Ukraine and Belgium are drawing up a bilateral agreement to deepen cooperation on drones, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said after meeting Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot in Kyiv on 18 August. The two also discussed strengthening Ukraine's air power and shielding it from Russian attacks.

Cheap drones now decide much of the fighting, and Kyiv has turned years of learning to fly and defeat them into leverage—trading that edge for weapons and money with a lengthening line of Western partners.

A new deal takes shape

Teams on both sides are now writing the text of the Drone Deal and weighing possible dates to sign it, ArmyInform reported. Ukraine is ready to share its own expertise in unmanned systems with partners, Zelenskyy said.

Defense ran through the meeting, with both sides focused on strengthening Ukraine's combat aviation and defending its skies.

"I expect that we will be able to implement what we discussed, and there will be more protection from Russian strikes," Zelenskyy said.

Belgium has promised 30 F-16 fighter jets—the largest F-16 pledge from any single country—though none have reached Ukraine yet, with deliveries tied to Belgium's own switch to newer aircraft.

Explore further

“First time”: Ukrainian troops joined Belgium’s National Day parade in Brussels

Belgium's deeper backing

Zelenskyy thanked Belgium for more than $1.28 billion in support this year, covering defense and civilian needs alike, and for backing Ukraine's move toward the European Union. The military share flows from a standing pledge: since 2025, Belgium has committed to at least $1.16 billion in defense aid a year.

A 2024 security pact locked in that relationship, making a small Western European country one of Ukraine's steadier partners. Belgian firms also service the F-16s Ukraine already flies, the jets delivered by other partners in the coalition.

Ukraine has moved to guarantee its people places to hide amid Russia's terror. The Ukrainian parliament has passed a bill on shelters in the first reading, introduced by the opposition European Solidarity faction, with 296 MPs voting for the legislation on measures to ensure citizens' safety.

The bill responds to a sheltering crisis that Russia's escalating strikes have created, as the invading army cannot achieve full occupation of Ukraine. As Russia intensifies its attacks on Ukrainian cities, tens of thousands of Kyiv residents now have to sleep in metro stations each night, and in Kharkiv, the underground has become a vast cover for tens of thousands.

The bill draws on the Finnish model

The legislation draws on a country known for its civil defense. It adopts Finnish experience on ensuring citizens' access to shelters and strengthens the responsibility of central and local authorities for maintaining and funding them, according to the European Solidarity.

The faction framed shelters as the top protective priority.

"We understand that the issue of bomb shelters, the issue of shelters, is becoming problem number one for protecting the civilian population," faction co-chair Iryna Herashchenko said.

The Ukrainian deputy emphasized the importance of considering the bill before the budget process begins.

What the bill requires

The bill sets concrete standards for shelters. It defines mandatory requirements, such as drinking water, medicine, sanitation facilities, a designated responsible person, and placement within 10 minutes' reach of people.

The 10-minute rule is the core of it.

"Shelters must be where there are concentrations of people, so they can reach them in 10 minutes," MP Viktoriia Siumar said.

The bill also guarantees unimpeded access to shelters during martial law, requires regular inspections of their condition, strengthens accountability for their upkeep, and supports the expansion of the civil-defense network, including through modular structures.

Ukraine brought the world's most battle-tested counter-drone experience to a NATO exercise. From 3 to 14 August, Ukraine took part in NATO's Baltic Trust 2026 exercise in Latvia, which focused on countering drones and other threats posed by uncrewed aerial systems, the General Staff reported.

The exercise responds to a mounting Russian threat against NATO's Baltic flank. Russia has probed the alliance's eastern edge so aggressively that NATO scrambled over the Baltic, jumping more than 250% in July.

Also, Moscow has increasingly launched drones on the Baltic States. Even on 14 August, the final day of the drill, a NATO fighter shot down a drone over Latvia after Russian electronic warfare pushed it off course, the second Baltic drone incursion that week. Baltic Trust 2026 was NATO's answer: about 650 participants from 24 countries building the counter-drone defenses that the threat demands.

The exercise tested systems working together

Baltic Trust focused on integration, not single technologies. Soldiers, specialists, and industry representatives jointly tested new technological solutions in conditions close to a modern operational environment, the General Staff said.

The core was whether the pieces work as one system. Participants checked how detection tools, command-and-control systems, and counter-drone measures can exchange data, form a common operational picture, and enable coordinated response.

Ukraine's experience is the draw

Ukraine's participation carries particular weight in this field. No NATO member has faced the scale of drone attack Ukraine confronts nightly, and its forces have built and continually adapt the detection, interception, and electronic-warfare methods that down Russian drones by the tens of thousands.

That makes Ukraine a source of hard-won practical knowledge for allies still preparing for threats Ukraine already lives with. Bringing Ukrainian experience into a NATO drill turns the country's battlefield lessons into shared allied capability, on exactly the drone warfare the alliance is scrambling to counter on its eastern flank.

The exercise builds collective defense

Baltic Trust served NATO's broader readiness. Jointly testing and integrating such solutions helps turn technological innovation into practical capabilities that strengthen readiness and collective defense.

Previously, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service Head Sergey Naryshkin accused NATO of escalating military activity near Russia’s borders. He warned that Poland and the Baltic states would be the first to suffer in the event of a war between Moscow and the Alliance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The change is driven by Ukraine's own success

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

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

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

Drones have pushed armored vehicles off the roads to Ukraine's front line, a Ukrainian brigade commander told RBC-Ukraine. Denys Perch, who commands the 107th Territorial Defense Brigade, says the drone-saturated belt has grown so deep that pickups no longer reach forward positions. The one enemy weapon his jammers can't touch is the fiber-optic drone.

The war has become a contest over who can pull people off the battlefield fastest, as cheap drones make any human movement near the front a target. Ukraine keeps out-inventing Russia at the front, but Russia copies each advance and floods the line with it at state scale.

When armor becomes the target

Until recently, armored vehicles still drove supplies to logistics hubs near the front. That is now almost impossible. Perch says that when a large, armored machine appears, Russian forces treat it as a prize target and swarm it with dozens of drones and munitions. Perch would sooner park his armor than seat soldiers inside it.

Explore further

This Ukrainian UGV, beloved by Ukrainian intel, is now winning over NATO countries and global defense giants

A kill zone that keeps widening

On the busiest sectors, Perch says, the kill zone—the drone-ruled strip around the contact line—now runs 15 to 20 kilometers deep. Some positions take three days to reach on foot. Where troops once drove most of the way and walked the last stretch, they now walk it all.

Robots take the drive

Under Perch, the brigade climbed, by his account, from around 22nd to third among Ukraine's Territorial Defense forces on the military's strike-results leaderboard, the home-guard units now fighting on the front. Ground robots—unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs)—do the work that armor cannot. They haul supplies and evacuate the wounded, though the robot often can't be brought back. His brigade runs over 1,500 logistics missions a month by heavy bomber drones alone, and still more by first-person-view (FPV) drones and robots. Russia hunts those bombers, he says, with interceptors that scramble the moment they hear one take off, so his crews mix high and low flight to slip past. Perch expects robots to move from supply runs into combat, hitting Russian troops in their rear.

Explore further

Ukraine wants robots doing 100% of frontline logistics. In June, they ran nearly 17,000 supply and evacuation runs

The drone his jammers can't touch

Both armies now field fiber-optic drones—machines guided by a hair-thin glass thread instead of radio. No signal means nothing to jam. Ukraine learned to block radio and digital drones, cutting their controls and video, Perch said. The glass-fiber ones his electronic warfare cannot reach, because there is no radio link to attack. His brigade still has no counter to them, Perch said, and he wants a technical fix that stops them.

Ukraine wrecked more Russian vehicles in July than in any month of the war. Ukraine's Defense Forces destroyed and disabled 13,998 units of automotive equipment, the most for the entire war, Ukraine's Defense Ministry reported on 12 August.

The record fits a month of intensifying attrition against Russian logistics and air defense. In July, the Defense Forces continued methodical work to weaken Russia's air-defense capabilities and logistics, and the vehicle figure, the war's highest, reflects a campaign hitting the trucks that move Russian ammunition, fuel, and troops to the front.

The vehicle losses target Russian logistics

The record vehicle toll strikes at how Russia sustains its offensive. Trucks and transport vehicles are the arteries that carry ammunition, fuel, and supplies to Russian forces, and destroying nearly 14,000 in a month, largely with drones, degrades the logistics that keep the assaults moving.

The figure marks a scale of vehicle destruction not seen before. That the highest monthly total of the war came in July matches the wider picture of that month, which was also Russia's deadliest for personnel in 2026, as Ukraine's drones reached deeper and hit more.

Air defense and armor were hit hard too

Ukraine also struck at the systems that protect Russian forces. Ukrainian troops hit 68 units of Russian air defense systems in July, chipping away at the shield that guards Russian positions and rear areas.

Armor losses were also heavy. Ukraine destroyed and disabled 162 tanks, including 28 in a single day on 22 July, along with 204 armored combat vehicles and 2,016 artillery systems.

The count is Ukraine's own

The figures are Ukraine's tally and cannot be independently verified. The Defense Ministry reports Russian losses without detailing Ukraine's own.

Meanwhile, July was Ukraine’s deadliest month for civilians since 2022 due to Russia's ballistic missile attacks and lack of Patriot interceptors from allies.

Ukraine has built an interceptor that catches Russian drones instead of ramming them. The company WINFLY has unveiled the WINFLY Spider, an interceptor equipped with a net-launcher to neutralize targets with a net and return to its launch point, the defense outlet Militarnyi reported.

The Spider is the newest entry in Ukraine's fast-growing interceptor-drone industry. Ukraine has fielded a widening range of cheap interceptors to counter Russia's massed drone attacks, and the Spider's distinction is reusability.

The netgun makes it reusable

Most interceptors are one-shot weapons that ram or explode against their target. The Spider instead carries the Karakurt net-launcher, made of high-strength aluminum and rated to work from −20°C to +50°C, which snares an enemy drone in a net while the interceptor itself stays intact and ready for repeat flights.

The economics are the point. The developers say each net shot about $27, while the drone remains undamaged. That turns the cost equation of drone defense, where an interceptor is often spent to down a single target, into one where the same aircraft can make many intercepts, paying only for a cheap net each time.

The platform and what it hunts

The Spider is built on an existing WINFLY interceptor. It uses the WINFLY 10 Hunter as its base platform, which operates at up to 5,000 meters, reaches 160 kilometers per hour, and has a range of over 18 kilometers.

