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.

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.

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.

Japan is considering new sanctions on Russia after President Vladimir Putin made his first visit to the disputed Kuril Islands on 13 August, a senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official told reporters, according to Kyodo News.

Putin traveled to Iturup — Etorofu in Japanese — the largest of the four Russian-held islands Japan claims as its own, days after overseeing Russian Pacific Fleet exercises in the Far East. It is the first time a Russian president or prime minister has set foot on the islands. Tokyo summoned Russia's ambassador and lodged a formal protest, calling the visit "totally unacceptable." Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said the islands are "an inherent part of Japanese territory both historically and under international law."

The Institute for the Study of War assesses that the Kremlin is likely using the visit to deter Japan from adopting a more assertive defense posture, and to discourage EU seizures of Russian shadow-fleet vessels — tying a Pacific island dispute directly to the pressure campaign around Russia's war on Ukraine.

An 80-year-old dispute, reopened on Tokyo's clock

Russia and Japan have never signed a peace treaty ending World War II, entirely because of the Kurils. The Soviet Union seized the four southernmost islands — Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan, and the Habomai islets — in the war's final weeks, expelling the Japanese residents. Japan calls them the Northern Territories and has never dropped the claim.

Putin's visit lands as Tokyo's posture toward Moscow hardens. Japan's 2026 Defense White Paper, published earlier this month, named Russia as one of the country's principal threats — a paper Putin criticized directly on Wednesday, saying the islands became Russian territory "as a result of World War II" and accusing Japan of imposing "unprovoked sanctions" over what he called the "Ukraine conflict."

The timing cuts against the diplomatic track Tokyo pursued for years. Under former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Takaichi's political mentor, Japan met Putin 27 times seeking a peace treaty, and in 2018 the two sides agreed to accelerate talks on a 1956 declaration that would have returned Shikotan and the Habomai islets after a treaty was signed. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine froze those talks in 2022, and Putin's visit closes even the pretense that they might resume soon.

Ukraine has already staked out a position in the dispute: Kyiv's parliament in 2022 recognized the islands as Japanese territory, and President Zelenskyy signed a decree affirming Japan's sovereignty over its "Northern territories" — a reciprocal gesture in the broader alignment between Kyiv and Tokyo against Moscow.

What Japan is weighing

A Foreign Ministry official said only that Tokyo is "considering what step to take going forward," with an additional sanctions package under consideration. No specifics on scope or target have been announced.

The precedent for a symbolic response exists: in 2010, then-President Dmitry Medvedev became the first Russian head of state to visit the islands, traveling to Kunashir — a visit that also drew formal protest without derailing bilateral contact entirely. Putin's visit as president is a harder marker, arriving alongside Russia's sustained war footing rather than a peacetime dispute.

The Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said the remains arrived on 13 August, and that investigators will now work to establish the identities.

Ukraine recovered the 261 bodies as part of repatriation measures carried out with Russia, the Coordination Headquarters reported. Russia claims the dead are Ukrainian servicemen, but law enforcement investigators and forensic experts will conduct the identification before any confirmation.

The return of the dead remains one of the few channels that still functions between Kyiv and Moscow during Russia's war against Ukraine. Each handover lets families of the missing bury their relatives, and it again relied on the International Committee of the Red Cross, which helped coordinate the exchange.

Ukraine's Interior Ministry, the Security Service of Ukraine, the Armed Forces, the Office of the Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, the State Emergency Service, and the Secretariat of the Commissioner for Missing Persons under Special Circumstances all took part, the Coordination Headquarters said. Units of the Armed Forces transported the remains and passed them to police and to medical examiners under the Health Ministry for identification.

Previous exchanges

The handover is the latest in a long series of transfers Russia has carried out during its war against Ukraine, and in each case it has claimed the dead were Ukrainian servicemen or citizens, an account Ukrainian forensic experts verify independently. The exchanges have followed the Istanbul agreements that Kyiv and Moscow reached on 2 June 2025. Over the course of that June, Russia returned 6,057 bodies, and on 17 July 2025 it handed over another 1,000. Further transfers of 1,000 followed on 19 August, 18 September, 23 October, and 20 November 2025, before Russia returned 1,003 bodies on 19 December. The exchanges continued into 2026 with 1,000 bodies on 26 February and another 1,000 on 9 April, after which the totals fell to 522 on 18 June and 501 on 16 July, ahead of the 261 returned on 13 August.

Taken together, the transfers have returned thousands of the dead since mid 2025, which makes the repatriation of remains one of the most consistent forms of contact that still survives between Kyiv and Moscow.

A man was killed in an explosion in occupied Sevastopol on the morning of 13 August, according to the Russian outlet ASTRA and the local Telegram channel Emergency/Sevastopol.

The man's identity has not been officially confirmed, but Russian and Ukrainian Telegram channels are circulating claims that he is Robert Shahieiev, deputy commander of the 4th separate submarine brigade of Russia's Black Sea Fleet — a former Ukrainian Navy officer who sided with Russia after the occupation of Crimea.

What happened

According to preliminary information from Russian sources, the man was walking down a set of stairs with a friend when the explosion occurred. He died of his injuries at the scene. The device is believed to have been planted in a trash bin next to a bench, per preliminary reports cited by Ukrainska Pravda.

The Russian Telegram channel "Baza" reported that the blast took place in a park behind a residential block on Stoletovsky Avenue and that forensic investigators were working at the scene. The channel said local residents were being urged to stay alert and avoid approaching suspicious objects.

Some witnesses initially believed a drone had struck a nearby building because of how loud the blast was, according to accounts circulating on Telegram.

Unverified claim about a suspect

The pro-Kremlin channel Mash claimed a woman carrying a backpack may have been involved, alleging she stood between two residential buildings — numbers 28 and 30 — and watched the man before the explosion. Ukrainska Pravda noted this claim has not been confirmed.

No source has provided official confirmation of the victim's identity or a motive for the attack.

Poland will decide within days whether to send Ukraine another batch of Patriot interceptor missiles, Deputy Defense Minister Magdalena Sobkowiak-Czarnecka said in a radio interview RMF24. Any transfer, she said, has to be judged first against Poland's own security.

A Russian strike on NATO soil is now moving Warsaw where months of Ukrainian appeals had not. Sobkowiak-Czarnecka said Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz leans toward sending more interceptors after a Russian missile crashed inside Poland on 30 July, and that he would rather one be shot down over Ukraine than reach Polish soil.

Tusk had signaled at the end of July that Warsaw would soon weigh sending more Patriots. Sobkowiak-Czarnecka's remarks are the first to put a timeline on that decision.

Warsaw had been split for weeks over whether giving up the missiles was the right call. She set that argument aside, saying only that a decision is a matter of the coming days.

A second handover from a thin stock

This would not be the first transfer. In the spring, Poland quietly gave Ukraine five PAC-3 MSE interceptors — the missiles a Patriot battery uses to stop ballistic threats — a move confirmed only in July, when the defense ministry declassified its aid records and Prime Minister Donald Tusk put the number at five.

The disclosure drew sharp criticism at home. Opposition figures noted that the PAC-3 is the only interceptor Poland holds capable of downing Russia's Iskander ballistic missiles — the same class of weapon now crossing into Polish airspace.

Why the interceptors are so scarce

PAC-3 interceptors are among the hardest munitions in NATO to spare. The United States builds them at a rate that does not cover its own needs, and only a handful of alliance members operate them at all.

Ukraine has been pressing for them for months. In early July, after one of the largest air attacks of the war, Kyiv appealed to nearly 40 countries to release Patriot missiles from existing stocks, warning that its air defenses cannot stop Russia's ballistic missiles without them.

Poland holds roughly 200 of the interceptors, by Ukrainian estimates — its own shield against the missiles now reaching its border. Kosiniak-Kamysz's reasoning turns that overlap into the case for giving some away: better the interceptor meets the missile over Ukraine than over Poland.

The transfer would come with Polish-Ukrainian relations at their lowest point in years. In May, Volodymyr Zelenskyy granted a special forces unit the honorary title "Heroes of the UPA" — the wartime insurgent army Poland blames for the Volhynia massacres of the 1940s, which Warsaw recognizes as genocide. Polish President Karol Nawrocki responded in June by stripping Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle, the country's highest honor; three former Ukrainian presidents returned their own in solidarity, and Nawrocki has since tied Ukraine's path into the EU to the unresolved history. Yet the friction runs mostly at the presidential level. The aid decisions sit with the Tusk government, and it has kept the weapons — and now, in all likelihood, the interceptors — moving to Kyiv regardless.

Ukraine struck the Novorossiysk naval base in Russia's Krasnodar Krai overnight on 12 August, and for the first time coordinated more than 15 different strike systems in a single operation, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. The package combined Palianytsia jet drones, Neptune anti-ship missiles and naval drones, hitting warships, air defenses and oil infrastructure at the Black Sea Fleet's main base.

Novorossiysk is the refuge Russia's fleet fled to after Ukrainian drones and missiles pushed it out of occupied Crimea. Reaching its warships there with a mixed salvo — and getting through air defenses that bystander footage showed firing heavily — is the operational read the strike carries, more than any single ship damaged.

The systems and the targets

Zelenskyy named more than a dozen systems that worked together for the first time, from the Palianytsia and Peklo drones to the long-range Neptune and a set of naval drones. He thanked weapons developers for the added reach, framing the coordination itself as the milestone rather than the results.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) confirmed hits on two Kalibr-carrying frigates, the Admiral Essen and Admiral Makarov, and the patrol ship Vasily Bykov. The same strike hit an S-300 radar, a firing position on one of the port's piers, the Sheskharis oil terminal and three of the harbor's berths — a target list wider than the ships alone.

How many ships

The three Ukrainian accounts agree on the two frigates but not on the full tally. The General Staff counted four warships, adding a Buyan-M missile ship to the SBU's three. Zelenskyy separately cited a large landing ship and a corvette among the vessels hit.

Independent analysts who reviewed satellite imagery told The Maritime Executive the damage did not appear catastrophic, with no ships visibly burning or sinking. Ukraine's General Staff said the assessment is still under way.

The fleet's shrinking refuge

The strike extends a campaign that has driven Russia's fleet eastward without Ukraine fielding a navy of its own. Having lost safe basing in Sevastopol, Russia moved its ships more than 300 kilometers from the front — far from Ukraine, but no longer out of reach.

The operation's footprint reached past the base. Russian authorities in Novorossiysk declared a state of emergency and cut water to the port city, and the strike on the Sheskharis oil terminal hit infrastructure that helps fund the war. Zelenskyy said Ukraine would keep striking such targets, and that Russia alone can end the war it started.

Ukraine holds only about a tenth of the Patriot interceptor missiles it needs from the United States to stop Russia's surging ballistic strikes, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN. Selling Kyiv 5% of the current US stockpile would carry the country through winter, he said, and 10% would let it "destroy all the Russians' ballistic missiles" — but he holds 1%.

The plea puts a number on a shortage that has run through Ukraine's diplomacy all summer and left its cities increasingly exposed. It is the concrete cost of near-empty interceptor stocks: on 5 August, Russia fired 28 ballistic and anti-ship missiles at Kyiv and Ukraine intercepted none of them, killing 17 people, and four days earlier launched 27 ballistic missiles with only one stopped. July was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since April 2022, according to the UN.

The arithmetic of a losing race

"This year we have two and a half times less interceptors than we had in 2025," Zelenskyy said, while "Russia has two times more ballistic missiles per month than they had before."

The interceptor that most reliably stops those missiles, the US-made Patriot's PAC-3, is scarce worldwide: the war between the United States and Iran drained stocks as American and Gulf forces spent dozens against Iranian missiles and drones, and the shortage has fallen hardest on Ukraine.

