Former Polish prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński accused groups in western Ukraine of desecrating remains and stealing WWII-era victims’ jewelry. The leader of the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) wrote on X on 14 August 2026 that his party would demand Polish government intervention.

Kaczyński’s claim comes amid growing anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Poland and a dispute with Kyiv over how Polish wartime victims are remembered. However, Kaczyński’s X post named no location and provided no public evidence, while authorized Polish-Ukrainian teams continue exhuming and reburying Polish victims.

“Illegal excavations at the sites of former Polish villages in Eastern Galicia are turning out to be real,” Kaczyński wrote, referring to a historical region now largely in western Ukraine.

He called the alleged looters “black diggers,” a term for people who dig through burials or archaeological sites for valuables. He said they were pilfering the graves of Poles killed in the World War II-era Volhynia massacres and alleged that local Ukrainian officials were allowing it.

Kaczyński said PiS would appeal to Poland’s state authorities, including the Foreign Ministry, and demand “explanations and a response.”

The evidence described by PiS has not been made public. Onet reported that it was unclear which incidents he meant and that neither government had responded at the time. PiS spokesperson Rafał Bochenek later told the publication Interia that citizens had sent photographs allegedly showing damaged graves and listings for excavated objects. Interia published neither.

Polish-Ukrainian teams continue authorized exhumations

Meanwhile, Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), the country's state historical institute, said Ukraine authorized its latest excavations at Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka in Volyn.

From 13 July to 7 August, Polish and Ukrainian specialists recovered 55 victims, including 26 children. They also secured more than 300 personal items and pieces of clothing. The remains are due to be buried at Ostrówki cemetery on 30 August.

The excavation followed a wider thaw. Ukraine lifted its moratorium on Polish searches, while joint teams exhumed and reburied 42 people at Puźniki in 2025. Both countries have exchanged lists of sites for further searches.

Historical disputes deepen the Polish-Ukrainian rift

Relations between Kyiv and Warsaw worsened after Ukraine gave a military unit the honorary title “Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)."

The UPA fought for Ukrainian independence but is held responsible in Poland for the World War II-era massacres of Polish civilians. Polish President Karol Nawrocki later stripped President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state honor.

Violence is also rising on the Polish streets. Reports of suspected hate crimes against Ukrainians in Poland rose by more than 30% in the first half of 2026, even as anti-xenophobic voices became more visible online. Kaczyński’s claim adds an unverified criminal allegation to the dispute.

Ukrainian forces have used British drones to attack targets inside Russia for the first time, adding two UK-built systems to Kyiv’s arsenal, The Sunday Times reported on 15 August, citing Ukrainian military sources. The newspaper explicitly identified oil refineries in Volgograd and Yaroslavl among the targets struck during the previous six months.

Ukraine still relies mainly on domestically produced drones. But the British systems give Kyiv cheaper weapons that can be replenished and launched in volume. They help sustain Kyiv's attacks on Russian oil, logistics, and military targets without running down limited stocks of Western long-range missiles.

The Sunday Times called this a new phase in UK–Ukraine military cooperation. A senior British defense source said the deployments showed London was “not nervous anymore” about Russian pressure.

What British support adds to Ukraine’s homegrown drone force

Britain has supplied Ukraine with two systems with very different ranges. The Nyan, a jet-powered one-way attack drone made by BAE Systems subsidiary Callen-Lenz, can travel more than 150 miles. The second is catapult-launched and has a range above 600 miles; The Sunday Times withheld its manufacturer’s name on security grounds.

Long-range drones typically cost £50,000 to £100,000, compared with more than £750,000 to replace a Storm Shadow missile, the newspaper said. They can also be stockpiled and launched in swarms, helping Ukraine strain Russian air defenses without exhausting finite missile stocks.

The drones extend wider British support. In June, the UK announced funding for 150,000 Ukrainian-produced drones by the end of 2026. Ukrainian forces have also deployed British Rapid Ranger systems against Russian Shaheds and used UK-supplied Storm Shadows inside Russia, protecting Ukraine at home while widening its options across the border.

Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign reaches 52 Russian regions

Across Ukraine’s overall campaign, The Sunday Times reported almost 700 successful deep strikes between January and June. They reached 52 Russian regions and caused more than £35 billion (about $47.3 billion) in economic damage.

A senior Ukrainian military source said the British systems were proving successful. “When we launch them, we always say Slava Ukraini and God save the King,” the source told The Sunday Times.

Former UK Air Marshal Greg Bagwell predicted Moscow would “sabre rattle” and potentially declare British factories legitimate targets. Other defense sources warned of intensified cyberattacks or espionage against the UK.

France, Germany, and the UK are working to create a format representing Europe in talks over Russia’s war against Ukraine, The New York Times reported on 15 August, citing five European officials. Known collectively as the E3, the three countries would support Ukraine’s position and protect European interests in any settlement.

The initiative is Europe’s attempt to secure a place in talks the US is expected to lead. The three governments fear that Washington and Moscow could reach a deal without them, although Europe would have to enforce sanctions, decide how to use frozen Russian assets, and help protect Ukraine afterward. European officials also doubt Washington will stay committed to serious negotiations.

The officials expect Washington to lead negotiations with Moscow. The E3 wants to become the core group supporting Ukraine, following Kyiv’s request that it prepare for talks. France and Germany are shaping the position, while Britain fears damaging relations with Trump.

Poland, Italy, and the Nordic countries would be consulted, with the EU later involved. Some Baltic states and Hungary do not trust France and Germany to represent them. London called the discussion speculative.

The Coalition has rehearsed a force but not agreed to deploy it

The E3 forms the core of the Coalition of the Willing. At a 7 June meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, its leaders backed an immediate ceasefire and legally binding guarantees, including the deployment of a multinational force.

More than 600 British troops rehearsed with French paratroopers and an Italian platoon in February for a possible deployment. They could form the core of a 10,000-strong force pledged by London and Paris after a ceasefire.

Yet some members reportedly made Russia’s consent a condition for deploying troops, effectively giving Moscow a veto. Bulgaria has left, and Germany has not committed troops. The Coalition’s leadership is also shifting after Keir Starmer’s resignation and ahead of Emmanuel Macron’s departure in 2027.

Ukraine talks still misunderstand Russia's intentions

European officials see few signs that Vladimir Putin is ready for serious negotiations, the NYT reported. A separate EU attempt to open direct contact with Moscow divided member states.

Experts told Euromaidan Press that Russia uses peace processes to stall, press maximalist demands, and improve its battlefield position. Moscow also dismissed a Black Sea ceasefire proposal after Kyiv offered a mutual halt to attacks on civilian targets.

Ukraine’s partners risk mistaking Russia’s presence at talks for a willingness to compromise. Former Ukrainian diplomat Iuliia Osmolovska warned that Moscow also benefits from failed negotiations by exhausting Western governments until they pressure Kyiv to concede.

Before 2022, Russia signed 26 ceasefires in eastern Ukraine; none lasted more than two weeks. A pause can bank concessions, rotate troops, and let Moscow resume fighting from a stronger position.

A Ukrainian company has built a tiny antenna to solve one of the drone war's hardest problems: staying connected. Ukraine's BlueBird Tech has unveiled the CLOVER 5.8 GHz antenna, a 25-gram device for transmitting and receiving radio signals, according to RBC-Ukraine.

The antenna addresses the connectivity problem at the center of Ukraine's drone war. Keeping drones linked to their operators under heavy jamming is one of the war's persistent technical challenges, and the CLOVER is one Ukrainian company's answer.

Previously, Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, confirmed that the main problem for Ukrainian forces operating some 25,000 combat robots is not hardware limitations but connectivity restrictions.

The design is built to hold a link in motion

The antenna's shape is engineered for stability. Due to its clover design, circular polarization, and omnidirectional radiation pattern, the antenna works even in dynamic conditions.

Weight is decisive for a drone. At 25 grams, the CLOVER adds almost nothing to a small aircraft, leaving weight for payload, battery, or range, which matters for the small FPV drones that do much of the fighting, where a reliable signal and low weight are both at a premium.

It works on drones and ground robots

The antenna is not only for flying drones. It can be installed and used on ground robotic systems as well as FPV drones, and extended to the uncrewed ground vehicles that Ukraine increasingly uses for logistics and evacuation, which face the same connectivity challenge.

In June, Ukrainian ground robots ran nearly 17,000 supply and evacuation missions. Every one of those runs depends on the robot holding a signal, the problem the CLOVER is built to address.

It is built for quick integration. Despite its compact size, the CLOVER covers a wide 4.9-6.1 GHz range and comes with an SMA male connector and an RG402 cable, allowing it to integrate quickly into drone-detection tools, radio-monitoring complexes, and measurement equipment. It is compatible with the main systems on the market.

A man killed by a bomb in occupied Sevastopol was likely a Ukrainian naval officer who had switched sides to Russia. The Insider has identified the victim of a 13 August explosion in Sevastopol as Robert Shageev, a former Ukrainian Navy officer, the journalists reported.

The killing reportedly struck a man whose career embodied the choice between homeland and working with enemy forces during the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Robert Shageev commanded the Ukrainian submarine Zaporizhzhia, which was blockaded in Sevastopol's Striletska Bay when Russian forces seized the peninsula, and he deserted the Ukrainian Navy to serve in the Russian fleet, The Insider writes.

The bombing

The explosion was likely a targeted attack. An improvised bomb was placed in a bin next to a bench on Stoletova Avenue in Sevastopol and detonated as a man passed by on the afternoon of 13 August, and he died of his injuries, according to Telegram channels.

Russian authorities confirmed a death without naming Shageev. The FSB confirmed only that a soldier of Russia's Defense Ministry was killed, according to Russian state media. That Shageev was the victim was first claimed by pro-Russian bloggers before The Insider's identification, and the claim has not been officially confirmed.

A suspect was detained

Russian authorities said they detained a suspect. The FSB reported detaining a suspected woman, and a court in Sevastopol later said she had been sent to pre-trial detention, without disclosing her identity, according to The Insider.

Meanwhile, pro-Russian Telegram channels and a Crimean informant claim the detained woman is a 32-year-old. Crimean informer Alexander Talipov, as well as Telegram channels linked to Russian security forces, claim that the detainee is 32-year-old Margarita Reut. Last year, she was fined for "discrediting the Russian army".

According to the New York Post, the Russian citizen appeared on escort websites and also worked as a biologist, producing vaginal suppositories with a floral scent.

The identification comes from Russian sources and has not been verified. Ukraine has not commented on the killing, and no party has claimed responsibility.

Targeted killings and sabotage have recurred in occupied Crimea and Russia through the war. Collaborators, occupation officials, and defectors have been killed in bombings and shootings, some claimed by Ukrainian intelligence or partisans, many never definitively attributed.

As Russia damages Ukraine's holiest sites, other countries are paying to rebuild them. Switzerland will contribute about $730,000 to the preservation and restoration of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, whose Dormition Cathedral was damaged in a Russian strike two months ago, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X.

The gift is a piece of an international effort to protect the Ukrainian heritage that Russia is attacking. On the night of 15 June, a Russian attack drone struck the altar section of the Dormition Cathedral, igniting a large fire that burned about 80% of the roof structures, according to UkrInform.

The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, where the cathedral is located, is a UNESCO World Heritage site and carries enhanced protection under the 1954 Hague Convention's Second Protocol.

Russia set fire to the Kyiv monastery where Moscow’s founder is buried

The strike hit a site weeks before its anniversary

Sybiha framed the strike as a deliberate blow to a spiritual landmark. Russia hit the centuries-old shrine two months before the Lavra's 975th anniversary, deliberately targeting one of Ukraine's most important spiritual and cultural landmarks, he said.

He tied the damage to a wider Russian aim.

"While Russia seeks to destroy Ukraine's cultural heritage and erase our identity, our partners stand with us in protecting and preserving it for future generations," Sybiha said.

Switzerland's aid comes through UNESCO

The Swiss contribution channels international heritage protection. Switzerland's Federal Council delegate for Ukraine, Jacques Gerber, announced in Kyiv that Switzerland would provide the contribution through UNESCO to protect and restore the shrine.

Sybiha thanked Switzerland for its support and for Gerber joining Ukraine in Kyiv to mark the 975th anniversary of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra.

"Together, we are safeguarding Ukraine's heritage and an invaluable part of Europe's and the world's cultural legacy," he said, framing the Lavra's preservation as a shared European and global responsibility, not Ukraine's alone.

The aid answers a documented campaign against heritage

As of the end of July 2026, Russian forces damaged or destroyed 1,990 cultural heritage sites and 2,625 cultural infrastructure sites in Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian government.

The Ministry of Culture records the highest number of damaged cultural heritage sites in Kharkiv Oblast — 358, Kherson Oblast — 303, Kyiv — 272, Donetsk Oblast — 229, and Odesa Oblast — 211.

Cultural institutions have been damaged in 354 territorial communities, representing 24% of all communities in Ukraine.

© AFP/Getty

Ukraine’s Navy said its forces struck the launch positions and deployment site of a Russian Bastion coastal missile system in occupied Crimea overnight on 16 August, reportedly inflicting significant losses in equipment and personnel.

Russia has regularly used Crimea as a launch platform for strikes against Ukraine, making its missile systems there a priority target for Ukrainian forces seeking to reduce Russia’s ability to attack Ukrainian territory.