It is designed for a range of Russian drones. The system targets fixed-wing UAVs, Mavic quadcopters, FPV drones, and fiber-optic drones, with flight times up to 25 minutes, deployment times of up to 3 minutes, and target detection ranges of up to 500 meters. The maker offers day and night versions.

One tool in a scaling defense

Ukraine is downing tens of thousands of Russian drones a month, per the Defense Ministry, and fielding interceptors from at least 29 licensed makers, with new designs like the high-altitude Tsyklop climbing above enemy drones and others ramming them.

Ukraine is shooting down drones at a fast-rising rate. Ukraine's Defense Forces destroyed 40,438 Russian fixed-wing drones, or "wings", in July 2026, Ukraine's Defense Ministry reported on 11 August.

The July figures mark a defense scaling up as fast as the threat it counters. Since the start of the year, Ukraine's Defense Forces have destroyed 195,000 Russian "wings" and 66,000 copters. A counter-drone effort is growing month by month against a Russian drone campaign that has itself expanded relentlessly.

The numbers climbed across drone types

Both categories of drone kills rose sharply. Fixed-wing "wings," the category that includes long-range attack drones like Shaheds, climbed from 27,711 in May to 40,438 in July, according to the ministry.

Copter kills rose even faster in proportion. The number of destroyed copters grew 42% in a single month, from 14,071 in June to 19,945 in July. The parallel rise in both types reflects a Russian drone offensive attacking on multiple fronts at once, from deep-strike Shaheds to short-range quadcopters over the trenches, and a Ukrainian defense expanding to meet each.

DELTA confirms every kill

Every strike has been confirmed by the DELTA system, and video recording of the shootdowns helps identify the most effective counter-drone tools for development and scaling, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said.

That verification matters for a claimed tally. Rather than a bare count, the numbers are tied to Ukraine's battle-management system, which logs and video-confirms each kill, the same DELTA platform whose combat data now trains Ukraine's target-detection AI.

The count is one side of the drone war

The figures capture only Ukraine's defensive half of a war fought increasingly by drones. Russia has expanded its drone production and nightly launches throughout 2026, aiming to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses with mass, and the rising Ukrainian kill counts are the answer to that escalation, not a sign it has eased.

South Korea is keeping lethal aid to Ukraine off the table while continuing humanitarian and reconstruction support, Yonhap reported on 10 August. The outlet cited a senior South Korean Foreign Ministry official.

South Korea’s response maintains its established policy of providing humanitarian and nonlethal support to Ukraine, but not direct weapons. Seoul previously helped move artillery shells to Ukraine through the United States. While South Korea arms NATO members with K2 tanks and K9 howitzers to free up older kit for the Ukrainian front, it still draws the line at any direct transfer to Kyiv. Seoul rejects Ukraine’s purchase requests as North Korea sends Russia ammunition and troops in exchange for money and military technology.

South Korean law bars direct exports of lethal weapons to countries in active conflict, a rule rooted in constitutional principles and Seoul's wariness of antagonizing Moscow and Beijing while managing the threat from the North.

Ukraine is seeking South Korean interceptor missiles for its air defenses. The official neither addressed the request specifically nor formally rejected it:

“South Korea’s supply of defense materials to any country has always been carried out in accordance with domestic law,” the official said. Seoul will continue to support Ukraine’s recovery through assistance in energy, infrastructure, healthcare, and education. 

The official also declined to confirm whether Seoul and Kyiv were discussing military support. However, he said Moscow-Pyongyang military cooperation “is directly related to our security and violates the United Nations resolutions” and should stop immediately.

Seoul’s indirect aid stopped short of direct arms transfers

In 2023, Seoul transferred hundreds of thousands of 155 mm shells to the United States under a confidential arrangement. Washington then arranged for them to reach Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported.

South Korean exports have also helped NATO members replace weapons sent to Kyiv. Poland bought South Korean K2 tanks and K9 howitzers while transferring older tanks and Polish-built Krab artillery systems to Ukraine.

Yet Seoul rejected Ukraine’s request to buy air-defense systems, radars, and artillery propellant in November 2024. In February 2026, it still limited support to humanitarian and nonlethal aid while considering NATO’s request to help purchase US weapons for Ukraine.

North Korean deployments bring the war closer to Seoul

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a decision had been made to deploy 30,000–50,000 more North Koreans to Russia. He warned that they would gain modern combat experience and Russian technology that could later threaten Asian countries. Kyiv wants South Korean air defenses and has offered cooperation on drones.

The South Korean official cited by Yonhap declined to confirm either the reported deployment or Zelenskyy’s statement that Ukrainian and South Korean diplomats were discussing possible cooperation.

North Korea is already believed to have sent approximately 20,000 combat troops and military engineers to Russia’s Kursk region, according to Yonhap. Pyongyang has earned as much as $22 billion from arming Russia, helping it finance conventional and nuclear forces.

The Japanese outlet Kyodo News reported in November 2025 that North Korea had transferred about 6.5 million rocket and artillery munitions in exchange for Russian air-defense, space, and nuclear technologies.  Moscow and Pyongyang’s 2024 mutual defense pact formalized the expanding military relationship.

Seoul says no again to Ukraine’s weapons request as Pyongyang gets ready to send Russia more troops

Ukraine is turning millions of hours of battlefield footage into fuel for its defense industry's AI. Ukraine's Defense Ministry has announced that it has opened Avengers Labs, a platform for training artificial intelligence models, to Ukrainian defense companies.

The platform is a new piece of the defense-tech ecosystem Ukraine has built around its war. Alongside the Brave1 cluster that funds and codifies weapons and the Test in Ukraine framework that trials them in combat, Avengers Labs supplies the raw material for AI, a vast, curated dataset of Russian military targets that a single private company could never assemble on its own.

The data comes from the battlefield

Avengers Labs was developed by the Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies, the team behind the DELTA battle-management system, and most of its data comes from DELTA and is constantly expanded.

The dataset captures the enemy in detail. It contains images of tanks, artillery, air-defense systems, infantry, and aerial targets, including Shahed drones and reconnaissance UAVs, a labeled library of what Russian forces look like from a drone's camera. According to the ministry, the system can significantly speed up the development of AI solutions for unmanned systems.

The AI already works in combat

A system trained on Avengers data is already in the field, analyzing over 100,000 drone video streams a month and detecting about 70% of enemy targets in real time, day and night.

The models enable more autonomous drones. Trained on Avengers data, they support automatic trajectory correction after an operator marks a target, and independent target detection by a drone in a defined area according to set mission logic, steps toward drones that find and strike targets with less human input, according to the ministry.

Partner-country firms can join too

Access extends beyond Ukraine, under vetting. The first Ukrainian defense companies have signed licensing agreements to use Avengers Labs, and companies from Ukraine's partner countries can also join, per the ministry.

The screening guards against leakage to the enemy. To gain access, companies must pass checks confirming no ties to the aggressor state, no business in Russia, no sanctions, and no activity in occupied territories.

The United States and Ukraine are working together to put fresh missiles into Ukraine's aging Soviet-era S-300 air defenses, retired US Army colonel Robert Hamilton told PBS NewsHour. These long-range systems shoot down aircraft, but the missiles that feed them have been depleted. The effort—retrofitting old rounds or building a newer variant—would revive launchers Ukraine already owns.

Ukraine's air defense runs on a shrinking supply of interceptors, with Russian ballistic and drone strikes outpacing what allies can ship. The chokepoint is production capacity, not willingness—and Hamilton frames the S-300 rebuild as one of the slower-burn fixes that ease the strain on scarce Western systems rather than replace them.

A working system near the end of 2026

Hamilton, who heads the Delphi Global Research Center, said the joint effort should come online near the end of 2026 and could turn out "100 or a couple of hundred" anti-aircraft missiles a year. He described the work as an effort to "essentially retrofit or upgrade the old S-300 missiles or a newer variant of the S-300" and give the system better capabilities.

Explore further

Ukraine drones hit Crimea’s S-300/S-400 near Kerch—and knocked out power across four occupied territories overnight

In September 2024, then-US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced at the Ramstein contact group that Washington, in partnership with several European companies, was working with Ukraine to "design and build a substitute" for the Soviet S-300 and the R-27 air-to-air missile used by fighter jets. He never spelled out what that substitute would be.

Why Ukraine's S-300s ran law

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine held roughly 25-30 S-300PT/PS battalions in varying states of readiness. As the missiles ran out, Kyiv came to lean on Western air defense systems and interceptors while Russia keeps launching mass strikes.

Explore further

“Very good results” – Wave of Ukrainian strikes across Russia and Caspian Sea overnight target warships, air defenses, logistics

Anything Ukraine can build or rebuild on its own soil is a supply that no foreign stockpile or political fight can cut off.

That same logic is pushing Kyiv toward co-producing Patriots with US firms and fielding its own ballistic interceptor—a race to turn air defense into a domestic industry before the next winter of strikes.

Ukraine's Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) destroyed a Pantsir-S1 air defense system worth an estimated $15 million and a military crane in occupied Crimea, HUR reported. The agency's Group 13 used maritime drones as drone carriers to deliver the strikes on ground targets. Separately, monitoring channels reported explosions across the peninsula from Kerch to Sevastopol overnight on 7 August, hitting the airfield Russia uses to launch Shaheds at Ukrainian cities.

FPV drones launched from Magura platforms destroy air defense

HUR's Group 13 used Magura naval platforms as floating carriers for FPV drones. The drones flew from the platforms to strike a camouflaged Pantsir-S1 and a military crane on land, the agency's video shows. HUR estimated the destroyed air defense system at $15 million.

HUR did not specify the exact location but said the operation took place in early August 2026. The Pantsir-S1 is a short-range gun-and-missile system Russia deploys to protect higher-value assets such as S-400 batteries and command posts. Each one destroyed leaves a gap in the layered coverage Russia relies on over the peninsula.

The agency noted that Group 13 operators recently struck a Podlyot radar control vehicle and a Parol-4 radar interrogator in Crimea as well.

The Pantsir kill adds to a months-long campaign that has destroyed nearly 200 Russian air defense assets in the first half of 2026 alone by the Unmanned Systems Forces.

Overnight strikes sweep peninsula from Kerch to Sevastopol

Separately, overnight on 7 August, Ukraine struck at least six locations across occupied Crimea.

Monitoring Telegram channel Krymsky Veter reported explosions and gunfire in Kerch at 02:38. Near Alushta, four strong explosions were heard in the village of Malorichenske close to a large power substation. In Sevastopol, mobile fire groups engaged targets without an air-raid alert, and residents reported a powerful explosion near Cape Fiolent.

