off from Starlink—Mykhailo Fedorov, a minister whom Ukrainians, in the last national poll, trust more than the president himself. Analysts and anti-corruption campaigners say the entire government was dissolved to make his removal possible without a scandalous vote.

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The move has set off a sharp public backlash, which commentators are comparing to last summer’s anti-corruption protests. A senior air force commander resigned, and cardboard-sign crowds returned to the streets of Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, and other cities on the morning of 16 July, hours after Russian ballistic missiles killed two people in Kyiv overnight. Parliament is expected to vote on Zelenskyy’s nominee, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, later in the day.

The crowds gathered at the same Kyiv square, beside the Ivan Franko Theatre and in sight of the Office of the President, where they massed a year ago to defend the country’s anti-corruption agencies. This standoff forced Zelenskyy to reverse course within nine days. By mid-morning, the protests had spread to more cities—Ivano-Frankivsk, Kremenchuk, Poltava, Mykolaiv—with crowds in Kyiv chanting “Shame.”

A resignation from inside the air force

Pavlo Yelizarov, a deputy commander of the air force, announced his resignation in protest, saying he had joined the armed forces in 2022 to win the war, not to imitate activity, and warning that stalling Fedorov’s air-defense reforms would let more Russian missiles and drones through. He called the dismissal grave harm to the country’s defense but said he would stay in uniform.

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Serhii Sternenko, who advised the ministry on drones, also stepped down.

By the figures Fedorov published in his farewell message, the air force’s interception rate for attack drones rose from 83% to 91% during his six months, and for cruise missiles from 47% to 87%—gains he tied to after-action reviews of each mass Russian strike. His team also ran the Logistics Lockdown program, which is choking Russian resupply to occupied Crimea.

The minister who outpolled the president

Zelenskyy has cast the decision as a management problem. At a Servant of the People faction meeting on 15 July, he pointed to a running conflict between Fedorov and Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. He said Fedorov had failed to deliver mobilization reform, according to lawmakers who were there.

Olexiy Haran, professor of comparative politics at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and research director at the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation, offered Euromaidan Press a different read.

The stated reason for dismissing Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko—the need for an energy specialist before winter—was unpersuasive, he said, since outgoing first deputy prime minister and energy minister Denys Shmyhal was already a high-level specialist in the field.

The more convincing explanation lay in Fedorov: dissolving the whole cabinet let Zelenskyy drop him without a targeted dismissal vote that would have drawn a scandal. Anti-corruption campaigner Daria Kaleniuk reached the same conclusion, telling the Kyiv Independent the entire government resignation was conceived to remove Fedorov.

The trigger, Haran said, may be Fedorov’s popularity. In a recent KIIS poll from May and early June, more Ukrainians trusted Fedorov than distrusted him by a margin of 29 points—wider than Zelenskyy’s 27, and beaten only by the Kharkiv mayor and the war’s most-trusted commanders, among them former army chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi.

Zelenskyy, Haran said, may have come to see his defense minister as a rival, and he predicted the removal would only lift Fedorov’s standing.

A former minister’s harsher read

Former infrastructure minister Volodymyr Omelyan told Euromaidan Press that the reshuffle could be an attempt to strengthen the government before a hard winter—but only if real professionals are appointed and left to work free of the Office of the President, which he doubted would happen.

Zelenskyy’s overriding aim, Omelyan argued, is to consolidate the security services and sideline the opposition to hold power indefinitely, with the war effort, arming the military, and EU integration all ranked behind the private interests of a few people around him.

He dismissed a theory foreign analysts had raised with Euromaidan Press—that the change is meant to reset relations with Poland—as nonsense, saying it would take new presidents in both countries.

Doubts about the successor

Klymenko, tapped to replace him, brings his own controversy. Non-affiliated MP Liudmyla Buimister warned that handing him defense would endanger a key wartime ministry, saying he had failed outright as interior minister.

She blamed him for the chaotic “busification” mobilization drives—in which men are seized off the street into vans—that police, she said, first stood back from and then made worse, in remarks on Telegram.

Incoming prime minister Serhii Koretskyi defended the nominee, calling him a results-driven minister. The objection lands on the exact ground Zelenskyy used to justify the swap: he faulted Fedorov for failing on mobilization, and mobilization is the brief on which Buimister says Klymenko has already failed.

Whether the protests move Zelenskyy is the open question. Last summer, mass protests and a freeze on EU aid reversed a similar move in nine days. Haran expects it to be harder this time: a reversal would mean Zelenskyy openly readmitting Fedorov, and the president, he said, is stubborn in such moments.

As the fuel crisis deepens, Russia’s regional governors are improvising.

Ukrainian drones have driven the country’s oil refining to its lowest level in more than two decades. Rationing has spread to more than 55 of Russia’s regions—forcing one southern region to order its officials onto bicycles, pushing farmers onto engine-wrecking fuel, and, with harvest season open, threatening Russia’s ability to bring in its own crops.

This is the domestic price of what Kyiv calls its “long-range sanctions”: a campaign that struck Russian refineries at least 194 times in the first half of 2026, 11 times the pace of a year earlier. For the first time, the crisis is no longer only queues at the pump—it is reshaping how Russia governs and feeds itself.

Officials on bikes, Cossacks at the pumps

In Stavropol Krai, Governor Vladimir Vladimirov has told his own administration to leave the cars in the garage. From 14 July, ministers and department heads may drive only within the regional capital, and any trip beyond it requires his personal sign-off; in town, Vladimirov told them to walk or cycle. The limit should free up about 3,000 tons of fuel a month for other users, he said.

Stavropol is not improvising alone. In the Leningrad region, Governor Alexander Drozdenko placed his officials under the same fuel limits as ordinary residents, arguing they should share the burden being asked of the public.

In Rostov, Governor Yuri Slyusar, who said drivers were growing aggressive in the queues, ordered Cossacks to keep watch at filling stations. A Sverdlovsk station raffled off a Lada; a Krasnodar pump charged 159 rubles ($2.03) a liter for AI-92 and 269 rubles ($3.44) for AI-100; in occupied Yevpatoria, grocery stores closed because owners could not fuel their generators; and in Kursk Oblast’s Kurchatov, filling stations began shutting for hours at a stretch, Echo FM reported.

Local outlets now print survival guidance. Auto instructor Viktoria Zameshaeva coached drivers to coast toward red lights and strip the roof rack, in a fuel-saving column carried across the Stavropol regional press.

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The crunch reaches the farms

The squeeze is now reaching the fields, in the middle of harvest season. To keep tractors running, on 2 July Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed a decree allowing dirtier Euro-3 fuel back onto the domestic market—and Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service says it is already damaging newer engines.

Aleksei Zhdanov, a farmer in Rostov Oblast, is pouring that low-grade Euro-3 diesel into his imported tractors and wrecking them, at 130 rubles ($1.66) a liter—double last year’s price, Zhdanov told 26.ru. “No prospects in sight,” he said. “We’re eating through old reserves, and no one knows what comes next.”

Smaller farms were cut off first, when refineries stopped releasing diesel to the traders they buy through. Drivers, meanwhile, are converting cars to run on gas: kits have jumped 30% in price and gone scarce, auto-center chief Ilya Nikolin told 26.ru.

Further east, the shortage becomes a food-security problem. In Novosibirsk Oblast, one of Siberia’s main livestock regions, farmers say the autumn feed harvest is at risk; if the feed cannot be cut in time, they will have nothing to carry dairy herds through winter and will send the animals to slaughter in the fall.

“Rapeseed can wait until spring, sunflower until winter. But if we don’t lay in feed now, it’s a catastrophe. We won’t buy it anywhere. This is our food security,” said Grigory Vlasov, a dairy farmer and deputy head of Soyuzmoloko’s Siberian branch, quoted by 26.ru.

How the refining ran short

Behind the queues is a refining system Ukraine has been dismantling plant by plant. Three facilities alone—the Omsk, Moscow, and Kirishi refineries—account for a quarter of Russia’s refining, and drones have hit all three, as 26.ru reported.

The deepest blow came on 6 July, when long-range drones struck Russia’s largest oil refinery at Omsk, roughly 2,500 km from Ukraine—the last of Russia’s 11 biggest gasoline producers to be hit, and its only maker of the catalysts other refineries depend on.

By early July, only one major Russian refinery, Angarsk in Irkutsk Oblast, remained undamaged, the Kyiv Independent reported.

The shortages have reached the front line, too: even before the summer, Ukrainian “middle-strikes” had forced some Russian units to cut diesel use by up to 20%, former drone operator Dmytro Putiata told the same outlet.

The ceiling

Moscow has now banned gasoline and jet fuel exports, is weighing a diesel export ban, and—at a government meeting on 8 July—floated the idea of building small refineries. Energy analyst Igor Yushkov told 26.ru the mini-refinery idea was sound but slow, and that Russia’s deeper problem is a rigid system in which the oil majors pump, refine, and sell with no room for competition.

This summer’s crunch is still milder than the shortage of late 2025, and supply now turns on a race between Ukrainian drones and Russian repair crews. If the strikes hold their pace and each bites harder, the advantage swings to Kyiv, Carnegie analyst Sergey Vakulenko wrote in a commentary.

Zhdanov, the Rostov farmer, was blunter about what comes next: whether he plows his land this year or abandons it, he said, only God knows.

This week, Herman Smetanin stepped down as head of Ukroboronprom—the state group of roughly 100 enterprises making missiles, drones, armored vehicles, and ammunition—days after a Russian strike detonated one of its ammunition depots, sited next to homes in breach of the law.

At least nine people were killed in Vyshneve, in what Ukraine’s prime minister at the time called the war’s worst destruction of a residential area.

Production has multiplied 35 times

Ukraine’s defense production capacity has grown from about $1 billion at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion to $35 billion a year, and the National Security and Defense Council projects $55 billion in 2026.

Yet domestic contracts covered only a third of that last year, leaving factories idling below capacity. Even after a €90 billion ($106 billion) EU loan, Kyiv still faces a funding gap of roughly $23 billion for its 2026 defense needs.

Two moves aim to close it. Kyiv will allow controlled exports of surplus weapons—Zelenskyy says some categories already run up to 50 percent beyond what Ukraine can use or finance—and plow the revenue back into production.

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And under the “Danish model” and its German and Baltic cousins, allies now pay to build Ukrainian-designed systems in their own factories, moving output beyond the reach of Russian missiles and into NATO supply chains.

Ukraine has now gone further, signing agreements that open the EU’s defense-research and production funding to its firms—including a €300 million ($350 million) instrument for its defense industry—though the deals still need parliament’s ratification.

The drones come from startups, not state plants

The real growth has moved off the state’s books. Private firms now turn out more than 4 million drones a year—the weapons the war runs on—while Ukroboronprom’s supervisory board has named an acting chief, Deputy Defense Minister Serhii Boiev, and opened a competition for Smetanin’s job.

That private surge carries its own risk: Fire Point, the munitions maker racing to build a homemade replacement for scarce Patriot interceptors, is under anti-corruption investigation over inflated prices and reported ties to a major graft case.

Which returns to Vyshneve. A depot beside homes is what happens when a defense base grows faster than the state can keep track of. Smetanin’s departure answers for that at the top—but it does nothing about the money, and the gap between what Ukraine can build and what it can fund only widens from here.

Ukraine’s parliament dismissed Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko on 14 July, 258 votes to one, three days short of her first year in office. No official reason has been given—not by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and not by Svyrydenko, who used her last hour as premier to read parliament a list of what her government had achieved.

On 1 July, her Cabinet approved the rules that let partner countries buy Ukrainian weapons directly from the firms that make them. The first permit sent combat drones to the US military. Thirteen days later, parliament voted her out.

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The ledger

“You also know that I love concrete results,” Svyrydenko said in her address to the parliament, and listed them: record defense funding, an electricity grid that survived the war’s hardest winter, $19.2 billion in international financing, negotiations opened on two European Union accession clusters, and the export mechanism. She thanked the president for his trust.

The defense number is not her arithmetic alone. Parliament raised security and defense spending by 1.56 trillion hryvnias ($35 billion) in June, lifting the 2026 total to a record 4.4 trillion hryvnias ($98 billion), of which 2.3 trillion ($51 billion) buys weapons and equipment. Most of that money rests on the €90 billion ($104.4 billion) EU loan her government negotiated.

Zelenskyy is satisfied with her work and has no complaints, government officials say.

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The name that is not in the ledger

Svyrydenko took office days before the largest corruption scandal of Zelenskyy’s presidency broke. The Midas case—a $100 million kickback scheme at state nuclear operator Energoatom—cost her two ministers and, in November, brought down Andrii Yermak, the head of the President’s Office, who resigned after investigators searched his home. He denies wrongdoing.

Svyrydenko had been Yermak’s deputy at the President’s Office in 2020–21 and was widely seen as his protégée when parliament made her premier. Her farewell does not mention Yermak, the scandal, or the two ministers she lost to it.

Orysia Lutsevych of Chatham House told RFE/RL that replacing her shows Ukrainians the president is “cleaning up the executive of Yermak’s influence.” Yevhen Mahda of the Institute of World Policy called the decision abrupt: a premier with no public complaints against her went to a meeting with the president and was told to resign.

Political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told the Kyiv Independent that Svyrydenko cut herself loose from Yermak the moment he fell—but that the public needs to see “de-Yermakization” continue, including through the replacement of the prime minister.

Twice in one war, without a vote

Ukraine has now replaced its government twice during the full-scale invasion, and no election has been held for either. Elections are suspended under martial law, and martial law also prohibits dismissing the Cabinet, a rule Kyiv treated as a gray area when Svyrydenko arrived, and treats the same way now.

The Cabinet now works in acting capacity, likely under First Vice Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal—the man Svyrydenko replaced a year ago. Parliament votes on a new premier on 16 July, with Naftogaz chief Serhii Koretskyi the front-runner.

Sources say Zelenskyy wants an energy figure in place before the next heating season. The Washington ambassadorship offered as her exit remains unaccepted. She says she will announce her plans now that the government has been dismissed.

Ukrainian strikes have pushed Russia’s oil refining down to 3.9 million barrels a day so far in July—the lowest level since March 2005 and more than 1.4 million barrels below a year ago, according to EA Analytics figures reported by Bloomberg on 13 July.

The collapse forced Moscow to ban most diesel exports through the end of July, on top of earlier gasoline and jet fuel restrictions—and the loss of a key global diesel supplier has driven prices to multiyear highs on a market already strained by Middle East disruptions.

Moscow hides the numbers

Russians can feel where this is going. They typed “how to make gasoline” into the Yandex search engine more than 17,000 times in June—the highest number since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, the Bell reported, citing Yandex Wordstat data.

Russia classified its refinery statistics after the strikes began, so EA Analytics reconstructs the numbers from external sources: satellite tracking of oil fields and storage tanks, and real-time cargo flows.

The International Energy Agency’s independent estimate points the same way—3.8 million barrels a day in June, 1.6 million below a year earlier, with more than half of Russia’s refining capacity affected since May.

Other analysts put the figure lower still. Energy Intelligence estimates current runs at about 3.6 million barrels a day—a level Russia last saw no later than 2002—with roughly 3.1 million barrels of daily capacity idle and no known restart dates.

The domestic market is short 400,000–600,000 tons of fuel a month, and imports from Belarus and Kazakhstan cover only about half the gap, the group’s analysts estimate.

Why the shortage runs coast to coast

The campaign behind the collapse: about 50 Ukrainian attacks in 100 days that hit at least 24 of Russia’s 34 large refineries, a Bloomberg tally shows—a campaign Kyiv says is designed to force the Kremlin to the negotiating table. Ukrainian drones now fly a claimed 3,400 km on one charge—this month reaching the Omsk refinery, Russia’s largest, which mainly supplies domestic consumers.

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That is why the shortage runs from Karelia to Kamchatka: hours-long lines, rocketing pump prices, rationing by license plate number in some regions, and a recommendation to Novosibirsk companies to bring back remote work to save fuel.

“We must acknowledge that there are problems and shortages,” Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said—he now holds meetings on the fuel market almost daily.

Yandex users, meanwhile, are exploring a different fix.

Ukraine’s parliament votes on the afternoon of 14 July to dismiss Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko, while the Washington ambassadorship offered as her exit remains unaccepted.

As of that morning, Svyrydenko was not considering the role for herself, three sources told Suspilne. Hours earlier, the Rada’s state-building committee backed her resignation—16 votes in favor, four abstentions. Whether she has refused outright is not known.

The Washington posting is the official rationale for the change. Sources in the President’s Office linked her exit to the need to replace Ukraine’s ambassador in the US—a role, they said, that requires an exceptionally strong figure as Kyiv works through the Patriot production license.

If the premier does not take the job, Ukraine’s second wartime change of prime minister rests on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s broader case: that the Cabinet needs renewal.

What Svyrydenko told parliament

Speaking to the committee before its vote, Svyrydenko said the president had made clear that the Cabinet needed to be renewed and certain policy directions strengthened, naming social and education policy as areas that could be run more effectively, Suspilne reported.

In her departure statement, Svyrydenko wrote on Telegram that she had discussed with the president the changes needed to strengthen the government’s work and relations with international partners, thanked her Cabinet, and said she is ready to continue serving the state and working toward a just peace.

Neither she nor Zelenskyy has publicly named a precise reason for the change. Government sources told Suspilne the president is satisfied with her work and has no complaints.

Who governs next

The likeliest candidate for the premiership is Serhii Koretskyi, head of state energy company Naftogaz, three sources in the President’s Office and the government told Suspilne. Koretskyi turned loss-making Ukrnafta profitable after 2022 and steered Naftogaz through the past winter.

Suspilne reported that Zelenskyy wanted an energy-sector figure in place before the next heating season amid Russian attacks. If parliament approves the dismissal, the Cabinet serves in an acting capacity, likely under First Vice Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, until a new government is voted in.

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A year, minus three days

Zelenskyy proposed Svyrydenko for premiership exactly one year before the dismissal vote, on 14 July 2025; she took office three days later. Her year in charge spanned the attempt to strip Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies of independence and the largest protests of the full-scale war, which reversed it.

It also saw the Midas corruption case that toppled the head of the President’s Office, the opening of Ukraine’s first EU accession negotiating cluster, and a €90 billion ($104.4 billion) EU loan. The sixth cluster opens in Brussels on the day parliament votes on her dismissal.

Russia’s State Duma has passed the largest overhaul of its bankruptcy law since the statute was written. On paper, the reform saves jobs by favoring rescue over liquidation.

In practice, Ukraine’s foreign intelligence assesses, it hands the Kremlin a legal instrument to decide which companies survive the insolvency wave building inside Russia’s war economy—a state-run version of “too big to fail,” where Moscow writes the list.

The fine print lets Moscow overrule creditors

The scale explains the urgency. Russian companies now owe more than everything Russia’s economy produces annually: 293 trillion rubles ($3.85 trillion) in liabilities by the end of April, against a GDP of about 214 trillion rubles ($2.8 trillion). Overdue payments rose 18% in a year to 7 trillion rubles ($92 billion).

That unpaid sum equals roughly three-quarters of Russia’s official annual defense budget. More than a third of corporate profits now go to paying interest alone.

