Russia has placed the Russian assets of French retailer Auchan, Swiss food giant Nestlé, and the former Leroy Merlin chain under temporary management, stripping the companies of effective control over their businesses in the country.

Foreign companies have long been urged to leave Russia because their continued operations generate revenue for a state waging war against Ukraine. They also face growing risks of asset seizure, legal and financial liabilities, and reputational damage as the Kremlin increasingly uses foreign-owned businesses as political leverage.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the decree on 17 September, transferring the assets to L.E.V. Management, a little-known Russian company. The decree also covers Russian assets linked to French logistics companies FM Logistic and Bati Logistics.

The measure does not formally change ownership. However, the companies' Russian assets are now controlled by the Kremlin-appointed administrator, and similar temporary-management arrangements have previously preceded forced sales or transfers to Russian buyers.

L.E.V. Management is headed by Andrei Krayushkin, a Russian Interior Ministry major general who previously served as first deputy head of the ministry's migration department.

According to Reuters, the Kremlin justified the move by pointing to the companies' ties to countries Russia considers "unfriendly." Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the countries involved are actively supporting Ukraine and participating in actions against Russia.

Companies warned they could lose their assets

The move comes after years of warnings to Western companies that remained in Russia carried an increasing risk of expropriation.

Denys Svyrydenkov, a representative of the B4Ukraine coalition, told Euromaidan Press that the organization had repeatedly contacted Auchan, Nestlé, and Leroy Merlin, warning them that their Russian assets could be seized.

"We repeatedly warned these companies about the serious and growing risks of continuing to operate in Russia, including the possibility of losing their businesses through nationalisation," Svyrydenkov said.

According to Svyrydenkov, the companies defended their continued presence in Russia by arguing that they provided essential goods and protected the livelihoods of Russian employees.

He rejected both arguments, saying Russia is largely self-sufficient in food and that Western sanctions do not prevent food or humanitarian goods from reaching the country. He also pointed to Russia's severe labor shortage and historically low unemployment, arguing that alternative employment opportunities are widely available.

"By staying, they were effectively running businesses that were no longer truly theirs," Svyrydenkov said.

Auchan and Nestlé remained in Russia

The three companies took different approaches after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Auchan did not leave Russia and continued operating its large retail network. It currently has around 230 stores across 100 Russian cities. The chain's Russian turnover reached 127 billion rubles ($1.5 billion) in the first half of 2026, according to The Moscow Times.

Nestlé also remained, but reduced its Russian operations. The company halted investments, withdrew some brands including KitKat and Nesquik, and said it did not intend to profit from its Russian business. It still operates six production sites in Russia, making products including coffee, confectionery, baby food, and pet food.

Leroy Merlin's owner announced its departure from Russia in 2023. Its Russian legal entity was renamed Le Monlid, while its stores now operate under the Lemana Pro brand.

Nestlé said on 18 September that it was assessing its options and would take "all necessary steps" to protect its rights and ensure business continuity, particularly for its employees.

A warning to companies still operating in Russia

The seizure reflects a broader pattern that has emerged since Russia began using temporary administration to take control of Western-owned businesses.

Companies including Danone, Carlsberg and Finnish energy firm Fortum have previously seen their Russian assets placed under state control. Reuters reported that Russia had seized more than $50 billion in foreign assets by 2025.

Svyrydenkov said the latest move was "more than predictable," arguing that Russia has repeatedly used Western companies' exposure to its domestic market as leverage.

"The Kremlin's seizure of the Russian assets of Auchan, Nestle and the former Leroy Merlin reinforces a reality that has been evident for years: Russia is a hostile and unpredictable environment where foreign companies' assets remain at the mercy of an authoritarian regime," he said.

He warned that companies remaining in Russia face the possibility of sudden expropriation while also continuing to generate economic activity inside a country waging war against Ukraine.

"The latest asset seizures should serve as a warning to all companies still operating in Russia: waiting for the Kremlin to decide the fate of your business is not a risk-management strategy," Svyrydenkov said.

Sanna Marin has made the journey to Kyiv and back many times since February 2022, in winter, summer, and autumn. Speaking at the Book 2.0 conference in Lisbon on Wednesday, days after returning from the September 2026 Yalta European Strategy conference, the former Finnish prime minister said this trip stood apart.

"This was the first time that I noticed so many drone alarms," she said. "I think there was only one missile alarm at that time we visited previously. Now in Kyiv, in this international meeting, I have never seen so many alarms going off when there's an international meeting, also with the US quite heavily represented there on site."

The knock at 5 a.m.

Marin was traveling back to Poland by train when the drone threat reached her carriage. "There was a knock on the door at 5 a.m. saying that we need to evacuate the train," she said. "I quickly put on my clothes and then saw what was happening. But then for some reason we were able to continue, so we never evacuated."

Another train on the same route was less fortunate. "Another train that was also traveling to Poland was evacuated several times, and it was also hit by a drone, and there was a missile that landed quite near as well."

That strike, on 13 September, hit the locomotive of a passenger train near the Polish border, at the Yahodyn crossing in Volyn Oblast. Ukraine's state railway operator, Ukrzaliznytsia, said the Russian drone may have been aimed at a diplomatic train carrying security advisers from several EU states and former European leaders, including former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, which had left the station earlier than scheduled as staff adjusted movements in real time. Former CIA director David Petraeus was on another train at the crossing during the attack.

Marin was careful not to assert what Russia intended. "I don't know what are the motives behind this. Was it just an accident where they're trying to hit a gas station, or whatever? So I don't know about the motives." A gas station near the Yahodyn crossing was indeed struck the same night, setting off a large fire.

A warning to Europe

What Marin could say was that the restraint she had seen on earlier visits was gone. "I think it is alarming that there isn't that kind of restraint any more from attacking when there are international people in Kyiv."

She read it as a message aimed at everyone who backs Ukraine, and framed her Lisbon remarks as a warning to Europe. "I think Putin is trying to send a signal that if you support Ukraine, we will bomb you. It's about creating fear. We shouldn't reply to that with fear but with determination."

Russia has made Ukraine's railways a deliberate target. It struck the network around 1,200 times in 2025, more than the previous two years combined, shifting its aim from track and stations to the rolling stock itself, and about 40 railway workers have been killed since 2022, according to Ukrzaliznytsia. Strikes on trains have averaged about six a day since early March.

Why the west is suddenly in range

Western regions were long considered safer because of their distance from the front. Two changes have brought them within reach, and what Marin noticed on this trip is the product of both.

The first is control range. Russia's drones are steered in real time only within a "red zone" near the border and the front, and until recently that zone did not reach the west. Russia extended it by building signal repeaters on towers and rooftops in Belarus, boosting Shahed control signals far enough to reach Kyiv, Rivne, and Volyn.

Ukrainian hackers exposed the network in February 2026, and by June President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was giving Belarus's Aliaksandr Lukashenka one week to strip the repeaters from its border towers, warning that if Belarus did not, Ukraine would. Russia has also used signal-relay balloons drifting from Belarus to keep its drones connected.

The second is speed. Ukrainian interceptor drones had learned to bring down about half of the incoming Shaheds by mid-2026, up from roughly 10% over the winter, so Russia reached for jet power: the jet-powered Geran-4 is built to fly at up to 500 kilometers an hour, several times faster than the piston-engine drones Ukraine spent three years learning to intercept.

Jet-powered Gerans now make up a large and growing share of Russia's nightly launches, and the largest model, the Geran-5, is credited with a range of up to 1,000 kilometers, far enough to put Warsaw within reach of the drone bases Russia has built near its borders. The near-miss on a diplomatic train two kilometers from Poland is what that reach looks like at its western edge.

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"That is a luxury"

Marin said she had not felt afraid on the train, and drew the distinction herself.

"Ukrainian people are living in fear every single day. I can travel back to Finland and be safe with my family. I think that is a luxury."

She said she would return. "I didn't feel intimidated or afraid, and I will definitely go back."

After a months-long pause, US President Donald Trump's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner opened their first round of peace talks in Kyiv to end the Russo-Ukrainian war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced their visit and talks on Telegram on 6 September. A day earlier, they visited Moscow and met with Russian President Vladimir Putin there. Ukraine came in with prepared proposals and a demand for security guarantees. Witkoff called the discussion substantive, and the British, French, and German national security advisers joined the later rounds. Despite their previous multiple visits to Moscow, this was their first-ever visit to Kyiv.

Zelenskyy came with a written package and one demand

Zelenskyy gathered his negotiating team before the meeting and wrote on Telegram that Ukraine was ready to talk. 

"Peace is needed. Security guarantees are needed. A dignified character of the post-war peace is needed. Our proposals have been prepared," he said, adding that it was important to work in a coordinated, substantive, and realistic way.

The preparatory meeting brought together head of the President's Office Kyrylo Budanov, Foreign Intelligence Service head Rustem Umierov, Servant of the People faction leader David Arakhamia, and First Deputy Head of the President's Office Serhii Kyslytsia—Ukraine's likely negotiating team.

The post announcing the start of the talks, published shortly after 2 p.m., carried video of Zelenskyy greeting the two Americans. He also told reporters the day would run in stages: one session with the US side, then another with the European advisers.  After the first part, Zelenskyy thanked American and European partners. 

The presidential website had published no report on the talks by the time this article went out.

Ending the fighting is not the goal, the envoys said

Witkoff called the talks substantive and said the US team was ready to continue working, TSN reported. He said Washington was looking for openings on external security issues and coordinating closely with Germany, France, and the UK.

Kushner said the goal was not only to end the fighting but to create conditions for a lasting peace. He called it “a very, very hard and complex problem,” but “a very worthy problem of solving,” and said a lasting peace should allow Ukraine to turn its wartime “bravery and ingenuity and strength” toward rebuilding the country.

Kushner also said Trump is determined to end the war and then shift toward investment and economic cooperation, which he argued could bring the countries closer and open new opportunities for Ukraine and Europe. He added that the talks continue between visits, with the US side speaking almost daily with the four Ukrainian negotiators, whom he named only by their first names.

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The Europeans joined the later rounds

Zelenskyy's spokesman Serhii Nykyforov said the first round with Witkoff and Kushner had finished, and that a second, expanded round with the national security advisers of the UK, France, and Germany would follow after a short break. A source familiar with the matter told Reuters the three advisers were in Kyiv on Sunday, without specifying which sessions they would attend.

A third round then opened, public broadcaster Suspilne reported. Witkoff described the discussion as substantive, concrete, and important shortly before it started.

Moscow, the day before

Witkoff and Kushner held three hours of talks with Putin in Moscow on 5 September. Putin's aide Yuri Ushakov stated the meeting was substantive, very frank, and constructive, and said Putin told them Russia would achieve its war aims and that the war's so-called "root causes" must be removed—Kremlin shorthand for Ukraine abandoning NATO membership and disarming, which Kyiv rejects.

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A White House representative told Radio Svoboda that the sides discussed concrete plans for next steps, to be announced in the coming weeks. Bloomberg reported that sources close to the Kremlin said Putin is ready to end the war only on his own terms, with Moscow's demands hardening. Axios reported that a US Treasury official responsible for sanctions policy joined the trip but did not attend the Putin meeting, alongside State Department and National Security Council staff.

Trump said on 4 September that Witkoff and Kushner were carrying a proposal to both Moscow and Kyiv, which he described as fresh, without giving details.

How the envoys reached Kyiv

Umierov published video this morning showing Budanov, Umierov, Arakhamia, and Kyslytsia welcoming Witkoff and Kushner at Kyiv’s railway station as the US envoys arrived for talks.

Ukraine had prepared to receive the envoys by air, but Russian strikes made that impossible, Zelenskyy said. He met them instead on Sofiivska Square before the delegation went inside St Sophia's Cathedral. In a 4 September address, Zelenskyy said Ukraine would keep Russian airspace safe for the envoys’ travel and demanded Moscow do the same.

A pause that covered two capitals

Ukraine ordered a three-day halt to strikes on Moscow around the visit, and the Kremlin claimed it would pause strikes on Kyiv until Monday. Nothing else stopped. Ukraine logged impacts at 11 sites across the country while the American delegation was in the Russian capital. Ukraine's 6 September strike hit the Ryazan oil refinery and set a core unit on fire, about 470 km from Ukraine.

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Twenty months of rounds without a deal

Trump made ending Russia’s war a priority after taking office in January 2025, but US-mediated talks produced little and later stalled during the US-Israeli war against Iran. Washington said in early August it intended to step up the effort, and Russian attacks intensifying pushed a planned August visit to Kyiv back.

The visit was confirmed on 4 September, after two weeks of heavy Russian attacks on Kyiv, including a drone strike on the headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and an earlier six-day bombardment. Previous talks also left Kyiv and Moscow far apart over Donbas, where Russia demands Ukrainian withdrawal from fortified cities still under Kyiv’s control.

Russia attacked Ukraine from 18:00 on 5 September and through the night into 6 September with 108 strike drones and S8000 Banderol cruise missiles, Ukraine's Air Force reported. The assault ran while US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were finishing three hours of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. They left the Russian capital after midnight and were expected in Kyiv on 6 September, again carrying a US proposal to end the war. Ukraine's own offer of a four-day pause in the fighting went unmatched by Russia.

The attack was still running in the morning

By 09:30 air defenses had downed or suppressed 82 Shahed-type, Gerbera, and other drones, along with six Banderol missiles. The military logged impacts at 11 locations and falling debris at seven more, and warned that Russian drones were still in Ukraine's airspace.

Over the previous day, Russian strikes killed seven people and injured 57 across Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk oblasts, according to oblast administration figures published on the morning of 6 September. Kharkiv Oblast lost four people, three of them one family in Chuhuiv. Zaporizhzhia Oblast reported one death, 25 injured, and 886 strikes on 54 settlements.

