Ukraine has employed a new tactic during its major Operation Vivaldi in Donetsk Oblast. During the 3rd Army Corps' offensive, fighters from the world's first experimental unit of unmanned ground-strike vehicles, "NC13", have upgraded their kamikaze ground drones with grenade launchers.

Vivaldi is the counteroffensive the corps is running near Lyman in northern Donetsk Oblast. Over its first two "seasons," the 3rd Army Corps and attached units have retaken more than 125 square kilometers, half of it de-occupied outright, and inflicted more than 3,000 casualties on Russian forces.

Through this offensive operation, the 3rd Army Corps, commanded by Brigadier General Andrii Biletsky, disrupted Russian forces' plans to encircle the fortress-belt cities in Donetsk Oblast from the north and south. Among them are Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, and Kostiantynivka. These cities have helped hold back Russian forces since 2014.

From intensive training to the world-first operations

The NC13 unit has been through Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and other of the toughest sections of the front.

Among its achievements: the world's first robotic assault carried out without infantry involvement, resulting in the capture of two Russian soldiers, a sabotage operation in the enemy's rear — blowing up a crossing and disrupting an offensive — using UGVs alone, and Ukraine's first fully robotic defense of a position for 45 days without involving infantry.

"No one in the history of warfare has used this kind of tactic before," the soldiers commented on the offensive.

The defenders say that a lack of combat experience is no barrier to joining the unit. Every recruit goes through an intensive training course led by experienced instructors.

Grenade launchers were developed based on the Soviet RPG-22

During the operation, UGVs equipped with two Bullspike grenade launchers attacked Russian positions, then detonated directly inside their shelters. The occupiers believed they were being attacked by an entire assault group. In reality, they were being torn apart by robots from the 3rd Assault Corps.

Ukrainian troops armed ground robots with grenade launchers and sent them to storm Russian positions during Operation Vivaldi near Lyman

The robots fired into Russian shelters at close range, then detonated inside them
3rd Army Corps, NC13 Unit pic.twitter.com/rjekIYxPbA

— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) September 27, 2026

"Yes, the UGVs carry out three tasks at once: they strike, they exert psychological pressure, and they clear the position. And most importantly, this happens without risk to our infantry," the force says.

The Bullspike grenade launchers were developed based on the Soviet RPG-22 anti-tank grenade launcher, which was previously manufactured under license by a Bulgarian defense company.

According to data from the manufacturer's website, the Bullspike RPG has a maximum aimed firing range of 350 meters, a direct-fire range of 150 meters, and armor penetration of 400 mm, Militarnyi reports.

The total weight of the launch unit, together with the 72.5 mm PG-22 grenade, is 3.4 kg. The length of the launcher is 780 mm.

The manufacturer states that the Bullspike-AT round is designed to destroy tanks, self-propelled artillery, and other armored vehicles, as well as to target enemy personnel located in bunkers, field fortifications, and urban-type brick fortifications.

The robots were controlled by operators from a safe shelter dozens of kilometers from the line of contact.

Earlier, for the first time in the world's history, the 3rd Army Corps dropped ground robots behind Russian lines from the air. The soldiers behind the mission say their heavy drones delivered kamikaze unmanned ground vehicles more than 10 kilometers into the Russian rear during the "second season" of Operation Vivaldi, letting Ukrainian troops flank them and clear another 40 square kilometers.

Ukraine has destroyed a record 76 Russian air-defense systems this month, and September is not over. The tally beats a record that had stood since July 2023 and reflects a systematic Ukrainian campaign to hunt down Russia's air defenses, opening the skies over occupied territory and inside Russia, the analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko said on Telegram.

Ukraine is methodically peeling apart Russia's layered air defense, and September has been its worst month yet: 76 systems destroyed, past the 73 lost in July 2023, by Kovalenko's count, with days still to go.

It is part of a campaign in which Ukrainian drones and special forces have hunted Russian radars and missile launchers across occupied territory and Crimea, and each one destroyed opens a corridor for the next strike.

The record falls with days to spare

Kovalenko credited Ukraine's Defense Forces' sustained hunt for Russian anti-air, which he said pays off twice: it clears the defenses that would otherwise stop Ukraine's strikes, making later attacks on occupied territory and on Russia itself more effective.

Each kill opens a corridor

Ukrainian drone and special-operations units have picked off Pantsir, Tor, Buk, and pieces of S-300 and S-400 systems across occupied territory and Crimea, sometimes several in a single night throughout 2026.

As Russia pulls its scarce long-range systems back to guard Moscow, fewer are left to cover occupied Ukraine, widening the openings for the next wave of Ukrainian strikes.

Russia cannot replace the losses

Over the full-scale war, Kovalenko said, Russia has lost more than 1,673 air-defense systems of every kind, from radars to surface-to-air missiles and self-propelled anti-aircraft guns.

That, he argued, is a level Moscow can no longer make good with a defense industry already stretched thin by the war.

"Such a quantity of equipment Russia will never be able to restore and compensate," he thinks.

He added that this means it would no longer be able to return to the pre-war level of closing the sky, neither technically nor technologically."

Ukraine, the country under daily Russian attack, is offering to help defend others from it. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine will share its drone-defense experience with partners facing Russia's hybrid and drone attacks, NATO members and non-members alike, through its "Drone Deal" agreements, according to UNIAN.

Russia's hybrid and drone attacks are spreading past Ukraine, to Moldova, Germany, and Romania, and Kyiv is casting itself as the country that knows how to counter them.