Explore further

Ukraine’s sea drone that never touched the shore struck two Russian radars in occupied Crimea

The heaviest strikes hit the Hvardiiske military airfield, which Russia uses to launch Shahed attack drones against Ukrainian cities. Hits landed in two waves, from 03:30 to 03:39 and from 04:34 to 04:47. A fuel and lubricants depot caught fire, and small-arms ammunition began detonating, Krymsky Veter reported. Residents described two fire sites visible for kilometers. The Crimean Bridge was temporarily closed during the strikes.

In Feodosia, initial reports of a strike on the oil depot were corrected: the hit likely landed on a concentration of Russian military equipment at the former 13th military compound on the Kerch Highway. Krymsky Veter noted the same compound was struck on 22 June. A vessel also burned at sea off Gelendzhik overnight.

No official confirmation of the strikes' results has been issued. 

Latvia will open military mobilization centers in four cities and build anti-tank barriers in its capital this week as the Baltic NATO member rehearses wartime call-up procedures, Latvian Public Media (LSM) reported. The drills come as multiple Western intelligence agencies have warned that Russia may test NATO's eastern flank with a limited military provocation within years.

Latvia rehearses crisis conscription

On 8 August, Latvia's National Armed Forces (NBS) will deploy mobilization centers in Rīga, Kuldīga, Valmiera, and Alūksne. The purpose is to train and improve procedures for calling up and conscripting Latvian citizens in a crisis. Citizens who applied for voluntary reserve training will report to the centers and travel to the Infantry School in Alūksne for a three-week military course.

The course, running from 8 to 29 August, will train 114 reservists in weapons handling, combat shooting, communications, topography, terrain orientation, field combat, and advanced first aid. After completing the program, reservists will take the soldier's oath, receive a reserve soldier's certificate and a mobilization order. Reserve soldiers must refresh their skills every four years.

Both women and men — Latvian citizens aged 18 to 60 with at least primary education, intermediate Latvian, no criminal record, and good health — can apply.

Today, on 7 August, a separate exercise in the capital will test Riga's ability to erect anti-mobility engineering structures — physical obstacles designed to slow enemy forces in urban environments. 

Explore further

What Moscow does to foreign embassies, Latvia will now do to Russia’s

Defense preparations accelerate amid Russian threats

The drills are the latest in a series of concrete defense steps Latvia has taken as the threat from Russia grows. 

Latvia's military chief warned in June that Russia could exploit its drone advantage to attack the Baltics by the end of 2028. In July, Latvia hardened security at its hydroelectric dam and gas storage facility after intelligence flagged specific Russian threats, and its prime minister asked NATO for more troops and air defense. 

Latvia completed a 280-km border fence in late 2025.

US negotiators have quietly kept a deal to let Ukraine help build Patriot interceptor missiles alive, even after US President Donald Trump publicly cast doubt on it, Reuters reported. Four people familiar with the talks said Washington never ordered them stopped. Ukraine, running low on air defenses, urgently wants the missiles to blunt Russia's growing ballistic strikes.

Russian daily drone attacks forced Kyiv to chase air defense from every direction at once, including home-grown interceptors. But this year, Moscow has increasingly turned to ballistic missiles, the hardest weapons for Ukraine to stop. US-supplied PAC-3 interceptors fired by Patriot systems are among the few weapons that can reliably shoot them down, and Ukraine has now run out.

The talks Trump seemed to kill

Last week, Trump appeared to reverse course, telling reporters the US had not agreed to let Ukraine build Patriots and must be "very careful about letting somebody build them." 

According to Reuters, two sources tied that to a tense White House meeting with Zelenskyy. Yet the negotiations pressed on. 

"No order was given to halt the discussions," one source said, adding that talks continued with US arms makers and military officials.

Matthew Whitaker, Washington's envoy to NATO, is leading the drive for a deal. He visited Kyiv last month to weigh options with Ukrainian officials and weapons executives. His spokesperson framed the trip around drone collaboration that would benefit US forces, without naming the Patriot plan. 

A senior administration official told Reuters that any agreement must protect US technology. 

Reuters: The Patriot deal Trump denied is quietly still alive

What Ukraine could build

The options include making Patriot components in Ukraine and shipping them to Germany for final assembly, the sources said. A US official called that the most feasible route. Germany already produces an older Patriot model, and the advanced PAC-3, the newest Patriot interceptor, is expected to follow.

Ukraine could instead join an existing US-European Patriot program, or build a cheaper version of the PAC-3. 

It might also tap Lockheed Martin's new lower-cost interceptor, the PAC-3 ACE, unveiled last month.

A promise made, then pulled back

During a meeting with Zelenskyy in Ankara last month, Trump said the US would license Ukraine to make PAC-3s. His later reversal caught many off guard, including Zelenskyy. In a follow-up call, US Vice President JD Vance assured him that deals between presidents would hold, one source said.

Explore further

Reuters: The Patriot deal Trump denied is quietly still alive

Ukraine's clock is running

Even with a deal, Ukraine would not receive newly built interceptors for a year or more. So Kyiv is urging allies to hand over some of theirs and exploring swaps to get missiles sooner. 

Earlier, Zelenskyy warned that Ukraine had run out of Patriots. That day, it intercepted just one of 27 ballistic missiles Russia fired. 

Global stocks of high-end interceptors have shrunk since the Iran war, with Patriots once bound for Ukraine diverted to US forces and Gulf allies.

Estonia will use part of a new European Union loan to arm Ukraine with drones, drawing on a loan worth up to €2.34 billion, according to ERR. The loan will also rebuild its own air defense and ammunition stocks, and all of it must be spent by 2030.

As Moscow continues its all-out war in Ukraine, the EU's northeast is rearming fast, bracing for a Russia that regional military chiefs expect to be combat-ready again within two years.

What the loan buys

Estonia signed the financing deal with the European Commission under SAFE (Security Action for Europe), a €150 billion EU program that raises money jointly on the markets and lends it to member states on cheap terms to fast-track defense spending, its finance ministry said.

A share of Estonia's up-to-€2.34 billion will go to Ukraine as drones. The rest strengthens air defense, buys military vehicles, and refills artillery shells and other ammunition. The credit runs 45 years, and every purchase and delivery must be finished by 2030. Estonia filed its final application in November 2025.

Why the loan helps

Borrowing through SAFE lets Estonia raise money on better terms than it could alone, because the EU issues debt at lower rates. The bloc raises the money jointly and splits it among members. Estonia will hold defense spending above 5% of GDP, and the loan eases the strain that puts on its budget.

Explore further

“Ukraine is becoming a security provider for Europe”: Ukraine signs Drone Deals with Estonia, the Netherlands, and Denmark as Europe taps Kyiv’s battlefield-tested weapons technology

Estonia, a NATO and EU state of about 1.3 million people, shares a 294-kilometer border with Russia and treats Moscow's war on Ukraine as a direct threat to its own security. It has studied that war closely for years and is now racing to rebuild its air defenses and ammunition stocks.

Kadri Peters, a deputy secretary general at Estonia's Defense Ministry, said the fast-changing security situation in Europe demands stronger, quicker defense from the whole alliance. She said large-scale purchases ahead will directly affect Estonia's security and the wider region.

Explore further

US soldiers left for a “summer rotation.” Estonia doesn’t know how many are coming back—or when

In July, Estonia and the United States agreed to resume weapons deliveries in the coming months, after a pause tied to the war in Iran, with long-range ATACMS ballistic missiles the exception. In May, Washington had warned European allies of long delays as it drained its own stocks, mainly of HIMARS rocket ammunition and NASAMS air-defense missiles. The same shortages hit Ukraine the hardest: it currently struggles to shoot down Russian ballistic missiles for lack of US-made PAC-3 interceptors.

Estonia has been backing Kyiv since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. It co-leads an IT coalition that has funneled over €1.4 billion into Ukraine's drone programs, and has moved to tap Kyiv's battlefield-tested drone technology for its own forces.

There is a reason Ukraine cannot simply blow up the launchers firing ballistic missiles at its cities. Russia's Iskander launchers are extremely hard to catch, and interfering with the missiles' production is nearly as difficult, presidential adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov said on the national telethon, according to UNIAN.

The launchers survive by never staying still or coming within reach. Iskander launchers head to their firing positions only when a combat task is set, sometimes moving along forest roads for five hours to avoid detection by satellites, then deploying fast, firing, and fleeing.

They launch from 140 to 150 kilometers behind the front line, which is why catching one on the march or at its firing position is so hard.

The launcher is a fleeting target

Beskrestnov described a weapon designed to be gone before it can be hit.

"The deployment of the Iskander happens very quickly. Then the launch. The Iskander fires and then flees the position," he said.

The forest-road approach and the 140- to 150-kilometer standoff are deliberate. By staying beyond HIMARS' range and moving under tree cover to evade satellites, the launcher gives Ukraine almost no window to detect, target, and strike it before it fires and moves on.

Attacking the factories is hard too

Ukraine's other option, hitting production, faces its own obstacles. The missiles are made deep underground, where they are not easy to attack, Beskrestnov said.

He also claimed sanctions do not work well against the Iskander because it is "probably the only product made 100% from Russian resources and Russian electronics." That claim sits awkwardly against Ukraine's own documented findings.

Ukraine's sanctions commissioner, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, reported that an Iskander fired at Kyiv Oblast on 10 July held more than 140 foreign components, 62 of them American. Meanwhile, Ukraine's Defense Intelligence has said that without foreign parts, Russia cannot build the missile at all. Ukraine has repeatedly struck the plants making Iskander components, precisely because those production nodes are vulnerable.

The interception gap makes it worse

The launcher problem compounds the shortage of defenses against the missiles themselves. With Ukraine short of the Patriot interceptors that are the only reliable defense against Iskander ballistic missiles, and the launchers nearly impossible to catch, Russia can keep firing them at a pace Ukraine cannot fully answer, striking cities from safe forest positions deep behind the front.

Ukraine's president has aired a pointed suspicion about why its air-defense missiles are running short. On 5 August, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said political motives may be one reason for the reduced supply of anti-ballistic missiles, including a wish to make Ukraine more compliant, he said at a meeting of the National Security and Defense Council.

The claim points a finger at Ukraine's partners over a shortage now measured in civilian deaths. Since the start of 2026, Ukraine has begun receiving three times fewer anti-ballistic missiles, Zelenskyy said.