Three hours in the Kremlin

Witkoff and Kushner met Putin on 5 September and left the Kremlin close to midnight. Putin opened by telling them he had "full trust" in the US side, Axios reported, and Washington's goal is to restart direct Russian-Ukrainian talks that stopped six months ago. Putin's aide Yuri Ushakov called the discussion "substantive, constructive, exceptionally candid," ABC News reported, and stated the envoys had promised to carry Putin's own assessments into their meetings in Kyiv. Ushakov also repeated that Russia will achieve its goals and that the war's "root causes" must be removed — the Kremlin's shorthand for barring Ukraine from NATO and cutting down its army.

A White House official told RFE/RL that the sides discussed "concrete plans" for next steps, to be announced in the coming weeks. Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev, who sat in on the talks, called the Moscow trip an important peacemaking visit, Al Jazeera reported. The Kyiv leg would be the envoys' first trip to Ukraine since taking over the US effort; it was set for August and postponed as Russian strikes intensified.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe visited Moscow on 25 August, becoming the first known serving CIA chief to travel to the Russian capital since November 2021, The Washington Post reported.

The Kremlin said the unannounced trip involved “contacts between security services” but did not identify whom Ratcliffe met or what they discussed. Dmitry Peskov told Interfax that Ratcliffe did not meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The CIA and White House did not publicly explain the mission.

Expert raises possibility of a warning mission

Washington also asked Ukraine not to attack Moscow or St. Petersburg during the visit, Ukrainian sources told Suspilne. Kyiv was told that a senior US delegation was traveling to Russia, although officials were not initially told that Ratcliffe would be part of it.

“It is difficult to speculate because there is essentially no information,” Tartu researcher Vladimir Sazonov, an associate professor who studies Russian state ideology and information warfare, told Euromaidan Press.

Ratcliffe may have carried a warning, as William Burns did in 2021, Sazonov said. It could have concerned a possible new Russian mobilization after September’s State Duma elections or Moscow’s escalating hybrid operations against NATO.

Stalled Ukraine diplomacy and Russia’s relationship with Iran were other possible subjects. None has been confirmed.

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The last CIA visit came before Russia invaded

A US Air Force C-17 flew from Joint Base Andrews outside Washington to Riga, and then Moscow, according to flight data analyzed by The Washington Post. The aircraft remained at Vnukovo Airport for about eight and a half hours before returning to Latvia. The newspaper also verified footage of a diplomatic motorcade traveling through central Moscow.

Ratcliffe’s visit was the first by a CIA director since Burns traveled to Moscow in November 2021 with evidence that Russia was preparing a major attack on Ukraine.

During that visit, Burns spoke with Putin by telephone from the Kremlin because the Russian president was in Sochi. Russia launched its full-scale invasion less than four months later.

Sazonov also raised the possibility that Ratcliffe discussed Americans detained in Russia. The CIA participated in previous negotiations that freed journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, and former US Marine Paul Whelan, RFE/RL documented CIA involvement.

“If we do not know the answers, all we can do is ask the relevant questions,” Sazonov added.

A New York networking company sold radios that let signals travel 100 kilometers. Ukrainian civilians say Russian drone crews used them to hunt people in Kherson, and they are asking a Manhattan jury to hold the company responsible.

Ukrainian civilians and relatives of people killed by Russian drones sued Ubiquiti Inc. in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on 11 August, alleging the company's wireless equipment became the backbone of the command network behind Russia's "human safari" against civilians.

The case rests on a comparison that the plaintiffs draw themselves. In February 2026, Starlink terminals that Russian forces had mounted on reconnaissance and strike drones were shut off after Ukraine and SpaceX built a whitelist of authorized terminals. Ubiquiti, the complaint alleges, had the same technical and contractual power over its own devices and did not use it.

That precedent cuts both ways. SpaceX had denied for years that Russian forces were using Starlink systematically, and the whitelist came together only after Ukraine's newly appointed defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, approached the company directly. The fix was technically possible—and it took a government to force it.

What the lawsuit claims

The law firm DiCello Levitt LLP filed the case, Kovalenko et al. v. Ubiquiti, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-06838. The plaintiffs are Ukrainian civilians who were maimed, displaced, or forced to live under drone surveillance, along with family members of civilians killed in drone attacks. They are seeking a jury trial.

Ubiquiti, listed on the New York Stock Exchange as UI, makes long-range wireless "bridges" widely used for internet access in areas without cable. Its radio bridge antennas and airMAX technology are subject to US export restrictions on Russia. The complaint alleges the devices kept reaching Russian forces through intermediary supply chains, and that they now link reconnaissance units, drone operators, attack units, and commanders across roughly 100 kilometers of encrypted battlefield network.

"Battlefield communications are the central nervous system of the Russian occupation forces: without them, they could not coordinate the human safari or maintain the occupation," Scott Gilmore, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs and a partner at DiCello Levitt, said in an interview with Euromaidan Press.

The complaint cites US export-control restrictions, Russian import data, public reporting, Russian military statements, battlefield images and video, and Ubiquiti's own device telemetry. It alleges the company held location data showing where its devices were operating, including inside Russia and occupied Ukrainian territory, and that it was repeatedly warned its products were being smuggled across the border.

It further alleges Ubiquiti continued issuing firmware updates and technical support that kept those devices running, and that it could have cut the pipeline off—by geofencing, by terminating distributors tied to sanctions-evasion routes, or by building a remote-disable feature into its firmware.

"Companies cannot willfully blind themselves when sanctions and export controls are being breached, and their devices are being foreseeably used in dangerous ways," Gilmore said. "US law is clear that companies bear legal responsibility when they entrust dangerous devices to end users who they know or should know are hurting people. This case is not about standard warfare: it's about murdering civilians."

The plaintiffs bring eight causes of action, including negligent entrustment, public nuisance, strict products liability for design defect, negligent product design, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and aiding and abetting assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

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How the radios got to the front

The lawsuit follows an investigation published in January 2026 by Hunterbrook Media, which documented widespread use of Ubiquiti products by Russian forces. One Ukrainian communications officer told the outlet that an estimated 80% of the Russian bridges he had observed near the front line were Ubiquiti devices.

Analysis of trade records found the value of Ubiquiti shipments crossing into Russia rose by 66% after the full-scale invasion, despite US and EU export controls, and that the shipments included models released after the bans took effect. The goods moved mainly through distributors in third countries such as Kazakhstan and Türkiye. Russian units often received the bridges from volunteers who bought them with crowdfunded money.

Ubiquiti has been here before. In 2014, the company paid a $504,225 settlement to the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control after its products were delivered to Iran in violation of US sanctions between 2008 and 2011.

The campaign at the center of the case

Russia's "human safari" is a campaign in which small drones hunt and attack civilians, concentrated in Kherson and other front-line areas. Operators use drone cameras to track people, vehicles, and rescuers, and sometimes strike the same target twice.

UN investigators concluded in September 2025 that Russian short-range drone attacks on civilians along the west bank of the Dnipro River amount to the crimes against humanity of murder and forcible transfer of population. The finding covers more than 300 kilometers across Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, and Mykolaiv oblasts. The complaint cites it as evidence.

Ukraine's Security Service has since charged 10 operators from Russia's 404th Motorized Rifle Regiment with war crimes in absentia, in a case that included explosives dropped on ambulances at a city hospital and a double strike on rescuers.

The incidents in the complaint include a married couple attacked in their car, a firefighter hunted and wounded by a drone while responding to a colleague, and an energy worker killed in a double-tap strike as colleagues tried to reach him.

"The human safari is one of the most horrific crimes against humanity of the 21st Century," Gilmore said. "We intend to present evidence of the widespread and systematic nature of this campaign in court, including international documentation. These coordinated attacks do not happen randomly: they require communications systems and a chain of command. That is precisely why the United States banned the export of Ubiquiti's radio bridge antennas to Russia—because they are necessary for Russia's war machine."

Russian state media has shown the equipment in use.

Zvezda, the television channel run by Russia's Defense Ministry, aired footage on 3 July 2025 of a Ubiquiti UISP Litebeam 5AC device; a TASS report in October 2025 showed a serviceman logging into Ubiquiti's airOS operating system, and a Rossiya-1 segment that month showed one climbing a tower to mount an antenna carrying the company's logo.

A Russian seller supplied Hunterbrook with letters she said came from Russian military units, thanking her for wireless bridges they described as necessary for connections over long distances.

Ubiquiti has said nothing

Ubiquiti did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

Neither the company nor its chief executive, Robert Pera, has publicly commented on the January investigation, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. No US or EU authority has announced an enforcement action against Ubiquiti over Russia, and the company has not been formally accused of sanctions violations tied to Ukraine. The allegations in the complaint are untested, and Ubiquiti has not yet filed a response.

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What the case would establish

If it survives, the suit would test whether ordinary US product-liability law reaches a manufacturer whose equipment ends up in a documented atrocity—a theory that does not require proving the company intended any of it, only that it knew or should have known and failed to act.

"The question is this: what would a reasonable company do if it learned its devices were being used to coordinate murder?" Gilmore said. "If it fails to follow reasonable safety measures, shouldn't it be held liable to the civilians who get hurt? Those are the questions we intend to put before a New York jury."

Gilmore, who has investigated war crimes for two decades, said the legal framework needed already exists at national and international levels, and that in mass-atrocity cases from Syria to Sudan, investigations, jurisdiction, and remedies take years. He said he expects accountability for Ukrainian victims to come through criminal prosecutions, civil litigation, and regulatory enforcement together.

"Our clients want to shine a light on the atrocities being committed against civilians in Ukraine and to remind companies that compliance with sanctions and export controls is not a mere technicality: it's a matter of life or death," he said.

"We are at the tip of the spear."

Editor's note: Euromaidan Press correspondent Zarina Zabrisky, who conducted this interview and reports from Kherson, co-developed draft US legislation on the drone campaign—the Liability for Operators and Responsible Authorities (LORA) Act—which would impose targeted sanctions on identified drone operators, restrict exports of drone components, and require public attribution of perpetrators. She has no connection to this lawsuit or to the firm that filed it. Her documentary Kherson: Human Safari is available free at khersonhumansafari.com.

Polish police have detained two of the three men suspected of beating a young Ukrainian couple in the city of Wrocław, Suspilne reported. Investigators are treating the assault as a hate crime driven by the victims' nationality, and the two detainees now face criminal charges and possible prison time. Officers are still searching for the third attacker as Kyiv presses for a full investigation.

Two suspects detained, one still sought

Wrocław police detained the two men on 27 July, and both had prior records. Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński announced the arrests on X, writing that brutal violence would never go unpunished. Counter-terrorism officers stopped one suspect as he tried to leave Wrocław. The third man remains at large.

The two detainees were to be questioned and charged at the Wrocław-Psie Pole district prosecutor's office. They face up to five years in prison, prosecution spokesman Jakub Dłubacz told Ukrinform. The charges combine battery with violence motivated by national intolerance under Poland's criminal code.

"Are you Ukrainian?" — three Polish men beat the couple 

The attack happened around 18:30 on 26 July in Wrocław's Zakrzów district. The victim's mother, Karina Kitsai, recounted the events to Radio Svoboda. Her daughter Nastia had stopped at a supermarket to buy coffee and food while her boyfriend Maksym waited in the car. At the checkout, one man set a beer in front of Nastia. When she pointed to the queue, he asked whether she was Ukrainian and began insulting her.

The men waited outside. As Nastia reached the car, they ran up and started beating Maksym. She screamed for them to stop, and one attacker turned on her.

"One of them ran up to her and started hitting her in the face. She fell on her back," Kitsai said. The men briefly stepped back, then attacked again as the couple tried to stand.

Nastia suffered a cut neck that needed stitches, a torn ear, and a badly bruised face. Her mother believes one attacker may have used a knife. The men beat Maksym's head and shocked him with the stun gun he had tried to use to defend himself. Both Nastia and Maksym were treated for suspected concussion. 

A neighbor heard the cries and filmed the assault from his balcony, and the family later published the video.

"We are compelled to note that cases of violence and aggression whose victims are Ukrainian citizens have recently become more frequent in Poland," Ukraine's Consulate General in Wrocław wrote, sharing the video.

Kyiv presses for justice as attacks climb

Ukraine's acting Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha thanked Polish authorities, law enforcement, and Wrocław's mayor for their swift response. He wrote that Kyiv expects a full and impartial investigation and fair punishment for everyone involved. 

Sybiha again urged "certain Polish politicians" to stop fueling hostility that turns into street violence. 

"We need dialogue and mutual respect, not looking for reasons to hate," he wrote.

A pastor who prays with President Donald Trump says he had never heard of Russia's drone campaign against civilians in Kherson—until Euromaidan Press told him.

"I have not heard about this," said Pastor Mark Burns, one of Trump's closest spiritual advisers, when briefed this week on Russia's "human safari" against civilians in Kherson and the drone siege trapping thousands of people in the occupied region across the river. By the end of the conversation, he had pledged to raise it with the president, senators, and members of Congress from both parties.

The campaign Burns had not heard of has a UN crime-against-humanity finding, named suspects facing war-crimes charges, a draft US bill, and a bipartisan screening at the US Capitol behind it. A man who prays with the president learned of it this week, from a journalist.

What he didn't know

For more than a year, Russian forces have used first-person-view drones to hunt civilians in Kherson's streets—women walking to the store, cyclists, bus passengers, emergency responders, journalists, even animals. Human Rights Watch and the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine have concluded the attacks amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Across the river, 5,000 to 6,000 civilians remain trapped in occupied Oleshky, Hola Prystan, and nearby settlements, under what Ukraine has called a drone-controlled siege—mined roads, blocked aid, and no reliable food, medicine, or power. EP reported on the UN's findings in November. In September, the UN concluded the campaign amounts to a crime against humanity; the Security Service of Ukraine has since charged 10 operators from Russia's 404th Motorized Rifle Regiment with war crimes in absentia.