The law flips the system’s default from liquidation to rescue. Companies gain a pre-bankruptcy sanation track to settle with creditors before any court case opens, plus a judicial debt-restructuring procedure with plans running up to four years, extendable by four more. A new anti-crisis manager oversees the debtor’s finances, payments, and recovery plan.

The decisive mechanism is the binding clause. For large debtors—companies with assets above 1 billion rubles ($13 million)—a court-approved sanation agreement, backed by a majority of independent creditors, becomes binding even on creditors who refuse to sign it. In a system where the biggest lenders are state banks, that lets Moscow impose survival on chosen enterprises and silence holdouts.

Six years of stalling ended in two days

Versions of this reform stalled for six years, with one government bill frozen in the Duma for two and a half years. Then the package cleared its second reading on 7 July and passed the third a day later.

“Its hasty advancement coincided with a sharp deterioration in Russian companies’ finances,” Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service assessed on 13 July. The system being replaced rescued almost no one: external administration was applied in 51 cases in all of 2025, financial recovery in eight, and rehabilitation accounted for less than 1% of corporate bankruptcies.

The agency expects Moscow to apply the new mechanisms selectively—defense plants first, then critical infrastructure, large employers, and companies dependent on state orders—to stagger big insolvencies and keep distressed assets from flooding the market at once.

Russia’s own top financiers had already publicly linked the strain to the war. Sberbank chief German Gref told shareholders in late June that investment had fallen more than 14% and could drop a further 3% this year, while central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina’s Bank of Russia conceded that pro-inflationary risks had worsened.

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The warnings are not only Ukrainian. In February, Ukrainian intelligence put non-performing loans above the 11% threshold that defines a systemic banking crisis, citing research on the $210–250 billion in loans Russian banks were forced to extend to defense contractors.

And a European intelligence note seen by Reuters warned on 6 July that the burden banks carry for the war economy creates an “explosive” risk—more than 500,000 Russians declared personal bankruptcy in 2025, up almost a third in a year.

Russian bankruptcy practitioners caution the new procedure works only if courts genuinely assess whether a business can recover—and with over a third of profits going to interest, many cannot. The law postpones the reckoning rather than canceling it.

When a crowd in Lviv overturned a draft-office car this week, the footage spread as such clips always do—as proof that Ukraine is growing war-weary. Yet, the reading is wrong—and it is the one Moscow works hardest to sell.

What the crowd was actually pushing against is not the war as such. It is a bargain that the Ukrainian state has, for more than four years, refused to make honestly.

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Who is actually carrying the war

Let me explain. Many of the men who volunteered in the first days of 2022—when there were long queues outside recruitment offices—are still at the front, with no legal way home.

“Not only motivated volunteers and those who could not buy a place in the reserve should have to fight,” Lieutenant Colonel Maksym Zhorin, deputy commander of the 3rd Assault Brigade, wrote back in January 2025; “representatives of all categories of society should fight—the children of politicians, officials, bloggers, and activists.”

But they do not. At least, many of them don’t, and the burden has narrowed either onto the people who shouldered it first or onto those who lack money or connections to avoid mobilization. By now, the war has lasted long enough for that to harden into something dangerous.

Why? Because there is no system to rotate those people out. There is no demobilization law, and the service is tied to martial law that will not be lifted while the fighting continues—the army cannot release them without replacements, and those replacements arrive too slowly.

So the ranks are topped up, the only way left: draft officers stopping men on the street. While the exact figures are hard to come by, Ukraine seems to mobilize around 30,000 a month, roughly half of what the military says it needs, the secretary of parliament’s national-security committee, Roman Kostenko, told NV in December 2025.

The street stops breed distrust. The distrust feeds evasion. The evasion deepens the shortage that makes the street stops unavoidable. And this, in turn, leads to situations like that in Lviv this week.

Although it is clear that Russia uses such incidents, the distrust is not solely Russian-made. Ukrainian media have documented units that chewed through mobilized men—the 155th “Anne of Kyiv” Brigade, French-trained, that hemorrhaged soldiers to desertion before it ever fought well.

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Soldiers talk; the families of the dead talk; and the reputation of the worst formations travels faster than the reality that most service is ordinary. To a man weighing whether to wait out the draft, who has heard mostly about the units that break, avoidance can look rational.

The objection that proves the point

Here, the government has a case, and it isn’t a foolish one: releasing a hundred thousand of your most experienced soldiers in the middle of a war, with nothing trained to fill the hole, would hand Russia the front. That is why the military command asked parliament, on the eve of the 2024 vote, to strike the demobilization clauses from the mobilization law. Keep the veterans in, and the line holds.

Except it does not hold, not across years. An exhausted soldier is not a preserved asset. Past a point, he is a man who cannot do it anymore, and the army loses him regardless—not on a schedule it manages, but chaotically, to death, injury, or desertion.

In 2024, some 51,000 Ukrainian soldiers left their units without leave, more than double the year before, with fatigue named among the primary causes. “The number of soldiers going AWOL will break every record,” a combat officer who joined on 24 February 2022 told Ukrainska Pravda. The men the state insists it cannot afford to release are leaving anyway.

That is what turns the military logic against itself.

Precisely because the country cannot simply free the 2022 cohort, it needs a system that moves people predictably—so veterans can be relieved before they break, and civilians can plan for service instead of fearing the street, which, in Lviv and elsewhere, young men now avoid. They are not afraid of the war but of how they’ll be taken to it.

Such a system is not a concession that weakens the army. In a long war, it is a condition for keeping the army whole. Which means the hard political decision beneath it—telling the country that the cost has to be shared and building the machinery to do so—was never avoidable. It was only delayed. And delay, dressed as military levelheadedness, is merely avoidance.

The reform that isn’t the repair

The delay is now, belatedly, ending—or half-ending. In 2026, President Zelenskyy ordered the overhaul he had promised once before, in late 2023, and dropped: new contracts, higher frontline pay, a phased path out for the longest-serving. Yes, there is a certain déjà vu to it. Yet, the plan is real and aimed at the right wound—service terms.

But soldiers have read it less as a way home than as a reset: sign a new contract and the clock restarts; serve months more before even a short deferment, an illusory reprieve rather than a discharge.

The combat medic and writer Yaryna Chornohuz has argued that the plan rewards the wrong thing—dangling combat bonuses while base pay is near $700, and offering a soldier of four years the same short deferment as a raw recruit, instead of being scaled by time served. Certainty, she and others say, would keep and attract more soldiers than any bonus.

And the reform barely touches the other half of the problem: the recruitment side—the street stops, and the exemption rules the military ombudsman Olha Reshetylova says any reform must start with. It fixes things for the soldiers already inside. It does nothing for the collision on the pavement between the state and the men it is trying to pull in. That collision is exactly what happened in Lviv.

The enemy in the vacuum

Into every space the state leaves, Russia pours. Its information war now targets not politicians but the country’s ability to raise an army at all, Olesia Horiainova of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre finds—turning the recruiter into the enemy in Moscow’s place.

It works because the vacuum is real: a state that says nothing leaves the field to an adversary happy to speak for it. The anger isn’t manufactured. That is exactly what makes it useful.

The bill for a fifth year

What would break the loop is not another contract scheme. It is the thing Ukrainian officials, from the human-rights commissioner to the military ombudsman, have only now begun to say aloud: the rules have to become fair and finite, and someone at the very top has to make the public case for why.

That case is politically expensive. It asks the comfortable to share a burden they have so far been able to sidestep, and it asks a president who reads the public mood closely to get out in front of it rather than trail behind. It has gone unmade for four years because it is hard. The car on its roof in Lviv is a preview of what a fifth year of not making it will cost.

Peeter Helme

Peeter Helme is a business journalist based in Lviv, Ukraine. Living in Ukraine since 2023, he first worked from Odesa and now reports from Lviv. Before joining Euromaidan Press, Peeter worked in Ukraine for an international logistics company in 2023–2024. Earlier, he worked across print, radio, and television journalism in Estonia, in both public and private media. His background also includes commercial and editorial copywriting. Peeter studied in Estonia and Germany, earning a BA in History from the University of Tartu in 2003. For Euromaidan Press, he covers Ukraine’s economy and wartime resilience, as well as energy issues, fiscal policy, and other major economic developments..

Editor's note. The opinions expressed in our Opinion section belong to their authors. Euromaidan Press' editorial team may or may not share them.

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An overturned draft-office car is no longer news in Ukraine. This one was different for the place, and for the response. It happened in Lviv, the heartland of the war effort, and within a day, two of Ukraine’s own oversight officials had blamed not the crowd but the government for a mobilization system it deferred fixing for years and has only begun, haltingly, to reform.

On the evening of 8 July 2026, a crowd of about 200 people in Lviv’s Sykhiv district blocked, smashed, and overturned a car belonging to the city’s territorial recruitment center, after draft officers stopped a man wanted since 12 June for dodging military registration, Lviv Portal reported. The standoff ran about five hours, into the early hours of 9 July; at least two servicemen were hospitalized with light injuries.

The friction is structural. Ukraine drafts about 30,000 men a month—only about half what the army needs, the secretary of parliament’s national-security committee, Roman Kostenko, told Radio NV—so the ranks are topped up by draft officers stopping men on the street, a system Euromaidan Press has argued was left broken because the hardest fixes were deferred.

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What happened—and what remains disputed

The recruitment center’s account, from deputy chief Petro Storozhuk at a briefing: draft officers checked the 30-year-old’s papers, found he was on a wanted list, offered to drive him in for a records check and a medical exam, and he got in—only then, they say, did an unknown group block the car and refuse to let it leave.

Accounts of how it started diverge. Eyewitnesses told NV the recruiters had beaten the man and dragged him into a minibus; one widely shared clip—which Euromaidan Press has confirmed was filmed at the scene, though not what led up to it—appears to show a recruitment officer getting out of a car and punching a man, The Ukrainians reported.

The district chief said that the footage was incomplete and out of context, that the conflict had begun earlier off-camera, and that, as he saw it, the officer was defending himself; police will make the legal call.

Someone fired shots into the air during the fighting; police said the gunman was a bystander who turned out to be an off-duty serviceman, firing to disperse the crowd, and that the shots hit no one, spokeswoman Alina Podreiko told Tvoemisto.

Separately, how many were hurt across the night is disputed—the recruitment center said two servicemen; police reported four members of the security forces.

Two inquiries followed: a criminal case against the crowd and a review of the officers’ own conduct. By midnight, the man the crowd had gathered to free was sent for a medical exam—in effect, mobilized.

The 23-year-old charged over the assault on police, named in court as Oleh Havrylov, told the hearing that he is himself a soldier of the 53rd Separate Mechanized Brigade, absent without leave since February 2026, formerly a drone operator near Kramatorsk—an account Euromaidan Press cannot independently verify. He faces up to five years.

Police mostly watched as the car was destroyed and sent no one to the next day’s briefing, even as a regional official praised their restraint, Focus.ua reported.

A flashpoint reaches the heartland

Anti-recruitment unrest is not new—a 2024 Kovel crowd that stormed a recruitment office, protests in Vinnytsia, and a wave of attacks on draft centers in early 2025. What is new is the address.

Lviv buries its war dead often and directs much of its budget into the army; its 58,000 residents in uniform make it one of the country’s most mobilized cities, said mayor Andrii Sadovyi, who called the scene “not yet a diagnosis but already a symptom” and noted Moscow most wants Ukrainians fighting each other.

Russia has turned its information war from attacking politicians to wrecking the state’s ability to raise an army, wrote Olesia Horiainova, deputy head of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre. Her team logged nearly 10 million mentions of mobilization in six months, most on Facebook and Telegram, plus AI-generated “soldiers” pushing Russian lines in Ukrainian.

The negativity fills whatever vacuum the state’s silence leaves, she argues—so one clash reads as “total collapse” while the tens of thousands of quiet call-ups each month go unseen. The sharpest criticism, though, came from Ukrainian officials, not bots.

When the state steps back, others step in

As the state hesitated, others moved. A volunteer, Anton Petrivskyi, said he and “active residents” had tracked down participants and filmed their apologies—one pledging on camera to enlist—while withholding parts of the “conversation” so Facebook would not block it. The apologies were extracted not by the police, who were charging the same people, but by self-appointed enforcers.

Two watchdogs, one root

The state’s own answer came a day later, and in words. Condemnation ran from the top down: the head of the Office of the President, Kyrylo Budanov, warned that anyone who strips and beats a soldier of their own army should ask who will defend them tomorrow; the defense ministry called mobilization necessary but its methods in need of work, as LIGA reported.

The two officials whose job is oversight aimed higher. The human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, urged the ministry to establish a working group to rewrite the rules, warning that when reports of draft abuses go years without a legal response, trust erodes.

The military ombudsman, Olha Reshetylova, blamed the government and local authorities for never settling who stays in the workforce and who goes to the front. Reform has to start with the draft-exemption rules, she said—and she rounded on the politicians and media who exploit mobilization for clicks and stoke hatred of the soldiers who enforce it.

They point from opposite ends at the same gap. Ukraine did finally move: in 2026, it launched a personnel overhaul—new contracts, higher frontline pay, a phased path out for the longest-serving. Yet soldiers panned it as an illusory reprieve, months more service before a short deferment rather than a way home, Ukrainska Pravda reported.

What it has not touched is the recruiters’ side of the system—the street stops and unfixed exemption rules that put a crowd around a car in Lviv in the first place.

On 17 June 2025—a year ago—Rostec CEO Sergei Chemezov met Putin at the Kremlin and reported that the state arms corporation had more than doubled its net profit to roughly $1.4 billion. Then, in the same meeting, he said three waste incineration plants would have to be frozen “until better days, when money is cheaper.”

Rostec produces 80% of the weapons Russia fires in Ukraine.

Long-term investments have become unviable

In June 2026, a study found that Russia had suspended roughly $2.3 billion worth of data center construction—gutting the infrastructure its government says is essential for sovereign AI.

In May 2026, it emerged that the railway to Putin’s flagship Arctic coal port had been halted because Russian Railways could not pay the builders, leaving a terminal that opened to great fanfare shipping just 3% of its design capacity.

Russia’s war spending has pushed interest rates high enough to make decade-long investments mathematically unviable, emptied the federal budget, and left state companies choosing between the front and the future.

Boris Grozovsky, a Russian economic journalist and editor of the independent outlet Strana i Mir, told Radio Liberty that the government has no interest in restoring economic growth: “The goal of restoring economic growth is incompatible with the war and accelerating nationalization, and I don’t see anyone seriously pursuing it.”

The data centers Russia cannot build

Russia suspended 38 data center projects over the preceding three years, worth roughly $2.3 billion in total, according to a study by the consulting firm Tekhexpo and the research group PKR, reviewed by Forbes Russia.

Russia is simultaneously drafting legislation to mandate a sovereign domestic artificial intelligence ecosystem—and watching the buildings that AI needs go unbuilt. “It remains unclear how the task of developing independent AI can be achieved, especially as legislation governing artificial intelligence is now being prepared for adoption,” Filipp Vratskikh, CEO of Tekhexpo, told Forbes.

Commercial data centers are built to pay back over roughly ten years. Stanislav Mirin, an analyst at iKS-Consulting, told Forbes that the Central Bank’s benchmark rate hit 21% in 2025 before falling to still above 14%: “At such rates, the business model often simply does not work.”

Those rates exist because war spending fuels inflation, and the Central Bank raises rates to contain it—a loop that makes any investment taking years to pay back impossible to finance.

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Electricity is the second obstacle. About three-quarters of Russia’s commercial data center capacity is in the Moscow region, where obtaining approval for new power connections has become “virtually impossible” for new investors, according to the same study.

Rostelecom president Mikhail Oseyevsky has warned that spare electricity capacity in Russia’s largest cities is nearly exhausted, already limiting new data center construction and blocking large-scale deployment of AI, The Moscow Times reported.

The Arctic port with no railway

In March 2025, Russia opened the Lavna coal terminal in Murmansk—a deep-water port on the western shore of the Kola Bay that Putin personally inspected by helicopter in 2023, describing it as essential to Russia’s Northern Sea Route ambitions.

The project had been in development for more than a decade, with total investment in the wider Murmansk Transport Hub exceeding $1.7 billion. Design capacity: 18 million tons of coal per year.

The Barents Observer reported in May 2026 that construction of the railway branch line connecting the terminal to Russia’s national network had been suspended because Russian Railways lacked the funds to pay its contractors.

The port is open. The train cannot reach it. In its first seven months of operation, the terminal shipped just 3% of its annual design capacity, according to The Coal Hub, an independent coal market platform.

Coal throughput at the older Murmansk Commercial Sea Port has been falling alongside the new terminal’s failure to ramp up, The Barents Observer found—down more than 40% year-on-year in January 2026 alone, and roughly 60% below its 2020 peak, according to The Barents Observer’s investigation published in May 2026.

The deeper problem is that even a completed railway might not save the project. Coal for Lavna comes mainly from Kuzbass—Russia’s main coal-mining region in southwestern Siberia, on the other side of the country—where production has been falling for years and dropped sharply again in early 2026.

“Even if the state manages to secure the funding to fully commission the Lavna port and the railway line leading to it,” The Barents Observer concluded, “there will be nothing to load.”

The mechanism

The same forces drive both failures. Russia’s Finance Ministry data, relayed by Interfax, put the federal budget deficit at $77 billion for January–May 2026—already 51% above the full-year target.

The war share of spending keeps growing; everything else competes for what remains. Grozovsky told Radio Liberty that the government’s priority is funding the military and defense industry “in the volumes it needs,” while preventing mass wage arrears and social unrest.

The arms maker’s incinerators are still unbuilt.

Rusal, the Russian aluminum giant whose raw materials have been traced to Russian weapons producers, also supplies a Swedish smelter and was documented as a Tesla supplier in 2022.

At a regular Ukraine solidarity rally in Uppsala on 6 July, Swedish tech entrepreneur and volunteer Jakob Gottlieb reported that Tesla has never answered whether it still sources from the company, and that the silence hasn’t changed.

An OCCRP-led investigation published in March 2026, carried out with The Irish Times, The Guardian, iStories, De Tijd, and others, traced Irish-refined alumina through Rusal smelters to a Moscow trader supplying dozens of EU-sanctioned Russian weapons manufacturers.

The Swedish tax authority Skatteverket has separately ruled that Rusal remains under the effective control of sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska—a finding that, if acted upon, would place all Rusal assets in Europe, including a Swedish aluminum smelter that relies on Irish alumina, under EU sanctions. Ireland is now under intense pressure to halt alumina exports to Russia as it holds the EU Council presidency.

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Tesla’s connection to Rusal was first documented by CNBC in March 2022, using invoices and internal correspondence showing the company had purchased millions of euros’ worth of aluminum from Rusal since late 2020 for casting and body shells at its Berlin gigafactory. CNBC asked Tesla whether it was taking steps to sever the relationship. Tesla did not reply.

Gottlieb and a colleague have since contacted Tesla’s press departments in the United States and Europe, as well as sales representatives in Germany and Sweden, asking whether the sourcing has changed.

They received no reply. A competitor to Rusal, consulted by Gottlieb, confirmed that such supplier contracts typically span many years due to the capital investment required to switch suppliers.