The bottleneck is structural, not budgetary. Only five or six countries build interceptors capable of stopping ballistic missiles, the US makes around 600 Patriots a year, and orders are placed years in advance — so money alone cannot close the gap before winter, defense expert Marc DeVore told Euromaidan Press in June.

A home-built Patriot, still uncertain

Zelenskyy said doubts remain over whether US President Donald Trump's apparent offer to let Ukraine manufacture its own Patriot interceptors will materialize. At the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump said he would license Ukraine to build the missiles, then days later said he was unsure; the Patriot makers have since sent officials to Kyiv, without result so far. "I hope that I will get it," Zelenskyy said, calling it "one of the biggest [challenges] I had from the very beginning of this war."

He described daily, largely private deal-making to close the gap: "million phone calls ... I try to exchange something to missiles ... I do some things which I can't even share. It doesn't mean that it's outside of the law. But I can't speak about it."

Putin, the Donbas, and the next war

On the stalled peace process, Zelenskyy said Kyiv had put new proposals to the Trump administration and needed "more involvement of the American side," adding that Vladimir Putin "doesn't want to stop this war now and (there's) not enough pressure on him now." He rejected ceding the rest of the Donbas that Putin seeks, arguing security guarantees matter more: "Why he will not come again ... to occupy us?"

He confirmed a recent call with Vice President JD Vance but declined to say whether Vance had asked Ukraine to halt strikes on a Russian Black Sea oil port that were hurting US firms and threatening a spike in global energy prices, as the Financial Times reported. Zelenskyy also endorsed Western assessments that Putin could widen the war toward a smaller NATO state, likely in the Baltics: "He wants quick victory ... occupy or destroy or control."

A large-scale Ukrainian drone attack cut electricity across occupied Sevastopol overnight on 13 August, with power later restored on a temporary scheme after strikes damaged the city's energy infrastructure, the Russian-installed head of the city wrote on his Telegram channel.

The blackout is the latest blow in Ukraine's months-long campaign to isolate occupied Crimea by degrading the fuel, power, and transport networks Russia relies on to hold the peninsula. Sevastopol — the former main base of Russia's Black Sea Fleet — has lost power repeatedly since early June, when Ukraine sharply escalated strikes on Crimean energy sites.

What was hit

Drones headed toward the Balaklava thermal power plant, one of the peninsula's two main power stations, while mobile fire groups worked over Sevastopol, the monitoring channel Crimean Wind reported. Witnesses described an explosion and the loss of electricity across the city.

A fire also broke out at a large water-supply facility near the village of Shturmove, south of Sevastopol, around the time of the strike on Balaklava, the same channel said. The cause has not been established. The site houses the city's No. 3 hydro unit, which supplies Sevastopol's water.

Elsewhere on the peninsula, gunfire was reported near the Tavriiska thermal power plant, and Russian air defense operated near the Gvardiiske airfield.

A grid already rationing power

Russia closed the Crimean Bridge to road traffic during the attack, the crossing's occupation-run information channel reported.

The outage lands on a grid already under strain. Sevastopol last went fully dark on 27 July, and in July the occupation authorities imposed a rolling blackout schedule that left residents with about six hours of electricity a day. Since early June, Ukrainian strikes have repeatedly cut power across Crimea, with some districts dark for a week or more, alongside disruptions to water and mobile coverage.

The isolation campaign

Ukrainian officials have described the strikes as stages of a plan to cut occupied Crimea off from mainland Russia. Beyond power plants, Ukraine has hit the fuel tankers supplying the peninsula, the bridges and rail links feeding it, and Russian vessels — leaving Crimea rationing petrol and, at times, short of food.

Ukraine's military had not publicly claimed the 13 August strike as of publication.

Ukrainian drones struck the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat oil-refining and petrochemical complex in Russia's Bashkortostan on the morning of 13 August, setting off a fire — the second strike on one of Russia's largest refineries in a month.

The repeat hit lands as Ukraine's deep-strike campaign forces Russian refining to its lowest level since 2002 and pushes fuel shortages back into at least 16 regions, where drivers again face queues and sales limits at filling stations. Striking the same plants faster than Moscow can repair them is the point — each return resets the clock on units that take weeks or months to rebuild.

What happened

Bashkortostan's head, Radiy Khabirov, confirmed that debris from a downed drone fell in Salavat's industrial zone and sparked a blaze, which he called a "terrorist attack." Ukrainian monitoring channels Exilenova+ and Supernova identified the target as the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat plant, and residents reported a column of black smoke over the site. Ukraine's military had not commented on the strike.

The complex is one of Russia's largest refining and petrochemical sites. It processed about 7.2 million tons of crude in 2024 — roughly 2.7% of Russia's total refining — and turns out gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, ammonia, and more, according to Reuters, citing industry sources.

Ukrainian drones struck the same plant on 14 July, damaging two primary distillation units and halting operations; industry sources told Reuters the repairs could take weeks to months. Open-source data cited by Radio Svoboda places Russia's only heptyl rocket-fuel producer, the Salavat Chemical Plant, inside the same industrial perimeter, though there is no confirmation it was hit.

A campaign that keeps resetting repairs

Since early August, at least four refineries have stopped processing after Ukrainian strikes, including plants in Orenburg, Tyumen, Saratov, and Volgograd oblasts. Across 2026, attacks have interrupted work at no fewer than 26 refineries, seven of them still offline at the end of July, according to S&P Global.

Russian refining has fallen to about 3.6 million barrels a day, the lowest since 2002, per EA Analytics — the trigger for the fuel crisis now resurfacing. Shortages had eased by late July, but by mid-August residents of at least 16 regions were again reporting queues and sales restrictions, with Ai-92 and Ai-95 grades pulled from some Gazprom and Lukoil stations.

Attack on warehouse Wildberries

Drones also struck a Wildberries logistics center under construction in Bashkortostan's Chishminsky district, according to the monitoring channel Astra.

Wildberries is Russia's largest online retailer. The hub—about 187,000 square meters—has been under construction since 2024 on the grounds of the "Center of Agrotechnologies" agropark.

A Russian jet-powered Shahed drone struck the locomotive of a passenger train in Odesa Oblast on the morning of 13 August, killing the driver and his assistant, Ukraine's national rail operator Ukrzaliznytsia reported. The train was carrying 340 passengers on the Odesa–Dnipro route.

Russia has spent 2026 methodically dismantling the network that keeps Ukraine supplied, destroying or damaging more than 200 locomotives in the first half of the year alone, as Euromaidan Press documented. The crew kept the train moving toward a station so passengers could get out; all 340 evacuated without injury, and were driven on to Odesa by bus.

Overnight drone barrage

Ukraine's Air Force shot down 111 of the 133 Shahed drones Russia launched overnight, it said. Part of Izmail lost power after the attack, and a strike set port infrastructure alight in Odesa Oblast.

A drone damaged a civilian vessel at a Mykolaiv Oblast port. In Chernihiv Oblast, Russia hit two raions, damaging homes and knocking out a filling station; a child was treated for shock.

Kherson and Kharkiv

Two men were killed and a three-year-old injured in a strike on Kherson's Korabelnyi district, according to reports. A separate airstrike on the city's central district injured a 63-year-old man, local officials reported.

In Kharkiv Oblast, a Russian strike killed a 36-year-old woman in Tsyrkuny. Three more people were wounded when Russia hit the center of a village elsewhere in the oblast.

Zaporizhzhia and the northeast

Over the previous day, Russia killed one person and injured three in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, striking 52 settlements 962 times with airstrikes, drones, and artillery, regional head Ivan Fedorov said. Seven people were injured across Sumy Oblast, where Russia shelled 19 settlements, the regional administration reported.

The US Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) forecasts that Ukraine's grain exports will fall steeply in the 2026-27 season, with corn shipments dropping 39% to 14 million tonnes and wheat 26% to 10.8 million, World Grain reported. The agency tied the decline to Russia's summer campaign against the Odesa ports, which handle roughly 90% of the country's grain.

The forecast puts Washington's own numbers behind what Kyiv has warned for weeks. Ukraine's agriculture ministry projects farm exports could fall by almost half this season, and the FAS estimate — from a body with no stake in Ukraine's budget — points the same way. The difference is where the FAS looks: not at the ships that cannot sail, but at the grain that cannot follow them out.

Grain with nowhere to go

The clearest sign of the blockage is in ending stocks — grain left sitting in the country when the season closes. The FAS expects Ukraine's corn stocks to jump more than tenfold, to 13.5 million tonnes from 1.3 million, and wheat stocks to more than double to 8.2 million. That is grain the harvest produced and the ports could not move.

Ukraine has more than 74 million tonnes of storage for grain and oilseeds, the FAS noted, including about 23 million tonnes of certified warehouse space. Even so, the agriculture ministry has said the country may need another 10 to 12 million tonnes of temporary storage to get through the corn harvest if the Black Sea disruptions continue — most acutely in regions near the front line.

Why Odesa decides the harvest

Almost everything moves through Odesa. Three deepwater ports in Odesa Oblast carry more than 90% of Ukraine's farm exports, and Russia spent the summer hitting them and the ships that call there. Missiles struck the Turkish-owned bulk carrier Golden Leo as it left Odesa loaded with grain on 19 July, killing 10. Days earlier, a Russian drone hit a Palau-flagged corn ship twice as it sailed for Greece.

The land routes that remain — rail, road, and the Danube — cannot take up the slack, and traders have pulled back from buying grain they have no way to ship.

Farming is Ukraine's biggest export earner, bringing in more than half of what the country made selling goods abroad last year. Ukraine is also among the world's largest corn suppliers, which is why a cut of this size registers well beyond its own budget. For the farmers holding this year's crop, the FAS forecast describes a harvest they may not be able to sell.

Ukraine and Moldova are discussing transporting Ukrainian grain by rail through Moldovan territory to the Romanian port of Constanta, an option driven by intensified Russian attacks on shipping in the Black Sea, according to unnamed sources in both countries cited by Reuters.

The talks come as Russian strikes on vessels using the Black Sea corridor have disrupted traffic during the harvest season and forced Ukraine to cut its export forecast. On 22 July, no ship passed through the corridor at all, and the country's agriculture ministry has already lowered its projection for the 2026–2027 season by up to five million tons.

Discount sought, volume guarantees demanded

Kyiv is asking for a discount of 50 percent off the nominal rate to transport its grain, according to the agency's sources. A source at Moldovan Railway said Moldova responded with a counterproposal: guarantees from Ukraine on the volumes of grain it would transport through the route.

"We are currently collecting information on potential volumes from interested shippers. The information-gathering process has not yet been completed," a senior Ukrainian industry official told Reuters.

Ukraine expects corridor to cover 10 percent of exports

Ukraine estimates the Moldovan corridor could handle 10 percent of its grain exports. Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi said earlier that his ministry had lowered its grain export forecast for the 2026–2027 season from 43 million tons to 38–40 million tons because of Russian attacks on ports.

Ministers discuss rail links

A day before the Reuters report, Moldova's Minister of Infrastructure and Regional Development, Vladimir Bolea, visited Ukraine's Odesa region and met with his Ukrainian counterpart, Mykola Kalashnyk, to discuss improving rail connections and expanding the transit network between the two countries.

Moldova's premier defends transit revenue

Moldovan Prime Minister Vasile Tofan said his country should not pass up the opportunity to earn millions of euros from transiting Ukrainian grain cargo. He dismissed suggestions by Moldovan farming groups that Ukrainian grain prices would depress the value of their own produce.

"Let's not look for enemies where there are none," he said on Moldovan television.