"Terrifying," he said in an interview with Euromaidan Press. "I did not know about this dire situation and that innocent people were being targeted in this human safari. It's becoming the new killing fields. That's what the Nazis used to do to the Jews. Russians are doing this now to the innocent people of Kherson."

He drew a line between combat and what he called deliberate attacks on civilians: "The fact that Russians are using drones to target innocent people—that is not war. These are war crimes. Targeting innocent people, children, and hospitals is against the Geneva Convention. They're attacking churches. They're attacking journalists. This is at the hands of Putin, a man who claims to be a Christian and claims to have moral authority. But yet the Russian Orthodox Church blesses missiles. They bless these drones that go out to kill innocent children, kill innocent people. And they're not trying to win a war. They are simply trying to terrorize the people. It's their mission. And that's what the world is starting to see."

He said he would raise it with US leadership—"the President, the Senators, the Congress, Democrats, and Republicans"—calling it something that "needs to be heard."

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UN traces Kherson’s “human safari” up the chain of command — to Putin himself

A gap he says is closing—but wasn't closed for him

Burns argued that American public awareness of Russian disinformation is improving. "The veil of the Russian propaganda is breaking," he said. "It is falling. More and more people in America are seeing right through the Russian propaganda and lies."

He said this a few minutes after saying he had not heard of the Kherson campaign, which the UN documented months ago. Both statements are his.

Burns traced his own shift to a 2025 visit to Bucha and Irpin, where he said seeing the evidence firsthand changed his understanding of the war.

Where he says US support stands

Burns said the US does not trust Russia—"We're not friends with Russia"—and pointed to the Ukraine Support Act, which the House passed in June with more than $8 billion in military financing loans for Ukraine. "We just passed an $8 billion bill to support the war effort in Ukraine," he said. The bill has cleared the House; it still needs Senate approval and the president's signature before it becomes law.

He said Ukraine's fight serves European security broadly—"Ukraine is on the front lines for Europe"—and that US intelligence assessments he's aware of see Putin's ambitions extending past Ukraine: "He will continue to Georgia, Poland, Moldova, and the Balkan states in his attempt to reestablish the former USSR. He's using Ukraine as a test."

He described relations between Kyiv and Washington as improved since President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's meeting with Trump at the G7, saying Trump "recently said that Ukraine is doing an amazing job" and "is winning the war."

What comes next

Burns said he would make the Kherson tragedy one of his rallying cries. "This is about spiritual diplomacy," he said. "And in the name of faith, that is my spiritual obligation as a man of God to do whatever it takes to promote peace and to promote the well-being of the innocent."

"I often say that Ukraine has the most powerful nation and the most powerful military in Europe," he added. "It is pushing back the full might of the Russian empire, the Russian Federation. 20,000–30,000 Russian soldiers are dying every month at the hands of the Ukrainians, and not because Ukrainians want war, but because they are defending their home."

Burns did not specify whether he meant killed or killed and wounded. Independent counts of Russian deaths run lower. Mediazona and the BBC's Russian service have confirmed more than 229,000 Russian soldiers killed by name as of late June 2026—a floor rather than a full toll, since the count includes only deaths verifiable through open sources. British intelligence has put the figure far higher: the head of GCHQ said in May that nearly 500,000 Russian troops had been killed since 2022. Ukraine's General Staff, which reports killed and wounded together, logs Russian losses at roughly 1,000 or more a day.

Burns said he plans to visit Ukraine as soon as August and is considering a trip to Kherson itself, "to let people know that the President has not forgotten."

Whether that follows through—and whether it changes anything in Washington—is untested. What's on record now is narrower and more specific: a pledge, made after being shown what he says he didn't know.

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The numbers are impressive. But two days in Gdańsk—25 and 26 June—revealed developments that matter more than any single agreement. The conference showed how European thinking about Ukraine is changing from postwar reconstruction to wartime resilience, from humanitarian support to strategic investment. 

It also exposed the distance that still separates political declarations from the scale of action Ukraine needs.

With Russia showing no sign of halting its invasion, the speed at which Ukraine rebuilds its economy, energy grid, and arms industry has become inseparable from its ability to keep fighting.

Recovery during war

The most important shift from previous Ukraine Recovery Conferences is not in the numbers but in the logic. Partners have stopped talking about recovery as something that begins after. Alongside the first €3.2 billion tranche, the President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced a separate €6 billion tranche specifically for drone production.

That is no longer humanitarian support, or even "reconstruction" in the classical sense — it is wartime capability funding, operating under the banner of a recovery conference.

At the closing press conference, Ukraine's Economy Minister Oleksii Soboliev called the conference "the most practical in history." Not the most generous — the most practical. That is effectively an acknowledgment that since Lugano 2022, the format has traveled from a declarative forum to a transactional platform.

But "practical" has its limits. One topic quietly circulating in the margins was a certain fatigue around forums about Ukraine's future reconstruction. Investors show up. Agreements get signed.

Actual projects on the ground move considerably slower than signing ceremonies.

One example of success: a factory in the Bila Tserkva Industrial Park, built by an Italian investor within a year of the Rome conference. One factory in a year is not the scale Ukraine needs.

Defense joins the agenda

Von der Leyen announced in Gdańsk the expansion of defense cooperation between the EU and Ukraine in the field of drones. Defense technology has formally entered the reconstruction discourse. Defense Day, running in parallel, focused on concrete mechanisms — joint ventures, investment pipelines, and legal frameworks for integrating Ukrainian defense tech into allied supply chains.

But a gap remains between what was discussed at Defense Day and what filled the main panels. The defense sector was more prominently represented this year, yet prominence is not the same as priority. Of the roughly €10 billion in signed agreements, the bulk falls on energy, infrastructure, and financial instruments. The defense industry got its own side event, but not its own line in the final communiqué.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Ukraine produced around 4 million drones in 2025 and is on track for 5 to 6 million in 2026 — Kyiv's own Defense Ministry targets 7 million. The obstacle to scaling is not engineers or ideas; it is capital, certification, and the absence of integration into EU and NATO procurement ecosystems. Gdańsk mapped those obstacles. It did not remove them.

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Europe opens the door — slightly

On 15 June, ten days before the conference opened, the EU and Ukraine opened negotiations on the first "Fundamentals" cluster, covering the rule of law, fundamental rights, and democratic institutions.

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said that the process is only the first step on a long journey: to join, Ukraine must meet a string of criteria on the rule of law, anti-corruption, and the alignment of its legislation with European standards.

He noted the process grows more complex every year as the EU's legislative framework expands, and cited Poland — which spent about seven years in technical accession talks before becoming a full member. That was unlikely to surprise anyone. But it matters that it was said out loud, and not only in the corridors.

That slots in directly under the "Europe opens the door — slightly" subhead, ahead of the Polish-Ukrainian agreements paragraph. Nothing else in the report changes.

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The diplomatic crisis between Poland and Ukraine had no significant effect on concrete outcomes: 15 of the 160 agreements were Ukrainian-Polish government-to-government deals, including cooperation between state-owned companies and credit agencies. Business separated itself from the presidential scandal. That is good news.

But Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko was not invited to the EU-member Eastern Flank summit, which took place in parallel with the conference. It is hard to imagine such a pointed exclusion had President Zelenskyy come to Gdańsk in person. The list of confirmed bilateral meetings she held over two days was limited to counterparts from the Czech Republic, Finland, Estonia, and the host, Donald Tusk. The president of Romania and the prime minister of Sweden flew into Gdańsk the same day — for the Eastern Flank summit, not for URC.

Diplomacy matters

Partners showed respect, but made clear that the level of representation affects the depth of discussions. That is not a footnote. At a conference where the weight of a voice is measured by who stands behind it, Ukraine arrived with its second-in-command.

Yulia Svyrydenko described the conference as a success that produced tangible results for Ukraine. But Zelenskyy framed Nawrocki's decision as domestic electoral maneuvering and said the Polish president had sought to derail the conference. If so, Nawrocki partly succeeded.

He did not cancel Gdańsk — but he changed its weight.

Without Zelenskyy, the conference remained a prime ministers' forum at a moment when Ukraine needed its head of state present not for protocol, but to sit at the tables where decisions on security guarantees and the pace of EU integration are actually made.

Two things are beyond dispute. First, European support for Ukraine is holding and, despite everything, growing. The conversation has shifted from humanitarian aid to strategic investment in a country at war. That shift is real.

Second, the distance between what was declared and what is sufficient remains large. Ukraine's external financing needs for 2026 stand at around $52 billion. Gdańsk closed part of that gap, not all of it. The defense industry received recognition, but not systematic integration into allied supply chains. EU accession moved, but the first cluster is not membership. And the largest continental donor's call to "freeze the front" sits uneasily at a conference dedicated to rebuilding a country where roughly 200 combat engagements occur every day.

Gdansk — More than 5,000 politicians, diplomats, investors, and representatives of international organizations gathered in the Polish city of Gdańsk on 25 June for the opening of Ukraine Recovery Conference 2026 (URC), the flagship international event dedicated to Ukraine’s reconstruction.

Yet from the first hours of the conference, it became clear that this year’s discussions would focus on more than rebuilding Ukraine.

The event is taking place at a moment when Polish-Ukrainian relations are experiencing one of their most serious crises since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The most visible symbol of the tensions was the absence of both presidents.

The past weeks have been one long and sad line of tit-for-tat measures between Warsaw and Kyiv, with awarded medals and ordens being publicly and demonstratively returned to sender, Polish nationalists making much political hay on Ukrainian president Zelensky’s decision to approve the naming a Ukrainian military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). This Spring has also seen an increase of anti-Ukrainian incidents in Polish society.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy decided several days ago not to attend the conference in person. Polish President Karol Nawrocki, meanwhile, was not invited by either Prime Minister Donald Tusk or the Ukrainian side. As a result, neither the president nor representatives of his office came to Gdańsk.

Officially, speakers focused on investment, reconstruction, European integration, and long-term support for Ukraine. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and Ukrainian First Deputy Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko all emphasized solidarity and the need to work together on Ukraine’s future.

Many participants acknowledged that holding the conference in Poland against the backdrop of the current diplomatic dispute felt unusual.

“Of course, people are talking about the tensions,” one representative told Euromaidan Press. “But everyone who came here came to work on Ukraine’s recovery.”

“For Polish business, this is not the ideal moment,” said a participant in the conference’s business forum. “But nobody wants this situation to become a long-term problem.”

Another attendee involved in reconstruction projects said that most participants viewed the crisis as temporary. “Poland and Ukraine have invested too much in this partnership. People here hope both sides will return to close cooperation as soon as possible,” he said.

Despite the political tensions, most discussions throughout the day remained focused on Ukraine’s long-term future. In that context, Swedish former Foreign Minister Carl Bildt drew a comparison between Ukraine’s prospects and Poland’s economic transformation.

“If you look at the long-term potential of Ukraine, it can clearly become a new Poland in terms of economic development,” Bildt said on the sidelines of the conference.

The conference began at a fast pace, with dozens of panel discussions, business meetings, and negotiations between government officials and investors throughout the day. The Ukrainian side expects new agreements and multi-billion-euro support programs to be announced during the event.

At the same time, deteriorating relations between Kyiv and Warsaw are already affecting calculations on both sides. Polish companies had hoped that URC would strengthen their position in Ukraine’s future reconstruction efforts. Now, many observers acknowledge that political tensions have complicated that picture.

Former Polish Ambassador to Ukraine Bartosz Cichocki warned that if Poland loses influence due to the current crisis, it could be excluded from future discussions on Ukraine’s reconstruction. Several days before the conference, Tusk also argued that Poland should be involved in any future negotiations concerning Ukraine and said Warsaw would not simply accept arrangements made without its participation.

Meanwhile, the European Union announced the transfer of a first €3.2 billion tranche from its broader €90 billion support package for Ukraine. Additional funding for Ukraine’s drone production sector is expected to follow in the coming days.

The first day of the conference highlighted a striking paradox. Inside the halls of AmberExpo, discussions focused on investment, reconstruction, and Ukraine’s future in Europe. Yet one of the most frequent topics inside conversations remained the future of relations between Kyiv and Warsaw.

For many participants, the key question is no longer only how Ukraine will rebuild after the war, but whether two countries that became some of each other’s closest partners after 2022 can quickly move beyond their current political dispute.

-Taisiia Vivdych, EP special correspondent at the URC

Belarus's exiled opposition has handed Ukraine a detailed report arguing that Alyaksandr Lukashenka's regime is systematically preparing the country to enter Russia's war, according to the United Transition Cabinet of Belarus. The 30-page analysis went to Ukraine's foreign minister and sets out the legal, military, economic, and social changes the authors say have rebuilt Belarus into a war platform. It also offers Western governments concrete steps to head off that scenario.

A report assembled from inside the system

Pavel Latushka, deputy head of the United Transition Cabinet, sent the file to Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha. The Cabinet announced the move on its channel. The 30-page report came from the National Anti-Crisis Management, a group of former Belarusian state officials now in exile. It builds on agreements reached during a May working visit to Kyiv. The authors list eight signs that the regime is readying Belarus to join the war or to host new strikes.

Laws rewritten for war

A 2022 constitutional referendum ended Belarus's neutral, nuclear-free status. The 2024 Military Doctrine now allows pre-emptive strikes when a conflict is deemed imminent. It also clears the way for the army to deploy abroad in support of an ally — meaning Russia. New martial-law and state-of-emergency laws widen state powers and curb citizens' rights.

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A 2024 law lets the army draft people with criminal records and prisoners, copying a Russian practice. A handpicked national assembly, newly empowered to approve foreign deployments, would supply rubber-stamp legitimacy on demand.