Asked whether he would send Ukrainian troops to defend NATO members, Zelenskyy instead pointed to the drone agreements, bilateral pacts open to partners in or out of NATO, that pair weapons sales and joint production with the transfer of Ukraine's combat experience.

Ukraine had signed such deals with nine countries by early August and is negotiating more than a dozen others, becoming, as its officials put it, "a security provider for Europe."

The attacks spread past NATO

"Russia will continue hybrid attacks against various countries, and not only NATO members," Zelenskyy said, pointing to drone incursions over Moldova, which belongs to neither NATO nor the EU.

Those crossings have become routine: Moldova logged 39 Russian drone incursions in the first eight months of the year, and on 24 September, drones entered both Moldova and Romania as Poland scrambled fighters. Ukraine has offered help, Zelenskyy said, "above all to those countries that help us during the war."

The Drone Deal shares experience

The Drone Deal agreements cover the sale of drones and missiles and joint production, he added, "but also an exchange of experience."

He offered a precedent: "How we sent our specialists to the Middle East, how we helped protect critical infrastructure." Sharing how to defend against drones, he said, is "precisely part of this exchange."

Ukraine turns security provider

Zelenskyy did not answer the question on whether Ukraine would put troops into NATO countries under attack, steering instead to what Ukraine can already give, its hard-won experience of fighting the very weapons now reaching its neighbors' skies.

Last winter, eight Ukrainian companies told the defense minister that their interceptors were ready to knock Russia's jet-powered drones out of the sky. They were not. A fast-flying drone is the easy part of the design, while combat testing exposed what the interceptors lacked in key features to chase an evading jet-powered Geran, presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov, known as Flash, said in an interview with NV.

Ukraine's answer to Russia's fast, hard-to-stop jet drones was supposed to be cheap interceptors, and last winter, their makers said they had them. But a jet Geran flies 450 to 500 kilometers an hour, up from the Geran-3's 320, varies its speed to slip past defenses, and will dodge harder once interceptors appear.

Catching one takes maneuverability, machine-vision target-lock, and fuel to loiter and search, not just speed, Flash said. Ukraine's cheap interceptors have already downed about half of Russia's slower drones, but the jet-powered systems have stayed a step ahead.

Eight makers said "ready"

At a meeting last winter called by Mykhailo Fedorov, then-defense minister, all eight interceptor makers reported the same thing: "everything's ready, the solution exists, it flies, we tested it, speed is sufficient," Flash recalled.

The mistake, he said, was that no one checked on them week to week. There were also too few jet Gerans in the skies then to test against.

"On the range, they showed: it flies. That was the problem," explained Flash.

Speed is the easy part

The engines are not the obstacle, Flash continues, since they can be bought abroad, and neither is a plane that flies fast in a straight line. The hard part is a machine agile enough to chase a jet-powered Geran, which is far more maneuverable than the propeller kind and will start changing altitude and throwing evasive maneuvers once interceptors appear.

Because an operator's aim frays at such speeds, he said, the decisive pieces are automatic target capture by machine vision and automatic terminal guidance.

"Building a construction that just flies fast is the easiest part," he added.

Mass orders must wait

That is why Ukraine cannot simply order thousands to blanket the country, Flash said: it first needs a proven design that works for any crew, from Security Service specialists to territorial defense soldiers, and is simple to launch, operate, and maintain.

Once such a sample exists, he said, scaling up is only a question of money. Meanwhile, the work is moving: a Ukrainian interceptor recently notched its first kills against jet Gerans and is heading toward mass production.

A Ukrainian jamming-systems maker went to a US Army base to do to candidate drones what Russia does to Ukraine's: flood them with electronic warfare (EW) and see which survives. Unwave company has tested four of its EW systems at Fort Carson in Colorado as part of the Pentagon's Drone Dominance program and has been asked to continue supporting it.

The Pentagon is using Drone Dominance to choose the drones it will buy at scale, more than 200,000 by 2027, and it needs to know they work under jamming, the condition that decides most drone fights in Ukraine.

So it brought in a Ukrainian electronic-warfare maker to supply that jamming, turning Ukraine's hard-won counter-drone experience into the test bench for American hardware. It follows a pattern in which US defense efforts adopt Ukrainian battlefield models.

Ukraine brings the jamming

From 24 August to 2 September, Unwave's team worked at the base, running scenarios that pitted its jammers against drones tasked with protecting fixed positions, moving vehicles, and infrastructure.

The crews operated from three separate positionsat short and long range to compare how drones from different manufacturers held up.

"Our mission was to create conditions as close to the real battlefield as possible," the company said, adding that it judged the tasks successfully completed but could not detail the scenarios for security reasons.

In all, 14 drone makers and three electronic-warfare firms took part.

Four systems on show

Unwave brought four:

• VIHA, which it calls Ukraine's first tactical-operational jammer for directed suppression of drones
• BOOMBOX, built to shield troops and positions from FPV and drop-drones
• SHATRO, for vehicles
• CHOVEN-2, a multi-frequency amplifier for cars.

Its participation was organized by Revenant Technologies, a US firm that specializes in bringing combat-proven defense tech to the American market, and helped design the scenarios using its ties to Ukraine and frontline experience.

A foothold in the US market

For Unwave, the value is a door into the alliance's security architecture. The event showed the importance of Ukrainian, American, and European specialists testing together, the company said, and "such interaction will help integrate Ukrainian technologies into the security architecture of our allies."