Russian attacks on shipping

Russia intensified strikes on vessels using the Ukrainian Black Sea corridor in July. On 13 July, Russian forces struck a civilian ship flying the flag of Togo while it was unloading mineral fertilizer off the coast of Odesa region, killing five crew members and injuring five others.

The following day, 14 July, Russia attacked two civilian vessels in the Black Sea — cargo ships flying the flags of Tanzania and Liberia. The captain of one of the ships was killed. On the evening of 17 July, a vessel flying the flag of the Marshall Islands was struck. Attacks continued afterward.

On 22 July, no vessel passed through the sea corridor. The Ukrainian government called the disruption "deliberate economic and humanitarian terror," coming at the height of the harvest season.

Ukraine convened an urgent session of the UN Security Council over the attacks, calling on all states — particularly those "which this directly concerns" — to demand that Russia stop striking shipping. Separately, the Southern Mining and Processing Plant (Pivdennyi HZK) announced it was suspending extraction and temporarily scaling back operations.

A bipartisan group of US House members introduced the House version of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 on 10 August, advancing the sweeping sanctions package during the chamber's summer recess just days after the Senate passed it.

The move puts the bill one chamber from becoming law. If the House passes it, it would hand the president authority to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the biggest buyers of Russian crude and gas—China and India chief among them—and to blacklist the aging tankers of Russia's shadow fleet, the vessels that move sanctioned oil around Western restrictions. The target is the oil revenue that pays for Russia's war on Ukraine, at a moment when Ukrainian deep strikes have already knocked a large share of Russian refining capacity offline.

What the bill would do

The package imposes primary and secondary sanctions on Russian officials, oligarchs, entities propping up Russia's defense-industrial base, and foreign actors that materially aid Moscow's military operations. It targets major Russian banks and the foreign financial institutions that do significant business with them, and it goes after the shadow fleet and sanctions-evasion networks—ships, owners, operators, insurers, and ports that knowingly move Russian oil. The tariff framework, up to 100% on the top five buyers of Russian oil and the top five buyers of its gas, replaces an earlier plan for a blanket 500% tariff, with the US trade representative setting the specific rate for each country. The bill also folds in Iran, extending the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996.

Sanctions could be lifted only if the president certifies to Congress that Russia has signed a peace deal accepted by a free and independent Ukrainian government and has halted hostilities and efforts to subvert Kyiv.

A bill born from a stall—and a death

Graham and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal introduced the measure in 2025 with 500% tariffs. It drew more than 80 Senate cosponsors and went nowhere for over a year, as the White House kept it off the floor while betting on negotiations that never delivered. Graham secured President Trump's sign-off, then died on 11 July of an aortic dissection, a day after his last visit to Kyiv. The Senate renamed the bill in his honor and passed it 86-11 on 7 August.

The House is not a rubber stamp

The House text is identical to the Senate-passed version, so the companion functions largely as a whip count—a way for members to signal support before a floor vote expected this fall, once the chamber returns from recess on 31 August. Passage is not guaranteed: some House members have voiced fundamental concerns about handing the president broad tariff powers that could raise costs for US importers and consumers.

Two Russian oil refineries caught fire on 11 August, but the two incidents tell very different stories. In Orsk, in Orenburg Oblast, drones sparked a blaze that Ukrainian monitoring channels quickly linked to Kyiv's long-range campaign. Meanwhile, thousands of kilometers farther east, a Rosneft plant in Komsomolsk-on-Amur burned for reasons that remain unexplained.

A drone strike deep in Orenburg Oblast

Early on 11 August, residents of Orsk reported explosions near the Orsknefteorgsintez refinery, and a large fire soon followed. OSINT analysts at the Telegram channel Exilenova+ reported the strike. By their assessment, the drones flew more than 1,500 kilometers from Ukraine's border to reach Orsk. Preliminary findings pointed to damage at the plant's hydrocracking complex. Modernized in recent years, the unit can process 1.6 million tonnes a year.

Russian officials confirmed the attack, though they did not name the target at first. Orsk Mayor Artem Vorobyov urged residents to stay indoors and away from windows. Orenburg Governor Yevgeny Solntsev, meanwhile, activated the "Kovyor" (Carpet) airspace-safety plan across a 100-kilometer radius. Authorities also imposed temporary flight restrictions at the Orsk airport.

"The strike drones covered more than 1,500 kilometers from Ukraine's border to reach Orsk—among the deepest targets yet in the refinery campaign," Exilenova+, via OSINT monitoring

An unexplained blaze in the Far East

Far to the east, the picture is murkier. Around 11:00 local time, residents of Komsomolsk-on-Amur reported a fire near the city's refinery. ASTRA then geolocated the footage to Rosneft's RN-Komsomolsk plant. Notably, Ukrainian analysts cautioned that the fire does not appear to stem from a drone strike. After all, the site sits roughly 6,500 kilometers from Ukraine—far beyond the range of Kyiv's long-range drones. Coverage from the Kyiv Independent, meanwhile, flagged no clear cause.

The plant's press service reported no injuries, as relayed by Russian state agency TASS. Commissioned in 1942, the RN-Komsomolsk refinery has a design capacity of about 8 million tonnes of crude per year. In fact, it supplies more than 60% of the petroleum products across Russia's Far Eastern Federal District. Moreover, it produces gasoline, diesel, marine fuel, and other products for the region.

Ukraine's campaign against Russian oil refineries

The Orsk plant is no stranger to such strikes. Drones previously hit Orsknefteorgsintez on 3 October and 11 November 2025, and again on 29–30 April 2026. Since 2022, Ukraine has widened its deep-strike campaign against Russian oil refineries, fuel depots, and pipelines. Such targets power the Kremlin's army and bankroll the war through oil exports. Increasingly, Russian oil refineries have become the signature target of Ukraine's long-range war. Just the night before, on 10 August, Ukraine's General Staff confirmed a strike on the TANECO refinery in Tatarstan. A fire broke out there, too.

As of publication, Kyiv had not claimed the 11 August Orsk strike. Still, the timing fit a familiar pattern—a long-range campaign aimed at the fuel that keeps Russia's war machine moving.

Ukrainian drones struck a Wildberries logistics complex in Voronezh Oblast overnight into 11 August, setting off a massive fire at one of the Russian retailer's largest and newest hubs, according to Russian and Ukrainian monitoring channels.

Voronezh Oblast Governor Alexander Gusev said one person was killed, a 49-year-old man who was outside during the attack, suffered severe wounds, and died in hospital. Two others were hospitalized, one caught outside and one on the grounds of the logistics center.

Gusev reported fires at two warehouses in the Novousmansky district, with firefighters containing one blaze across about 16,000 square meters and battling another over roughly 20,000 square meters. Debris also damaged three trucks and a car, he said. Russian outlet Astra and Ukrainian monitoring channels identified the site as a Wildberries complex, which Gusev did not name, placing it at the village of Aleksandrovka.

The struck hub opened fully in late 2025, spans about 152,900 square meters, and can hold more than 90 mn items. Wildberries said it had evacuated staff at its logistics sites across the oblast in line with safety requirements. Gusev claimed Russian air defenses detected and destroyed 15 drones over Voronezh and five districts of the oblast.

The strike is the latest in a widening Ukrainian long-range campaign against Wildberries, described by Ukrainian officials as Russia's answer to Amazon and targeted, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said, because the platform helps supply the Russian military with parts for drones and other equipment. Russia rejects the claim.

Ukraine had already hit its 16th Wildberries warehouse in under three weeks by 5 August, when drones set fire to a logistics center in Oleksin, Tula Oblast.

Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi said on 4 August that the campaign had struck 15 sites in 18 days, thirteen of them knocked out of action or seriously damaged. Russian outlet Agentstvo put the count at more than 20 warehouses since mid-July. On 7 August, drones reached a Wildberries hub in Yekaterinburg, more than 1,700 kilometers from Ukraine, and earlier fires hit sites in Moscow Oblast, Tambov Oblast, Krasnodar, Stavropol Krai, Leningrad Oblast, St. Petersburg, and occupied Crimea, as well as Voronezh Oblast itself. Estonian military intelligence has estimated the strikes have caused up to $2 bn in direct damage

Russia has rebuilt its missile industry around the weapons most likely to pierce Ukraine's thinning air defenses. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) made that case on 10 August. Kyiv's Patriot interceptor shortage, it assessed, now hands Moscow no reason to negotiate. Because Kyiv can no longer reliably stop ballistic missiles, the Kremlin sees a clear military path to its maximalist aims.

Factories retooled around the missiles that get through

Since April 2026, Russian plants have prioritized ballistic and cruise missiles built to evade interception. HUR Deputy Head Major General Vadym Skibitskyi reported the shift. Monthly ballistic launches have more than tripled between April and July, he said. Meanwhile, output of key missile types runs 10 to 20% above plan. Moscow also met its full-year Zircon and Onyx targets by 3 August. To free capacity, it suspended the less accurate Kinzhal and Kh-32 lines. Skibitskyi flagged a newer twist, too: S-400 launchers now fire specially developed RM-48U rounds along a ballistic path. Russia is also striking Ukraine's defense plants, he warned, to choke off Kyiv's own ballistic-missile program.

Fired fresh, not from the stockpile

Crucially, these strikes draw on newly built missiles rather than war reserves. That approach lets Moscow sustain larger, more frequent salvos. Its stockpile stays intact for the occasional very large barrage. Unmanned Systems Forces commander Major Robert "Magyar" Brovdi put numbers on the trend. Russia can already loose a simultaneous salvo of 77 missiles, and it is pushing toward 200. He stressed that he meant weapons of all types, not ballistics alone. Kalibr cruise missiles, by contrast, are piling up unused. Moscow is shipping them to fleets beyond the Black Sea as Ukrainian crews down nearly all of them. Repeated strikes have meanwhile driven the Black Sea Fleet back to the port of Novorossiysk.

"The Patriot shortage hands Russia an opening to do serious damage over the winter — and a reason to keep meaningful talks at bay," - Institute for the Study of War assessed

Why the Patriot interceptor shortage stalls negotiations

This reprioritization feeds a winter strategy meant to break Ukraine's will to fight, ISW assessed. The Patriot is still the only system Kyiv fields that can down Russian ballistic missiles. And Kyiv has warned partners it cannot close the interceptor gap before the cold months. As a result, the Kremlin thinks it can hammer cities without paying a battlefield price. That calculation could drag the war into 2027, ISW noted. Putin's theory of victory still rests on outlasting Ukraine's defenses and Western resolve. On 9 August, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin restated Moscow's line. Any "freeze" that ignores the war's "root causes" is unacceptable, he said — shorthand for the Kremlin's original demands.

Russia struck the capital with ballistic missiles early on 11 August. One of them came down on the grounds of a Kyiv children's hospital in the Shevchenkivskyi district. Rescuers also fought a warehouse fire nearby that left one man injured.

The Kyiv children's hospital strike

Two craters opened on the hospital grounds, while the impact shattered windows and ruptured a gas line, rescuers reported. Utility crews sealed the leak within the hour. Staff at the Kyiv children's hospital had moved patients into the shelter before the strike, so it hurt no one there.

"Luckily, the children and medics were in the shelter — there were no casualties," - State Emergency Service reported

A warehouse ablaze and one man hurt

At a second address in the same district, a strike ignited a fire across 1,200 square meters of warehouse space. Crews first contained the flames, then put them out. Medics soon treated the lone casualty, a 28-year-old man. Earlier, the Air Force had warned of the ballistic threat before the missiles arrived.

Kyiv Oblast also under fire

The wider Kyiv Oblast took damage as well. In the Bucha district, the strike wrecked warehouse buildings and three trucks, although it caused no casualties. Officials said the enemy had again hit the region with ballistic missiles and attack drones.