A bigger army and a fresh militia

Contract soldiers have grown 1.5 times since 2022, and the mobilization reserve is put at 289,000. A planned Southern Operational Command points at the Ukrainian border, with troop numbers that could top 80,000. The regime is also raising a "people's militia" of up to 150,000 for territorial defense and internal control. Recruitment offices can now issue draft summonses by text message, with stiffer fines and travel bans for those who dodge. Lukashenka has already shifted to rolling "targeted mobilization," EP reported in May.

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The economy on war rails

Over four years, defense spending has risen fivefold. In 2025 it grew by 32% to 4.7 billion Belarusian rubles ($1.7 billion), with 145 million rubles ($52 million) set aside for mobilization work. A decree handed the Economy Ministry control of mobilization planning. The defense industry is fully fused with Russia's, under a blanket secrecy regime. In 2024 alone the military took on more than 4,000 new pieces of equipment.

Nuclear weapons and Russian mercenaries

Integration with Russia's army has reached its peak, the authors say. Russian troops are permanently based in the country. Russia signed a 2023 deal to base tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, and Lukashenka has offered to host the Oreshnik missile system.

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Russia and Belarus capped joint nuclear drills in May with simulated launches. Instructors from Russia's Wagner mercenary group, relocated after Prigozhin's 2023 mutiny, trained Belarusian assault units in close-quarter city fighting.

Fortified borders and militarized children

Since 2023, Belarus has built fortifications nicknamed the "Khrenin Line" after Defense Minister Viktar Khrenin. The "resistance nodes" run along its borders with Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania. Bridges, airfields, and roads are being upgraded to carry heavy Russian equipment. Schools now require military training. The report says the regime planned to send more than 30,000 children through military-patriotic camps run on army bases in 2024.

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Medicine, shelters, and stockpiles

The Belarusian Health Ministry has approved instructions for harsh wartime triage of the wounded. Minsk inspected 5,000 bomb shelters and regularly tests its alert sirens. Districts buy body armor in bulk for the militia. Mandatory fuel reserves have doubled to 30 days of supply. A 15 May 2026 government resolution lets the state force companies' civilian trucks into military convoys. Non-stop exercises, the authors add, double as a way to quietly check mobilization lists and keep society on edge.

Sport keeps quietly letting Russia and Belarus back in, and the officials who take those decisions seldom explain why out loud. Janek Mäggi is an exception. The president of the World Draughts Federation (FMJD)—whose board has just cleared Belarusian players to return from 1 July—lays out the case plainly: the sport has lost half of its elite, the standard has dropped sharply, and a federation this small cannot run a foreign policy of its own.

His federation is one of many. Four years into Russia’s full-scale war, international bodies are easing Russian and Belarusian athletes back through a now-familiar route.

It is not a public reversal of sanctions but a “neutral athlete” pathway—competing without flag or anthem—that widens by degrees until the exclusion has all but ended. Tennis never removed them at all. Judo, aquatics, gymnastics, equestrian sport, several winter sports, and ice hockey have settled into versions of the same arrangement.

The argument has narrowed as it has spread. In 2022, the question was whether Russian athletes belonged in world sport while their state invaded a neighbor. By 2026, many governing bodies have swapped it for a smaller one: on what terms should they be allowed back?

Euromaidan Press has reported the athletes’ side of that argument—Ukrainian players who refuse the handshake, who read out overnight casualty counts before walking on court, who say that playing as though nothing is happening is itself a political act. This interview is the other chair at the table.

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Contents

• Ukraine plays Russia today for a French Open final. The Russian stays mum on war; the Ukrainian doesn’t
  • Sport is letting Russia back in. This Ukrainian tennis player says no.
  • “A warning to companies that remain”: Russia takes control of Nestlé and Auchan’s assets – companies that stayed in Russia following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine
  • “I can travel back to Finland and be safe. That is a luxury”: Sanna Marin on the Russian strike that stopped her train from Kyiv
  • Ukraine put its own peace proposals on the table as two US envoys reached Kyiv for the first time

Ukraine plays Russia today for a French Open final. The Russian stays mum on war; the Ukrainian doesn’t

Euromaidan Press spoke with Mäggi on 8 June 2026—days before the FMJD board voted unanimously to readmit Belarusian players, both youth and adults, from 1 July under neutral status, without flag or anthem. That was the cautious route Mäggi forecasts below: short of the full return the IOC recommended on 7 May, and with no decision on Russia.

Peeter Helme: Various world sports federations have started letting Russia, and Belarus too, back into their ranks to compete under their own flag. Can you describe what the reasons are—and, if it isn’t a secret, whether you in the Draughts Federation are discussing this, and what the arguments are?

Janek Mäggi: It is actually very simple. The overwhelming share of top athletes are Russian and Belarusian—and not only in draughts, which has some 200 million players worldwide, or chess, with around 600 million. Both rank among the world’s ten largest sports by participation, and the same pattern is taken for granted almost everywhere.

There are 125 sports federations recognized by the International Olympic Committee, and in many of them, the very best players have come from these two countries.

In draughts this is completely the case—essentially half the world has been removed. The sport has two, really three, core disciplines: checkers, played by about 100 million people; international draughts, about 40 million; and Russian draughts, around 50 million. Add Brazilian draughts and a few smaller variants, perhaps 10 million more.

Take last year’s World Championship in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Nine of the 12 finalists were Dutch, three-quarters of the final. That is completely abnormal; it looked like a Dutch national championship.

With the Russians and Belarusians gone, a great many strong players were simply not there, and chance had more room. So, point one: over these four years, the level of tournaments has dropped sharply. That is a very big problem.

The second thing that has happened is alarming: the standard among young players has fallen. The Russians, of course, immediately poured their energy into their own international body—the International Draughts Federation (IDF)—and many countries are in it. The Western draughts world we imagine as the whole universe is, in fact, very small.

Compare it with Africa: the European Union fits into the continent more than seven times over, the population is far larger, and the standard of play is high there too. Their young players keep developing in their own environment, undisturbed.

And the Russian grandmasters? They all work in China now—every one of them, because the Chinese pay enormous salaries. China alone has 542,000 draughts players competing in title events, and those are only the ones in title tournaments.

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Sport is letting Russia back in. This Ukrainian tennis player says no.

Helme: The Ukrainian athletes make a different argument—that this is not about the standard of play, but about competing alongside people representing a state that is waging war on Ukraine. What do you say to that?

Mäggi: On the players themselves: they are certainly not warmongers—at least in draughts; I do not know other sports as closely. In chess, it is the same story, and I sit on the International Mind Sports Association too. They really are not.

Most of them are close friends of mine—friends of 30 years. They are exactly like you: they sit down, we play, we talk. Some views differ, and there is the odd madman, but a great many genuinely good players have now been shut out.

On 7 May, the International Olympic Committee decided that Belarus, for one, should be readmitted. The underlying reason is the one I described, but the important part was the wording: Belarus has met all of the IOC’s requirements, and Russia has not. So between the two, there is, by now, quite a large difference.

There is also a contradiction that the sports world cannot resolve. Some countries argue that the United States should be barred from every competition for attacking Iran, and that any tournament with Israeli participants should be banned outright—and that, measured against them, Belarus is a very peaceful country.

Helme: You see a clear difference between Russia and Belarus. But why does that judgment fall to the IOC—why shouldn’t, for example, the draughts federation set its own line?

Mäggi: What guides a world federation? Firm principles. We want to be part of the international sports community, and that is the key point: we do not run an independent foreign policy. We cannot.

We are about 10 middle-aged people—some Black, some women, everyone represented—who decide what line to take. Setting our own geopolitics is simply out of the question; we follow the directions that come from the IOC.

Unfortunately, the IOC’s core policy is decided by the big powers. So I cannot say that everything they agree on is black-and-white good. I cannot say that at all.

Helme: So, where does that leave draughts right now?

Mäggi: In draughts, the position now is this: we have Belarus’s application to return—fully and immediately, as the IOC put it—and the Russians’ application for their juniors to play at once. We discuss it next Friday [12 June, when the board voted to readmit Belarus—EP]. I can guess the outcome, but I will not speculate before it is decided.

I will say this much: some easing toward Belarus will certainly come, though I am not sure it will be as fast as the IOC recommends. And there is a further problem—whether federations should weigh states’ decisions at all.

Take the European Championships in Tallinn in August. We may clear young Belarusians to play, but whether Estonia gives them visas and they actually turn up is a separate question.

We cannot factor in national politics—that is their problem to solve, not ours, because there are about 200 countries in the world. As for the Russians, while the war continues, I do not see all 125 federations cheerfully letting them back. But I think the end of the war is near, and if it comes, the Russians will also have a fast, wide-open path to return to most sports, for the reasons I have given.

This interview is part of Euromaidan Press’s series on how international sport is negotiating sanctions and Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Russia bombed Kyiv and Dnipro on Monday night, killing 22 people and wounding more than 130. On Tuesday, Marta Kostyuk beat fellow Ukrainian Elina Svitolina to reach her first Grand Slam semifinal. On Thursday, she plays Russia's Mirra Andreeva.

It is the second time in five weeks the two have met for a major title shot. It is also the latest chapter in tennis's most sensitive and unavoidable storyline: the sport has quietly let Russian players keep competing through four years of full-scale war, and their Ukrainian opponents are increasingly unhappy about it.

Four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian athletes are slowly being welcomed back by many international sports federations.

Despite the fact that Russia is still occupying 20% of Ukraine and is raining bombs and missiles down over Ukraine every night.

A sequel

Five weeks ago, Kostyuk and Andreeva faced each other in the Madrid Open final, where the Ukrainian claimed the biggest title of her career with a 6–3, 7–5 victory—her first WTA 1000.

As has become customary in matches between Ukrainians and Russians, there was no handshake. Not before, not after.

Kostyuk ended her trophy speech with the words, "Glory to God and glory to Ukraine."

Andreeva, 19, broke down in tears during the same ceremony as she tried to thank her coach, former Wimbledon champion Conchita Martínez. She congratulated Kostyuk on what she called an "incredible victory."

The contrast was the picture of the spring clay season. Kostyuk's triumph carried obvious symbolic weight for Ukrainian supporters. Andreeva's tears underlined the pressure on one of the sport's brightest young talents.

Thursday's meeting arrives with both that history and unfinished business attached.

"I don't know how you can sleep at night"

On Tuesday, after her three-set quarter-final win over Svitolina—the first all-Ukrainian women's quarter-final at a Grand Slam in the Open era—Kostyuk did her on-court interview with tears running down her cheeks. She dedicated the win to Ukraine, referring directly to the previous night's attack.

"So many people are dead," she said. "I want to give this to the Ukrainian people."

At her press conference the next day, asked about her Russian opponents, she went further:

"They are all grown-ups. They know what's going on. They have phones. They have Instagram. They have news… I wish there was some more clear stance on what's going on, especially when your country is killing other people.

I don't know how you can sleep at night peacefully when you know that this is going on, and you have nothing to say about it."

She has been saying versions of this since 2022. She refuses to shake hands with Russian opponents who have not publicly opposed the war. Her argument has been consistent: a handshake reads as normality, and the war is not normal.

The numbers behind what she means are not abstract. Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office has registered more than 190,000 war crimes committed by Russian forces since the full-scale invasion began. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission has verified more than 56,000 civilian casualties—a floor, not a ceiling. Russia still occupies roughly a fifth of Ukraine. The strikes that killed 22 people on Monday night used 656 drones and 73 missiles.

The political context tennis tried to leave outside

The picture is more complicated than a clean Russia-versus-Ukraine narrative. Andreeva has lived and trained in Spain through most of her adolescence and has worked under Martínez's guidance for the past two seasons. At 19, she belongs to a generation whose professional life has been shaped more by the tour than by the politics of the country on her player profile.

She has chosen to keep her public statements about tennis. She has not condemned the war. She has not endorsed it either.

That silence is itself the question Kostyuk keeps asking.

The tennis tours never banned Russians and Belarusians outright. The WTA, ATP, ITF, and Grand Slam Board agreed in March 2022 to let them continue competing as neutrals, without national flags or anthems. Wimbledon was the outlier—it banned them in 2022 and reversed in 2023. Since then, the only public friction has been the players themselves: the missing handshakes, the dedications, the press conferences that begin with overnight casualty counts.

Other sports have been less consistent. World Athletics held its ban longer. Some federations have eased their positions over the past year as Western governments have shifted focus elsewhere. The drift is one direction.

For Ukrainian players, the issue has never been whether individual Russian opponents are personally responsible. It is that the war is ongoing and the cost—tens of thousands of Ukrainians killed, millions displaced, cities under nightly drone attack—does not pause for the tournament calendar.

What Kostyuk thinks the match is for

Andreeva's rise over the past two seasons has been one of the best stories in women's tennis. She has been to a Roland Garros semifinal once before, as a 17-year-old in 2024. She is now No. 8 in the world and a Grand Slam contender before her 20th birthday.

None of which makes the match politically inert.

Kostyuk wants to use her platform, she told reporters in Paris.

"The biggest thing I can do is sit here and talk about it so more people can find out about it so they don't get used to this terrible life."

The French Open has long sold itself as international sport at its most transcendent—two weeks where the game stands above the world it is played in. The Andreeva–Kostyuk semi-final is a reminder that the world walks onto the court anyway, especially in wartime. It walks on with the player whose country is being bombed.

It was officially just a tennis match. What was really being played out on Court 7 at Roland Garros was whether sport gets to move on—while Russia is still occupying Ukraine and killing Ukrainians.

Extra security around the relatively minor Court 7. No polite handshake before or after the match. The tension was tangible long before the first yellow ball was struck.

When Ukraine's Oleksandra Oliynykova faced Russia's Diana Shnaider at the French Open on Saturday, the match was officially a third-round contest. It was also a very public collision between two visions of what sport is supposed to be during wartime—a part of sanctions and a tool to isolate the aggressor, or a space that pretends politics ends at the baseline.