A drone-warfare course written by Ukrainian officers from real combat has earned NATO status. The English-language Drone Warfare Awareness Course, built on Ukraine's war experience, is now "NATO Selected" and has been taught to officers from more than 10 countries, the General Staff said.

Ukraine's combat experience is flowing into NATO's classrooms, and the alliance is starting to treat Kyiv as a teacher rather than only a recipient. It follows a broader shift of Ukrainian lessons into allied curricula.

Combat lessons become a course

The course came out of Ukraine's International Peacekeeping and Security Center, whose instructors at its "Partnership for Peace" training center wrote the syllabus, formally titled "Fundamentals of the Combat Use of Unmanned Systems", based on the Armed Forces' own experience.

In November 2025, the Ukrainian team presented it at a seminar in Sweden attended by NATO commanders and analysts.

The next year, it passed international trials with officers from more than a dozen countries and earned its NATO Selected mark, a recognition that it meets Alliance standards and can be offered to member-state officers, short of the full accreditation the center is still pursuing.

Sweden and Finland lend a hand

Two Nordic partners helped get it there. Sweden's SWEDINT began working with the center in 2024, teaching international methods for course development and preparing courses for accreditation.

Finland's FINCENT joined in 2025, sharing insights on building a military education system and assessing training needs. In the fall of 2026, delegations from both countries visited the center and signed plans for further joint work.

Ukraine teaches the Alliance

The course is one piece of a wider reversal. Ukrainian officers have trained Polish and German counterparts in drone and electronic warfare, and at the joint NATO-Ukraine center in Poland, they have set their battlefield practice against NATO doctrine, exposing where the Alliance's assumptions no longer fit in a modern war.

The person who built Ukraine's "Army of Drones" is now building an "Army of Robots". Myhailo Fedorov, the former defense minister, has launched a private-sector push to robotize the war, wanting machines to take the deadliest jobs, evacuating the wounded, laying and clearing mines, and fighting, so soldiers come home, he wrote, announcing the effort at the IT Arena conference in Lviv.

The pitch rests on a track record. Fedorov's Army of Drones, launched in 2022, helped make drones the weapon behind more than 95 percent of Ukraine's battlefield hits. Over 700 makers now building them, and he is betting robotization is the next such leap.

Army of Robots is meant to be an ecosystem, not a company: investing in defense-tech firms, standing up R&D, testing with troops, and scaling fast, whatever works. Fedorov is running it from outside government, having left the defense ministry in July and started building a defense-tech company backed by Palantir chief Alex Karp.

Robots take the deadliest jobs

Fedorov's vision is a battlefield where machines go first. A sensor spots a threat, then a robot enters the danger zone, he says. Humanoid robots would carry ammunition and pull out the wounded, lay and clear minefields, scout, hold positions, and strike, taking the roles that today cost soldiers their lives. For now, it is a vision more than a fielded capability: Fedorov is describing where he wants the battlefield to go, not a robot force already in the fight.

The Army of Drones sets the model

The aim, Fedorov says, is to gather the best engineers, combat experience, and capital and point them at one goal: making robots fight instead of people. The obstacle is Russia, which he said has learned to quickly copy and scale military technology, so Ukraine must keep inventing the next cycle before the enemy does.

"Russia will stop only when we can break its backbone," he says, arguing that it will take Western capital, world-class engineers, and private initiative.

Russia's best defenses against ballistic missiles ring Moscow, leaving much of the rest of the country exposed to Ukraine's growing missile arsenal. That concentration is why Ukraine's homegrown ballistic missiles could cause Russia real trouble beyond the capital, even as Russia's air defenses show gaps elsewhere, expert Vadym Kushnikov says, Ukrainian Radio reports.

Russia has the systems to stop ballistic missiles, Kushnikov continues, but it has massed the best of them around Moscow: the S-500 "Prometey", with interceptors adapted from the A-135, the Soviet-era shield built to defend the capital from missiles.

Other regions, by his assessment, are left more open to Ukraine's massed and combined strikes. That matters now that Ukraine's own ballistic missile, such as the Sapsan, is entering combat.

The best defenses ring Moscow

"If you analyze the characteristics, Russia today has concentrated its most modern S-500 complexes, with 77N6-N and 77N6-N1 interceptors, in Moscow Oblast," Kushnikov says.

Elsewhere, he said, Russia is short of air-defense complexes, the S-400 among them, a shortfall he said is visible in satellite imagery.

Ukraine's ballistic program grows

Ukraine's deep-strike arsenal has been shifting from foreign-supplied systems to homegrown ones. Alongside its Neptune and Flamingo cruise missiles, it now fields the Sapsan, an Iskander-class ballistic missile with a range of about 500 kilometers, which President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed was in combat late last year.

A domestic ballistic missile will let Ukraine strike deep inside Russia without waiting for a Western green light.

Production faces hard hurdles

Building them is the hard part. Ukraine's rocket-engineering tradition runs deep, Kushnikov suggests, but its production sites, mostly in the east, are direct targets of Russian strikes.

The missiles also depend on components that are difficult to make, chiefly solid-fuel rocket engines and the guidance that steers a warhead flying at five times the speed of sound along a ballistic arc.

"The combination of all these factors is exactly what our engineers have worked on for years, building the Ukrainian ballistic shield," he adds.