A far deadlier night beyond Kyiv

Elsewhere, the toll climbed sharply. In Zaporizhzhia, a combined missile and guided-bomb strike killed six people and injured 19, regional authorities reported. Across the oblast, meanwhile, Russian forces launched 938 strikes on 58 settlements in a single day, injuring 52 residents in total. Officials also logged 341 reports of damage to homes, vehicles, and infrastructure.

In central Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, drones and artillery hit five districts more than 20 times. The strikes killed three people, among them a 15-year-old boy, and hurt five others, including a 7-year-old girl. To the northeast, an attack on Zlatopil in Kharkiv Oblast damaged civilian infrastructure and injured a resident.

Meanwhile, in Mykolaiv, drones hurt a 75-year-old woman and damaged homes and an industrial site, and officials described her condition as satisfactory. In nearby Snihurivka, six more drone strikes damaged houses, a shop, and a car, though they caused no injuries.

The strikes add to a wave of Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities this summer. The capital had already endured ballistic missiles days earlier, on the night of 8 August. That evening, explosions also echoed through Kyiv and Dnipro during a mass drone assault.

Russia can currently fire a simultaneous salvo of 77 ballistic missiles, and it aims to lift that ceiling to 200. Robert "Magyar" Brovdi, who commands Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, told the Associated Press. He called the plan one of Ukraine's gravest weak points.

Ballistic missiles remain the hardest to stop

That shortfall has already turned lethal. Intensified strikes made July the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since April 2022, the UN human-rights office in Ukraine documented. Air defenses downed just 29 of the 195 ballistic missiles Russia fired that month, roughly 15%. Another 40 fell short on their own. Yet the largest single-night launches recorded so far run to only a few dozen. That is well below the salvo of 77 that Brovdi describes, and a fraction of the 200 Moscow is reaching for.

"Even if they only manage half of that, it will all be flying at us."
- Robert "Magyar" Brovdi, commander, Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces

Production running ahead of plan

His warning tracks Ukrainian intelligence. Russia's defense industry is overfulfilling its monthly targets, hitting 110% to 120% on the main missile types. So said Deputy Military Intelligence Chief Vadym Skibitskyi in an interview with RBC-Ukraine. He put July output for the Kh-101 cruise missile at 140% of plan, the Kalibr at 111%, and the Kh-35 at 200%. A pause in strikes, he judged, is unlikely.

The pivot to jet-powered drones

Moscow's factories are also retooling around drones. Russia plans to assemble 11,000 strike drones of various types in August 2026, Skibitskyi said. That mix spans the Geran-1 through Geran-5, the Harpia, and several Gerbera variants. Output dipped in July as the industry shifted toward the turbojet Geran-4 and Geran-5.

Those jet models fly faster and demand different interceptors or short-range air defense. They already made up half of one recent attack. The concentration of jet-powered Shaheds, meanwhile, has climbed 2.5 times in recent weeks, Brovdi added. Taken together, the assessments point one way: more missiles and faster drones, launched in larger waves, against defenses Ukraine is scrambling to rebuild.

Ukraine's Crimea campaign aims to make the occupied peninsula unusable to Russian forces, its drone-forces commander told The Associated Press. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. The campaign is only the first phase, said Maj. Robert "Madyar" Brovdi. His units could strike seven times more military targets with faster Western funding, he said.

The constraint is financing, not factory output. Brovdi put his forces at 14 percent of the strength a full-capacity operation would require. He traced the gap to the timing of allied money, not to Ukraine's drone production. "It's not that the production capacity of Ukrainian manufacturers doesn't allow us to make the necessary quantities" of drones, he said. He added: "It's the banal problem of untimely financing, which our partners do allocate, but which moves significantly slower than our plans."

Even so, Brovdi framed the peninsula as decisive. "Crimea falls within the key conceptual pillars on the path to ending the war," he said.

What the Crimea campaign has hit

The summer strikes have hit rail bridges, oil depots, and power infrastructure. These aim to cut supply lines and blind Russian air defenses as drones approach. To pry open a "window" for those drones, the force destroyed more than 300 air defense assets in recent months. Those included surface-to-air systems, radar stations, and electronic-warfare equipment.

Where Starlink connectivity reaches, an average of three drones can now destroy even a heavily defended target, Brovdi said. In turn, his crews match the munitions to each aim. One mix suits a bridge pier; another fits a fuel truck or a moving train. Even so, his forces avoid civilian infrastructure, he added. Still, strikes on the power grid have cut electricity for residents. Brovdi said he has twice publicly apologized to Ukrainians living in Crimea.

He also pointed to one measure of progress. Across four recent large-scale Russian barrages from the peninsula, launch sites fired only five missiles in total. He credited that drop, however, to the destruction of Russian air defenses. The AP could not independently verify the claim.

Forcing Russia off the peninsula

Much of Russia's Soviet-era air defense runs on the power grid. That is one reason Crimea's electricity network keeps drawing fire. As a result, losing power leaves Russian soldiers "blind," Brovdi said, with only machine guns and rifles.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is working to dismantle Crimea's role as a naval base. "Creating conditions that make it impossible for any kind of military capability … to remain there will make Crimea uninteresting … as a military staging ground," he said.

The offensive began in late June. Two weeks in, Ukrainian intelligence indicated Russia had ordered its military commands and security services off the peninsula, Brovdi said. In addition, a covert order called for removing secret archives and artworks. The AP could not independently verify the account.

Russian countermeasures and the missile threat

Russia is pushing back against the Crimea campaign. It is installing jamming systems that will degrade Starlink to some degree, Brovdi said. Russia is also building its own satellite network to rival the service. "This is a risk for the entire planet," he said, "because a dictatorship will gain access to information across the whole globe."

Other threats are mounting as well. Jet-powered Shahed drones are harder for Ukraine to shoot down. Their concentration has risen two and a half times in recent weeks, he said. Moreover, Russia can now fire a simultaneous salvo of 77 ballistic missiles and plans to raise that to 200. As a result, the danger is pressing. Ukraine is short of interceptors for the US-made Patriot, its only defense against ballistic missiles.

"Even if they only manage half of that, it will all be flying at us," Brovdi said. The only way to bring the number down is to hit every facility that builds the missiles, he added. That, he said, is why Ukraine's long-range strikes inside Russia matter.

Wildberries in the crosshairs

One civilian-facing target Brovdi named was Wildberries, Russia's largest online marketplace. Many call it the country's answer to Amazon. "Wildberries is, first of all, a supply platform—it's the war's quartermaster," he said. The company also runs a dedicated section selling goods for Russia's military, he noted.

For now, these strikes aim to make ordinary Russians feel the war directly. He declined to give a timeline. Instead, the strikes will continue "until it becomes impossible for it to recover quickly," he said.

Finally, he cast the retailer as a pressure point on morale. "Ultimately, Wildberries is, forgive the expression, a consumer gambling addiction," he said, comparing lost access to restrictions on social media. "It turned out to be a sensitive sensor of the comfort of Russia's massive population—people who consider themselves completely untouched by the actions of the aggressor country."

The pace at which Russian forces are occupying Ukrainian territory has fallen sharply since the start of 2026, while the scale of Russian losses has not, Radio Svoboda's Russian Service reports, citing data from the Ukrainian project DeepState, which tracks the front line.

DeepState's figures show Russia seized 450 to 550 square kilometers a month at the 2025 peak. The rate then declined steadily from December 2025 through July 2026: 445 square kilometers in December, 160 in April, and 27 in July. A comparable Russian project, Slivochny Kapriz, which by contrast credits the Russian army with any area where its personnel have been spotted—even without confirmed control—recorded a similar slowdown, from 550–600 square kilometers a month last year to 112 in June.

A shrinking prize in northern Donbas

At the end of last year, roughly 5,000 square kilometers remained under Ukrainian control in northern Donbas, including three "fortress" cities larger than Pokrovsk: Kostiantynivka, Kramatorsk, and Sloviansk. Even using Slivochny Kapriz's more generous estimate of the current pace, capturing that territory would take a year and a half.

Losses hold steady as gains shrink

Despite the slowdown, Ukrainian military estimates of Russian losses have not fallen and remain at roughly the level recorded in the second half of 2025. Both Ukraine's General Staff and its Ministry of Defense now publish official loss estimates. According to the General Staff, Russia lost nearly 164,000 people from February through June 2026—five months—an average of 32,800 a month. The Ministry of Defense's verified count for the same period was 157,000 killed and wounded, or 31,500 a month on average. The General Staff puts Russia's total losses since the start of the full-scale invasion at 1.4 million, a figure that includes killed, missing, wounded, and other losses, not only irrecoverable ones.

Western officials have offered comparable figures. UK intelligence chief Anne Keast-Butler said in May 2026 that the Russian army had lost 500,000 servicemen killed alone; at a ratio of two to three wounded per fatality, that implies total Russian losses of 1.5 to 2 million, according to British intelligence. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio estimated Russian losses at 7,000 soldiers a week roughly six months ago, a figure that broadly matches Ukrainian military estimates.

The cost of a square kilometer has tripled

The American Institute for the Study of War calculated in 2024 that Russia lost 125,800 people while capturing 2,356 square kilometers between September and November—53 losses per square kilometer. Radio Svoboda's own calculations, based on General Staff and DeepState data, put the 2025 figure at 85 losses per square kilometer. By the latest 2026 estimates, that figure has risen to 290—3.5 times the 2025 rate.

Drones make breakthroughs impossible, officials say

The slowdown is now widely attributed to Ukraine's growing advantage in drone warfare. CIA Director John Ratcliffe, citing US intelligence, said the average lifespan of a Russian recruit arriving at the front in Ukraine is 20 to 30 minutes. He said the Russian advance has slowed because Ukraine has made major gains in the use of drones and asymmetric warfare methods that are leveling the battlefield: "AI drones have become specialized and inexpensive killing machines."

Current Time, the Russian-language network run by Radio Svoboda, reports that the slow pace of both armies' advances today stems from the specific nature of this war: drones have made rapid breakthroughs impossible.

A Ukrainian drone operator, whose name Radio Svoboda withheld for security reasons, said the decline in the Russian advance stems from a collapse in the training level of Russian troops: "He's worse than he was a year ago. Actually, he's simply not there. They grabbed men from the garage, gave them a rifle, and said: 'Run!'"

The operator said Russian commanders now resort to any means necessary to force some forward movement: "In Kostiantynivka, they now drop supplies for the [infiltrated] soldiers a block away from where they're sitting, just so there's some kind of advance. It's absurd, but unfortunately, that's the reality." That tactic helps Russian forces advance, he said, but at a catastrophic cost: only one soldier in 15 survives.

Russian infiltration groups of two to six fighters cover 15 to 20 kilometers on foot to reach positions, carrying "everything that will help them survive," which makes them, in the operator's words, "the easiest possible target for us." He acknowledged that some Russian soldiers still slip through: "Recently, while we were destroying Russian equipment near one settlement, we missed some motorcyclists who are now hiding somewhere in the tree lines." Stopping the Russian advance entirely, he said, is simply not possible: "We're constantly adjusting our tactics, but so are they—though technology helps us, while for them, as usual, everything is done with an axe."

Kremlin prepares for a new mobilization wave

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said recently that Russian leader Vladimir Putin is preparing to announce a new mobilization wave after Russia's State Duma elections in September, aiming to recruit 300,000 to 500,000 people. The Kremlin denies planning a mobilization, but the Institute for the Study of War says Russian authorities are taking steps consistent with preparations for a large-scale draft.

