The scale of Ukrainian forces' counteroffensive in southeastern Ukraine early this year is finally becoming clear. In six months of maneuver starting on 29 January, a clutch of Ukrainian units, including the 78th, 79th, 80th, 82nd, and 95th Air Assault Brigades and the 1st and 425th Assault Regiments—tens of thousands of troops, in all—marched through gaps in Russian defenses and, according to Ukrainian officials, liberated around 745 square km and 26 settlements. Mostly in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast but also in neighboring Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk Oblasts.

That is Kyiv's own accounting, and it is the high end. The Institute for the Study of War, which maps control from geolocated imagery, put the figure at roughly 627 square km across the Oleksandrivka direction and the northern Hulyaipole direction—while noting its own conservative method probably undercounts. Either number describes the largest Ukrainian territorial gain since 2023.

The Ukrainian gains helped to offset Russian gains around the last few free cities in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast. Between the start of February and the end of July, Russian regiments captured a net total of just 260 square km of Ukrainian soil, according to a tally by the Black Bird Group. It would've been more than 1,000 square km if those air assault and assault units hadn't been busy clearing the Russians from a wide swathe of the southeast.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive kicked off on 29 January. Three days later, Elon Musk's Starlink bricked Russia's thousands of smuggled and stolen satellite terminals. Practically overnight, the Russians lost their best method for controlling small drones and guiding assault units across the disputed gray zone. Drones couldn't fly. Troops couldn't navigate.

Ukrainian commanders surely knew their communications advantage wouldn't last: the Russians would eventually adapt with new methods of command and control. Seizing the opportunity, Ukrainian paratroopers and assault troops pressed the attack. And in stark contrast to the usual assault tactics for both sides, the Ukrainians attacked in tanks and other armored vehicles, counting on the Russians' connectivity problems to clear a path for heavy forces.

The blackout was not the only thing working in Ukraine's favor. ISW credits the gains to five reinforcing factors: better operational planning, a campaign to suppress and destroy Russian air defenses, deeper strikes on Russian logistics, Ukrainian drone superiority at the tactical level—and the Starlink cutoff. But the cutoff is the one that arrived all at once, and it arrived just as Ukrainian armor was starting to move.

Mechanized assaults

Not all the vehicles got through. The assault troops lost one up-armored M-1 Abrams tank in early February. But by March, other assault forces M-1s were engaging Russian troops at point-blank range with their 120-mm main guns. After clearing a few disputed villages along a 45-km front between Dobropillya and Zelenyi Hai, the Ukrainians focused their maneuver and firepower on Komar, 12 km southeast of Zelenyi Hai.

The Ukrainians "started a slow and quiet offensive, with very few videos and small teams, during April and May," mapper Clément Molin recalled. The strict information security obscured the Ukrainian moves for all but the closest observers, allowing Ukrainian commanders to press their attacks without drawing too much attention—and risking a Russian countercounteroffensive.

By summer, the Ukrainians were within mortar range of Komar. Embarrassed Russian commanders resorted to sending out small teams on virtual suicide missions to plant Russian flags in disputed territory. The flags could create the impression of Russian control on terrain that, in fact, neither side controlled. "Russia is trying to intoxicate us with flag videos, which are meant to hide the real situation to both us and their command," Molin wrote.

The reality was that the Ukrainians had gained ground. A lot of it.

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Announcing the results on 12 August, Ukrainian officials also claimed 9,550 Russian troops killed and more than 6,600 wounded—figures no independent body has verified. Former commander in chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, who planned the operation, said it proved the Ukrainian army "is capable not only of steadfastly holding its defences, but also of launching offensives, seizing the initiative, and liberating Ukrainian land."

But the momentum was unsustainable. As the Russians gradually restored command and control through the summer, the Ukrainians encountered more resistance. Now the gray zone is stabilizing again. Observer Moklasen predicted new Ukrainian commander in chief Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi will order his corps and brigade commanders "to dig in positions, consolidate and strengthen more army corps" instead of continuing to attack.

After all, the Russians are pushing hard in Donetsk, and the resources the Ukrainians had devoted to the southeastern counteroffensive could boost the defensive effort in the east. Moreover, there are worrying signs the Kremlin may attempt another mobilization soon, potentially surging hundreds of thousands of fresh troops into Ukraine.

The Ukrainians may soon prioritize holding over attacking.

On 16 July, one-way attack drones from the Ukrainian state security service—the vaunted SBU—motored 800 km to strike Engels-2 air base in western Russia. At the time, there were reportedly five bombers on the ground at the base: four Tupolev Tu-22Ms and a single Tupolev Tu-95.

The drones struck the four-engine, propeller-driven Tu-95. "According to preliminary data, the plane suffered critical damage," the SBU claimed. "It completely tore off the tail part." That particular aircraft, the SBU added, had been used systematically to launch massed missile strikes on Ukraine. Satellite imagery later confirmed the bomber's destruction.

Nearly a month later, we finally know which drone type the SBU flung at Engels-2 and its parked bombers. They were MICH 2000s—Ukrainian aircraft that began as copies of the Chinese ZTK-150, built after Beijing stopped selling. Ukrainian website Oboronka, which visited the factory, broke the news. "Today, the Mich' is no longer just a Chinese plane, but a drone that is exclusively used by the SBU Special Operations Center 'Alpha.'"

According to Oboronka, whose report was agreed in advance with the manufacturer and the SBU, the MICH 2000 flies as far as 2,000 km with a warhead weighing 25 to 60 kg. "The list of targets hit by this drone is updated every week," Oboronka noted. They include Russian ports, military and industrial sites around Moscow and Engels-2.

The Engels-2 raid might be the most immediately impactful. After the 16 July raid, the Russians may be down to 43 Tu-95s, only a dozen of which are usually active at any given time.

The plane that came from China

The MICH 2000 started as someone else's drone. In the summer of 2023, Beijing restricted exports of the civilian aircraft Ukrainian units had been buying and converting into deep-strike munitions. At the end of that year, a team of Ukrainian developers flew to China to buy some anyway.

At the factory, they found dozens of ZTK-150s coming off the line—Shahed lookalikes distinguished mainly by a pair of forward canards. The Chinese intermediaries floated selling the production technology outright, and Ukrainian commanders liked the idea. But when the team came back ready to buy, the factory's management refused.

The intermediaries wanted the deal anyway. They offered to assemble the drones somewhere without export restrictions—and to train Ukrainian pilots. The team took the training. "We came there to teach pilots to fly Chinese drones," one member told Oboronka. "And in parallel with the training we photographed everything that was there. Everything from the production process to the arrangement of the shelves and cabinets." They flew home with trained pilots and eight Chinese drones.

Two years later, the Ukrainian version costs $48,000 in its basic configuration. The Chinese original costs $50,000. And according to the manufacturer, almost nothing of the Chinese drone survives in the MICH 2000 now except its outline.

Whittling down the bomber fleet

Ukrainian drones are slowly chipping away at the Tu-95 fleet. A 2022 drone raid badly damaged one of the lumbering turboprop bombers at Engels-2, potentially leaving no more than 51 intact Tu-95s in the Russian air force inventory at the time. Smuggling tiny explosive drones across Russia in trucks on 1 June, 2025, the SBU hit at least seven more Tu-95s as well as four Tu-22Ms, among other aircraft.

The 16 July raid is the more recent Ukrainian effort to shrink the Russian bomber force, but it surely won't be the last. The Russians' roughly 120 bombers—Tu-95s, Tu-22Ms and Tupolev Tu-160s—launch the cruise missiles that routinely blast Ukrainian cities and power plants.

Struggling to intercept all Russian deep strike munitions in the target zone, in part owing to a deepening shortage of the best air defense missiles, Ukrainian forces increasingly aim to prevent the Russian munitions from even launching—by smashing munitions factories or, yes, destroying irreplaceable bombers. Of the three Russian bomber types, just one—the Tu-160—is still in production, albeit at a rate of barely just one every year or two.

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Expect more MICH 2000 raids. The type's anonymous builder churns out 6,000 MICH 2000s a year but aims to boost output to 10,000 a year. And the firm customizes the drones to suit particular missions.

According to Oboronka, there are eight main versions. "Fighters can choose what kind of communication they need: analog, digital or Starlink. They can choose the warhead, the size of the fuel tank, the possibility of additional guidance." The navigation system can be made more jam-proof by adding additional jam-resistant controlled reception pattern antennas.

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Russia has figured out how to stop Ukraine’s most powerful missile

Drone strikes by MICH 2000s and other drone types aren't the only ways Ukrainian forces are trying to blunt Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and power plants. Ukrainian drone teams are also trying to take out the last five warships in the battered Russian Black Sea Fleet that can fire Kalibr cruise missiles.

On 11 August, drones struck at least three of the ships in the port of Novorossiysk in southern Russia. The frigates Admiral Essen and Admiral Makarov and the corvette Bykov all suffered visible damage.

Russia has been shooting down most of Ukraine's best long-range cruise missiles as fast as Ukraine can launch them. Just one or two of the $500,000 Fire Point FP-5 Flamingo missiles have hit their targets in recent weeks.

That means Russian air defenses are working for now. Whether they'll continue to work is the critical question for Ukrainian strike planners.

Under the cover of darkness on 6 August, the Ukrainian army's 19th Missile Brigade launched at least three of the six-ton, jet-propelled Flamingos toward Tyumen Oblast in western Siberia. The missiles traveled around 2,500 km before disappearing, according to mapper AMK Mapping.

The apparent shoot-downs capped a difficult week for Ukraine's deep strike campaign. AMK Mapping claimed the Russians shot down 10 of 11 launched Flamingos since 1 July. That count is one mapper's, based on open-source tracking, and no official Ukrainian or Russian figures exist to check it against.

The mapper may be off by one. Between 24 and 25 July, at least one Flamingo struck the Vyatka Machine-Building Enterprise Avitek missile plant in Kirov Oblast 1,300 km from the border with Ukraine. Michael Bohnert, an analyst with the RAND think tank in California, concluded that two Flamingos hit the plant, causing visible damage.

It was a potentially powerful blow. Among other things, Avitek produces parts for the Tor medium-range surface-to-air missile system. Slowing Tor production "will have the most impact," Bohnert explained. And the Ukrainian system that a Tor slowdown might benefit the most is ... the Flamingo.

After all, the Tor is one of the air defense systems the Russians could use to shoot down Flamingos. "Any slow-down in the production of these could greatly improve the prospects of FP-5 performance over time," Bohnert noted.

Aerial defenses

At present, however, it seems that the Flamingo's biggest problem is in the air, not on the ground. Russia is shooting down most of the incoming FP-5s because it has eyes in the sky.

The Russian air force's fleet of lumbering Beriev A-50U radar early-warning planes now has one mission and one mission only: the A-50Us with their fuselage-mounted radars patrol over the likeliest flight paths for Flamingos motoring into the Russian interior to strike strategic industries.

The A-50Us are effective in the role. As recently as June, more Flamingos were getting through Russian defenses. Between 9 and 10 June, the 19th Missile Brigade launched five Flamingos at the VNIIR-Progress electronics plant in Cheboksary, in western Russia, 960 km from the Ukraine border.

Two missiles struck the plant, punching right through anti-drone protections and inflicting major blast and fire damage with their 1,150-kg warheads, the biggest on any Ukrainian deep strike munition.

Russia adapted fast. On 4 July, an A-50U helped missile batteries on the ground spot and shoot down five FP-5s flying toward Votkinsk, 1,360 km from Ukraine. From its perch thousands of feet in the air, the A-50U has a much longer detection range against low targets than any radar on the ground can manage.

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Targeting A-50Us on the ground and in the air in a series of drone and missile ambushes, the Ukrainians have destroyed two A-50Us and damaged at least two others, reducing the fleet to no more than five. Russia has no way to build replacements. But those five planes are now fully committed to the anti-Flamingo fight.

On 7 July, the Russians reportedly launched four of the irreplaceable planes at the same time in order to coordinate the Flamingo shoot-downs. Now, almost all Flamingos go down in flames before they reach their targets.

Ukraine isn't powerless. Fire Point has been working hard to improve the Flamingo and make it harder to shoot down. Perhaps most importantly, it seems the company tweaked the missile's altimeter in order to help it fly lower. The lower a missile flies, the better chance it has of hiding among the radar clutter created by surrounding terrain.

But if a lower-flying Flamingo is harder to shoot down, the improvement hasn't yet registered in the statistics. For now, Russia has figured out how to take out almost all of Ukraine's heaviest deep-strike missiles.

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Russia is running out of its best eyes in the sky

Russian troops are slowly marching toward and around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last two big free cities in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast.

The Russians have a standard playbook for taking a Ukrainian city, and running it means doing two things at the same time. Along the nearly 100-km Kramatorsk front, they don't have the infantry to do both at once. Every time a Ukrainian brigade holds somewhere, the Russians have to move men to cover it—and something stalls somewhere else.

That strategy is simple in concept but difficult in practice. The idea is for Russian forces to advance along a city's under-protected flanks in order to put pressure on the main supply lines of the city's garrison. As the flank attacks squeeze the garrison's logistics, Russian infiltrators slip into the city, hoping to create a lodgement for follow-on forces.

The final assault through that lodgement comes late in the campaign, after the Ukrainians are already weakened by a lack of supplies.

The strategy only works when the troops on the flanks and those in the middle work together. The former squeezes. The latter infiltrates. The problem for the Russian Center Group of Forces on the Kramatorsk front is that it's not squeezing and infiltrating at the same time. That delays the overall Russian advance and buys time for Ukrainian forces to dig in, reinforce, and hope for a miracle.

"Russian offensive planning at the operational level remains disciplined," mapper and analyst Vitaly explained. But only "on paper," Vitaly added. "Groupings are sequenced, axes are assigned, objectives are staggered."

"What the discipline is not is well-manned," the mapper wrote.

Vitaly reads one recent Russian adaptation as evidence of the shortfall rather than of cleverness. "I read the shift to two- and three-man infiltration teams on motorcycles and ATVs as less a sign of tactical innovation than of a manpower deficit that organization is straining to hide," he wrote.