“If they were supplying in 2023, chances are very high that the Tesla you want to buy made in Berlin is made with Russian aluminum,” Gottlieb said. The conclusion is his own inference, not independently verified by EP. Tesla has not responded to this article.

The scale of corporate complicity

Gottlieb also presented a comparison that reframes the overall scale of corporate tax flows to Russia. PepsiCo and Mondelez together have contributed an estimated $4 to $5 billion in taxes to the Russian state since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022—roughly half of Sweden’s total support to Ukraine over the same period, Gottlieb said. The estimate is based on publicly reported tax data and is his own calculation.

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To help consumers act on this information, Gottlieb introduced two free tools: the Leave Russia database maintained by the Kyiv School of Economics, which tracks more than 4,000 multinational companies’ Russia status, and the Push To Leave app, which lets shoppers scan a product barcode to check whether its parent company still pays taxes in Russia.

He illustrated the choice with two cafés near the rally square: Espresso House, owned by JAB Holding, whose portfolio includes brands still operating in Russia, is directly on Uppsala’s central square. Gateau, owned by Finnish company Fazer, is one block away. Fazer chose to exit Russia in 2022 despite employing more than 1,000 people there.

A movement with a memory

Måndagsrörelsen—“The Monday Movement”—was founded in March 1990 to support the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from the Soviet Union. For 79 consecutive Mondays, demonstrators gathered at Norrmalmstorg in Stockholm; the rallies spread to around 50 Swedish cities at the movement’s peak.

When the Baltic states regained independence in 1991, the gatherings ended. A granite monument, “The Source of Freedom,” was installed at Norrmalmstorg in 1994. On 28 February 2022—four days after Russia’s full-scale invasion—the Monday rallies began again.

Marius Domeika, a Lithuanian participant who attended the Uppsala rally carrying the Lithuanian flag, was direct. “When Lithuania was fighting to regain its freedom from the Soviet Union, many of the people standing here today were demonstrating every Monday at Norrmalmstorg, Stockholm,” he said. “Today we are free, and we value that freedom deeply. That’s why we stand with Ukraine.”

Marco Selander, whose son Edvard Selander died fighting for Ukraine, attends the gatherings regularly. After hearing Gottlieb’s presentation, he said the scale surprised him. “It made me think more carefully about which brands I support and how my own choices can make a difference,” he said.

The next Uppsala rally takes place on 3 August 2026, with Magdalena Andersson, leader of the opposition and former Swedish prime minister, confirmed as a speaker.

A Ukrainian court has blocked the publication of a completed investigation, using a legal tool meant to protect evidence in a lawsuit that, as of publication, does not exist.

On 24 June, investigative outlet Slidstvo.Info and the Anti-Corruption Action Center (ACC) sent questions to a company called Parkovyi-2 about 143 real estate properties that the reporters had traced to Oleksandr Sukhachov, a Kharkiv businessman and the brother of State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) Director Oleksii Sukhachov, according to Slidstvo.Info’s own statement.

Parkovyi-2 never answered; on 3 July, a Friday, it asked the court for an injunction instead, and by Monday, 6 July, Pecherskyi District Court Judge Serhii Vovk had signed an order barring Slidstvo.Info and the ACC from publishing anything about the property.

The underlying defamation or privacy suit that would normally justify such a ban has still not been filed. According to the court’s own account, the claimant now has 10 days from 6 July to file the suit, or the order will lapse on its own, the Pecherskyi court told Suspilne.

Why a request turned into a courtroom order

The mechanism at work is an interim injunction, ordinarily used to freeze assets or preserve evidence while a court case is underway, not to stop a story before the case behind it is lodged.

The court defended the ban as a routine practice under Ukraine’s martial-law provisions, arguing that weighing free expression against the injunction is a matter for the court once the actual lawsuit is filed.

A tool built to prevent evidence from disappearing mid-case has just been used to stop a finished story from appearing at all, while no case is open yet to test it against. If it survives this use, any person facing embarrassing reporting has a template: file an injunction first, then decide later whether to sue at all.

Media lawyers and the outlet descrive this specific sequence—an injunction granted before the underlying suit is filed—as unprecedented in Ukraine.

As Ukrainska Pravda reports, the court’s order itself gives two reasons for the ban: that publishing details of the properties and how they were financed could cause Oleksandr Sukhachov “irreparable harm,” and that the information could expose Parkovyi-2’s trade secrets.

“We believe the Anti-Corruption Action Center and Slidstvo.Info are simply being used to test an instrument for banning journalists from exposing corruption,” ACC director Daria Kaleniuk said in a statement.

Slidstvo.Info co-author Maksym Savchuk told Ukrainska Pravda the months-long investigation had traced 143 properties to Oleksandr Sukhachov and found “threads leading directly to” the SBI his brother runs.

Reporters Without Borders expressed concern, saying courts should not be used to suppress reporting on matters of public interest.

Why the SBI’s own family matters here

Ukraine’s SBI investigates officials and law enforcement, including cases that touch its own ranks. A court has now shielded the family of the person who runs it from published scrutiny, days before any legal case against that scrutiny existed.

This is not the only recent case of pressure on Ukrainian outlets reporting on state institutions. On 7 July, investigators raided the home of Babel co-founder Oleksii Babenko, days after his outlet published an investigation into deaths at Ukraine’s largest assault regiment.

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Judge Vovk has a documented history of rulings favoring politically connected figures, according to Slidstvo.Info, which reports he sentenced former Interior Minister Yurii Lutsenko in 2012 in a case the European Parliament later called inconsistent with international fair-trial standards, and separately lifted an asset freeze on 415 properties linked to businessman Ihor Kolomoisky.

In 2015, parliament approved Vovk’s own arrest after prosecutors accused him of a ruling that unlawfully stripped someone of property rights; he was suspended, then reinstated in 2016. In 2022, Slidstvo.Info found that his wife had become the owner of a Volkswagen Multivan, now worth roughly $90,000; when asked how she had afforded it, Vovk said it had been a gift from unnamed family members.

The DEJURE Foundation reported that the SBI searched Ukraine’s High Qualification Commission of Judges in March 2025, shortly after judges from the Pecherskyi court, including its chair, were called in for a review that could have cost them their posts.

DEJURE stopped short of alleging a direct link between that episode and this ruling, describing the two courts’ relationship instead as an exchange of favors.

Slidstvo.Info and the ACC say the case carries the hallmarks of a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP—a suit filed less to win than to exhaust and silence the party being sued, and note that Kyiv has committed to EU-standard anti-SLAPP legislation by 2027 as part of its accession process, under the same first cluster of talks covering judicial reform and freedom of expression.

Ukraine’s central bank reserves rose to $51.3 billion (2.3 trillion hryvnia) in June, reversing a four-month, $12 billion drawdown driven almost entirely by one thing: the cost of oil.

A war between Israel and Iran that shut the Strait of Hormuz forced Ukraine to spend down its financial buffer to defend the hryvnia against rising fuel-import costs. On 8 July, oil prices spiked again—a reminder that the recovery rests on a war Ukraine has no control over.

The National Bank of Ukraine reported the figure on 7 July, up from $45.7 billion (2 trillion hryvnia) at the start of June. It is the first monthly increase since January, when reserves peaked near $57.7 billion (2.5 trillion hryvnia) before four straight months of decline drained a fifth of the buffer.

Oil prices drive the buffer

Ukraine imports nearly all its refined fuel, so global oil prices translate directly into Ukraine’s import bill and, from there, put pressure on the hryvnia. When oil spikes, the National Bank sells dollars from reserves to keep the currency stable; when oil falls, it can sell less.

Brent crude climbed above $110 a barrel (4,800 hryvnia) and stayed there for much of the spring as the Israel-Iran war escalated and the Strait of Hormuz stayed shut to most shipping. Ukraine’s fuel inflation hit 23.4% year-on-year in March, more than twice the headline rate, and the National Bank paused a rate-cutting cycle it had only just begun in January.

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Then, through June, a US-Iran truce began restoring tanker traffic through Hormuz and OPEC+ raised output quotas. Brent fell from $91 a barrel (4,000 hryvnia) at the start of June to $72 (3,100 hryvnia) by month’s end, according to daily price data—a drop of more than 20% in four weeks.

Partner funding in June outpaced what the central bank had to sell defending the hryvnia, according to the same NBU release—enough to push import cover from under five months to just over five.

Drone funding stands apart from reserves

A separate $4.4 billion (192 billion hryvnia) payment is not included in that total. The European Commission disbursed €3.9 billion on 30 June as the first tranche of a €6-billion drone-procurement package under the EU’s wider Ukraine Support Loan—money earmarked for weapons purchases, not counted toward general reserves.

Ukraine also made its routine debt and IMF payments in June.

The relief is already fragile. On 8 July, Brent jumped over 5% in a single day after the US struck Iran again and revoked its oil-export waiver, following attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Oil’s June retreat took a month to build. It may take less than that to unwind, and with it, the conditions that let Ukraine’s reserves recover.

Ukraine’s drone campaign has forced Russia to start rationing its own gasoline, and the squeeze has split the country in two. Where the drones reach the refineries, regions ration what fuel remains; where they cannot, officials stockpile in anticipation of a shortage that has not yet arrived. On 6 and 7 July, both ends of the country showed it at once.

In Nizhny Novgorod—the Volga region that hosts NORSI, Lukoil’s largest refinery—the regional operational headquarters moved to hand out gasoline by appointment, Governor Gleb Nikitin said on Telegram.

It approved a QR-code pilot for filling stations, kept a 40-liter cap already taking effect at Lukoil stations, and floated selling fuel on alternating days by the first digit of the license plate—plates starting with an even number one day, odd the next—announcing the measures in the same breath as reassurance that deliveries had “normalized” and risen 29 percent since the end of the previous week.

Rationing spreads past 60 regions

The machinery is borrowed. Occupied Sevastopol began issuing weekly personal QR codes for 20 liters at a time in June, its Kremlin-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said on Telegram. Oryol was the first region to float plate-number sales, up to 50 liters, its Governor Andrey Klychkov said in a VKontakte broadcast reported by Meduza.

NORSI went offline in early July after a drone strike, and mandatory or ad hoc fuel limits now apply to two-thirds of Russia’s regions, the Moscow Times counted. Putin has conceded the strikes are causing problems, acknowledging “a certain shortage” of fuel in a Kremlin-published interview, The Insider reported.

On Russia’s border with Finland, the wait itself became the story. In Petrozavodsk, the Karelian capital, photographer Igor Podgorny queued five hours overnight for 30 liters of gasoline—the wait alone, he noted, was enough to have driven to St. Petersburg, Stolitsa na Onego reported. Lukoil stations across the city had run dry; only one small chain was still filling canisters, and not always.

Nine time zones and 6,300 kilometers east, on the Pacific, Kamchatka has lost no refinery and lies far beyond drone range—yet it is preparing anyway, local outlet Kam24 reported. Officials there logged a 30-day fuel reserve on 7 July and said two towns that had run short the week before had been stabilized.

A tanker was steaming toward Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky with about 1,000 tons of AI-92 gasoline and 2,000 tons of diesel, a second vessel loading behind it. Jet fuel is secured until 13 August. Independent stations are already raising prices; the region’s main supplier is holding steady, and the governor ordered regulators to keep it that way.

Between the frontiers, drivers wait hours in line; black-market gasoline in Irkutsk climbed toward 350 rubles ($4.53) a liter at the peak of that region’s shortage. For most of the war, the roughly one in five Russians tied to military pay or war production stayed insulated while everyone else absorbed inflation and service cuts—fuel does not sort that way.

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Fuel crisis reaches the fields

The strain reaches the fields, too, as PLN Pskov reported. In Pskov Oblast, on the Estonian and Latvian border, growers have lost working hours to fuel queues in the middle of harvest, with diesel near 80 rubles ($1.03) a liter and summer sales to visitors down by around half. Panic-buying has driven demand up 20–30%, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak has said.

A country that sells oil to the world is now administering its own gasoline—by QR code and by license plate. In Nizhny Novgorod, the machinery went up the same day its governor said the shortage was easing.

When Russia menaces a nuclear plant, or a drone strays near an occupied reactor, Western audiences hear an echo of the Cold War: deterrence, the standoff of two rational powers each too afraid to shoot first.

The Ukrainian media scholar Svitlana Matviyenko thinks that the frame is not just wrong but useful to the Kremlin. What Ukraine faces, she argued at a public talk in Lviv on 6 July, is not deterrence but terror: a tactic built on randomness, meant to get Western voters to do Moscow’s calculating for it. She likes to start with a taxi ride.

In April 2024, Matviyenko was invited by the Canadian Senate’s Committee on National Security, Defence and Veterans Affairs to testify in Ottawa on disinformation. The driver who collected her from the airport had no idea who she was.

He drove her through the city, gestured at what the Canadian government had built with public money, and told her the rest of it was flowing to Ukraine—a waste, in his view. When she asked why, his reasoning was blunt: Russia already had nuclear weapons, so what was the point? She opened her testimony, she told the Lviv audience, with that ride.

The talk was part of a fellowship run by INDEX, a Lviv institute that brings foreign researchers to live inside wartime Ukraine. Its subject that night was ecocide and what the organizers call nuclear colonialism.

It fell six weeks after a Russian barrage on Kyiv badly damaged the National Chornobyl Museum, which had reopened only weeks earlier for the 1986 disaster’s 40th anniversary; part of its collection was lost; crews saved the rest. That loss hung over the room. But the night’s sharpest argument was not about the past. It was about the word the West uses for the present.

Deterrence is the wrong word

For most of her audiences abroad, Matviyenko said, any mention of nuclear danger summons a single Cold War idea: deterrence—the logic of two rivals holding each other in check, each restrained by the other’s arsenal.

Raise the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest, seized in 2022, or the Chornobyl zone, taken in the first weeks of the invasion, and Western listeners reach for the same frame.

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It is the wrong frame, Matviyenko argued. Deterrence is a game of cold arithmetic: two sides, each move calculated to avoid the worst, each assuming the other wants to avoid it too. Terror works the other way. Its logic is randomness, not calculation—something done at a distance that stuns, freezes, and kills all the same.

You cannot know where the next strike will land or when, only that something will. A drone hits a spent-fuel store; a line fails at an occupied reactor. Each incident can be waved away as an accident, she said, because the trajectories cannot be proven—and that deniability is not a flaw in the system but the point of it. Randomness, in her account, is not a breakdown of the order. It is the order itself.

A card the Kremlin keeps playing

The taxi driver was the argument in miniature. On a far larger scale, so was the autumn of 2022.

As Sasha Dovzhyk, INDEX’s head, put it from the floor—drawing on her recent interview with the historian Serhii Plokhy for the London Ukrainian Review—Moscow reached for nuclear blackmail just as its front was collapsing at Kherson and Kharkiv, its defense minister warning NATO capitals that Ukraine was preparing a “dirty bomb.”

By his account, the bluff worked. Fear of escalation slowed Western arms deliveries, including F-16s. It helped produce the failed 2023 counteroffensive—the drive to sever occupied Crimea from the Russian mainland and, with it, break Russia’s hold on the Zaporizhzhia plant. That the plant is still occupied, Plokhy argues, is largely the blackmail’s doing.

Matviyenko’s interest is in why the bluff keeps working. Terror, she said, colonizes the imagination: it gets people abroad to rule out helping Ukraine before Moscow has to lift a finger.

That week, she said, she was publishing a piece in a Canadian outlet making the same case: that what the West takes for deterrence is, in fact, terror. She keeps explaining the difference wherever she can. The fear, she said, spreads faster than she can correct it.

Who gets to speak for the colonized

The evening’s other live argument was aimed at a tactic Ukrainians increasingly meet abroad. The card of great Russian culture, Dovzhyk said, no longer plays well with thoughtful people, so Russia has reached for a newer one: the rights of ethnic and linguistic minorities, of its own colonized peoples.

The trouble is who ends up holding the microphone—often émigré Russians from Moscow and St. Petersburg, with polished reputations, speaking on behalf of communities they do not belong to, and doing it, more often than not, against Ukraine.

Matviyenko was less alarmed by this than by a parallel move she does expect in earnest: the weaponizing of ecocide. On the minorities front, she was more sanguine. In North America, she said, the norms of decolonial discourse are strong enough that a Russian speaking in place of an Indigenous person is challenged on sight. Indigenous activism, especially on the environment, is real and deserves genuine partnership. The answer, she said, is not to cede the ground.

The moderator, Nina Direnko, offered the bluntest version. When minority rights are raised to put Ukraine on the back foot, she said, someone in the room should simply raise a hand and ask what those rights mean when Russia is erasing them across occupied Ukraine—and conscripting some of the same minorities to kill Ukrainians. It is a crude move, she allowed. It is also, she said, exactly the one to make.

The harm you cannot see

The ecocide the evening was named for had a clear anchor. Opening the night, Dovzhyk had reached back to 6 June 2023, when Russian forces destroyed the Kakhovka dam, draining the reservoir whose water once cooled the Zaporizhzhia reactors and sending a wall of water and decades of toxic sediment down the Dnipro to the Black Sea. The environmental crime and the nuclear one, in this telling, are the same crime.

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The curator and writer Kateryna Iakovlenko traced how Ukrainian artists have followed the harm underground. Early in the war, she said, they favored the view from above—maps, the drone’s-eye survey of scarred terrain.

Then the gaze turned downward, to what lies beneath: contamination, buried and unexploded ordnance, the remains of the dead. She has written about a “new geography” being drawn by the war’s rusting leavings, and about art’s power to record not only what is visible but what slips past the eye.

The story does not start in 1986

If the threat is colonial, the panel argued, so are its roots—and they run deeper than the reactor that exploded in 1986. To talk about nuclear colonialism honestly, Matviyenko said, you have to move your gaze back to the 1970s and earlier, to the Soviet decision to develop this stretch of Ukraine as a nuclear landscape in the first place.

She has been going to the Chornobyl zone for a decade, several times a year, and she watched the 40th-anniversary wave of remembrance with some unease: too much of it, she said, ran on the comforting myth of nature quietly reclaiming the exclusion zone, greening over the disaster as if it had healed. A book she hopes to finish this year makes the same case—decenter 1986, and look instead at the decades of engineering and politics that built the landscape before it failed.

Larissa Babij, managing editor of the London Ukrainian Review, followed the same thread through the work of Orysia Kulick, whose essay traces the roots of the Soviet program back to the scramble for Nazi Germany’s V-2 rocket technology.

The weapon had been assembled at a slave-labor camp; as the war ended, both superpowers seized its designs and its engineers. In the United States, that inheritance ran through Wernher von Braun; in the Soviet Union, it ran through the Zhytomyr-born Sergei Korolev, who had himself survived the Gulag.

And the wider enterprise, from uranium to reactors, was built on Gulag labor, its plants and atomic cities concentrated in Ukraine and, to a lesser degree, Lithuania—the very lands the camps had drawn their postwar prisoners from. Ukrainians, Babij argued, should not borrow ready-made colonial theory but make outsiders look at Ukraine on its own terms.