The Navy said the final Russian losses were still being assessed and did not provide details on the weapons or personnel destroyed.

Bastion systems used to strike Ukraine

The Bastion is a costly and scarce Russian coastal missile system that can launch P-800 Oniks cruise missiles. Russia has used Oniks missiles launched from occupied Crimea to attack targets across southern and other regions of Ukraine.

Oniks is a supersonic anti-ship cruise missile that Russia has adapted for strikes against ground targets in Ukraine, including Odesa Oblast. The missile can travel at more than 3,000 km/h, making it difficult for air defenses to intercept. Its standard range is about 300 kilometers, while upgraded variants can reportedly reach up to 800 kilometers and carry a 300-kilogram warhead. Russia launches ground attacks with Oniks from mobile Bastion systems based in occupied Crimea.

The Navy also said Russia uses Bastion systems to launch Zircon hypersonic missiles against Ukraine.

The Zircon is a newer hypersonic cruise missile designed to reach speeds of roughly Mach 5–9. Russia has used it against Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, with launches previously reported from Bastion systems in occupied Crimea. Its officially claimed range exceeds 1,000 kilometers, although analysts question that figure; Ukrainian analysts have estimated a lower effective range.

Bastion launchers in Crimea are a particularly important target for Ukraine: they give Russia a mobile platform for striking targets across southern Ukraine and, with Zircon, deep into the country. Ukraine’s air defenses have struggled to intercept these missiles, making strikes on the launchers an important way to reduce the threat before the missiles are fired.

The Ukrainian Navy said the strike was part of ongoing efforts to reduce Russia’s combat potential in the Black Sea region.

Several Ukrainian strikes recorded overnight

The Crimea strike came amid a broader wave of Ukrainian attacks on Russian military, industrial, and logistics targets overnight on 16 August.

Ukraine’s General Staff reported a strike on the Kamensky Combine in Russia’s Rostov Oblast, where a fire was recorded. The plant produces solid rocket fuel for Russia’s Uragan, Smerch, and Tornado-S multiple-launch rocket systems, as well as components for other missile and aviation weapons.

In Moscow Oblast, a Ukrainian drone struck a 250,000-square-meter Wildberries warehouse in Koledino, while another fire was reported at the Severnoye Domodedovo logistics complex. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry later confirmed the Wildberries facility had been put out of operation, saying it was the retailer’s largest warehouse by area.

The General Staff also confirmed the results of two earlier strikes. It said the ZapSibNeftekhim petrochemical complex in Tobolsk was shut down after its central gas-fractionation unit was struck on 10 August, while an 11 August strike damaged several processing units at the Orsknaftaorgsyntez refinery in Orenburg Oblast.

The strikes show the expanding reach of Ukraine’s campaign against the military and industrial infrastructure supporting Russia’s war, from missile systems and rocket-fuel production to oil, petrochemical, and logistics facilities.

A dog was caught in mesh beside a frontline road and could not free itself. Ukrainian soldiers stopped their vehicle, cut away the netting, and released it, as footage Ukrainian serviceman Denys Lysak posted on 10 August 2026 shows.

The netting is meant to shield traffic from Russian FPV drones, but it can also trap animals left in the combat zone. The roadside rescue reflects how Russia's war against Ukraine has adversely impacted animals throughout Ukraine, while also highlighting a familiar relationship along Ukraine’s front, where soldiers feed, shelter, and sometimes take in the animals they encounter.

Lysak wrote that animals left without owners suffer greatly in areas affected by fighting. Ukrainian troops try to feed, evacuate, or shelter them, he said. Many units have taken in several rescued cats and dogs.

“Unfortunately, you can’t help all of them, but we try,” Lysak said.

The animals Ukrainian troops find at the front

Across Ukraine, animals are caught in the crossfire—injured, stranded, or driven from their habitats. Sometimes Ukrainian troops reach them in time, as they did during the Special Operations Forces' (SSO) “Operation Bambi.”

Rangers from the 6th Separate Special Operations Regiment found a frightened fawn while clearing a Russian position, according to footage the SSO released on 15 August. The video shows the animal nestled against one soldier as the unit moved out.

Some animals remain with the units that find them. Euromaidan Press reported in 2022 on Max, a Belgian shepherd abandoned by a Russian National Guard unit in Mykolaiv Oblast. A villager sheltered him before handing him to Ukraine’s National Guard, where handlers began teaching the former Russian service dog to follow commands in Ukrainian.

The fawn’s destination remains unknown. The SSO said only that it had been evacuated from the danger zone. Kharkiv volunteers had evacuated 18,800 animals by October 2024, but only around one-fifth had been reunited with their owners.

Russia's assault on Ukraine's ecosystem

Russia’s war has also affected wildlife beyond the trenches. Marine biologist Ivan Rusev estimated that more than 100,000 Black Sea dolphins have died since 2022, with sonar, underwater blasts, mines, and pollution among the suspected causes.

Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka Dam dealt another blow. The floodwaters swept through areas holding 70% of the world’s Nordmann’s birch mice and half its sandy blind mole-rats, while killing tens of thousands of nesting birds.

Ukrainian emergency services confirmed a large fire at the Pochaina book market in Kyiv’s Obolonskyi district after an overnight Russian ballistic attack on 16 August. Several rows of stalls were burned. The strike comes amid mounting losses across Ukraine’s book industry, as Russian strikes burn printing houses, markets, and the millions of books within them.

Pochaina’s latest fire is at least the third to damage the market or adjoining trading rows since mid-June. For decades, the sprawling market has served as part bookshop, part flea market, and part archive of Kyiv life — a place to hunt through rare titles, vinyl, and remnants of the 20th century. Officials have not said Russia deliberately targeted it, however, the damage lands amid repeated attacks on Ukraine’s publishing chain and efforts to remove Ukrainian literature under occupation.

By 9:36 a.m., rescuers had extinguished fires at four locations in Kyiv and were dismantling damaged structures. Three people were hospitalized: two in moderate condition and one with light injuries. Pochaina metro station remained open, but damage to its glass entrance temporarily closed one vestibule.

На книжковому ринку у Києві рятувальники долають наслідки атаки.

Кілька рядів торговельного павільйону вигоріли. У багатьох інших — пошкоджені вікна. Книжки продовжують тліти

Відео: Ірина Сітнікова / hromadske pic.twitter.com/Bq3p4x6MT8

— hromadske (@HromadskeUA) August 16, 2026

Founded in 1997, Pochaina grew into Kyiv’s largest book market, offering everything from novels to specialist literature, according to a 2020 preservation petition. Independent vendors organized to defend it after plans emerged to clear the site for another shopping center. The campaign described the market as a cultural institution that supported thousands of jobs.

The adjoining weekend flea market endured the invasion and disappearance of tourists. In 2023, the Associated Press found hundreds browsing stalls stocked with vintage medals, ceramics, VHS tapes, and cracked guitars.

Russia destroys books as part of its war against Ukraine

Russian attacks have damaged publishing houses, printing plants, warehouses, libraries, bookshops, and markets across Ukraine.

The 16 August attack was not the first time Russia had hit Pochaina. A Russian attack damaged book-market pavilions in mid-June. On 30 July, falling missile debris ignited nearby stalls and destroyed collections of antiques, vinyl, and Ukrainian household artifacts, Suspilne reported.

Russia's war against Ukraine has particularly devastated Ukraine's publishing houses and their infrastructure. A 2024 Russian strike on Kharkiv’s Factor Druk printing house killed seven workers and burned 50,000 books. On 1 August 2026, a drone destroyed about eight million books at publisher Ranok’s warehouse.

Reuters reported that Russian strikes destroyed more than 10 million books in recent months.

In occupied areas, Russian forces have also seized Ukrainian history books and burned Ukrainian literature in boiler houses, Ukrainian authorities say.

Yet the Ukrainian book industry continues to thrive, despite Russia's assault. In 2025, Ukraine registered a record 117 new publishing businesses.

A drone hit a major Wildberries warehouse at Koledino near Moscow overnight on 16 August 2026 and set it ablaze, Moscow Oblast Governor Andrey Vorobyov said. Vorobyov described the overnight swarm as “one of the most massive drone attacks in recent times.”

It comes amid an expanding Ukrainian campaign against Wildberries, Russia's largest online retailer with a vast network of warehouses and logistics centers, that has reached warehouses from Moscow Oblast to the Urals. Ukrainian authorities say Wildberries facilities are used to supply components for Russian drone production and navigation equipment, making them part of Russia’s wartime logistics network.

The Koledino fire puts a major part of Wildberries’ storage and sorting capacity at risk. At about 250,000 square meters, the complex is one of the retailer’s largest logistics hubs. Ukrainian sources say the marketplace has moved drone parts and other military-linked goods. Wildberries denies supporting Russia’s military. 

Wildberries’ parent company, RWB, confirmed the fire, saying workers had been evacuated and deliveries rerouted. 

Unlike the 28 July fire at Koledino industrial park, the latest blaze was confirmed at Wildberries’ own Koledino warehouse. Initial reports in July had also pointed to Wildberries, but open-source investigators later identified the burning building as a neighboring warehouse run by a third-party logistics company.

The entire Wildberries logistics hub in Koledino, Moscow Oblast, is engulfed in flames following today’s attack.

The complex covers around 250,000 m² and has long been one of Wildberries’ largest and most important logistics centers. https://t.co/qqrrsLFB3Y pic.twitter.com/YivkijfyeT

— Special Kherson Cat (@bayraktar_1love) August 16, 2026

A second fire broke out at Warehouse No. 15 in MLP Severnoye Domodedovo, a multimodal logistics complex near one of Moscow’s main airports. Vorobyov said the warehouse stores medications.

Vorobyov claimed an 83-year-old man was killed after a drone fell on a private home in the Ramenskoye district, while at least six other people were injured across the region.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin claimed that Russian air defenses destroyed 201 drones approaching the region.

Ukraine confirms Wildberries warehouse was targeted

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry confirmed that the Wildberries logistics hub in the Koledino industrial park was put out of operation during the overnight drone attack.

The ministry said the facility, which covered 250,000 square meters, was Wildberries’ largest warehouse by area. It also said Ukraine has now disabled seven of the company’s 10 largest logistics centers.

Ukraine’s campaign against Wildberries keeps growing

Ukraine’s campaign against Wildberries began on 18 July 2026, when drones struck warehouses in Elektrostal and Kotovsk. Reported attacks have since reached the retailer’s sites across Russia, including a newly opened hub near Voronezh and a warehouse in Tver targeted three times in two weeks.

By 14 August, Agentstvo had counted fires at more than 20 Wildberries sites. The sustained attacks had already prompted Wildberries to prohibit warehouse workers from bringing smartphones to work, citing concerns that photos and videos taken during drone alerts could pose a security risk. 

The effects on Russia’s economy

The number and geographic spread of Ukraine’s strikes have put sustained pressure on the retailer’s nationwide warehouse network and Russia’s economy at large. 

Earlier fires destroyed goods belonging to independent sellers, The Moscow Times reported. Wildberries said it was considering compensation, although its contracts do not require the company to cover losses caused by drone attacks. 

In response to Ukraine’s strikes, the company has also reportedly sought additional storage in Kazakhstan, giving local warehouse operators greater leverage as it tries to replace capacity lost in Russia.

The physical disruption was followed on 15 August by a Ukrainian cyberattack targeting Wildberries’ payment and customer service systems. The hackers said customers could not make payments or reach the company through its main online support channel. 

Ukraine struck the plant that fuels the rockets Russia rains on its frontline cities. On the night of 16 August 2026, Ukraine's Defense Forces hit an important Russian military-industrial enterprise, the Kamensky Combine in Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, Rostov Oblast, and a fire was recorded at the site, the General Staff reported.

The plant makes the fuel for weapons that Russia uses to grind down Ukrainian civilian areas. The Kamensky Combine produces solid rocket fuel for the Uragan, Smerch, and Tornado-S multiple-launch rocket systems, which Russia fires at frontline cities like Zaporizhzhia, where there is no metro to shelter in and civilians have only minutes to get behind walls the rockets punch through easily.

The Tornado-S is one of Russia’s most advanced long-range rocket artillery systems, capable of striking targets up to 120 kilometers away. Russian “Tornado-S” and “Smerch” systems are designed to fire and retreat rapidly, making them extremely difficult to locate.

The target feeds Russia's rocket artillery

The Kamensky Combine is a node in Russia's weapons production. It produces solid rocket fuel for the rocket systems, as well as a range of missile systems and aviation strike weapons, with its output directly serving the needs of Russia's armed forces.

The damage is still being assessed. The extent of the damage and the results of the strike are being clarified, the General Staff said, with a fire confirmed at the site.

Two earlier strikes were confirmed hit

The General Staff also confirmed results from recent deep strikes. Analysis of additional data confirmed the shutdown of the ZapSibNeftekhim complex in Tobolsk, Tyumen Oblast, one of Russia's largest petrochemical plants, after its central gas-fractionation unit was struck on 10 August.

A refinery was confirmed to have been hit, too. The 11 August strike at the Orsknaftaorgsyntez refinery in Orsk, Orenburg Oblast, damaged its hydrocracking unit, several primary oil-processing units, and a secondary distillation unit. The refinery produces gasoline, diesel, aviation fuel, and other products for Russia's armed forces and military industry.

The campaign continues

The General Staff signaled more to come. Work on key military and military-industrial targets of the enemy continues, it said, closing with "to be continued."