Ukrainian soldiers have built a drone that carries a combat ground robot into battle and drops it where needed, a trick the US has pursued but never fielded. The Alter Ego battalion of the 93rd Mechanized Brigade has paired a bomber drone with a purpose-built robot, the Desantnyk, and took it from idea to combat in 10 days, the Brave1 defense cluster said.

The system answers a problem that has long hobbled ground robots: getting them to the fight over mined, cratered terrain they cannot cross on their own.

A drone carries the robot dozens of kilometers behind the lines and drops it precisely, in a pairing engineers call a "marsupial", one carrier delivering another. The US worked on such systems for more than 30 years, Brave1 said.

And it is not alone: the 3rd Army Corps has been air-dropping robots behind Russian lines in its Vivaldi offensive.

A drone carries the robot in

The Desantnyk is a compact wheeled platform. Alter Ego built a way to release it accurately from a heavy bomber drone, dropping it well beyond the range a ground robot could reach on its own. It lands deep in the enemy rear and drives on to its target. The point is to spare the robot the most dangerous, exposed leg of the journey.

Confirmed kills follow fast

According to Brave1, just 10 days passed from the idea to its first combat use, and the Desantnyk has already carried out confirmed strikes: the unit used it to destroy Russian shelters and troops. Only a handful of Ukrainian units have mastered the tactic so far.

Brave1 moves it to production

The defense cluster, a state platform for scaling battlefield inventions, said it took notice of the Desantnyk and helped the battalion find a manufacturer to move it from prototypes to serial production and out to other units.

Ukrainian drone makers are getting another shot at a Pentagon contract, this time for bomber drones. Seventeen companies, including Ukrainian firms and Western partners fielding Ukrainian designs, will test bomber drones at Camp Grayling in Michigan in October, the next stage of the Pentagon's Drone Dominance program, Defender Media reported.

The Phase 2.5 Bomber Qualifier is the latest round of the Pentagon's drive to buy combat-tested drones at scale, and Ukrainian makers are again in the field, some through US-registered partners, because Pentagon rules bar direct sales from foreign firms.

This time, the target is bombers, the drones that drop munitions on what is below them.

Seventeen makers head to Michigan

The contest runs at Camp Grayling, a Michigan training range, and organizers call it the hardest and fastest-paced stage of the program yet. Each company must bring at least six fully built systems.

The testing splits into two parts: a Bomber Qualifier, which the makers conduct themselves, and a Bomber Gauntlet run by US soldiers. Organizers have not published details of a third mission. Winners of the wider program earn Pentagon supply contracts.

Ukrainian bombers make the list

The invited firms include UFORCE USA Services, Grim Tech, Gurzuf Defence, UA Defense Tech, Skycutter, and UDD Tech Corp. Which models they will bring is not yet clear.

UFORCE is known for its Nemesis bombers. Grim Tech showed a light bomber, the Grim-18, at the MSPO defense expo in Poland this month, and Gurzuf builds heavy bombers, including the Ayudag-6, which recently set a Ukrainian payload record for multirotor drones at 130 kilograms.

A second try after a US sweep

In the program's last phase, the Pentagon picked five winners in each of two categories, and all were American, though a Ukrainian firm had reached the second round and, by industry accounts, Ukrainian designs were incorporated into some Western entries. For Ukraine's makers, the bomber round is another chance to turn battlefield-proven hardware into a US contract.

Ukraine is opening its battlefield data to British weapons makers so they can train their AI on a war no one else has fought. Up to 12 British defense companies will join Avengers Labs, Ukraine's platform for training AI models for drones and robots on real combat data, the Defense Ministry said.

Ukraine's combat data is a resource no other military has access to. British firms get to build and test their AI on battlefield data they could not access elsewhere, while Ukraine gets their technology and joint development of AI for unmanned systems.

What is Avengers Labs?

More than 30 Ukrainian companies already use the Avengers Labs, and three of their systems have reached the battlefield. It is part of the AI push former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov built around Ukraine's data.

The terms are built around control. The British companies can develop and test their own AI models within Avengers Labs, the ministry said, but the data remains within the platform's protected environment, with no way to download it or take it out. That lets Ukraine share the value of its war experience, the annotated record of real combat, without surrendering the record itself.

The platform was developed by the Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies, the team that created the DELTA combat system. At the core of Avengers Labs is an annotated dataset of 5 million frames collected on the battlefield. Most of this material comes directly from the DELTA combat system and is continually supplemented with new data of practical value in combat conditions.

Britain trains for a real war

In March 2026, Ukraine announced the establishment of a system of military technology competence centers. The first in the network was intended to be the Defense AI Center "A1," which would focus on AI solutions.

The AI center is being launched with support from the UK. Its main tasks were planned to be:

analysis of combat data;

forecasting enemy actions;

development of autonomous systems;

new management/control tools

A separate center was said to have been established for each key direction of the war: drones, mid-range strike, deep strike, artillery, and others.

A year ago, 12 Ukrainian brigades could order their own weapons off a state marketplace. Now, more than 500 units can. DOT-Chain Defense, which lets frontline units order necessary supplies using state funds or bonuses with just a few clicks, has scaled across most of Ukraine's Defense Forces, the Defense Ministry said.

The platform is the delivery backbone of Ukraine's soldier-led procurement revolution. It lies in a shift in the philosophy of defense procurement. Ukraine is abandoning the Soviet principle of "fight with whatever is handed down from above" and transitioning to a market-based model that centers on the choice of the individual soldier.