Four years after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian athletes are slowly being welcomed back by international sports federations—while Russia is still occupying close to 20% of Ukraine and bombing the rest of the country almost every night.

Vladimir Putin himself has said Russia is intensifying the attacks to force Kyiv to surrender. Overnight on Monday, at least 22 people were killed across Ukraine in one of the largest missile and drone barrages of the year, with strikes on residential buildings in Kyiv and Dnipro.

The 25-year-old Oleksandra Oliynykova was not having it.

Before the match, she centered her criticism on Shnaider's appearance at a Gazprom-sponsored exhibition match in Russia last year, and on Shnaider's social media activity—what Oliynykova described as liking "pro-Kremlin" and "pro-war" posts.

The woman behind the protest

For Oliynykova the war is not an abstract geopolitical dispute to be discussed between matches and forgotten by the next tournament.

She continues to live and train in Kyiv. Her father and her boyfriend have both volunteered for the Ukrainian army.

That reality helps explain why she has become one of the most outspoken Ukrainian voices in sport. She has been backed by other Ukrainian players too—Ukraine has eight women among the top 100, and several have publicly supported her stand.

Last week, after winning her first-round match, world No. 15 Marta Kostyuk described receiving photos, three hours before stepping on court, of a residential building destroyed by a Russian missile 100 meters from her parents' home in Kyiv. Her mother, sister, and aunt were inside the house during the attack.

"I'm incredibly proud of myself today. I think it was one of the most difficult matches of my career," Kostyuk said in her on-court interview. "This morning, 100 meters from my parents' house, the missile destroyed the building. It was a very difficult morning. I didn't know how this match is gonna turn out for me. I didn't know how I would handle it. I've been crying part of the morning."

What makes Oliynykova unusual is that she is so directly challenging the idea that Russian athletes should be considered politically neutral in the first place. And she is doing it with panache.

Ahead of her match with Shnaider, Oliynykova publicly presented screenshots and photographs which she argues show links between Russian athletes, state-sponsored events, and pro-Kremlin narratives.

Her criticism focused particularly on Shnaider's participation in a Gazprom-sponsored exhibition event in St. Petersburg in 2025. Gazprom is the Russian state-controlled energy giant that has historically contributed close to 10% of Russia's federal budget—and, by extension, to its war effort.

Oliynykova described Gazprom as "a company which is financing war crimes" and compared playing at such an event to "playing in Nazi Germany for Gestapo officers, on the tournament organized by a company which built Auschwitz."

"My home is being attacked by Gazprom money," she said.

"You can be sanctioned if you are participating in a tournament organized by a betting company," she added. "But if they have this mechanism, why will they not use this for the tournament organized by a war crimes sponsor?"

Oliynykova also accused the tennis world of silence: "Everybody is silent about what this person did."

Diana Shnaider just wants to play tennis, she says

In the end, the Russian won the match relatively easily, 7-5, 6-1.

Afterwards, Shnaider dismissed Oliynykova's accusations relating to her participation in the Gazprom-backed exhibition event and her alleged pro-Russian activity on social media.

"I don't know anything about what she said," Shnaider told reporters. "Wasn't interested at all."

She added that playing exhibition matches in Russia offers her a rare opportunity to spend time with family during the tour season.

Shnaider declined to discuss the war. "About social media, I have no idea what she found. I have no idea, so I don't have any comments on that," she said. "I'm not going to speak anything about the situation. I'm here just to speak about tennis and about my game."

Post-match is not post-war

Following her defeat, Oliynykova delivered an emotional statement insisting that her position was not about politics but about what she called "humanity."

"I know that some people disagree with my actions. I know that some people would prefer that I stay silent. But what I do is not about politics, it's about humanity."

"When people are being killed," she said, "while children are dying, when violence is justified or celebrated, we cannot pretend that nothing is happening. We cannot look away."

That is what makes her clash with Shnaider significant beyond tennis.

The match exposed a deeper divide that international federations increasingly prefer not to discuss publicly. In 2022, the central question was whether Russian athletes should be excluded from global competition. By 2026, many sports bodies have quietly shifted to a different question: under what conditions should they be allowed back?

Tennis effectively answered that question early. Russian and Belarusian players continued competing as neutral athletes, stripped of national symbols but not excluded from the sport. The arrangement generated controversy, but over time it became normalized.

The same model is now used by federations governing judo, aquatics, gymnastics, university sport, equestrian sport, several winter sports, and ice hockey. Several other federations are on the fence, but about to lose their balance.

The pattern is consistent. Rather than announcing dramatic reversals of sanctions, federations have tended to move incrementally—creating neutral-athlete pathways, restoring eligibility, loosening restrictions, and avoiding large public declarations.

Oliynykova's intervention challenges precisely that quiet normalization.

That is why the dispute resonated far beyond a court at the French Open. One side is asking whether sport should not move on. The other is asking why it should, while Russia is still occupying Ukraine and killing Ukrainians.

"This war, it defines my life, because my future is in Ukraine," Oliynykova said. "My father, he's coming back to the army. My boyfriend, he's a soldier. Everything in my life is defined by war."

This is the first in a series on how international sport is negotiating its relationship with sanctions and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Sweden officially announces transfer of 16 Gripen JAS 39C/D fighter jets to Ukraine by 2027, and sale of 22 Gripen JAS 39E aircraft by 2030, during President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's visit to Stockholm on 28 May, according to Ukrainian and Swedish officials.

At a military base in Uppsala the two countries also signed a declaration on deepening defence cooperation. The aircraft represent the largest single component of a Swedish aid package exceeding 2 billion.

The Swedish Prime Minister emphasized that Ukraine's air defense needs reinforcement, and that his country is transferring the Gripens for Ukraine's long-term protection.

"Ukraine has very clearly identified the Gripen as its choice and priority for long-term air defense. Ukraine would like to acquire the latest model — the Gripen E/F. Ukraine will purchase 22 Gripen E-series aircraft. Negotiations are ongoing, and we will conclude them and be able to deliver these aircraft by 2030," said Kristersson.

He also noted that Sweden will transfer 16 Gripen C/D aircraft to Ukraine from its own stockpiles in early 2027.

Zelensky said Sweden is providing a support package for the defense of cities worth $2.7 billion — of which $2 billion will go toward aircraft and nearly $400 million toward drone production.

"We expect to receive the first capabilities, the first Gripens, within the next ten months. We will do everything on our end. I think we will receive the first Gripens with our Ukrainian pilots in December or January," he said.

According to the President, Ukraine will receive the aircraft with a full weapons package, which will help defend against Russian guided aerial bombs.

What Is the Gripen E

Developed in the 1980s by a Swedish consortium including Saab and Volvo, the JAS 39 was built to combine the roles of reconnaissance aircraft, bomber, and fighter in a single airframe — and to operate without fixed airbase infrastructure. According to Militarnyi analyst Kushnikov: "The Swedes lived under the conditions of the Cold War and proximity to the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. Understanding that fixed ground infrastructure could be struck quite quickly, they built a doctrine of dispersal and maximum survival of their forces under those conditions. [Gripens] can successfully take off from motorways, be quickly prepared for a sortie, equipped without hangar infrastructure, and deployed on tasks straight off the wheels."

The Gripen E — the variant Ukraine intends to acquire — features a new active electronically scanned array radar, an updated electronic warfare suite, a more powerful American-made engine, a cannon, and additional weapons hardpoints. Fewer than 15 have been produced to date, with roughly eight operated by Brazil and three by Sweden in a test configuration. Kushnikov placed it alongside the F-16 Block 70, Eurofighter Typhoon, and Dassault Rafale as a peer-class aircraft.

Scale of the Order

The potential 150-aircraft order — for which Ukraine signed a letter of intent in October 2025 — could become the largest single order in Saab's history and the largest arms purchase ever made by Ukraine, which would make it the world's second-largest Gripen operator by fleet size. Sweden itself is waiting on 60 jets; Brazil has ordered more than 100.

Saab currently produces between 20 and 30 Gripen E aircraft per year, according to Militarnyi. Analyst Vadym Kushnikov estimates Ukraine will not receive all aircraft before 2030 under an optimistic scenario. Professor Andrii Kharuk of the National Academy of Ground Forces suggested the first batch may arrive in the older Gripen C/D configuration, given the high cost of modifying already-produced airframes to the E standard.

Why Ukraine Chose the Gripen

Three factors drove the selection.

Fleet unification. A single Gripen type can replace five distinct Soviet platforms currently in service: the Su-24M bomber, Su-24MR reconnaissance aircraft, Su-25 ground-attack jet, and the Su-27 and MiG-29 fighters. Ukraine's Air Force Vision for Development to 2035, published in 2020, had already named the JAS-39E/F Gripen or F-16 Block 70/72 as its target platform.

Cost and survivability. At approximately $10,000 per flight hour — versus roughly $30,000 for the F-16, according to Kushnikov — the Gripen is the cheapest aircraft in its class to operate. In conditions of repeated Russian strikes on Ukrainian airfields, its ability to operate from highways and without hangar infrastructure is a concrete tactical advantage.

Weapons compatibility. The Gripen can fire Swedish-made air-to-air and air-to-ground munitions, the RBS-15 anti-ship missile, and American weapons already in Ukrainian service: AIM-120 air-to-air missiles, GBU-39 small-diameter bombs, and JDAM precision-guided kits. Kushnikov highlighted the Meteor missile in particular: "This is currently one of the few solutions in the arsenal of Western countries that can effectively strike enemy targets at distances of over 200 kilometres." Professor Kharuk also noted the Mauser cannon's potential for use against Shahed drones, adding that deploying Gripens against the launch platforms for Russian glide bombs would be even more impactful, as it could push those aircraft away from Ukrainian airspace.

Limitations

The Gripen has only five operators outside Sweden, compared with 30 for the F-16, limiting the accumulated experience base. The type has not been used in direct combat: Sweden's eight jets deployed to Libya in 2011 flew 650 sorties exclusively for air policing. Czech and Hungarian aircraft perform similar NATO policing missions. Kharuk concluded: "In all likelihood, these aircraft will undergo their real combat testing in the skies over Ukraine."

Belarus "is very unlikely to launch a ground invasion against Ukraine," yet Moscow and Minsk appear to be setting the informational groundwork to justify Russia launching drones at Ukraine from Belarus, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said on 26 May. ISW reads Belarusian Security Council Secretary Alexander Volfovich's same-day claim of 116 attempted Ukrainian drone crossings into Belarus as preparing the pretext. Belarusian airspace would let Russia hit Polish-Ukrainian supply lines that Moscow cannot easily reach from its own territory.

Lukashenka security chief's claim and its framing

Lieutenant General Volfovich claimed on 26 May that Belarusian forces have allegedly "recorded" 116 Ukrainian drone attempts to cross the international border into Belarus over the past week. He also stated that some of those crossings were intentional Ukrainian strikes on Belarusian border facilities.

The claim follows weeks of Ukrainian warnings that Moscow has been pushing Minsk to take military action against Kyiv or against an unspecified NATO state.

Why a ground invasion is not what ISW expects

ISW sees little chance Belarus will mount a ground push into Ukraine. The think tank reports no signs of Belarusian troop concentrations on the Ukrainian border at the scale a ground operation would require. Moscow itself does not have the spare combat-ready forces it would need to back a Belarusian incursion.

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Robert "Madyar" Brovdi, head of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS), has already drawn red lines on that scenario: he warned on 26 May that "the first 500 targets are already marked" if Belarus enters Russia's war. He directed the warning at Belarusian leader Aliaksandr Lukashenka.

What Belarus airspace gives Russia

Russian forces are already hitting western Ukrainian oblasts from Russian soil but lack the precision to strike moving targets, the ISW assessment notes. Operating Shahed-class drones and lower-cost Molniyas from Belarusian soil would put the M-06 highway from Kyiv to the Polish border within precision range. The same applies to the rail line that carries Polish supplies into Ukraine. Remote control from Belarus would also let Russian operators hit moving convoys and trains.

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Belarusian territory is already part of Russia's drone-strike chain. In February 2026, Ukrainian hackers exposed a six-month operation routing Russian Shaheds through Belarusian civilian cell towers and using signal repeaters installed on Belarusian rooftops to reach Kyiv, Rivne and Volyn oblasts. Ukraine dismantled that Mesh relay network later that month. By 2 May, Russia had shifted to airborne signal-relay balloons drifting from Belarus into Ukrainian airspace to keep its strike drones connected.

The Korosten precedent

A Russian drone operator based in Belarus already executed this kind of strike once. Ukrainian officials reported that on 22 December 2025, a Shahed-type drone derailed a freight train near Korosten, in Zhytomyr Oblast, northern Ukraine. Four railway workers were injured. The hit landed about 50 kilometers south of the Belarusian border.

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That strike showcased flying a Shahed remotely via FPV (first-person-view, remote-piloted) control onto a moving locomotive. A Ukrainian expert has since analyzed the technique as Russia's main evolving long-range drone threat. ISW frames the Korosten strike as Russia's operational template for its theater-wide campaign against Ukrainian rear logistics.

The Russian Orthodox Church has been quietly removing priests who refused to support Russia's war on Ukraine, an investigation by Systema, the RFE/RL Russian investigative unit, has documented. The church courts that hand down the verdicts operate behind closed doors with no procedural code, no defense lawyers, and prosecutors and judges drawn from the same circle. Patriarch Kirill personally signs off on the rulings.

A church court with no rules

Diocesan courts that defrock priests operate without a published procedural code, defrocked priest Andrei Kurayev told Systema. The accuser also acts as judge, hearings are closed, lawyers are barred, and defendants are not told the charges against them. The judges are appointed by bishops, receive no salary, and keep serving in ordinary parishes, leaving them fully dependent on those who appointed them, Kurayev said. 