Manpower shortages

Ukraine's manpower problems are well-known. Fewer observers appreciate that Russia struggles, too. Yes, the Russians still recruit around 30,000 fresh troops every month. In theory, that's enough new manpower to replace monthly losses.

But replacing casualties is not the same as resourcing a strategy. Ukraine's commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi put the Russian force in Ukraine at 721,300 at the end of June—a gain of only around 11,000 since late 2025, against Russian losses he estimated at 30,000 to 35,000 a month. Contract recruitment collapsed in the spring, falling by a third year on year, and Ukraine's foreign intelligence service counted 195,000 contract recruits by early July against an annual target of 409,000.

A Russian general, speaking anonymously to the investigative outlet IStories, put the requirement more starkly. To capture the rest of the Ukrainian-held Donbas, he said Russia would need to replace at least 55,000 to 60,000 casualties every month—roughly double what it recruits. That figure rests on a single unnamed source and should be weighed accordingly. But it describes the same gap Vitaly sees on the map.

When a Ukrainian brigade defeats one attack anywhere along the Kramatorsk front, it may compel Russian regiments to shuffle troops between units in order to quickly replace the losses. The shuffle may sap the combat power of a flanking or infiltration unit working along some other section of the front.

A weak flanking unit may not be able to keep up the pressure on enemy supply lines, perhaps imperiling the adjacent infiltration unit as it probes for the gaps in Ukrainian defenses that the flankers were supposed to help create. By the same token, weak infiltrators may find gaps in Ukrainian defenses, but fail to secure a lodgement—effectively wasting the efforts of the adjacent flankers.

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Russia is assaulting the gateway to Sloviansk. Ukraine’s 81st Brigade is holding it nearly alone

"That gap keeps producing the same effect," Vitaly explained. The Ukrainian armed forces' "ability to hold separate sections of the front independently forces Russian formations to compensate for each other's failures, and that compensation creates new stalls."

Vitaly gave a name to the effect, and was careful about what he was not claiming. "I call it structural deterrence—not deterrence in the conventional sense, and not a doctrine, but the byproduct of asking an undermanned army to keep a sequenced plan on schedule."

A byproduct is not a defense, and it holds only as long as the Ukrainians can keep producing it. That requires synchronization of their own. Supplies and reinforcements must arrive when and where they're most badly needed. Air and artillery support should shift from sector to sector depending on the urgency of the local garrisons' needs.

All that is to say, the lack of synchronization that has slowed the Russians' march on Kramatorsk could eventually speed up the Russians' march—if and when the Ukrainians are the ones struggling to synchronize.

It's worth noting that the Russians aren't advancing fast toward Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, but they are advancing—especially from the northeast.

The Russians may not be perfectly synchronized. But they're clearly synchronized enough to grind toward the last free cities in Donetsk. Just very, very slowly.

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Can Ukrainian forces save Sloviansk and Kramatorsk?

For years, Russian troops probed the Ukrainian garrison at Mykolaivka in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, sending in small teams of infiltrators for the defenders to hunt down. On 29 July, they stopped probing. "The Russians have begun an assault on Mykolaivka from the east," observer Thorkill reported, citing the local Ukrainian Telegram channel nikolaevka_online.

Russian assault groups are attacking the apartment blocks along the town's eastern edge. Mykolaivka sits 8 km east of Sloviansk, one of just two big free cities in Donetsk Oblast, and taking it is the precondition for any Russian siege of the city. "The situation is deteriorating," nikolaevka_online warned.

Mykolaivka is "the eastern gateway to Sloviansk," according to mapper Clément Molin. The Russian offensive in Donetsk aims to lay siege to and ultimately capture Sloviansk and neighboring Kramatorsk, which together are still home to nearly 100,000 people despite hundreds of thousands of others having fled.

A Ukrainian garrison anchored by the 81st Airmobile Brigade has defended Mykolaivka for years. But the garrison has been struggling to interdict every team of Russian infiltrators—and now the infiltrators have company.

The sector is an exception to a mostly frozen front. Russian troops captured 106 square km of Ukrainian territory in July, according to the Blackbird Group—the fastest Russian advance since January, but a fifth of what the Russians seized in July 2025. Blackbird reads the figure as evidence Russia has largely exhausted its offensive options; in June, Russian forces lost 9 square km on net. The slow average along the 1,200 km gray zone belies much faster movement in a handful of sectors, and east of Sloviansk is one of them.

Expect a long, hard fight in and around the ruins of Mykolaivka. "It is highly unlikely that the battle for Sloviansk will begin this year, not least because the fighting in Mykolaivka is likely to be prolonged," Molin explained.

Tough terrain

The geography is difficult for both the defenders and the attackers. The Donets Canal, which abuts Mykolaivka on the west, "aids the Ukrainian defense just as much as it facilitates the Russian offensive," Molin noted. To reinforce the 81st Airmobile Brigade in and around Mykolaivka, Ukrainian troops must cross the canal while under Russian fire. "Massing troops there is a highly complex undertaking," Molin warned.

But the Russian army will face the same challenge if and when it marches through Mykolaivka. "Crossing the canal, particularly around the Sloviansk power plant and its network of waterways, will come at a very high cost, especially given the extensive fortifications the Ukrainians have built in the area over recent months," according to Molin.

In other words, the 81st Airmobile Brigade has fallback positions on the near side of the Donets Canal. If the brigade can't hold Mykolaivka, maybe it can hold the canal—and delay if not halt further Russian advances toward Sloviansk.

The Ukrainians would prefer to hold in Mykolaivka, of course. But it's looking increasingly dire. The Russians appear to be accumulating in the seasonal homes, or "dachas," on the northeastern outskirts of Mykolaivka. "It is difficult to say at this point how many Russian soldiers have infiltrated there," Thorkill wrote. "However, their very presence has forced the command of the 81st Air Assault Brigade—responsible for the city's defense—to secure with patrols."

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Can Ukrainian forces save Sloviansk and Kramatorsk?

The Ukrainian brigade is trying to build a wall of infantry and drones between the dachas and a key road intersection that can carry defenders and attackers across central Mykolaivka.

But the 81st Airmobile Brigade is outnumbered, probably badly so. For the first two years of the wider war, the brigade could count on help from the 54th Mechanized Brigade, which clung to the 81st Airmobile Brigade's right flank.

While the 54th Mechanized Brigade still registers on many maps of the gray zone, in fact it's barely there. "Various snippets of information indicate that the 54th Mechanized Brigade—longtime right-flank neighbor of the 81st Brigade—was completely withdrawn from the front between June and July 2024 and sent to the deep rear," Thorkill wrote. East of Sloviansk, "only its drone group remained."

"The unit had long been a brigade in name only," Thorkill noted. So the 81st Airmobile Brigade fights mostly alone, for now—defending the gateway to Sloviansk.

Frustrated by Ukrainian electronic warfare, Russia transformed its drone arsenal to be harder—or impossible—to jam.

Most of Russia's tiny first-person-view drones now send and receive signals via jam-proof fiber optic cable instead of wireless radio. For heavier one-way attack drones that travel too far for fiber optics, the Russians have mostly switched to jam-resistant mesh radio networks made up of many interconnected senders and receivers.

In both cases, China is key. Chinese companies sell Russian companies the optical fibers and mesh modems that the Russians install in their drones. In other words, Beijing is the critical enabler in Moscow's ongoing aerial aggression.

That's the unsurprising yet sobering conclusion that Tatarigami, the founder of the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group, reached in a recent investigation.

It's not enough for Ukrainian forces to shoot down or otherwise defend against Russian drones, or to fight back with their own drones. To win the drone war, Ukraine and its allies must "step up pressure on Chinese manufacturers," Tatarigami wrote.

As the drone war over Ukraine ramped up in 2022 and 2023, most Russian FPVs were wireless models. And most heavier one-way attack drones navigated via satellite. Both classes of drone could be jammed. A cottage industry of Ukrainian electronic warfare producers sprung up. Each firm offered some variation of a radio noisemaker that can ground or misdirect wireless and satellite-guided drones.

The jamming worked. Combined with kinetic defenses—guns and missiles—and add-on protections such as mesh, cages and netting, the jamming blunted the impact of Russia's drone arsenal. But the Russians adapted. The turning point came in the spring of 2025, when Russia's elite Rubicon Center drone group led the counterattack against Ukrainian troops occupying parts of Kursk Oblast in western Russia.

Rubicon's fiber optic FPVs wreaked havoc on Ukrainian forces in the Kursk salient, damaging or destroying hundreds of trucks and other vehicles in the span of a few weeks. Starving for supplies and in danger of being cut off, the Ukrainians retreated.

But the Russian adaptation was just beginning. The Russians are now launching 10,000 FPVs a day. And in certain key sectors, 60% of the FPVs were fiber optic models, according to Tatarigami. The Ukrainians can shoot down these drones and block them with armor, nets and earthworks. They can also strike at the Russian FPV teams before the Russians can launch their FPVs.

But there's one thing the Ukrainians can't do: they can't jam the drones.

Unjammable drones

Jamming continued to work against many one-way attack drones that must travel hundreds or even thousands of kilometers—too far for optical fiber. Another turning point came in February, when Elon Musk's Starlink bricked Russia's thousands of smuggled and stolen satellite terminals, some of which Russian forces used to control the approximately 5,000 Geran attack drones they launch every month.

The Starlink shutdown compelled Russian developers to accelerate the transformation of the one-way attack drone force. "Russia's second adaptation was mesh networking, routing data through mesh modems to keep communications alive across both short and long-range drones," Tatarigami explained.

It's possible to jam a mesh radio network, but it's hard. Every drone in a given network is a node. It's not enough to jam a few of them; you have to jam all of them.

If there's a constraint on Russia's switch to fiber optics and mesh networks, it's that Russian industry can't produce all the necessary hardware. "Unable to meet domestic demand, Russia turned to China," Tatarigami wrote.

The Washington Post reported Chinese optical fiber shipments to Russia growing from 119,000 miles in May 2025 to 328,000 miles that August. China sent Ukraine 72 miles the same month. For mesh networking, the Russians came to depend on XK-F358 modems from China's Shenzhen Xingkai Technology.

Ukraine's overstretched air defenses can't shoot down every Russian attack drone. Ukrainian troops and vehicle crews can't hide from 10,000 Russian FPVs a day. To defeat Russia's jam-proof drones, Ukraine and its allies must cut off the supply of Chinese parts, Tatarigami stressed.

They should extend export controls to modem-makers and producers of optical fiber, reels for the fiber and equipment associated with fiber production. "The recommendation is to expand sanctions beyond individual firms to the entire supply chain," Tatarigami advised.

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Some Ukrainian bomber drones aren’t carrying bombs anymore. They’re carrying robots.

Ukraine's latest deep strike drone is one of a kind. The Triada Robotics Bravo features a "blended wing body" design that's rarely seen on a drone. The special platform maximizes lift and minimizes drag, helping the drone fly farther for a given speed and payload than a conventional "tube and wing" drone can do.

A stubby jet drone appeared fleetingly in a video shot from the ground during a strike on the Ufa refinery cluster in Bashkortostan on 2 August, more than 1,700 km from the Ukrainian border. Ukrainian forces hit the three Bashneft plants at Ufa on 1, 2, and 5 August.

No official body has identified the aircraft in the footage. Online observers compared the silhouette to the American F-117 Nighthawk; the outline is also consistent with the renders Triada publishes of the Bravo. The clip runs a few tenths of a second.

Everything that has reached that deep into Russia until now has been propeller-driven, plodding along at less than 200 km/hr. A jet Bravo cruising at 600 km/hr covers the same 1,700 km in under three hours instead of nine and a half. That is the difference between an air defense network with all morning to work out where a drone is going and one with a couple of hours.

Exactly what the drone in the video was aiming for, and whether it struck its target, is unclear. But that's not stopping Russian observers from panicking. "Shooting down a drone is practically impossible," one Russian blogger moaned.

It's untrue. Motoring along at 600 km/hr—Triada claims around 800 km/hr in the final phase of flight—the jet-propelled Bravo is neither the fastest Ukrainian deep strike munition nor the slowest. If Russian air defenses can take down 950 km/hr Fire Point FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles, they can take down Bravos, too. Detecting one is a separate question: Triada says the Bravo's composite airframe reduces its radar cross-section.

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But invulnerability surely wasn't the main goal when Kyiv-based Triada Robotics designed the Bravo over the past couple of years. Efficiency was the objective. Which is probably why the firm chose the blended-wing-body arrangement for the one-way explosive drone, which it lists at around 174,000 euros—roughly $200,000.

The blended shape "provides many different aerodynamic benefits over conventional aircraft design," Oliver Johnson and Sam Dakka wrote in a 2019 article in International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics and Aerospace.

Most drones, like most manned aircraft, have the same layout: a tube-shaped body and separate wings jutting from the body. These tube-and-wing aircraft are the easiest to conceptualize and the most straightforward to assemble, as the fuselage and wing can be built independently and attached during production.

The problem is drag, especially at the junctures between body and wing. A draggier airframe suffers a range and speed penalty compared to a less draggy airframe.

Alternative shapes

There are alternatives to tubes and wings. Flying wing aircraft such as the US Air Force's B-2 and B-21 stealth bombers, both built by Northrop Grumman, are all wing—and have neither an identifiable fuselage nor horizontal or vertical stabilizers. They look like boomerangs.

At subsonic speed, that shape is less draggy than a tube and wing shape is, and thus more efficient for long-range flight. At the same time, a flying wing's lack of sharp angles reduces its radar reflectivity. In short, it can be very stealthy and hard to detect on radar.

The downside of a flying wing is that it's unstable and requires sophisticated flight controls to keep it in the air.

A blended wing body shape is a kind of compromise between a flying wing design and a tube and wing design. There's a fuselage and a wing and stabilizers, but the fuselage and wing blend into each other. A blended wing body isn't as stealthy as a flying wing is, but it's easier to control.

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And it's still less draggy than a tube-and-wing type. "The improvements increase the overall lift to drag ratio providing a higher performance aircraft saving 27% fuel burn per passenger mile that of the modern conventional configuration," Johnson and Dakka wrote.

