World Boxing has lifted the last restrictions on Russian athletes, clearing them to compete under their own flag and anthem as they chase qualification for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Days earlier, in a frontline Kherson gym that Russian artillery had wrecked, the teenage boxers who trained there had recorded their own message to the Olympic movement: keep Russia out.

World Boxing approved the change on 30 July, the latest sports federation to roll back its wartime restrictions as the Olympic movement eases Russia back toward the Games, even as its attacks keep destroying Ukraine's sports infrastructure and the lives of athletes in frontline oblasts such as Kherson.

The 11-year-old martial-arts champion who trains between drone strikes

Tymur, 11, steps out into his yard and listens to the sky. No buzzing. This means no “human safari” drones nearby. Timur has just given himself his morning insulin shot, had his breakfast, and he now heads for his punching bag, hanging from the old walnut tree. He warms up with pull-ups, the branch being his pull-up bar, as his dog runs around, and then works the punching bag, pierced by Russian shrapnel.

Training in the yard is not enough, so Tymur rides his bicycle under Russian FPV drone attacks to his practice session. Along the way, he stops to hide under a tree. In summer, Kherson poplars and sycamore trees offer many good hiding places, and the anti-drone nets cover many streets, but the Russian drones are flying low now.

When they spot a car, a pedestrian, or a child on a bicycle, they dive even lower. The pilots on the other side of the river see their targets but carry on with their hunt. Lately, some drones fly without making any noise.

Hearing loud buzzing, Timur jumps off the bike and throws himself in the grass. Lawns are often littered with mines, but there is no choice. After a few stops, he arrives at the practice, held in a basement. For a while, Timur can focus on the training—until he starts on his way back home.

Tymur, the Kherson city champion in hand-to-hand combat and the Mykolaiv Oblast champion in MMA, takes his training seriously, even after he was diagnosed with insulin-dependent Type 1 diabetes right after the occupation. He dreams of becoming the champion of Ukraine, Europe, and the world.

His role model is Muhammad "D.K." Ali, a British professional boxer who, like Tymur, lives with insulin-dependent Type 1 diabetes. He is also inspired by Yulian Pozdniakov, a Ukrainian professional kickboxer, a European professional kickboxing champion, a Ukrainian IFMA Muay Thai and WAKO K-1 champion, and Timur has recently started training in kickboxing and Muay Thai.

Chess retreats to a basement after Russia jails the grandfather who taught it

Like Tymur, Sasha started boxing before the occupation. Eight at the time, he also practiced chess with his grandfather, an avid player, who was kidnapped by the Russian military during the occupation and sentenced to 20 years of strict regime on fabricated charges. Sasha stopped boxing, but he still plays chess.

His grandmother Tania, who also plays chess, said in an interview that Kherson is “a sports city.” Tania trains at home, doing yoga and general fitness routines.

“Everything here—our rivers and fields—is made for an active lifestyle,” said Tania. “And so our people are fit, morally and physically. The enemy is trying to destroy our places of strength, but our children stand firm and train. They do not give up in spirit.”

Her daughter, Sasha’s aunt, also practices with him over the phone as she had to move to Mykolaiv due to intense attacks on her district of Kherson. She used to go to the Children’s and Youth Sports School, also known as Chess Club. Sasha practices online with a coach during the week, but on the weekend he follows the family tradition and joins about 20 other young Kherson chess players for in-person training at the same school. Tania often walks her grandson to the basement practices, and fondly remembers the chess club and its beautiful home.

Since the 1980s, the Children's and Youth Sports School, funded by the city, held training and national and international tournaments at a historic building, a snow-white villa with arched windows and ornate wrought-iron balconies downtown Kherson. Vitaliy Bohdanov, the president of the Kherson Oblast Chess Federation for over 20 years, told Euromaidan Press that generations of young Khersonians studied chess and checkers in a former residence of the Italian embassy.

In 2023, the school had to move classes and tournaments to a safe underground facility due to constant shelling, and the building stood vacant. On 24 July 2026, the Russian military destroyed the architectural monument. The building burned out, taking a 5,000-book library of books on chess with it, and its roof collapsed after artillery and drone attacks, during which drones dropped incendiary napalm-like mixture.

Russia levels the last boxing gym as its teenagers film a plea to the IOC

The morning after the chess club was destroyed, Russian artillery hit Kherson's only surviving boxing gym. After the city's liberation, the gym hosted regular training sessions and competitions.