That history also holds a lesson about solidarity. The same Chornobyl issue carries an essay by Kacper Szulecki on Poland, where the fallout reshaped politics: Catholic groups, mothers, and ecological activists found common cause in their fury at a government that had hidden the danger, and the movement helped push the country toward democracy. The catch, as Babij drew it out, is that once such coalitions were folded into institutions, the broad ties that had powered them frayed.

That is the thread Matviyenko wants Ukrainians to pick up. Empires, she argued, survive by keeping their subject peoples turned against one another; the work now is to rebuild the horizontal bonds that make a different aftermath possible.

Not justice, but negative peace

Matviyenko, who called herself a pessimist, doubts that justice—courts, convictions, a full reckoning—is what waits on the far side of this war. She reached instead for the peace scholar Johan Galtung and his term, negative peace: the kind that settles in when the fighting stops but the wrongs are left standing.

After the Second World War, Matviyenko noted, only a fraction of the guilty were ever punished; she would be surprised if this war ended any differently. The work, then, is to prepare for that—to build the ties and habits of care that make survival in an unjust aftermath bearable.

It was not a hopeful evening. Six weeks after a missile tore through a museum built to remember one nuclear catastrophe, in a country living above the next, the panel was not offering comfort—only a clearer view of the danger.

Sport has spent four years quietly letting Russia and Belarus back in, usually through a “neutral athlete” side door that widens until the ban is gone. Chess just did the opposite.

On 11 June 2026, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) suspended the Russian Chess Federation, though individual Russians may still compete under a neutral flag—the first time it has stripped its most powerful member of its membership rights.

And yet a former Russian deputy prime minister still runs world chess. FIDE is led by Arkady Dvorkovich, in office when Russia annexed Crimea, and he stands for re-election at the FIDE General Assembly in Samarkand on 26–27 September.

Malcolm Pein—the English Chess Federation’s delegate, the de facto leader of chess’s anti-Russian camp, and now the candidate for deputy president on Jan Henric Buettner’s ticket—argues the suspension is one win in a much longer fight to break Russia’s grip on the game.

Pein is standing against Dvorkovich’s machine and makes no secret of wanting it gone. Euromaidan Press sought him out precisely because that investment makes him one of the sharpest readers of how the capture works—and where it is vulnerable.

Peeter Helme: Chess has often presented itself as a world apart—a game of ideas, concentration and personal talent, something supposedly above day-to-day politics. Has Russia’s war against Ukraine made that view impossible?

Malcolm Pein: Your question is framed in a historically inaccurate way, because chess has always been extremely important—to the old Soviet Union above all—and it has always been a metaphor for geopolitics.

Go back to Reykjavik in 1972, or to Kasparov playing Karpov, the new Soviet Union against the old, and you see that the West, too, has always treated chess as a bellwether. The difference now is that instead of being a metaphor, it is actually a political weapon. It has never before been used that directly—in sporting boycotts of Russian teams, or anything else. That is the new situation.

Helme: Seen from Ukraine, this is far from abstract. Some Ukrainian players have lost relatives, homes, careers.

Pein: Some have been killed—there are Ukrainian chess players who have been killed. And there are others heavily involved on the front line. Grandmaster Igor Kovalenko has done his full military service, and Grandmaster Oleksandr Sulypa, the captain of the Ukrainian team, has volunteered in the armed forces. And there are countless others.

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Helme: Has international chess really listened to what Ukrainian players have to say?

Pein: Not everybody. There is a strong constituency of Western nations that have fought the good fight and continue to do so. But chess is no different from many other sports.

In Latin America, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not really a news story—it does not resonate, people do not care. And, most unfortunately, that is true for most of Africa and most of Asia. Which makes it all the more important that those of us in Western Europe, with a worldview that seeks democracy and a rules-based order, fight this fight as hard as we can.

Helme: There is an argument that athletes should not pay for the actions of their governments. What is your view?

Pein: Wherever possible, individual athletes should not be sanctioned—I would not punish people simply for being Russian, because you do not know what they feel about the war. But where someone has spoken out in favor of the war, or taken part in propaganda—and here I would point to the Grandmasters Sergey Karjakin or Denis Khismatullin—then those people I would certainly sanction.

The average Russian player just trying to make a living has seen his opportunities seriously limited, and rightly so. But I would not go out of my way to make their lives harder. If anything, those people have my sympathy.

Helme: Why is the pressure to bring Russian and Belarusian players back growing now? The war and the occupation are still going on—nothing has changed.

Pein: There is a certain fatigue—it is hard to keep something at the top of the agenda when there is no radical development, a kind of stalemate. And Russia is trying nonstop, devoting considerable diplomatic resources to getting these bans reversed.

But despite the best efforts of Dvorkovich, we recently scored a very big win at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, and got the Russian Chess Federation suspended. That is an absolutely fantastic and unprecedented success. In some sports, things have gone backwards, and Russia has regained influence—fencing is one, boxing another. In chess, we have held the line.

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Helme: Distinctions are often drawn between individual players and national teams—so-called neutral players under a neutral flag. What do you make of that?

Pein: I am not in favor of banning Russian players for being Russian. I am in favor of banning Russian teams for being Russia—that is the distinction.

In fact, in the Russian press this morning (2 July 2026—EP), there was an article claiming that, if elected, I would ban all Russian players. That is absolutely not true. I would not change the status quo unless the IOC took further action against Russia.

Helme: Why should the return of Russian teams be seen as politically significant, rather than a niche sporting question?

Pein: First, chess is no longer niche—it is a hugely popular global sport. But the real reason it matters is that it matters to Russia. The unwritten arrangement between the Russian state and its citizens was: life is hard, we are not as wealthy as the West, but we are a great country, we compete, and we win.

Chess is one of those achievements—embedded in the culture and history of the Soviet Union and Russia. Taking it away is significant, and the regime knows it. Arguably, it matters to them more than the success of their football or volleyball team.

Helme: You would not punish players for being Russian, but you would bar Russian teams. What would a fair, principled policy look like?

Pein: The policy we fought for—with a great deal of help from Oleksandr Kamyshin—was the one we defended in September 2024, when the FIDE General Assembly voted to keep sanctions on Russian teams.

No flags, no anthems, no officials, no teams, and any players competing under a neutral flag. That, to me, is the policy. I campaigned very hard to maintain it, and we succeeded.

Helme: Is there, in your eyes, a difference between the Russian and Belarusian teams and athletes?

Pein: No—Lukashenka cooperates with Putin. I know the IOC has removed its recommendation to restrict Belarusian athletes and teams.

I would prefer to keep Belarusian teams out for the moment. But generally, I would like FIDE to be aligned with the IOC as far as possible, so it may be something I would eventually comply with.

Helme: Should there be safeguards when the president of an international federation presides over decisions that affect his own country’s national federation?

Pein: It is a colossal conflict of interest. Russia has basically hijacked FIDE—just go to the FIDE website and look at where the employees come from: Russian head of PR, Russian head of legal, and so on.

Helme: Beyond Ukraine—what argument travels in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where the war does not resonate?

Pein: You campaign on other issues. The main one is that when Dvorkovich came in, he said the most important thing he wanted people to know was that presidents would no longer serve unlimited terms—there would be term limits.

And then he had that overturned. So there is plenty to campaign against him on that resonates more widely than something Ukraine- or Russia-specific.

Helme: You are standing for deputy president on Jan Henric Buettner’s ticket. Who else is in the race, and what concerns you about the field?

Pein: There are three tickets in this election so far. Dvorkovich is running with Timur Turlov, who heads a Nasdaq-listed finance company and the Kazakhstan federation, and who was formerly Russian before becoming Kazakh, which itself raises a question.

Another ticket is headed by Wadim Rosenstein, who has sponsored a great deal of chess recently but is hard to pin down—much of his business history has been erased. He was born in Ukraine and seems to have extensive connections in Russia. Our concern is that he is really the Kremlin’s plan B—or plan A, if the EU sanctions Dvorkovich.

We are setting up our ticket as an alternative to 30 years of Russian domination of FIDE—one that would bring in money from wider sources than Russian or Russian-linked oligarchs.

This interview is part of Euromaidan Press’s series on how international sport is negotiating sanctions and Russia’s war on Ukraine.

On 16 June, the Saratov regional assembly’s industry committee raised the possibility of convening a session on the fuel shortage. Stanislav Denisenko, a deputy of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDNR), argued against it.

The problem, he said, was being artificially inflated by “hostile YouTube channels.” He had personally checked the filling stations. There was no shortage. His proposed solution was to block VPN access so that Russians could not reach the channels spreading panic.

Denis Bulanov, a Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) deputy, replied that the Kommersant article documenting the national fuel crisis was available without a VPN.

Two weeks later, Olga Alimova, a KPRF deputy in Russia’s State Duma, told a Saratov party meeting that residents were tired of having their real problems “either silenced or replaced with formal reports.”

On 30 June, by which point more than 55 of Russia’s regions were reporting fuel supply problems or government-imposed restrictions, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Siberia.Realities—the Samara regional assembly voted on whether to put the crisis on its agenda. Deputy Maxim Fedorov had proposed the discussion. The vote was 14 in favor, 19 against, and one abstaining.

Assembly speaker Gennady Kotelnikov explained that the government was already handling it, that committees had discussed it, and that “the situation has stabilized, but problems remain.” The region had been under a rationing order for six days: 40 liters of gasoline per car, 100 liters of diesel. Sales into canisters were suspended.

Manual mode

For most of the past four years, Vladimir Putin largely managed to shield the population from the immediate economic consequences of the war, Politico wrote on 2 July.

About 20% of Russians have income tied to military service or war production, Euromaidan Press has reported—wages in that sector have risen while the rest of the population absorbed inflation and cuts to civilian services. The fuel crisis is different—it is immediate and personal for civilians with no connection to the front.

In Irkutsk Oblast, governor Igor Kobzev published a post on Telegram explaining the problems but not the cause, merely stating that there are disruptions across the country and that his region had shifted to “manual mode,” determining fuel volumes for each recipient individually. Siberia.Realities reported that the original post contained a reference to the Ukrainian drone strikes, which was later removed.

What followed in Kobzev’s public communications was logistical: 6,000 tons of fuel from refineries across the country were moving to the region under existing contracts, to be distributed across more than 20 districts with few or no Rosneft filling stations.

He declared a state of heightened readiness on 28 June, called on residents and organizations to reduce driving, and flew to Moscow to brief Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak. He returned without saying how the crisis would end. “Honestly,” he wrote on 1 July, “despite all the measures taken, the situation with fuel in the region continues to be very difficult.”

Siberia.Realities reported that in late June, an ambulance leaving Baykalsk—a town of 13,000 without a maternity ward, 150 kilometers from Irkutsk—needed a pickup truck carrying a fuel drum to follow it, because the stations on the route had run dry. The baby was born on the highway.

In Pskov Oblast, Mikhail Vedernikov sent his own staff to verify whether the stations actually had fuel, then publicly reported what they found. The worst single-day queue documented by his team: nearly 100 cars backed up simultaneously in the Kuninsky district in the far south-east of the oblast.

Vedernikov negotiated a dispensation for holders of boat registration documents to fill jerry cans and announced that, from the following day, residents could purchase five liters in certified containers for household use—a regional emergency staff decision binding on all stations.

Irkutsk activist and Yabloko party member Pavel Kharitonenko posted on Telegram that Kobzev’s emergency flight to Moscow pointed at the structural problem: Irkutsk Oblast sits on oil fields and hosts the Angarsk Petrochemical Company (ANKHK), one of the country’s largest refining facilities, which should supply the region’s needs and send the surplus elsewhere. Instead, Rosneft—the refining monopolist in the oblast—supplies fuel only through its own station network, squeezing independent operators out of the market.

“Why can’t the governor sort this out?” Kharitonenko asked. “It’s very simple: he was installed here by Moscow in uncontested elections and works for Moscow bosses, not for the residents of the region.”

Russian economist Sergei Aleksashenko, quoted by Siberia.Realities, stated: “We must understand and accept that the main cause of what is happening is the war. As long as the war continues, Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries will only intensify.”

30 liters, if you’re lucky

A reporter from the Samarska Gazeta joined the queues over the weekend of 28–29 June. At a Rosneft filling station, the limit was 30 liters per fill. The AI-95 grade was unavailable; the reporter took AI-92 instead. Two nearby Tatneft stations had their nozzles marked as broken.

When the pump moved to the next driver in line, it ran dry. “Another thing we noticed,” the paper wrote, “fewer cars on the roads. This may be connected to the vacation season, or to drivers deciding to wait out the hard times.”

In the week of 23–29 June, Samarastat recorded a 10% rise in AI-92 prices, to 73.68 rubles ($0.95) per liter, and an 8.74% rise in AI-95, to 78.50 rubles ($1.02). At smaller independent chains—Olvi, Roza Mira, Irbis—the T-Bank price-tracking app showed AI-92 at 112 rubles ($1.45) and AI-95 at 116 rubles ($1.50) per liter.

Governor Vyacheslav Fedorischev said on 29 June that rationing could be lifted early if the situation stabilized. The regional Ministry of Industry advised residents who considered the prices unreasonable to contact the Federal Antimonopoly Service. The Antimonopoly Service said companies set prices based on market conditions.

Into the kindergartens

In occupied Sevastopol, governor Mikhail Razvozhaev told a 30 June government session that the city had reduced the number of working kindergartens from 74 to 24. The cause was not budget pressure. It was fuel and electricity constraints. The remaining 50 could not be kept running.

Food prices on the peninsula have roughly doubled at some stores, with goods being repriced at the checkout counter every few hours as supply chains fail to keep pace, according to Ukrainian media monitoring Crimean social media.

Ukraine’s Center for National Resistance documented shortages of sugar, flour, cereals, salt, and pasta in stores across Crimea as early as 8 June, with some retail chains introducing purchase limits per person.

Gasoline at official filling stations—when available—has passed 200 rubles ($2.59) per liter in Sevastopol. The fuel station chain TES dispenses 20-liter allocations by QR code—obtaining one, the outlet noted, is “an internet lottery with minimal winners.” Resellers charge 400 rubles ($5.17) or more.

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The market the state left behind

In Irkutsk, a black market for fuel opened at 150 rubles ($1.94) per liter at the start of the shortage and reached 350 rubles ($4.53) by the end of it, according to Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service.

In Sevastopol, two residents lost nearly 90,000 rubles ($1,164) in one day to scammers offering fuel without a queue: a 33-year-old woman transferred 5,500 rubles ($71) to a supplier who vanished after receiving payment; a 32-year-old man lost 83,000 rubles ($1,074) in the same scheme.

In the Penza region, Sberbank’s deputy chairman warned businesses of fraudulent commercial offers impersonating major oil company suppliers; the bank said it had already prevented 18 million rubles ($233,000) in corporate losses.

Into the loan book

The fuel shortage has reached Russia’s corporate loan book. Sberbank CEO German Gref told Russia’s Financial Congress that his credit committee had become “a committee on problem assets” as more companies sought debt restructuring.

The Bank of Russia’s April data put problem corporate loans—including risky restructurings—at 11.2 trillion rubles ($145 billion), or 11.6% of the entire corporate portfolio, with the oil and gas sector among the hardest hit.

Gref linked the mounting pressure directly to the war. Central Bank of Russia (CBR) governor Elvira Nabiullina described the fuel situation as “of course, concerning” but “temporary,” saying the CBR would watch for secondary inflationary effects—rising fuel prices causing people to expect broader price increases across the economy—before deciding on further rate moves.

At its 19 June meeting, the CBR cut its key rate by only 25 basis points to 14.25%, half the reduction markets had expected, citing pro-inflationary risks from the fuel market.

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Ukraine carried out at least 30 strikes on Russian oil assets in May alone—16 of them on fuel-producing facilities, hitting eight of Russia's 10 biggest refineries—the highest monthly toll since the full-scale invasion began. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said 11 refineries were struck in June.

Before the June strikes, Energy Intelligence estimated that around one-third of Russia’s refining capacity had been knocked out. Repairing the damaged equipment is complicated by Western technology sanctions: Ukraine has targeted specialized imported components, and sourcing replacements around the restrictions has made repairs slow and expensive, Euronews reported.

On 2 July, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed a decree permitting the sale of lower-grade Euro-3 gasoline—with sulfur content up to 150 mg per kilogram, against the previous Euro-5 standard—through the end of 2026. The government described it as a “preventive measure to prevent destabilization of the domestic motor fuel market.”

Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service has reported widespread accounts of engine damage in newer turbocharged cars, particularly Chinese models, from lower-grade fuel already in circulation.

Kommersant’s Crimea correspondent reported on 1 July that gasoline in Russian-occupied Crimea was selling for 185–200 rubles ($2.37–$2.56) a liter at filling stations when fuel was available. In Sevastopol, the pump price had reached 199 rubles ($2.54) a liter. Resellers were asking 250–400 rubles ($3.20–$5.12).

On 30 June, Crimea’s Russian-installed leader Sergey Aksyonov said on Telegram that large volumes of fuel would not reach the market soon, despite authorities’ ongoing efforts to resolve what he called the fuel crisis. He asked residents to be patient.

At the top of that range, gasoline costs more than twice as much as at a station. Kommersant described a market split between intermittent retail sales and a separate resale trade, with drivers paying sharply different prices depending on where they can buy fuel.

Stations open without warning

Kommersant said some filling stations were opening only briefly and without notice, leaving price boards blank. Where fuel was available, gasoline sold for 185 rubles ($2.37) per liter and diesel for 199 rubles ($2.54) per liter. Drivers have begun queuing from early morning, standing for hours in summer heat, and many still leave without filling their tanks.

Aksyonov said that public transport and municipal services had been fully supplied with fuel. His post did not explain how long those protected supplies would last.

Russia’s Energy Ministry warned on 2 July that online services claiming to track fuel availability at filling stations could not be considered reliable. The ministry said such platforms had become more active since late June and that more than 30 Russian regions had imposed limits on gasoline and diesel sales since early May.

National averages miss the local shock

Rosstat’s weekly price release recorded a 1.6% nationwide increase in gasoline prices and a 2.2% rise in diesel prices during the week of 23–29 June. Gasoline was 6.69% more expensive than at the end of May and 11.58% above its end-2025 price. Diesel had risen 6.94% since the end of May and 11% since December.

Rosstat’s index is based on weekly price checks for 110 goods and services in 280 Russian cities. Kommersant’s Crimea correspondent reported a different part of the market: whether drivers can find an open station at all, and how much they pay when they turn to resellers.

Moscow acknowledges wider shortages

Kommersant reported on Wednesday that Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak acknowledged fuel shortages at some Russian filling stations, blaming logistical changes. He maintained that Russia’s domestic market was supplied overall and said he hoped the disruption would have only a limited effect on price growth and inflation expectations.

The Bank of Russia says the fuel-market disruption may have a longer-lasting effect on inflation than in the past, as higher gasoline and diesel prices can filter through to other goods and services via transport and production costs.

Bloomberg tanker-tracking data show Russia shipped 4.13 million barrels of crude a day by sea in the four weeks through 28 June—the highest since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Yet the gross value of those shipments fell to $1.9 billion a week, the lowest since March.

The Bloomberg calculation multiplies tanker volumes by prices by Argus Media, an independent energy and commodity price-reporting agency, so the $1.9 billion figure measures gross seaborne crude value rather than federal tax receipts. Russia’s oil exporters are moving record volumes without receiving a larger return for their cargoes.