Analysts point to a law Putin signed in November 2025 allowing reservists to be sent into combat zones without a formal mobilization declaration. On 22 July, the State Duma passed in three readings a law expanding the pool of people with criminal records or under investigation who may sign military service contracts during mobilization and martial law. The day before, a draft amendment was published under which Russia's National Guard would revise its civil defense rules to explicitly reference mobilization and martial law, requiring advance protective measures for its employees, civilian staff, and their families "from dangers arising during mobilization, during martial law, in wartime," according to Meduza.

The Ukrainian drone operator said mobilization could increase the pace of the Russian advance: "You can't keep track of everyone."

Russian forces struck the Mayaki bridge on the M-15 highway on 9 August, the Institute for the Study of War reported. The strike severed a road link that ties southern Ukraine to Moldova and Romania. That Odesa–Reni route crosses the Dniester and feeds the Danube ports. Those ports have become Kyiv's main export outlet since Russian strikes crippled its Black Sea shipping.

Conflicting claims over the Mayaki bridge

Russian milbloggers reported the attack, though their accounts diverged sharply. One claimed that Russian forces had destroyed the span. Others published footage purporting to show that it still stands. A local outlet serving nearby Izmail reported on 9 August that the strike damaged the crossing. Ukraine's State Border Guard Service separately confirmed that authorities briefly restricted traffic on the route. Moscow had already targeted the same structure in December 2025.

Why the land corridor matters

Russia likely hit the Mayaki bridge to choke Ukrainian grain exports, ISW assessed. Those exports now move through a land corridor that Kyiv has leaned on since strikes disrupted its maritime routes. Moscow has steadily intensified this campaign since July 2026. Navy Spokesperson Captain Third Rank Dmytro Pletenchuk offered one measure on 31 July. He said Russian strikes had damaged more than 20 ships near the Black Sea and sharply slowed cargo flows. Meanwhile, the country's main farmers union weighed in on 15 July. The Ukrainian Agri Council estimated that Russian attacks had cut about a third of Ukraine's grain-export capacity.

Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food Taras Vysotskyi has described the fallout. He said the strikes are forcing Kyiv to reroute grain and cargo through the Danube River. Russia used the same playbook in July 2023. Back then, then-Minister Mykola Solskyi reported that strikes destroyed 60,000 tons of grain at Chornomorsk port overnight on 19 July. Therefore, ISW concluded, Russia is likely shifting its strikes from the sea corridor to the land corridor. The aim, analysts wrote, is to block grain exports and weaken Ukraine's wider economy.

Russian forces are likely shifting their strikes from Ukraine's sea corridor to its land corridor to block grain exports and degrade the economy. — Institute for the Study of War

Türkiye floats a Black Sea moratorium

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan raised a separate track on 9 August. He said Ankara had proposed a Russian–Ukrainian moratorium on strikes against merchant ships in the Black Sea. Both Moscow and Kyiv have received the offer, Fidan added, and Türkiye now awaits their response.

Ukrainians place the most trust in Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine's ambassador to the United Kingdom and former commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, according to a nationwide survey the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) conducted between 16 and 31 July. Some 66% of respondents said they trust him, against 24% who do not—a net balance of +42%.

Close behind sits Mykhailo Fedorov, the former defense minister who previously led the Ministry of Digital Transformation and launched the Diia app. Pollsters recorded 63% trust and 16% distrust for him, producing the strongest net balance in the survey at +46%.

Kyrylo Budanov, head of the President's Office and former chief of Ukraine's Defence Intelligence, rounded out the top three. He drew 61% trust and 22% distrust, for a balance of +39%.

Zelenskyy ranks fourth

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy followed the three military and government figures, trusted by 56% of respondents and distrusted by 38%, for a net balance of +18%. At the opposite end of the ten-name list, former president Petro Poroshenko drew the weakest result—20% trust against 76% distrust, a balance of −56%.

The institute also flagged a rise in confidence in Fedorov as the standout shift since its May 2026 telephone survey, the only change it called significant.

Firm trust versus tentative trust

Sociologists further split the responses into "completely" and "rather" trust. Across the leading figures, roughly half—or fewer—of those expressing trust chose the softer "rather" option rather than "completely," the institute noted, a distinction it argued carries political weight.

Those who "completely" trust Zelenskyy mostly want to see him as president after the war—while those who "rather" trust him mostly want someone else.
— Kyiv International Institute of Sociology

KIIS interviewed 1,808 respondents using a mixed-mode design, splitting the sample evenly between computer-assisted telephone interviews and face-to-face tablet interviews on territory controlled by Ukraine.

Russia has decided to bring between 30,000 and 50,000 North Korean troops onto its territory, up from initial deployments of hundreds and then thousands, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview with the "Yedyni Novyny" telemaraphon on 8 August.

The figure marks a sharp rise from what Zelenskyy gave two weeks earlier. In a 25 July address, he said Russia wanted 30,000 additional North Korean troops and that preparations to receive them had been underway in Russia's Voronezh region since June.

Rising troop estimates

"North Koreans appear on the territory of the Russian Federation from time to time. We see this, we know this," Zelenskyy said, adding that Russia had now made "a decision for 30,000 to 50,000 North Koreans to be on the territory of Russia." He said North Korea "will build up experience of modern warfare" and would receive licenses from Russia.

Russia and North Korea have not announced plans to expand their cooperation, Radio Svoboda reported.

Missile deployment already underway

Ukrainian authorities said Russian forces used a North Korean missile for the first time in a long period last week, striking Radushne, near Kryvyi Rih.

A North Korean missile unit has begun deploying in western Russia and may be equipped with 120 ballistic missiles and six launchers for strikes on Ukraine, Reuters reported on 5 August, citing Andrii Cherniak, a spokesperson for Ukraine's Defense Intelligence directorate (HUR). Pyongyang has already sent a new batch of 40 KN-23 and KN-24 missiles along with personnel, Cherniak said, though the final deployment configuration and total missile count are to be settled at high-level talks next month.

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha separately said North Korean missile launchers would "immediately become a legitimate target" if deployed in Russia, Radio Svoboda reported.

Kyiv seeks South Korean support

Zelenskyy argued the deployments carry risks beyond Ukraine. "They are studying this war," he said, warning that North Korea could apply lessons learned to future "crises and escalation" in the Pacific that would threaten "other states in the Asian direction."

He said Ukraine wants closer cooperation with South Korea, "primarily" on air defense systems, and said Kyiv is ready to work with Seoul on drone technology as well. Zelenskyy acknowledged that South Korea faces "a legal restriction under the Constitution" on such cooperation but said Ukrainian diplomats remain in contact with South Korean counterparts, as well as with Japan, over the Russia–North Korea partnership.

Military alliance since 2024

Russia and North Korea signed a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty in 2024, cementing a military alliance between the two countries.

Zelenskyy confirmed on 14 December that North Korean soldiers were fighting alongside Russian forces in Kursk Oblast, and Ukrainian intelligence reported that North Korean troops had been placed on high alert the following day. Ukraine's Special Operations Forces (SSO) captured North Korea's first documented prisoner of war in the war on 26 December, Militarnyi reported. The SSO described the raid as an operation "to destroy the enemy in the Kursk sector," in which its forces also seized a Russian BTR-82 armored personnel carrier along with weapons and documents. That prisoner died of his wounds, South Korea's National Intelligence Service confirmed on 27 December.

On 11 January 2025, Zelenskyy announced that Ukrainian forces had captured two more North Korean soldiers, also wounded, in Kursk Oblast; both survived and were taken to Kyiv, where they were questioned by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). Ukraine's Defense Intelligence directorate had previously reported that the first North Korean units arrived in the war zone on 23 October 2024.

South Korea's intelligence agency confirmed the capture on 12 January and pledged cooperation with Ukraine. Two days later, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lee Jae-woong said Seoul was open to discussing relocating the two men, citing a constitutional provision under which North Koreans are considered South Korean nationals, Yonhap reported. At the time, neither soldier had expressed an intention to defect.

In late February 2025, the two soldiers — identified by the Wall Street Journal as Ri, 26, and Paek — gave the first Western interviews of North Korean troops captured in the war, published 27 February. They said they had been told they would be fighting South Korean forces, not Ukraine, and that they were not paid for their service. Paek was shot and lay wounded for five days before capture, later having several toes amputated due to gangrene; Ri was shot in the arm and jaw. South Korea's Foreign Ministry confirmed on 19 February that it would accept North Korean POWs who sought asylum, saying "they should not be sent against their will to a place where there's a threat of persecution."

By late February 2025, Zelenskyy said around 4,000 North Korean soldiers had been killed or wounded fighting for Russia; North Korea's overall troop commitment was estimated at roughly 11,000–12,000 by early 2025. Losses continued to mount — by January 2026, Ukraine put North Korean dead in Kursk Oblast at 6,000, where the contingent remained stationed and continued carrying out strikes on Ukrainian border communities. Ukrainian soldiers have described North Korean troops as reluctant to surrender, with some reportedly attempting suicide rather than be captured.

Drones struck several Russian oblasts overnight into 10 August. A probable strike hit a Nizhnekamsk refinery in the Republic of Tatarstan, while fires spread across occupied Crimea. Local Telegram channels and Ukrainian monitoring groups reported the attacks. Kyiv has not claimed them, and the damage stays unverified.

Thick smoke over the Nizhnekamsk refinery cluster

Residents of Nizhnekamsk reported explosions on the morning of 10 August. Footage online showed drones crossing the city, with dense black smoke above one district, local channels said. Which Nizhnekamsk refinery took the hit stayed unclear. The city hosts two major plants — the TAIF-NK and TANECO complexes.

TAIF-NK processes 7.3 million tons of crude and 1 million tons of gas condensate a year. Its 49 products include AI-92 and AI-95 gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. TANECO belongs to the Tatneft group. It ranks among Russia's largest and most advanced refineries. Its design capacity exceeds 16 million tons of crude a year.

Ukraine's Defense Forces struck both TANECO and TAIF-NK on 12 June, the General Staff confirmed. Ukrainian units hit the same cluster again in July.

Fires flare in occupied Crimea's Krasnoperekopsk

Explosions rocked Krasnoperekopsk — known in Ukrainian as Yany Kapu — overnight. Numerous fires burned by morning, the monitoring channel Crimean Wind reported. Around 7 blasts sounded between 2 and 3 a.m. Subscribers described a fire behind the railway station in the industrial area.

By the morning of 10 August, NASA's FIRMS satellite system flagged multiple heat signatures there, Crimean Wind said. The hotspots clustered in the town's southern industrial zone. Russian forces store and repair equipment in the area, the channel added.

Drones also crossed Sevastopol. Residents heard aircraft and gunfire near the Balaklava thermal power plant. The Russian-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhaev, claimed 15 drones fell, mostly over the sea. He admitted, though, that falling debris ignited a forest fire near Inzhir beach and forced a campsite evacuation. A blast in Simferopol briefly cut power around 4 am before supply returned.

Moscow and Rostov cite downed drones

In the capital, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said air defenses downed 13 drones approaching Moscow overnight. He gave no details on any consequences. Over Rostov Oblast, Governor Yuri Slyusar said more than 70 drones destroyed. Information on casualties and damage was still coming in, he said.

Both counts reflect Russian air-defense claims rather than independently confirmed strikes.

Overnight, Russia's aviation authority Rosaviatsia restricted takeoffs and landings at Begishevo airport in Nizhnekamsk. The curbs also covered 14 other airports, among them Kazan, Ufa, Samara, and Moscow's Domodedovo and Vnukovo.

A World Health Organization humanitarian warehouse in Dnipro was destroyed in a strike on 7 August, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reported on 9 August, without naming those responsible.