The youth team just returned from a tournament and, instead of practicing, helped to clean the premises. Four young athletes recorded an address to the International Olympic Committee, pleading to ban Russian athletes from international competitions. Tymofiy, 15, said that he trained in this boxing ring for seven years and could not find the words.

Standing amid bricks and fallen ceiling beams, Dmytro Obolentsev, Director of the Kherson Regional Children and Youth Sports School for Boxing and Other Sports and coach of the youth team, said that training will continue.

“These walls witnessed it all: the nerve-breaking moments before stepping onto the floor, the smiles after victory, the tears of defeat, the embraces of coaches, the applause of families, and the unforgettable moment when a young athlete stepped onto the podium to receive a well-earned medal and trophy,” wrote Zakhar Zhizhko, a Kherson resident. “Years will pass, but the memory of those competitions will remain. We want to believe that this gym will once again be filled with children's laughter, genuine emotion, and the joy of victory.”

The Olympic medalist who can no longer reach his river, and trains anyway

Serhiy Kyrsanov, a fit man in his sixties, cleaned the destruction site on 29 July, after several Shahid drones devastated his neighborhood in the residential area of Kherson. Serhiy and his wife Luiza mopped broken glass and considered themselves lucky: their neighbors’ homes were destroyed and burned. Their spacious house featured Olympic posters and impressive memorabilia: Serhiy, a prominent Ukrainian rower, is an Olympic silver medalist and three-time world champion.

As Luiza wiped dust off the medal display in the living room, she said that both she and her husband are still involved in youth training in the city.

“I can’t row as we can’t reach the river,” said Serhiy. “But we do all sorts of other training, and we are not going to stop.”

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The chess world condemns as the boxers' video circles the globe

The Italian Embassy in Ukraine condemned the attack on the chess school building, which was built for the Italian Ambassador in 1905 and hosted the Italian Embassy from 1906 to 1918. Lithuanian grandmaster and politician Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen expressed her indignation. Peter Heine Nielsen, a Danish chess grandmaster and five-time Danish champion, also condemned the attack. Garry Kasparov, former World Chess Champion and one of the greatest chess players in history, wrote that he was looking forward to helping to rebuild the chess club.

The boxing team’s video address to the International Olympic Committee went viral and was shared globally. Vladyslav Heraskevych, the first Ukrainian ever to compete in skeleton at the Winter Olympics, and an advocate for excluding Russian and Belarusian athletes from international sport, shared the address, adding that “Russian sports is an accomplice to Russia’s crimes.” The Boxing Federation of Ukraine issued a statement about the attack and looked into fundraising options.

"A sports city": 221 venues destroyed, its athletes still on the podium

Tymur, Sasha and the young boxers are not an exception. The girls’ soccer team used to train outdoors until a Russian shell destroyed the soccer field. Russian shelling heavily damaged Kherson's only indoor ice rink, once home to youth hockey and figure skating. The war has devastated Kherson Oblast's sporting infrastructure as 221 sports facilities have been damaged or destroyed, forcing many clubs and sports schools to relocate, operate in basements, or train in mixed and remote formats.

Yet, sports go a long way in the city nicknamed “invincible.” Mothers and grandmothers frequent various training sessions, from fly yoga to belly dance and karate. Fathers and grandfathers run under drones and used to play basketball and soccer in the red zone until the point when being outside became impossible due to the massive FPV drone attacks. Swimming pools and gyms operate in half-ruined buildings and, in winter, in freezing temperatures.

Despite daily Russian attacks, Kherson's sports community continues to compete. According to the official regional statistics, provided by the Department of Physical Culture, Youth and Sports of the Kherson Regional State Administration, in 2025 more than 50 athletes from Kherson Oblast were winners or medalists at international and Ukrainian competitions across more than 20 sports, including rowing, wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, athletics, archery, volleyball, swimming, karate, sambo, draughts, sumo and canoeing.

The list included Olympic, Paralympic and Deaflympic athletes, as well as world, European and national champions and medalists. Kherson athletes competed at the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Deaflympics, and World and European Championships, while more than a dozen regional coaches were recognized for training international-level competitors.

During the first six months of 2026, 396 athletes from Kherson Oblast took part in Ukrainian and international competitions, winning 74 medals in Olympic sports, 93 in non-Olympic disciplines, and 10 in Paralympic and Deaflympic events.

Nearly 200 displaced children from Kherson Oblast participated in regional sports competitions, while another 198 children from frontline communities attended a two-week sports and rehabilitation camp in the Carpathians.