That benefit is apparent in the Bravo's performance specifications. The drone reportedly ranges 2,000 km with a warhead of 100 to 200 kg and AI-assisted targeting, flying as high as 5,000 m. It's unclear how the Bravo navigates, but it's probably via some combination of satellite and inertial systems.

It's an impressive set of stats. A $50,000, propeller-driven Fire Point FP-1 ranges slightly farther—2,300 km—but the FP-1 cruises at just 180 km/hr and packs a 60-kg warhead. The Bravo is more than three times as fast and carries at least half again as much explosive, and possibly triple, while still flying far enough to reach deep inside Russia.

Yes, the Bravo costs four times as much as the FP-1 does, probably in part because of the jet propulsion, but that could change if Triada Robotics can scale up production. Co-founder Artem Veselov has said the company aims for a first pre-series batch of 100 by the end of the year. For now, the Bravo is a rarity. But it may become much more common in the sky over Russia in the coming months.

It's possible Ukrainian forces launched a new type of ballistic missile at Moscow on 1 July. The apparent Ukrainian missile, which air defenses reportedly shot down over the Russian capital, is a harbinger of things to come.

Ukraine is developing several new ballistic missiles with the range to reach Moscow, 500 km from the border with Ukraine. If and when they begin raining down on Russian cities, gas facilities, factories and refineries, Russia may have to change the way it fights.

The Russians might have to aim their best S-400 air defense batteries into the sky, instead of aiming them at the ground. For Ukraine, that could mean some respite from relentless Russian missile strikes. After all, S-400s doubling as surface-to-surface munitions are in the mix most nights when Russia bombards Ukraine.

"Ballistic missiles force a different problem on Russia," wrote Michael Bohnert, an analyst for California think tank RAND.

The coming shift comes down to speed. Where one-way attack drones and many cruise missiles are slow—often motoring along at just a few hundred kilometers an hour—and are thus fairly easy to shoot down, ballistic missiles are fast.

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Ukraine’s ballistic missile may have reached Moscow. The damage wasn’t the point.

They're all supersonic, traveling at least the speed of sound. Heavier ballistic missiles may even be hypersonic. That is, capable of reaching five times the speed of sound.

The same air defenses that swat down incoming drones can't stop ballistic missiles. Only the best air defenses stand any chance of hitting an incoming ballistic missile. Ukraine's main defense against Russian ballistic missiles is its six or so US-made Patriot batteries; for Russia, the main defense against the coming Ukrainian ballistics will be the roughly 50 S-400 batteries.

Keenly aware of the deep strike dynamics, the Russians are pivoting away from easy-to-kill drones toward hard-to-kill ballistics. This is a serious problem for Ukrainian air defenses, which are desperately short of missiles for their Patriot batteries owing to the Americans' reluctance to sell or donate missiles. US forces are struggling with their own air defense shortfalls resulting from the on-again, off-again war with Iran.

In one wave of Russian attacks on 6 July, Ukrainian air defenses shot down 326 out of 351 incoming Geran drones and 37 of 39 incoming subsonic cruise missiles. But the Russians also launched six supersonic anti-ship missiles and 23 ballistic missiles. Every single one got through, wreaking havoc across Kyiv. At least 22 people died in the capital and the surrounding oblast, and 90 more were injured.

Deep strike disparity

At present, Ukraine can't match these strikes. Yes, the Ukrainians can launch lots of one-way attack drones. In fact, far more drones than Russia can launch. And the Ukrainians also have a reliable subsonic cruise missile in the form of the Fire Point FP-5. But Ukraine doesn't yet have a fully operational ballistic missile in the class of the Russian Iskander or S-400 (in its surface strike mode).

That's about to change, of course. The apparent 1 July ballistic missile strike targeting Moscow was just a preview of a wider Ukrainian campaign. Fire Point co-founder and chief engineer Denys Shtilierman has circulated what he claimed was test footage of a new ballistic missile, possibly the 855-km FP-9, and hinted that strikes on Russian soil could begin soon.

Soon has a season attached to it now. Fire Point CEO Iryna Terekh told The War Zone the company is casting the FP-9's solid-fuel engine—4.6 tons of propellant, more than four times what the smaller FP-7 carries—and that everything else on the missile is finished. "It's the last touch on the engine, and we are ready to start," she said, putting the first test launch in the autumn. Shtilierman told interviewer Dmytro Gordon on 27 July that strikes on Russia could begin as early as this autumn, too.

If FP-9s begin bombarding Moscow, Russian commanders might not have the luxury of using many, or any, of their S-400s for surface strikes.

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Every month, Russian industry produces approximately 40 missiles for S-400s batteries. If Ukraine can fling a few dozen FP-9s or similar missiles at Russian targets every month, Russia would have to devote its entire S-400 capability to air defense just to blunt the bombardment. After all, it usually takes several missiles in the class of a Patriot or S-400 to hit one incoming ballistic missile.

"Russia would have to choose," Bohnert wrote. Either "keep using the S-400 as a strike weapon and accept that hardened targets get hit, or return the system to its designed air-defense role."

If the Russians choose protection, they'll have somewhat fewer ballistic missiles to fling at Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. That should take some pressure off Ukraine's own overstretched air defenses.

A doomed Russian tank assault on 22 July along the southern approaches to the twin cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last big free cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, was ultimately a sideshow. The Russians’ main effort, in their long and bloody campaign to capture all of Donetsk, is playing out in the north, not the south. 

The front northeast of Sloviansk “has been the most successful for the Russian army throughout 2026,” mapper Clément Molin noted. 

The bad news for Ukraine is that its forces in the area—parts of six brigades including the 53rd, 54th and 63rd Mechanized Brigades and the 81st Air Mobile Brigade and the 117th and 120th Territorial Defense Brigades—are “insufficient,” according to Molin. 

Worse, relentless Russian bombardment of the roads and paths leading to and through Sloviansk means the Ukrainians may struggle to sustain any additional brigades in the area. Assuming there are any free brigades, of course.

The bombardment is intensifying. On 31 July, a Russian warplane struck the Sloviansk Chemical Plant, deep inside the city, with a 1,500-kg KAB-1500 precision glide bomb. “The city has come under increasingly heavy attacks in recent days,” AMK Mapping noted.

But the same difficult terrain, crisscrossed by the Donets Canal and dense Ukrainian fortifications, complicates Russian attacks. There are few protected approaches toward Sloviansk from the Russians’ main bases in the ruins of Siversk, 31 km to the east. And one big town town stands between the Russians and the free city: Mykolaivka.

And the Ukrainians are bombarding Russian supply lines with the same intensity that the Russians are bombarding Ukrainian supply line. It’s for those reasons that Molin expects the Russians to eventually lay siege to Sloviansk and neighboring Kramatorsk from the northeast.

But not anytime soon. “It is highly unlikely that the battle for Sloviansk will begin this year, not least because the fighting in Mykolaivka is likely to be prolonged,” Molin predicted.

Crawling advance

The slow pace of the Russian advance belies the worsening conditions in Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. Out of a combined pre-war population of around 440,000, just 90,000 people remain in the twin cities. The other 350,000 have fled.  

As the cities slowly empty, all eyes turn to the tiny village of Rai-Oleksandrivka, 14 km east of Sloviansk. “This small village, seemingly insignificant at first glance, is actually of strategic importance, as the surrounding high ground overlooks the city of Sloviansk,” Molin explained. 

“In recent weeks, Russian forces have been consolidating their hold on the village and the surrounding heights, even though Ukrainian troops still maintain positions in many areas,” Molin wrote. 

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Russian forces are already relentlessly bombarding Ukrainian supply lines in the area with air-launched glide bombs. As Russian ground forces advance closer to Sloviansk and consolidate along key heights such as those around Rai-Oleksandrivka, they can begin aiming more tube artillery at the same supply lines, compounding the Ukrainians’ logistical problems. 

The coming battle is neither won nor lost yet. But time is running out for Ukrainian forces to reset the battlefield in their favor. 

If the Ukrainian command can prioritize the front, and push enough supplies to front-line positions, it might yet save Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. As Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky completes his reshuffle of key civilian and military leaders and a new command, that command’s attention “must shift to the Donbas,” Molin stressed.

The authors of a new Ukrainian war-crimes framework say the line between a Russian targeting error and a deliberate method may not matter in law: a repeated failure to spare civilians can itself be a violation, whoever the missile was meant for. That goes further than their own report, published last week.

“An isolated targeting error and a method of conducting attacks are not mutually exclusive alternatives, nor is an error necessarily exculpatory,” Volodymyr Hryshko, deputy head of the legal department at Truth Hounds, told Euromaidan Press.

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Contents

• Precision missiles hit the coordinates. Investigators ask who was still standing there
  1. Error and method are not the only options
  2. The evidence that would settle it
  3. What the framework asks
  4. Precision missiles hit the coordinates. Investigators ask who was still standing there
  5. Russian soldiers execute seven civilians in Pokrovsk after being refused alcohol
  6. Life sentence for Russian who executed Ukrainian POW exposes stark asymmetry in prisoner treatment

Precision missiles hit the coordinates. Investigators ask who was still standing there

International law obliges an attacker to verify a target and to break off if it changes or the civilian cost turns excessive. Skip that, over and over, and “a recurring failure to take such feasible precautions may itself constitute a violation, regardless of whether civilian harm was specifically intended.”

The report calls this a “moving target attack”: the weapon cannot be recalled, and the target can move, disperse, or be warned before it lands. Russia’s standard defense—that a precise hit proves a lawful target—does not, the authors argue, survive that gap.

“A recurring failure to take such feasible precautions may itself constitute a violation, regardless of whether civilian harm was specifically intended.”

Volodymyr Hryshko

Error and method are not the only options

The report found a war crime in only one of its four cases—Kramatorsk, 27 June 2023, a Russian cruise missile into a pizzeria that killed 13 people, among them the novelist Victoria Amelina, who had left fiction to document Russian war crimes for Truth Hounds itself. The other three it left unresolved, and those are the ones Euromaidan Press asked about.

The four strikes are hard to read as simple accidents, said Maria Burnett, senior legal coordinator at Project Expedite Justice. Soldiers were present in each case—off duty, or at a scheduled meeting, or at an exhibition—but a temporary presence, the report argues, did not strip these places of protection.

Russian forces used precision weapons despite long gaps between the last intelligence and impact, she said, so “the risk that the target would move or disperse, while civilians remained exposed, was entirely foreseeable.” Doing it repeatedly “suggests a willingness to proceed without reliable control over whether the military objective would still be present when the missile arrived.”

The evidence that would settle it

Nothing in the open yet proves “an officially directed policy or deliberate method across the Russian armed forces,” Burnett said.

What would prove it is inside the targeting chain—the intelligence before each strike and when it was last checked, the choice of warhead, the launch order, the legal advice, the after-action report—and none of that is public. Orders or testimony from the people involved, she said, would show whether the strikes were “individual failures, a tolerated operational practice, or a formally approved policy.”

What the framework asks

The recommendations run to the International Criminal Court, the ICRC, the UN human rights office, and courts acting under universal jurisdiction: treat the interval between launch and impact as evidence, and stop reading precision as proof that a strike was lawful.

But the orders and targeting files that would prove method over error sit inside the Russian military, within reach only of investigators who can compel them. Truth Hounds is trying to build those cases on a shrinking budget—it lost the American money that had covered a third of it, and has laid off staff and shelved an archiving project.

Friday evening, 19:00, they met again. The crowd wasn't uniform: students, pensioners, whole families who'd come with small children, couples. A five-year-old girl in fluffy earmuffs held her own cardboard protest sign. A few soldiers among them. Several hundred people, loose across the steps beneath the Shevchenko monument, the poet's bronze hand open above them.

The mood was quiet, more communion than fury, people just standing together in the fading light. The signs were as diverse as the attendees. One sign, in green marker with a row of red hearts, read "Mykhailo Vasyliovych, we believe in you!!!" Another, block letters on brown card: "Fedorov is our Minister of Defense." A third, held high near the scaffolding: "Fedorov, minister of victory." The child's placard read simply: "My first placard."

Protests like this have been ongoing in cities across Ukraine since 16 July, amid President Zelenskyy's Cabinet shakeup that had the popular defense minister fired. Participants want Mykhailo Fedorov reinstated and say they will stay until their demand is granted.

Fedorov is not a career soldier: he built Ukraine's Diia digital-state platform and, as digital-transformation minister, drove the drone-procurement push that turned cheap unmanned systems into the country's most-used weapon against Russia's invasion. To the people on the square he is the man who stands for winning the war with technology rather than with bodies—and his removal, after barely six months at the ministry, landed as that bet being called off.

A year ago the same kind of crowd defended institutions: the anti-corruption bureau and prosecutor's office, when the government moved to strip their independence. This time the placards carry one man's surname. The instrument is the same; what it is pointed at has narrowed from a rule to a person.

That 2025 anti-corruption protest

Contents

• They came. They cussed. They won.
• The demand, and the reason behind it
  • “They removed the auditor, not the thieves”: why Ukrainians are protesting Zelenskyy’s reshuffle
• Blogger-driven outrage and media bombshells
• Why the protests went open-ended
  • The Syrskyi feud was not it: why Ukraine really dropped its drone-war minister
• A soldier, and a philosopher, dissent
• Is this Euromaidan?
  • Ukraine’s defense minister explained how the country buys weapons—after he was sacked

They came. They cussed. They won.

What a passerby would not have guessed is that no one on the square could say who had called it. The rally assembles by loudspeaker and group chat—a woman with a megaphone naming the next time to gather, a Telegram channel filling in the rest.

Kyiv-based Zinaida Averina, who helped launch last year's anti-corruption protests, says this wave has no single leader or even a single group of organizers: each local initiative, she wrote, plugs in and syncs "small pieces" into one shared wave. In the middle of a full-scale war, in roughly twenty cities, Ukrainians are holding open-ended nightly rallies that no party organized and no leader directs.

The demand, and the reason behind it

Protesters in Lviv began the open-ended rallies on 24 July. "The main demand is the appointment of Fedorov as minister of defense," said Dmytro, 24, who described the dismissal as a violation of a social contract. "This has become a systemic problem when the entire Cabinet of Ministers is dismissed without any explanation given to us."