That promise fits a campaign that has spent 2026 reaching ever deeper into Russia, hitting the refineries, petrochemical plants, and now rocket-fuel factories that supply the war. Each confirmed strike degrades a different piece of Russia's ability to produce the weapons and fuel its forces run on.

Video shows thick plumes of smoke rising from a burning Wildberries warehouse in Moscow, after Ukraine launched hundreds of drones against Russia overnight.

© Reuters

An international sports body has welcomed Russia back under its flag while Russia keeps killing Ukraine's athletes and civilians. The World Archery Federation has lifted restrictions on Russian athletes, allowing them to compete with their country's identity, including under the Russian flag and anthem, the federation announced.

Russia has killed more than 760 Ukrainian athletes and coaches since the start of the full-scale war, with many others made refugees or losing loved ones to strikes on civilians, and some who took up arms without combat experience. Among them is Ukrainian archer Oleksandr Onyshchuk, a master of sport and European champion, killed fighting the occupiers.

What World Archery decided

The federation acted on an Olympic ruling. Its Executive Board met online on 14 August to review the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) 7 July decision, which confirmed that earlier recommendations restricting Russian athletes no longer applied, then lifted the restrictions on Russian athletes, teams, and officials at its events.

The Russians may now compete fully. They can take part under their national flag and anthem at events including the Archery World Cup and World Championships, and the 2022 restrictions on the Russian flag and anthem were removed, in line with a similar decision on Belarus in May. The federation said participation remains subject to standard eligibility, anti-doping, host-country, and visa requirements, and that it supports the Ukrainian archery community and all affected by the war.

Ukraine calls it sportswashing

For Ukraine, the reinstatement serves Russia's propaganda. Allowing Russian athletes into international competition is a means of sportswashing, spreading disinformation, and legitimizing the aggression against Ukraine before foreign audiences, while presenting Russia as still part of the civilized world.

Ukraine also points to who Russia sends. Ukrainian intelligence has documented Russian athletes who are direct participants in the war, including a lieutenant colonel in Russia's armed forces and a deputy brigade commander who competed internationally, according to Ukraine's Defense Intelligence.

Ukraine's National Olympic Committee called the IOC decision behind the reinstatement premature and unjustified and has appealed it to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The archery ruling arrives as Russia's strikes keep killing Ukrainian civilians and athletes in the war that the returning competitors' flag represents.

On 14 August 2026, Polish broadcaster RMF FM identified American-Ukrainian rapper and video blogger Kyivstoner as the previously unnamed target of an alleged Russian-directed assassination plot in Warsaw. The case comes as European authorities investigate suspected Russian attacks and sabotage across the continent.

The alleged plot against Kyivstoner comes amid attacks on Kremlin critics abroad, including the fatal shooting of a Russian opposition artist in Poland in June.

Polish authorities disclosed the Kyivstoner's case on 13 August but withheld the target’s identity. RMF’s identification points to a possible motive, though it relies on unverified allegations from the FSB, Russia's domestic security agency that Kyivstoner of managed drone deliveries intended for attacks near Moscow.

Who is Kyivstoner?

Kyivstoner was born Albert Vasiliev and uses the name Slevin Dadyan on his US passport. He gained attention through humorous videos and the Ukrainian group Hryby before releasing solo tracks, including “Leto” (Summer) and “Zvuk” (Sound).

In a 2025 interview, Vasiliev voiced support for Ukrainians and opposition to Russian occupation, saying Russian ruler Vladimir Putin made him angry and that he wanted civilians and soldiers to stop dying.

In July 2026, Russia’s FSB accused Kyivstoner of overseeing logistics for a foiled drone attack on a defense enterprise near Moscow.

The agency alleged that 35 drones assembled in Kyiv were concealed in a shipment of ceramic tiles and smuggled into Russia through Slovakia, Poland, and Belarus. Russian authorities also added Vasiliev to a register of people they label as involved in extremist or terrorist activity.

Vasiliev responded on Instagram by mocking Russia's allegation, saying he had been relaxing and playing video games rather than organizing an attack.

Russian authorities also accuse him of cooperating with Ukrainian intelligence. He denies the accusations, and RMF offered no independent evidence to substantiate them.

Suspect detained before alleged attack

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Polish services detained the Russian suspect on 7 August, stopping the alleged attack “at the last minute.” US services assisted the operation. A Polish court remanded the man in custody for three months.

The journalists described the Russian citizen as a native of Donbas in eastern Ukraine. Tusk said the target, who holds Ukrainian and US passports, was “inconvenient to the Putin regime.”

The prime minister called it the first Russian-ordered attempt of its kind against a US citizen in another NATO country.

Killings and disrupted plots across Europe

Throughout Europe, Russia has tried to hunt down and kill anti-Kremlin critics and supporters of Ukraine. In June, Russian opposition artist Robert Kuzovkov, known as Semyon Skrepetsky, was shot dead in eastern Poland. Hours earlier, he had reported threats from “Russian patriots.” Polish authorities detained two Belarusian nationals, but have not attributed the killing to Moscow.

US and German services also reportedly foiled a Russian plot against Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger in 2024. German intelligence later treated the surveillance of Bavarian drone manufacturer Donaustahl’s CEO as a suspected planned assassination.

Polish police detained two women in connection with an attack on Ukrainian men outside a Poznań restaurant, Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński announced. The incident comes as Polish-Ukrainian relations grow more strained and public attitudes toward Ukrainians worsen. The incident occurred shortly after midnight on 13 August on Półwiejska Street.

Police data obtained by Rzeczpospolita show 180 hate-crime reports involving Ukrainian citizens in the first half of 2026, over 30% more than a year earlier. Police have not said whether they are treating the Poznań case as a hate crime, although the recording includes nationality-based abuse.

One woman insulted two Ukrainian men, spat at one, knocked over a restaurant parasol, and struck one of the men, the Polish radio station RMF FM reported.

Półwiejska core pic.twitter.com/n2KGfyDRA7

— poznan_moment (@poznan_moment) August 13, 2026

Regional police spokesperson Iwona Liszczyńska said officers responded to reports of two apparently intoxicated women. However, the women had left before officers arrived. Police contacted the restaurant manager, who filed a formal complaint on the morning of 14 August. Officers had already begun identifying the women before the complaint was filed.

Kierwiński first reported that police had detained one woman and identified the other. He later announced the second woman’s detention and declared “zero tolerance for aggression and hatred.”

Previous attacks on Ukrainians in Poland

Kierwiński’s warning followed a series of attacks against Ukrainians in Poland this year. In July, three men allegedly beat a Ukrainian couple in Wrocław after asking whether the woman was Ukrainian. Police detained two suspects and treated the assault as a nationality-motivated hate crime.

In May, police detained five suspects aged 15 to 18 after an attack on three Ukrainian teenagers in Warsaw. One of them, 16-year-old Artem, suffered a fractured skull. 

Earlier in July, two men linked to Poland’s far right confronted a Ukrainian woman at her legal-aid office in Poznań. They demanded entry and asked whether she supported Stepan Bandera, a WWII-era Ukrainian nationalist disliked by many Poles.

Historical dispute deepens political rift

The Poznań incident comes as anti-Ukrainian themes have gained ground in Polish far-right politics, while Warsaw and Kyiv remain divided over the WWII-era Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Many Ukrainians honor the UPA for resisting Soviet rule. Poland holds it responsible for massacring Polish civilians. 

Poland and Ukraine’s dispute over the Volhynia massacres, exhumations, and UPA symbols has prompted protests and a diplomatic clash over state honors. Police have not linked the Poznań attack to that dispute. 

Ukraine condemns Russia for jailing people on fabricated terrorism charges. Yet, its own security services keep sending Kremlin opponents back to Moscow, human rights defender Borys Zakharov said in an interview with Ukrainian outlet Texty.org.ua.

The handovers are not a relic of a friendlier past. They slowed after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, then resumed; the transfers now run through third countries, Zakharov says, and at least one has ridden the prisoner swaps that bring Ukraine's captured soldiers home. Ukraine is returning the exact people who bet their lives on it; at the moment, it presents itself to the world as the rule-of-law side of this war.

A double standard, few in Kyiv discuss

Zakharov directs the charitable foundation Human and Law, which defends people fleeing authoritarian states. Russia prosecutes captured Ukrainians on invented terrorism charges, and Kyiv rightly calls it a sham. But when Chechens, Ingush, and other North Caucasians ask Ukraine for protection, officials sometimes brand them criminals and send them back—men who often fled two brutal Chechen wars and the crackdowns after them, and some of whom later fought Russia in volunteer units.

"We say: yes, they are criminals. We hand them over to Russia to die," Zakharov said.

International law forbids this. The principle of non-refoulement bars any state from returning a person to a country where they face death, persecution, or torture. Zakharov says Ukraine's migration authorities often skip that risk assessment entirely.

The cases the West never heard about

Take Timur Tumgoev, an Ingush volunteer fighter whom Ukraine extradited in September 2018. A Russian court sentenced him to 18 years on terrorism charges, his defenders call fabricated. Zakharov says he was tortured so badly that he can barely move.

Others escaped by luck. Ukraine nearly removed Zelimkhan Belkharoev, a wrestler, in 2016 despite an emergency order from the European Court of Human Rights, Zakharov says; a deputy justice minister intervened in time. Adam Osmayev, a Chechen battalion commander whose wife Amina Okueva was killed in a 2017 assassination attempt, was saved the same way years earlier.

Why did it not stop after 2022

The war did not end the handovers—it rerouted them. Direct extraditions paused; the transfers now run through Belarus, Moldova, and Turkiye, Zakharov says.

Zakharov says Zaur Shogentsukov, a Kabardian who crossed from Belarus to join Ukraine's forces, allegedly failed a polygraph test with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and was pushed back into Belarus under a readmission deal. His tortured body later came back to his family in Nalchik, he says.

Alexey Gerasimov, a student from Russia's Chuvash region who reportedly backed his homeland's independence, slipped into Ukraine in 2024 to join the Sibir Battalion, a unit of Russian volunteers. He ended up in one of the large prisoner exchanges that followed the May 2025 Istanbul talks, and Ukraine delivered him to Russia, where he now faces terrorism charges—the independent Russian outlet Verstka reported in an investigation carried by Novaya Gazeta Europe.

The most recent case is still unfolding. Aslan Khakimov, a Russian engineer who fled the Federal Security Service (FSB) in 2015 and spent years building robots for Ukraine's army, has sat in a migration facility since April 2026, accused of financing terrorism and facing deportation.

The most recent case is still unfolding. Aslan Khakimov, a Russian engineer who fled the Federal Security Service (FSB) in 2015 and spent years building ground robotic systems for Ukraine's army, entered on forged documents and lived for a decade under a false identity, Ruslan Puptaiev—the illegal stay Ukraine's migration service cites for the deportation order it issued in April 2026. Russia has separately convicted him in absentia of terrorism, a charge his defenders call fabricated. His supporters argue that returning him would be a death sentence.

Ukraine's services frame these as wartime security decisions, and infiltration is a genuine risk. But non-refoulement admits no wartime exception: even a proven spy is not a country's to send to his death.

The money question

Zakharov offers a blunter explanation for at least some cases: money. In the Tumgoev handover, he says, the man's family was quietly invited to outbid Moscow—to top the sum Russian handlers allegedly pay SBU officers for each person delivered.

"Totalitarian regimes spare no money persecuting their opponents," he said.

Ukraine's security service has not confirmed his account, and the allegation rests solely on his testimony.

Russia, for its part, has already shown its games in these exchanges, at times swapping in people with no link to the war. As Kyiv negotiates ever-larger exchanges to free its own soldiers, the same machinery can carry the Russians and Caucasians who fought for Ukraine the other way — a propaganda gift to Moscow and a warning to the next would-be defector that Ukraine's protection may not hold. For a state that anchors its whole cause in the rule of law, that is a debt that keeps compounding.

Ukraine sent rescuers to help fight wildfires in France, and they returned from a first-of-its-kind mission. Workers of Ukraine's State Emergency Service (DSNS) have reached Ukraine from France, where they spent nearly two weeks helping to contain large forest fires, Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi announced.

The deployment was Ukraine's first mission to aid an EU member state under the bloc's own civil-protection system, with a combined unit of 70 rescuers and 15 pieces of special equipment, a role reversal for a country that has spent the war receiving European aid rather than sending it.

What the team did in France

The Ukrainians worked the fires alongside crews from several countries. Their work involved dozens of call-outs, hundreds of hectares of surveyed territory, and fire pockets that kept smoldering underground, Vyhivskyi says

With them, they took wartime methods to the work. The Ukrainian rescuers patrolled the forests, used drones to spot new ignitions, and contained the fire together with their colleagues. The days became shared work and shared experience, uniting rescuers from Ukraine, France, Slovakia, and other countries, with different languages but with one profession and goal. For the European emergency employees, it was a chance to grasp the unique experience they gained during the full-scale war.

Ukrainian rescuers returned home after nearly two weeks helping fight massive wildfires in France, their first mission under the EU Civil Protection Mechanism

A joint unit of 70 rescuers and 15 pieces of specialized equipment patrolled forests alongside French, Slovak, and… pic.twitter.com/SXJvqemgQm

— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) August 15, 2026

The mission is a marker of Ukraine's changed role

Vyhivskyi says that every day, Ukraine's rescuers respond to the aftermath of Russian strikes dozens of times, working in extremely difficult conditions, but despite those challenges, Ukraine is always ready to lend a shoulder to its partners.