The boxers whose gym Russia destroyed had asked the Olympic movement to keep Russia out. On 30 July, World Boxing gave its answer: Russian athletes will compete under their own flag, like everyone else. Their ring is still rubble. Training, their coach said, continues—in the basement, under the nets.

Russia's Tyumen oil refinery has fully halted crude processing and fuel output since a late-July Ukrainian drone strike, two industry sources told Reuters on 28 July. The plant sits more than 2,000 kilometers from Ukraine, deep in western Siberia. How long the damaged gasoline production will take to repair remains unclear.

The plant stopped making fuel

RI-Invest, which owns the Tyumen refinery, shut down crude processing and all product output on 25 July, when the Ukrainian drones hit the facility, according to the two sources in a Reuters report carried by The Moscow Times. The drone strike that day damaged the plant's secondary units and set them on fire. 

The blaze hit a diesel hydrotreating unit rated at 2.6 million tons a year. It also struck the combined high-octane gasoline complex, which pairs a catalytic reformer with an isomerization unit. Neither source could estimate how long the gasoline repairs would run, according to Reuters.

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A plant already patching an older fire

The same diesel hydrotreating unit spent last month under repair after a 6 June fire from internal causes. The gasoline complex was built under a license from the US firm UOP and started operating in 2018. The refinery's full capacity reaches 9 million tons a year, the sources said. In 2024 it processed 5.7 million tons of crude, turning out 0.5 million tons of gasoline and 2.8 million tons of diesel.

Drones over Siberia, far from any front

On 25 July, Tyumen Oblast Governor Alexander Moor confirmed the drone attack on the region and reported no casualties. 

Ukrainian drones had already reached the same plant on 20 June. The lost output tightens a home fuel market that has run short since spring, as Kyiv escalated its campaign against oil-processing plants.

Tyumen Oblast is currently also bracing for major flooding as the Tura River rises.

Russia struck two Ukrainian cities hundreds of kilometers apart in daytime attacks on 26 July, hitting a supermarket and residential areas and killing civilians including a child, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and local officials in Chernihiv and Zaporizhzhia. The local authorities reported deaths and more than a dozen wounded. Zelenskyy called the strikes deliberate terror with no military purpose and renewed his push for tougher sanctions on Moscow.

Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram that Russian forces keep "defeating" ordinary civilian objects, calling the Chernihiv strike an absolutely cynical drone attack on an ordinary supermarket. Meanwhile, Zaporizhzhia was struck by aerial bombs. 

"They hit people directly, with no military sense at all," he said. "This is deliberate Russian terror that has no military justification whatsoever." 

A drone hit an ATB supermarket in Chernihiv

In the northern city of Chernihiv, a Russian drone struck an ATB supermarket, part of Ukraine’s largest no-frills grocery network, around the middle of the day. City military administration head Dmytro Bryzhynskyi first reported two people killed and three wounded. He later noted that a child was among the dead. As rescuers worked, he reported one victim in serious condition, then said the number of wounded had climbed to seven. 

Later that afternoon, he updated the toll to 13 injured — four men and nine women — with three hospitalized in moderate condition. In a subsequent update, he said 20 people had sought medical care and three were hospitalized.

Chernihiv Oblast administration head Viacheslav Chaus identified the dead child as a 9-year-old girl. He said a 10-year-old boy was among the wounded and that three people were in intensive care. Other strikes in the city damaged cars and vehicle service stations, Chaus added. 

Guided bombs killed a man in Zaporizhzhia

Far to the south, Russian guided aerial bombs hit the city of Zaporizhzhia. Regional administration head Ivan Fedorov reported that the bombs damaged residential and non-residential buildings and an educational institution. One person was killed and six were wounded, according to Fedorov and the regional prosecutor’s office. The man who died was 46. The regional prosecutor's office said a gas station was also damaged.

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Russia destroys a Home Depot-style megastore in Kryvyi Rih—the third one it has erased in the same region since 2024

Hours earlier, Russian drones burned down a home-improvement megastore in Kryvyi Rih, the third such store wrecked in that southern region since 2024.

For the first known time, a Romanian fighter jet has fired on and destroyed a drone that violated the country's airspace. The intercept happened during a large Russian overnight attack on Ukraine that pushed some of the explosive drones toward the Romanian border. Bucharest has not said where the drone came from.