The crowds made two demands: remove Oleksandr Syrskyi as commander-in-chief, and bring Fedorov back. The first was met within days—Syrskyi was dismissed and replaced by the more popular Mykhailo Drapatyi. The second was refused.

Iryna, 23, said she felt a violation of reciprocity between citizen and state. "Through documentation, taxes, and declarations, we are always accountable to the state, but the state is not as accountable to us as it should be," she said. She had chosen to stay in Ukraine when she could have left abroad as a refugee, she said, and wanted transparency in how personnel decisions are made.

What almost no Gen-Z on the square could say precisely was what, exactly, was being done wrong—only that something was. It is the same barometer that worked a year ago: most of the anti-corruption protesters could not have explained what the bureau adjudicates, but they knew corruption was being shielded, and they acted the only way they knew.

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Blogger-driven outrage and media bombshells

In many countries, the media struggle to get Gen Zs interested in politics. In Ukraine, bloggers fill that niche. Media activist and volunteer Serhii Sternenko has spent the protest days explaining the firing to a Gen-Z audience—one stream making the case against Syrskyi drew more than 842,000 views.

What they sense, and what Sternenko names for them, is an old-army culture—"sovok," in the protest's own shorthand—of loyalty over competence and lives spent cheaply, against the newer Ukraine Fedorov stood for. Fedorov, in this telling, was pushed out for trying to change it.

The sensing rests on something real. In late June the outlet Babel published a two-month investigation into the 425th "Skelia" assault regiment, reporting at least 25 non-combat deaths of recruits in training over roughly six months—a toll that has since risen past 30 as more families came forward—with accounts of beatings and torture and official causes recorded as illness. State investigators, police, the military prosecutor and the ombudsman have opened proceedings, and the regiment's commander has been suspended. Syrskyi has called it a shameful situation and blamed individual offenders. Sternenko calls it a systemic pattern—a characterization the investigations have not established.

Why the protests went open-ended

The escalation on 24 July followed the president's decision not to nominate Fedorov. "As long as necessary, we will keep coming out until the government hears us," said Yevheniia Kupriienko, 23.

Andrii, 23, rated the government's transparency at one out of ten and said protesters want parliament to act as an independent institution rather than a rubber stamp: "decisions cannot be made by one person in the country without any commentary or communication with the people."

The man at the center of it describes something more tangled than the chant. In an interview on 29 July, Fedorov said the main reason for his removal was not the clash with Syrskyi at all. Reshaping defense procurement and tenders, he said, "stepped on the interests of many people and companies," after which pressure on his team built through the spring. He called the government's collapse a possible "screen" for his dismissal, and said he never fought for the post and would have gone quietly had someone simply explained why.

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The Syrskyi feud was not it: why Ukraine really dropped its drone-war minister

Even the adulation makes him uneasy. His wife, Anastasia, called the frenzy around him a "sick cult of personality." The crowd chanted his name at a Kyiv music festival anyway, his face on the big screen. The man the movement is built around, and the person closest to him, are both declining the icon it has made of him.

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A soldier, and a philosopher, dissent

Andrii said he had come to stand up for the voices of Ukraine's soldiers. One serviceman passing by did not recognize himself in that description. "I know neither Drapatyi nor Fedorov. I can talk about my company commander or battalion commander," he said. He questioned how civilians, and young women in particular, could judge how senior officials are appointed, and said of the leadership: "They have big brains, they know what they are doing."

His doubt is not only his. It is the worry named this week by the philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko, president of PEN Ukraine: that the tech dream the protesters chant for is real but incomplete, and that there is no alternative to massive military mobilization. "Without technology we won't win the war, but with technology alone we won't win it either. We still need people," he said. A street that senses correctly that something is wrong, in his account, is a reliable alarm—not a mechanism for choosing who runs the war.

Yet other soldiers support the protests. Veteran Dmytro Koziatynskyi, one of the Kyiv protest initiators, sparked a march "for dialogue in reform" held on vul. Khreshchatyk on 31 July. He demands Zelenskyy give Fedorov a year to conduct reforms and then "make decisions based on results."

The predictable counter-narratives have arrived too: claims that the rallies are paid, which Fedorov himself has rejected. Ukraine's disinformation center has also flagged Russian attempts to exploit the moment abroad. None of it touches the crowds on Ukraine's own squares.

Is this Euromaidan?

The comparison to the Euromaidan Revolution, in which the Russian-aligned president Yanukovych fled in the winter of 2014 after three months of protests against a rejected EU Association agreement, comes up constantly, and the protesters do not agree on it. One participant argued the mechanism is the same even if the scale is not: "No matter who the president is, if he doesn't listen, that was Yanukovych's mistake."

The serviceman rejected the comparison entirely. In 2013 the choice was between the European Union and Russia, and Russia's response to that choice produced the war Ukraine is now fighting. The present situation—a fired minister—is a different matter entirely, he said.

Halyna, 88, who watched the Euromaidan Revolution from Lviv while her son was in Kyiv, said the two are not comparable in intensity. "In 2013, the Euromaidan was such that I can't even describe it to you," she said. "Well, now the protests are not like that. People are just relaxing."

She supports them anyway. People are tired of lies and tired of a war Russia forced on them, she said, and the worst of it is that young people are dying with no end in sight. She wants to live long enough to see Ukraine at peace and left alone. Whether the rallies continue, she did not know. "I think the clock is ticking."

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Ukraine’s defense minister explained how the country buys weapons—after he was sacked

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Russia's rarest armored fighting vehicle (AFV) just broke cover for the first time this year. The heavily armed BMP-T Terminator is back! Just don't expect it to make much, or any, difference on the ground in Ukraine.

The BMP-T exists to escort tanks and shoot up the infantry ambushers who hunt them. The problem for the 90th Tank Division, the sole confirmed user of the 48-ton, five-person vehicle, is that infantry ambushes are rare these days. The main threats to Russian tanks are mines and drones. And to mines and drones, the BMP-T is just another target.

A photo circulated online recently depicting a BMP-T with add-on anti-drone protection. It's one of just 20 or so the Russian vehicle-maker Uralvagonzavod has ever produced for the Russian army. That makes it one of the rarest fighting vehicles in an army with tens of thousands of tanks, BMP-2s and BMP-3s and other AFVs.

The BMP-T is special. It's not as well-armed or well-protected as a tank, but it's better-armed and better-protected than a standard BMP infantry carrier. With its small turret cradling twin 2A42 30-mm cannons firing 300-g shells at a rate of around 200 rounds a minute, the BMP-T can lay down a lot of firepower.

"The most important thing is to support the tanks," a BMP-T commander told the Russian state newspaper Izvestia. That emphasis on tank support is why the BMP-T doesn't carry infantry passengers, unlike other BMP models that are primarily infantry carriers.

Ukrainian forces have destroyed or damaged several BMP-Ts since the type first rolled into action no later than early 2023. Late last year, Uralvagonzavod produced a small batch of new BMP-Ts to complement the initial batch of 12 vehicles.

Don't expect many more BMP-Ts to roll off the factory floor. It's not that Uralvagonzavod isn't hard at work. The factory is churning out hundreds of new T-90M and T-72B3M tanks every year, complementing the thousands of older tanks that Russian forces have pulled out of long-term storage for refurbishment, upgrade and further use.

The ongoing production and restoration, combined with a sharp reduction in Russian vehicular attacks in Ukraine, have allowed the Kremlin to make good heavy losses in Ukraine, and then some. Russian forces have lost no fewer than 14,000 AFVs in 53 months of wider war. But Russian industry has built or restored ... at least 14,000 replacement AFVs.

De-mechanization

All that is to say, Russia's war on Ukraine de-mechanized the Russian army. But then the army re-mechanized by redoubling production and mostly pausing mechanized attacks in favor of infantry-led assaults across the drone-patrolled, mine-infested gray zone.

Exactly what the Russians are saving all those vehicles for is unclear. Maybe they're preserving them for some future conflict. Or maybe they're just waiting for more favorable conditions along the 1,200-km gray zone threading across eastern and southern Ukraine.

Those conditions may never come as Ukraine deploys more drones and lays more mines. The same unit that operates the BMP-Ts, the 90th Tank Division, learned this the hard way on 22 July. Perhaps sensing that the terrain around Shakhove in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast was too rough for infantry traveling on foot, the 90th Tank Division and elements of the 8th and 41st Combined Arms Armies attacked with armored vehicles for the first time in months.

A clutch of upgraded T-72B3A tanks with Arena-M anti-drone defenses led the attack. The Arena-M uses radar to detect incoming enemy munitions and then fires tiny projectiles at the munitions from an array of 12 launchers. The Arena-M works against small drones, but it's useless once it fires all 12 projectiles. To knock out the T-72B3As near Shakhove on 22 July, all the Ukrainians had to do was launch more than 12 drones per tank.

The BMP-T doesn't have active protections in the class of the Arena-M. It would've been even more vulnerable to drones, and even more useless in the doomed assault near Shakhove. The Russians have settled on two vehicle types as they rebuild their mechanized forces: tanks for leading assaults and BMPs for carrying infantry behind the tanks.

Where does the BMP-T fit in this construct? The infrequency with which BMP-Ts have appeared anywhere near the gray zone in the past year is the strongest sign that the fast-firing vehicles don't fit anywhere. They're vanishingly rare because they're increasingly useless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russia's cheap Gerbera drones are getting a little more expensive—and a lot more capable. And that's bad news for Ukrainian forces as both sides in Russia's 53-month wider war on Ukraine escalate their attacks on the enemy's logistics.

The upgrade is AI-assisted targeting, and it gives the $10,000 Gerbera the same machine vision Russia put on its far pricier Geran strike drones. In the same way Ukrainian drone units are relentlessly bombarding Russian supply lines with their AI-assisted "middle strike" drones, Russian drone units can now bombard Ukrainian supply lines, potentially weakening Ukrainian units before Russian units even make contact with them.

In recent days, the first Gerberas have appeared with AI-assisted targeting. It's the same "Seeker" modification the Russians recently added to their long-range Geran attack drones—Russia's licensed copy of the Iranian Shahed-136: forward-looking cameras feeding a Raspberry Pi microcomputer that runs machine vision software.

On the Gerans, the operator picks out a target—a truck, a locomotive—from around a kilometer away and locks the drone onto it. From there the machine vision flies the rest of the run, holding the lock through the Ukrainian jamming that would otherwise break the operator's radio link in the final seconds. Russia has standardized the guidance, communications and navigation components across the Gerbera Seeker and the Geran Seeker, the Hudson Institute reported on 29 July, so the 18-kg Gerbera should finish its attacks the same way. The Gerbera Seeker also picks up an inertial navigation unit and a jam-resistant Kometa-M satellite antenna carried over from the Geran-2.

Greater autonomy via the Seeker mod helps the propeller-driven, plywood-and-foam Gerberas strike more widely within their range of up to 600 km—less when they're carrying a warhead. As it happens, 600 km is just enough to hold at risk all the main supply lines for Ukraine's front-line brigades and regiments. Russian crews have already been hunting Ukrainian trains with cruder versions of the same idea.

Ukraine's Defense Intelligence says Russian robotic-warfare formations have been tasked with striking fuel stations and civilian vehicles—trucks, buses and passenger cars—in front-line and border areas, with the Gerbera Seeker among the systems earmarked for the job, according to the same Hudson assessment.

Decoys, scouts and relays

The Gerbera wasn't always an AI attack drone. The Chinese-designed, Russian-manufactured drone—Ukraine's Defense Intelligence names the developer as the Chinese model-aircraft maker Skywalker Technology Co., Ltd., which ships kits and Chinese components to the Alabuga plant for assembly—started out as a decoy for bigger, pricier drones. Where a Geran might cost between $50,000 and $100,000 depending on the exact model and its features, a Gerbera is priced to move at just $10,000 or so.

Before launching Gerans, the Russians would send in Gerberas in order to distract Ukrainian air defenses and force them to expend their limited supply of ammunition. Gerberas can function as simple reconnaissance systems, relaying video back to their operators. It's likely the Gerans also serve as relays in mesh radio networks, passing radio signals back and forth on behalf of a wider wave of drones.

Transforming a basic Gerbera into a Seeker Gerbera adds cost and weight. At tens of dollars per unit, a Raspberry Pi isn't exactly expensive. It's unclear how much the warhead and software cost, however. In any event, a Seeker Gerbera is still much cheaper than a Seeker Geran is. Adding Seeker Gerberas could allow the Russians to focus their Seeker Gerans at the toughest and most distant targets: ships and port infrastructure, for example.

Low cost is a prerequisite for saturation middle strikes across the logistical zone. The targets—trucks, trains, warehouses and depots—are numerous, after all. Ukrainian drone units launch hundreds of middle strike drones every day, many of them with AI targeting. The defense ministry in Kyiv hopes to expand the strikes by procuring 100,000 middle strike drones for 2027.

The Seeker Gerbera could help Russia begin to catch up.

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If the Russians do indeed scale up Seeker Gerbera raids, the Ukrainians may have to counter the drones the same way the Russians counter Ukraine's own middle strike drones. The Russians spread their supply vehicles along more secondary roads and also attach air defense gun teams to more convoys. The same tactics could blunt Seeker Gerbera attacks.

Ukrainian investigators have published a framework that challenges Russia’s standard justification for missile strikes on civilian places: that a precision weapon hit a legitimate military target. Precision settles nothing, they argue, when the missile takes 10 minutes or more to arrive, and the target is a gathering of people who can leave, disperse, or be warned before it lands.

The report, titled “Out of Control” and published on 28 July by the documentation group Truth Hounds and Project Expedite Justice, builds the argument on four strikes and calls the pattern a “moving target attack.”

The report reaches a war crime conclusion for only one of the four—the 2023 strike on a Kramatorsk cafe. The other three are offered as variations on the same problem, not as verdicts. The framework itself is new: a test the authors want courts and investigators to apply to a kind of attack that existing law, they say, has addressed without enough rigor.

A missile can hit its programmed coordinates exactly and still land where no military objective remains.