$45 was not June’s average

The Moscow Times report says Argus assessed Urals, Russia’s main export grade, at $44.96 per barrel on 26 June—40% below the start of June and less than half April’s $115 peak, when disruption in the Strait of Hormuz had briefly erased Urals’ discount to Brent.

Bloomberg estimated Urals’ June average at about $62 per barrel, meaning the late-month assessment was not the price received throughout June and may not mark a lasting floor. But if prices remain near $45, they will stay below the $59-per-barrel average assumed by Finance Minister Anton Siluanov for Russia’s 2026 oil-and-gas revenues.

The Moscow Times report put Pacific Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean (ESPO) oil at $61.27 per barrel on 26 June, 20% below the start of June and 36% below early May. Like Urals, it had returned to early-March levels.

Why Russia is exporting more

Kyiv School of Economics oil tracker says Ukrainian drone strikes reduced refinery runs and forced Russia to ship more unprocessed crude in April and May, while a shortage of shadow-fleet tankers pushed it back toward Western maritime services.

Bloomberg market analysis points out that lower global benchmarks, an interim US-Iran deal that began restoring Persian Gulf flows, and muted Chinese demand have all weighed on Russian prices.

Russia had 133 million barrels at sea on 28 June, 34% above its mid-April low, with cargoes accumulating near Egypt and Singapore.

The budget can’t ignore lower prices

Russia’s 2026 budget law projected a full-year federal deficit of 3.8 trillion rubles ($49 billion).

Ministry figures via Prime show oil-and-gas revenue was 2.98 trillion rubles ($39 billion) in January–May, down 29.8% from a year earlier. The federal deficit had already reached 6 trillion rubles ($78 billion) by the end of May. The Finance Ministry attributed the early deficit partly to faster spending, and said lower oil prices in previous periods had cut energy revenue.

The Finance Ministry reserves data place liquid National Wealth Fund assets at 3.4 trillion rubles ($44 billion) on 1 June, down from 3.6 trillion rubles ($47 billion) a month earlier. That is the fund’s liquid portion, rather than its total reported value.

Ukrainian strikes add barrels, markets cut their value

KSE’s June oil tracker says Ukrainian strikes forced Russia to export more unprocessed crude after refinery runs fell. That helps explain why more Russian barrels are moving offshore, but not why they are earning less.

Bloomberg’s market analysis links the price decline to lower global benchmarks, recovering Persian Gulf flows, and subdued Chinese demand. For now, Ukraine’s refinery campaign appears to be adding barrels to Russia’s export stream—while the market cuts the value of each one.

INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange launched in Lviv in 2024 with an unusual premise—that the fastest way to change how the world understands Ukraine is to bring the world to Ukraine and keep it here for a while.

The institute documents civilian experiences of Russia’s war against Ukraine and runs fellowships and residencies that pair Ukrainian researchers and cultural practitioners with peers from abroad.

Its head, Sasha Dovzhyk, was born in Zaporizhzhia shortly before the Soviet collapse, into the generation that grew up with Ukrainian independence. She studied at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, then took her master’s and PhD at Birkbeck in London, and worked at the Ukrainian Institute London.

She came home at the start of February 2022, just before the full-scale invasion, worked as a fixer for foreign correspondents, and returned for good in 2023. She now lives in Lviv.

Euromaidan Press spoke with her about what INDEX is trying to fix.

Why the world has to come to Ukraine

Peeter Helme: You worked as a fixer before you founded INDEX. What did that teach you?

Sasha Dovzhyk: When journalists come here for three days, it doesn’t matter how smart or erudite they are—they just don’t get it. People need to spend more time here. They need to develop networks to be embedded in Ukrainian society and social efforts in order to understand what Ukrainian resistance actually is. Through that slow work of introducing them to our context, we can hope they write better stories and make art that feels truthful to us.

And it matters in the other direction too. For Ukrainians still in the country, it’s important to see that the outside world is coming to meet them on their own terms. Our veterans, our Ukrainian fellows—they see international scholars and practitioners coming to learn from them, and through them.

In that laboratory format, with international and Ukrainian fellows working side by side, we try to produce a more nuanced understanding of what Ukraine is today and what Russian aggression means for us.

Peeter: The name INDEX suggests an indicator, a way of locating something. What does the institute help people locate?

Dovzhyk: We’re locating Ukraine on the map for people coming from outside, and pointing toward a more just future for our country—toward epistemic justice. We want the stories of Ukraine and the history of this war told through the insider’s perspective and knowledge.

We’ve lived through Russian colonialism and imperialism for centuries, so we know what it means when your story is told for you by the oppressor. And we know from the first eight years of this war what it means when your story doesn’t resonate abroad because nobody knows who you are. They know big Russia. They don’t know what Ukraine is. We’re trying to give the Ukrainian perspective the resonance it deserves.

Peeter: Aren’t you worried this becomes extraction—a foreigner comes, gathers material, then goes off to explain Ukraine on their own terms?

Dovzhyk: The model INDEX tries to create is precisely the alternative to that extractivist model. People come for three months; many have later moved to Ukraine. When they leave, they do so with more than professional contacts—they build intellectual friendships that keep them in check over the longer term.

On their side, they provide platforms for the Ukrainians they start working with. We often witness the beginning of long-term projects—five-year projects that employ Ukrainians in international research.

One of our fellows, Johana Kotišová, began work at INDEX in 2024 on the value of emotions in international reporting, then won a roughly €1.5 million ($1.7 million) European Research Council grant at the University of Amsterdam and hired four people, one of them Ukrainian.

Why Russia is still the default interpreter

Peeter: But why is Russia still treated as the default interpreter of Eastern Europe—even after it’s common knowledge that it lies, manipulates evidence, and weaponizes history?

Dovzhyk: Russia worked for a very long time to reach the position it holds today. It’s not the past ten or thirty years—it’s centuries of colonialism, and in the 20th century, that was financed by oil and gas money. They take resources from the countries they dominate, and they understand the value of cultural influence.

They’ve invested enormous money and human resources into producing an image of Russia that is now in the heads of every person in the West. Ask anyone what Moscow is, what Russian ballet is, and they’ll have a pretty good idea.

That cultural image is fully formed. We don’t have the same resources to draw on. We were overshadowed by our imperial neighbor for centuries, so we have to be creative.

In Ukraine’s case, I think we were only recognized as the autonomous political nation we are after the full-scale invasion, because of Ukrainian resistance. Now we have a chance to build a new familiarity with Ukraine and Ukrainian culture, and to make it a household word. If people know who you are—if they’ve read a book, if they have a friend here—it’s harder for them to disregard your existence, or to grow bored with the war.

Peeter: At what point does familiarity with Russia stop helping someone understand Ukraine and start distorting it? We have to know the enemy—but can we be too familiar with it?

Dovzhyk: I don’t think we should stop studying Russia. It depends on where you study it from and which voices you listen to. If you keep going to Moscow, your picture of Russia will be the same as it’s been for 300 years.

If you want to know what Russia is, talk to the nations it colonized. You look for resistance in Ukraine, in Georgia, not in Moscow. That’s how you start to understand what Russia actually is.

Peeter: Ukraine became visible through war, destruction, and suffering. Is there a risk that foreign audiences consume Ukraine as an experience of trauma, and how do Ukrainians tell the truth about the war without being reduced to objects of compassion?

Dovzhyk: You’re right, and it’s a problem. What shakes our fellows most is that two things are true at the same time. Ukraine is surviving a genocide—there are war crimes here daily, huge destruction, huge loss, a country in grief.

And at the same time, we have the best coffee, book festivals with tens of thousands of attendees, and a flourishing cultural life. Showing that complexity matters. So does the longevity of our history: we did not spring into existence in 2022. Our resistance today is the result of a long tradition of resistance. The fact that the world didn’t notice it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

We’re educated by the dissidents, who were educated by the Executed Renaissance, who were educated by a generation before them, and so on. This country has been fighting for its existence and its recognition for a very long time.

Documenting people without turning them into exhibits

Peeter: Documentation preserves evidence and testimony, but it can also turn people into objects of observation—pieces in a museum. How does INDEX keep Ukrainians as active interpreters of their own experience?

Dovzhyk: It’s one of the rules of oral history: you don’t ask a person only about the most traumatic thing. You ask how they grew up, what shaped them, and you let them tell the story on their own terms.

We try to do the same. We don’t concentrate only on the person standing in front of their destroyed house—we want the story of the community, and we bring the community into the telling.

The latest example is civilians in captivity. There’s no Geneva Convention that covers civilians captured by the aggressor—they’re not prisoners of war; they simply shouldn’t be there. When you focus on the scale of it, people lose attention, because the scale is hard to comprehend. So you tell personal stories.

We work with people whose loved ones were held in Russia for years. We don’t talk to them for two hours—we talk to them for days. We ask them to write their own narrative, we publish it, and we bring our community in to help tell it.

Peeter: But foreign journalists often come here for sensation.

Dovzhyk: The ones chasing sensation aren’t our audience. We’re interested in people who can spend the time and attention to hold the complexity—who come back, and come back again.

Peeter: What should foreign audiences start asking about Ukraine that they rarely do?

Dovzhyk: Our memory culture. Our relationship with our dead is very specific: there’s a strong emphasis on continuing the work of the people this aggression has taken. There’s grief and loss, but also a sense of responsibility to carry on their work.

The Victoria Amelina Fellowship is one small example; there are dozens of similar initiatives. I created a project called “People of Culture Taken Away By The War”—portraits of cultural figures who were killed, each with a paragraph on how their initiatives are being kept alive by the people close to them.

Your dead push you into the future, because you carry the responsibility to live for those who can’t. And Ukrainians should look outward too—to the strategies other communities have developed against similar threats, and talk to each other beyond the echo chamber of Ukraine.

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Peeter: How do you do that in practice?

Dovzhyk: Bring them here. Create the connections on the ground. For many Ukrainians—men who can’t leave the country—building bridges abroad isn’t possible. So organizations like INDEX have to bring our allies into the country and build those grassroots connections here. For the world to know you, you have to invite the world into your home and make it welcome.

And then there is the Ukrainian bookshelf. We should all be filling it—with the books, films, and cultural work that require time and take years. It’s natural to concentrate on short-term tasks because there are so many.

But those longer works will shape the memory of this war, and it matters that they’re told by people with direct experience of it. This is the work nobody can do for us.

Poland’s president stripped Ukraine’s Zelenskyy of his top state honor last month, and Zelenskyy mailed it back—the lowest point in Polish‑Ukrainian relations since the full‑scale war began.

At the same time, Poland’s consulate in Lviv displayed a memorial to fallen Ukrainian soldiers of Polish descent on its fence for three years. Now the exhibition is touring Poland and Ukraine instead—and drawing requests to travel to towns that have never hosted it before.

Both things are true of the same diplomatic outpost. Poland’s Consulate General in Lviv, an arm of the same state that just permanently archived Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Order of the White Eagle, is simultaneously the institution that has spent three years helping a Ukrainian journalist track down the families of soldiers it continues to commemorate.

39 names, one exhibition

The exhibition, “Byłem Polakiem—obywatelem Ukrainy” (“I Was a Pole—a Citizen of Ukraine”), names 39 people: Ukrainian citizens of Polish descent killed fighting Russia since 2022, alongside a handful of Poles who died defending Ukraine.

It was created by journalist Dmytro Antoniuk for the Center for Polish Culture and European Dialogue in Ivano‑Frankivsk, with funding from Poland’s Foreign Ministry, the Polish Senate, and the Lviv consulate itself, which also helped locate relatives of the fallen.

Antoniuk found most of his subjects by phone and in person, not from records. He worked through parish priests, Polish associations, and consulate staff in Lviv, Kyiv, and Vinnytsia, who passed word to families that the exhibition was being assembled.

In the village of Susly, in Zhytomyr Oblast, he traced six Polish-descent residents killed in the war—four of them from a single family, cousins, an uncle, and a nephew. Some relatives he found refused to be included. One local government in western Ukraine, suspicious he was running a scam, asked him to send his passport details before they would help.

A Polish NGO recently borrowed the exhibition for the Folkowisko Festival in the village of Gorajec in Podkarpackie Voivodeship; it is scheduled to travel next to the Ukrainian village of Nahachiv, according to Marek Radziwon, Poland’s Consul General in Lviv, who said requests have also come in from other Polish towns.

It has previously been shown in Kyiv, Odesa, Uzhhorod, Warsaw, Poznan, Krakow, and Rzeszow, and once hung on the fence of Ukraine’s own consulate in Krakow. Radziwon also said a new exhibition of Polish war photography, “Eyes of War”, is going up on the consulate grounds this week.

Why Poland and Ukraine are at odds

In the background, the dispute driving the rupture between the two countries continues. Zelenskyy’s 27 May decree honoring a special operations unit as “Heroes of the UPA”—the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, blamed in Poland for the 1943‑1945 Volhynia massacres—prompted Nawrocki to strip him of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest honor.

Zelenskyy mailed the medal back on 20 June; Warsaw confirmed it arrived two days later and will be archived permanently, never to be awarded again. Polish Prime Minister Tusk called the standoff “a strategic mistake that will cost both sides: in business, geopolitically, and reputationally.”

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A KIIS survey found 90% of Ukrainians favor a constructive approach to the historical dispute—57% say each nation should keep its own heroes without interference, 33% favor joint historian commissions—while just 5% backed forcing either country to adopt the other’s view.

The Lviv consulate’s fence carried, until recently, a memorial built explicitly on the premise that Ukrainian and Polish dead belong on the same wall, and even with this exhibition now traveling, there will be a new one.

“Eyes of War” is a long-term, multi-part initiative by the Polish Press Club in collaboration with partner organizations, presenting photographs from the war against Ukraine taken by Polish photographers, who constitute the largest group of foreign correspondents in Ukraine.

Antoniuk has framed his project as a continuation of the alliance that took Kyiv together in May 1920 and defended Warsaw months later. The consulate funding it has not changed that framing, even now.

Russia is drawing down gasoline reserves, has banned gasoline and jet fuel exports, and is weighing a ban on diesel exports as well, after Vladimir Putin admitted for the first time that shortages and queues persist at filling stations across the country.

A reserve figure is not the same as fuel at the pump. The gasoline has to be the right grade, in the right region, and moved through a distribution network already strained by refinery outages—and a ban on diesel, Russia’s largest fuel export, would reach far beyond its borders.

Putin told Kremlin officials on 28 June that “problems for drivers and for businesses persist” and that “there are still queues at gas stations too.” He said Russia had begun using gasoline reserves, which he put at 1.7 million tons, predicted that July production would exceed June’s level, and confirmed that Moscow was considering a complete diesel export ban while a government task force worked around the clock to stabilize supplies and prices.

Reserves do not automatically reach the pump

Russia’s gasoline output has fallen about 25% from a year earlier after Ukrainian drone strikes, Reuters reported. The International Energy Agency called the disruption unprecedented in the war, RFE/RL reported.

That helps explain why a country can cite substantial stocks while drivers still face queues and purchase limits. Stored fuel is a buffer, not a guarantee: it cannot immediately replace refinery output, conjure a missing gasoline grade, or clear bottlenecks in rail, road, and regional distribution.

The day after Putin’s meeting, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, who oversees Russia’s energy sector, told regional heads to use fuel more efficiently and take a “balanced approach” to distribution, and ordered continued monitoring of prices, supply, and logistics, the Russian government said.

Rationing spreads across Russia

Reuters documented sales restrictions in central Russia, the Volga area, Siberia, the Far East, occupied Crimea, and Sevastopol, with at least 15 regions limiting sales by 23 June. Caps ranged from set volumes per vehicle to bans on filling portable containers, while some regions reserved fuel for emergency services and critical infrastructure.

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The shortages have moved far beyond the refineries Ukrainian drones hit. In Siberia, thousands of kilometers from Ukraine, Irkutsk Oblast governor Igor Kobzev declared a high-alert regime, capped fuel at state Rosneft stations at 50 liters per vehicle a day with other stations free to set lower limits, banned sales into any container other than a vehicle tank, and urged employers in non-essential sectors to move as many staff as possible to remote work, Kobzev wrote on Telegram.

Ukrainian drones struck Russian refineries 16 times in May, Euromaidan Press reported earlier, and kept up the pace into June, hitting the Moscow refinery in Kapotnya twice in a week.

A diesel ban would reach beyond Russia

A diesel export ban would not stay a Russian problem. Russia supplied about 11% of the world’s diesel last year and sends roughly 40% of its diesel output abroad, Bloomberg reported.

So cutting those exports would tighten a global market already disrupted by the Iran war. The diesel ban is not decided: Novak said on 29 June that as of Friday’s task-force meeting the Energy Ministry still recommended against it, with another review set for Monday, Novak told journalists.

An oil exporter starts looking abroad

Alexander Novak said on 29 June that importing fuel was one of the government’s key stabilization measures and was already being implemented under preferential tax terms, Novak said—a rare step for one of the world’s largest exporters of oil and refined products.

The option had surfaced a week earlier: after a 22 June fuel-market meeting Novak chaired, the government was weighing fuel imports and a Finance Ministry tweak to let the budget subsidize them, Vedomosti reported.

Gasoline from Belarus runs an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 tons a month, roughly 3,000 to 5,000 tons a day, against a shortfall of about 25,000 tons a day, traders told The Insider.

Moscow is also in talks with Kazakhstan over about 50,000 tons of AI-92 gasoline, Reuters reported on Kazakhstan, though available volumes may be limited: maintenance at the Atyrau refinery could constrain supply, and one potential supplier, the Kondensat refinery, lost feedstock after a Ukrainian strike disrupted the TANECO plant.

Russia shipped out around 5 million tons of gasoline in 2025, Reuters reported in March, even as it repeatedly curbed exports to contain domestic shortages and rising prices.

Ukraine’s refinery campaign reaches the consumers

Ukraine has spent months striking Russian refineries, fuel depots, and pipelines to cut the revenue and fuel that sustain Moscow’s war. Overnight on 28 June, Ukrainian drones hit refineries in Krasnodar Krai and Yaroslavl Oblast; the Slavyansk-na-Kubani plant alone processes about 100,000 barrels per day.

That refinery is a key Crimean supplier, which ties the strikes straight to the pump.

Reserve drawdowns, delayed refinery work, lower-quality blends, rationing, export bans, talks to import fuel: the response now runs well beyond the refineries themselves.

Putin insisted that Ukrainian strikes do not affect the front line. He also said occupied Crimea had fuel for only a few days, Putin told the Kremlin meeting, promising more deliveries by land and sea.

The EU bans aluminum exports to Russia—but not alumina, the powder from which aluminum is smelted. On 26 June, B4Ukraine and five partner organizations formally demanded that gap be closed in the next EU sanctions package, citing evidence that Ireland’s largest alumina refinery ships hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the material to Russian smelters whose customers include weapons manufacturers.

Ireland’s Aughinish Alumina refinery—Europe’s largest—is owned by Russian aluminum giant RUSAL, whose controlling shareholder is Oleg Deripaska, sanctioned by the EU following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. RUSAL itself is not sanctioned, a distinction that has allowed intra-company alumina shipments to continue uninterrupted.