Over its first year, it has put more than 1.3 million drones and other systems into units' hands, worth about $1.9 billion, and the orders show what this war runs on: 84 percent are drones, with electronic-warfare gear and ground robots making up most of the rest. It is also the engine behind the points-for-kills system that lets units bank credit for battlefield results and spend it on their own equipment.

Access jumps from 12 to 500 units

The growth has been steep. DOT-Chain Defense is now used by combat units across the armed forces, the National Guard, the border and special transport services, the police, the Security Service, and Defense Intelligence, says Deputy Defense Minister Mstyslav Banik.

Assault regiments and the "Drone Line" project have joined, ordering unmanned systems to their own specifications.

Drones dominate the orders

By the ministry's count, electronic-warfare systems make up 8.6 percent of everything ordered, ground robotic complexes 7.2 percent, and ammunition a sliver at 0.2 percent.

The gear, worth about $1.9 billion, came both through direct marketplace purchases and through the "Army of Drones. Bonus" program, the points system tied to the same platform.

The US copies the model

The approach has drawn imitators. The US has launched its own Amazon-style marketplace for military drones, explicitly modeled on Ukraine's Brave1 Market and DOT-Chain Defense. For Ukraine, the payoff is data: a running record of which weapons work on which part of the front, which the state uses to scale up what performs.

Russia is scouting Kyiv and the surrounding region for its next targets, from power substations and railways to hypermarkets and airports. Nikolaievsky Vaniok, a major Ukrainian monitoring channel, says Russian aerial reconnaissance has been mapping specific sites across the capital and Kyiv Oblast, and a national-security official warns that a ballistic strike is being prepared.

The reported scouting fits Russia's pattern of taking apart Ukraine's power and civilian infrastructure as winter nears, with Moscow switching to terror or rear as its tactics of the war.

Signs of preparation are present

Andrii Kovalenko, who heads the National Security Council's Center for Countering Disinformation, has also confirmed Russia is preparing a ballistic strike, with signs of the preparation visible, while its diplomats stall on any real step toward a ceasefire.

Ballistics are the threat Ukraine's air defenses struggle most to stop: in a recent attack on Kyiv's water system, not one of Russia's ballistic missiles was intercepted.

"The enemy is preparing a ballistic strike. Signs of preparation are present," he wrote, adding the warning to "be attentive in the coming days."

The scouting maps the everyday

Nikolaievsky Vaniok, which tracks Russian air activity, says the reconnaissance had lingered over the capital's ordinary machinery.

In Kyiv, it listed traction substations and other rail infrastructure, an Auchan hypermarket and similar stores in the Obolon district, power substations across several districts, a trolleybus depot, and Zhuliany airport.

In Kyiv Oblast, there are substations near Bucha and Irpin, many more that feed the railways, possible fuel depots near Borodianka and in the Bila Tserkva district, and the airfield at Vasylkiv. The account could not be independently verified.

Jet-drone defenses run late

Ukraine is racing to build a large-scale defense against jet-powered drones, the fast Gerans that have strained Kyiv's air cover, but the channel's administrator said the work was moving at "its own pace".

"If we manage a proper counter before winter, that will be very lucky," he added.

Ukraine has taken out a Russian artillery regiment commander in Kherson who was once a Ukrainian naval officer and who betrayed his country in 2014. Colonel Oleksandr Isaiev, a Mykolaiv native who defected to Russia during the seizure of Crimea and rose to command Russia's 8th Artillery Regiment, was killed by a Ukrainian FPV drone on 19 September, the Book of Executioners, a Ukrainian government project documenting Russian war crimes, said.

Isaiev's death, if confirmed, closes a decade-long arc of betrayal. The Ukrainian citizen, who served in Ukraine's military from 1992, defected while serving as a senior officer in Ukraine's coastal artillery, joined Russia's Black Sea Fleet, and by 2024 was commanding a Russian regiment that shelled the country he had sworn to defend.

A drone finds the commander

The regiment Isaiev led, military unit 87714, operated on the coastal tactical axis in southern Ukraine as part of Russia's "Dnepr" grouping, the project said. An FPV drone, the small first-person-view aircraft that now dominates the front, struck him in Kherson Oblast on 19 September. The project provided no further details on the location, time, or circumstances of the strike.

The betrayal dates to Crimea

Isaiev was by 2014 chief of staff and first deputy commander of the 406th Separate Coastal Artillery Brigade in Ukraine's navy.

When Russia seized Crimea that year, he switched sides, in what Ukraine calls high treason, and took a post as chief of staff and deputy commander of the same 8th Artillery Regiment on the Russian side.

Discharged to the reserve in 2015, he returned to Russian service in October 2022 to join the war against Ukraine, and in September 2024 was made the regiment's commander and promoted to colonel.

A database keeps the list

The Book of Executioners is Ukraine's public register of those it accuses of crimes against the country, and it closed its report on Isaiev with a standing vow: every war crime will be investigated, every war criminal identified, found, and, in time, punished.

Ukrainian partisans say they have sabotaged the railway signaling that keeps Russian troops supplied on the Lyman front. The ATESH movement reports that its agents disabled four relay cabinets on a line through Voronezh Oblast that carries military cargo to Russian forces there, delaying ammunition to three regiments.

The strike was timed to help Ukraine's Operation Vivaldi, the counteroffensive the Third Army Corps is running near Lyman in northern Donetsk. In its first phase, the operation cleared 75 square kilometers of Russian infiltrators and de-occupied another 10.

Cutting the rail line that feeds the Russian units facing that offensive is, by ATESH's account, part of the same fight, targeting the supply line rather than the front.