The deficit left Ukraine without the possibility to down any of Russia's missiles on 5 August, leading to the deaths of 17 people in Kyiv Oblast.

His suggestion that the cut may be deliberate leverage escalates a supply problem into a question about his allies' intentions.

The official reason is the Middle East

Zelenskyy first cited the explanation Ukraine has been given. The reduction was connected to war, or today it would be fair to say hostilities and wars in the Middle East, the official reason received from partners, primarily the US and also European partners, he said.

But he did not treat that as the whole story. He suggested the cut may have other causes beyond the diversion of missiles to the Middle East, where US air-defense stocks have been drawn down through the war involving Iran.

The suggestion of political pressure

Zelenskyy then made the pointed claim.

"Maybe these are also political steps to make Ukraine more compliant. In my view, not without that," he said, stating that Ukraine is in a situation of shortage of missiles able to intercept ballistics.

It is a notable accusation to level publicly, implying that a partner may be throttling the weapons Ukraine needs to survive Russian strikes in order to pressure Kyiv at the negotiating table. Zelenskyy offered it as his own view, hedged with "maybe," rather than as an established fact.

The response is to build and to beg

Zelenskyy turned the complaint into instructions. He urged the Defense Ministry and Foreign Ministry to do everything possible to ensure that partners increase supplies of relevant air-defense missiles, and told defense-industry enterprises to speed up work on Ukraine's own anti-ballistic project.

Ukraine has publicly shown off a homemade air-defense weapon that turns American anti-tank missiles into a drone-killer, The Defence Blog reported. The launcher stacks spare parts from three countries onto an ordinary military truck. It hands Ukraine a cheaper way to knock down the Russian attack drones that hit its cities.

Ukraine has become a proving ground for cheap air defense, forced there by a Russian bombing campaign that leans on mass and low cost. Then what works over Ukrainian cities is increasingly getting copied abroad.

Three countries' parts, one Ukrainian drone-killer

Ukraine's 302nd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade released an official video of the weapon, called STASH. Clips had leaked online for months, but this is the first time the military has shown it openly.

The build is a patchwork. The missile is American. The radar comes from RADA, an Israeli maker of defense electronics. The truck is a Dutch DAF, a type that the Netherlands has long supplied to Ukraine. Crews bolted them together into a single launcher.

Why a tank missile now hunts drones

The missile at the core is the Hellfire, built to punch through tanks and armored vehicles when fired from helicopters. Ukraine repurposed it to shoot things out of the sky instead.

Explore further

Ukraine’s private air defense has quadrupled since spring: businesses are now shooting down Shaheds over their own sites

Not just any Hellfire, though. This is the radar-guided Longbow version (AGM-114L), not the common laser-guided one. After launch, the missile picks out its target and stays on it without further help from the crew. The crew does not have to keep pointing anything at the drone. They can fire without staying locked in place to guide the missile. The Israeli radar spots small, low-flying drones that slip past standard air-defense sets.

What it can and can't do

The weapon reaches about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That makes it a short-range system, built to guard one specific site rather than cover wide stretches of sky the way Patriot batteries do.

It is built to stop Russia's Shahed and Geran attack drones—including the newer jet-powered versions that now fly too fast for Ukraine's cheap interceptor drones to chase down. What it cannot reach are Russia's cruise and ballistic missiles, which travel much faster still.

The cost math behind the welding

A single Patriot interceptor runs into the millions of dollars. A Shahed-type drone sets Russia back just a few tens of thousands of dollars, and it launches them in swarms of hundreds during a single night. Trading costly missiles for cheap drones is a losing exchange, and it drains Ukraine's limited stock of interceptors.

STASH is how Ukraine tries to rebalance those numbers. It leans on anti-tank missiles that are cheaper and more available than purpose-built interceptors, carried on plain trucks rather than the permanent emplacements a full battery demands. Ukraine has been chasing cheaper ways to stop drones for a while now.

Explore further

EU releases another €3.47 billion for Ukraine’s “urgent needs” – drones, missiles, air defense, and Gripen jets

Not the first improvisation

STASH is not brand-new. It draws its missile and radar from a prior system, Tempest, built by the American contractor V2X and reportedly already flying with Ukraine's Air Force. Footage of Tempest downing drones at night surfaced in January 2026. STASH appears to strip that idea down, swapping the buggy-style chassis for a simpler truck or trailer launcher—less mobile, but cheaper to run and better for guarding fixed sites.

Ukraine has welded mismatched gear together like this before, pairing donated missiles with whatever launchers and trucks it can find.

Russia's overnight missile-and-drone barrage on Kyiv and its surrounding region on 5 August destroyed the warehouses and production sites of several of Ukraine's largest retail and logistics companies, killed 17 people and wounded 44 more, and laid bare the country's dwindling ability to intercept ballistic missiles, according to Ukrainian officials.

Russia's main target on 5 August: Ukraine's warehouses

Russia has spent this year pushing its air war toward the ballistic missiles that Ukrainian defenses struggle most to stop, launching more of them than Ukraine can shoot down while its Patriot interceptor stocks run dry, and pairing them with drone waves that keep reaching homes, transit and the warehouses that feed the country.

Three Russian ballistic missiles destroyed the largest distribution center operated by Rozetka, Ukraine’s biggest online retailer, near Kyiv overnight on 5 August. Rozetka co-founder Iryna Chechotkina said the warehouse had processed more than 100,000 online orders each day and was beyond repair.

By dawn, the attack had torn through the civilian logistics network moving parcels, groceries, household goods and construction materials across the capital and its suburbs. At least 17 people were killed and 44 injured in the broader barrage, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

In its 5 August 2026 strikes, Russia destroyed a sorting center owned by Nova Poshta, Ukraine’s largest private parcel carrier, as well as major facilities operated by Epicentr, the country’s largest home-improvement retailer. Sites belonging to Novus and Fozzy Group, two major Ukrainian grocery retailers, were also damaged.

Nova Poshta said cluster munitions—bombs that scatter smaller explosives across a wide area—destroyed its Kyiv sorting center. Three people were killed and eight injured. Two of those killed were drivers for a partner carrier, while the third worked for a contractor.

Epicentr lost two major warehouse complexes and much of its ceramic-tile production. One employee was killed, and three were hospitalized at the company’s complex in Kalynivka. Its logistics center on Kyiv’s Viskozna Street burned completely, while another Russian missile destroyed the factory's kilns.

During a separate overnight attack on 3-4 August, a Russian drone destroyed a Biosphere warehouse storing household and personal-care products in Dnipro, although all employees reached shelter and no one was injured.

The Kyiv attack extended beyond commercial facilities. Russia's attack killed eight people waiting for a delayed train at Kvitneva station, a commuter stop near Brovary, east of Kyiv. Missiles also hit homes and offices, damaged an ambulance and caused an ammonia leak at a non-residential site.

An earlier Euromaidan Press report detailed the destruction across Kyiv and the surrounding region.

Why Ukraine intercepted none of the missiles

Russia launched 24 ballistic missiles and four Zircon and Oniks anti-ship missiles, high-speed weapons designed primarily to strike naval targets but also used against Ukrainian cities.

Ukraine intercepted none of the 28, the Ukrainian Air Force said. Air defenses shot down or electronically disabled 98 of the 115 accompanying drones.

Missiles and 17 drones struck 26 locations, while debris fell at another six.

Zelenskyy said ballistic-missile interceptors could have saved those killed. Ukraine’s stocks of Patriot missiles, its only reliable defense against Russian ballistic weapons, are critically depleted. 

A global interceptor shortage means manufacturers cannot produce advanced air-defense missiles fast enough to meet demand.

Russia exploited the same gap on 1 August 2026, when it fired 27 ballistic missiles at Kyiv and Ukraine intercepted only one.

Moscow may point to recent Ukrainian strikes on Wildberries logistics centers to frame its attacks as retaliation. Ukrainian officials say the Russian retailer transports military goods, including drone components and navigation equipment. The Kremlin denies that Wildberries carries military cargo.

Ukraine’s acting Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha rejected any comparison between the attacks. "Russian attacks cannot be justified by anything, including any actions by Ukraine," he said.

Ukraine's Air Force says its air defenses have destroyed more than 445,000 Russian aerial targets since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, according to figures released on 2 August.

The numbers come as Russia is reshaping much of its aerial campaign around ballistic missiles, exposing one of the few remaining vulnerabilities in Ukraine's air defense network despite its continued success against drones and cruise missiles.

The statistics were published in a statement marking more than four and a half years of resistance since Russia launched its all-out invasion on 24 February 2022. The Air Force said its personnel preserved Ukraine's air defense network under sustained missile and air attacks from the opening hours of the war, preventing Russia from achieving its initial objective of subjugating the country.

The statement paid tribute to fighter pilots, air defense missile units, radar troops, drone operators, communications specialists, and support personnel involved in defending Ukraine's airspace.

More than 65,000 Shaheds intercepted

According to the Air Force, Ukraine's air defenses have destroyed more than 445,000 aerial targets since February 2022, including:

• 91 Kh-47M2 Kinzhal aeroballistic missiles
• 794 Kalibr cruise missiles
• 2,809 Kh-101/Kh-555/Kh-55 cruise missiles
• 13 Kh-22/32 cruise missiles
• 12 Oniks anti-ship missiles
• 294 Iskander-K cruise missiles
• 346 Iskander-M and North Korean KN-23 ballistic missiles
• 12 Zircon anti-ship missiles
• 622 guided air-launched missiles
• More than 70 missiles of other types
• 65,618 Shahed attack drones
• 20,286 reconnaissance drones
• 10,604 Lancet loitering munitions
• 342,585 drones of other types

Air Force reports more than 38,000 combat sorties

The Air Force said Ukrainian military aviation carried out 38,367 sorties between 2022 and 2026, including 12,280 strike and close air support missions and 21,524 fighter cover missions.

It added that aircraft from Ukraine's Defense Forces have destroyed more than 12,000 aerial targets during the full-scale war while striking Russian command posts, logistics facilities, and concentrations of troops and military equipment.

The statement also honored fallen service members and thanked those who continue defending Ukraine's skies.

Russia's ballistic missile attacks rise, breaking through Ukraine’s proven air defenses

The figures come as Russia increasingly turns to using ballistic missiles against Ukrainian cities, which are among the most difficult threats for Ukraine's air defenses to intercept.

Russia launched 126 ballistic missiles against Ukraine in July, the highest monthly total recorded this year. The attacks included Iskander-M missiles, North Korean KN-23 ballistic missiles, and S-300 and S-400 air defense missiles repurposed for ground strikes.