The six signatories—B4Ukraine, the Economic Security Council of Ukraine (ESCU), the Independent Anti-Corruption Commission (NAKO), the State Capture Accountability Project, the Dekleptocracy Project, and the International Partnership for Human Rights—represent a coalition of more than 100 civil society organizations.

They want the EU to add alumina under HS code 2818.20 to the restricted-goods list under Council Regulation 833/2014 and introduce controls against rerouting through third countries.

The call arrives days before Ireland assumes the rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU on 1 July 2026, giving Dublin direct influence over Council discussions, including negotiations on the next sanctions package.

Almost $308 million shipped to Russia

According to trade data compiled by ESCU and published by B4Ukraine, Aughinish shipped 540,497 tonnes of alumina worth more than $307.85 million to three RUSAL entities between April 2024 and March 2025: RUSAL’s Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Plant, RUSAL Trading House, and the Bratsk Aluminum Plant. Russia’s share of Aughinish’s exports rose from 23% in 2020 to 68% in 2024, as Euromaidan Press reported in May.

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Alumina requires no export license under EU or Irish law, and Ireland has no unilateral mechanism to restrict it—trade policy with third countries is an EU competence. The coalition argues that Ireland’s most effective lever is therefore political: pressing the European Commission and fellow member states to include alumina in future sanctions.

Supply-chain evidence

The coalition traces a supply chain from Aughinish’s RUSAL smelters to Moscow-based aluminum trader ASK LLC. Since 2022, more than 100 Russian defense-sector companies have purchased aluminum from ASK, including 40 entities currently sanctioned by the EU.

One ASK customer is the P.I. Plandin Arzamas Instrument-Making Plant, which manufactures BDG-1M damping gyroscope units—precision guidance components of the Kh-101 cruise missile, used extensively by Russia in strikes against Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure.

The link between Irish alumina and the Kh-101 is circumstantial, not direct. Because smelters continuously blend alumina from multiple sources, reporters working on an OCCRP-led investigation that informed the coalition’s call could not match a specific batch of Irish alumina to a specific weapon.

“Although this evidence constitutes a supply chain inference rather than direct proof of end-use,” B4Ukraine said, “the convergence of trade data, procurement records, and technical specifications establishes a compelling basis for regulatory action.”

Ireland faces pressure

The coalition is also asking Irish authorities to examine a 2024 restructuring that transferred ownership of the refinery operator, Limerick Alumina Refining Ltd, from Libertatem Materials Ltd to Libertatem Investments Ltd, and to determine whether it triggered obligations under foreign investment screening or corporate ownership disclosure rules.

Aughinish has said it complies with all applicable EU sanctions, export-control, and trade rules; Irish authorities have maintained that alumina is not a sanctioned product and that its export to Russia is therefore not restricted.

The EU’s 20th sanctions package, adopted on 23 April, expanded restrictions on Russian banks, energy infrastructure, and military suppliers but did not add alumina to the restricted-goods list.

I have not been to a literary evening in years, and as I find a place in the garden of Franko House on the evening of 25 June—the closing night of a fellowship named for a Ukrainian writer a Russian missile killed three years ago—I am already a little sorry I came.

Then the moderator, Sasha Dovzhyk, opens by explaining that both of this year’s fellowship writers spent three months circling one idea: home. It is fitting, she says, to talk about home in the house-museum of Ivan Franko, a classic of Ukrainian literature. Here we go again, I think. Another manufactured theme, another self-pleased little world that flatters the people sitting in it and says nothing to anyone outside it. I settle in to be bored.

Anna Gruver starts to read

Anna Gruver left Donetsk at 17 and has not been able to go back in the 13 years since. She reads from a text built almost entirely out of what is missing: home as a doll in a velvet dress, still lying, perhaps, in a drawer in her occupied apartment; home as a cemetery she cannot reach to tend her dead.

“Maybe home is testimony,” she reads. “I testify, therefore I have a home.”

Then: “Home is explosion. Explosion. Explosion.”

By now she has tears in her eyes, and so does much of the garden, and so, to my surprise, do I. It hits me like a freight train. I came braced for polite boredom, and instead I am sitting among strangers who are quietly coming apart—and I am one of them.

Gruver says, a little later, that she feels skinless up here, that she cannot hide behind irony, and that home for her is the one place a person is allowed to be seen like that. I sit there thinking about my own home: where it is and what it is. So much for the emotionless man who came to be bored.

The writer they came for

Victoria Day closes the fellowship that INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange runs each year in memory of Victoria Amelina. She was a novelist who founded a literary festival in the town of New York in the Donetsk region, and who, after the full-scale invasion, retrained to document Russian war crimes with the Truth Hounds team.

Her posthumous war diary, Looking at Women Looking at War, won the George Orwell Prize for political writing. Each year, the fellowship brings one Ukrainian and one international writer to her hometown of Lviv for three months.

On 27 June 2023, a Russian missile strike on a restaurant in Kramatorsk left Amelina critically injured, and she died days later, on 1 July. The same strike killed 13 people, four of them children.

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Opening the evening before the writers spoke, the United Kingdom’s Chargée d’Affaires to Ukraine, Charlotte Surun, gave the official count: the Prosecutor General’s office has recorded more than 200,000 crimes since the start of the full-scale invasion, each one with a person behind it, she said. She quoted a line of Amelina’s that the rest of the evening kept proving: the answer to truth is often more truth.

The two fellows this year, Gruver and the British journalist Lucy Fulford, both arrived at the same subject without planning to. The evening falls almost exactly three years after the missile, in the last days of June that now belong to her.

Home down to a hand in your hand

Olena Stiazhkina, a novelist and historian also from Donetsk and a member of the fellowship jury, says she wants to talk about home like a mad person—from a position of madness, she says, and of mad solidarity.

She does not soften what the warm garden is sitting on. This evening should not be happening, she says, simply because Russia keeps killing the people dearest to us, and the four of them should be on this stage with Amelina, not in her place.

Her old Donetsk home is made of absences now, she says, and what is no longer there shouts the loudest; she keeps wondering where the absent finds such strength for a voice.

Years ago, she wrote that occupied Donetsk looked like a woman who had been raped, a city the municipal crews scrubbed every morning in a kind of compulsion, washing it and washing it raw. When she heard Gruver tell that same lost city, this evening, that she missed it and loved it, she heard it as love spoken to the violated woman. Not everyone can give love to what is filthy, spat on, defiled, wounded, she says. But we do.

Then she follows the madness where it leads. Earlier that day, she walked to Amelina’s grave, and on the way back, she passed the medical university on Pekarska Street, a building she had walked by for years and somehow never seen.

Her father, a Jewish boy who left the antisemitism of Donetsk, studied there in the late 1950s, and she had never thought to ask him how he lived in this city, whether he was happy, whether anyone needed him. On the old facade, she read the words “anatomy” and “histology” in Latin, and she stood there and cried. It was a gift from Vika, she says, because that is how it works.

She traces her own idea of home down to almost nothing. Leaving Donetsk in 2014 with two suitcases, she thought two was a reasonable number for any life; later, a single emergency bag seemed plenty; later still, she understood that a hand held in your hand was enough, and that the hand in your hand was the home. When she thinks about home now, she says, she thinks only about people, and about wonder.

And some of those people are dead. When a shelling ends in Kyiv, she says, her friends text one another, “How are you?” and once it is over comes the second line: “Today it’s not you. All clear.”

Everyone knows where the phrase comes from, and it means that Vika was with them this time. In her own diary, Vika is still alive, and the two of them quarrel—Stiazhkina cannot forgive her for leaving the Book Arsenal festival to drive off with the Colombian writers to Kramatorsk, where she was killed. Sometimes they make up, when Vika lets her know she is there.

The invisible displacement

Lucy Fulford brings an outsider’s view that, she argues, the subject badly needs. She knows displacement from inside her own family: her grandparents were among the South Asians whom Idi Amin expelled from Uganda in 1972, given 90 days to go, and they made their way to Britain and then to Australia, where she was born, a journey she told in her book The Exiled.

Displacement, she says, is the story of our times, certain to grow with war and climate change, and she has watched hostility to migrants harden at home in Britain even as she reports it abroad.

So she came to Ukraine for the part of this war that readers abroad mostly miss. Far more has been written internationally about the Ukrainians who fled in 2022 than about the displacement inside the country, she says: “There’s a general lack of understanding of how disruptive this war has been within the country.”

For three months, Fulford gathered testimony from people forced to move within Ukraine and from those who chose to return. A chapter on how Mariupol is being kept alive in memory elsewhere. A chapter on newsrooms that fled and kept publishing. One on civilian injury and rehabilitation as its own kind of displacement, and one reaching back to Chornobyl.

One interview stayed with her. A former school principal from Mariupol, now a mathematics teacher working with young children, was describing, almost point for point, the story of Fulford’s own displaced grandmother—a maths teacher who became a primary-school teacher after she was uprooted.

Home is people

Yaryna Grusha, who lives in Italy and translates Amelina into Italian, built a home inside a second language out of necessity in 2022, when her parents were under occupation and unreachable, and she had to make Italian readers grasp that she no longer had one.

Her first piece in Italian was about the walnut tree in her parents’ yard, the tree that shaded them all from the heat for years and could do nothing to shield them from Russian bombs. Home, she has decided, is a climate that other people make for you, and most of the people who make hers are in Ukraine.

What keeps surfacing, across all four, is how much of their language for home came from Amelina. Stiazhkina says Vika seemed to have written the dictionary herself, that she already had a word for their Donetsk home before the rest of them could find one.

Grusha says reading Amelina’s novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom in 2017 made her understand that this was allowed: that you could tell the history of a country through one family. She has been writing toward that permission ever since.

Chuprynenko starts to sing

The conversation ends, and the musician Marusia Chuprynenko comes out with a small guitar. She works in what she calls documentary song: at some point, she stopped inventing and began singing only what she lives through. The melodies are plain, sometimes barely melodies at all, more spoken than sung, the same lines circling back on themselves.

She sings in surzhyk, the mixed Russian-Ukrainian speech of the south, and her last song of the night walks through a beautiful city that will not become home. Someone, she sings, has taken all the things she loves and quietly swapped them around.

The wall where she once pinned pictures of the places she dreamed of seeing now has the barrel of a tank against it. At the market where she always paid in hryvnia, they now want rubles. Her own side bombed her music school to kill the Russian soldiers inside it, and she never even loved the school, yet it grieves her all the same.

Russia is wiping her home region off the map, she sings, with the patience of someone embroidering. By the end the song has worn down to a single line, repeated and then breaking off, a heart and a stone trading places.

She has tears in her eyes through almost all of it, and keeps singing. By the end, I have them too, and I am not the only one.

Home will slowly grow, runs the line of Amelina’s that gives the fellowship its name. In the garden, three years almost to the day since a Russian missile killed her, it is doing exactly that—poem by poem, song by song, among the people who loved her and the ones only now finding her. Including the one who came to be bored.

Ukraine has again promised to sell two of its state-owned banks by the end of this year. It has been making that promise—and breaking it—for a decade. The obstacle is no longer political will but price. The state wants top money for its big banks; the foreign buyers actually turning up will pay little, and only for small ones—never the state giants the sale is really about.

The latest promise came on 24 June, when the governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU), Andrii Pyshnyi, told the Kyiv Independent that Sense Bank and Ukrgasbank have a “good chance” of being sold before the end of 2026, with an “ambitious strategy” for state banks due by the end of the month.

He said it on the sidelines of the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdańsk—the event Ukraine holds to draw the very foreign investors who have so far declined to buy its banks.

The sales are not optional. They are written into Ukraine’s memorandum with the IMF, which obliges Kyiv to shrink the state’s grip on a banking sector it controls more than half of today, and they sit inside the wider reform agenda Ukraine must deliver to join the EU.

That makes the stall a test of something Western taxpayers have a stake in: whether the conditions attached to billions in aid are being met, and whether private capital will follow that aid into Ukraine.

And the plan is not new. A 2016 strategy set deadlines to bring in the World Bank’s investment arm and the EBRD as shareholders by 2020; by 2021, those had all been missed, and the goal of cutting the state’s share to a quarter had been pushed out to 2025. That year has passed, too, and the banks remain in state hands.

The price nobody agrees on

The official line is that buyers are waiting. NBU deputy governor Dmytro Oliynyk said this month that foreign investor interest is “already emerging,” that one large European banking group has hired an adviser to prepare a bid, and that strategic investors are expected to be the main buyers, each committing €200–300 million ($228–342 million).

Officials have even floated listing PrivatBank shares on the Ukrainian or Polish exchanges, at a price they expect to reach one and a half times book value—roughly half again as much as the banks are worth on paper.

The professionals are less sure. Serhii Budkin of FinPoint, who helped sell Aval Bank for $1 billion two decades ago, reckons even banks in EU countries change hands at half their capital, and that expecting more for a Ukrainian bank in a country at war is unrealistic unless the state sweetens the deal—by letting a foreign buyer send its profits home, for instance. One side wants one and a half times book value. The other is offering half of it.

Footholds, not flagships

Foreign money has not stayed away, but none of it is heading for the giants. Two European fintechs bought into Ukrainian banking this year through failed lenders picked up cheaply for the license: Estonia’s Iute, which capped its bet at €15 million ($17.5 million), came in via the collapsed RwS Bank, and Poland’s ZEN.com, with €20 million ($22 million) to invest, won the auction for insolvent PINbank.

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Even the incumbents stay small: France’s Crédit Agricole, in Ukraine since 1993, is expanding not by bidding for a state bank but by bolting on Bank Lviv, a small regional lender in the west.

The market they are all buying into punishes ownership—bank profits are taxed at 50% this year, and private banks cannot pay dividends to their owners at all. A state bank is worth more to the state, which keeps both the tax and the dividend, than to any private buyer.

Why the state will not let go

There is a reason the seller keeps quoting a high price. PrivatBank alone generated 39% of all Ukrainian banking profits in 2024, and state banks together accounted for 65% of the sector’s total profits.

In the same year, they transferred more than UAH 67 billion ($1.64 billion) to the budget through taxes and dividends—money that, in wartime, flows straight back out as defense spending. Selling the banks means handing a private buyer a revenue stream the state now spends on the war.

The reluctance is not new. Before the Financial Stability Council cleared the path last August, sources at Ukraine’s largest state bank told the Kyiv Post the Finance Ministry had wanted to delay any sale until martial law ended.

The wartime nationalizations worked. They steadied the sector and made it profitable. That success is the problem: a state that has learned to run banks at a profit, mid-war, partly to fund that war, is not a motivated seller.

The one bank that might actually move

One counterweight applies specifically to Sense Bank. The former Alfa-Bank Ukraine became state-owned in 2023 after Ukraine sanctioned its Russian owners, among them the Ukrainian-born oligarch Mikhail Fridman, who are now pursuing $1 billion in arbitration against Kyiv.

An open-tender sale would set a market price, and a market price undercuts that claim, while delay leaves Ukraine’s legal position weaker. For this one bank, the state has a reason to sell that owes nothing to the IMF—which may be why Sense, not the more profitable giants, leads the queue.

Even that incentive does not close the price gap by December—and Sense carries a problem money cannot fix. Ekonomichna Pravda reported that the six people appointed to Sense Bank’s supervisory board on 18 June 2025 had been named, to the seat, in leaked recordings from the Midas corruption case some 40 days earlier—a conversation in which figures in the case discussed shaping the make-up of a board that is supposed to be independent.

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Pyshnyi’s strategy is due any day. Whatever it sets out, the buyer and the seller are still pricing two different banks—and the deadline they are pricing toward is the same one Ukraine has been chasing since 2016.

Russia can no longer blockade Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, so it is bombing them instead—and the campaign now carries both a price and a deadline.

Intensifying strikes on the Odesa ports could cut Ukraine’s monthly grain exports by as much as a third. That drains the wartime budget of its single largest source of hard currency and threatens a supply line that feeds buyers across Africa and the Middle East.

Damaged terminals could push monthly shipments from the Odesa ports—Odesa, Chornomorsk, and Pivdennyi—down to about four million tons, from six, a one-third cut. At current wheat prices, the lost volume is worth nearly $900 million a month in foreign earnings, according to Deputy Economy Minister Taras Vysotskyi’s estimate.

The drop would fall on grain that has already backed up: Ukraine is heading into July with carryover stocks of around 9 million tons of corn and wheat, near the top of recent years.

July is the danger window

Russia is likely to step up strikes on the Odesa ports in July and August, when about 30% of the new crop moves to the docks, Growex owner Bohdan Lukiyanchuk told LIGA.net.

Heavier attacks in that window, he said, could push Ukrainian grain off global markets, to Russia’s gain.

Terminals out of money, workers in shelters

Private terminal operators have lost an estimated $1.5 billion since the invasion and cannot fund the repairs alone, UAC deputy head Denys Marchuk told Reuters. The disruption is physical and daily. “There are shifts when the terminal works for one hour and then everyone spends 11 hours in shelters,” said Arsen Muradian of Novotech-Terminal in Odesa.

He counted 2,600 air-raid alerts in the city since the war began. Ukraine has shipped 34.9 million tons of grain so far this season, down from 39.5 million a year earlier.

The bombing is the second phase of a longer campaign. Before the invasion, Ukraine shipped more than 60 million tons of grain a year through its Black Sea ports, about a tenth of global supply; within days of February 2022, the Russian navy blockaded them, and exports fell to almost nothing.

Ukraine clawed the trade back—first through the UN-brokered grain deal, then, after Russia walked out of it in 2023, through a corridor Ukraine opened itself once naval drones drove the Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol. By 2025, the sea route again carried about 92% of grain and oilseed exports, near pre-war levels. Those are the ports Russia is now bombing.

Russia hit Ukrainian ports 90 times in 2025 alone. The World Bank now puts Ukraine’s transport-sector rebuild at more than $96 billion, a bill it ties to intensified attacks on rail and ports.

A new procurement law rarely travels beyond a country’s own civil servants. Ukraine’s does. The reform Volodymyr Zelenskyy just signed binds about a quarter of the country’s wartime economy to European Union rules, unlocks $3.4 billion in World Bank budget support, and clears an early hurdle on Ukraine’s path into the EU.

He signed the law on 23 June, finishing a reform two years in the making. It forms part of the first cluster of accession talks, which the EU opened on 15 June—and even as Ukraine clears the substance inside that cluster, Hungary is blocking the procedural step needed to open the rest.

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Enacting the law releases $3.4 billion under the World Bank’s Development Policy Operations program, money routed straight into the budget for priority social and humanitarian spending.

Deputy Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Economic Development, Oleksii Movchan, called it a historic moment that locks in European rules of the game in a field where a quarter of national output is distributed.

What Prozorro is—and why it travels

Prozorro—“transparent” in Ukrainian—is the open-source system that publishes Ukraine’s state tenders for anyone to see, built by civic activists after the 2014 Maidan revolution and credited with saving roughly $6 billion since 2017.

Multilateral lenders, the World Bank among them, have recognized Prozorro as meeting their procurement standards and committed to channeling more of their Ukraine financing through it. That reaches beyond Ukraine: procurement is the channel through which reconstruction, and the foreign money funding it, will eventually flow.