The two hours before the pizzeria

The diagnostic case is the strike on the Ria Lounge cafe in central Kramatorsk on 27 June 2023, which killed 13 people and injured 60. A Russian informant last watched the site at around 17:00. The missile arrived at 19:29, after a flight of nine to 15 minutes. In the interval, no one on the Russian side could see who was inside, and once the missile was launched, no one could call it back.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had destroyed a temporary command post of the 56th Motorized Infantry Brigade, killing two generals, up to 50 officers, and up to 20 foreign mercenaries.

The evidence describes an ordinary pizza restaurant instead: 40 to 50 customers, around half civilians and half off-duty soldiers in mixed dress, unarmed, out with friends and family. A basement room had been booked a month ahead for an officer’s birthday. No one outside could tell the place was military.

The missile struck the public level. The basement that Russia said it was aiming at came through essentially intact. Of the 13 killed, two were serving soldiers. Among the dead was Victoria Amelina, a novelist who had retrained as a war crimes documenter and worked with Truth Hounds itself. The organization concluded in 2023 that the strike was a war crime in the form of an indiscriminate attack under the Rome Statute.

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The gap the weapon leaves open

The framework turns that single case into a test. A moving target attack, as the authors define it, combines three features: a military rationale resting on a temporary presence of personnel, a location of civilian character where civilians are foreseeably present, and a weapon whose flight time is long enough that the situation on the ground can change before impact.

A missile can hit its programmed coordinates exactly and still land where no military objective remains.

The authors selected three further strikes that met the same criteria and examined them through open sources.

In Vinnytsia on 14 July 2022, the report finds, three Kalibr missiles killed 29 people, including three children and five servicemen, and wounded at least 154. Russia said the target was a scheduled Air Force command meeting. The air raid alert sounded at 10:12; the missiles hit at 10:41, about 40 to 50 minutes after launch.

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In Zlatopil on 4 July 2023, the report documents, a missile landed 800 meters from a serviceman’s funeral, in a residential area, wounding 42 civilians including 12 children. Organizers had asked mourners to shelter from the heat about 10 minutes earlier, leaving the square nearly empty.

In Chernihiv on 19 August 2023, a missile fitted with a proximity fuse detonated in the air above the Drama Theatre, where NGOs were running a defense-tech exhibition inside. All seven people killed were outside the building.

For these three, the report states that the evidence does not support conclusions equivalent to Kramatorsk.

What the report asks investigators to do

The recommendations run to the International Criminal Court, the ICRC, the UN human rights office, and prosecutors working under universal jurisdiction.

They ask that the launch-to-impact interval be treated as a working indicator, that technical precision no longer be read as evidence that a strike was lawful, and that the presence of soldiers in a civilian place not be taken to strip it of protection.

One question the report raises and declines to settle is whether the four strikes are a run of targeting failures or a method. Answering it needs orders and targeting packages that only investigators with coercive powers can reach—at a moment when Truth Hounds is working on a budget cut by a third after the US withdrew funding, Reuters reported in May.

The Ukrainian National Guard has found a new way to speed armored robots to the front line. Instead of building all its 'bots from scratch, the 2nd National Guard Corps "Khartiia" has converted at least one old American-designed M113 armored personnel carrier into a big, capacious unmanned vehicle.

If it works, and there's no reason to think it won't, the robotic M113 could become common in Ukrainian service. After all, allies have shipped Ukraine at least 1,729 M113s and vehicles built on the same chassis over the course of the war, making it one of the most numerous Western armored types in Ukrainian service.

The Khartiia Corps took one of its 12-ton M113s, added external cameras, control servos, and a radio-based command system and fitted it with anti-drone armor and a front-mounted mine flail. "Re-equipped by the engineers of Khartiia, it performs missions involving remote de-mining and logistics, allowing the operator to control the armored personnel carrier from a remote control unit," the corps stated.

Ukrainian forces use thousands of small unmanned ground vehicles. Some carry guns into battle. Others haul supplies or speed injured troops from the gray zone to field hospitals. Most of these UGVs are purpose-made models with wheeled or tracked chassis and remote control systems based on line-of-sight, mesh or satellite radio, or fiber-optic cable.

The purpose-made UGVs tend to be small, lightweight, and limited in range. They might weigh a couple hundred kilograms, range a few tens of kilometers and cost $10,000. The small size, light weight, and limited range might not be a major constraint on a UGV whose main mission is, say, speeding a single wounded infantryman away from his front-line fighting position along a road or path.

But clearing mines or other obstacles is a whole other matter. Mine-clearing plows, rollers, or flails might weigh tons. The vehicle carrying the mine-clearing gear must be able to withstand the blasts from any mines it triggers. Clearing mined roads and fields leading to and across the disputed gray zone is tedious work requiring greater endurance and cross-country mobility than a small, under-torqued UGV can manage under battery power.

It's not for no reason that most existing Ukrainian mine-clearing vehicles are big, heavily armored, and powerful. They include American-made Assault Breachers, German-made Wisents and an array of ex-Soviet engineering vehicles. The problem, of course, is that these vehicles are manned. And their crews are exposed to extreme danger while inching along mined roads and fields within range of Russian drones and artillery.

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Attritable vehicles

In fitting a diesel-powered, aluminum-armored M113 for remote operation, the Khartia Corps has removed the most vulnerable component of the best mine-clearing systems: the people. Now the corps can clear mines without worrying about losing precious manpower. If the M113 gets blown up, just add servos and radios to another one of the M113s still in the Ukrainian inventory.

It's such a good idea that more than one army has tried it. The US Army, which still owns tens of thousands of the 1960s-vintage M113s, has experimented with several types of unmanned M113. One essayist, writing for an official US Army blog, urged the American ground combat branch to convert M113s into unmanned "breaching" vehicles.

"Obsolete M113s can be repurposed to deliver massed unmanned assaults to reduce the enemy’s strongest defenses," Jason Flores Rutledge wrote. "Turning obsolete vehicles into remotely-operated machines can save money and lives."

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Best of all, the basic equipment that transforms a manned M113 into an unmanned M113 is platform agnostic. That is, it should work just fine on almost any vehicle, as Rutledge noted. "As the Army runs out of M113s, subsequent generations of Armored Fighting Vehicles could be automated as they approach obsolescence."

With refinement and scaling, Ukrainian forces could produce reliable, inexpensive kits for converting an array of wheeled and tracked vehicles into robots. Tanks and infantry fighting vehicles with manually loaded main guns and complex fire control systems might not be eligible for conversion. But engineering vehicles, supply vehicles, and ambulances should be first in line.

Think of manned-to-unmanned vehicle conversions as an expedient. In a bid to reduce risk to their most precious resource, their soldiers, Ukrainian forces have already contracted more than 22,000 domestically built UGVs so far this year—nearly double the total for all of 2025—with more contracts still coming, the Defense Ministry reported. They could add thousands of vehicles to that total by converting M113s and other (currently) manned vehicles.

The Ukrainian navy's tiny fleet of donated Westland Sea King helicopters appears to have a new mission: hunting Russian Geran drones.

Aviation reporter H.I. Sutton was the first to note the new mission, when he spotted a specially equipped Sea King on the ground at the Farnborough Air Show in the United Kingdom this week.

The 1970s-vintage Sea King had new equipment: an under-fuselage railing for small interceptor drones. Ukrainian forces use the inexpensive interceptors to chase down and take down Russia's Geran one-way attack drones. Some of the remote-controlled interceptors feature A.I.-assisted targeting and pack tiny explosive charges. Others are strictly manually controlled and knock down their targets through the sheer force of impact.

Regardless of the details of their designs, interceptors costing just a few thousand dollars apiece have helped Ukrainian air defenders blunt the impact of the thousands of Gerans, drones modeled after Iranian-made Shaheds, that Russia launches at Ukrainian cities every month. Air defenders typically take out around 90% of incoming Gerans.

But interceptor drones come with limitations. They're powered by batteries that exhaust themselves after just a few minutes of flight. And they are prone to being blinded by bad weather and low clouds. To prolong the interceptors' flights and get them above the rain and clouds, Ukrainian forces have begun using manned aircraft to loft the interceptors into the air before launching them.

The Sea King, it seems, is Ukraine's latest interceptor drone carrier. While the helicopter Sutton spotted at Farnborough was unmarked, it's likely one of six Sea Kings Germany has donated to the Ukrainian war effort. The United Kingdom previously donated three surplus Sea Kings to Ukraine. The Ukrainian navy's sole helicopter unit, the 10th Naval Aviation Brigade, reportedly operates the Ukrainian Sea Kings.

Before now, it seems the Ukrainian Sea Kings strictly flew coastal search and rescue flights in support of Ukrainian ground and naval forces. But there's an obvious need for more air defenses over the Ukrainian coast. Sea Kings hauling interceptor drones under their bellies, and the drones' operators in their cabins, could be just the thing.

Geran killer

The threat: A.I.-assisted Geran drones. Shortly after Ukrainian drone forces began targeting the tankers, dry cargo ships and auxiliaries belonging to the unregistered "shadow fleet," Russian forces retaliated, launching cruise missiles and Gerans at grain ships and infrastructure in Odesa and other ports in southern Ukraine. Over weeks of near-daily port strikes, Russian missiles and drones have repeatedly hit grain carriers and terminals; the deadliest, a cruise-missile strike on the bulk carrier Golden Leo on 19 July, killed 10 of its crew.

An interceptor drone flying around 350 km/h is too slow to hit a cruise missile flying 900 km/h, but all but the fastest jet-powered Gerans are within the targeting envelope of all but the slowest interceptor drones. The problem, of course, is battery life and weather. To stand the greatest chance of hitting the most Gerans, the interceptors should launch from around a thousand meters in the air.

The Sea King is an old helicopter. But it's also reliable, cheap to operate and capacious. A solid platform for drone launches.

And it's part of a widening trend. This spring, Ukrainian forces armed an Antonov An-28 light turboprop transport with interceptor drones, complementing the An-28's existing side-firing gun and giving the lumbering transport great reach during its drone hunts.

As a drone platform, the An-28 apparently works. Well enough, in fact, that Russian forces have copied the concept. A recent video depicts two old Russian warplanes getting the fittings for aerial interceptor drone launch: a Yakovlev Yak-52 turboprop trainer and an Antonov An-2 piston-powered transport.

Like the Ukrainians do, the Russians hang drones under the planes' wings and seat the drones' operators inside the cabin or cockpit. All aerial drone platforms require add-on radios and antennae to connect the seated operators to their interceptors so that the operators can see what the drones see, and steer them to a hit.

If the Sea Kings also work well as drone platforms (and there's no reason they shouldn't), the Ukrainians may well extend the concept to other airframes. Any helicopter, transport or trainer with a reasonable payload and some space in the cabin or cockpit is eligible.

The Sea King is the latest Ukrainian drone hunter, but it's probably not the last.

Overeager to break through Ukrainian defenses and march on the city of Kramatorsk from the south, the Russian Center Group of Forces got desperate and sloppy this week. They paid for their desperation and sloppiness in lives and metal. The tanks were carrying a brand-new anti-drone shield, and they had left the welded scrap metal at home.

That combination is the news. For more than a year, Russian commanders have kept their armor off the roads because Ukrainian drones kill tanks faster than factories can rebuild them. The Arena-M active protection system is the fix that was supposed to let the tanks come back—reliable enough, the Kremlin's own press said 10 days ago, to make the improvised cages unnecessary. This week it went out on a road in Donetsk Oblast without them.

On and around 23 July, the Russians rolled tanks along the road through the village of Pankivka, roughly 36 km southwest of Kramatorsk and its twin free city of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast. Ukrainian drones spotted the tanks coming, and attacked.

When the smoke and dust cleared, the Russians had lost at least 9 tanks. Ukrainian tank kills were already running hot: the general staff in Kyiv claimed Ukrainian forces took out 28 Russian tanks across the 1,200-km gray zone in the two days before, 21–22 July. "It was a good day," wrote Dimko Zhluktenko, a soldier with the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces' 413th Regiment.

The mechanized assault was unusual for its rarity. For more than a year now, the Russian army of occupation in Ukraine has mostly parked its armored vehicles, and instead attacked on foot or on motorcycles or other light vehicles. The pause in mechanized assaults has bought time for the Kremlin to ramp up vehicle production and bring battered regiments and brigades back to up to their full allotment of tanks and other armored vehicles.

But those vehicles aren't necessarily being used in Ukraine. Ukrainian tiny explosive drones are everywhere all the time, and Russian forces have few ways of reliably defeating them. Russian commanders correctly concluded that small groups of infantry stand a better chance of slipping past Ukraine's undermanned defenses than big, easy-to-detect tanks do.

Infantry infiltrations work. They're how Russian assault groups have ground their way into the city of Kostiantynivka, 24 km southeast of Kramatorsk. Moscow claimed the city on 3 July. Ukraine's general staff says it still holds it. And infiltration is how the Russians are gradually creeping around the city of Lyman, 21 km northeast of Sloviansk. The infiltrations are slowly closing a vice around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last free big cities in Donetsk Oblast.

Costly attacks

But the infantry action is costly. The Kremlin recruits around 30,000 fresh troops every month but, if the Ukrainian general staff's tallies of killed and wounded are accurate, loses roughly that many troops every month. Ukraine is desperately short of infantry. Russia isn't nearly as desperate, but that doesn't mean it's got infantry to spare.

Last month, analyst Jompy predicted that if infantry casualties spiked or recruitment slipped, Russian commanders "could also be forced to go back to mechanized warfare." That may be why the Center Group of Forces pivoted back to tank-led assaults in their south-to-north push toward Kramatorsk.

The shield that replaced the scrap metal

Without so-called "active defenses" that can shoot down incoming drones, "it is currently very easy to throw a tank battalion into [an] assault and lose it all without achieving anything," analyst Jakub Janovsky explained. The Arena-M is Russia's answer. It uses a Doppler radar to spot incoming rockets, missiles, and drones, and 12 launchers ringed around the turret fire tiny charges meant to shred the threat a few meters out.

Twelve is the whole magazine. And the system does not run itself: the commander switches it on when reconnaissance or a drone detector warns him, the Russian state newspaper Izvestia reported on 13 July, in a dispatch from a training range where crews of the Center grouping's 90th Tank Division were learning the new machines.