Ghebreyesus's account added to a pattern the organization has tracked since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion: 3,148 strikes on Ukrainian healthcare facilities, which have killed 240 people and injured 1,055 more, according to World Health Organization Ukraine data.

The warehouse held humanitarian medical supplies intended for medical facilities at the front line, Ghebreyesus said.

Evacuation before the strike

A WHO staff member and drivers helping evacuate cargo were working at the site before the strike that destroyed it. Before the attack began, they managed to remove 130 of approximately 300 pallets of medical supplies. Preliminarily, no one was injured.

Ghebreyesus withholds blame

Ghebreyesus said he had no data on who struck the warehouse and did not name a culprit. Similar caution from international organizations in describing attacks in Ukraine has occurred before, including after the strike on the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra.

"Attacks on healthcare facilities MUST STOP. Otherwise people are left without life-saving medical care. Even wars have their rules. One of them—health must be protected!" Ghebreyesus added.

Other recent strikes on healthcare infrastructure

On 6 August, five people were killed in Dnipropetrovsk oblast—three in Kamianske district and two in Pavlohrad, where an Ukrposhta depot was also destroyed. On the night of 1 August, Russia struck the territory of Kyivmedspetstrans twice, burning five ambulances. On 2 June, five medical facilities in the capital were damaged by Russian strikes.

Demonstrators gathered in 22 Polish cities on Sunday, 9 August, to protest a rise in violence against Ukrainians, with most rallies beginning after 17:00, RMF24 reported.

The Sunday rallies followed a demonstration two days earlier, on Friday, 7 August, under the slogan "My Poland doesn't hit, insult, or incite," when organizers submitted a petition signed by more than 11,000 people to the prime minister's office and the Ministry of Interior and Administration, demanding decisive measures against violent attacks on Ukrainian citizens.

Nationwide campaign led by pro-democracy group

The Committee for the Defense of Democracy organized the nationwide campaign. Organizers said the demonstrations respond to increasingly frequent verbal and physical attacks on people targeted because of their origin, language, or appearance. The rallies were also meant to show solidarity with those experiencing violence and discrimination.

A slogan from Auschwitz

The phrase that became the demonstrations' slogan, "Don't be indifferent," was spoken by Marian Turski on 27 January 2020, during commemorations of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Turski, a former prisoner of the camp, used the speech to urge people not to accept cruel treatment of minorities, violations of human rights, and historical falsehoods.

Recent incidents

The number of attacks on Ukrainians in Poland has sharply increased in recent weeks. In Kraków, a 39-year-old man who had verbally insulted two people of Ukrainian nationality turned himself in at a police station on 8 August and was detained, according to reporting cited a day before the Sunday protests.

Separately, Tobiasz Bocheński, a member of the European Parliament and former candidate for mayor of Warsaw, said that if the Law and Justice party came to power, it would ensure the deportation of Ukrainian men of conscription age who are not legally employed in Poland. Poland's Ministry of Interior and Administration said such statements amount to populism.

The flag came down from a building in central Prishtina on 9 August, Mayor Përparim Rama said in a Facebook post, after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy remarked on Kosovo during his visit to Serbia. Rama said "the state of Kosovo must be respected."

"Our compassion and solidarity will always be on the side of peoples facing war, violence, and persecution," Rama wrote. "Because we, better than many others, know what it means to fight for freedom, dignity, and the right to exist as a state."

What Zelenskyy said in Belgrade

The exchange was reciprocal: Zelenskyy reaffirmed Ukraine's refusal to recognize Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence, while Vučić reiterated Serbia's backing for Ukraine's territorial integrity, including Crimea.

At the 8 August joint news conference in Belgrade, Zelenskyy said Ukraine's position had not shifted. "Our position on what you said, about the unilateral declaration of Kosovo's independence, remains unchanged," he said. "We have always emphasized this, and Ukraine's policy has not changed. Likewise, we are grateful to our partners for respecting Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty, including, of course, Crimea's belonging to Ukraine. This position of Serbia is also unchanged, including in the UN General Assembly."

Vučić's position

Vučić, in turn, tied his support for Ukraine's territorial integrity to Serbia's own stance on Kosovo. "We support the UN Charter, UN resolutions, and that means the territorial integrity of all UN members, which means the territorial integrity of Ukraine as well," he said. "Likewise, we are very grateful to Ukraine for supporting the territorial integrity of the Republic of Serbia. And as far as we are concerned, we will continue this principled policy. There are no 'buts' about this. This is being stated very clearly and firmly now."

Kosovo's recognition status

Kosovo is a partially recognized state on the Balkan Peninsula, in the Kosovo and Metohija region, with a population of about 1.7 million, according to Suspilne. Its capital and largest city is Prishtina. Kosovo is recognized by 22 of the European Union's 27 member states. Ukraine does not recognize Kosovo's independence.

Ukrainian forces struck two Russian oil refineries and a surveillance post mounted on a Black Sea drilling rig on the night of 8 August, Ukraine's General Staff said.

The strikes extend a months-long Ukrainian campaign against Russia's refining sector. Ukrainian forces attacked Russian refineries about 50 times between mid-April and 13 July, hitting at least 24 of the country's 34 large plants and cutting refining volumes to their lowest level in more than two decades, Bloomberg estimated.

A fire at the Ilsky plant

The strike on the Ilsky refinery in Krasnodar Krai touched off a fire on the plant's grounds, the General Staff said. It put the site's capacity at six process units and about 6.6 million tons of oil a year.

The plant "receives, stores and processes hydrocarbon feedstock, produces and ships petroleum products," the General Staff said, adding that its output serves the needs of the Russian armed forces, among other users.

Syzran plant tied to Rosneft

Ukrainian forces also hit the Syzran refinery in Samara oblast, which is part of Rosneft's oil complex, the General Staff said. It described the plant as having a design capacity of about 8.5 million tons of oil a year and producing more than 20 types of petroleum products, including motor fuels and road bitumen, and named it one of the region's key refining facilities supplying fuel to the Russian armed forces.

A surveillance post on the Syvash rig

The third target was a technical observation post on the Syvash jack-up drilling rig in the Black Sea, the General Staff said. Russia uses the rig to house surveillance equipment and keep it operating in those waters, the statement said.

Russian officials confirm the attacks

Overnight, Russian Telegram channels reported drone attacks on Krasnodar Krai and Samara oblast. Samara governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev confirmed the shelling. Local channels said the Syzran strike landed near an AVT distillation unit and oil storage tanks.

In Krasnodar Krai, the regional operational headquarters confirmed the Ilsky refinery had been damaged and said "debris fell on the plant's territory."

Neither the strikes nor their extent could be verified through independent sources, Radio Svoboda said. The General Staff has said Ukrainian forces "systematically implement measures aimed at reducing the combat potential of the Russian occupation forces" and pressing Russia to end its aggression against Ukraine.

The European Union has transferred an additional €30 million to the Ukraine Energy Support Fund, raising its total contribution to the mechanism to €279 million, First Deputy Prime Minister and Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal wrote on Telegram.

The transfer is the latest in a series of contributions to the fund from Ukraine's partners. Luxembourg also added funds to the same mechanism recently, and Denmark contributed more than €10 million, European Pravda reported.

What the funding supports

In his Telegram post, Shmyhal described how the fund is used:

"The funds coming in through this financial instrument help us restore the energy infrastructure damaged by Russian attacks, purchase critically needed equipment for our energy companies, and ensure a reliable energy supply, above all for critical infrastructure," Shmyhal wrote.

Ukraine has reached concrete agreements with the United States for monthly deliveries of interceptor missiles for its Patriot air defense systems, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at a joint press conference with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić in Belgrade on 8 August.

The commitment does not close Ukraine's gap. Zelenskyy said the monthly volume remains insufficient and laid out a parallel effort to secure interceptors from Europe, the Middle East and further afield, as US shipments have thinned this year.

The US as the primary supplier

Repelling ballistic missiles has been a problem since the start of the full-scale war, and the search for a solution begins with the country that builds the systems, Zelenskyy said.

"From the first days of the war in Ukraine there was nothing to repel ballistic missiles. This is very difficult work. In which directions can this problem be solved? Well, first of all, who has anti-ballistic missiles and systems? The manufacturer. That is the United States of America, first of all. Can they help? We are working. Will they allocate us missiles every month? Yes. We have agreements," he said.

Asked whether that supply met Ukraine's needs, he answered: "Are these missiles enough? No." He added that the monthly volumes of American missiles had decreased this year compared with 2025.

Where else Kyiv is looking

Patriot missiles are also held by European countries, Zelenskyy said, naming Germany and Poland as able to substantially strengthen Ukraine's air defense. Kyiv is also in talks with Norway, the Netherlands and Middle Eastern states.

South Korea and Japan could potentially help but do not currently hand over such systems, which Zelenskyy attributed to restrictions in their domestic legislation and constitutions. Ukraine is separately discussing air defense with Israel; the president said Ukraine is ready to buy but that no such option exists at present.

"Every day I speak with one European state or another and with Middle Eastern states so that Ukraine receives additional missiles outside the American package. We are simply at the level where all our institutions must work on this, not only the president. Everyone must work, otherwise there will not be enough missiles," he said.

The Belgrade remarks came a day after Zelenskyy arrived on his first official visit to Serbia.

Zelenskyy had bilateral meeting with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. Vucic voiced support for Ukraine's territorial integrity and its path to the European Union.

What esle Zelenskyy and Vučić discussed

The two presidents held talks that ran across the countries' European integration, trade and energy cooperation, a prospective free-trade zone, and diplomatic paths to ending Russia's war on Ukraine. Vučić had said ahead of the meeting that he would discuss both countries' route to EU membership, along with economic and energy cooperation and other opportunities

On the economy, Vučić said the sides had reviewed infrastructure projects and the involvement of Ukrainian companies in Serbia. On peace efforts, Zelenskyy said the leaders had discussed diplomatic instruments capable of bringing the war closer to an end.

Before the press conference, the sides held a ceremony to sign a memorandum on cooperation in animal health and food safety. The document was signed by Serbia's Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Management Dragan Glamočić and Ukraine's ambassador to Serbia Oleksandr Lytvynenko.

Territorial integrity

Vučić framed Serbia's position as a matter of UN principle and tied it to Ukraine's reciprocal stance on Serbia.

"We support the UN Charter, UN resolutions, and this means the territorial integrity of all UN members, which means the territorial integrity of Ukraine as well. Likewise we are very grateful to Ukraine for supporting the territorial integrity of the Republic of Serbia. And as far as we are concerned, we will continue this principled policy. There are no 'buts' on this question. This is being said very clearly and resolutely now," Vučić said.

Support on the road to the EU

Vučić said Ukraine could always count on Belgrade's support in EU accession, and the two discussed both countries' European path during the meeting.

"We wish for Ukraine to open all negotiating clusters as quickly as possible, to close them as quickly as possible, because this is the wish of the Ukrainian people, of the Ukrainian leadership. And speaking of ourselves, we have not had and will not have any problems regarding this in the future. On the contrary, everything we can do to help Ukraine on its European path, we will do," Vučić said.

Trade at $321 million in six months

Vučić said trade between the two countries is growing rapidly: while it stood at $450 million for all of last year, it had already reached $321 million in the first six months of this year.

"The most important import item is iron ore from Ukraine. And I believe that cooperation in the sphere of agriculture, but also in other spheres of energy, everywhere trade turnover can be greater. We discussed projects in the sphere of infrastructure, involving Ukrainian companies on the territory of Serbia. I believe we can have serious and good results in the future," the Serbian president said.

Vučić said he hoped cooperation between the countries would become "significantly stronger and larger-scale" after the war ends. In future, he said, Serbia and Ukraine could jointly export certain goods and enter third-country markets, in particular in Africa and Asia.