What the law changes

The reform implements EU Directive 2014/24/EU and broadens the menu of tender formats that Ukrainian buyers can use, introducing European mechanisms for complex and repeat purchases.

It forces large contracts to be split into lots, so a single dominant supplier cannot sweep an entire order, and small regional firms can bid on slices of big reconstruction tenders. For mid-range purchases, an electronic marketplace becomes mandatory.

The new rules take effect nine months after publication, the window the government has to write the secondary legislation and the Prozorro team to build the tools.

Why it took two years

The Cabinet-initiated bill was registered in August 2024 and cleared its first reading that September. Then it stalled, and the problem lay in the draft itself.

Anti-corruption monitors warned at the time that the government had pushed it through behind closed doors, that it still did not comply with the very EU directive it was meant to implement, and that it carried provisions they called corruption risks.

A lengthy rework followed, bringing Transparency International Ukraine, the State Audit Service, and the Antimonopoly Committee into working groups that secured more than 40 changes; several potentially corrupt provisions were stripped before the bill finally passed on 27 May with 245 votes in favor and none against.

Transparency International Ukraine says the European Commission’s feedback on the final text is still pending and will likely require further changes, with full harmonization due under the EU’s Ukraine Facility by 2027.

The defense localization wrinkle

The law also widens Ukraine’s localization requirements—the “Made in Ukraine” rules favoring domestic production—and extends them, for the first time, to civilian goods bought for the defense forces. Body armor, helmets, and mechanized demining equipment have been added to the localization list.

The degree of localization will be calculated based on production costs to prevent suppliers from inflating the figure, and the State Audit Service will gain the power to verify a product’s origin at every stage.

That expansion lands on a system with a known strain. In May, a National Guard soldier said an auto-parts dealer had won his unit’s drone-battery tender by cutting the price from 6,250 hryvnia ($156) to 3,780 hryvnia ($95) per unit, then delivered batteries labeled to spec but packed with cheaper, explosion-prone cells.

The new law routes more defense goods through that same system.

Russia built two power plants in occupied Crimea to free it from blackouts. They run on gas piped from Russia, so the Ukrainian drone strike that cut electricity across all of Sevastopol on 24 June hit a dependency Russia engineered into the peninsula.

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Sevastopol is the home port of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and the blackout was the latest in a week of strikes that have left much of Crimea rationing power. The reason the damage sticks is Western sanctions: the plants run on turbines Russia can no longer properly repair, so each hit compounds the last.

The independence that runs on gas

The two plants at the center of the project—Balaklava in Sevastopol and Tavrida in Simferopol—were built to end Crimea’s reliance on imported electricity and opened by Vladimir Putin in 2019. Together, they were meant to cover about 90% of consumption, a figure Russian authorities promised at the time, and both were gas-fired, built around Siemens turbines that were transferred to Crimea and installed in breach of EU sanctions.

The gas the plants burn arrives from Russia, and that is the second dependency. Crimean Tatar Resource Center head Eskender Bariiev told RBC‑Ukraine that the peninsula’s main plants run exclusively on gas, so strikes on gas distribution and compressor stations paralyze electricity generation.

Ukraine said it struck the Simferopol gas distribution station and a Crimean substation on the night of 22–23 June, and power outages have begun reaching critical equipment at the peninsula’s state water utility, ISW reported.

Energy analyst Hennadii Riabtsev told Suspilne that occupied Crimea is an energy dead-end with no grid ring of its own, dependent on a single artery from Russia and backed only by small local stations sized for morning and evening peaks. He put the money Russia has poured into the peninsula since 2014 at levels comparable to Chechnya, with little to show for it in everyday life.

Sanctions keep the damage in place

The Siemens units remain under sanctions and out of proper service, and Russia is already planning new generators to cover a forecast Crimean deficit, turning to Russian and Iranian turbines because Western parts are out of reach, according to Global Energy Monitor.

Russian state media says a new block at the Tavrida plant will make it the most powerful in Crimea. It will burn the same gas piped from the mainland—more generation hung on the very supply the strikes can choke.

Even occupation officials concede the peninsula could face chronic electricity shortages by 2031, Euromaidan Press reported in December. Each strike lands on a grid that cannot be quickly or fully rebuilt.

An economy that runs on a season

Crimea’s occupation economy rests on two supports: federal subsidies and the summer tourist season. Now the season is being shut down by decree.

Russian-installed head Sergey Aksyonov announced a halt to all civilian fuel sales from 21 June, then, a day later, he suspended children’s camps and tourist stays for minors until 1 September. A season closed by order hits an economy that leans on it, on top of subsidies Moscow has to keep raising.

When Putin opened the two power plants in 2019, the promise was that Crimea could meet almost all of its own power needs. The peninsula now rations electricity by the hour and waits on gas and parts it cannot guarantee.

Russia started rationing gasoline in Siberia this week, carrying a fuel crisis driven by Ukrainian strikes into the country’s heartland, thousands of kilometers from the front. Omsk and Irkutsk restricted fuel sales on 22 June, and Novosibirsk signaled it would follow.

Novosibirsk had no shortage of its own, Governor Andrei Travnikov said. Yet on 23 June he announced the region would restrict sales because its neighbors already had—the shortage now jumping from one region to the next, not only where the strikes land. It started in Russia’s southern and border regions and occupied Crimea, the product of a Ukrainian drone campaign against refineries and fuel logistics.

From the border to the heartland

By mid-June, the limits had gone national. Chains operating at least 7,000 of Russia’s roughly 29,000 gas stations—about one in four—had capped sales, analysis by the independent Russian outlet Agentstvo found.

Omsk’s governor, Vitaly Khotsenko, banned canister filling and capped purchases at 40 liters of gasoline per car, casting the curbs as a stand against “artificial hype” and “speculation.”

Irkutsk went further, switching to what its governor, Igor Kobzev, described as a “manual mode” in which authorities set fuel volumes “for each recipient individually.”

In Novosibirsk, officials reported stable reserves, no queues, and a 0.3 percent rise in gasoline prices in May. By 20 June, a station in the region’s Chanovsky district had hit 99 rubles ($1.33) a liter.

Occupied Crimea runs dry

Crimea has gone furthest. From the morning of 21 June, Russian-installed authorities halted all fuel sales to individuals and businesses—by cash, card, or coupon—keeping what was left for, in the words of Crimea’s Russian-installed head, Sergey Aksyonov, “the state services that ensure the functioning and security of the Republic of Crimea.” He asked residents to “remain calm and trust only official sources.”

The next day, his administration suspended children’s summer camps and tourist stays for minors until 1 September, citing “public safety,” while repeated overnight strikes knocked out power across much of the peninsula.

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The strikes behind the crunch

By April, with strikes forcing major plants offline, Russian refinery runs had fallen to their lowest level since 2009, and the campaign has reached deep into the country—drones struck a Tyumen refinery some 2,000 kilometers from Ukraine on 20 June.

The cumulative damage has pushed Russia, one of the world’s largest oil exporters, to import gasoline by sea.

On 22 June, Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a record budget of 4.4 trillion hryvnia ($97.6 billion), most of it borrowed from Europe. The money to keep Ukraine fighting, and eventually to rebuild it, is flowing as never before.

That same quarter, the economy it is meant to revive posted its sharpest contraction since the wartime recovery began—and the constraint that now shapes Ukraine’s economic future is no longer money but the power, workers, and institutions to use it.

Real GDP fell 0.6% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, the National Bank confirmed on 18 June, and 0.7% against the previous quarter. The number is small. What hides behind it is not.

For nearly three years, Ukraine’s economy grew through bombardment—near-continuously from the middle of 2023, when the country clawed its way back from a collapse of almost 29% in the invasion year. It dipped only once before now, briefly, when drought hammered the harvest at the end of 2024. The first quarter of 2026 was the sharper break.

It is the sharpest contraction since the recovery began, and the forecasters who first called it a winter blip have spent the spring marking the year down: the National Bank to 1.3%, the IMF to between 1 and 1.6%. The investment house ICU said it bluntly: weak growth, its analysts wrote, is “the new norm.”

The official line is more hopeful: the National Bank expects growth back as soon as the second quarter, and the government pencils in 4.5% for 2027. But a bounce off a depressed quarter is not a recovery, and the full-year number has only been marked down further.

Where the bombs show up in the accounts

The contraction has a clear author. Energy output fell 15.2% year-on-year, transport 9.4%, and construction 4.5%, the National Bank’s breakdown showed—the sectors directly in the path of the strike campaign, now showing up as line items in the national accounts.

The first sector to fall was electricity generation, with transmission disrupted where the grid was hit; the second was transport, after heavy strikes on the railways, economist Oleksandra Betliy told Kyiv Post.

Household consumption rose 11%. Manufacturing grew 1.9%, trade 5.5%, financial activity 15.5%, and mining 2%. The economy contracted because three bombed sectors outweighed a domestic economy that, by almost every other measure, kept working. ICU called the quarter a display of “unprecedented resilience” to the blackouts.

The hryvnia keeps sliding

Unlike the contraction, the hryvnia's slide owes nothing to the weather. Through the first five months of 2026, the hryvnia weakened against the National Bank’s official rate—from a 2025 average of 41.7 to the dollar to 42.9 in January, 44.1 by May, and 44.9 by 23 June. A widening trade gap drives the slide, the Centre for Economic Strategy reported.

A cold snap can knock out a quarter of GDP growth. It cannot make a currency depreciate every month for half a year. That slide tracks a structural deficit between what Ukraine earns abroad and what it spends there, and it will outlast the spring.

Defending that slide has cost the central bank its cushion. Reserves dropped to $45.7 billion by the start of June, down from a record near $57.7 billion early in the year—roughly $12 billion sold off in four months to slow the hryvnia while partner aid ran late. The National Bank calls the level sufficient, about 4.7 months of imports, and the inflows now arriving are meant to refill it.

Prices, at least, are easing. Inflation slowed to 8.2% in May, helped by falling oil prices as the war in the Middle East de-escalated—Washington cleared Iranian crude sales on 22 June, pushing prices to around $74 a barrel, which both cheapens Ukraine’s energy imports and thins Russia’s war revenue. The National Bank held its key rate at 15% on 18 June, judging the easing cycle done for now.

The deeper drag

The contraction had near-term authors—the strikes, the cold, the delayed budget spending. The drag beneath them is older, and no thaw fixes it: Ukraine is running out of people. The number of full-time employees fell from 7 million in 2021 to 5.3 million by late 2025, according to GMK Center, citing official data.

Half of companies were already citing the staff shortage as the main obstacle to their businesses six months ago, Euromaidan Press reported, citing the National Bank’s enterprise survey, and the labor force has only thinned since then.

The war took around a quarter of the labor force; 5.9 million Ukrainians are abroad; and the National Bank expects the net outflow to run into 2027 before any return begins. The shortage pushes wages up even as output falls—part of why inflation has stayed above 8%, and a large part of why every forecaster now caps growth near zero.

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Money is arriving

For most of the war, the binding question was whether the money would come at all. In February, it nearly didn’t: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán blocked the €90 billion ($104 billion) EU loan agreed in December, holding it hostage to a dispute over Russian oil through the Druzhba pipeline.

Then Orbán lost his election after 16 years; his successor dropped the obstruction; the pipeline was repaired; and the bloc finally approved the package on 23 April—€45 billion ($52 billion) of it for 2026.

That money is what funds the record defense budget. The first €3.2 billion ($3.7 billion) tranche of budget support lands at the Recovery Conference in Gdańsk on 25–26 June, with €5.9 billion ($6.8 billion) for the army to follow by the end of the month, European Pravda reported.

The central bank expects roughly $13 billion in June across all programs. The inflows have a paradoxical effect on the books: the projected 2026 deficit has narrowed to 12.1% of GDP, from the 18.5% first planned, the Centre for Economic Strategy noted in the same review, though defense spending is running at only about 80% of plan, and the budget underfunded the military pay raises it promised.

The bind is no longer the money

The bill, as of December 2025, is almost $588 billion—nearly three times the country’s annual output—a joint assessment estimated by the World Bank, EU, and UN in February, up from the $524 billion figure of a year earlier.

To rebuild and keep pace with its neighbors, Ukraine needs around $40 billion a year, the Berkeley economists Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Maurice Obstfeld estimate: $20 billion to replace destroyed capital, $10 billion to stop falling further behind its eastern European peers, and $10 billion to start closing the gap. Set against Poland’s post-communist investment inflows, or the immobilized Russian assets sitting in Europe, that figure is not a fantasy.

The problem is the other side of the ledger. Ukraine can realistically absorb $10 to 15 billion a year right now, Ukraine’s deputy representative at the IMF, Vladyslav Rashkovan, argued on a Centre for Economic Strategy podcast.

If $100 billion arrived this month, he said, the country could not spend it. Not enough projects are ready. Not enough institutions to run them. Not enough throughput at a customs service that would have to clear 10 times the imports.

The workers to do the rebuilding are scarcer still: around 4.5 million will be needed, the Economy Ministry projected already in January, in an economy already short more than 600,000 skilled hands this year.

The constraint has quietly flipped. For three years, the question was whether the world would fund Ukraine. The question now is whether Ukraine can build the capacity to take the funding—and that is slower, less photogenic work than wiring a loan.

It is also the work that decides everything downstream. Investment does not go where a president points it, Rashkovan said; it goes where the balance of risk and return beats the alternatives. The institutions, the rule of law, the energy capacity to power a rebuilt economy, the workers to build it—none of it visible, all of it now the binding constraint on whether the recovery resumes or settles into the new normal ICU described.

The contraction may not be the most important number from this June. Ukraine has $5.8 billion lined up for priority reconstruction projects this year, and a $9.5 billion funding gap remains. The bombs are still landing on the sectors that fell. And the hryvnia, indifferent to the weather, keeps closing on 45.

Maksym Dobrianskyi fought as a commander around Bakhmut and Avdiivka until 2023, when he stepped on an anti-personnel mine and lost a leg. He is now in mine action—one of a growing number of war-wounded Ukrainian veterans being retrained for the decades-long job of making their country safe to walk again.

Euromaidan Press heard him speak this month at a demining-technology exercise in Lviv Oblast.

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The Ministry of Veterans Affairs already counts well over a million veterans, a figure that climbs every month, and projects five to six million veterans and their families once the war ends. Set against a clearance task measured in decades—patient, ground-level labor—Ukraine is not short of people who could do the work, only of the money to hire them.

The effort that brought Dobrianskyi in is paid for one grant at a time. Its latest cohort, under a UNDP-backed program—40 specialists, many of them veterans with disabilities—began work in Kharkiv Oblast in January 2026 on 12-month contracts.

They are trained in non-technical survey and risk education: the unglamorous front end of demining, working out which land is dangerous and warning the people who live on it. An earlier round trained 22; 11 found work. The Netherlands and Luxembourg funded this one. How big the next one is depends on who funds it.

Russia’s war has left farmland larger than Croatia unusable, at a cost Kyiv puts at $11 billion a year—and by the government’s own reckoning, the job will take at least a decade, with some land never safe to return to at all.

Deputy Minister Ihor Bezkaravainyi, who coordinates the demining response, lost his own leg to a Russian anti-tank mine in 2015 and has argued that mine survivors make natural recruits for mine action. Dobrianskyi is what that argument looks like in a field.

He had braced himself, he says, for a life of sitting at home and grieving, until a leaflet at an employment center offered retraining. He would rather not remember the treatment, the rehabilitation, the prosthetics. What changed was the work and the people beside him.

“I was wounded, and I want to help people the same way,” he said, “so that this doesn’t happen.” The veterans he trained with, he added, are “like a family now.”

Forty of them got a year’s contract this round.

The cameras were up and the film was rolling, and so was the ScanJack 3500—the biggest machine on the field, four wheels, roughly the size of a bus. It crawled along the sandy ground for over five minutes, engine deafening, its chains churning the soil and raising a cloud of dust and sand, pace glacial, every lens trained on it and waiting.

When it finally reached its mine and set it off, the bang caught the whole press corps out: we twitched as one, then burst out laughing, a little sheepishly, at having flinched. It was the one moment all day that went exactly to plan—a machine doing on cue what the brochure promises—and we had been walked over specially to see it.

This was the second UTTC Technology Week, its media day of live trials on 17 June at a field in Lviv Oblast nobody would name. The Ministry of Defense staged it with the Ministry of Economy, Environment and Agriculture and the UN Development Programme, and the pitch was the future of demining: minefields cleared by drones, AI, and robots, with people kept as far from the bang as possible.

A swimming meet in the dust

The centerpiece was a “technology relay.” Whatever that would mean.

In the end, it was two teams—government operators on one side, commercial deminers on the other—turned loose on two plots, an open agricultural field and a wooded strip, apparently seeded with mines and tripwires.

Apparently, because for the time we were there, nothing on those plots went off. There was the roar of engines, the scorching sun that fried us where we stood, giant horseflies buzzing bloodthirstily around, and the machines spent half the time too far off or behind the trees and bushes to make anything out.

Drones whirred overhead and fed images to the screens in the nearby tent; a woman with a microphone narrated gamely, and still none of it resolved into anything I could follow. The officials kept insisting this was not a competition but an exchange of experience—a strange thing to say about two teams racing each other across a minefield.

I kept thinking of Raoul Duke—Hunter S. Thompson’s stand-in in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—out at the mad racing event called Mint 400, trying and failing to keep track of a race behind a wall of dust and chaos. I was not alone in this. During the debrief, one veteran of the event admitted he had stood at the edge of the same field with the same question I had: Okay, but what is actually going on here?

The cast

There were speeches, because there always are. Oleg Shuvarskyi of the Ministry of Defense opened by promising the equipment on show was no longer absurdly expensive—that it had, as he put it, more “earthly” prices now.

Then came Deputy Minister Ihor Bezkaravainyi, who lost his own leg to a Russian anti-tank mine in 2015 and now coordinates Ukraine’s demining response. He reached for Lao Tzu—governing a state, the saying goes, is like cooking a small fish—and then delivered the line he repeats like a mantra: mine action is not about demining. Demining is only part of it. The rest is economy, agriculture, environment, governance, the whole slow business of making land usable again.

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The UN’s people spoke too. Ben Lark, who runs UNDP’s mine action program here, framed the day as less about the machines than about getting operators, manufacturers, scientists, and donors into one field to argue with each other.

His research specialist, Edward Crowther, was bolder about the stakes: Ukraine, he said, is at the cutting edge of humanitarian demining technology worldwide right now. Coming from the organization writing some of the checks, it is the kind of claim worth holding at arm’s length—though on the evidence of the impressive-looking hardware rolling past, not an empty one.

The march of machines

Before the relay, there was a “march of technologies.” The whole arsenal passed us in single file—driven, flown, or, for the small things like experimental battery packs or smaller medical units, carried by hand.

Among them: the behemoth ScanJack 3500, different soil-tilling rigs and remote-controlled mowers, the medium MV-4 and the Neo ground robots, drones for visual and magnetic survey, an electromagnetic trawl for detonating mines from a distance, even a portable Vodafone base station for throwing up a signal in a field.

Most of it Ukrainian-made. A good deal of it still experimental, being tested and tweaked on this very ground, partially on this very day.