The shift is exposing a growing vulnerability in Ukraine's air defense network. Unlike drones and cruise missiles, ballistic missiles can only be reliably intercepted by a limited number of advanced systems, primarily the US-made Patriot with PAC-3 interceptors, which remain in short supply in the country. 

Ukraine has urged international partners to provide more of these interceptors, but these efforts have not led to any major supply breakthroughs and have so far not made a significant difference.

The trend towards ballistic missile use suggests Russia is increasingly exploiting one of the few remaining gaps in Ukraine's air defense shield.

While Ukraine continues to destroy large numbers of drones and cruise missiles, the growing use of ballistic missiles is placing mounting pressure on its most limited and hardest-to-replace interceptor stocks, all while causing mass civilian casualties and major damage to cities across the country.

One of the worst consequences of Russia's war, and of Iran's tactics, is that potential aggressors worldwide now see how much damage ballistic missiles can do to human life. So the global ballistic threat will grow, and anti-ballistic defenses must grow with it, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says, according to UNIAN.

Ukraine has put a number on the shield it wants to build itself against ballistic missiles: 100 systems. These systems are planned to be built as part of its FREYJA anti-ballistic project.

Zelenskyy frames the project as an answer to a threat spreading beyond Ukraine.

FREYJA is Ukraine's own interceptor, recycling a Soviet S-300 missile with a German seeker at roughly $700,000 per shot, a fraction of a $3.8 million Patriot, though its maker, Fire Point, does not target a first ballistic intercept until late 2027.

FREYJA as a shared European system

Zelenskyy pitches the Ukrainian project as Europe's future shield.

"Our FREYJA can become a common system for Europe that provides integrated protection. FREYJA will be fast to produce and tested by war," he said, offering to share all the know-how with partners if the system proves itself.

The project already has a coalition. Ten nations joined the European Anti-Ballistic Coalition in July, per Euromaidan Press, with Ukraine contributing the missile and partners supplying radars, command systems, and components Ukraine does not make.

The shield is a bet against a shortage

The 100-systems goal collides with the interceptor shortage that FREYJA is meant to solve. FREYJA has three tracks, including a transatlantic dimension and Ukraine's relationship with the US, Zelenskyy said, without disclosing details, and Ukraine needs both funding and certain components to build it.

In the meantime, Ukraine leans on the countries that already have Patriots. While Ukraine builds FREYJA and runs short on its current anti-ballistic systems, those partners that lack the production Ukraine needs but hold Patriot missiles today can invest those interceptors into Ukraine's defense, Zelenskyy said, welcoming them into the anti-ballistic coalition. The 100-system shield is the long game, while the borrowed Patriots are what keep Ukrainian skies covered until it exists.

A drone came down on a beach full of Russian holidaymakers, and the evidence points to Russia's own air defense bringing it there. On 3 August, drones attacked Krasnodar Krai, and one crashed onto a beach in Arkhipo-Osipovka near Gelendzhik, killing at least six people, three of them children, and injuring around 40, Krasnodar Governor Veniamin Kondratyev said.

Russian outlet Agentstvo and OSINT analysts assessed that the drone likely fell because of Russian air-defense fire rather than a direct hit, citing gunfire audible in footage before the drone dived and an abrupt change in its flight path.

The beach sits directly in front of the Rassvet resort, a facility of NPO Mashinostroyeniya, one of Russia's key missile-manufacturing enterprises.

The warning system did not sound

Survivors say they had no notice. Local residents and holidaymakers complained that no air-raid alert sounded at all, though warning systems are installed in the village, and the Russian channel Astra also noted that no alert was heard in the region during the attack, per the reports.

People on the beach were in the open, with little chance to take cover, even if they had been warned. The absence of a siren in a resort packed at the height of the summer season left sunbathers and swimmers with no warning that a drone was overhead and being fired at.

The target was a missile maker's resort

NPO Mashinostroyeniya develops cruise missiles for the Russian army, and its Rassvet recreation base was the apparent target roughly 300 meters from where the drone came down, the Supernova Telegram channel reported.

Ukraine strikes Russian military-industrial sites across the country, and a missile-development enterprise is a legitimate military target. What turned a strike near a defense plant into a mass-casualty event on a beach was, by the analysts' account, Russian air defense knocking the drone down over the crowd rather than away from it. Ukraine had not commented on the strike.

The dynamic is one Ukraine knows intimately in reverse

Russian air-defense missiles and the debris of intercepted drones regularly fall on Ukrainian cities, killing civilians, and Ukraine has long documented how interception over populated areas kills the people it is meant to protect.

Ukraine's military intelligence turned its newest sea drones into carriers for FPV strike drones and knocked out two Russian radar targets in occupied Crimea, according to Ukraine's Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR). The strike let its uncrewed boats reach Russian targets on land, a move the unit called a shift of the war to a new plane. HUR released footage of the operation on 3 August.

Sea drones that launched FPV drones onto land

HUR's special unit Group 13 ran the operation in occupied Crimea in late July 2026, the agency reported. The operators used the newest versions of Magura naval platforms, this time set up as FPV-drone carriers, to hit Russian ground targets on the peninsula. It was the first operation to show the newest Magura's effectiveness.

The aerial FPV drones struck a control vehicle from a Russian Podlyot radar system. They also hit a Parol-4 radar interrogator, part of the system Russian forces use to tell friendly aircraft from hostile ones.

The footage opens with a Russian projectile fired from the Crimean coast. It streaks past a Ukrainian naval drone and misses. After a cut, a naval drone fires anti-air missiles. The video then shows an FPV aerial drone launching from a naval drone. Two FPV drones then dive into the two radar targets.

The Maguras that hunted ships now threaten land

The Group 13 commander, callsign Thirteenth, framed the strikes as a turn in the war. 

"From now on our Maguras threaten the Russian occupiers on land too, a fundamental shift of the fight to another plane," he said. 

At sea, Group 13 has destroyed nine Russian ships and damaged five, HUR says. It has also destroyed three enemy helicopters and damaged one, and destroyed two Russian fighter jets.

Russia fired more ballistic missiles at Ukraine in July than in any other month of 2026, around 126 of them, according to the monitoring project Oko Gora. The barrage mixed Iskander-M missiles, North Korean rounds, and air-defense missiles repurposed to hit ground targets. It climbed as Ukraine's shield against exactly these weapons kept thinning.

July outran every month this year

The climb is steep. Russia's monthly ballistic launches ran from 74 in January to 116 in February, then fell to 39 in March, 50 in April, 86 in May, and 96 in June, before last month topped them all, the project counted. The notable addition was the S-300 and S-400 air-defense missiles fired at ground targets alongside the Iskander-M and North Korean ballistic missiles.

The North Korean missile returned

One weapon stood out for its comeback. On 30 July, Russia used a North Korean KN-23 for the first time in a long while, striking the village of Radushne near Kryvyi Rih. The strike killed five members of one family, and the missile's reappearance suggested a fresh shipment from Pyongyang.

Interceptions returned, then collapsed

Around 14 July, Ukrainian air defenders resumed shooting down Russian ballistics, and on 9 July President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine would soon receive a US batch of PAC-3 interceptors. By month's end the gains were gone. Ukraine's Air Force downed one missile out of 27 on 1 August, and one of nine on 30 July. As recently as June, Ukraine had stopped about four in ten ballistics, a rate that has since fallen toward zero as PAC-3 stocks run dry.

Ukraine is trying to win back the soldiers who walked away by giving them the choice of where to fight. The voluntary return program for service members who went absent without leave is expanding, and those who qualify can now choose from more than 70 units in the Armed Forces, the National Guard, or the State Special Transport Service, the Defense Ministry announces.

The expansion widens a program that answers Ukraine's deepest manpower problem. Soldiers can file a report to return through 20 September 2026, and the simplified program is open to service members whose unauthorized absence, known in Ukraine as SZCh, was recorded on or before 12 June 2026.

The program is a response to a desertion crisis that has grown throughout the war. Some 51,000 Ukrainian soldiers left their units without leave in 2024, more than double the year before, with fatigue cited as a primary cause, bringing the cumulative total to more than 100,000. The root is a service without an end date: soldiers mobilized in 2022 have had no legal pathway home, and exhausted men have left anyway, chaotically, when the state would not release them on a schedule it managed.

What the expanded program offers

The Defense Ministry has widened the list of units to give returning soldiers more say in where and how they serve. The expansion lets them serve in a preferred direction, choose a desired position and commander, and apply their previous experience, the ministry said.

"Drivers, UAV operators, clerks, rifle troops: the army needs everyone," said Deputy Defense Minister Mstyslav Banik.

The list includes mechanized, assault, airborne, drone, artillery, and other units, each requiring soldiers with different experience and specialties, and is viewable on the program's official site and in the Army+ app when filing the report.

The return program is one half of Ukraine's manpower squeeze

The effort to coax back soldiers who left runs alongside a harder push to find and mobilize more, two sides of the same shortage. The return program is part of the reform package the ousted Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov launched in June 2026, which also created fixed-term contracts with a guaranteed end date to replace open-ended service.

The army's new leadership is working on the same problem from the other end. Commander-in-Chief Mykhailo Drapatyi has launched a force-wide manning audit to identify soldiers who have been kept away from the front lines, and investigators have swept through recruitment offices nationwide. The return program's logic is the gentler side of that drive: rather than only hunting for manpower through mobilization, the state is trying to make it easy and dignified for the soldiers it has already trained to return on their own terms.

On 1 August, Russia burned the vehicles that rushed to Ukrainian civilians after its terrorist attacks. Russian forces hit the territory of Kyivmedspetstrans twice during their massive strike on Kyiv, and while the workers fortunately escaped injury, five ambulances burned down completely, the Kyiv City State Administration reported.

The strike crippled part of the fleet that responds to exactly these attacks. The double strike on the ambulance depot was part of a combined attack that killed at least nine people across Kyiv.

Kyivmedspetstrans is the municipal organization that operates the capital's ambulances and specialized emergency medical transport. The Russian strike partially destroyed four of its buildings while damaging several more premises.

"Twenty vehicles that served the capital's healthcare facilities sustained significant damage," the Ukrainian authorities said.

The barrage that hit the ambulances

The strike on the medical depot came during one of the heaviest ballistic attacks on the capital of the summer. On the night of 1 August, Russian forces launched a combined strike using 35 missiles and 185 attack drones of various types.