When Ukrainian and French forces fought wildfires together, the combined detachment deployed six water tankers on the ground, supported from the air by three French aircraft, two planes, and a helicopter.

During the mission, the Ukrainian rescuers discovered that local residents hang “thousand thanks” banner in recognition of their service.

Local residents hang “thousand thanks” banner as Ukrainian firefighters help stop wildfire from reaching their French village

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.

Romania found two Russian drones bobbing in its sea—and didn’t wait to ask questions

Russian assault troops spent days crawling through a pipe to reach Ukrainian lines, and most of them were killed before reaching the place. Russian soldiers walked 28 kilometers, then came under fire on emerging and ultimately surrendered, Ukraine's 71st Separate Air Assault Brigade reported.

This is a portrait of how Russia spends its infantry who enlist voluntarily for the war against Ukraine. The soldiers were sent on a grueling underground infiltration with bad information and no proper food, ordered forward despite wounds, and largely killed.

The 28-kilometer crawl

The group reached Ukrainian positions through underground infrastructure. The Russians covered about 27 to 28 kilometers moving inside a reinforced-concrete pipe roughly a meter and a half in diameter, spending three days on the way, sleeping inside the pipe, the 71st Brigade reports.

Their command had lied to them about what waited. The soldiers were told they were only going to reinforce a battalion and that there were no Ukrainian troops in the forest, a captured Russian says. On arrival, the opposite was true, and they were sent onward without a normal food supply, forced to forage on their own. Many of the assault troops, the prisoner said, are recruited from prison colonies, signing contracts to avoid long sentences.

From 16 to four

When the group emerged onto open ground, Ukrainian troops hit them. Of the 16 Russians who set out, only about 8 reached the forest, and later, just 4 survived.

The wounded were abandoned by their own side. Russian command was in no hurry to evacuate them, and despite wounds and Ukrainian drone strikes, the assault troops were ordered only to keep moving forward, per the captured soldier. The survivors eventually ran into fighters of the 71st Brigade, laid down their weapons, and asked the Ukrainians not to shoot.

"No money is worth this"

The captured soldier was given medical care and made an appeal to other Russians. He urged them not to go to war against Ukraine.

"I will not advise anyone to go to war. No money is worth this, nor any benefits they promise us. To die and go to a foreign land, for what? For whom? Let them put me in prison. As long as they don't send me here, I will never come here again," the prisoner said.

© AP

Ukraine has hit Russia's biggest marketplace in cyberspace as well as with drones. Cyber specialists disrupted Wildberries' operations across Russia, Ukraine's Defense Ministry's Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) reports.

Ukraine says that Wildberries is not ordinary commerce but a piece of Russia's war logistics. According to the military command, the network moves military-related goods, and President Zelenskyy has said Russia uses the platform to bring in sanctioned drone components, which is why Ukraine has spent weeks burning its warehouses and now strikes its servers.

HUR reports that on 10 and 11 August, specialists from the Cyber Corps community attacked Wildberries' digital infrastructure, causing failures in its payment and customer service systems.

The attack hit payments and support

The disruption struck where customers feel it. Because of the problems with the payment infrastructure, users complained they could not complete certain transactions.

For a platform whose whole value is the frictionless movement of goods and money, a payment system that will not process transactions is a direct hit to the business.

The strain spread to customer service. At the same time, the load on the support service rose, causing failures in the contact centers, so the attack degraded both the ability to pay and the ability to get help across Russia.

It pairs with the warehouse strikes

In July, Ukrainian drones destroyed eight Wildberries warehouses, about 15.4% of the marketplace's storage.

Pairing strikes on physical infrastructure with Ukrainian cyber operations strengthens the pressure on the company, HUR assessed.

The logic is to squeeze the same target from two directions at once: burn the warehouses that store the goods, then disable the systems that move them to customers, so damage in one domain amplifies damage in the other.

Earlier, Ukraine hit the Progress Rocket Space Center in Samara, which builds Soyuz-2 rockets used to launch Rassvet, Russia’s planned alternative to Starlink.

Reported Flamingo strike hits Samara industrial area housing factory that builds rockets for Russia’s Starlink rival

Samara Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev confirmed that a missile struck an unnamed industrial enterprise overnight on 15 August 2026. Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, said the Progress Rocket Space Center was burning. He provided no damage details.

Progress would be a significant target because it builds Soyuz-2 rockets used to launch Rassvet, Russia’s planned alternative to Starlink. Its Soyuz-2.1b rockets carried Russia’s first serial-production Rassvet satellites into orbit this year. However, neither the governor’s statement nor available imagery establishes that Progress itself was hit.

Exilenova+ published early footage from Samara and reported that a Flamingo cruise missile had struck the city.

A mature Rassvet network could reduce Russia’s dependence on unauthorized Starlink terminals. For now, neither damage to Progress nor the reported use of a Flamingo missile has been independently confirmed.

Two Ukrainian FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles reportedly struck Samara. The likely target was TsSKB-Progress. TsSKB-Progress develops, produces and operates medium-class launch vehicles and spacecraft for Earth observation and scientific purposes. The enterprise says more than… pic.twitter.com/VW09MVpRuU

— NOELREPORTS (@NOELreports) August 15, 2026

Open-source analysts at Falcon Insight Map geolocated the smoke near Aviakor’s Building No. 106. Militarnyi said Aviakor and Progress sit a few hundred meters apart, and available images could not establish which enterprise was hit. The industrial area lies roughly 900 kilometers from Ukraine.

Kyiv pushes strikes deeper into Russia

Ukraine has increasingly attacked factories far behind the front to disrupt the supply chains sustaining Russian weapons production.

Speaking separately to Euromaidan Press, defense scholar Marc DeVore urged Ukraine to disrupt Russian missile production and launches. Retired US Lieutenant General Ben Hodges noted that Ukraine’s interceptor shortage means it is better to “kill the archer” than try to stop every arrow. 

In June 2026, Ukrainian cruise missiles hit a Voronezh semiconductor plant supplying components for the Pantsir-S1, Iskander-K, and Kh-101.

MISSILE ATTACK IN SAMARA, RUSSIA

INSANE FOOTAGE OF THE DIRECT HIT

pic.twitter.com/8UVHSL5hid

— WW3 Monitor (@WW3_Monitor) August 15, 2026

A reported Flamingo strike in July also damaged the Avitek defense plant in Kirov, more than 1,200 kilometers from Ukraine.

The deeper strikes come as Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) says Russian factories are producing 110% to 120% of their monthly missile quotas. 

How the Samara plant supports Russia’s Starlink alternative

The Progress factory in Samara makes the Soyuz-2.1b rockets used to launch Rassvet satellites developed by Russia’s Bureau 1440. A second batch of 16 entered orbit in July, bringing the serial constellation to 32.

Rassvet’s coverage remains intermittent. However, Moscow plans to deploy 292 satellites by the end of 2027 and 924 by 2035. A Ukrainian defense adviser estimated that continuous service would require 200–250 satellites.

More than 100 drones were detected near Romania over the past 96 hours, with NATO fighter jets scrambled seven times in response to the increased aerial activity, Romanian Defense Minister Radu Miruță said, according to Antena 3 CNN.

The figures come as Romania faces a growing number of drone incidents linked to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Romanian forces have recently shifted from monitoring and escorting drones to actively destroying those that enter Romanian airspace, while NATO aircraft are increasingly being called on to respond to aerial threats along the alliance’s eastern flank.

NATO aircraft repeatedly activated

According to Miruță, Romanian authorities detected more than 100 drones in the vicinity of Romanian territory during the four-day period. NATO fighter jets participating in air-policing missions were activated seven times.

Miruță did not report how many of the detected drones entered Romanian airspace, nor how many were identified as Russian or Ukrainian.

Miruță said most of the drones were destroyed by Ukrainian air defenses outside Romania, but close enough for their debris to reach Romanian shores.

“[Russia’s war in Ukraine] is a real war, with real consequences. That is why we are taking every measure we can to limit the indirect consequences that are also being felt here,” Miruță wrote on Facebook.

The report comes shortly after Romania destroyed two Russian Gerbera-type drones that were found drifting in the Black Sea near the Neptun Deep offshore gas project on 11 August. Romanian military divers carried out controlled detonations after Ukraine confirmed the drones were not Ukrainian.

Romania has begun shooting down drones

The latest figures follow a significant change in Romania’s response to drone incursions.

In late July, Romanian F-16s shot down three drones over Romanian territory and territorial waters in three consecutive days. One of the drones was identified as a Russian Shahed-type attack drone, while investigations were conducted into the others.

The July incidents marked a shift from Romania’s previous approach of tracking or escorting drones that crossed into its airspace during Russian attacks on Ukraine. Four of the five drones shot down in EU and NATO countries at that point had been neutralized by Romanian military pilots, according to Miruță.

Romanian President Nicușor Dan called the repeated violations of Romanian airspace “inadmissible and intolerable” and Bucharest prepared a diplomatic protest to Moscow after one of the downed drones was identified as Russian.

Drone war reaches beyond Ukraine

Romania has repeatedly dealt with drones crossing its border during Russian attacks on Ukrainian territory, particularly in the vicinity of Ukrainian ports on the Danube and the Black Sea.

In June, a Ukrainian sea drone that had lost control, which Kyiv attributed to Russian electronic warfare, exploded near an oil terminal in the Romanian port of Constanța. No one was injured, but more than 1,000 people were evacuated from the area as a precaution.

The incidents have also extended beyond Romania. On 14 August, NATO fighter jets shot down a foreign drone after it entered Latvian airspace. Latvia said the drone had entered its airspace as a result of Russian electronic warfare activity.

The repeated incidents have made drone activity around NATO’s eastern border an increasingly regular consequence of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) plans to abolish special border zones along several boundaries with Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia, according to draft orders reviewed by the Russian outlet Agentstvo.

The proposed changes would remove restrictions that currently treat movement between Russia and occupied parts of Ukraine much like crossing an international border. The FSB says the move follows Russia’s claimed incorporation of the occupied Ukrainian territories into Russia.

FSB seeks to remove border zones

The draft orders, as reported by Ukrainska Pravda, would invalidate previous FSB orders establishing border zones along the boundaries between Russia’s Rostov and Voronezh oblasts and the occupied territories of Ukraine.

A similar change is planned for occupied Crimea, where the current border zone along the boundary with occupied Kherson Oblast would be abolished.

The existing rules effectively impose additional controls on people entering and leaving the occupied territories, making movement subject to procedures similar to those used at Russia’s state border.

In the draft orders, the FSB justifies the changes by referring to the alleged “admission into the Russian Federation” of the occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson oblasts.

Russia illegally claimed to annex those territories, along with Zaporizhzhia Oblast, in September 2022. The move has been rejected by Ukraine and the international community, and Russia does not control all of the territory it claims to have annexed.

Border zone would remain around Crimea's islands

The FSB proposal would not completely eliminate the border zone in occupied Crimea.

A restricted zone would remain “within the boundaries of the Black Sea islands belonging to the Russian Federation,” according to the draft. The FSB’s regional directorate would determine where and when people could enter the zone and would install warning signs.

The proposed changes would remove the existing border zones along Russia’s boundaries with occupied Ukrainian territories, while retaining a border zone around certain Black Sea islands in occupied Crimea.

Russia treats occupied territory as part of its territory

The planned changes reflect Moscow’s effort to incorporate occupied Ukrainian territories into Russia’s administrative and legal system.

In September 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed so-called “accession treaties” claiming to incorporate Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts into Russia. Russia’s parliament subsequently approved the claims.

The treaties purported to define the boundaries of the annexed territories according to the borders they had on the day Russia claimed to admit them into the Russian Federation, despite Russia not controlling the entirety of those regions.

Russia previously used similar measures to formalize its control over occupied Crimea after illegally annexing the peninsula in 2014.

A Ukrainian court has sentenced a Russian soldier to 12 years in prison for repeatedly raping a 57-year-old civilian woman for about two months in an occupied village in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office said on 14 August.

Ukrainian authorities and international monitors have documented hundreds of cases of conflict-related sexual violence by Russian forces in Ukraine, while warning that the true number is likely higher because many cases go unreported, particularly in occupied territories.

Woman was trapped with Russian soldiers

The 50-year-old Russian serviceman entered a village in the Pokrovsk district in September 2025 as part of a small infantry group, according to prosecutors. He and two other Russian soldiers occupied the basement of a private home where two local civilians were sheltering from Russian attacks.

During one of the attacks, the civilian man was killed. The woman was then left in the basement with the three armed Russian soldiers.

In early October, one of the soldiers began sexually assaulting her. The court found that the abuse became systematic and continued for about two months.

The soldier threatened to kill the woman if she refused. Two other Russian servicemen were present during this period, while the woman was effectively unable to leave the basement or protect herself.

The abuse ended in December, when Ukrainian forces captured the Russian soldier during fighting. The woman was freed.

Convicted Russian soldier had spent 32 years in prison

The convicted man is a resident of Russia’s Sverdlovsk Oblast who had spent a total of 32 years in prison for robbery and armed robbery before joining the Russian military.

He signed a contract with the Russian army while serving his sentence and was later deployed as a rifleman with the 114th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade of Russia’s 51st Combined Arms Army.