"I think we will yet see agreements on such cooperation. Yesterday we had long discussions, today the discussions were really good. I am grateful to President Zelenskyy for the visit to Serbia. I hope we received you properly. And I want to believe that our meetings in the future will be incomparably more frequent than they were before," Vučić added.

A free-trade zone by the end of 2026

Zelenskyy said negotiations on creating a free-trade zone between Ukraine and Serbia are under way, and expressed hope the agreement could be concluded by the end of 2026.

"Our teams must work well to speed up the agreement on a free trade zone between Ukraine and Serbia. These negotiations are progressing, this is positive. And it would be good to prepare everything by the end of this year for concluding the agreement on free trade between Ukraine and Serbia," the Ukrainian president said.

Damaged energy grid and a Serbian humanitarian package

Zelenskyy described the state of Ukraine's infrastructure under Russian strikes.

"For the fifth year now we in Ukraine are forced to go through all these strikes. Russian strikes are aimed mostly at facilities that work precisely for the life of the people. We have virtually no undamaged power plants left. Many railway stations are destroyed, hospitals, universities, ordinary civilian enterprises. In a time of such a war we appreciate and are very grateful for all the support that Ukraine receives from other countries, from other peoples," Zelenskyy said.

He said Ukraine continues to expand all formats of cooperation with partners to give communities and people "more resilience, more capacity to hold out despite all the challenges of the war."

Zelenskyy said Serbia would provide Ukraine with a humanitarian aid package. "We are grateful that there will be a new package of humanitarian support from Serbia for Ukraine, in particular in the sphere of medicine, in the sphere of energy. This is very important for us," he said.

Diplomacy to end the war

Zelenskyy said the leaders had discussed diplomatic instruments that could bring the war closer to an end, and pointed to capitals with influence over the process.

"It is important that everywhere in the world they know what we want, and this is true, and this is a fact, we want a dignified peace, that every opportunity be used for the sake of peace, for the sake of guaranteed security. All available opportunities that exist in Washington, and in Beijing, in the capitals of Europe, our partners in the Middle East, in the Gulf, in all the capitals of the world that have influence over the relevant processes," Zelenskyy said.

A Russian strike on the village of Pukhivka in Kyiv Oblast's Brovary raion overnight into 8 August killed three members of one family: a three-year-old boy, his grandmother, and his grandfather. Four other people were wounded, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

The boy's parents and his 15-year-old brother were among the injured, along with a neighbor who came to help the family and was hit in a second, follow-up strike. The attack came as Russia leans on the ballistic missiles Ukraine can least often intercept, and as Zelenskyy again pressed partners for the interceptors his air defenses are running short of.

A family killed in their home

Zelenskyy said the strike hit an ordinary residential building. Those wounded, among them the dead child's parents, were treated for thermal burns and shrapnel injuries.

The neighbor was hurt after coming to help the family, when a second Russian strike hit the same place — the double-tap tactic of following an initial strike with another timed to catch rescuers and responders. Russia used it in Kyiv a week earlier, when a follow-up strike killed a 20-year-old volunteer medic.

Six ballistic missiles on Kyiv

Overnight, Russia also struck civilian infrastructure in Kyiv with six ballistic missiles. One person was killed, their body found by rescuers during the cleanup, the Kyiv City Military Administration reported.

A widening gap, and a renewed appeal

Zelenskyy called on Ukraine's partners to tighten sanctions on Russia's ballistic-missile production and to supply more air defense systems and interceptors. The appeal lands against a defense Russia has spent the year outpacing: in July, a third of the missiles it fired — 126 — were ballistic, the type that gives the shortest warning and that Ukraine's systems, save for the Patriot, cannot reliably stop. In the last two large attacks, Ukraine downed two of 36 ballistic missiles, roughly one in twenty, for lack of Patriot interceptors. Russia builds around three ballistic missiles a day, by Ukrainian analysts' estimates, while Ukraine's interceptor stocks stay severely limited.

The same night, Russia also attacked Donetsk, Kharkiv, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, and Poltava oblasts.

Ukraine's Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food has asked the European Commission for €220 million ($253 million) in grants to keep its small and medium farmers afloat, after Russian strikes on the Greater Odesa ports severed the sea route that carries most of the country's agricultural exports. The money would cover interest on loans issued under the state "Affordable Loans 5-7-9%" program, the ministry's press service said.

The request marks the point where Russia's Black Sea campaign stopped being a shipping story and became a farm-finance one. With the corridor all but stalled, the ministry projects exports for the 2026/2027 season could fall by almost half, from 64.4 million to about 29.6 million tonnes. Grain the farmers have already harvested is piling up in silos the ministry expects to be full by October, and without cash from those sales, producers cannot finance the autumn sowing that plants next year's crop.

How €220 million turns into €4 billion in loans

The grant is small next to the hole it is meant to plug. Ukraine estimates its farm sector will take in roughly €6.4 billion this season against €11.2 billion in operating costs, and will need about €4 billion in working capital just to keep running. The €220 million would not cover that gap directly. Instead, by subsidizing interest, it is designed to unlock a credit portfolio of up to €4 billion ($4.6 billion) at a rate to farmers of no more than 10%, open to small and medium producers that meet the program's environmental and social criteria. Wheat exports alone could otherwise drop from 17.6 million to 8.3 million tonnes.

The blockade behind the request

Through July, Russia intensified strikes on civilian cargo ships in the Black Sea corridor, killing crew members and, on 22 July, halting traffic entirely — not a single vessel passed that day, at the height of the harvest. Ukraine's government called it "deliberate economic and humanitarian terror." Around 90% of Ukraine's farm exports normally move through three Odesa Oblast ports, and Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi has said the rail, road, and Danube routes that remain can carry only about half the lost volume.

The squeeze is already reaching the fields. Oilseed and grain prices have fallen about 30% as unsold stock backs up inside the country, and the ministry puts direct losses to the sector this year at between $1.5 billion and $3 billion. The government has lowered minimum export prices on some products to keep trade moving, and Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi has said it is expanding a separate program of grain-backed loans so farmers can borrow against stored crops rather than sell them cheap.

Whether Brussels funds the €220 million request, and how fast, will help decide how much of this year's harvest gets planted — and how much stays stranded in silos while the ports stay shut.

North Korea has pulled in as much as $22 billion in foreign earnings since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022—nearly four times what it earned in the previous four years, and the most cash Kim Jong Un has commanded in his 15 years in power, Bloomberg Economics estimates.

That money is the bill for Russia's war, paid to the other side of the world. In exchange for the shells and soldiers keeping Moscow's offensive alive, Pyongyang has been handed the cash, food, and military technology to turn itself from an isolated pariah into a nuclear power that no longer needs to negotiate with anyone. The war draining Russia has quietly built a second, stronger adversary.

Half of Russia's shells, and thousands of soldiers

By the end of 2025, North Korea was covering up to half of Russia's need for 122mm and 152mm artillery ammunition, Ukrainian intelligence estimates—a share Euromaidan Press has tracked since the shipments began in 2023. Pyongyang backed the shells with men: some 16,000 soldiers, for whom Russia paid roughly $2,000 a month each, plus extra for the dead, by Bloomberg's accounting.

The turning point came in 2022. Kim had spent the previous years humiliated—a failed summit with Donald Trump, a harvest failure that triggered hunger, a self-imposed Covid border closure that severed trade with China. In a 2020 national address, he wept while apologizing for the economy. Then Putin's stockpiles ran low, and North Korea's warehouses became a resource Kim could turn into hard currency.

Cash, food, and the technology to build better weapons

The dangerous part is what came back the other way. Russia handed over advanced military technology alongside the payments, and US Forces Korea has said the transfers let Pyongyang compress its weapons-development timelines. Moscow supplied air defenses including at least one Pantsir-class system—a transfer Euromaidan Press reported last year—and a Pantsir-M worth about $20 million now sits on one of North Korea's two new 5,000-tonne destroyers, the largest warships it has ever built. The two countries have also begun jointly producing attack drones.

Kim poured the windfall into a nuclear buildup that, Bloomberg reports, puts North Korea on a path to rival France's arsenal. The country's economy grew 3.5% in 2025, its third straight year of expansion, according to the Bank of Korea.

A windfall that outlasts the war

The boom does not depend on the war continuing. Over the past decade Kim assembled the world's most prolific army of crypto thieves: hacking groups tied to Pyongyang now account for more than 70% of global cryptocurrency thefts, up from about 30% in 2017, according to blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs. The stolen funds are laundered mostly through Chinese organized-crime networks that take a cut in exchange for clean offshore accounts. "It's absurd to think North Korea now has access to that much money," said Nick Carlsen, a senior TRM investigator.

Kim is spreading his bets diplomatically, too, hosting officials from Singapore, Indonesia, Belarus, and Vietnam over the past year to loosen his reliance on Moscow.

The Kim once written off as an erratic recluse is emerging as the durable leader of a growing nuclear power—one with little reason left to bargain. "Pyongyang has proven its ability to adapt to persistent sanctions," said Jenny Town of the Stimson Center. "And as international law and norms are eroding, it has found camaraderie in its resistance."

Polish President Karol Nawrocki used a speech marking his first year in office to restate that Poland will keep backing Ukraine's war against Russia—and to frame that backing as cold strategic interest rather than solidarity, warning in the same speech that continued help does not extend to tolerating Ukrainian nationalist symbols" on Polish soil. He spoke on 6 August at a ceremony in the courtyard of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw, reported by RMF FM.

The remarks land at the hottest point yet in a Polish-Ukrainian memory row that has stripped Kyiv of much goodwill from its most important frontline ally. Poland's interest, Nawrocki said, is that Ukrainians fight "as long as possible and as effectively as possible" against Russia, keeping it far from Poland—help offered not out of shared cause but because a Ukraine that bleeds Russia serves Warsaw. Coming from the country most vital to Ukraine's supply lines, it is a statement of support recast as conditional self-interest.

Support as strategy, not solidarity

"Poland's interest is that Ukraine and Ukrainian soldiers cope as well as possible with the post-Soviet Russian Federation and keep it as far from Poland as possible. That is obvious; that is the Polish state's strategy," Nawrocki said. "Let them kill the Soviets who attacked them—it does not hurt us Poles at all. In this they can always count on our help, because where a Muscovite is beaten, Poland helps, even if it does not take part directly in this war."

The register was deliberate. Nawrocki, a historian who ran the Institute of National Remembrance before winning the presidency, used the pejoratives "Soviets" and "Muscovites" for Russians throughout, casting Polish aid as a matter of keeping the fight on the far side of the border.

The red line: no Bandera flags

The support came fenced. "It is also Poland's strategic interest that Bandera flags do not fly in Warsaw or anywhere in Poland," Nawrocki said, promising to help "but always saying: Poland first, Poles first"—not, he added, "thoughtlessly sending fleet after fleet without analysis, on phone calls and smiles."

The condition points straight at the dispute that has consumed the relationship since May, when Zelenskyy signed a decree granting a special-forces unit the honorary title "Heroes of the UPA," the insurgent army Poland's parliament holds responsible for the Volhynia killings of tens of thousands of Poles and has declared a genocide. Nawrocki stripped Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle in response; in July he pressed parliament to ban the UPA's red-and-black flag by law.

Moscow moves to widen the gap

Russia moved to pry the crack open within hours. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova derided Nawrocki as a former Gdansk war-museum director whose "clinical Russophobia," she claimed, was affecting his judgment, and reminded him that Russia and Poland share a border "with no Ukraine and no Ukrainians between us"—the erasure of Ukraine stated plainly, from Moscow's own podium.