The missile mix was overwhelmingly ballistic. Russia fired 27 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, four Zircon anti-ship missiles, two Kh-59/69 guided aviation missiles, and two Kh-31 anti-radar missiles. Ukraine's air defenses managed to shoot down only one Iskander-M ballistic missile and one Kh-59/69.

Against 27 ballistic missiles, Ukraine intercepted only one because the Patriot is the only system that reliably engages Iskander-M, Zircon, and similar high-speed weapons, and Ukraine has run out of Patriot interceptors.

Striking the ambulances twice fits a documented pattern

Hitting a medical-transport depot twice in one attack is not incidental, and it carries the marks of a tactic Ukraine has documented across the war. A second strike on the same site endangers the emergency crews responding to the first, and destroying ambulances degrades the capacity to save the wounded from the very barrage that created them.

Russia has repeatedly used "double-tap" strikes that hit a target, wait for rescuers and medics to arrive, then strike again, a tactic Ukrainian prosecutors and international monitors have flagged as targeting first responders. Ukraine documented the same method days earlier, when Russia struck a passenger train in Zaporizhzhia Oblast twice.

Russia fired 27 ballistic missiles at Kyiv on 1 August, and Ukraine could stop only one. A massive overnight Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv killed at least nine people, damaged the Lithuanian embassy, and destroyed part of the city's ambulance fleet, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine has run out of interceptors for its Patriot systems. Meanwhile, Russia continues to target Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy, Kharkiv, and Poltava oblasts.

The interceptor shortage is now measured in bodies

During the attack, Ukraine's air defenders could engage the drones and the eight non-ballistic missiles, but against 27 ballistic missiles, the weapons, except for the Patriot, could not reliably stop them; they had almost nothing to fire.

"Every package of ballistic missile interceptors saves the lives of our people. Every night without them results in more casualties," Zelenskyy said.

This is the concrete form of a shortage that has run through Ukraine's diplomacy all summer, the 40% ballistic-interception rate in June now fallen closer to zero as stocks run dry.

The strike came days after Zelenskyy met the makers of the Patriot in Washington, where joint production, in the manufacturers' own words, was still in the "early days," and the missiles Ukraine needs tonight still depend on American stocks that are not arriving fast enough.

The strike hit an embassy, a school, and the ambulances

The attack damaged the city's civilian and diplomatic fabric. Russia's attack damaged 18 residential buildings, a school, and critical infrastructure, and the Lithuanian embassy suffered limited damage, though no embassy staff was harmed.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha condemned the embassy strike as a violation of international norms.

"Russian terror spares no one and does not respect any international norms, including the Vienna Convention. It can only be stopped through strength and with sufficient air defense," Sybiha said, thanking Lithuania for standing with Ukraine and offering any help needed.

Russia claimed it hit only military targets

Moscow's account of the night bore no relation to the residential buildings and the dead. Russia's Defense Ministry claimed the strike hit "military-industrial complex facilities and logistics centers" in Kyiv and said nothing about the numerous civilian casualties, per its own statement.

Friday evening, 19:00, they met again. The crowd wasn't uniform: students, pensioners, whole families who'd come with small children, couples. A five-year-old girl in fluffy earmuffs held her own cardboard protest sign. A few soldiers among them. Several hundred people, loose across the steps beneath the Shevchenko monument, the poet's bronze hand open above them.

The mood was quiet, more communion than fury, people just standing together in the fading light. The signs were as diverse as the attendees. One sign, in green marker with a row of red hearts, read "Mykhailo Vasyliovych, we believe in you!!!" Another, block letters on brown card: "Fedorov is our Minister of Defense." A third, held high near the scaffolding: "Fedorov, minister of victory." The child's placard read simply: "My first placard."

Protests like this have been ongoing in cities across Ukraine since 16 July, amid President Zelenskyy's Cabinet shakeup that had the popular defense minister fired. Participants want Mykhailo Fedorov reinstated and say they will stay until their demand is granted.

Fedorov is not a career soldier: he built Ukraine's Diia digital-state platform and, as digital-transformation minister, drove the drone-procurement push that turned cheap unmanned systems into the country's most-used weapon against Russia's invasion. To the people on the square he is the man who stands for winning the war with technology rather than with bodies—and his removal, after barely six months at the ministry, landed as that bet being called off.

A year ago the same kind of crowd defended institutions: the anti-corruption bureau and prosecutor's office, when the government moved to strip their independence. This time the placards carry one man's surname. The instrument is the same; what it is pointed at has narrowed from a rule to a person.

That 2025 anti-corruption protest

They came. They cussed. They won.

What a passerby would not have guessed is that no one on the square could say who had called it. The rally assembles by loudspeaker and group chat—a woman with a megaphone naming the next time to gather, a Telegram channel filling in the rest.

Kyiv-based Zinaida Averina, who helped launch last year's anti-corruption protests, says this wave has no single leader or even a single group of organizers: each local initiative, she wrote, plugs in and syncs "small pieces" into one shared wave. In the middle of a full-scale war, in roughly twenty cities, Ukrainians are holding open-ended nightly rallies that no party organized and no leader directs.

The demand, and the reason behind it

Protesters in Lviv began the open-ended rallies on 24 July. "The main demand is the appointment of Fedorov as minister of defense," said Dmytro, 24, who described the dismissal as a violation of a social contract. "This has become a systemic problem when the entire Cabinet of Ministers is dismissed without any explanation given to us."

The crowds made two demands: remove Oleksandr Syrskyi as commander-in-chief, and bring Fedorov back. The first was met within days—Syrskyi was dismissed and replaced by the more popular Mykhailo Drapatyi. The second was refused.

Iryna, 23, said she felt a violation of reciprocity between citizen and state. "Through documentation, taxes, and declarations, we are always accountable to the state, but the state is not as accountable to us as it should be," she said. She had chosen to stay in Ukraine when she could have left abroad as a refugee, she said, and wanted transparency in how personnel decisions are made.

What almost no Gen-Z on the square could say precisely was what, exactly, was being done wrong—only that something was. It is the same barometer that worked a year ago: most of the anti-corruption protesters could not have explained what the bureau adjudicates, but they knew corruption was being shielded, and they acted the only way they knew.

Explore further

“They removed the auditor, not the thieves”: why Ukrainians are protesting Zelenskyy’s reshuffle

Blogger-driven outrage and media bombshells

In many countries, the media struggle to get Gen Zs interested in politics. In Ukraine, bloggers fill that niche. Media activist and volunteer Serhii Sternenko has spent the protest days explaining the firing to a Gen-Z audience—one stream making the case against Syrskyi drew more than 842,000 views.

What they sense, and what Sternenko names for them, is an old-army culture—"sovok," in the protest's own shorthand—of loyalty over competence and lives spent cheaply, against the newer Ukraine Fedorov stood for. Fedorov, in this telling, was pushed out for trying to change it.

The sensing rests on something real. In late June the outlet Babel published a two-month investigation into the 425th "Skelia" assault regiment, reporting at least 25 non-combat deaths of recruits in training over roughly six months—a toll that has since risen past 30 as more families came forward—with accounts of beatings and torture and official causes recorded as illness. State investigators, police, the military prosecutor and the ombudsman have opened proceedings, and the regiment's commander has been suspended. Syrskyi has called it a shameful situation and blamed individual offenders. Sternenko calls it a systemic pattern—a characterization the investigations have not established.

Why the protests went open-ended

The escalation on 24 July followed the president's decision not to nominate Fedorov. "As long as necessary, we will keep coming out until the government hears us," said Yevheniia Kupriienko, 23.

Andrii, 23, rated the government's transparency at one out of ten and said protesters want parliament to act as an independent institution rather than a rubber stamp: "decisions cannot be made by one person in the country without any commentary or communication with the people."

The man at the center of it describes something more tangled than the chant. In an interview on 29 July, Fedorov said the main reason for his removal was not the clash with Syrskyi at all. Reshaping defense procurement and tenders, he said, "stepped on the interests of many people and companies," after which pressure on his team built through the spring. He called the government's collapse a possible "screen" for his dismissal, and said he never fought for the post and would have gone quietly had someone simply explained why.

Explore further

The Syrskyi feud was not it: why Ukraine really dropped its drone-war minister

Even the adulation makes him uneasy. His wife, Anastasia, called the frenzy around him a "sick cult of personality." The crowd chanted his name at a Kyiv music festival anyway, his face on the big screen. The man the movement is built around, and the person closest to him, are both declining the icon it has made of him.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Реальний Київ (@kiev_real)

A soldier, and a philosopher, dissent

Andrii said he had come to stand up for the voices of Ukraine's soldiers. One serviceman passing by did not recognize himself in that description. "I know neither Drapatyi nor Fedorov. I can talk about my company commander or battalion commander," he said. He questioned how civilians, and young women in particular, could judge how senior officials are appointed, and said of the leadership: "They have big brains, they know what they are doing."

His doubt is not only his. It is the worry named this week by the philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko, president of PEN Ukraine: that the tech dream the protesters chant for is real but incomplete, and that there is no alternative to massive military mobilization. "Without technology we won't win the war, but with technology alone we won't win it either. We still need people," he said. A street that senses correctly that something is wrong, in his account, is a reliable alarm—not a mechanism for choosing who runs the war.

Yet other soldiers support the protests. Veteran Dmytro Koziatynskyi, one of the Kyiv protest initiators, sparked a march "for dialogue in reform" held on vul. Khreshchatyk on 31 July. He demands Zelenskyy give Fedorov a year to conduct reforms and then "make decisions based on results."

The predictable counter-narratives have arrived too: claims that the rallies are paid, which Fedorov himself has rejected. Ukraine's disinformation center has also flagged Russian attempts to exploit the moment abroad. None of it touches the crowds on Ukraine's own squares.

Is this Euromaidan?

The comparison to the Euromaidan Revolution, in which the Russian-aligned president Yanukovych fled in the winter of 2014 after three months of protests against a rejected EU Association agreement, comes up constantly, and the protesters do not agree on it. One participant argued the mechanism is the same even if the scale is not: "No matter who the president is, if he doesn't listen, that was Yanukovych's mistake."

The serviceman rejected the comparison entirely. In 2013 the choice was between the European Union and Russia, and Russia's response to that choice produced the war Ukraine is now fighting. The present situation—a fired minister—is a different matter entirely, he said.

Halyna, 88, who watched the Euromaidan Revolution from Lviv while her son was in Kyiv, said the two are not comparable in intensity. "In 2013, the Euromaidan was such that I can't even describe it to you," she said. "Well, now the protests are not like that. People are just relaxing."