That dispatch is worth reading for what the reporter noticed was missing. No turtle armor. No tsar-mangal. No dreads, no cages, no hedgehogs—none of the welded scrap the Russian army has bolted onto its armor for two years. A company commander told Izvestia the system had shown high effectiveness against drones on the range, and that the tanks would reach the line of contact within days. Russian industry has been calling the Arena-M the first system in the world able to protect armor from FPV drones and loitering munitions. Israel's Rafael announced drone-interception upgrades to its Trophy system in January 2025.

Ten days later the tanks were on the road, without the cages, and Ukrainian drones found them. Footage published by Ukraine's border guards and by the National Guard's Omega unit shows a T-72B3A taking a hit to the rear, then two more drones finishing it. A second tank—this one wearing a conventional mangal cage—was leading it and was immobilized too. Both Russian answers to the drone problem were on that road. Neither one came off it.

What the shield actually did is contested, and the argument is worth following. One Russian armor specialist watching the video saw no reaction at all—countermeasures still sitting in their launchers, no attempt to engage. Observer Matt Drew, watching the same footage, read it the other way: a puff of smoke off the turret in the opening seconds, an explosion to the side, and several drone feeds that cut out before reaching the tank—which is what an interception looks like from the drone's camera. Only after the tanks were disabled and abandoned could the drones close in and linger, and it took bomber drones to finish the hulks. "Probably not the success the Russians were hoping for," Drew wrote, "but it definitely worked for a while."

A while is the problem. Twelve charges is a finite number and Ukrainian drone crews do not attack in twelves. A shield that intercepts the first drones and runs dry against the tenth turns a tank into a slower target, not a surviving one. And the latest push toward Kramatorsk failed.

That doesn't mean Kramatorsk and Sloviansk are safe. Hurling tens of thousands of troops and, occasionally, a few armored vehicles against Ukrainian defenses, the Russian Center Group of Forces is making very, very slow progress toward the twin cities from both the south and the north.

But every assault the Ukrainians defeat delays the day when Kramatorsk and Sloviansk come under direct siege and infiltration. The cities are most vulnerable from the north around Lyman, mapper Clément Molin noted. "The current situation is not very good for Ukraine in this direction."

At the current rate of advance, the Russians may be able to slip their first infiltrators into Sloviansk from the north some time next year, Molin concluded.

Sometime late last year, some enterprising Ukrainian volunteers mounted a 7.62-millimeter minigun to the port fuselage hatch of an Antonov An-28 turboprop transport—and went hunting for Russian Shahed attack drones.

Months later, in April, the same crew added much heavier armament to their Shahed-killing gunship—in the form of inexpensive interceptor drones hanging from the old transport's wings. Interceptor drones normally launch from the ground before slamming into their Russian targets. But low clouds can blind them. Launching from an airborne An-28 means the interceptors can get above the clouds—and continue their hunt in all but the worst weather.

It's such a good idea that Russian forces have copied it. A new video that circulated online depicts Russian aircrew arming an Antonov An-2 biplane and a Yakovlev Yak-52 turboprop training plane with underwing interceptor drones. The Ukrainians also use Yak-52s for air defense against drones, albeit with a gun-armed shooter in the back seat.

The An-2 was designed in the 1940s. It cruises at barely 250 km/hr. The 1970s-vintage Yak-52 is slightly faster at 285 km/hr. But both types are stable and maneuverable and cheap to operate. They may not be able to take down the highest and fastest aerial targets, but they don't have to. They're for the lower, slower targets.

In other words, the An-2s and Yak-52s complement surface-to-air missiles and missile-armed fighters. They don't replace them. "This is the low-cost way if providing area air defense," wrote Michael Bohnert, an analyst with the California think tank RAND.

The interceptor drones hanging under the An-2 and Yak-52's wings function as inexpensive air-to-air missiles, helping the old planes hit Ukrainian drones from potentially 10 km away or farther. The concept is simple. The biplane or trainer takes off, maneuvers between incoming Ukrainian drones and their target and launches its underwing interceptors, most likely one at a time.

A crew member in the cabin of the An-2 or the back seat of the Yak-52 sees what the interceptor sees on a handheld console, and steers the interceptor to a collision with a Ukrainian drone. Some interceptors drones have a small explosive payload, but they don't normally need it: the impact alone should take down a drone.

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Enviable concept

It's obvious why the Russians copied the Ukrainian gunship concept. Ukrainian drones struck no fewer than 1,000 Russian air defense systems and related facilities just between June and March, according to Ukrainian analysis group Tochnyii. The resulting gaps in Russian air defenses helped more Ukrainian drones reach strategic targets such as munitions factories and oil refineries.

Now the Ukrainians are launching more than 11,000 one-way attack drones a month at targets in occupied Ukraine and Russia itself, steadily bleeding the Russian war effort through thousands of pinpricks. Russia needs more air defenses, fast. The cheaper the better as it scrambles to replace destroyed missile batteries and plug gaps in the overall air defense network.

Old turboprop planes costing just a few thousand dollars and hour to fly, and carrying interceptor drones also costing just a few thousand dollars, are just the thing. An-2s and Yak-52s could fly over Moscow or other cities in western Russia, swatting down incoming Ukrainian drones and freeing up higher-end air defenses to focus on harder targets such as Ukraine's Fire Point FP-5 cruise missiles.

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Where a propeller-driven attack drone cruising at just 200 km/hr is vulnerable to an interceptor drone speeding along at 350 km/hr or faster, an FP-5 jetting along at 950 km/hr is too fast to intercept with a drone. It's not that the Russians can't shoot down an FP-5—they can and do—but it's apparent they usually do so with missiles costing hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece or more.

Those missiles are in increasingly short supply in Russia, just as they are in Ukraine. The Russians are keen to save them for the hardest targets. And that means taking down the easiest targets with something like an old transport plane lugging $2,000 interceptor drones.

The Russians' improvised gunships aren't foolproof, of course. Russian forces adapted to Ukrainian forces' gunships by acquiring more jet-propelled Shaheds that can outrun the gunships. The Ukrainians could adapt in the same way: adding more jet drones to their attack mix in order to thwart the Russian gunships.

A Crimean Tatar human rights movement has ended a decade of documenting political persecution in Russian-occupied Crimea, Crimean Solidarity said in its final statement. The status Russia imposed on it puts anyone connected to it at risk, from the lawyers named on the same list to people who simply pass its reports on. Its website and social media pages have stopped updating, and the movement plans to appeal.

Why it stopped

Russia's Justice Ministry entered Crimean Solidarity in its register of so-called "foreign agents" on 26 June 2026. That status changes neither the movement's values nor its goals, the activists said, but leaves no possibility of working in the earlier format. Every text they publish must now carry an 18+ marking and a block-capital disclaimer, which in occupied territory and Russia must sit above the text. That disclaimer opens administrative and then criminal cases against designated people and against whoever shares what they publish, the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group noted. With the label in place, the rights group said, no one who has had dealings with the movement is safe from prosecution.

"We have carefully studied the legislation and taken a joint decision to terminate the activities of our civic movement," the activists wrote on 21 July.

Eleven names, sentences up to 20 years

The ministry listed eleven Crimean Tatar lawyers, journalists, rights defenders, and activists alongside the movement. Among them are Server Mustafaiev, already a political prisoner, and journalist Lutfiye Zudiieva, designated separately in May 2025. Three well-known defense lawyers are on the list as well. Many of the movement's people are serving terms of up to 20 years, and Russian officers detained more than 20 of its men in a single raid on 27 March 2019.

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What the peninsula loses

For 10 years the movement supported families of the detained, arranged legal defense and put out material that often never reached the official agenda. Many of the people doing that work were themselves fined, held under administrative arrest or prosecuted.

"History shows that civic solidarity is not defined by state registers," the statement said.

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Tamila Tasheva, a Ukrainian lawmaker and former permanent representative of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, called the decision an act of pressure meant to isolate and discredit rights defenders. Hundreds of families of political prisoners and thousands of residents of occupied Crimea may now be left without legal support, she wrote on Facebook.

A decade under pressure

Crimean Solidarity took shape in 2016, after Russian forces stormed Crimean Tatar homes and jailed the human rights defender Emir-Usein Kuku along with three others. By 2017 the Russian FSB was fairly openly going after its civic journalists and activists. In August 2023, FSB officers searched Crimean Tatar homes and took several activists to the security service's office in Simferopol. Pressure on independent initiatives there has built up for years.

Crimean Tatars who stayed there could still become the backbone of resistance to the Russians when Crimea is liberated, Aider Rustemov, mufti of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, told ZN in an earlier interview.

Just days after landing robots on an enemy shore in the first all-robot amphibious assault, Ukrainian forces flew one into battle. This week, a Russian video circulated depicting a Ukrainian heavy bomber drone airlifting an explosives-laden unmanned ground vehicle into action.

What happened next is unclear. Did the exploding UGV successfully strike its target?

Regardless of the outcome, however, the unmanned air assault is notable. If Ukrainian forces can use an unmanned aerial vehicle to airlift one unmanned ground vehicle, they can do it a second time. And a third. And fourth. So on until these kinds of all-robot operations become routine.

And that's indeed the aim in Kyiv. To make robotic combat operations an everyday occurrence in order to help alleviate a deep and persistent manpower shortage. This spring, recently sacked Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov claimed Ukraine would acquire 25,000 UGVs in just the first six months of 2026.

That's twice as many UGVs as Kyiv bought in all of 2025. The rapid mass acquisition would allow more Ukrainian brigades to shift to robotic resupply missions, removing potentially thousands of precious human logisticians from dangerous roads.

But UGVs perform combat missions, too. Armed with guns, they help counterattack Russian infiltrators and also patrol roads inside the disputed gray zone. In November, one gun-armed UGV belonging to the Ukrainian 5th Assault Brigade, fighting north of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, inadvertently advanced UGV tactics in an accidental encounter with an up-armored Russian MT-LB infantry transport.

The UGV, equipped with thermal night vision and armed with a remotely operated M2 .50-caliber machine gun, was reportedly on a combat trial—crawling around the battlefield at nighttime for testing purposes—when an MT-LB rolled toward it on the same road.

Connected via radio, the UGV operators opened fire, peppering the tracked MT-LB with rounds until the Russian vehicle passed by—and escaped in the opposite direction.

One-way drones

Other Ukrainian UGVs are meant to fight exactly once. They're suicide bombers, hauling payloads of explosives into Russian strongpoints and blowing themselves up. Back in January, the Ukrainian 3rd Assault Brigade's NC-13 robotics unit piled a dozen TM-62 anti-tank mines, each with 7.5 kg of explosives, onto one of its UGVs and carefully steered the robot into a Russian bunker presumably somewhere south of the ruins of Kupiansk in eastern Ukraine's Kharkiv Oblast.

It made a very big boom. As seen in an official video, the NC-13 team broke into cheers when an escorting aerial drone registered the blast. The team had carefully assembled, painted, and deployed the robot apparently over a period of days before maneuvering it 19 km across rough terrain to deliver the explosive payload.

The recent robotic air assault addressed the mobility problem. A 19-km trip is a long trip for a remotely controlled vehicle that's susceptible to enemy radio jamming and prone to getting stuck in potholes. Airlifting a UGV underneath a heavy bomber drone gets the UGV into action faster and with less risk of a loss or accident en route.

A heavy bomber drone could just drop a bomb, of course. But a UGV can do something an aerial bomber can't do: drive straight through the open door of a Russian bunker regardless of how much protection the Russians pile atop the door.

The Ukrainians are finding more and more new ways to get their UGVs into action. On 13 July, the Ukrainian 123rd Territorial Defense Brigade sailed several unmanned surface vessels across the western Black Sea and landed gun-armed unmanned ground vehicles on the Kinburn Spit, at the westernmost edge of the Russian occupation zone in southern Ukraine.

The 123rd Territorial Defense Brigade released a video montage—shot by a USV, a UGV and an escorting UAV—depicting the UGV firing on a Russian installation with its suppressed .50-caliber machine gun.

It was an all-robot amphibious assault. "An impressive feat," RAND analyst Michael Bohnert wrote.

The later robotic airlift was no less impressive.

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Ukraine's drone force is walking a fine line as it escalates its attacks on Russia's unregistered commercial "shadow fleet" in the Sea of Azov and eastern Black Sea. The drone operators are trying to immobilize the ships without breaching their hulls and spilling fuel or crude oil into the water.

That fleet is a big piece of how Moscow keeps its war funded—the aging tankers move Russian oil around Western sanctions—which is why Ukraine's drones have spent the past two weeks hunting it across the Azov and Black seas at better than a dozen ships a day.

"The goal is not to pollute the sea with oil spills; therefore, there must be no hull breaches," wrote Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine's independent Unmanned Systems Forces.

Instead, Brovdi stressed, the objective is "irreversible paralysis of oil, fuel and cargo logistics operating around sanctions. Turn every self-propelled vessel into a drifting barge, blind and deaf."

To immobilize a ship without breaching its hull requires accuracy: the drone must strike the ship's superstructure or screws, and only its superstructure or screws. Hitting a ship, but hitting it along its biggest part—its hull—risks polluting the already fragile Black Sea ecosystem.

The Black Sea is home to many unique species. But the pollution and stress resulting from more than four years of naval warfare threatens to drive many of these species toward extinction. Scientists estimate tens of thousands of dolphins have died; others have fled to the Black Sea's southwestern edge in the hope of escaping the poison and noise.

Ukrainian commanders aim to throttle Russia's sea trade across the Sea of Azov and Black Sea and through the Bosporus Strait into the Mediterranean. But they hope to do it without further harming the ecosystem.

Balancing act

It's a difficult balancing act. Post-strike imagery from some of the 159 ships Ukrainian drones have struck, by Brovdi's count, since the countershipping campaign commenced on 6 July shows scorched or burning ships, but no oil slicks. Other imagery depicts oil in the water, however.

The clean hits point to skilled operators. Videos from the 12-day countershipping campaign depict remote-controlled Fire Point FP-1/2 drones maneuvering to strike the bulky sterns of dry-cargo ships and tankers, where crew and vital above-the-waterline systems are concentrated.