Four cabinets go dark

The sabotage hit a rail corridor running through the Voronezh, Novovoronezh, Liski, and Ostrogozhsk areas of Voronezh Oblast, a route ATESH says Russia uses to move military cargo toward the Lyman axis.

Relay cabinets house the switching gear that runs a line's automatic signals. Knocking them out can freeze traffic on a stretch of track without a single explosion, and ATESH says its agents disabled four of them. As with the movement's other claims, the account could not be independently verified.

Ammunition backs up

By ATESH's telling, the signaling failure delayed shipments of ammunition and engineering materiel to the 1st and 15th Guards regiments and the 254th Motor Rifle Regiment. Russian commanders, it said, had to rush in repair crews and divert resources to guard the infrastructure. A delayed shipment, far behind the front, can be felt at it, where an assaulted position waits for the ammunition that does not arrive.

ATESH hunts the supply lines

ATESH is a network of pro-Ukrainian agents operating inside Russia and Russian-occupied territory, and it has increasingly gone after the rail and power infrastructure that sustains Moscow's war. This month, the group also said it knocked out the power supply of a plant in Voronezh that makes components for Russian missiles.

A Ukrainian company has disclosed a small aircraft that can bomb a target, relay radio signals, carry FPV drones behind enemy lines, or strike on its own. The KARA, a fixed-wing drone made by Ukrskytechnology, is listed on Ukraine's state Brave1 Market in three tiers, from a bare airframe to a ready-to-fly aircraft, Defender Media reported.

One airframe does the work of several, and it goes for some $9,900. The marketplace it sits on, Brave1 Market, has processed more than $235 million in orders, lists over a thousand products, and lets frontline units buy gear even before a weapon clears formal codification.

One airframe does four jobs

What the KARA does depends on how it is kitted out. Fitted one way, it drops cargo; another, it works as a signal repeater to extend a unit's radio reach; another, it ferries FPV drones deep into the enemy rear to be released; and another, it carries out strikes itself. Buyers choose among an empty glider they equip themselves, a Plug-N-Play version with basic electronics installed, and a Ready-To-Fly model.

The drone flies light and far

The specifications are modest but flexible, according to Ukrskytechnology. The KARA has a tactical radius of 70 kilometers, and a stated endurance of 2.5 hours, cruises at 90 kilometers per hour and tops out at 120, and works at 200 meters but can climb to 3,000.

It runs on either an electric motor or a combustion engine, and carries two payload blocks of up to three kilograms each under the wing. Launched by catapult and landing like a plane, it takes 10 minutes to set up.

The marketplace lists it now

The KARA is being prepared for codification, the formal approval that clears a weapon for standard state procurement, but it does not have to wait for that to reach the front. Brave1 Market was built precisely so that units can buy proven kit fast, without waiting on the slow pipelines of the past, and the KARA is already there for the price of a used car.

The EU locked in its sanctions on Russia for an unprecedented three years this week, and paid for it by letting two of the country's richest men off the list. Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman were delisted at the insistence of Slovakia, France, and Luxembourg, DW reported.

France pushed to remove Usmanov, a Kremlin-linked metals and telecoms magnate, as part of a secret deal to free prisoners held in Azerbaijan, and Luxembourg pushed to remove Fridman, who is pursuing the country for about $16 billion in arbitration over the losses his sanctions caused, the Financial Times reported.

Kyiv's reaction was immediate and furious

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called the decision shameful and unjustified and urged EU states to impose their own national sanctions on the pair.

"In Moscow, they celebrate, because they got what they wanted: a sense of impunity, humiliation of the European Union, and division among Europeans," he wrote on X.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who raised the issue with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen in New York, called the delisting "suicidal and counterproductive."

"Wars end with resolve and strength, not concessions to the aggressor's cronies," he said, thanking von der Leyen for agreeing to work on adding more Russian names to the lists.

At the same time, he stated that he "is grateful to Ursula for her willingness to work on adding more Russian individuals to the EU sanctions lists."

The step was a bargain of durability for names. Rather than roll the sanctions over for the usual six months, the EU previously extended them to 22 September 2029, keeping some 2,600 Russians and companies, including President Vladimir Putin, frozen out for three years, after weeks of deadlock that at one point nearly let the whole regime lapse.

The deal came only after the bloc pushed its deadline back a week to buy time, and its Irish presidency called the result a difficult compromise.

Russia has destroyed a Ukrainian toilet-paper maker's warehouse for the second time. According to Snow Panda, an everyday brand of toilet paper, paper towels, and wipes, a Russian strike on 22 September again leveled its warehouse complex. This time, its workers came through unhurt, the company said.

The strike is a small piece of a systematic campaign against Ukraine's civilian economy. Russia has destroyed more than two-fifths of the country's modern warehouse space, some 2.1 million square meters, hitting the depots of retailers, food companies, drugmakers, and couriers far from the front.

Snow Panda makes nothing military, only household paper goods, and it has now been struck twice, in a pattern where rebuilt or dispersed storage becomes the next target.

A second strike levels the warehouse

"On 22 September, as a result of a Russian strike, our warehouse complex was completely destroyed for the second time," the company said.

It provided no further detail on the damage or losses, but emphasized the outcome that mattered most to it.

"The most important thing is that the people are alive and unharmed," its press service said.

July's missile hit the main hub

The first blow came on 1 July, when a Russian missile struck the Snow Panda plant in Odesa Oblast and wounded people there. The company called it its most important hub, the point from which its goods and those of other brands were shipped across the country.