The defendant denied committing the crime in court. Prosecutors presented evidence that the court found sufficient to establish his guilt in the cruel treatment of a civilian.

He was sentenced to 12 years in prison, the maximum punishment under the provision of Ukraine’s Criminal Code used in the case.

Sexual violence as a weapon of Russia’s war

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office had recorded 401 cases of sexual violence against civilians allegedly committed by Russian military personnel since the start of the full-scale invasion as of June 2026.

The victims included 250 women and 151 men, including 23 girls and one boy.

Donetsk Oblast had the second-highest number of documented cases, with 92, behind Kherson Oblast’s 124. Ukrainian prosecutors had sent 64 indictments involving 81 people to court, while Ukrainian courts had issued 19 verdicts against 26 individuals. All those convicted received prison sentences.

The documented figures do not capture the full scale of the abuse. The Prosecutor General’s Office has noted that the actual number may be higher because these are cases victims have been able to report.

On 14 August, Ukraine's Military Intelligence (HUR) published data on 26 vessels via its War&Sanctions portal, noting that 18 ships face no sanctions from any of Ukraine's partner countries.

The agency said the ships carry Russian oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG), or agricultural products from occupied Ukraine. Euromaidan Press could not independently verify HUR’s vessel records.

Russia relies on maritime trade both to fund its war through energy exports and to sell crops taken from occupied Ukraine. Kyiv began building a dedicated system against Russia’s shadow grain fleet in April, modeled on its oil-fleet campaign. A US bill introduced this week would also target vessels, owners, insurers, and ports involved in sanctions evasion. HUR’s new list shows how many ships remain outside those restrictions.

Russia’s grain shadow fleet

HUR divided the 26 vessels into three groups:

• oil tankers serving Lukoil, Rosneft, Surgutneftegas, Novatek, Tatneft, and Gazprom;
• dry-cargo ships using the occupied ports of Berdiansk, Sevastopol, Kerch, and Feodosia;
• LNG carriers moving gas from the sanctioned SAAM FSU floating storage unit, which holds LNG from the sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 project.

HUR highlighted three of the 18 vessels that are not facing partner sanctions. The bulk carrier LAMAR S repeatedly loaded wheat at the Avlita terminal in occupied Sevastopol in 2026 for delivery abroad, including to Syria, the agency said.

NAYA FALCON carried baking soda and granulated wheat bran from occupied Sevastopol to Egypt and Cyprus, HUR said. The agency linked the oil tanker GREGAL to UAE-based Cymare Navigation FZC, which it described as affiliated with Sovcomflot, Russia’s state-controlled shipping company.

Russia steals grain while striking Ukraine’s exports

Crops taken from occupied land are sold abroad as Russian produce, while Russia's attacks leave Ukraine’s legitimate harvest with fewer routes to market.

Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service said Russia sold more than 2 million tons of grain from occupied Ukraine as Russian produce in 2025. The agency said ship-to-ship transfers at Kavkaz helped conceal its origin.

Meanwhile, Russian attacks have squeezed Ukraine’s legitimate grain trade. Strikes on civilian ships brought the Black Sea corridor to a near standstill during the July harvest peak. Ten people died when Russian missiles hit the grain-laden Golden Leo on 19 July.

HUR called on Ukraine and its partners to synchronize sanctions and detain vessels that violate restrictions. It said the measures could curb Russia’s maritime logistics and war funding.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian special services are conducting targeted operations against collaborators in Russian-occupied territories who assist Russia’s attacks against Ukraine and Ukrainians.

Speaking after a meeting of Ukraine’s top military leadership on 14 August, Zelenskyy said he received a separate briefing from Ukraine’s special services on the progress of these operations.

He specifically mentioned occupied Sevastopol, where Ukrainian officials have previously accused local collaborators of supporting Russia’s military operations.

“Responsibility for collaborators is inevitable,” Zelenskyy said.

Operations target those helping Russia

Zelenskyy did not identify the individuals targeted or provide operational details, saying only that the special services had reported on the implementation of “targeted operations” against collaborators in occupied territories.

He said the targets include people who participate in Russian attacks against Ukraine and Ukrainians.

The comments signal that Ukraine is continuing to pursue individuals in occupied territory who assist Russian forces, including through intelligence, military support, or other forms of cooperation.

Sevastopol explosion on 13 August

The statement comes shortly after an explosion in occupied Sevastopol on 13 August killed a Russian military officer.

Russian and Ukrainian sources have circulated claims that the victim was Robert Shageyev, reportedly a former Ukrainian Navy officer who joined Russia after the occupation of Crimea and later served in Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. 

His identity and the circumstances of the explosion have not been officially confirmed by Ukrainian authorities.

Russian sources had suggested Ukrainian involvement in the incident, but Ukraine has not publicly claimed responsibility.

Ukraine prepares for Russia’s next moves

The discussion of operations against collaborators was part of a broader meeting focused on Ukraine’s military preparations for the coming months.

Zelenskyy said the main issue was securing funding for Ukraine’s defense and security forces through the fall and winter. Officials identified funding gaps and additional requirements for expanding production of advanced weapons.

Among the priorities are faster production of Ukrainian strike weapons and new defensive systems, including jet-powered interceptor drones designed to counter Russian aerial threats.

Ukrainian intelligence also provided updated information about Russia’s plans, according to Zelenskyy. He said Ukraine is preparing countermeasures, including asymmetric responses.

The meeting also covered the effectiveness of Ukraine’s long-range and medium-range sanctions against Russia. Zelenskyy said the existing sanctions plan is being implemented and that priorities are being adjusted to ensure Ukraine has the capabilities needed to achieve its objectives.

Borka arrived as a kid about a year and a half ago, carried in by one of the men and left at the door of the unit's house in Donetsk Oblast, the battalion's chief sergeant, who uses the callsign Sheva, told ArmyInform, the Ukrainian defense ministry's information agency. Someone suggested keeping him, someone else joked about meat, and no one followed through. He has stayed ever since, through several redeployments and near-daily Russian drone activity. On one occasion, a Russian FPV drone exploded near the position. The soldiers relocated in a hurry, then realized they had left Borka behind and went back for him, Sheva recalled.

Borka is one of many animals Ukrainian troops have taken in and pulled out of front-line areas during Russia's war against Ukraine. Sheva casts the care as a deliberate contrast. "They are our lesser brethren. We are responsible for those we have tamed. We are not like the Russians," he said, adding that comrades have evacuated dogs, cats, and once even a cow from wrecked settlements.

Sheva, who volunteered with friends at the start of Russia's full-scale invasion and has fought on the Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, and Donetsk fronts, says Borka is no easy houseguest. Whoever feeds him is his favorite, and whoever is late feeding him, Sheva included, risks a headbutt. He once snapped his tether and walked straight into the house where the soldiers were resting, to their general shock. To burn off his energy, the unit built him a training station out of a stump with an old helmet hung on it, and in winter they put up a small insulated shelter that he keeps demolishing, and they keep repairing. They trade chocolate bars for hay and straw, and tell his story to people who then pitch in with food.

The plan is, eventually, to find Borka a permanent home in good hands. "No one is going to send Borka for meat," Sheva said. On the front, he added, any small distraction has value: a cat purring on your lap settles you, and Borka does something different. "He's the kind of guy who keeps us all on our toes."

A former fighter from the Akhmat forces, armed formations loyal to Chechnya’s Kremlin-backed ruler Ramzan Kadyrov, said he wants to fight for Ukraine after nearly a year in captivity.

Identified only as Magomed, he gave his account to Dmytro Karpenko, a Ukrainian journalist and blogger known for interviewing Russian prisoners of war, in a video published on 9 August 2026. Militarnyi, a Ukrainian military news outlet, reported on the interview on 13 August.

Magomed’s reported crossing reflects a divide that has placed Chechen fighters on both sides of Russia’s war. Since 2014, Kadyrov-loyal formations have fought for Moscow, while anti-Kremlin Chechens seeking independence from Russia have supported Kyiv.

Magomed’s account traces one fighter’s claimed passage from the first camp toward the second after Russians allegedly killed his brother. His account has not been independently verified.

The Chechen fighter said he had served near Svitlodarsk, Bakhmut, and Horlivka, including evacuating soldiers’ bodies.

Magomed also claimed two Chechens had crossed before him, prompting Russian commanders to check fighters’ phones and tighten surveillance.

According to Magomed, he later followed a Ukrainian drone toward Ukrainian positions with other Chechens. Ukrainian troops dropped medicine, water, and a radio to guide them. A Russian FPV drone attacked during the crossing and killed one Chechen, he alleged.

Ukrainian forces received the survivors and handed Magomed to the police brigade "Liut". His captivity began on 29 August 2025. Magomed also alleged that Russians killed his brother and called the death an epileptic seizure. Magomed said that drove him to fight Russia.

Militarnyi reported that Magomed had joined the International Legion, which is run by Ukraine's military intelligence. However, Karpenko’s video description says he wants to join the legion. Neither source explained the discrepancy.

What is Akhmat?

Akhmat, the unit Magomed belonged to, provides Russia with frontline troops and rear-area security. UK intelligence estimated in 2024 that around 9,000 personnel served in pro-Russian Chechen units in Ukraine.

Kadyrov’s reach has also expanded during the war. A later investigation found that his armed network had grown to 20 units across Russia’s military and security structures.

The Akhmat group's influence may extend beyond military operations. In January 2026, ATESH, a Ukrainian-Crimean Tatar partisan group, said Moscow planned to hand occupied Mariupol to Akhmat as a reward for Chechen leaders’ loyalty. The resistance organization claimed that arriving Chechen forces sought control of the city’s resources and industry.

Chechens also fight for Ukraine

On the other side, Chechens seeking an independent Ichkeria (the indigenous Chechen name for Chechnya) have fought for Ukraine since 2014.

In April 2026, Ukrainian intelligence said Shamanbat, a Ukrainian special unit that includes Free Ichkeria fighters, helped conduct drone and artillery strikes on Akhmat positions. The agency claimed the operation killed dozens of Akhmat personnel and wounded about 80.

Meta has filed a patent for its AI smartglasses that uses facial recognition to automatically detect who is in the frame, creates a video clip whenever one of those people does something — like picking an item up or walking around — and then generates a highlight reel of what just happened, according to a copy of the patent published Thursday. One example given is the system capturing highlights from a dinner party and then serving those up to the user.

The patent gives new, granular insight into what Meta may be planning around its highly controversial push into facial recognition in combination with its AI glasses, which have already been widely lauded as “pervert glasses.” 

Starting in September, Belarusian 10th-graders will be split by gender for new practical training: boys will take a 10-hour drone-piloting course, girls an expanded tactical medicine block, Deputy Education Minister Alyaksandr Kadlubai said, according to BelTA. The changes fall under the "pre-conscription and medical training" classes already taught in Belarusian schools.

The update fits a broader pattern of militarizing education in Belarus since the 2020 protests and Alyaksandr Lukashenka's subsequent crackdown. Military-patriotic clubs, formalized under a 2022 presidential decree, have spread through Belarusian schools, sending children as young as elementary school age through weapons training and field exercises. This year, Radio Svoboda says that 10-day military field camps have become mandatory for 10th-graders, and kindergartens have opened groups with a military-patriotic focus.

Kadlubai singled out cooperation with a Minsk-based military unit, No. 5448, home to a police brigade of the interior troops, saying the ministry aims to "scale this experience across the whole of Belarus."

"We've strengthened the practical component," Kadlubai said. "We've shifted the balance toward practical classes and increased their volume."

While Belarus drills its own children, Russia indoctrinates Ukraine's

Belarus is not a neutral bystander to Russia's war. Alyaksandr Lukashenka's government let Russian forces stage the February 2022 invasion from Belarusian soil, and Kyiv says it keeps expanding the logistics routes, training grounds, and artillery positions Russia could use for future operations.

And what its ally teaches at home, Russia imposes by force on Ukrainian children under occupation. From 1 September 2026, occupation authorities roll out a curriculum built around loyalty to the Russian state — a compulsory Russian "identity" subject, a split-off military-training course, and behavior graded from the second grade as "exemplary," "acceptable," or "unacceptable." It already reaches more than 582,000 children in nearly 2,000 schools.

A Kyiv court has sentenced an unemployed man to 15 years in prison with confiscation of his property for carrying out arson attacks on behalf of Russian intelligence, Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) said on 13 August. The man was recruited while looking for "easy money" on Telegram channels and carried out two arson attacks in Kyiv before fleeing to Odesa, the SBU reported.

Russian intelligence increasingly recruits Ukrainians through Telegram for arson and sabotage. It targets people seeking quick money and treats them as disposable operatives, paying small sums for a single task and discarding them once they are caught.

The Russian agent carried out two arson attacks

According to the SBU, the man first set fire to a relay cabinet belonging to a railway signaling system. Russia intended the attack to disrupt freight logistics, including supplies to areas near the front.

The agent later burned a volunteer’s SUV used to deliver humanitarian aid and evacuate civilians from areas affected by Russia’s war. He carried out the attacks at night, using a flammable mixture and filming each incident on his smartphone before sending the footage to his Russian handler.

The SBU arrested him in Odesa in July 2025, where he had attempted to hide after carrying out the attacks. Investigators seized his phone, which contained evidence of his cooperation with Russia.

A court found him guilty on two counts — sabotage committed under martial law, and intentional destruction of property by arson — both carried out as part of a group acting on prior conspiracy. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison with confiscation of his property.