These ecclesiastical courts existed in tsarist Russia and were destroyed by the Soviet regime. The Russian state restored them in 2004, but they only began to function under Kirill, who, in Kurayev's account, drafts the rules on the fly when he wants to remove priests he finds inconvenient.

"I don't know what Holy Rus is"

The charge that has cost several of the targeted priests their robes is the same: refusing to read the so-called Prayer for Holy Rus — a reference to a foundational Russian state mythos that falsely casts Moscow as the sole heir of Kyivan Rus — during the Divine Liturgy. Patriarch Kirill, a vocal backer of Vladimir Putin and the invasion, invented the prayer and recited it himself in September 2022, about six months after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Moscow Patriarchate then made it mandatory across services nationwide, part of the same arc that ended in the church's March 2024 declaration of the war as a holy mission.

The prayer states that "those who wish to wage war have risen up against Holy Rus" and asks God to "grant us victory by Your power." It frames Ukraine, the country Russia invaded, as the aggressor.

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Father Aleksei Uminsky, a Moscow rector for more than 20 years, was called in three days before Russian Orthodox Christmas in 2024, handed a suspension decree, and within an hour** questioned by an unidentified disciplinary committee over his refusal to read a prayer supporting the war.

"I don't know what Holy Rus is," he answered.

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Church authorities suspended Uminsky, ordered him to remove his cross, and summoned him to trial. He fled Russia after being warned he would be arrested, and was defrocked with Kirill’s approval. Uminsky, 65, says former colleagues write to him in the same bind: they find it impossible to pray for the war but fear denunciation and church discipline.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople assigned Uminsky to a small church in Paris. He has a small flat above the church and no salary. He gives lectures and sermons on social media to make a living. He likened the separation from his former Moscow parish to losing his family.

From a Moscow cathedral to a Vilnius concert hall

The crackdown extends from Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East to Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. Vladimir Selyavko was defrocked in 2022 with several colleagues from the city’s main Russian Orthodox cathedral. He says the case may have started when a new bishop found printouts of their antiwar statements on his desk — and then judged them himself.

Selyavko, also reinstated by Bartholomew, now serves in a Vilnius church that was converted into a concert hall during the Soviet occupation. 

Today, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya paid her first official visit in Kyiv. It marks a milestone in relations between Ukraine and the Belarusian democracy movement.

Since Aliaksandr Lukashenka crushed the 2020 protests and handed Russia a staging ground for its 2022 invasion, Belarus's opposition has operated entirely from exile. Independent political parties have been banned. Most leading figures spent years in prison. The December 2025 prisoner releases—part of a deal involving the lifting of Western sanctions—brought several of them back into public life, along with renewed attention to where the movement stands on Ukraine.

The short answer: nearly unanimously in support. But the nuances matter, particularly for a movement that hopes one day to govern a country with deep historical, economic, and social ties to Russia.

Tsikhanouskaya: from diplomatic hedging to clear solidarity

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is the most internationally recognized figure in the Belarusian opposition. She entered politics in 2020 when her husband, video blogger Siarhei Tsikhanouski, was disqualified and later arrested ahead of the presidential election. She had no prior political experience; her stated goal was to free political prisoners and secure new elections.

On Crimea, her early statements were deliberately cautious. In September 2020, she told Lithuanian broadcaster LRT that the peninsula was "de jure Ukrainian and de facto Russian"—acknowledging international law while stopping short of a direct claim. By April 2021, she had abandoned the hedge and directly stated that Crimea is Ukrainian. "When you speak indefinitely, it doesn't mean you're wrong—you're just speaking diplomatic language," she told Eurointegration. "Now I've said it clearly."

Since Russia's full-scale invasion, her position has hardened into something closer to a strategic doctrine. "There will be no free Belarus without a free Ukraine, and there will be no safe Ukraine without a free Belarus," she said in a 2023 DW interview, noting that hundreds of Belarusian volunteers were fighting in Ukrainian ranks. By 2025, she was describing Russia's war as "a war against freedom itself." Her office and the United Transitional Cabinet have supplied drones and equipment to the Kalinouski Regiment—a unit of Belarusian volunteers fighting for Ukraine. In August 2024, the regiment's deputy commander, Vadzim Kabanchuk, formally joined her transitional cabinet. In January 2026, she held her first full bilateral meeting with President Zelenskyy.

"We, Belarusians, know what Russia is. We know its imperial appetites. We know what tyranny is. We understand that today Ukraine is fighting not only for itself, but for all of us — including for a free Belarus", Tsikhanouskaya stated in an address marking the fourth anniversary of the full-scale invasion.

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Siarhei Tsikhanouski himself traveled to Russian-occupied Crimea in 2017 and was added to the Myrotvorets data base, a visit he later attributed to political indifference—he was not politically involved, and hadn't thought seriously about who the peninsula belonged to. In prison, he revised his position. In a 2021 statement, he declared Crimea should belong to Ukraine both de jure and de facto. After his 2025 release, he was unambiguous.

"I fully support Ukraine. President Zelenskyy has had to bear such a terrible burden. What I went through is nothing compared with what he has endured. He is a hero to me. I support him fully and unconditionally", he said at a press conference.

Babaryka: support for Ukraine, prolonged silence on Crimea

Viktar Babaryka was another major 2020 presidential candidate, and the most complicated figure in this picture. He was arrested on 18 June 2020 and sentenced to a lengthy prison term that ended only with his release in December 2025 in exchange for sanctions relief. A former head of Belgazprombank—a subsidiary of Russia's Gazprom—he had argued for a neutral Belarus that would exit the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a position that placed him at odds with Moscow despite his professional ties to it.

On Crimea, Babaryka long avoided a direct answer in public. In May 2020, asked who the peninsula belongs to, he quipped to Nasha Niva: "There's a beautiful answer: 'To Greece.'" After his December 2025 release, he again declined to answer the question directly—even as he voiced general support for Ukraine in a video call with Zelenskyy. His refusal sparked sharp discussion on Belarusian social media. Dissident and blogger Ihar Losik, who just like Babaryka, spent more than five years in prison commented on such statements in the following way:

“Even in incommunicado detention, there were different ways to learn about the events of the war in Ukraine, and after my release, everyone I spoke to was surprised at how I knew almost everything. [...] But my views on ‘whose Crimea is it’ and ‘who is the aggressor’ were not formed after the war, nor after my Ukrainian relatives went to fight as volunteers from the very beginning and were killed there by Putin’s forces. I believe that every adult and educated person should have made up their mind back in 2014, when Putin occupied Crimea and Donbas and shot down the Malaysian Boeing. It is surprising that even in 2025, despite many years in prison, someone still cannot answer these simple questions,” wrote Ihar Losik on Facebook.

Only later, in a February 2026 interview with Zerkalo, did Babaryka explicitly say that Crimea “legally and justly belongs to Ukraine,” while admitting that his 2025 answer had been “wrong.” He lives in exile in Berlin and declared his intention to return to politics. Babaryka's case is the partial exception to the broader shift. His correction came late, and only after public criticism within the opposition itself.

Maria Kalesnikava: no ambiguity on Crimea, but nuance on sanctions

Maria Kalesnikava was part of Viktar Babaryka's 2020 campaign team and quickly became one of the opposition's most prominent faces. Arrested in September 2020, she was held for over five years before her December 2025 release.

Her position on Ukraine was the most unequivocal of the major figures. In an interview after her release, she told Zerkalo that Crimea is unambiguously Ukrainian and that she had held this view since 2014. In a video call with President Zelenskyy, she voiced full support for Ukraine's fight for freedom and sovereignty.

She has also taken a distinct position on the internal opposition debate over sanctions, arguing they should be limited in scope to prevent Belarus from falling into deeper economic dependence on Russia—a view that has generated controversy within the exile community.

Veterans of the Belarusian dissident movement

Long before the 2020 protest generation, an older cohort of Belarusian dissidents had been sounding the alarm about Russian imperialism—and building concrete ties with Ukraine. For most of the post-Soviet period, however, their analysis was considered the concern of cultural nationalists rather than serious political analysis. The political mainstream, including the moderate opposition, focused elsewhere: on free elections, civil society, and the prospects of economic reform. The threats these dissidents named—to the Belarusian language, to Belarusian sovereignty, from Russian imperial ambition—were widely viewed as marginal issues, not strategic ones.

Zianon Pazniak, who ran against Lukashenka in 1994 and has lived in exile ever since, warned of Russian imperial ambitions that same year—nearly three decades before February 2022. He held a moment of silence for assassinated Chechen president Dzhokhar Dudayev at a 1996 rally, left Belarus immediately afterwards, and never returned.

In exile, he remained a famous but also controversial opposition politician, often known for getting into conflicts with other opposition politicians and accusing them - including Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya - of being “agents of the regime”. He is therefore now seen as having comparatively little influence on the Belarusian opposition movement. However, Pazniak remained firm in his support for Ukraine and Belarusian volunteers fighting for Ukraine. In January 2023, he visited Kalinouski Regiment fighters in Bakhmut. Pazniak has consistently argued that Belarus is de facto under Russian occupation and that the war in Ukraine is simultaneously a war for Belarus's future.

Pazniak co-founded the Belarusian Popular Front, whose alumni include Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski and Pavel Sevyarynets, both released from prison in December 2025 after years of detention.

Sevyarynets was also one of the first leaders of the youth organization Young Front and later of the political party Belarusian Christian Democracy, both with longstanding pro-Ukrainian profiles. When a fellow Belarusian Christian Democracy member, Ales Charkashyn, died fighting for Ukraine in 2015, Sevyarynets attended the funeral and knelt at his tomb. The chairman of Young Front, Dzanis Urbanovich, joined Ukraine's territorial defense forces in 2022 along with six other organization members.

Mikalai Statkevich has a significantly dramatic story. A veteran dissident who left the Communist Party in 1991 in protest at the crackdown on Lithuanian independence, he had spent years warning that Russia intended to absorb Belarus. In 2019, together with Pavel Sevyarynets, he organized protests against the intensified integration process with Russia in Minsk. Arrested in May 2020, he was due for release in September 2025 but refused deportation to Lithuania, preferring to remain in Belarus. He was promptly rearrested, then released in February 2026 following a stroke.

Nobel laureate Bialiatski, commenting on Statkevich's conduct, said:

"You need incredible resilience to endure what he endured—I deeply respect it. And I think the question of Ukraine and Crimea was never a question for Mikalai. He's a person with a clear, firm position."

These figures had been making the case for decades. Their warnings—about Russian imperial ambitions, about the structural link between Belarusian and Ukrainian sovereignty—were widely viewed as cultural nationalism rather than mainstream political analysis until the events of 2020 and 2022. Today, most of the opposition agrees with them.

Free Belarus, free Ukraine: the opposition's shared logic

Five years ago, much of Belarus’s opposition tried to avoid drawing hard lines on questions like Crimea or Russia. That space is gone.

War, prison, and exile have forced choices that once seemed politically inconvenient. For most opposition figures, supporting Ukraine is no longer just a statement of values—it is a recognition of reality. As long as Russia props up Lukashenka, change in Belarus remains out of reach. And as long as Ukraine is fighting that same Russia, the two struggles are inevitably linked.

There are still differences in tone and emphasis. Belarus’s future leaders will have to reckon with a country deeply tied to Russia, and not everyone is ready to close every door. Babaryka’s hesitation shows that calculation hasn’t disappeared.

But the direction is unmistakable. Across generations, the opposition has largely aligned around a simple idea: Belarus cannot be free while Russia’s war continues—and Ukraine cannot be secure while Belarus remains under Lukashenka.

What was once a slogan now reads more like a strategy. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya's visit to Kyiv will reveal the potential of this strategy.

On 24 May, French President Emmanuel Macron warned Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka against involvement in Russia's war on Ukraine, AFP reported. The call was the first since 26 February 2022, days into Russia's full-scale invasion. It came as Russia hit Ukraine with another massive missile and drone strike, including its third Oreshnik launch.

What Macron told Lukashenka

Belarusian state-run news agency Belta confirmed the call took place at Paris's initiative. AFP, citing a source close to Macron, reported the warning. Macron stressed "the risks for Belarus of allowing itself to be drawn into Russia's war," the AFP source said. The French President also pressed Lukashenka to take steps toward improving Belarus's relations with Europe.

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Two readouts, one confirmation

Belarus's presidential press service made the conversation public, but the French presidency has not. The Minsk readout, published by Le Temps, said the leaders discussed regional issues and Belarus's relations with the EU, particularly with France. French TV TF1/LCI separately described the conversation as fruitful.

Belarus, the Oreshnik, and NATO's eastern flank

The call came on the same Sunday Russia hit Bila Tserkva in Kyiv Oblast with the Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile. The strike marked Russia's third use of the weapon against Ukraine. 

Belarus hosts the Oreshnik on its territory and borders three NATO members—Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. The two leaders had not spoken since the early days of Russia's invasion, which was partly launched from Belarusian soil.

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Nuclear drills, briefings, and Belarus's deeper involvement

Russia and Belarus conducted joint nuclear drills between 18 and 21 May. Ukraine's foreign ministry condemned the exercises as a violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy briefed Macron and other Western leaders on Russia's plans for Belarus on 22 May. 

Macron also published a post condemning Russia's latest Oreshnik strike and citing the "hopelessness" of Russia's aggressive war. 

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told President Donald Trump on 22 May she will resign effective 30 June, citing her husband Abraham Williams's recent diagnosis with a rare form of bone cancer. Trump named Principal Deputy Director Aaron Lukas—a career CIA officer who served on Russia and Europe at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration—as acting DNI from 1 July.

Her departure removes the highest-ranking US official who publicly broke with the intelligence community's own assessments of Russia, and who used her position to limit how that intelligence reached America's allies. It does not, on its own, change Trump's pressure on Kyiv to settle the war on terms favorable to Moscow.