"Now we are assessing the scale of the destruction and making the first decisions to save our life's work," it declared after that strike.

Russia targets the civilian economy

Snow Panda's losses fit what Ukraine has faced all summer, as Russia turns drones and missiles on the warehouses, distribution centers, and railways that keep the country supplied. The target list has run from a toy retailer's depot near Kyiv to food, medicine, and parcel warehouses across the country.

Retailers, grocery chains, and pharmaceutical distributors have all been hit, often more than once, pushing companies to scatter their stock into smaller sites that then draw the next strike.

The US will carry a proposal to Russia to halt strikes on Ukraine's energy systems amid talks over the so-called "energy ceasefire" ahead of the cold season. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he and US President Donald Trump discussed the energy truce at the UN, and that Washington made no unilateral demands of Kyiv, agreeing only to pass the mutual offer to Moscow, his office said.

The outcome eases the worry that shadowed the earlier round, when Trump blamed Ukraine's strikes for record US diesel prices above $6 a gallon and pressed Kyiv to stop hitting Russian refineries, CNBC reported.

Zelenskyy offers a mutual halt

"We talked about an energy truce for us. If they do not want us to attack oil-refining capacities, then let them not touch our energy system, our water supply," he said.

The US side, he continues, would relay the offer to Russia. The two presidents met in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on 22 September.

Air defense stays unresolved

At the same time, no agreement was announced on launching production of Patriot interceptor missiles in Ukraine, the only ones that can intercept Russia's ballistic missiles.

According to the president, his adviser, Pavlo Palisa, spoke with representatives of Raytheon, the Patriot interceptor producer. Zelenskyy added that Ukraine had asked Trump to help accelerate the process.

“We need the licenses to prepare for Patriot production. Raytheon is ready, and I asked President Trump to help with this. He responded positively,” the president said.

Zelenskyy stressed that Ukraine plans to launch the project within the next year to 18 months, emphasizing that “this is work for the long term, for the future.”

The two leaders also discussed other bilateral and multilateral issues, including a winter air defense package for Ukraine, but no specific details or concrete agreements were announced.

Ukraine's defense makers have signed the first 26 deals under a program that lets them lease or rent new equipment, with the right to subsequently purchase it into ownership, while the state covers most of the bill. The preferential-leasing scheme has channeled about $2 million so far, with producers paying just 5% of the leasing fee and the state covering the rest, the Defense Ministry said.

For many Ukrainian arms makers, the bottleneck is not orders but the cash to expand fast enough to fill them, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Hvozdiar says, and the program is the state's answer.

Producers can lease equipment, machinery, automation equipment, transportation, and even factory space, paying 5 percent per year while the state subsidizes the rest, up to about $11 million per contract over five years.

The state covers most of the cost

Beyond capping the borrower's rate at 5 percent, the contracts can defer lease payments for up to a year, easing the squeeze while new equipment is bought and installed.

Only companies that hold "critically important" status in the defense sector, a label the state gives firms it deems essential to the war effort, can take part. The 26 deals are only the first, the ministry said, with the program still open to new applicants.

Three banks run the leasing

The Defense Ministry launched the program in April and named Ukreximbank, PUMB, and MTB Bank as the first authorized lessors, it said. In August, it spelled out what producers can lease, from machines, mobile production platforms, and technological gear to the non-residential real estate a plant needs to run.

Ukraine races to scale production

The leasing program is one piece of a broader drive to get money flowing to Ukraine's defense industry so it can produce more, faster. The government has been building financing tools around the sector, including a push by former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov to raise the country's largest defense-tech venture fund.

NATO's top generals gathered in Copenhagen, and Ukraine was at the center of the table. The Alliance's Military Committee, its 32 chiefs of defense and two strategic commanders, met to reaffirm support for Ukraine, accelerate its readiness, and appoint a new chairman, Ukraine's General Staff said.

The meeting comes as intelligence services and Western leaders warn that Russia may be preparing to move against NATO itself, not only Ukraine. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has recently told his parliament that intelligence points to Russian plans for drone and missile strikes on NATO countries.

Ukraine anchors the agenda

The annual conference, held in Copenhagen and chaired by Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone alongside the Alliance's two strategic commanders, followed up on decisions from the recent NATO summit in Ankara and centered on deterrence, defense, and new technology, with Ukraine running through it all, according to the NATO Representation in Ukraine.

Cavo Dragone said the Alliance maintains its unwavering support for Ukraine, and that allies continue to send equipment, conduct training, and provide aid while absorbing the hard lessons of Ukraine's defense.

The chair calls out Russia

Cavo Dragone framed the moment bluntly. The Alliance had again seen "the reckless behavior of Russia, including airspace violations, drone incidents, hybrid activities," he said at a joint press conference. He credited allied forces for their swift responses to those incidents and vowed the Alliance would defend every inch of its territory.

Germany's Breuer takes the helm

The chiefs have also elected General Carsten Breuer, Germany's chief of defense, as the next chair of the Military Committee, NATO's highest military body. He will take over in the summer of 2027 for a three-year term, succeeding Cavo Dragone.

Breuer, Germany's chief of defense since 2023, was the front-runner, and his selection, backed by Washington, hands the role to Europe's largest military spender and signals Germany's growing weight in the Alliance's command.