Easy money, hard time: other Telegram recruits jailed too

The case follows several similar convictions. In a May case, an agent received 15 years for burning a railway relay cabinet near a Dnipro station in an attempt to disrupt frontline logistics. The SBU said the unemployed local, recruited through Telegram, filmed the arson and reported it to his handler, then was caught before he could carry out a planned series of attacks on the city's critical infrastructure.

In June 2026, another agent was sentenced to 15 years for preparing to burn an electrical substation in Kropyvnytskyi.

In July, SBU investigators reported that a GRU agent in Zaporizhzhia received 15 years for preparing explosives for Russian-organized attacks.

Police arrested a man in Texas early Wednesday morning for saying “bullshit” at a public city meeting a week earlier.

Police in Fort Worth, Texas pulled over local radio host and political activist EJ Carrion just outside of his home and arrested him for "tumultuous behavior” related to a Commissioner's Court meeting on August 4, according to a copy of the arrest report obtained by 404 Media. Video of the alleged crime on YouTube showed Carrion saying the word “bullshit” while talking about polling center reductions during the meeting before walking away from the microphone.

Carrion told NBC DFW that he had been out with friends late Tuesday night and came home around 3 AM on Wednesday morning. He pulled into his cul-de-sac when the cops pulled him over for not using a turn signal. They told Carrion they had a warrant for his arrest.

According to an arrest report obtained by 404 Media, Carrion is charged with two counts of disrupting a meeting or procession, a misdemeanor in the state of Texas. “On or about the 4th day of August 2026, in the county of Tarrant, state of Texas, [Carrion] did intentionally hinder an official proceeding [...] by noise or violent or tumultuous behavior,” the record said.

Tarrant County is the home of the city of Fort Worth, where. Carrion and other residents have been fighting a long battle with city officials over a plan to reduce the number of polling places by almost 50 percent ahead of the November midterms. During the last election, the city had 316 polling places. The county’s election administrator wants to cut that to 176.

Carrion is a local celebrity — a podcast host, political activist, and EdTech entrepreneur — who has used his platform to speak out against the plan. He’s attended many public meetings of the Tarrant County Commissioners and spoken against the proposed polling plan several times.

“You said you were all about cooling the temperature and yet you vote for this extremist bullshit,” Carrion said. “All of you are bullshit.” Carrion then turned around and walked away from the mic.

“Remove him immediately from the room,” Tarrant County judge Tim O’Hare said.

“I’m walking out, small man,” Carrion shouted over his shoulder as he walked away.

“You are disrupting the meeting, we are now in recess,” O’Hare said. This exchange was, apparently, what caused Tarrant County to issue a warrant for Carrion’s arrest.

Things did not calm down after Carrion left. Thirty minutes after his comments, a woman took the mic and criticized how the meetings worked. “People are removed for clapping. People are removed for speaking out. People are treated like a disruption instead of the reason this government exists,” she said. “You keep telling us not to ‘California my Texas’ while in reality you keep Russia my Texas. You three boys from the GOP—”

“Alright, hang on, that’s it,” O’Hare cut her off. “We’re going to clear the chambers now.” Off camera, someone called something out to O’Hare.

“Take that one, remove him from the building,” O’Hare said, pointing off camera.

An hour after that, the chamber cleared, O’Hare ordered the arrest of another speaker for touching the microphone. Former Texas State representative Lon Burnham spoke out against the polling plan and the Commission. “For the last couple of years now all we have seen is total disrespect for the public,” he said. A previous speaker had been removed for touching the microphone and Burnam picked it up during his own speech.

“Set the microphone down, Mr. Burnam,” O’Hare said. “I’ve asked you to set the microphone down. Please remove him.” The judge placed the meeting in recess again and Tarrant county officers physically dragged Burnam out of the chambers and charged him with two counts of public disruption — the same charges faced by Carrion.

O’Hare is an elected official who presides over the Tarrant County Commission with four other elected representatives. Commissioner Roderick Miles Jr. questioned Carrion’s arrest in a public statement on his Facebook page. “I am deeply disturbed by the circumstances surrounding the arrest of Efrin ‘EJ’ Carrion earlier this morning,” Miles Jr. said in the statement.

“Government must exercise extraordinary restraint when speech at a public meeting leads to involvement with the criminal justice system. Residents should never have to wonder whether speaking forcefully to their elected officials could result in a warrant, an arrest, or an encounter with law enforcement,” he said. “Because once that fear takes hold, the damage reaches far beyond one person.”

Miles Jr. called on his fellow commissioners to make the Commissioners Court a place where residents could feel safe to speak their mind. “There must be a line the government does not cross,” he said. “The authority entrusted to us does not belong to us. It belongs to the people [...] this must stop. And I will not be silent when the public trust, the safety of our residents, and their rights to be heard are at stake.”

Carrion’s arrest is the latest in a growing trend around the country. People are angry at their local politicians — often about surveillance cameras and data center contracts — and have been showing up at public hearings in huge numbers to tell them. In February, cops in Oklahoma arrested a farmer for speaking a little too long during a data center meeting. In July, police arrested a person in Kansas for clapping during the public comments portion of a data center meeting.

Carrion and the Fort Worth Police Department did not return 404 Media’s request for a comment.

Russia's economy grew 1.3% in the second quarter of 2026, the state news agency TASS reported on 12 August, citing preliminary estimates from the state statistics agency Rosstat — a figure that, if accurate, would end a slump that had opened the year with the country's first quarterly contraction since 2023.

And it comes from a state agency months after Putin dressed down his economic team in April and demanded "concrete measures" to restore growth — the print then beat the government's own economists in exactly the direction he wanted.

The quarter may have brought a real if shallow rebound, or the state's statisticians may have produced the figure the president wanted. Either way it matters, because Russia's economy is what pays for its war, and its strength sets the ceiling on how long the Kremlin can keep fighting.

Barely growing all year

Even taken straight, the rebound is thinner than it looks. The first quarter had closed 0.2% down, and across the whole first half of the year output rose just 0.6%, half of last year's pace and close to seven times slower than the wartime boom of 2023 and 2024. The quarterly figure jumped. The underlying trend barely moved.

The weakness had been building for over a year. War spending drove the 2023–24 boom and overheated the economy; to curb the resulting inflation, the central bank raised its key rate to 21%, choking lending and investment. It has cut rates since, to 14% in July, but money is still tight and inflation is rising again as Ukrainian strikes push up fuel prices.

Growth the war paid for

As The Moscow Times set out, reviewing the data and the economists reading it, most of the quarter's growth rested on one-off factors: more working days than a year earlier, a temporary oil-revenue spike during the Iran war, and a budget that lifted spending 16%, a third of it on the army and weapons. The split underneath is the tell.

Military plants kept raising output; civilian industry kept shrinking, down 3.2% from a year earlier by the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting (CMASF), a Russian forecasting institute, according to its estimate.

Rosstat also billed the quarter as its strongest in six, and said it had beaten the forecasts of both the economy ministry, which had projected 0.9%, and the central bank, which saw 0.8%.

Few expect it to last

Russia will "remain in a state of stagnation" for the foreseeable future, said Liam Peach of Capital Economics, citing high interest rates and the fuel crisis.

Ukraine's long-range drones are adding to the strain. Their strikes have cut Russian oil refining to its lowest level in more than two decades, draining fuel supply and pushing prices up at home, and forcing Moscow, an oil giant, to import gasoline from as far as Morocco.

Russia's glide-bomb strike on Kramatorsk killed one person and wounded 18, the head of the Donetsk Oblast Military Administration, Vadym Filashkin, reported on the morning of 14 August. The Donetsk Oblast Prosecutor's Office has opened a war-crimes investigation into the attack.

Russian forces dropped eight FAB-250 aerial bombs fitted with universal glide and correction modules (UMPK) on the city on the evening of 13 August, hitting residential areas including apartment buildings, the prosecutor's office reported. An apartment building and a car were damaged. Filashkin said the strikes also hit the nearby settlement of Bilenke.

The strike on the residential area was another instance of Russian forces using guided aerial munitions against civilian areas. Under international humanitarian law, civilian objects may not be deliberately targeted.

The toll rose overnight. Filashkin first reported at least one killed and 15 wounded on the evening of 13 August. By the next morning, the prosecutor's office had documented 17 of the wounded — seven men and 10 women aged between 47 and 85 — with blast and traumatic brain injuries, shrapnel wounds, cuts to the head, arms and legs, and abrasions and bruises. Filashkin's later update put the number of wounded at 18.

"Russia again turned an ordinary evening in the city into deadly danger. This is not an accident or a mistake — this is how the enemy wages war against our people," Filashkin said.

Deliberately directing attacks against civilian objects may constitute a war crime under international humanitarian law. The prosecutor's office has opened a pre-trial investigation under Part 2 of Article 438 of Ukraine's Criminal Code.

"In total, over the past day, Russians shelled populated areas of Donetsk Oblast 37 times. 624 people, including 90 children, have been evacuated from the front line," Filashkin reports.

Repeated pattern of glide-bomb strikes on Donetsk Oblast

Russian forces regularly use FAB-250 bombs equipped with UMPK to strike populated areas in Donetsk Oblast and other frontline regions.

On 11 August 2025, Russian aircraft dropped FAB-250 bombs equipped with UMPK on a residential quarter in Bilozerske, Donetsk Oblast. Two civilians were killed, a 43-year-old man and a 34-year-old woman, while seven others were injured, including a 16-year-old boy. Eight apartment buildings and six vehicles were damaged. A pre-trial investigation was opened under Part 2 of Article 438 of Ukraine's Criminal Code.

On 18 September 2025, Russian forces struck civilians with a FAB-250 bomb equipped with UMPK in Kostiantynivka, Donetsk Oblast. Five residents aged between 62 and 74 were killed; three men and two women were outside at the time of the strike. The facades of four apartment buildings were damaged.

On 25 June 2026, Russian forces dropped three FAB-250 bombs equipped with UMPK on Druzhkivka, Donetsk Oblast. A 56-year-old woman was killed, and four others were injured: a 68-year-old man and three women aged 51, 58, and 67, sustaining blast injuries and shrapnel wounds.

Russia dismissed the idea of a Black Sea ceasefire on 14 August, Reuters reported, a day after the agency disclosed that Ukraine had proposed a mutual halt to attacks on civilian targets there.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said Moscow saw no grounds for measures that would give Kyiv a temporary reprieve.

Russia’s dismissal comes after its strikes drove shipowners from Odesa as Ukraine’s wheat harvest peaked. More than 90% of Ukraine’s farm exports leave through three deepwater Odesa ports. Reuters reported that Ukraine’s 12 August operation at Novorossiysk targeted a naval base and warships, although nearby grain terminals also suspended operations.

Russian forces, by contrast, have repeatedly struck foreign-flagged ships and Ukrainian port infrastructure. The disruption is stranding Ukrainian crops and raising concerns over global food supplies.

Zakharova accused Ukraine of deliberately destabilizing civilian shipping but did not mention Russia’s attacks, Reuters said. She was responding to Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who said Ankara had proposed a Black Sea moratorium to both sides.

Zakharova also said Moscow had received no formal proposal from Türkiye and ruled out reviving the 2022–23 Black Sea grain deal, calling it one-sided.

Ukraine’s harvest has nowhere to go

Reuters said Ukraine’s grain exports had fallen 76% year on year so far in August. Ukraine’s Agriculture Ministry projects agricultural exports could nearly halve, from 64.4 million to 29.6 million tonnes. It expects silos to fill by October as grain backs up.

World Grain, citing the US Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service, reported that corn exports could fall 39% and wheat exports 26%. The US agency expects unsold corn stocks to rise more than tenfold.

The ministry has asked the EU for €220 million to subsidize farm loans and help producers finance autumn sowing. Reuters separately reported, citing unnamed sources in both countries, that Kyiv and Chisinau were discussing a rail route to Romania’s Constanța port. Kyiv estimates it could carry only 10% of Ukrainian grain exports.

Russia turns ports into targets

After Russia refused to extend the UN- and Türkiye-brokered grain deal in 2023, Ukraine opened its own maritime corridor. It remained operational until this summer’s escalation.

Russian forces repeatedly struck foreign-flagged vessels in July. On 19 July, Russian missiles hit the Guinea-Bissau-flagged, Turkish-owned Golden Leo as it left Odesa carrying corn. The attack killed 10 people, Ukraine’s Navy and Sea Ports Authority said. Ag Bull Trading reported that the attacks brought the corridor to its first full stop since it opened in August 2023.

Russia’s dismissal leaves Ukraine’s corridor officially open while Russian attacks continue to drive shipowners away.

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.

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.

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.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said authorities had detained a Russian citizen recruited by Moscow to kill a man in Warsaw. The target holds US and Ukrainian passports, the Associated Press (AP) reported on 13 August. Tusk said Polish security services stopped the alleged attack “at the last minute.” 

Since 2022, AP has mapped about 200 acts of sabotage, arson, and disruption across Europe that officials have linked to Russia. European governments say the campaign aims to intimidate Ukraine’s supporters and disrupt military aid, while Ukrainian authorities report similar recruitment tactics inside Ukraine.

The suspect was detained on 7 August and remanded for three months, Warsaw police said. Tomasz Siemoniak, the minister overseeing Poland’s intelligence services, said the operation involved US services.