A quieter corner

At a separate briefing held for the small group of journalists present, in a calmer corner of the field, a veteran named Maksym Dobrianskyi told us how he came to this work. He fought around Bakhmut and Avdiivka, and in 2023, he stepped on an anti-personnel mine and lost a leg.

He had braced himself, he said, for a life of sitting at home and grieving. Instead, he found a leaflet at an employment center advertising retraining for wounded veterans as humanitarian deminers, and took it. He clears mines now.

“I was wounded, and I want to help people the same way,” he said, “so that this doesn’t happen.” Two men in the same field, both missing a leg to a Russian mine, both now spending their lives on it.

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Macarons and minefields

The lunch was warm—a choice of sausage or baked fish, spaghetti with herbs—and the spread around it was generous: fruit and vegetables, little cakes, macarons, different salads. We stood eating there in a dust-blown field while fat horseflies worked our arms and legs, and I felt the sunburn slowly but surely taking hold of my face and neck.

Russia’s war has affected roughly 133,300 square kilometers of Ukraine, including 57,900 square kilometers of farmland—an area larger than Croatia—at a cost Kyiv puts at $11 billion a year. Mines and unexploded ordnance have killed more than 400 people and injured over 1,000 since the full-scale invasion, by Ukraine’s own count.

Bezkaravainyi has said openly that parts of the country may never come back: a Ukrainian Zone Rouge to set beside the one the First World War left in France, or beside Chornobyl.

What the machines still can’t do

The jury’s sharpest verdict of the day was not praise but a wish list. Deminers are still hauling five or six separate robots to a site—one to fly, one to search, one to dig, one to blow things up—when what they want is a single universal machine that does it all. Whether it’s a realistic direction engineers are working toward or a sci-fi dream remains one of the day’s mysteries.

Another remark was that although at the exercise field the teams could freely use airborne drones for reconnaissance, in reality, it would be impossible near the front because such drones are not hardened against electronic warfare.

And the minister whose ministry helped stage the whole show is the same man who told me, a month earlier, that innovation has been far better at killing in this war than at cleaning up after it. Machines identify, Bezkaravainyi said. Humans still clear.

By the end of the day, I was sunburned, bitten raw by horseflies, and too fried to follow the closing remarks, which had drifted into the kind of shop talk only the people who do this for a living could love and understand.

When it was over, the buses took us back. Bone-tired as I was, I held off until we hit the main road and the signal returned, then grabbed my phone and frantically thumbed through a day’s worth of emails and messages, feeling naked after so long cut off from the world.

Sport keeps quietly letting Russia and Belarus back in, and the officials who take those decisions seldom explain why out loud. Janek Mäggi is an exception. The president of the World Draughts Federation (FMJD)—whose board has just cleared Belarusian players to return from 1 July—lays out the case plainly: the sport has lost half of its elite, the standard has dropped sharply, and a federation this small cannot run a foreign policy of its own.

His federation is one of many. Four years into Russia’s full-scale war, international bodies are easing Russian and Belarusian athletes back through a now-familiar route.

It is not a public reversal of sanctions but a “neutral athlete” pathway—competing without flag or anthem—that widens by degrees until the exclusion has all but ended. Tennis never removed them at all. Judo, aquatics, gymnastics, equestrian sport, several winter sports, and ice hockey have settled into versions of the same arrangement.

The argument has narrowed as it has spread. In 2022, the question was whether Russian athletes belonged in world sport while their state invaded a neighbor. By 2026, many governing bodies have swapped it for a smaller one: on what terms should they be allowed back?

Euromaidan Press has reported the athletes’ side of that argument—Ukrainian players who refuse the handshake, who read out overnight casualty counts before walking on court, who say that playing as though nothing is happening is itself a political act. This interview is the other chair at the table.

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Euromaidan Press spoke with Mäggi on 8 June 2026—days before the FMJD board voted unanimously to readmit Belarusian players, both youth and adults, from 1 July under neutral status, without flag or anthem. That was the cautious route Mäggi forecasts below: short of the full return the IOC recommended on 7 May, and with no decision on Russia.

Peeter Helme: Various world sports federations have started letting Russia, and Belarus too, back into their ranks to compete under their own flag. Can you describe what the reasons are—and, if it isn’t a secret, whether you in the Draughts Federation are discussing this, and what the arguments are?

Janek Mäggi: It is actually very simple. The overwhelming share of top athletes are Russian and Belarusian—and not only in draughts, which has some 200 million players worldwide, or chess, with around 600 million. Both rank among the world’s ten largest sports by participation, and the same pattern is taken for granted almost everywhere.

There are 125 sports federations recognized by the International Olympic Committee, and in many of them, the very best players have come from these two countries.

In draughts this is completely the case—essentially half the world has been removed. The sport has two, really three, core disciplines: checkers, played by about 100 million people; international draughts, about 40 million; and Russian draughts, around 50 million. Add Brazilian draughts and a few smaller variants, perhaps 10 million more.

Take last year’s World Championship in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Nine of the 12 finalists were Dutch, three-quarters of the final. That is completely abnormal; it looked like a Dutch national championship.

With the Russians and Belarusians gone, a great many strong players were simply not there, and chance had more room. So, point one: over these four years, the level of tournaments has dropped sharply. That is a very big problem.

The second thing that has happened is alarming: the standard among young players has fallen. The Russians, of course, immediately poured their energy into their own international body—the International Draughts Federation (IDF)—and many countries are in it. The Western draughts world we imagine as the whole universe is, in fact, very small.

Compare it with Africa: the European Union fits into the continent more than seven times over, the population is far larger, and the standard of play is high there too. Their young players keep developing in their own environment, undisturbed.

And the Russian grandmasters? They all work in China now—every one of them, because the Chinese pay enormous salaries. China alone has 542,000 draughts players competing in title events, and those are only the ones in title tournaments.

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Helme: The Ukrainian athletes make a different argument—that this is not about the standard of play, but about competing alongside people representing a state that is waging war on Ukraine. What do you say to that?

Mäggi: On the players themselves: they are certainly not warmongers—at least in draughts; I do not know other sports as closely. In chess, it is the same story, and I sit on the International Mind Sports Association too. They really are not.

Most of them are close friends of mine—friends of 30 years. They are exactly like you: they sit down, we play, we talk. Some views differ, and there is the odd madman, but a great many genuinely good players have now been shut out.

On 7 May, the International Olympic Committee decided that Belarus, for one, should be readmitted. The underlying reason is the one I described, but the important part was the wording: Belarus has met all of the IOC’s requirements, and Russia has not. So between the two, there is, by now, quite a large difference.

There is also a contradiction that the sports world cannot resolve. Some countries argue that the United States should be barred from every competition for attacking Iran, and that any tournament with Israeli participants should be banned outright—and that, measured against them, Belarus is a very peaceful country.

Helme: You see a clear difference between Russia and Belarus. But why does that judgment fall to the IOC—why shouldn’t, for example, the draughts federation set its own line?

Mäggi: What guides a world federation? Firm principles. We want to be part of the international sports community, and that is the key point: we do not run an independent foreign policy. We cannot.

We are about 10 middle-aged people—some Black, some women, everyone represented—who decide what line to take. Setting our own geopolitics is simply out of the question; we follow the directions that come from the IOC.

Unfortunately, the IOC’s core policy is decided by the big powers. So I cannot say that everything they agree on is black-and-white good. I cannot say that at all.

Helme: So, where does that leave draughts right now?

Mäggi: In draughts, the position now is this: we have Belarus’s application to return—fully and immediately, as the IOC put it—and the Russians’ application for their juniors to play at once. We discuss it next Friday [12 June, when the board voted to readmit Belarus—EP]. I can guess the outcome, but I will not speculate before it is decided.

I will say this much: some easing toward Belarus will certainly come, though I am not sure it will be as fast as the IOC recommends. And there is a further problem—whether federations should weigh states’ decisions at all.

Take the European Championships in Tallinn in August. We may clear young Belarusians to play, but whether Estonia gives them visas and they actually turn up is a separate question.

We cannot factor in national politics—that is their problem to solve, not ours, because there are about 200 countries in the world. As for the Russians, while the war continues, I do not see all 125 federations cheerfully letting them back. But I think the end of the war is near, and if it comes, the Russians will also have a fast, wide-open path to return to most sports, for the reasons I have given.

This interview is part of Euromaidan Press’s series on how international sport is negotiating sanctions and Russia’s war on Ukraine.

The ice-capable ships that Western sanctions kept out of Russian hands for four years may now be sold to Russia.

Novatek, Russia’s largest independent gas producer, is in talks to buy ten of them from Japan’s Mitsui O.S.K. Lines (MOL), one of the world’s largest shipping companies, and South Korean shipbuilder Hanwha Ocean, according to the shipping outlet TradeWinds—the polar fleet Moscow has failed to build for itself, and the missing piece its sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 project needs to run.

Arctic LNG 2 is the venture that US and EU sanctions set out to strangle, central to Russia’s push to dominate Arctic gas exports. Six of the ten ships are the heaviest icebreaking class, the Arc7, built for that project and stranded at Hanwha’s yard since Russia’s full-scale invasion; the other four are lighter ice-class carriers the European Union sanctioned and then removed from its list.

Acquiring them would hand Moscow the ships months before Europe’s ban on Russian LNG imports takes effect, and just as Brussels proposes to outlaw this exact kind of sale.

The ships sanctions stranded

The six Arc7 carriers have sat completed at Hanwha Ocean’s Geoje shipyard, the bills for keeping them idle mounting with no buyer in sight, the Korea Times reported. Three had been ordered by MOL under long-term charters to serve Arctic LNG 2; three by Russia’s state shipping company Sovcomflot.

Those three were ordered through Cyprus-registered shell companies—Elixon, Azoria, and Glorina—that the US Treasury sanctioned in February 2024, making the ships undeliverable: any yard that handed them over risked sanctions itself.

Hanwha, which had canceled the Russian contracts, finished the vessels anyway, and the Russian side has since pursued the yard for $877 million in damages at the Singapore International Arbitration Centre, a case TradeWinds reports to be unresolved.

For four years, the practical effect was a chokepoint. Western firms holding the ships meant Russia could not fully run the project they were built for.

Ships with nowhere else to go

The other four are newer Arc4 ice-class carriers—North Moon, North Light, North Ocean, and North Valley. The European Union listed three of them in its 17th sanctions package in May 2025, then reversed course that July—in what appeared to be the first time it had lifted a designation in the Russian LNG sector.

The European Commission said the ships were delisted following commitments that they would “no longer engage in the transport of Russian energy” from the Yamal and Arctic LNG 2 projects.

What followed showed the limit of that promise. Stripped of Russian work, the carriers sat idle off Indonesia for months, with the cost of keeping them anchored reported above $50,000 a day, because ships built to break Arctic ice have almost no work outside the Russian projects they were designed for.

Each step can be presented as compliant: building the ships, clearing the Arc4s on a written promise, routing a purchase through Singapore. Together, they move the ice fleet toward a sanctioned Russian project.

Why Russia cannot build its own

Moscow needs the foreign ships because its own program has stalled. Of a planned fleet of 21 ice-capable carriers, Russia’s own yards have delivered only one—the Alexey Kosygin, handed to Sovcomflot on 24 December 2025, years late and assembled from sections and equipment shipped in from abroad before sanctions cut off the suppliers.

Two more are promised from the Zvezda yard in 2026, but the lining that holds the super-cooled gas, once supplied by France’s GTT, remains a bottleneck. Finishing them this year “could be optimistic as sanctions have cut off access to key equipment, engineering support and expertise,” Kpler analyst Laura Page told Bloomberg.

The calendar sharpens the need. Europe’s ban on long-term Russian LNG imports takes force in 2027, pushing Novatek toward longer voyages east to Asia that demand more ice-capable ships.

Bought first, sanctioned later

The ten modern carriers are the high end of a fleet Russia has spent 2026 assembling. It has added at least six LNG carriers to its shadow fleet this year, TradeWinds reported, older steam-turbine ships—among them the freshly reflagged Avacha—bought to haul Arctic LNG 2 cargoes the long way to Asia.

The sanctions have trailed the purchases. On 16 June, the United Kingdom became the first G7 country to designate four of those ships—Orion, Merkuriy, Kosmos, and Luch—for carrying Russian LNG to third countries, months after Russia acquired and deployed them. The buying did not stop.

Novatek is “purchasing LNG tankers wherever it can and as fast as they can,” Denys Svyrydenkov, a communications specialist at B4Ukraine, a global coalition of civil society organizations, told EP, to ease the shipping bottleneck before Europe’s import ban takes hold.

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A ban is still only a proposal

On 10 June 2026, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled a 21st sanctions package that would ban LNG-tanker sales to Russia, extending to gas carriers a rule that already covers oil tankers. “We propose restricting the sale of LNG tankers to Russia,” she said.

The proposal still needs unanimous approval from EU member states, and routing the purchase through a company in Singapore is the kind of workaround such bans struggle to catch.

The reports were circulated to the media by B4Ukraine, which wants the sale stopped. Because the ten ships are not themselves sanctioned, “the tanker sale would technically not be illegal,” Svyrydenkov said, though he argues the vessels would still carry gas from the sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 terminal—a breach he believes US lawmakers and the Treasury should examine.

Allied governments hold leverage of their own. Hanwha Ocean is bidding against Germany’s TKMS for Canada’s submarine contract, a decision due before the end of June 2026—and Ukrainian advocates have urged Ottawa to use that contract as pressure over the ship sale.

The proposed ban awaits the member states. The ships are reportedly ready to deliver this year.

Russia is trading fuel quality for quantity. To keep pumps supplied as drone strikes cut into refining, the government is letting some refineries sell dirtier, lower-grade gasoline and diesel on the home market, the business daily Kommersant reported, citing a source.

Fuel sold under the Euro-5 label can now contain up to 150 milligrams of sulfur per kilogram—15 times what that grade allows. The easing began quietly last autumn and was extended in May.

Gasoline can also carry more aromatic hydrocarbons and octane-boosting additives, the Kommersant report found. Only refineries modernizing under deals with the Energy Ministry qualify, and the ministry must report to the government each month on who makes the fuel and in what volume.

The fuel keeps its Euro-5 label, with no marking to flag the lower grade, so drivers cannot tell what they are buying, Za Rulem reported.

No official decree has been published, and market sources said only isolated cases of refineries producing the lower grade had occurred so far. Wholesale AI-95 gasoline and diesel rose about 10% in the first half of June. Supply problems have hit around a dozen regions, and the number of drone strikes on Russian refineries has roughly doubled since the start of 2026.

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Even so, the change will not end the shortage. The additional volumes can only partially ease regional shortfalls, NEFT Research managing partner Sergey Frolov told Kommersant.

The extra sulfur and aromatic compounds speed wear on engines, catalytic converters, and exhaust systems, Novaya Gazeta reported. The aromatics are also toxic compounds tied to health problems, Reuters noted.

Tatneft, meanwhile, limited gasoline and diesel sales across its entire Russian network on 16 June and moved to cash-only payments, without giving a reason or an end date. In the Urals, its stations cap sales at 30 liters of gasoline and 60 liters of diesel per customer.

In Russian-occupied Sevastopol, drivers lined up for fuel on 15 June. One, who gave only her first name, doubted the shortages would ease while the war went on. “How can it be solved, how? Only if the special military operation ends,” Reuters quoted Alyona as saying.

Ukraine’s drone war on Russian refineries has reached the gas pump in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Restrictions on gasoline sales hit the two capitals in mid-June, part of a shortage that the independent outlet The Moscow Times says now spans more than 25 Russian regions.

The strikes have squeezed Russian refining for months. What is new is that the shortage has spread to the two largest cities and into the cost of living.

Kyiv has struck the refineries to cut the oil revenue funding the war and deny Moscow the windfall from this year’s Iran-war price spike, a Bloomberg report found. Its drones hit Russian refineries at least 16 times in May, eight of the country’s ten largest among them, with at least 30 strikes on Russian oil assets overall—the most of any month since the full-scale invasion.

What the shortage looks like

The deficit started in occupied Crimea and spread inland, The Moscow Times reported. Tatneft now sells no more than 20 liters of gasoline per customer in at least six regions. At the same time, outages have hit stations in Kuzbass, Tatarstan, and the Ulyanovsk and Nizhny Novgorod oblasts.

Farmers report diesel delivery gaps across southern Russia, the Central Black Earth zone, and the Volga region at the start of the planting season.

Aviation is the newest casualty. Six cities, including Nizhny Novgorod and Krasnodar, limited the refueling of passenger aircraft in mid-June, after airports in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, and Ufa ran short of jet fuel in late May. Moscow has banned jet-fuel exports until the end of November to protect domestic supply.

What “lost a third” really means

One figure circulating about the campaign needs care. Energy Intelligence estimates that almost a third of Russia’s refining capacity, about 2.14 million barrels a day, sat idle in early June, The Moscow Times reported. That number is idle capacity at a single moment, not lost output, and it changes whenever a damaged unit restarts.

Actual throughput has fallen by less. Russian refinery runs averaged 4.58 million barrels a day in May, down about 13% from a year earlier and the lowest since 2009, the analytics firm OilX estimates, a Bloomberg report found. By the first week of June, The Moscow Times wrote, runs had slipped below 4 million barrels a day, a 21-year low.

The difference this round is where the drones land. Earlier strikes hit primary distillation units, which Russia repaired quickly. Ukraine is now striking secondary units, the equipment that turns crude into gasoline and diesel, which take months to fix and depend on imported parts that sanctions choke off, Sergey Vakulenko told Bloomberg. Vakulenko ran strategy at Gazprom Neft until February 2022 and now studies the industry at the Carnegie Endowment.

The caveat runs the other way, too. Russia has absorbed strikes before, rerouting crude to export and so blunting the hit to domestic supply in April.

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Russian refining output fell 9.2% in April as Ukrainian drone strikes hit fuel plants

Energy Intelligence’s warning of the worst fuel crisis in Russia’s history is a forecast, not a verdict; Bloomberg’s early-June read was that Russia was still short of its 2023 crisis levels.

Moscow trades quality for quantity

The government is spending and bending rules to keep fuel moving. Oil companies received 700 billion rubles (about $9.7 billion) in subsidies across April and May. In June, the authorities allowed the sale of lower-grade Euro-3 gasoline in place of Euro-5—trading fuel quality for fuel quantity.

Prices are climbing regardless. On the exchange this year, diesel is up 43% and jet fuel 40%, The Moscow Times reported. Retail gasoline rose 3.93% over the month to early June, its sharpest jump since 2018, and headline inflation could pass 6% year on year for the first time in 2026, the forecasting center TsMAKP found.

TsMAKP tied the fuel-price rise to a mix of higher world oil prices, the summer travel and farming season, and the fallout from drone strikes in southern Russia. It stressed that the jump is concentrated in a few categories rather than systemic, and still judged a 5% year-end inflation rate achievable.

The Kremlin denies a problem. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on 21 May that supply and demand were balanced and blamed lower output on seasonal maintenance.

Yaroslav Kabakov, a strategist at the Russian brokerage Finam, reads it differently. The shock is coming from the supply side, he argued, and the crisis is only beginning, with peak demand in August and September still ahead.