The targeting parameters have narrowed since the strikes commenced. "Initially, they fired at the crew in the wheelhouse—the vessel would be blinded, but the engine would still work, and the crews learned to steer from the wheelhouse using a compass and telephone," Russian political analyst Igor Dimitriev explained.

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"Then they started firing at the stern: after this, the vessel is left drifting or being towed, and the tugs are also knocked out. The crews usually survive. But a disabled stern is no less unusable, and it also takes up ship repair capacity, which is otherwise almost nonexistent."

There's a new complication in this fight for clean anti-ship strikes, however. Some recent videos of FP-1/2 strikes feature the telltale symbology of AI-assisted targeting. More and more Ukrainian deep-strike drones have on-board AI systems for automatically spotting pre-programmed target types—trucks, air defenses, ships, helicopters, whatever—and autonomously maneuvering for an accurate hit.

The main benefit of AI targeting is that it works even when Russian radio jamming scrambles a drone's connection to its remote human operator. The main downside is that AI is only as good as its training. And the AI targeting seems to be struggling when it comes to ships. A video of recent shipping strikes shows one AI guiding a drone to a strike on a tanker's hold, where the oil is.

The AI may be able to tell a ship from the surrounding water, but it may not be able to tell the best part of a ship to strike for a spill-free hit.

Yet. AI improves as its data set expands. More anti-ship strikes mean more data and better AI.

And, hopefully, more clean hits.

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Seven months after capturing the city of Siversk in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, Russian forces are inching toward their next objective on the hard road to the ultimate prize: Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the last two big free cities in Donetsk.

The Russians' advance around the city of Lyman, 20 km northeast of Siversk, is both bad news and good news for Ukraine. Yes, the Russians are closer to Lyman and thus closer to Sloviansk. But it's taken them far longer than anyone anticipated to close that gap. And time isn't necessarily on the Russians' side as Ukrainian drones strike deeper and harder.

Since marching through the ruins of Siversk in mid-December, Russian attacks have nudged the disputed gray zone halfway toward Lyman, 20 km to the west. "The current situation is not very good for Ukraine in this direction," mapper Clément Molin noted. Having captured Siversk and, earlier, Soledar and Bakhmut, Russian commanders "have a very good accumulation possibility," Molin pointed out. That is, they have plenty of urban bases where they can hide troops and equipment. It helps that the Russians have also captured disused mine complexes that can function as secure, largely drone-proof bases. "It is therefore easier to have troops ready for assault at any moment," Molin explained.

The Russians' goal, Molin concluded, is to march through or around Lyman, consolidate control over the town of Mykolaivka and nearby Rai Oleksandrivka, and begin heavily bombarding Ukrainian supply lines no later than the end of the year. That could position the Russians to assault Sloviansk in 2027.

The attacks on Ukrainian supply lines around Lyman are already intensifying, forcing the Ukrainian garrison to rely on unmanned ground vehicles for much of its resupply. Recall that the Russian bombardment of supply lines into Kostiantynivka forced that city's garrison to switch to robotic resupply, too. The switch was a harbinger of the eventual Ukrainian retreat from Kostiantynivka in recent weeks.

But the Russians aren't the only ones attacking the enemy's supply lines. This spring, at the urging of sacked former defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukrainian drone units intensified their strikes on Russian trucks, trains, and ships hauling supplies to front-line regiments and brigades.

Logistics squeeze

The Ukrainian counterlogistics "middle strikes" have been most successful in southern Ukraine, where Russian supply lines are longest, most exposed, and most fragile. But they're having an effect in eastern Ukraine, too.

Just not very quickly. Russian logistics in the east "are hit very hard," Molin observed, "but it's obviously not enough to slow the momentum." For now.

But there's a silver lining inside the storm clouds gathering over Lyman and Sloviansk. As recently as late last year, Russian commanders had planned to bypass Lyman from the north and south in order to form what mapper Vitaly called a "western claw"—one that could crush Lyman and then reach for Sloviansk as early as this year.

The stout Ukrainian defense of Lyman, coupled with targeted Ukrainian counterattacks north of the city, broke the claw. Now the Russians need to build a new one, and hope for a fresh opportunity to assault Sloviansk next year. Kramatorsk would be next.

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All that is to say, Ukrainian defenders in and around Lyman have bought time—time that Ukrainian drone units could use to escalate their counterlogistics campaign and weaken the grip of the new Russian claw forming around the city. Whether they can strike hard enough, and often enough, along the supply lines threading toward Siversk and the Lyman front to foil the Russians' 2027 plans is one of the most pressing questions of the war's 53rd month.

The drones can't stop the Russian advance on Lyman. But they can make it so slow, and so costly, that Sloviansk stays free into 2027 and beyond. On the evidence so far, that's the likeliest outcome.

Four months after Euromaidan Press first documented the drone siege of occupied Oleshky and neighboring communities, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and the Institute for the Study of War have independently confirmed the humanitarian crisis, major international outlets covered it, and the Pope has been informed. Yet interviews with residents, volunteers, and local officials indicate that conditions continue to deteriorate, with thousands of civilians trapped without food, medical care, or a safe way to leave.

International reports confirm the humanitarian catastrophe

Reports published by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and the Institute for the Study of War in late June and July 2026 point to a worsening humanitarian crisis in Russian-occupied Oleshky, where civilians face starvation as they remain trapped by drone attacks, landmines, and restrictions on movement.

On 25 June, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) called the situation in Oleshky and neighboring territories "desperate." Continuous first-person-view (FPV) drone attacks and extensive mine contamination have severely restricted the delivery of food, medical assistance and evacuations. Ukrainian authorities estimate that up to 6,000 civilians, including more than 180 children, remain in the occupied communities.

The mission documented at least 29 civilians killed and 54 injured in Oleshky and Hola Prystan in 2026 alone, most of them in attacks involving short-range drones.

"Frequent attacks by short-range drones and the presence of landmines are having devastating consequences for thousands of people in these communities," said Danielle Bell, Head of HRMMU. "People can't get out, food can't get in, and sick and injured are not getting the medical assistance they need."

HRMMU called for a local ceasefire to allow evacuations and the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Human Rights Watch reached similar conclusions. The organization documented severe shortages of food and medical care, the collapse of basic services, and constant danger from drones and landmines. Former residents said there was no organized evacuation route and that those leaving the occupied town had to pass through Russian military checkpoints before traveling through Russia and Belarus to reach Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Men who want to escape face a further trap: leaving in practice requires Russian travel documents, and applying for them, HRW found, funnels men straight to a military enlistment office. Compelling civilians in occupied territory to serve in the occupying power's forces is a war crime, the organization noted.

Human Rights Watch could not determine responsibility for individual drone strikes or the emplacement of specific mines in the area. The organization noted that Oleshky sits on the front line and has been subjected to sustained attacks by Ukrainian forces as well, and that it found credible indications Ukrainian forces may have used drones and mines on roads around the town. It said civilians wishing to leave are entitled to safe passage under international humanitarian law.

According to HRW, Russia, as the occupying power, is responsible for ensuring access to food, medical care, and humanitarian assistance.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) concluded that Russia is effectively blockading occupied Oleshky while failing to meet its obligations under international humanitarian law as an occupying power. The report mentioned that "the Russian military command deployed a detachment of penal recruits to Oleshky in early July, resulting in widespread abuses against the civilian population, including sexual assaults committed against women and minors."

On 15 July, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) reported that conditions "remain especially dire in the Russian-occupied frontline areas of Kherson region."

As of May 2026, around 6,000 residents, including approximately 200 children, remained in and around Oleshky and Hola Prystan, where witnesses described towns transformed into a combat zone. ODIHR also received accounts that Russian forces prevented residents from leaving Oleshky and used civilians to shield military positions.

The crisis in Oleshky and the surrounding areas has received growing attention in international media. The Washington Post described Oleshky as a town being slowly strangled under occupation, citing accounts from recently evacuated residents, and called the situation "unbelievably awful." Le Monde published a detailed report on the suffering of the civilians. The Times' dispatch is called Four years of horror in Ukraine's 'forgotten Bucha.'

Houses damaged by drones and artillery, Oleshky. July 2026. Photos provided by Ksenia Arkhipova.

Houses damaged by drones and artillery, Oleshky. July 2026. Photos provided by Ksenia Arkhipova.

Houses damaged by drones and artillery, Oleshky. July 2026. Photos provided by Ksenia Arkhipova.

On 16 July, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha raised the humanitarian situation in Oleshky and Hola Prystan during a meeting in Kyiv with the Vatican representative, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, stressing the urgent need for a humanitarian corridor to evacuate thousands of civilians. The same day, at a Vatican meeting of Nobel laureates, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk spoke about Russia's drone attacks on civilians in the Kherson region.

While the information blockade is broken, the siege continues.

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Reports from the ground

"Only one ambulance was able to leave Oleshky and come back since May 26," said Ksenia Arkhipova, the volunteer from Oleshky who helps to organize evacuation and speaks to the locals despite the problems with communication. "That's it. There is no food."

Arkhipova spoke to Euromaidan Press over the phone from her home in Ukrainian-controlled territory. According to her contacts in the occupied territories, the situation in the nearby villages has deteriorated dramatically. Civilians are reportedly killed while attempting to leave to buy food or bottled gas. Residents describe drones overhead that make leaving basements next to impossible.

These reports are confirmed by Oleshky Military Administration head Tetyana Hasanenko, also living in exile. She said that roads leading from villages farther from the Dnipro River, including Radensk, Chelburda, and Kostohryzove, have also become increasingly dangerous.

In Oleshky, the terror campaign is ongoing.

Three former residents speaking to their relatives have confirmed to Euromaidan Press that the newly arrived Russian military personnel are former convicts who loot and rob residents of the last food.

V., who recently escaped Oleshky and spoke to Euromaidan Press on the conditions of anonymity, said one man who lived alone was tortured to death in his basement; his neighbors found the body and managed to bury it. Others were beaten, and there are accounts of sexual violence, according to V.

The accounts were confirmed by Kherson's popular Telegram channel Kherson: Non Fake.

Posts appearing in the Oleshky community groups mentioned the robbery by former convicts. One post sought help for a dog "dying of hunger." The dog owner, who shared all the food with the pet, pleaded for evacuation.

"Now there is nothing left for people to eat," the post read.

According to Hasanenko, residents are on the brink of starvation. She described conditions in Oleshky as "hell on earth." She said the town's morgue had long been destroyed, around 100 bodies remained in the basement of the hospital for months because they could not be buried, and occupying authorities were preventing families from recovering the dead.

The reports point to the same conclusion: an urgent need for a humanitarian corridor to allow civilians to evacuate safely and humanitarian aid to reach those who remain.

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The Russian force in Ukraine has mostly parked its armored vehicles and shifted to infantry-led assaults across the drone-patrolled gray zone.

Which is why what happened on or just before 8 July is so bewildering. Despite Russian commanders concluding that vehicles are too easy for Ukraine's tiny first-person-view drones to find and strike, and despite a reported ban on Russian vehicular traffic on eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Ring Road, the Russian Center Group of Forces massed no fewer than 50 vehicles 12 km south of the gray zone stretching between Kostiantynivka and Toretske in Donetsk Oblast.

The outcome was predictable. Drones from the Ukrainian State Security Service's Ivan Franko Group detected and attacked the column of trucks, vans, cars, all-terrain vehicles, and motorcycles just south of the ring road near the village of Malynivka, an important base for Russian forces fighting in Donetsk Oblast. When the smoke and dust cleared, more than 50 vehicles had been hit and immobilized if not destroyed.

"Despite the ban on movement of cargo and military transport on the Donetsk Ring Road, IFG with a firm hand and drones that you donated 'detained' several violators," the Ivan Franko Group quipped.

It's unclear how many Russians were killed or wounded. But the Center Group of Forces clearly failed at whatever it was trying to achieve—and the assembly of the column, in daylight, within drone reach, is the puzzle. Russian commanders knew what the sky over the gray zone does to vehicles. They sent the column anyway.

It's possible the column was trying to reach the Donetsk Ring Road in order to turn west toward Toretske or east toward Kostiantynivka. Russian forces are attacking in both directions, aiming to break through Ukrainian defenses to open a path, any path, toward the twin free cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, 22 km north of Kostiantynivka.

Left or right?

Whether the Russians planned on investing those vehicles in a direct assault in either direction is anyone's guess. It's possible the column was merely transporting infantry closer to the gray zone, sparing them a long foot march ahead of a dangerous foot assault.

But it's also possible that, yes, the Russians meant to send the trucks, vans, cars, all-terrain vehicles, and motorcycles across the gray zone. Vehicular assaults are rare these days, but they still happen from time to time. They almost never succeed. There are just too many drones over and behind the gray zone.

Indeed, the vehicular kill zone is getting wider by the day as Ukraine deploys more and more drones for strikes on Russian supply lines at depths up to 200 km. The Ukrainian counterlogistics campaign that kicked off this spring has struck potentially thousands of Russian trucks as well as trains, bridges, and, more recently, cargo ships plying the Sea of Azov and Black Sea hauling critical war supplies.

The Russians are now adding anti-drone cages to some trucks and guarding the most important convoys and supply routes with gun-armed air defense teams. More convoys are taking back roads, hoping to escape the attention of the ever-present drones.

But these measures aren't working as more Ukrainian drones take flight, including $6,000 AI-assisted fixed-wing models and $500 first-person-view quadcopters with detachable wings for greater range. Scrutinizing official videos for evidence of drone strikes, mapper Clément Molin tallied 600 destroyed or damaged Russian cargo trucks in June and another 240 in just the first week of July.

Importantly, Molin only counted confirmed strikes. There are surely many others that don't leave behind clear, public video evidence.

The pace of strikes is increasing even as the Russians add anti-drone protections. There were 20 hits on Russian trucks every day in June, on average, and 34 hits every day in July. The strike near the Donetsk Ring Road occurred too late to be included in Molin's count. When he adds it, the daily average will be higher still.

All that is to say, more of occupied Ukraine is becoming steadily more hostile to Russian vehicles. Knowing that, why would the Russians line up 50 vehicles so close to the gray zone? On the evidence near Malynivka, they no longer have a good answer.