PM Tusk called it the first Russian-ordered attempt of its kind against a US citizen in another NATO country. He said the target was “inconvenient to the Putin regime,” without explaining why.

In their bulletin, Reuters reported that Russia’s Warsaw embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Moscow denies conducting a sabotage campaign in Europe.

Russia has already gone after a German arms CEO and critics of the Kremlin

European authorities had already reported plots against arms-industry figures supplying Ukraine. CNN reported in 2024 that US and German services foiled a plot against Rheinmetall chief Armin Papperger. 

Former Bellingcat investigator Christo Grozev said an intelligence insider told him he was on Russia’s kill list. He also warned Putin critic Garry Kasparov that a Russian agent trained in assassination had infiltrated exile groups to approach him.

Russia has also been accused of targeting Kremlin opponents abroad. In June, Kremlin critic Robert Kuzovkov was shot dead in Poland. Tusk said the killing resembled a political assassination, but Warsaw has not attributed it to Russia.

Russia uses disposable agents, not career spies

The alleged recruitment in Warsaw resembles tactics reported elsewhere in Europe. German investigators identified a former Ukrainian bricklayer and an untrained Romanian woman as the suspected operatives surveilling Stefan Thumann, head of Bavarian drone maker Donaustahl. German intelligence later classified the case as a suspected planned assassination.

Ukrainian authorities have reported similar recruitment at home. The SBU said an FSB-directed foreign pair killed Colonel Ivan Voronych in Kyiv in July 2025. Both suspects later died in a shootout with law enforcement.

Ukrainian police say Russian recruitment can escalate from surveillance and simple deliveries to arson, terrorism, and murder. Since the start of 2026, police and the SBU have registered 31 terrorist attacks and prevented another 14.

Russia's defense ministry posted photographs of attack drones in flight on its Telegram channel, captioned "like snow on your head," and told Ukrainians that "in winter, you'll get a freeze." The ministry attached the threat to its own earlier claim of strikes on Ukrainian port infrastructure and vessels.

The post puts in writing what Russia has done to Ukrainian civilians through every winter of the full-scale war: strike the power and heating grid to leave homes cold and dark. What is new is not the tactic but the candor — a ministry that usually insists it hits only military targets openly advertising the coming assault on the systems that keep civilians warm. And the taunt lands as Ukraine heads into the season more exposed than at any point in the war: President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN this week that the country holds about 1% of the Patriot interceptors it needs to get through winter.

The winter campaign Russia is advertising

Since late 2022, Russia has systematically struck Ukraine's electricity, gas, and heating infrastructure, causing rolling blackouts and cutting heat and water during freezing weather. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly called the campaign "energy terrorism," and grid operators say the strikes have shifted toward knocking out entire energy districts rather than staging single mass barrages. This summer Russia widened the target set again: on 13 August a Russian drone set port infrastructure alight in Odesa Oblast and damaged a civilian vessel at a Mykolaiv port, the national rail operator and regional officials reported — the same kind of strike the ministry's post was boasting about.

Ukraine enters winter short of the weapon that stops ballistic missiles

The threat is heavier because Ukraine cannot reliably stop the missiles that would carry it out. Zelenskyy told CNN that selling Kyiv 5% of current US Patriot stocks would carry it through winter and 10% would let it "destroy all the Russians' ballistic missiles" — but that he holds 1%. On 5 August, Russia fired 28 ballistic and anti-ship missiles at Kyiv and Ukraine intercepted none, killing 17 people. July was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since April 2022, according to the UN.

Europe is scrambling to add generation before the cold sets in. Finland said on 13 August it would fund a €28.5 million ($33.2 million) power plant project for Ukraine, one of several efforts to keep the lights on when the strikes resume. Ukrainian officials have warned that the coming winter could be more difficult than any before it.

Bulgaria's interest in buying Poland's retiring MiG-29s has pushed Warsaw and Kyiv closer to finalizing their long-stalled swap, Polish officials say.

Poland and Ukraine are in the final stage of negotiating a deal to transfer Poland's aging MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine in exchange for drones and Ukrainian drone-warfare know-how, with the jets potentially shipping within weeks, Polish outlet Wirtualna Polska reported, citing sources in the Polish Armed Forces and Defense Ministry. The report follows months of on-and-off talks that Poland's own officials have repeatedly declared both close to done and dead.

Polish Deputy Defense Minister Cezary Tomczyk said on Polsat News that Bulgaria's competing interest in the jets has "livened up" Warsaw's discussions with Kyiv. Bulgaria has told Poland that if Ukraine will not commit, Sofia would buy the jets itself, Tomczyk said.

"I hope it will be soon," Tomczyk said when asked when Poland intends to sign the agreement with Ukraine. He said Poland has laid out the technologies and know-how it wants from Ukraine in return, calling the exchange in both countries' interest. "Today I cannot say with 100% certainty that this matter will be finalized, but we hope so."

According to Wirtualna Polska, the deal covers Soviet-era jets Poland's air force is retiring as it phases in Western aircraft, in exchange for a large batch of Ukrainian drones of various types and the transfer of Ukrainian combat know-how. The outlet reports Poland wants data on strike-drone communications links, control principles, footage of strikes on targets, and physical samples of the hardware itself.

Poland's Defense Ministry has said the process picked up pace after Rustem Umerov took over as head of Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tasking him with negotiating drone agreements. A source involved in the talks told Wirtualna Polska that Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point has offered to supply Poland with 1,500 long-range drones, plus a matching batch if war breaks out — an offer the source said Poland regards cautiously, since a company citing force majeure in wartime could leave Warsaw without the hardware it was promised.

A deal that has collapsed and revived for a year

Poland and Ukraine signed a bilateral security agreement in July 2024 that raised the prospect of transferring a squadron of at least 14 Polish MiG-29s. By early 2026, Warsaw had narrowed the offer to six to eight jets. In June, Poland froze the transfer, with Deputy Defense Minister Tomczyk citing Ukraine's refusal to share its drone and counter-drone technology. Talks restarted in July after Kyiv sent Warsaw a letter with concrete proposals, and by 31 July, Poland said Ukraine had returned with a specific list of drones it would hand over — a proposal Poland's ministry was still reviewing.

Poland's ambassador to Ukraine, Vasyl Bodnar, told Ukrainska Pravda's Yevropeiska Pravda that dialogue continues but that several obstacles still stand in the way of the transfer.

Why this matters

The MiG-29 remains a core part of Ukraine's air force even as it shifts to F-16s, Mirages, and incoming Gripens — Ukrainian pilots already fly the Soviet-era jets and have adapted them to carry Western precision weapons, so a new batch could enter service without the delays a Western aircraft transition requires. Poland's own hesitation reflects the same trade-off every one of its allies faces: what it gives up in hardware, it wants back in the operational knowledge Ukraine has built fighting Russia's drone war for four years — knowledge with no equivalent on any NATO training ground.

Serafim Hordiienko enlisted at 19 in 2022, fought as a mortarman near the front line, then moved into drone warfare as it grew central to Russia's war on Ukraine. In an interview with RBC-Ukraine, he pushed back on the idea that unmanned systems are phasing out infantry, arguing the two perform separate functions neither can absorb.

The debate is live inside Ukraine's own military. Ukraine's Third Army Corps has said it plans to replace roughly 30% of its infantry with ground robotic systems by the end of 2026, and other officers have called full infantry replacement an eventual goal. Hordiienko's account, shaped by his own shift from rifle-and-mortar combat to drone operations, argues against that trajectory ever completing — infantry holds ground; drones strike and surveil; neither substitutes for the other.

"Different functions of war"

Hordiienko compared infantry and drones to two halves of a single system rather than competing tools. Infantry cannot operate without supporting fire and reconnaissance, he said, and drones — while efficient at surveillance and strikes — cannot hold territory the way ground troops can. If war is still fought over front lines and captured ground, he argued, only infantry can perform that function; drones deliver cost-effective damage but do not occupy space.

He traced Ukraine's drone advantage not to hardware alone but to the system around it — production, battlefield communication, and rapid adaptation to frontline needs. Ukrainian manufacturers he named, including Skyeton, Ukrspetssystems, DeviRO, and Firepoint, built reconnaissance and strike capabilities under resource shortages that Russia's more centralized, state-linked defense industry did not face in the same way, he said.

The end of romanticized war

Hordiienko dates a turning point in how Ukrainian soldiers relate to the war to the 2023 Zaporizhzhia counteroffensive. Before it, he said, volunteers who joined in 2022 operated in an emotionally charged, maximalist mode — young men competing to reach combat before the war, as they assumed, ended quickly. After the counteroffensive stalled, he said, that gave way to a more systematic, mechanized phase he calls "a war of military machines."

He illustrated the shift with a sword-and-shield framework: each side develops a new method of attack, the other adapts a defense, and the balance resets every few months. The side that adapts and scales fastest gains the advantage, he said — a dynamic he sees as running through the drone war specifically.

Hordiienko enlisted through an unusual path. He and three other volunteers, all under 21 and already carrying combat experience from the war's opening months, could not sign standard military contracts because of their age. They were enlisted only after Ukraine's then-commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, issued a personal order on their behalf.

What newer recruits are owed

Speaking about troops mobilized later in the war — arriving without the volunteer surge's initial urgency — Hordiienko said commanders now owe recruits honesty rather than appeals to abstract duty. He described his approach as a direct exchange: a commander sets out the conditions of service, and the soldier meets specific obligations in return, with consequences if either side breaks that arrangement. Motivation, in his account, rests less on invoking "fighting for Ukraine" and more on concrete terms of service, fair treatment, and — where the national cause doesn't land for a given recruit — the practical case that military service builds expertise, particularly in drone and other technical specialties, that carries into civilian life.

A NATO fighter patrolling Baltic airspace shot down a drone over Latvia early Friday, the Latvian Armed Forces said, in the second Baltic-region drone incursion this week.

The interception happened over Balvi Municipality, near Latvia's borders with Belarus and Russia. Latvian officials said the drone entered the country's airspace after being knocked off course by Russian electronic warfare systems — not as a deliberate strike on Latvian territory. Russia has regularly bombarded Ukraine's Baltic-facing neighbors with stray drones since intensifying its own long-range strike campaign, and on 12 August, Romania detonated two Russian drones that washed up near its Black Sea gas field.

Latvian forces reported an "airspace threat" in four districts bordering Belarus and Russia shortly after 04:00, and announced the drone's destruction roughly 30 minutes later. Ieva Bērziņa, a representative of Latvia's Joint Armed Forces Staff, said the crash site had been located but its exact position was not being disclosed, and that debris may be scattered over a wide area because the drone was shot down at high altitude.

The incident coincided with a large-scale drone attack on Russian targets in Leningrad Oblast overnight.

This is not the first time drones have crossed into the Baltic states during Russian strikes on its own territory. In May, a drone that entered from Russia damaged fuel tanks at an oil depot in Rēzekne, about 40 kilometers from the border. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said in March that Russia was deliberately steering Ukrainian drones toward Baltic airspace using electronic warfare, adding that Moscow later uses the resulting incidents in information operations targeting the region.

Latvia is weighing the purchase of Brazilian-made A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft for counter-drone missions, funded through more than €1 billion the government has earmarked for stronger air defense.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the results on 12 August after a briefing from Commander-in-Chief Mykhailo Drapatyi, Chief of the General Staff Ihor Skybiuk, and Airborne Assault Forces Commander Oleh Apostol.

Kyiv says the operation recaptured 745 km² and 26 villages across Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. The Airborne Assault Forces and attached units carried it out. The goal was to stop Russian forces from advancing further and push them beyond the administrative border of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. The President's Office put Russian losses at at least 9,550 killed and over 6,600 wounded. Ukrainian forces are continuing to build on the gains. The operation also added to Ukraine's prisoner exchange pool.

Since its 2023 counteroffensive stalled, Ukraine has mostly defended while Russia grinds forward, making any sustained Ukrainian advance rare. With Western aid uncertain and its own troops stretched, Ukraine rarely gets to trade defense for offense on its own land.

A reversal Russia paid for across the front

Ukraine has spent most of the past year on the defensive. The Oleksandrivka counteroffensive broke that pattern. For over six months, Ukrainian forces pushed forward rather than holding ground, and they did it in Ukraine's own Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, not on Russian territory.

The operation also hurt Russia elsewhere. Every unit Moscow sent to defend in the Oleksandrivka direction was a unit it could not use to attack other parts of the front, the US-based think tank ISW assessed. Russian recruitment is declining, which makes that tradeoff harder to absorb.

The numbers across the whole frontline tell the same story. Between late January and 12 August, Russian forces seized roughly 383 km² but lost about 234 km², according to ISW. The net Russian gain was far smaller than in previous seasons.

How Ukraine clawed the ground back

The counteroffensive began on 29 January, according to ISW. Texty reported it ran in two stages: January to May and May to August. It was one of two mutually reinforcing Ukrainian drives in the Oleksandrivka and Huliaipole directions. Both aimed to push Russia from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and disrupt preparations for Russia's 2026 offensive.

Kyiv says the following 26 villages were liberated: Tolstoi, Novokhatske, Hrushivske, Zirka, Zelenyi Hai, Piddubne, Myrne, Tsehelne, Pryvillia, Zlahoda, Krasnohirske, Pryvilne, Novohryhorivka, Stepove, Kalynivske, Berezove, Novomykolaivka, Voskresenka, Oleksandrohrad, Yalta, Rybne, Maliivka, Sichneve, Ternove, Novoheorhiivka, and Zaporizke. The settlements span all three oblasts.