Russia's missiles and explosive drones batter Ukrainian homes and civilian infrastructure night after night, and some of those drones wander across borders into NATO states, where allied jets only lately opened fire after years of merely tracking them.

A pilot, an empty field, and an air-to-air missile

Romanian President Nicușor Dan announced the shootdown on X, saying a pilot flying an F-16 downed the drone around 11:00 on 24 July 2026. He noted the target fell over an uninhabited area, so the pilot could fire without endangering anyone below. 

"At present, specialist teams from the relevant agencies are surveying the area to establish all the circumstances of the incident," Dan said some 30 minutes after the strike.

Romania's Defense Ministry detailed the sequence. Radar detected the drone at 09:39, roughly 20 km east of Sulina in the Danube delta. It then entered national airspace and flew a Sulina–Brăila–Fetești–Buzău route. Two Italian Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon jets on a NATO air policing mission from Mihail Kogălniceanu airbase went up, along with two Romanian F-16s from the 86th airbase at Fetești. At 11:02, one of the Romanian jets struck the drone with an air-to-air missile over an uninhabited area near Padina, in Buzău county.

The drone's flight path points to the Black Sea as its way in — the same route Russian drones tend to take when they go after the nearby Ukrainian Danube port of Izmail.

Until now, Romanian jets had only escorted a Russian drone near the Ukrainian border until it disappeared from radars. Overnight on 29 May, during a Russian attack on Odesa Oblast, a Geran-2 drone crashed into a 10-story residential building in Galați, hospitalizing two people and forcing 70 to evacuate.

Russia's overnight barrage on Ukraine

The intercept coincided with one of Russia's mass overnight strikes. Ukraine's Air Force reported that Russia launched 180 strike drones — Shahed types, including jet-powered ones, plus Gerbera, Italmas, and Parodiya decoy drones — and five X-59/69 guided missiles by preliminary count from the Black Sea areas, Russian regions and occupied territory. By 08:00, air defenses had downed or suppressed 160 drones and four missiles, though one missile and 14 drones hit across nine locations.

In Odesa Oblast, a Russian strike on a residential sector injured a woman and a child overnight, damaging an apartment roof, homes, cars, and an enterprise, the head of the Odesa Oblast military administration, Oleh Kiper, reported. 

"The residential sector and industrial infrastructure were struck. Unfortunately, a woman and a 4-year-old child were injured," he said. 

Farther south, Russia hit the Izmail district — the part of Odesa Oblast bordering Romania — damaging homes and a business without casualties, the district military administration said.

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Russian aerial bombs struck Izium in Kharkiv Oblast, hitting a Nova Poshta parcel depot and cutting power to part of the district. Four Geran drones set a boarding house in Radychiv, Chernihiv Oblast, ablaze, and the State Emergency Service noted the site was not in use. An evening attack damaged a house and an enterprise in Kirovohrad Oblast, without casualties, the regional administration said.

A Russian drone killed a man driving his car in Kharkiv Oblast. The strike hit a Peugeot on the Zolochiv-Maksymivka road near the village of Berezivka in Bohodukhiv raion on the evening of 14 July, killing the 61-year-old driver, the Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor's Office said on Telegram. The drone was preliminarily identified as a Molniya.

The precise hit on the moving car suggests that the Molniya was piloted in real-time.

In October 2025, a Russian Molniya drone hit a car in the Kupiansk district, wounding a 37-year-old volunteer, and an FPV drone killed two men in another car in the same raion two hours later. Both were classified as war crimes.

Molniya is cheap, common, and now flies itself

The Molniya is among the cheapest weapons in Russia's arsenal. It is a low-cost kamikaze drone built close to the front, reliable and ubiquitous. Russia launches up to ten a day on the Zaporizhzhia axis alone.

Ukraine shot down an AI-equipped Molniya over Zaporizhzhia for the first time on 9 July. The AI variant has no antenna, no operator link, and no emissions for a detector to catch, making electronic warfare useless against it. Ukraine's answer is kinetic interception. Defense Ministry adviser Serhii Beskrestnov has warned that a fiber-optic Molniya is already in testing, which would emit no radio signal at all.

Russia's terror documented

Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office has documented over 11,000 Russian FPV attacks on civilians since 2024, with 2,010 recorded in the first four months of 2026 alone.

The road between Zolochiv and Maksymivka is a public road in a Ukrainian oblast. A man was driving home on it. 

Earlier, a Russian FPV drone killed a 57-year-old hospital worker walking along a road in the same oblast — the last resident of the border village of Tokarivka Druha.