That is the move Warsaw itself has warned about. Polish officials have cautioned that Russia would seek to exploit the Ukraine tensions, and Polish services recently detained a group accused of recruiting Ukrainians for paid anti-Ukrainian rallies on Russian instructions. The memory feud, as one Polish advocate for Ukraine told Euromaidan Press in June, is theater that serves only one audience—the one in the Kremlin.

Luxembourg contributed an additional €8 million ($8.7 million) to the Ukraine Energy Support Fund, raising its total donations to €30 million ($32.7 million), Ukraine's Ministry of Energy reported.

The contribution arrives as the fund—which crossed €2 billion ($2.18 billion) in total lifetime contributions in July—races to close a €650 million ($709 million) gap in unfunded needs ahead of the 2026/2027 winter season. Russia has destroyed more than 9 gigawatts of generation capacity since the start of the most recent heating season alone, and all previously available fund resources have been fully contracted.

Luxembourg's steady commitment

This marks Luxembourg's fourth donation to the fund since 2024. The country initially transferred €2 million in 2024, followed by €10 million in June 2025 and another €10 million in December 2025. The latest €8 million brings the total to €30 million—a notable sum from a country with a population of roughly 660,000.

Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal thanked Luxembourg and its Agency for Development Cooperation for what he called systematic support for Ukrainian energy, adding that the contribution would help provide energy companies with essential equipment and strengthen the resilience of Ukraine's power grid, European Pravda reported.

A fund preparing for its fifth wartime winter

The Energy Support Fund was established in April 2022 and is managed by the Energy Community Secretariat. It has become the primary international mechanism for channeling emergency energy assistance to Ukraine, with contributions from 37 donors across 26 countries and three international organizations.

In a June 2026 joint statement, the G7+ Energy Ramstein Group identified €650 million in priority needs for winter preparation and called for swift mobilization of additional funding.

Luxembourg's contribution is part of a broader wave of European support. Ireland announced €25 million ($29 million) for energy and critical infrastructure protection during its prime minister's visit to Kyiv on 23 July. Sweden's €123 million contribution on 8 July pushed the fund past the €2 billion milestone. Denmark has also recently added over €10 million.

A European Union rule requiring newly arrived Ukrainians of military age to prove they have met their military obligations before receiving temporary protection took effect on 5 August, according to the Council of the EU and Czechia's Interior Ministry. The rule, Council Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1912, was published in the EU's Official Journal on 4 August and applies only to new applicants — not to Ukrainians already holding protected status.

The measure closes a gap Czech and other EU officials have raised for months: hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men of conscription age have used temporary protection to remain in the EU while Ukraine's own martial law bars most men aged 23 to 60 from leaving the country. Applicants must now show they left Ukraine legally — typically via a passport exit stamp — or produce paper or electronic proof of an exemption or completed service, drawn from Ukraine's Reserve+ registration app, among other documents.

What the rule requires

The decision extends the EU's temporary protection mechanism for displaced Ukrainians to 4 March 2028, one year beyond its prior expiration. That extension applies broadly. The new documentation requirement is narrower: it targets people with military obligations under Ukrainian law who are applying for temporary protection for the first time, not renewals.

Czech Interior Minister Lubomír Metnar said the change would cut new arrivals "by tens of percent," according to a statement carried by the Interior Ministry and Radio Prague International. He said the restriction would ease pressure on the Czech healthcare and social welfare systems, which he said are close to capacity — Czechia hosts roughly 395,000 Ukrainians under temporary protection, the largest share relative to population of any EU state.

The EU has framed the change as balancing humanitarian protection against Ukraine's manpower needs. "Recognising both the need to protect displaced persons and Ukraine's need to defend itself against Russia's illegal war of aggression, EU countries agreed that temporary protection should be granted only to those complying with their military obligations in Ukraine," the Council of the EU said.

A narrow carve-out, a broader debate

The rule does not close off asylum entirely — Ukrainians can still apply for international protection under standard EU asylum law, evaluated case by case, regardless of military status.

The change follows years of friction over Ukraine's own registration system. EP has previously reported that the Reserve+ app, heavily promoted by Ukraine's Ministry of Defense as a fix for a paper-heavy, post-Soviet mobilization bureaucracy, "delivered far less than hoped," part of a broader draft-evasion problem officials have linked to gaps in the system rather than to the app itself.

The EU's move also lands against a backdrop of Ukrainians increasingly settling in for the long term. In Poland, which hosts the largest Ukrainian population in the EU, 73% of surveyed Ukrainians say they plan to stay long-term and 44% for at least several more years, according to a University of Warsaw Center of Migration Research study cited in the source reporting; employment among that group has risen from 69% in 2022 to nearly 83% in 2026, though 45% work outside their qualifications.

The US military has used up nearly 80% of its THAAD interceptors and roughly half of its Patriot stock during the five-month war with Iran, according to two sources familiar with the latest Pentagon inventory report, CNN reported.

Senior US military commanders are warning the Pentagon's munitions stockpile is "dangerously low," according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. The disclosure on THAAD levels has not been previously reported. Before the war began, the US had around 2,200 Patriot interceptors of the platform's two most modern variants and 452 THAAD missiles, according to Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates. CSIS has assessed the war with Iran drained over half the global Patriot stockpile within its first 39 days.

The Patriot and THAAD systems are the same interceptor families that arm Ukraine's own air defense against Russian ballistic strikes - Kyiv depends on to stop Russian ballistic missiles. Thus a stockpile "dangerously low" for Washington is one that's already left Ukrainian Patriot launchers running empty during Russian barrages.

Commanders call stockpiles dangerously low

The US Army has fired "virtually all" of its long-range, surface-to-air precision weapons during the war, one source told CNN, referring to Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). Close to half of the US Tomahawk cruise missile stockpile has also been used, a source said, up from nearly 30% reported by CNN in April.

Gulf allies have raised concerns that the shortage could limit their own ability to intercept Iranian retaliation, particularly if Washington resumes strikes. Replenishment is slow: the Pentagon is currently receiving about 15 new Tomahawks and 20 new Patriot missiles a month, and CSIS estimates rebuilding THAAD stocks to prewar levels will take three years or more.

Weekend strikes called off over stockpile concerns

The munitions warnings, combined with intelligence on the risks of striking Iranian energy infrastructure and concerns raised by Gulf states, were factors in President Donald Trump's decision to call off planned strikes over the weekend, according to CNN's sources. Trump had authorized the operation Friday, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth receiving the final order to proceed, a senior Trump official said. Trump reversed course Saturday after Middle East allies told him they feared Iranian retaliation against their energy infrastructure, the official said. He told Hegseth to stand down for now but has not ruled out strikes at a later date.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement that the US military "has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President's choosing." White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said the military has "more than enough munitions, ammo, and stockpiles to serve all of President Trump's strategic goals and beyond."

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine raised the stockpile issue in a separate White House meeting last month, CNN previously reported, where officials also discussed the risk of mass civilian casualties from a resumed US campaign inside Iran.

The shortage extends beyond Iran

CNN's sources said the depleted stockpile could affect the US military's ability to fight a future war involving China, Russia, or North Korea. "The lack of interceptors means that conventional attacks can backfire if the suicide drones start making it through in-masse," one source said. "Tit-for-tat will never end this."

Euromaidan Press has reported that the same Patriot shortage has already strained deliveries to Ukraine, which depends on PAC-3 interceptors as its only defense against Russian ballistic missiles. A senior Ukrainian official has told the Financial Times that deliveries to Kyiv faced delays since the war with Iran began, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said late arrivals have left Patriot launchers empty during Russian missile barrages.

Analysts expect a slow recovery. The Precision Strike Missile and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile inventories should return to prewar levels by mid-to-late 2027, according to CSIS. The Defense Department has signed two deals this week to expand Patriot and THAAD rocket motor production, though a Pentagon spokesperson declined to say when the expansion would show results.

Trump on Monday called Iranian leadership "unbelievably duplicitous" after Tehran denied that negotiations would resume, and said Tehran had one "last chance" to sign a deal.

A Ukrainian drone strike set fire to a Wildberries logistics center in Oleksin, Russia's Tula Oblast, overnight into 5 August, according to the monitoring Telegram channel Exilenova+ and Russian outlet ASTRA. Tula Oblast Governor Dmitry Milyaev confirmed one person was injured and said a drone came down on the sorting center's territory before the fire broke out.

The strike extends a Ukrainian campaign against Russia's largest online retailer that has hit 15 Wildberries logistics sites in 18 days, Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi said on 4 August, before the Oleksin strike. Thirteen of those 15 were knocked out of action or seriously damaged, he said. Ukraine's deep-strike drones have turned Wildberries hubs — repeatedly described by Ukrainian officials as Russia's answer to Amazon — into a recurring target as they widen a campaign against the fuel and freight networks that keep Russia's war economy running.

Wildberries confirmed the fire at its Oleksin site, saying it evacuated staff in advance and temporarily redirected new deliveries to other warehouses. Milyaev also reported damage to two apartment buildings in Venyov district and two industrial sites in Novomoskovsk and Uzlovaya district from the same overnight barrage.

The Oleksin center covers about 194,500 square meters, according to Exilenova+, and opened in 2022. It supplies Tula, Kaluga, Oryol, Bryansk, Kursk, Lipetsk, Ryazan, and other central Russian oblasts, and partly relieves logistics centers in the Moscow region.

The strike follows fires at two other Wildberries sites — in Krasny Bor, Leningrad Oblast, and Chekhov, Moscow Oblast — overnight into 4 August, and comes as Wildberries has begun restricting employees to camera-free phones after staff filmed and shared footage of the strikes.

Russia launched a massed combined missile and drone attack on Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast overnight into 5 August, killing 14 people and injuring 26, Ukraine's State Emergency Service (DSNS) reported. Rescuers were still working seven locations across three raions as of the latest update, with fires, a residential building collapse, and an ammonia leak among the damage reported in the capital and its surrounding region.

The strike is the second massed barrage on Kyiv in five days. Russia killed nine people in the capital on 1 August with 27 ballistic missiles, damaging the Lithuanian embassy and destroying part of the city's ambulance fleet in a double-tap strike on a medical-transport depot.

The renewed attack this week points to a pattern of sustained pressure on the capital even as Russia continues to reject a full ceasefire in ongoing talks.

Kyiv Oblast bore the heaviest toll. Most of the deaths came in Brovarskyi raion, where nine people were killed, according to Kyiv Oblast Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko. Four more people died in Bucha raion and one in Fastiv raion. Warehouse fires broke out in Brovary, Velyka Dymerka, Kvitneve, and Peremoha in Brovarskyi raion; rescuers were also fighting a warehouse fire in Chaiky, Bucha raion, and had extinguished a logistics-facility fire in Sofiivska Borshchahivka.

In Kyiv city, ballistic missiles and drones struck four districts — Obolonskyi, Sviatoshynskyi, Holosiivskyi, and Desnianskyi — starting shortly after midnight. A woman was killed in Obolonskyi, where a non-residential building caught fire. In Holosiivskyi, a strike destroyed a private residential building, with rescuers searching for people under the rubble, and damaged a tank holding roughly 300 liters of ammonia at a nearby industrial site. Emergency crews contained the leak and confirmed no threat to residents. Repeated explosions at one strike site also damaged an ambulance, injuring its driver.

The overnight fires pushed air quality across Kyiv to hazardous levels by morning, with monitoring stations in Obolonskyi and Sviatoshynskyi districts recording index readings of 140–174 against a healthy baseline of under 50, according to SaveEcoBot and AQICN data.

DSNS said the death and injury toll could still rise as search-and-rescue operations continue in Brovarskyi and Bucha raions.