A career CIA officer steps in

Lukas's profile is the institutional opposite of his predecessor's. He spent more than 20 years at the CIA, first as an analyst and then as a clandestine operations officer. From 2020 to 2021 he served as Deputy Senior Director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council under the first Trump administration. Briefly, in 2020, he was chief of staff to acting DNI Richard Grenell. Trump nominated him as Principal Deputy DNI in February 2025—Gabbard's deputy by design, not by her choice.

White House officials had heard rumors for weeks that Gabbard was on her way out. Two weeks ago, she was denying it. Laura Loomer, a Trump confidante and a vocal Gabbard critic, was first to report the resignation. Gabbard is the fourth cabinet member to leave Trump's second-term administration, after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi were fired, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned.

The Five Eyes block and the CIA feud

Gabbard's tenure was defined, more than anything she said in public, by what she did with the intelligence she controlled. In August 2025, CBS News reported she had signed a memo on 20 July ordering US agencies to stop sharing intelligence on the Russia–Ukraine peace negotiations with the Five Eyes alliance—the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The directive walled off America's closest intelligence partners from the talks Trump was simultaneously asking them to support.

In December 2025, she went onto her personal X account to assert that the intelligence community had concluded Russia "does not even have the capability to conquer and occupy Ukraine, what to speak of ‘invading and occupying’ Europe." Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin investment-fund CEO and Putin associate, replied with public praise, calling her work "exposing the deep-state warmonger machinery."

Her record on Russia and Ukraine predates the cabinet

In February 2022, days before Russia's full-scale invasion, Gabbard called Joe Biden a "warmonger" who wanted Russia to invade Ukraine to start a new Cold War for the benefit of the military-industrial complex. She wrote on X that the way Biden could "very easily prevent a war with Russia" was by guaranteeing Ukraine would not join NATO.

In March 2022, weeks into the invasion, she promoted unfounded claims about US-funded biolabs in Ukraine—talking points that mirrored a Kremlin justification for the attack—and later clarified her remarks under pressure. As DNI, she launched an investigation into 120 US-funded biolabs, dozens of them in Ukraine.

Her record is not perfectly linear. In April 2022, she posted a Facebook video addressed directly to Putin, calling his attack "reprehensible" and "a huge geopolitical error which has already cost Russia dearly," and urging him to pull Russian forces out of Ukraine.

In another video she argued Ukraine is not a democracy because Kyiv imprisoned the head of an opposition party. The opposition figure she meant is Viktor Medvedchuk—a personal friend of Putin, who is godfather to Medvedchuk's daughter. The Ukrainian TV channels being shut down Gabbard cited as evidence of authoritarianism under Volodymyr Zelenskyy were all linked to Medvedchuk. Those details were not in her remarks.

The day-to-day pressure on Kyiv is not Gabbard's project. The 20-point peace plan being advanced by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff predates her, sits outside her remit, and continues. Russia still demands roughly 5,000 square kilometers of Donbas it never captured. Ukraine has said no. The deadlock has not moved.

On 22 May, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized Russia's aggressive public campaign against the Baltic states as "concerning" at a NATO Foreign Ministers' meeting in Sweden. He said that "you always worry that something like that can spark into something bigger," the US Department of State reports. 

Recently, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, claimed that Ukraine was “launching drones from the territory” of Baltic countries, including Latvia. He also threatened Latvia with retaliation, even though the country is a NATO member. 

"We understand these countries feel threatened by it, obviously, for obvious reasons. So it’s a concerning thing because you always worry that something like that can spark into something bigger," Rubio stated. 

NATO allies discuss Russian threats against Baltic states ahead of Ankara summit

"We’re obviously engaged in – with our Allies in NATO on that regard in terms of what’s happening, and we keep up to date," he said. 

He did not characterize the Russian rhetoric as a violation of NATO commitments, did not commit to specific protective measures for the Baltic states beyond unspecified "talks" with NATO. 

The Helsingborg meeting is the last senior-level NATO ministerial before the alliance's Ankara summit in July 2026, PBS News reported.

Russia threatens NATO member Latvia over alleged Ukrainian drones launches

Russia's UN Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia claimed earlier this week that Ukraine "launches drones from the territory" of Baltic states, specifically naming Latvia, and threatened Latvia with a retaliatory strike, UNIAN reported.

Latvia is a NATO member state, covered by Article 5 mutual-defense provisions. Meanwhile, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna has stated that Russia is attempting to redirect Ukrainian military drones toward NATO countries. 

Earlier, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called Russia's public threats against the European Union's Baltic member states "absolutely unacceptable." She assigned direct responsibility for endangering eastern-flank populations to Russia and Belarus.

Russia is working on a secret military project codenamed "Skythen" to station nuclear missiles on the seabed, German broadcasters WDR and NDR reported on 21 May 2026 after a months-long investigation, according to tagesschau.

The project would let Russia hide ballistic missiles at depths of several hundred meters and remotely activate them, the broadcasters said, citing Western intelligence sources. Hidden launch platforms would be hard for NATO to detect or strike in wartime.

What investigators uncovered

WDR and NDR analyzed satellite imagery, Russian scientific databases, and historical documents, and spoke to military officers and experts during the investigation, the broadcasters said. Intelligence services have been monitoring a Russian ship called the "Zvezdochka" in connection with the project.

The "Zvezdochka," a 96-meter, 18-meter-wide specialized vessel, is based in Severodvinsk, a shipbuilding city in northwest Russia on the White Sea, WDR and NDR reported. It is built to move heavy equipment on the open sea with cranes and loading ramps, including in icy northern waters. A special submarine called "Sarov" may also be used in the project.

The "Skif" missile

NATO has identified the missile being developed for the project as the "Skif," a modified version of the "Sineva" missile that arms Russian submarines, WDR and NDR reported. "Skif" missiles can reportedly be launched from the seabed and have a range of up to several thousand kilometers.

First tests are said to have taken place several years ago. Viktor Bondarev, former commander-in-chief of Russia's Aerospace Forces, told a Russian news agency in 2017 that "Skif missiles, which hide on the seabed, are part of the arsenal of the Russian armed forces."

Strategic rationale and Cold War precedent

Helge Adrians, a naval officer and guest scientist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), said the seabed approach would let Russia maintain nuclear deterrence with fewer submarines. "Positioning intercontinental missiles on the seabed and keeping them operational has two significant advantages, in my view," Adrians told WDR and NDR. "First, neutralizing them appears very difficult. Second, this procedure offers the possibility of saving submarines and their personnel."

The Pentagon studied a similar concept in 1980 under the codename "Orca," with a model sketch of a missile silo anchored at the seabed that would detach, rise to the surface, and release the missile in case of war, WDR and NDR reported.

The US military ultimately abandoned the idea, citing difficulties in transmitting data to missiles at the seabed or testing their readiness without revealing their location, the broadcasters said.

Treaty restrictions and responses

A 1971 international treaty, the Seabed Treaty, prohibits the emplacement of nuclear weapons on the seabed in international waters, but does not cover a state's own coastal regions. The "Skythen" project would involve placement in Russian waters, the broadcasters said.

NATO and Russia's defense ministry declined to comment on the project; the Russian embassy in Berlin said it had no information about the matter.

The Philippines has shipped 40 portable power generators to Ukraine through an EU emergency-aid framework to keep hospitals and schools running during Russian-induced blackouts, the European External Action Service announced on 20 May.

The shipment is modest in scale but lands as Manila and Kyiv build a relationship that barely existed two years ago, when Volodymyr Zelenskyy made the first leaders' visit between the two countries in 32 years of diplomatic ties. The donation also moves through a framework the EU built specifically to absorb third-country aid for Ukraine — a channel that has gained importance through four winters of Russian strikes on Ukraine's energy grid.

The 6 kW units, supplied by Manila firm Highball Traders Inc, will travel from the Philippines to the Port of Gdansk in Poland and onward to Ukraine through Poland's Governmental Strategic Reserves Agency. The donation moves through the EU Civil Protection Mechanism's rescEU Donations Scheme and followed an 11 February meeting between Ukraine's ambassador to Manila, Yuliia Fediv, and Philippine Senator Erwin Tulfo, who chairs the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

The generators are for civilian and humanitarian use only and carry no military application, the EU Delegation to the Philippines confirmed.

"These generators will provide much-needed relief to Ukrainian civilians, ensuring that essential services remain operational during power outages," Fediv said.

A bilateral relationship built in real time

Until two years ago, neither country kept a resident embassy in the other's capital. The shift began when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made his first-ever visit to the Philippines on 3 June 2024 and met Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in Manila — the first leaders' meeting in the 32-year history of bilateral relations. Zelenskyy thanked Marcos for the Philippines' support of Ukraine's territorial integrity in UN resolutions and announced Ukraine would open an embassy in Manila that year. Ambassador Fediv now holds the post.

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Zelenskyy visits Philippines for first time, meets President Marcos

Manila has reciprocated. Philippine Ambassador Alan Deniega — a career diplomat based in Warsaw but accredited to Ukraine on a concurrent basis — presented copies of his credentials in Kyiv to Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Oleksandr Mischenko this spring. In September 2025, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha met Philippine Foreign Secretary Theresa Lazaro in New York and noted the importance of opening a resident Ukrainian embassy in Manila. Mischenko himself flew to the Philippines this month, holding security talks with Philippine Undersecretary of National Defense Ireneo Espino alongside ambassadors from the UK, Denmark, Finland and Sweden, and diplomats from the US, EU, Japan, Canada, Germany, Poland and Norway.

Moscow's invention

As Manila and Kyiv have deepened cooperation, Moscow has tried a different framing.

On 27 November 2025, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told state news agency TASS that "US representatives" had launched a campaign in the Philippines to recruit Filipinos for the Ukrainian army through a Florida-based firm called RMS International. She alleged training at a facility in San Fernando, Pampanga; $5,000 monthly pay; and Schengen work visas issued by the German embassy in Manila to route recruits through Germany and Poland into Ukraine. She showed no evidence.

Every named party rejected the claim. German Ambassador to the Philippines Andreas Michael Pfaffernoschke said the embassy "strictly refuses and denies those baseless allegations." Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs Secretary Theresa Lazaro called the story fake news, relayed through President Marcos's spokesperson. Regional analysts assessed the story as almost certainly disinformation, part of a pattern of similar Russian claims surfacing across Southeast Asia.

The verified Filipino casualty

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Filipino mercenary killed in Russian army “meat assault” after just one week of training, Ukrainian intelligence says

The verified case runs the other direction.

In January 2026, Ukraine's military intelligence agency HUR identified the body of John Patrick, a Filipino national, among Russian troops killed during a "meat assault" near Novoselivka in Donetsk Oblast. Patrick had served in the 9th Assault Company, 3rd Battalion, 283rd Regiment of Russia's 144th Motor Rifle Division. He received one week of training before deployment. He did not speak Russian. After being wounded, his unit left him to die in a forest belt.

He carried a small slip of paper. On it: his unit number, a phone number, and his commander's name.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed a joint declaration in Beijing on 20 May on building a "multipolar world," The Moscow Times reported. The text, published by the Kremlin press service, was signed alongside around 40 other documents and a 47-page joint statement on the strengthening of the partnership.

Putin's visit to China began on 19 May, marking 30 years since the founding of the Russia-China strategic partnership and coming days after President Donald Trump's own visit to Beijing.

The declaration's principles are sweeping: respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states, equal and respectful inter-state relations, and inadmissibility of expanding military alliances and waging "hybrid wars" or "proxy wars".

Many of these principles are being violated by Russia itself at the moment of signing. 

 Long-term state of polycentricity: what does declaration say? 

The text frames the current international moment in colonial-era terms: efforts by "a number of countries to unilaterally run global affairs, impose their interests on the entire world and limit the opportunities for sovereign development of other countries in the spirit of the era of colonialism have failed."

It argues that the world has entered a "long-term state of polycentricity." Russia, in language included in the joint statement, "appreciates China's objective position on the Ukrainian conflict" and welcomes "the desire to play a constructive role in the settlement."

The principles enumerated for the proposed "more just and rational system of global governance" include attention to "rational security concerns" of all states, and the proposition that "no state or group of states should control international affairs, dispose of the destinies of other countries, or monopolize opportunities for development."

Where do the principles meet conduct? 

Russia is in the fourth year of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022, holds occupied parts of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson Oblasts. Meanwhile, Ukraine says Russia has at least five scenarios to expand its offensive to the Chernihiv–Kyiv axis or against a NATO member state from Belarusian territory, Euromaidan Press reported.

The 2022 invasion was framed by Putin himself at the time as a "denazification" and "demilitarization" of Ukraine — an explicit denial of the principle in the declaration that every sovereign state's chosen path and development model must be respected.

China asserts sovereignty over Taiwan, which it has not controlled since 1949, and claims contested portions of the South China Sea, a claim a UN-backed arbitration tribunal in 2016 found had no legal basis under the Law of the Sea.

The declaration condemns "expansion of military alliances," "hybrid wars," and "proxy wars." Reuters reported on Monday that three European intelligence agencies and documents the agency reviewed indicate China secretly trained about 200 Russian military personnel on Chinese soil in late 2025, with some returning to fight in Ukraine.

The European Commission President said that Russia and Belarus bear "direct responsibility" for drone incursions threatening EU eastern-flank populations — incursions over which the Latvian government resigned last week. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin's longtime foreign-policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, disavowed the term "spirit of Anchorage". The Kremlin has used it for many months to suggest a US-Russia understanding emerged from last August's Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, the Financial Times Moscow bureau chief Max Seddon reported on X.

In October 2025, when Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov publicly said the "momentum from Anchorage has been largely exhausted," Ushakov was the senior Kremlin figure who corrected him. Later, Ryabkov reversed himself and declared "there is no alternative to the spirit of Anchorage," Meduza documented in a February investigation.