She supports them anyway. People are tired of lies and tired of a war Russia forced on them, she said, and the worst of it is that young people are dying with no end in sight. She wants to live long enough to see Ukraine at peace and left alone. Whether the rallies continue, she did not know. "I think the clock is ticking."

Explore further

Ukraine’s defense minister explained how the country buys weapons—after he was sacked

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Реальний Київ (@kiev_real)

Polish prosecutors have identified the cruise missile that crashed in eastern Poland during Russia's mass overnight attack on Ukraine yesterday, according to Ukrinform. Investigators traced the weapon to a recent Russian production run and dated its manufacture, with a Ukrainian expert helping confirm the find. 

Prosecutors trace the missile to a Moscow-area plant

Marcin Kozak, spokesman for the District Prosecutor's Office in Lublin, spoke at a media briefing on Friday, a Ukrinform correspondent reported on 31 July. He said the fallen weapon was a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile. Investigators reached that conclusion after examining the impact site in Lublin Voivodeship and the fragments recovered there. The same work let them date the weapon's manufacture and trace where in Russia it was built.

"Preliminary work examining the site and the traces found — that is, elements of the aerial object — allows us to state unequivocally what object we are dealing with," Kozak said. "This is a Kh-101 missile, manufactured in the second quarter of 2026 at one of the enterprises in Moscow Oblast."

That places the weapon's origin at a plant in the Moscow area, the region ringing the Russian capital. A Ukrainian expert arrived in Poland yesterday evening and joined the identification.

Explore further

Warsaw confirms a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile overshot Ukraine and hit a field in Poland

How the missile crossed into Poland

Yesterday, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk confirmed that a Kh-101 had crossed into Polish airspace during the overnight barrage. It came down about 50 kilometers from Lublin, leaving behind a crater where its warhead exploded. Poland put its air defenses on alert and scrambled military aircraft as Russia's missiles neared the border. Air raid sirens sounded in Lublin around 03:50 local time, and crews later found the crater and scattered debris around 95 km into Poland.

The Russian missile either strayed into Poland or was deliberately directed there during Russia's mass attack on Ukraine overnight on 30 July. Russia sent missiles and drones across the country, and several areas reported hits and fires. Its strikes hit Lviv, Kyiv, and Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, where the barrage also killed civilians in central Ukraine.

After the missile fell, two disinformation campaigns spread through Poland's information space, one aimed at Ukraine and the other at the Polish government.

Tusk also signaled that Warsaw would soon weigh sending Ukraine more missiles for its Patriot air defense systems.

Poland will consider providing Ukraine with additional Patriot interceptor missiles after a Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace during Moscow's latest mass attack on Ukraine, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on 30 July.

Speaking at the site where a suspected Russian Kh-101 cruise missile crashed in Poland's Lublin Voivodeship, Tusk said Warsaw would review further military assistance to Ukraine following the incident, according to Ukrinform.

Poland weighs additional Patriot missiles

"After this incident, together with the defense minister, we will consider as soon as possible the issue of further assistance to Ukraine, including the transfer of additional missiles for Patriot systems, should such a need arise," Tusk said.

The announcement follows Russia's overnight missile and drone barrage against Ukraine, during which a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile flew roughly 95 kilometers into Polish territory before crashing in a field. Polish authorities said they scrambled an F-16 fighter jet and were prepared to shoot the missile down had it continued deeper into the country.

Explore further

Warsaw confirms a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile overshot Ukraine and hit a field in Poland

Patriot interceptor missiles are currently Ukraine's most effective defense against Russian ballistic missiles. Ukraine has repeatedly warned it is running short of interceptor missiles, while Russia has intensified its use of ballistic weapons that can only be shot down by a limited number of advanced air defense systems.

Tusk added that no country has completely secure airspace.

"There is no sky – not in the United States, not in Israel, not in Ukraine, and not in Russia – that is 100% safe," the Polish prime minister said.

Tusk: Next 100 days could decide the war

Tusk said he discussed the battlefield situation and prospects for ending the war during talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday.

"After my conversation with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, one thing is quite clear: the next 100 days could determine the outcome of this war. It's fifty-fifty," Tusk said, according to Ukrinform.

Investigation into missile incursion continues

Tusk said there was currently no evidence that Poland itself had been the intended target of the missile.

He added that the United States, European Union member states, and Norway had offered assistance with the investigation. Ukraine has also proposed helping examine the incident, and Polish authorities plan to use the expertise of Ukrainian specialists.

The missile incursion occurred during one of Russia's largest aerial attacks in recent months, which killed at least eight civilians across Ukraine and injured more than 50 others. Officials have said the object that crashed in Lublin Voivodeship was most likely a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile.

Explore further

Two children pulled from the rubble alive, three did not survive—one village near Kryvyi Rih after the Russian missile attack

A Russian cruise missile crossed deep into Poland and crashed in a field during Russia's mass overnight strike on Ukraine, Polish and Ukrainian officials said. Warsaw says it scrambled a fighter jet and was ready to shoot the missile down had it flown on. The same barrage killed civilians across Ukraine and sent hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles at its cities.

A Kh-101 crossed nearly 100 km into Poland

In the early hours of 30 July, a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile flew into Poland and came down about 95 km from the Ukrainian border, the Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi reported. 

Poland's Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz called it an extremely difficult night for the country's air defense and said an unidentified object had fallen in a field.

The missile in Poland was one of 74 missiles and 265 drones that Russia fired at Ukraine overnight — 61 Kh-101 and Kalibr cruise missiles, four Zircon and Onyx, and nine ballistic Iskander-M, S-400, and KN-23. 

Ukraine's acting Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha noted that the Kh-101 missile crossed into Poland, called it a violation of NATO airspace, and said Kyiv is informing partners and international organizations about the attack.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk later said everything indicated it was a Kh-101, and that Polish forces were ready to shoot it down had it continued deeper.

Explore further

Two children pulled from the rubble alive, three did not survive—one village near Kryvyi Rih after the Russian missile attack

Poland scrambled a jet and tracked the missile

During the attack, Poland's Operational Command set out the sequence. 

• Around 03:29 Polish time, one object came within about 5 km of the border, then turned away. 
• At 3:40, radar caught an unidentified object moving west over Polish territory, and an F-16 went up to identify and intercept it. At 3:46, it vanished from the screens before it could be identified. 
• Sirens sounded for Lublin and much of the voivodeship only around 3:50. 
• A helicopter crew later located the probable crash site in open ground near Tarnawa-Kolonia, in Lublin Voivodeship. 

Ukrainian monitoring channels eRadar and Strategic Aviation placed a cruise missile over Poland at 04:40 Kyiv time, equal to 03:40 in Warsaw. The monitoring channel Strategic Aviation tracked it over Lublin Voivodeship, which borders Ukraine's Volyn Oblast.

Explore further

The Belarusian tunnel to the EU was almost done. Then Lithuania drilled a hole in exactly the wrong place—for the diggers

At least eight civilians killed in Ukraine during the same attack

In Ukraine, one of the Russian missiles killed a family — parents and three children — in a direct hit on their home near Kryvyi Rih, while rescuers pulled two more children from the rubble alive. In Lviv, western Ukraine, another missile destroyed apartments, injured dozens including children, and damaged two kindergartens and a school. Russia's strike killed at least eight people across Ukraine and injured dozens, with civilian casualties in Kyiv, Poltava, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Sumy, Vinnytsia, and Cherkasy.

Not the first Russian missile over Poland

This was not the first Russian cruise missile to cross into Poland. In 2023, a Kh-55 flew several hundred kilometers over Polish territory before it fell near Bydgoszcz. Earlier in July, the Polish outlet Onet, citing intelligence and diplomatic sources, warned that Poland could become a target of Russian provocations meant to test NATO's resolve, with strikes on critical infrastructure among the scenarios named.

Ukraine's military intelligence has destroyed one of Russia's electronic-warfare stations in temporarily occupied Crimea, the country's Defense Intelligence agency (HUR) said. Fighters caught the coastal complex on the peninsula and published video of the strike, the latest in a run of intelligence operations stripping Russia's sensors off Crimea. The station was built to listen in on and jam communications across a wide area, and none of that reach kept it alive.

A jamming station that could not save itself

In the night of 26 to 27 July 2026, fighters from HUR's Department of Unmanned Systems found and destroyed the Russian Murmansk-BN electronic-warfare station near Cape Fiolent in occupied Crimea, HUR reported on Telegram, sharing footage of the hit.

The Murmansk-BN is a coastal complex that Russian forces use for radio reconnaissance, intercepting signals, and jamming shortwave communications, HUR said. Its range can reach up to 5,000 kilometers. A station meant to jam and silence an enemy's communications across that distance did nothing to detect the drone closing on it.

What the Murmansk-BN does

The Murmansk-BN is a strategic, long-range electronic-warfare system. Made by the Russian concern KRET, it entered service in 2014 and was first fielded in occupied Crimea, south of Sevastopol. It works in the high-frequency band, the shortwave range armies use for long-distance radio when other links fail.

Western analysts have documented the same system type suppressing high-frequency traffic over great distances. That is what makes each one Ukraine removes a hole in Russia's electronic cover rather than a small loss.

Days after an S-400, another Crimea kill

The jammer is the second high-value Russian system this unit has taken off the peninsula in days. Days ago, HUR's drone operators burned an S-400 Triumf launcher and its 96L6 radar in occupied Crimea, the long-range battery Russia leans on to shoot down aircraft and missiles.

Both hits fit a wider pattern. Ukraine's drone crews have struck close to 200 Russian air-defense assets in the first half of 2026, and over the unit's life have struck 76 radars and 31 electronic-warfare systems among a larger tally, thinning the cover Russia depends on over occupied territory.

Russia struck cities across Ukraine with a mass wave of missiles and drones overnight into 30 July 2026, killing civilians, including children, and injuring dozens, according to Ukraine's Air Force, State Emergency Service, and local authorities. Rescuers dug through collapsed homes in Lviv, in the capital, and in a village near Kryvyi Rih, and one Russian cruise missile crossed the border into Poland. It was the first mass strike on Ukraine's western oblasts since March.

The scale of the attack

Ukraine's Air Force tracked 358 incoming weapons — 74 missiles and 284 drones of various types. Air defenses shot down or suppressed 320 of them, 55 missiles and 265 drones. The missiles included Tsirkon and Oniks anti-ship missiles, Iskander-M, S-400, and North Korea's KN-23 ballistics, and Kh-101 and Kalibr cruise missiles, alongside Shahed, Gerbera, Italmas, and decoy drones launched from four Russian regions.