Ukrainian troops gathered for an assault on two Russian-held villages, and the Russians never saw them coming. A captain of the 60th Mechanized Brigade, with the callsign Akhmet, says the concealed buildup near Derylove and Drobysheve was what allowed his units to take the villages once Operation Vivaldi began, Suspilne reports.

The account fills in how Vivaldi actually takes ground: not by overwhelming force but by concealment, timing, and technology. Only the first phase of the "Operation Vivaldi" counteroffensive, which the Third Army Corps is running near Lyman in northern Donetsk Oblast, has cleared 75 square kilometers of Russian infiltrators and liberated another 10 square kilometers of territory.

Concealment set up the assault

The brigade's task was to free Derylove and take control of Drobysheve. The key, Akhmet says, was accumulating forces as covertly as possible in Drobysheve and on the outskirts of Derylove, so the units could begin exactly on schedule.

The Russians, he believes, failed to spot the buildup because Ukraine had done its reconnaissance well during the planning and preparation. Constant coordination with neighboring units, sharing information, and lending help mattered too. The point was to keep the movement and massing hidden until the appointed hour, so nothing tipped the Russians off before the assault opened.

The captain coordinates the fight

As a battle captain, Akhmet oversaw the tasks set by brigade command and the work of several strands at once: reconnaissance, drones, electronic warfare, and air defense.

"We determine where the enemy sits, we inflict fire damage on Russian soldiers, and we cover our groups on the ground," he said.

The job was to find the Russians, strike them, and shield the assault teams as they moved up.

Timing cleared the infantry's path

The brigade also located where Russian drones were taking off and hit those launch points at set times, to keep enemy operators from scouting and firing on the Ukrainian troops working below. Getting the timing right was the whole point, Akhmet explains, so the infantry could move to its positions and reach cover without being caught in the open.

The two villages were a piece of a larger aim: the Institute for the Study of War has assessed that Vivaldi disrupted Russia's plan to encircle the fortified belt of Donetsk cities.

Ukraine's forces have shot down more than 350,000 Russian drones since the start of the year. The count, some 220,000 fixed-wing drones, 100,000 quadcopters, and 31,000 long-range Gerans, was filmed hit by hit in the DELTA combat system and verified by the Brave1 defense-innovation cluster, the Defense Ministry said.

Meanwhile, Russia is now threatening NATO countries directly, its drones probing Polish and Baltic skies, and those countries manage to down only a small fraction of what crosses their borders. In one incursion, Poland shot down just four of about 19 Russian drones.

Ukraine's 350,000 is the record of a force that has had to master drone defense at an industrial scale, night after night.

The tally runs to hundreds of thousands

Most of the kills belong to the Defense Forces' unmanned-systems units, which downed more than 320,000 Russian fixed-wing and copter drones. Those units, together with mobile fire groups and army aviation, also brought down faster Geran-type attack drones.

The pace has been relentless: in August alone, Ukraine destroyed some 35,000 fixed-wing drones and nearly 24,000 copters, the ministry said.

DELTA verifies every hit

Every downing is logged and confirmed in DELTA, the digital system Ukraine uses to run the battlefield, and which the ministry calls a key to its edge over Russia. Filming and verifying each kill lets commanders study how it was done and scale up whatever works.

The purpose is concrete: knocking down fixed-wing drones blinds Russian reconnaissance, and blunts strikes on cities and critical infrastructure, while downing copters keeps Russia from finding and hitting front-line positions. Each drone stopped, the ministry says, is potentially the life of a Ukrainian soldier or civilian saved.

The same threat now shadows NATO

That threat is spreading. Prime Minister Donald Tusk told Poland's parliament that intelligence points to Russian plans for drone and missile strikes on countries backing Ukraine.

The allies being warned are the ones that have struggled to stop even a handful of drones, while Ukraine, out of necessity, has learned to bring them down by the hundred thousand.

Germany's far-right AfD has confirmed it is in talks with Gazprom to bring Russian gas back to Germany. Its foreign-policy speaker met the Russian gas giant's chief in Moscow to discuss resuming supplies, a step that would reverse the break with Russian energy Germany made after the 2022 invasion, the party told DW.

The AfD is openly working to undo one of the West's central responses to the war. Before 2022, Russia supplied about 55 percent of Germany's gas, a dependence federal officials later blamed for Berlin's slow initial reaction to the invasion.

Cutting it cost Moscow its biggest European market. Restoring it would hand back one of its largest revenue streams at a time when energy sales fund the war.

The Kremlin has already publicly welcomed the AfD’s efforts to engage in dialogue with Moscow. Dmitriy Peskov, press secretary for Russian President Vladimir Putin, has also reacted positively to the party’s growing popularity.

The AfD confirms the Moscow talks

The confirmation came from Beatrix von Storch, deputy leader of the AfD's Bundestag faction.

The party's foreign-policy speaker, Markus Frohnmaier, was in Moscow and personally spoke with Mr. Miller of Gazprom, she said, referring to Alexei Miller, the company's chairman.

"Of course, we are interested in resuming trade. We need affordable energy and the widest possible supply, so we consider it in our interest to get supplies from Russia too, which is why we are holding these talks," she said.

The politics run through the east

The talks land as the AfD surges at the polls, topping recent votes in eastern Germany and in Berlin, contests in which Russia's war against Ukraine figured in the party's platform. Asked what signal those results send Moscow, von Storch cast the war less as foreign policy than as a domestic worry.

"Of course, it is an important topic. People fear war and that Germany will be drawn into it, let itself be drawn in, or directly enter it," she said.