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Ukrainian drones are wreaking havoc on Russian ships sailing the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. But the Russians are waging their own war on shipping, sortieing the latest Geran drones to strike grain ships in Ukrainian ports.

The Geran-4 Seeker drones pummeling Ukrainian ports combine jet propulsion, mesh radio control, and machine-vision targeting run off a Raspberry Pi—the same $50-class hobbyist computer that schoolchildren use to build robots. They're the best one-way attack drones in the Russian inventory, and cause for concern in Kyiv as the dueling Ukrainian and Russian countershipping campaigns escalate.

On or just before 12 July, Geran-4s penetrated Ukrainian air defenses and targeted ships in the port of Chornomorsk, 20 km south of the larger port in Odesa in southern Ukraine.

Chornomorsk is one of three ports carrying the bulk of Ukraine's grain to market. Egypt, Algeria and Indonesia bought 62% of Ukraine's wheat last season—Egypt alone took more than a quarter of it. The ship the Geran-4s went for was carrying somebody's bread.

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This grain is vital to the Ukrainian economy and to the populations of food-poor countries. It's also a top target in Russia's ongoing terror campaign. The Geran-4s that reached Chornomorsk in recent days struck at least two grain ships with warheads weighing as much as 90 kg.

It's unclear how much damage the Geran-4s inflicted. What is clear is the difference in scale between the two campaigns. Since 6 July, Ukrainian one-way attack drones have struck 105 vessels belonging to Russia's unregistered "shadow fleet" on the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.

The shadow fleet hauls critical war supplies including fuel to Russian forces in occupied southern Ukraine, and also carries commercial goods—again including fuel—out of the Black Sea. Ukraine launched its countershipping campaign eight days ago, and has been striking the fleet at a rate of better than a dozen vessels a day since.

Different campaigns

The difference in scale is partially attributable to the Ukrainian command and control advantage. Ukraine still has access to Starlink satellite terminals. Russia doesn't. To navigate to a Ukrainian port through intensive Ukrainian electronic warfare, Russian drones need redundant communications and terminal autonomy.

The 3.5-m Geran-4 has both, thanks to its mesh radio modem—which links to other drones to form a resilient control network—and the Raspberry Pi microcomputer running machine-vision software. The operator picks out the ship and locks the drone onto it. From there the Raspberry Pi flies the attack, holding the lock through the jamming that would otherwise break the operator's radio link in the last seconds.

"Seeker is controlled by an operator via a radio mesh modem, but it can be locked onto a target and handed over to its machine-learning algorithms to complete an attack in the presence of EW jamming," Canadian drone expert Roy noted.

Ships aren't the only targets in the Geran-4s' crosshairs. The jet-propelled drones also struck two Ukrainian air force Mikoyan MiG-29 fighters on the ground at Voznesensk airfield in southern Ukraine on or just before 27 June. Where older, propeller-driven Gerans cruise at just 340 km/hr, the jet-propelled Geran-4 cruises at 500 km/hr or faster. The newer, faster drone outpaces many Ukrainian interceptor drones, making it harder to take down by kinetic means.

That doesn't mean the Ukrainians are powerless to stop Geran-4s from striking grain ships in Ukrainian ports. Faster interceptor drones are coming. In the meantime, ports would benefit from additional guns and surface-to-air missiles.

Longer-term, the same Ukrainian deep-strike forces that are chasing down Russian ships are also targeting the factories deep inside Russia that build the components for munitions including the Gerans. Hit enough factories frequently enough with sufficiently powerful missiles or drones, and the Russians won't be able to build enough Gerans to sustain intensive attacks.

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Ukrainian drones hit 14 more Russian vessels — 10 tankers and four ferries — overnight on 12 July in the Sea of Azov, Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi reported. The strikes cap a week in which Ukraine hit 90 ships serving Russia's continued occupation of Crimea and the fuel trade in the Black Sea region. Moscow, a week into the losses, has shown no visible attempt to defend its commercial shadow fleet.

One vessel every 112 minutes 

This morning, Brovdi wrote:

"14 vessels on the night of 12 July: 10 tankers and 4 ferries," the commander said, adding that this puts the week of 6–12 July at 90 units of Russia's shadow fleet hunted down by the "birds" of SBS. 

That works out to one Russian tanker, tug, dry cargo carrier, or special vessel struck every 112 minutes of the week. 

"Moscow will fall," the commander added.

His post carries video of the strikes:

Among the identifiable targets are the ferries Mariya, Yeysk, and Sky One — the latter hit in the port of occupied Kerch by pilots of the 413th Raid Regiment — plus an unnamed ferry used for transport across the Kerch Strait.

The SBS's live scoreboard currently shows 14 new strikes on Russian shipping. The tally can move in either direction during the day — up or down — as internal reports get verified. The total of Russian ships hit in July now stands at 91.

NASA FIRMS satellite data shows fires in the usual location — the anchorage north of occupied Kerch.

Small tankers, double duty

The shadow fleet tankers under attack are not blue-water, ocean-going ships. They are smaller—yet mostly also sanctioned—vessels built for Russia's internal waterways, sized to squeeze through the Volga-Don Canal. Russia has moved them en masse to the Azov and Black seas for two jobs: pumping export fuel at sea into ocean-going shadow-fleet tankers sailing with trackers switched off, and supplying occupied Crimea.

Damaging them en masse kills two birds with one stone. Each disabled tanker cuts the volume of Russian oil exports at the source and tightens the noose around the occupied peninsula. And beyond the material damage sits the sheer shame: shipping disabled in such quantities has not been seen since World War II.

Disable, don't sink

Madyar's videos show the method. Ukrainian drones consistently go for the ships' superstructure and bridge, or sometimes the propulsion section at the stern. The goal appears to be to render the vessels uncontrollable rather than send them under.

Sinking would demand more drones per ship — and would cause an ecological disaster in the shallow Sea of Azov. Moreover, the tugs that come to evacuate the ships-turned-barges become the next targets.

Russia can't fight back

About a week into the campaign against its shipping, Russia has shown no sign of trying to protect the vessels — no warplanes or helicopters, no navy ships, not even onboard firearms. Some ships display metal bars rigged in front of the bridge, a passive, improvised anti-drone screen that is useless against the powerful FP-1 and FP-2 strike drones. 

Moscow's only visible reaction has been retreat: it halted shipping through the Don-Azov canal and closed the Kerch Strait after the tanker strikes — pulling its disabled vessels off the water instead of defending them.

The pace shows why. Just the night before, the tally was staggering: "28 vessels of Russia's shadow fleet hunted down on the night of 11 July in the Azov Sea by the Birds of SBS," Madyar wrote yesterday: 

And the ships were only part of that night's work — the SBS also hit nine energy nodes in the occupied territories, the Saky thermal power plant, a training ground, a special communications node, and what the commander called an enemy lair in Horlivka, Donetsk Oblast.

A basic first-person-view attack drone might range just 19 km or so before its battery runs out. Certain pricier FPVs with denser batteries and lighter construction can fly as far as 70 km before they, too, run out of power.

But Ukraine's drone developers keep innovating. And now there's an FPV that ranges a staggering 110 km. Six times the distance of a basic model.

The distance is the headline. The price is the point. Extending inexpensive FPVs out to 110 km lowers the cost of drone strikes across the logistical zone stretching as far as 200 km behind the disputed gray zone. Before, these "middle strikes" required a fixed-wing attack drone costing thousands of dollars. Now a middle strike is possible with an FPV costing perhaps a tenth as much.

Cheaper middle strikes mean more middle strikes, and more pressure on Russian logistics. Drone raids targeting Russian supply lines have recently helped slow, if not entirely halt, Russian advances as Russia's wider war on Ukraine grinds into its 53rd month.

Yaroslav Azhnyuk, a representative of Ukrainian defense firm The Fourth Law, revealed the 110-km FPV strike on Friday. "Wow!" Azhnyuk wrote. "A new FPV strike record." The previous marks, set in late May, were 102 km and 103 km.

The FPV, flown by the Ukrainian 5th Border Guard Detachment, was a 38-cm quadcopter from Ukrainian manufacturer Vyriy, and it struck Russian logistics.

The record comes at an awkward moment for the manufacturer. Ukraine's State Bureau of Investigations raided Vyriy on 7 July, days before the strike, after a media outlet owned by Vyriy's CEO, Oleksii Babenko, published an investigation of alleged corruption and mismanagement inside the Ukrainian 425th Separate Assault Regiment.

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Contents

• CEO of one of Ukraine’s biggest drone makers just got raided. He also owns outlet that exposed 25 non-combat deaths at military unit
  1. FPV upgrades
  2. Ukraine’s new Tu-95 killer is a ,000 copy of a drone China refused to sell
  3. Russia has figured out how to stop Ukraine’s most powerful missile
  4. How Russia built a jam-proof drone force—and the Chinese supply chain that could still break it

CEO of one of Ukraine’s biggest drone makers just got raided. He also owns outlet that exposed 25 non-combat deaths at military unit

FPV upgrades

According to Azhnyuk, the 15-inch drone boasted numerous upgrades:

But even those range-extending enhancements probably weren't sufficient to take an FPV out to 110 km. At that distance, the drone likely needed a major aerodynamic boost—and that can really only come from an add-on wing. Azhnyuk's list of upgrades doesn't mention one, so the wing remains an inference rather than a confirmed feature of this particular flight.

Late last year, Russian and Ukrainian developers got serious about adding wings or ducts to their quadcopters. The ducted models don't seem to have caught on. The winged models work best.

Haye Kesteloo at DroneXl explained the physics. "Multicopters burn most of their energy just staying airborne, because spinning rotors generate lift the hard way."

A wing produces lift for free once the aircraft is moving, which is why fixed-wing designs have always dominated long-range strike work. The winged FPV grafts that efficiency onto a quadcopter: the motors mostly handle forward propulsion during the long cruise, and a release mechanism drops the wing near the target so the drone recovers full quadcopter agility for the final attack run.

"The winged-quadcopter approach is the attempt to get fixed-wing reach without giving up the multicopter's close-in lethality," Kesteloo concluded.

But the cost is the main benefit. With an inexpensive bolt-on wing, a $500 FPV can now do the job of a $5,000 fixed-wing drone, and strike targets more than 100 km away.

The town of Velyka Novosilka, in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, is a major hub for supplies flowing east to west to Russian forces fighting in southeastern Ukraine.

The village of Komar, 14 km to the north, anchors Russian defenses along the road threading south toward Velyka Novosilka.

All that is to say, if Ukrainian forces can capture Komar, they can squeeze the supply lines through Velyka Novosilka, and by extension squeeze Russian regiments and brigades all along the southeastern front line.

And that's why, for months now, Ukrainian forces have been quietly probing for gaps in Russian defenses around Komar. Borrowing infiltration tactics from the Russians, the Ukrainians have been slipping forces across the wide, disputed gray zone, aiming to consolidate enough troops in key positions to nudge the gray zone far enough to the southeast to put Komar in play.

That won't win the wider war, however. Russia might be losing. But it hasn't lost.

The problem for the Ukrainians in the sector near Komar is the Mokri Yaly River, which flows around Komar and forms a natural barrier. The Ukrainians have succeeded in expanding the gray zone, but they haven't succeeded in capturing Komar. Yet. "For now, Komar is 100% Russian controlled," mapper Clément Molin noted.

But that doesn't mean the Russians are winning this battle, or the Ukrainians are losing it. In months of hard fighting, a mix of Ukrainian mechanized, air assault and marine brigades have crossed the Vovcha River, 13 km north of Komar and the Mokri Yaly River, and extended the zone of clear Ukrainian control in the direction of Komar and Velyka Novosilka.

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That is to say, the Ukrainians have the momentum in the fight over supply lines in the southeast. It's just one of several axes where Ukrainian forces have the edge on the ground. Russian forces have the edge along other axes, but if you're wondering why overall monthly Russian gains have decreased to nearly zero in recent months, it's because of battles like that for Komar.

Yes, the Russians are marching through the ruins of Kostiantynivka, 90 km to the northeast, but the Ukrainians are successfully counterattacking elsewhere, resulting in a near zeroing out of Russian advances as the wider war grinds through its 53rd month.

How the Ukrainians have managed to turn the tables on the Russians in certain sectors is no secret. Ukraine has the advantage in the air over the gray zone and also over the logistical zone stretching 200 km behind the gray zone.

Ukrainian drones are hounding Russian supply convoys, throttling the flow of supplies to front-line units and weakening them before they can even being organizing an attack or defense.

Meanwhile, Russia's own drones sometimes struggle to even take flight owing to gaps in Russian command and control resulting from billionaire Elon Musk's war-changing decision, back in February, to throttle Russia's thousands of smuggled and stolen Starlink satellite terminals.

The air war shapes the ground war. And as long as Ukraine controls the air over and near the gray zone, it can find times and places to counterattack along the gray zone, even though Russian troops still outnumber Ukrainian troops in most sectors. "Middle-strike capabilities doing exactly what they were built for," the Ukrainian defense ministry boasted.

Stalemate

In nearly zeroing out Russian gains, Ukrainian troops have achieved a virtual stalemate in the wider war. Whether the stalemate lasts is anyone's guess, but for now it counts as a kind of victory for Ukraine.

Yes, liberating large swathes of Ukraine would be more desirable in Kyiv. But merely halting the Russians' overall progress represents a major turnaround for the Ukrainians, who as recently as last fall were losing hundreds of square km a month to the advancing Russians.

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To achieve any of its strategic aims in Ukraine, up to and including regime change in Kyiv, Russia must advance. By contrast, Ukraine's own main aim is to survive as an independent state. By those standards, Ukraine has the edge.

To be clear, the war is far from over. "There is a fundamental difference between saying Russia has lost and saying Russia is currently losing," analyst Joni Askola stressed. "Factually, Russia is losing."

It'll take much more than a few modest Ukrainian counterattacks to turn "Russia is losing" into "Russia has lost," however. The Russians still have more infantry and more ballistic missiles. The Ukrainians still have too few infantry and too few missiles that can intercept the ballistics.

And so, despite Ukraine's improving fortunes, the war will grind on. Probably for a long time.