The ballistic missiles remain the biggest problem for Ukraine. Of the nine Russia fired, air defenses stopped only one. Impacts landed at 20 locations, with debris falling on 13 more.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy put the current nationwide toll at eight dead and dozens wounded in the capital and across ten oblasts. He tied the losses directly to the missing air defenses. 

"Protection from the Russian missile threat is the most important task for saving our people's lives," he wrote. "Untimely help, delays in supplying anti-ballistic missiles — that is exactly this destruction, exactly these casualties that, unfortunately, we have today."

A family of six killed near Kryvyi Rih

The heaviest loss of life came in Radushne, a village in Kryvyi Rih district of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. An Iskander-M ballistic missile hit a house where a large family lived. Six people died, three of them children, and eight were wounded, the head of the Kryvyi Rih Defense Council, Oleksandr Vilkul, reported.

The head of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Oleksandr Hanzha, named the children killed as a six-year-old girl and boys of 11 and 17. An 84-year-old woman was hospitalized in serious condition, and a 49-year-old woman and boys of 6 and 15 were taken to hospital in moderate condition. Two houses were destroyed and five damaged. Rescuers pulled two children from the rubble alive.

Lviv: homes, a school, two kindergartens

Lviv neighborhoods took some of the worst damage. The number of wounded recently rose to 26, with 15 hospitalized, children among them, the head of Lviv Oblast, Maksym Kozytskyi, reported. One child was in the hospital.

Two residential buildings on Patona and Vyhovskoho streets were hit, and more than 20 apartment buildings were damaged, along with lyceum school No. 15 — where 140 windows and four doors were blown out — and two kindergartens. Mayor Andrii Sadovyi described a direct hit and no military target anywhere near it. 

"Here on Patona we see a direct missile hit. The floors have essentially been sheared off," he said. "They simply attack residential buildings, kill people directly. There are no military targets here, nothing at all."

Rescuers freed a woman, a man, and his six-year-old son from a collapsed building, the Lviv Oblast prosecutor's office said. A crane was used to lift people from a damaged five-story block through a blocked stairwell.

One killed in Kyiv

In the capital, one person died and two were hurt, the Kyiv Military Administration and the Emergency Service reported. Fires broke out in two districts: market pavilions in Obolon and a garage cooperative in Sviatoshyn, where firefighters found a body while putting out the flames and hospitalized an injured man, the emergency service said.

In Skybyn, in Brovary district of Kyiv Oblast, a strike partly destroyed a two-story house and wounded five people, including a 16-year-old boy, the emergency service confirmed.

Poltava, Zhytomyr, Mykolaiv, and the coast

In Poltava district, warehouses caught fire from the strikes and one person died, the head of Poltava Oblast, Vitalii Diakivnych, said. A Nova Poshta parcel terminal was also hit, with no casualties there.

Mykolaiv Oblast came under a night of drone attacks that damaged port infrastructure, warehouses, homes, an ambulance, and an administrative building, but wounded no one, the oblast administration reported. 

In Kharkiv, a jet-powered Shahed hit an industrial zone, Mayor Ihor Terekhov reported. 

The Russian strikes injured three children and two adults in Zhytomyr Oblast, local authorities said.

Air defenses also worked over Kirovohrad Oblast, where a private yard was damaged in Svitlovodsk and no one was hurt, the oblast administration said.

Explore further

Moscow struggles to stockpile all the missiles it needs—so it fires them straight off the line, Ukraine says

A cruise missile in Poland

One Russian cruise missile crossed into Poland during the attack and came down in Lublin voivodeship, near the village of Targowisko, where a blast woke residents and rescuers found a crater in a field, the outlet lublin112 reported. Polish forces had put military aircraft into the air hours earlier because of Russia's long-range strikes on Ukraine, the country's Operational Command said, with fighters and an early-warning plane airborne and ground air defenses at readiness.

It was not the first such incursion. In 2023 a Russian Kh-55 flew several hundred kilometers over Polish territory before it fell near the city of Bydgoszcz. Earlier in July, the Polish outlet Onet, citing intelligence and diplomatic sources, warned that Poland could become a target of Russian provocations meant to test NATO's resolve.

Ukraine has lost another F-16. During a combat mission on one sector of the front, an F-16 fighter of the Ukrainian Air Force experienced an onboard emergency, forcing the pilot to eject, the Air Force reported on Telegram.

Every F-16 lost matters more than the airframe, because Ukraine has so few and needs them so badly. The fighters are instrumental as a line of air defense against the missiles and drones Russia launches in massed nightly attacks.

On 29 July 2026, contact was lost with the F-16, which was flying a combat mission to intercept enemy aerial targets on one sector of the front, and preliminary data indicate an onboard emergency forced the pilot to eject, according to the Air Force.

The pilot is now completely safe, was successfully evacuated, and was taken to a medical facility for examination. Experts and law enforcement are working at the crash site, and no civilian casualties or destruction were recorded.

The pilot's survival sets this loss apart

That the pilot survived is the most important fact, because Ukraine's F-16 losses have more often taken the pilot with them.

Ukraine has paid a heavy price for these aircraft and their pilots. Since receiving its first F-16s in mid-2024, Ukraine had lost four of them by August 2025, with three pilots killed and one ejecting safely, per Euromaidan Press.

Oleksii "Moonfish" Mes was killed in the first loss on 26 August 2024.

Captain Pavlo Ivanov, 26, died on 12 April 2025 when his jet was likely shot down over Sumy Oblast.

A third F-16 was destroyed on 16 May 2025 in an onboard emergency from which the pilot ejected.

Lieutenant Colonel Maksym Ustymenko was killed on 29 June 2025 defending against a large-scale Russian assault, per Euromaidan Press.

The jets are scarce and hard to replace

Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway committed a total of 80 aircraft, but they arrived in batches, and the pool of trained pilots is limited, so each loss subtracts from a capability that Ukraine cannot quickly regenerate.

Russia may be about to fire its Banderol cruise missiles from the ground, and that could change the warning Ukraine has. Photos of a new Russian ground launcher for the S8000 "Banderol" cruise missile have appeared online, and Russia reportedly presented the launcher to Russian ruler Vladimir Putin at a closed exhibition in 2025, the Ukrainian defense outlet Defense Express reported.

Until now, the only confirmed launch platform for the Banderol was the Orion strike-and-reconnaissance drone, and no ground launcher for the missile had appeared online. That mattered for Ukraine's defense: the Orion is rare, with only nine confirmed losses throughout the war, and it has to be flown in first, where Ukraine can spot it in advance.

A ground launcher removes that warning. The Banderol is a fast, cheap jet-powered cruise missile that flies up to 500 km at 500 to 560 km/h with a 114.3-kg warhead, and Russia has used it in its largest combined strikes on Kyiv. The threat is that ground launchers let Russia fire Banderols without the Orion's telltale takeoff, and can be assembled in large numbers for mass attacks.

The launcher strips away the time Ukraine had to react

The second danger is volume. A single Orion can carry only one Banderol, but ground launchers can be built in dozens and used for mass attacks. That turns a missile previously limited by its scarce drone carrier into one Russia could salvo, the same shift from trickle to swarm that has made Shaheds so hard to stop.

The launcher may still be in testing, the analysts cautioned, and Russia may be trying to conceal its use. But the fact that Russia has ground launchers at all is the threat, because it changes how and how many Banderols can reach Ukraine.

The tradeoff is the range for surprise

Ground launch is not free for Russia either. Fired from a launcher on the ground, the Banderol will have a shorter range than when dropped from an Orion already at altitude and speed. Even with a booster, the missile has to accelerate and climb to its cruising height on its own, spending the energy an air launch provides for free.

The launcher's design reflects that. Judging by its construction, the missile rail can be lowered to a horizontal position, and, given its small size, the launcher could theoretically be mounted on trailers or other mobile platforms. A small solid-fuel booster is probably used to get the missile off the ground. That mobility is its own threat: a trailer-mounted launcher can hide, move, and fire from unexpected locations, trading the Banderol's maximum range for the surprise of a ground launch close to the border.

Ukrainian intelligence has mapped its 30-company foreign component supply chain, down to a Chinese jet engine available on AliExpress, and President's adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, who first identified the missile, has called it "nothing outstanding, a budget cruise missile with a small warhead."

Ukraine and NATO are funding joint teams to turn battlefield prototypes into weapons. Ukraine's Brave1 defense cluster and its allies have begun accepting applications for their first joint grant program, UNITE - Brave NATO, Ukraine's Defense Ministry announced.

The program helps bring successful defense-technology prototypes to serial production and battlefield use, pairing a Ukrainian company with a company from a NATO country in joint teams.

The competition focuses on developing Ukraine's drone capabilities, protection against enemy drones, and strengthening air defense. Depending on the type of technology, winners can receive up to $293,000 or about $585,000 per side of the joint team.

Applications for the first stage are accepted until 3 August 2026. It is the working phase of a program EP has tracked since NATO and Ukraine launched UNITE - Brave NATO in November 2025, with a €10 million pilot budget split equally between NATO and Ukraine.

The program routes Ukraine's combat experience into the NATO industry

The pairing requirement is the point. By requiring a Ukrainian company and a NATO-country company on each team, UNITE - Brave NATO connects the world's most combat-tested defense innovators with allied industry and channels the real-time battlefield lessons Ukraine generates back into the Alliance.

NATO wants that experience deliberately. NATO's Communications and Information Agency manages the competition on the Alliance side, while Brave1 coordinates it in Ukraine. The first round targets the very technologies Ukraine faces daily: countering unmanned aerial systems, strengthening air defenses, and securing frontline communications.

Brave1 is the hub that the whole system runs through

The grant program is one node in the innovation network Ukraine has built at the center of its war effort. Brave1 has become the central hub of Ukraine's wartime defense innovation, and as of June 2026, the cluster had processed over $235 million in procurement orders, registered more than 3,600 developments, secured 300 NATO-codified items, and disbursed $50 million in defense innovation grants.

UNITE - Brave NATO sits alongside a widening set of bilateral partnerships that Brave1 runs with individual NATO members, including Brave Germany, launched with Berlin in May 2026, and Brave France, a €20 million drone-development program launched with Paris in June. The common thread is the Test in Ukraine framework, which allows foreign manufacturers to trial new technologies under conditions close to actual combat and to obtain performance data that no peacetime range can produce.