"Maybe the spirit of Beijing exists. I don't know about the spirit of Anchorage, I never used this phrase," Ushakov told the state-television journalist.

What was said, and which summit did it refer to? 

The Trump-Putin meeting in Anchorage on 15 August 2025 ended without a Ukraine deal, but Moscow subsequently promoted "the spirit of Anchorage" to suggest a "whole set of understandings" had been reached, as Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov put it, declining to elaborate.

Meduza's investigation found that the phrase "exists only in Moscow's vocabulary", as it has not been used by the Trump administration to describe the summit's outcome.

Ushakov, 78, has been Putin's principal foreign-policy aide since 2012 and a key Kremlin interlocutor with the Trump administration through the Anchorage process.

"Spirit of Anchorage" project is quietly retiring 

The substitution carries content. Putin traveled to Beijing for his 25th visit, days after President Donald Trump's own visit to China.

Earlier, reports said that three European intelligence agencies and documents the agency reviewed indicate China secretly trained about 200 Russian military personnel on Chinese soil in late 2025, with some returning to fight in Ukraine.

The Russia-China "no limits" partnership, declared days before the 2022 war, has remained Moscow's anchor orientation throughout the period the Kremlin was simultaneously promoting the prospect of an American thaw.

Editorial: The summit that peacewashed genocide

The Anchorage narrative has, in the meantime, produced no Ukraine deal, no substantive normalization of US-Russia relations, and a steadily escalating Russian-Belarusian pressure campaign on the EU's eastern flank.

The "spirit of Anchorage" project, sustained by the Kremlin for nine months, appears to be quietly retiring.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called Russia's public threats against the European Union's Baltic member states "absolutely unacceptable". She assigned direct responsibility for endangering eastern-flank populations to Russia and Belarus.

On May 19, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service accused Latvia of allowing Ukrainian drones to be launched from its territory against targets in Russia.

The service issued threats against Latvia, stating that “the coordinates of the decision-making centers on Latvian territory are well known,” and that the country’s NATO membership cannot shield it from what the SVR called “just retribution.”

Latvian Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas sheltered in parliament building

President Gitanas Nausėda and Prime Minister Inga Ruginienė were taken to shelters during the roughly one-hour alert in Vilnius, with the Lithuanian army instructing residents to "immediately take shelter in a safe place, take care of your close ones, await new recommendations."

Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas was photographed sheltering in the parliament building. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys has called the incidents "a transparent act of desperation" by Russia, "an attempt to sow chaos and distract from a simple reality: Ukraine is hitting Russia's military machine hard."

New forms of pressure on Eastern Flank countries

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called the broader sequence of incidents a "coordinated provocation," telling reporters from Warsaw that "we can't pretend that nothing is happening," Euronews reported.

The European Commissioner for Defense, Andrius Kubilius, wrote on X following a recent drone incident in Latvia that Russia is testing "new forms of pressure on the Eastern Flank countries" with the goal of "frightening people of the region," and called for further increases in national and EU defense spending and stronger support to Ukraine.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said the incidents are a consequence of Russian aggression in Ukraine and that the alliance is responding under existing defense plans.

Von der Leyen's statement came after 15 Baltic Members of the European Parliament circulated a letter on Wednesday, urging her to condemn Russia, writing that "Russia's continuous open, dangerous and threatening provocations against the Baltic states have reached a critical point."

The United States is pressing Ukraine to ease restrictions on Belarusian potash imports and to lobby European governments to do the same, Bloomberg reported on 20 May, citing people familiar with the discussions. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

The request lands three months after Kyiv expanded its own sanctions on Aliaksandr Lukashenka and his inner circle over Belarus's role hosting Russian Shahed drone relays that strike Ukrainian cities. Washington is now asking Ukraine to argue against the same economic pressure it just moved to tighten.

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Contents

• “This will affect not only Lukashenka, but also his inner circle, his sons”: Ukraine promises further actions against Belarus for drone relays
  1. What potash is, and why Belarus needs it back
  2. What Washington has already done
     • “A direct investment in ammunition flying across the border”: Belarusian defectors warn US sanctions relief is funding Russia’s war
  3. First Lithuania. Now Kyiv.
  4. The scenario Belarusian sources predicted
  5. What Belarus is doing while Washington negotiates
  6. “A warning to companies that remain”: Russia takes control of Nestlé and Auchan’s assets – companies that stayed in Russia following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine
  7. “I can travel back to Finland and be safe. That is a luxury”: Sanna Marin on the Russian strike that stopped her train from Kyiv
  8. Ukraine put its own peace proposals on the table as two US envoys reached Kyiv for the first time

“This will affect not only Lukashenka, but also his inner circle, his sons”: Ukraine promises further actions against Belarus for drone relays

What potash is, and why Belarus needs it back

Potash is a potassium-based fertiliser. Crops need it to grow. Belarus produces roughly a fifth of the world's supply, and before 2022 the trade brought in around $3 billion a year — close to 4% of the country's GDP. Almost all of it left through the Lithuanian port of Klaipėda on the Baltic Sea.

Lithuania shut that route after Russia's full-scale invasion. Since then, Belarus has been forced to send shipments through Russian ports — a longer, more expensive journey that, according to journalist Igor Kuley of the Belarusian Investigative Center, eats "almost all the profit." Unlocking the European route is the single biggest financial prize Lukashenka can ask for. It is also the one the US cannot deliver on its own.

What Washington has already done

Since September 2025, the Trump administration has softened US sanctions on Belarus in four rounds, each timed to a release of political prisoners. The state airline Belavia was delisted first. In December, three potash producers received partial relief. In March, the US Treasury fully removed Belaruskali, the Belarusian Potash Company, the subsidiary Agrorozkvit, and the state-run Belinvestbank from its sanctions list. The latest round came on 28 April. Lukashenka called it part of a "big deal" still under negotiation.

The relief works only halfway. Without the EU lifting its own sanctions, Belarusian potash still cannot move through Klaipėda. Belarus is left shipping via Russian ports, paying Russian transit fees, and deepening its dependence on the Kremlin — the opposite of what Washington says its policy is meant to achieve. EU sanctions on Belarus run until February 2027 and require unanimous agreement to extend.

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“A direct investment in ammunition flying across the border”: Belarusian defectors warn US sanctions relief is funding Russia’s war

First Lithuania. Now Kyiv.

US Special Envoy for Belarus John Coale visited Vilnius in March and urged the Lithuanian government to reopen talks with Lukashenka and restore the potash transit. Vilnius refused. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys later told reporters on 14 May that "the situation is changing — I have always said that there is no such activity, but today I can say that yes, additional activity has appeared from the US side." Lithuania's Foreign Ministry the next day pushed back against media framing that he had used the word "pressure."

President Gitanas Nausėda then walked the temperature down further, saying Lithuania faced no US pressure but that even if it did, the sanctions were European and Vilnius could not lift them unilaterally. "The Belarusian regime is not changing its nature and continues to actively assist Russia," he said. "I would advocate for the extension of those sanctions."

The Bloomberg report extends the same conversation to Kyiv. The American argument, according to the sources cited, is that softening restrictions could pull Belarus a little further from Moscow.

The scenario Belarusian sources predicted

Igor Kuley sketched out exactly this kind of escalation in an interview with Euromaidan Press in April. He argued that if European transit stayed closed, the US would look for an alternative — including potentially through the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Odesa — and that Washington would seek Ukrainian cooperation to make the wider Belarus deal viable.

"It wouldn't be difficult for the Americans to agree with the Ukrainians for transhipment to go through, say, the port of Odesa," he said.

Belpol, a group of former Belarusian security officers who defected after the 2020 crackdown, told Euromaidan Press in the same investigation that each round of US sanctions relief frees money the regime previously spent on workarounds, and that the released capacity flows to "both its own survival and help to the partner-neighbour — the Russian Federation, which is solving its tasks on our territory, including military ones." Their investigation documented Belinvestbank loans to Belarusian factories producing 152mm artillery shells and 122mm rockets — the same calibres Russian forces fire at Ukrainian positions daily. Belinvestbank came off the US sanctions list in March.

What Belarus is doing while Washington negotiates

On Monday 18 May, two days before the Bloomberg report, Minsk announced that the Belarusian armed forces would conduct snap nuclear exercises alongside Russian units. Russia has stationed tactical nuclear warheads on Belarusian territory since 2023 and deployed the Oreshnik intermediate-range missile system there in November 2025.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned earlier this month that Belarus could again become a staging ground for renewed attacks on Ukraine, as it was in February 2022. The Lithuanian Defence Ministry's 2026 threat assessment concluded that Lukashenka uses prisoner releases to charm Western governments while continuing to serve as a Russian instrument of pressure against Europe.

Roughly 841 political prisoners remain behind bars in Belarus, according to the human rights group Viasna. New arrests continue.

Bloomberg's sources said there are no signs the EU is preparing to ease its restrictions. Whether Kyiv will be asked to make the case for them anyway, in public, is the next question.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping called for the "complete elimination" of the "root causes" of what they termed the "Ukrainian crisis" in a joint statement signed in Beijing on 20 May 2026, according to Radio Free Liberty.

Beijing has officially presented itself as neutral on the war while continuing to purchase Russian oil and supply dual-use goods used by the Russian military. The 20 May text formally aligns Chinese language on the war with Moscow's preferred framing.

What the joint statements say

The paragraph on Ukraine in the bilateral statement on strengthening partnership says the parties are "convinced of the need for the complete elimination of the root causes of the Ukrainian crisis on the basis of observing the principles of the UN Charter in their entirety, totality, and interconnection," and that they "advocate continuing the search for a solution through dialogue and negotiations." Russian officials have routinely invoked unspecified "root causes" that must be eliminated to end the war against Ukraine, with the list ranging from NATO expansion to Ukraine's language laws.

A second document — the Declaration on the Formation of a Multipolar World and International Relations of a New Type — contains veiled criticism of the United States and other Western countries. It states the need to "resolutely oppose the use of human rights as a pretext for interference in the internal affairs of other states, as well as the politicization and instrumentalization of human rights issues," and that "disagreements and disputes should be resolved peacefully, eliminating the root causes of conflicts." Putin aide Yury Ushakov called the document "conceptual and programmatic."

A joint statement issued after the talks said the two countries "intend to continue strengthening cooperation in combating the glorification of Nazism, fascism, and militarism, as well as attempts to revive these destructive ideologies," the Kyiv Independent reported.

Power of Siberia 2 still without an agreed timeline

Negotiations on the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline have stalled for years, with China demanding gas prices close to Russia's heavily subsidized domestic rates and seeking only limited volumes. Moscow regards the pipeline as central to recovering gas markets lost in Europe after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov confirmed after the talks that the project was discussed but said there is no "clear understanding" yet on implementation timelines. Putin said Russia is ready to continue uninterrupted deliveries of oil, gas, and coal to China.

Ushakov said agreements had been reached "on joint projects in energy" and on "something very important" in another sphere, without providing details.

Bilateral ties and visit context

China's Foreign Ministry said the two countries had agreed to extend their visa-free regime until 31 December 2027. Around 40 documents were expected to be signed during the visit, alongside the release of a 47-page joint statement on strengthening bilateral ties, the Kyiv Independent reported. The trip also marked the 25th anniversary of the existing Russia-China friendship and cooperation treaty, which the parties agreed to extend.

Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources, that the Chinese military secretly trained about 200 Russian military personnel in China in late 2025, with some later returning to fight in Ukraine, the Kyiv Independent noted.

Putin's visit came one week after US President Donald Trump traveled to China from 13 to 15 May 2026, the first visit by a US president since 2017. Trump described the trade deals reached on his trip as "fantastic."

Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) claimed on 18 May that Ukrainian forces are preparing to launch drone strikes against Russia directly from Latvian territory, stating that Ukrainian drone operators have "already deployed to Latvian military bases," according to ISW's Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment for 19 May 2026.

The SVR went further, heavily implying that Russia intends to strike the claimed Ukrainian drone launch points — specifically identified as Latvian military bases — as well as "Latvian decision-making centers," in response to any strikes it attributes to Ukrainian forces operating from Latvian soil.

Latvian officials have denied the accusations. According to ISW, Latvian authorities have "repeatedly denied Russian accusations that Latvia allowed Ukraine to use their airspace or territory to launch strikes against Russia."

ISW: A pattern of pretext-building

ISW describes the SVR's role as an instrument of narrative warfare. "The Kremlin often uses the SVR to spread extreme and unfounded narratives intended to destabilize other countries and justify potential Russian interference and aggression," the assessment states. The think tank frames the May 18 SVR statement as part of a sustained Russian effort to "set conditions to violate Baltic and Finnish airspace or conduct other military operations against the Baltics."

The drone diversion problem

The SVR's claims emerged alongside a separate, documented incident. On 19 May, a Romanian fighter jet intercepted a Ukrainian drone over Estonian airspace, according to ISW. Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi stated that day: "Russia continues to redirect Ukrainian drones into the Baltics with EW systems," and issued an apology to Estonia and other Baltic states for what he described as unintended incidents caused by Russian electronic warfare interference.

ISW notes it has "previously observed reports of Ukrainian drones crashing in Baltic and Finnish territory, possibly as a result of Russian EW efforts" — a pattern that predates the 19 May incident.

The mechanism

The convergence of the two threads — documented Russian EW diverting Ukrainian drones into Baltic airspace, and SVR claims that Latvia is actively hosting Ukrainian drone units — fits what ISW identifies as an established Russian information operation framework. By attributing drone incidents in Baltic airspace to deliberate Baltic state complicity rather than Russian electronic interference, Moscow constructs a narrative in which strikes on Latvian infrastructure would be framed as self-defense.

The SVR's 18 May statement, ISW concludes, is "a continuation of Russian officials' efforts to set conditions" for exactly that scenario.