Where Kyiv's map and ISW's diverge

ISW described the results as evidence that Ukrainian forces can still carry out significant tactical advances and bring back limited mechanized maneuver on parts of the frontline.

It assessed that the success was likely the result of several factors working together: better Ukrainian operational planning, a campaign to suppress and destroy Russian air defenses, deeper strikes against Russian supply lines, Ukraine's advantage in tactical drones, and the 01 February Starlink cutoff that hit Russian forces in Ukraine.

Geolocated footage from 11 August showed Ukrainian forces holding positions southeast of Ternuvate and Vozdvyzhivka. Russian sources had claimed advances in those areas. ISW assessed those claims were likely largely exaggerated.

ISW's own mapping recorded roughly 627 km² of Ukrainian gains across the Oleksandrivka and northern Huliaipole directions combined. Even that two-direction total falls below Kyiv's 745 km² for the Oleksandrivka direction alone. ISW noted its conservative methodology likely underestimates Ukrainian advances.

The Airborne Assault Forces Command added that some flag-raisings over liberated villages were done at a "safe distance" from actual positions for operational security. This suggests forces had moved beyond the settlements they publicly named.

At least 437 civilians were killed and 2,610 injured across Ukraine in July, the highest monthly death toll since May 2022, according to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU), which published the figures on 12 August. The toll was 30% higher than June and 70% higher than July 2025.

The deadliest single attack came on 2 July, when Russia launched 74 missiles and nearly 500 long-range drones at Ukraine, mainly targeting Kyiv. Ukrainian air defenses downed 524 of 570 aerial targets, but the 46 that got through — including 25 ballistic missiles — killed 30 people and destroyed a nine-story apartment block in the capital's Darnytskyi district. Russia fired at least 429 missiles at Ukraine over the course of the month, more than double June's total.

A trend that keeps getting worse

"Every month this year the number of killed and injured civilians has increased," HRMMU head Danielle Bell said. "That trend accelerated sharply in July. The number of civilian casualties in July was the highest we documented in a single month since March 2022."

Child casualties also hit a new high: 17 killed and 166 injured, the worst toll since April 2022. Over the first seven months of 2026, HRMMU verified 12,477 civilian casualties — 1,839 killed and 10,638 injured — a 44% increase over the same period in 2025 and more than double the 2024 figure.

Long-range weapons still the top killer, but glide bombs surged

Long-range missiles and drones caused 38% of all July casualties (183 killed, 967 injured), most of them far from the front line in cities. Casualties from aerial glide-bomb strikes jumped 143% compared with June — from 45 killed and 308 injured to 105 killed and 753 injured — making glide bombs the second-leading cause of civilian harm. Short-range drones near the front line killed 111 people and injured 710, the highest monthly toll from that weapon since 24 February 2022.

Kyiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Sumy took the heaviest losses among the 14 regions where casualties were recorded. HRMMU also verified 25 killed and 50 injured in Russian-occupied territory, cautioning that shrinking access to information there means the real toll is likely far higher.

Attacks on Black Sea shipping and port infrastructure in Odesa and Mykolaiv oblasts also intensified, with at least 39 strikes — 20 of them on vessels — killing 19 port and crew personnel and wounding 25.

Since the full-scale invasion began on 24 February 2022, the UN has verified at least 16,874 civilians killed and 51,173 injured.

Ukrainian drones struck a Wildberries logistics warehouse in Russia's Tver Oblast overnight into 14 August, damaging a wall for the third time in two weeks, regional governor Vitaly Korolev said. No one was hurt, and Wildberries said the goods stored there survived.

The Emmaus facility, built on a roughly 77,000-square-meter footprint about 150 km from Moscow, has become a fixture in a Ukrainian long-range drone campaign against Wildberries, Russia's largest online retailer, now in its fifth week. Since 18 July, Ukraine has hit more than 20 of the company's logistics sites, according to Russian outlet Agentstvo, part of a declared operation President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced on 25 June to pressure the Kremlin toward ending the war.

What happened in Tver

Korolev said drone debris damaged the wall of the Wildberries warehouse building in the Kalininsky district overnight, and that the resulting smoke was "promptly extinguished." No warehouse staff were injured, he said. Wildberries confirmed "minor damage" to the logistics complex and said the fire's aftermath was "promptly eliminated," adding that "the goods were not affected."

It is the third reported strike on a Wildberries facility in the Emmaus area in under two weeks. Drones first hit the site on 4 August, damaging a wall, and returned on 6 August, damaging the facade — though Tver governor Korolev did not confirm at the time whether the two strikes hit the same building. Ukrainian monitoring channel Supernova+ has said the repeated, inconclusive strikes mean Ukrainian forces are likely to keep coming back until the hub is disabled.

A campaign built on repetition, not precision

The Tver hub is a minor player in a campaign that has concentrated on Wildberries' largest distribution centers — Koledino outside Moscow, Khryastovo in Vladimir Oblast, Oleksin in Tula Oblast — each spanning well over 100,000 square meters and each hit with enough force to halt operations for days. By contrast, all three Tver strikes have caused only minor structural damage with no confirmed disruption to the warehouse's operations.

That gap matters for how the campaign is read. Euromaidan Press has reported that Ukraine has concentrated its drones on roughly two dozen hubs that move most of Wildberries' goods, while hundreds of smaller depots — Tver likely among them — remain largely untouched or only lightly damaged. Measured against the whole network, the physical loss looks modest; measured against the major hubs Ukraine has targeted, more than half are out of action.

The financial pressure has outpaced the physical damage. Wildberries has been scouting storage space in Kazakhstan beyond the reach of Ukrainian drones, and the Kremlin has been weighing state loans to keep the company solvent, at a point when Russia's federal deficit had already outrun the full-year shortfall the Treasury had budgeted. Ukrainian officials and Estonian military intelligence say Wildberries' warehouses store and move military-linked goods, including body armor and drone parts sold on the platform — a claim Wildberries denies.

On the evening of 12 August 2026, NASA displayed a map on which Crimea was marked as Russian. It happened during the live broadcast of a total solar eclipse: on the graphic, the peninsula was separated from mainland Ukraine by a border line and presented as part of Russia.

Crimea is a Ukrainian region that Russia occupied after its illegal annexation in 2014. Ukraine and the overwhelming majority of the world's states do not recognize that annexation, and no cartographic error changes the peninsula's status under international law. Each uncorrected map treats as ordinary what international law still calls an illegal occupation.

What happened during the broadcast

The US agency streamed the total eclipse, whose path crossed Greenland, Iceland, and Spain, live to a global audience. The error appeared on one of the visibility maps NASA showed during the broadcast: on it, Russia's border was drawn along the land boundary between mainland Ukraine and the peninsula, creating the impression that Crimea belongs to Russia.

Additional images from the August 12 Solar Eclipse are on our Flickr feed. Check them out! A few more frames may be added later too. https://t.co/CwbEoWw3Eq pic.twitter.com/mZRukcYnZd

— NASA HQ PHOTO (@nasahqphoto) August 12, 2026

Not the only case

In December 2024, FIFA eventually apologized for a map it displayed during the qualifying draw for the 2026 World Cup that left occupied Crimea outside Ukraine's borders. The graphic was meant to show pairs of teams that cannot be drawn against each other for geopolitical reasons, among them Spain and Gibraltar, Kosovo and Serbia, and Ukraine and Belarus. It marked out Ukraine but drew the country without the peninsula. Ukraine's Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi objected, Kyiv called the omission an unacceptable error, and football's world governing body pulled the image.

On 24 September 2024, the British broadcaster Sky News published an investigation into a scheme for supplying sanctioned goods to Russia through third countries, Georgia among them. The report was accompanied by three maps of vehicle-transport routes into Russia, on each of which Crimea was marked as Russian territory, Detector Media reports. The maps have since been edited, and Crimea is now marked as part of Ukraine.

The Polish broadcaster TVN showed a map of Ukraine on which occupied Crimea was marked in a separate color during the entertainment show The Floor. The episode aired on Polish television, and the broadcaster published its video on its website in 2025.

Behind Putin's sacred Crimea stood Sevastopol's airfields

Explaining the annexation, Putin spoke not of the military but of sacred things. In his December 2014 address to the Federal Assembly, he called Crimea a place of "enormous civilizational and sacral significance," comparing the peninsula to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Europe rejected that mythology: just ten days after the sham referendum, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 68/262 by a vote of 100 to 11 and declared the annexation illegal.

But behind Moscow's "spiritual" rhetoric lay a different purpose for Crimea. Sevastopol, its airfields, and its logistics turned the peninsula into a springboard for the 2022 invasion, and it is largely for this reason that Ukraine's forces are now focused on striking Crimea. Robert "Madyar" Brovdi, commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces on 10 August said that the strikes are the first phase of a campaign meant to render the peninsula unusable for Russian troops.

"Crimea is one of the key conceptual pillars on the path to ending the war," Madyar told the Associated Press.

Ukrainian drones struck Russia's Ust-Luga port overnight on 14 August, sparking a fire at the Baltic Sea terminal — the sixth attack on the facility since March, according to Russian and Ukrainian reporting.

Leningrad Oblast Governor Alexander Drozdenko said air defenses shot down 51 drones over the region and that "damage was recorded" at the port, with a fire breaking out and firefighters responding. By morning he raised the regional tally to 54 drones destroyed. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin separately claimed 10 drones downed approaching the Russian capital overnight, with no casualties reported in either city. Drozdenko did not specify which facility inside the sprawling port complex was hit or the scale of the damage.

Ust-Luga is Russia's largest Baltic Sea port and, as of January 2026, handled nearly half — 47.4% — of the Baltic basin's total cargo turnover, according to industry data cited by Censor.NET. Its oil terminals ship crude and refined products, including naphtha, fuel oil, and jet fuel, and serve as the endpoint of the Baltic Pipeline System-II.

Sixth strike since March

Ukrainian forces have hit Ust-Luga repeatedly through 2026. The first major strike came overnight on 24–25 March, when long-range drones hit the NOVATEK gas condensate complex; Euromaidan Press reported the SBU and Special Operations Forces both claimed the operation. Follow-up strikes hit the port again on 27 and 29 March, and a fourth wave on 31 March damaged a mazut storage tank and two NOVATEK fuel tanks, according to Euromaidan Press's own coverage. A fifth strike reached the wider St. Petersburg port area on 3–4 July.

Drone strikes on Ust-Luga forced the terminal to cut oil-export operations by roughly half in September, Reuters reported at the time, dropping throughput to about 350,000 barrels per day after Ukraine also struck the Unecha pumping station that feeds the port.

Wednesday's strike came two days after Ukrainian drones hit Russia's Sheskharis terminal at Novorossiysk on the Black Sea — the country's largest oil-export hub after Primorsk and Ust-Luga — and follows a late-July strike on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium terminal, also on the Black Sea. Combined, Ust-Luga and Primorsk normally move about 40% of Russia's seaborne oil exports, according to Reuters figures cited by The Moscow Times.

© Reuters

Ukrainian drone operators overwhelmed US Army troops at a training exercise in Germany this year, the Wall Street Journal reported. The drill showed how far American forces still trail on the cheap front-line drones that dominate Russia's war on Ukraine, despite billions in Pentagon spending.

Drones now decide who moves and who dies along Ukraine's front, and Western armies are scrambling to master a way of fighting Kyiv rewrote under fire—some even copying its tools and procurement wholesale.

The dust gave them away

The exercise, Combined Resolve, ran in April and May. Around 3,500 US personnel, mostly from the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, tried to seize a position defended by an opposing force reinforced with Ukrainian drone troops of the 412th Regiment of Unmanned Systems Forces, or Nemesis. The Ukrainian operators "eliminated" the attacking armored brigade, US officials briefed on the drill told the Journal.

Heavy vehicles kicked up dust that reconnaissance drones caught at once. Explosive-dropping and first-person-view drones, flown straight into their targets, did the rest. Kills came so fast that US vehicles had to be "re-spawned" as fresh units to keep the drill running, a US official told the Journal.

Years of fighting Russia made the difference

Ukrainian crews have fought Russia for nearly four and a half years, repairing and adapting drones on the move, while US operators have never had to fix and arm them under fire, one person present told the Journal. Midway through, the Ukrainians switched sides and coached the Americans on attacking with drones. Eliot Cohen of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said mastering drones is now vital for the US military, and that so far it has not.

Not everyone agrees on why. Some US officers say drones dominate only because the front barely moves, and that maneuver warfare would revive the tank, the Journal noted. Ukraine's former commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, argues drones have frozen maneuver for now, the reason the eastern front barely shifts.

Not the first Western army to lose

It keeps happening. Ukrainian drone teams beat British, Estonian, and other NATO troops, including Americans, at a Baltic exercise in May 2025, and outdid Swedish-led NATO forces this spring, the Journal reported. Back in 2023, a US officer training Ukrainians realized the lesson ran the other way.

What Washington is doing about it

The Trump administration, despite friction with Kyiv, has been reaching out to Ukraine, the Journal reported. It is testing Ukrainian drones it may buy, and used counter-drone tools proven in this war to defend its troops against Iran's drones. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in May that he was sending more Americans to study drone warfare in Ukraine. By Washington's own reckoning, no US maker can match Ukraine's combat-forged drones.